Hindsight

by AA Bell

  Another test? It had to be. Six doors to go … Five … Four. Surely Ben wouldn’t betray me now after all we’ve been through? Everything he’d ever done and promised had been working towards this day with her. They’d also begun to plan so many things to do later, and yet it wouldn’t surprise her if Neville Kenny leapt at her with a needle and sedative. She tensed, clenching her fists, relying totally on Ben to keep her safe.

  Three doors to go … Two.

  More footsteps ahead warned her that the hall wasn’t as vacant now as it had been. Movement behind her too! A food trolley rattled out of a room. More shoes! All around her now. Was it only the end of breakfast? Just dishes being whisked away from the other room-bound residents?

  Someone grabbed her elbow, and she spun about, coiling to fight.

  ‘Steady, Mira!’

  The voice was Ben’s, then she soon realised, so was the hand.

  ‘There’s a packing box in front of you. Come this way a little more or you’ll trip.’ His hand shifted lower to the small of her back as he guided her around it. ‘Hey, relax, will you?’ He kept a firm hold of her arm. ‘I won’t let Freddie anywhere near you.’

  She nodded, drawing comfort from his gentle touch, but her attention remained fixed on her old door until he led her beyond it and she sighed. Then she noticed the air still seemed intense, and the vibrations through her feet grew even stronger as they neared the lift.

  Doors chimed and a friendly electronic voice invited them to step in. However, to Mira, through the purple haze of time, the flashing lights on the wall indicated that the elevator was still above her, lifting up between floors.

  Clamping her eyes shut, she trusted her hands to find the truth and the open threshold. Ever cautious of falling down the shaft that appeared as soon as she leaned through the ghostly door, she stretched forward with her foot as well to find the invisible floor. She knew she must look insanely over-cautious to anyone else.

  Inside, the walls were trembling so much, she could hear the light fixture above her rattling.

  ‘Don’t tell me you can’t feel that?’ She pressed her fingers flat against the side, daring them to do the same. ‘This whole building is shaking!’

  ‘Oh that …’ Sanchez patted her shoulder, making her flinch. ‘That’s only Freddie. Press the button for the basement, honey, and cover your ears.’

  Braille on the buttons made it easy for Mira to find the invisible controls, provided she kept her eyes closed to eliminate distractions from standing mid-air in the ghostly shaft, and she didn’t dare to open them for fear of heights.

  ‘Is that his music?’ Ben asked. ‘Must be loud if we can feel this much through all the sound-proofing.’

  ‘Well, I did say he could go crazy down there. Then again, I’ve noticed he does usually seem happier underground. The soft walls also offer additional benefits, especially if he starts banging his head.’

  ‘He’s still supervised?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Remotely. I’ve got two cameras on him until he’s through this. He’s also wearing a straitjacket, so he’ll be perfectly safe with Mira.’

  The lift thudded to a halt and doors chimed as they slid open, revealing a ghostly crowd that filled the foyer and music room, both rooms with tall carpeted walls and ceiling lights that flashed slowly in sequence. All the ghosts had their backs to Mira, mesmerising her as they swayed hypnotically in time with the lights — all except for a silent band of four women who played on a raised platform in the furthest corner — while a much faster racket assaulted Mira’s ears and continued to shake the walls.

  ‘Rock’n’roll!’ Ben shouted. ‘I can feel the noise!’

  Mira moved out and mingled with the ghostly crowd in the foyer — until Ben grabbed her arm.

  ‘Wait!’ he warned. ‘Let Maddy unlock the doors first, and turn down the concert.’

  Mira bit her lip, trying to keep her thoughts straight over the noise, and noticed she couldn’t hear the matron’s distinctive footsteps any more. If the electronic voice in the elevator had announced their arrival, she hadn’t heard that either.

  ‘Poor fellow, deaf as dirt in the real world,’ Sanchez shouted, her disembodied voice carrying her away across the foyer. ‘Still, he can’t get enough bass! Makes no sense. You’d think all those extra future echoes must be downright torturous.’

  ‘Just another form of self harm,’ Ben yelled.

  Mira slapped her hands over her ears, and as expected, the rock rolled out even louder as the doors opened.

  ‘Watch out!’ Ben shouted. He wrenched Mira roughly behind him. ‘He’s out of his straitjacket!’

  Inside, Freddie hugged the subwoofer; rhythms beating him, soothing him, keeping him sane enough, barely, between the accolades. No applause, just all the braces of bass and all the living noise, rippling back through time to him.

  ‘Deaf as dirt,’ his angel had said, but only to every now and every yesterday. He’d heard every whisper of their next conversation as she’d brought him down to this place. The batteries in his headphones were dead.

  Try them instead, she’d said with her hands, and led him through to the drumheads, where the speakers sat askew, bidding him to sit a while too.

  Enough! he thought, bumping his head against the padded wall. Pound me with fouled rhythm long enough and I become it! Yet silence carried the sweetest poetry and the constant thrum of a hard bass was the closest he could get to it.

  ‘Feel the noise,’ Ben had said.

  Yes, that’s it exactly. Sound waves striking each other at just the right moment in time could cancel out each other, leaving only the truest whispers of the future to echo back to him. So he salved himself with The Beatles and turned up the speakers — a difficult task with his arms crossed and bound inside the white jacket.

  Once free, he’d made a dash for the music room noticeboard where most of the brass tacks had been pre-arranged into golden Braille patterns a fortnight before by a female member of his blind faithful, since male members weren’t permitted in the women-only wards. Some tacks had strayed over the days. He recovered them, and re-forged one message to frighten them all. They’d never forget it. Braille so huge, his trio would see it from across the room: the lie is true.

  Mira read the warning and took a step backwards, not knowing or caring how Freddie had worked his wicked magic in a room where he’d allegedly never been before. The ghostly message was there on the noticeboard, and who else but Freddie or his female friends would have arranged it? The only other living beings who knew about making palm-sized Braille out of thumbtacks, were Ben and the matron. Yet if Ben was lying about being her authorised escort or co-guardian, what were they doing? Did they really need her cooperation so badly first, to help Freddie?

  ‘I’m here,’ Ben reassured her. He hugged her closer under one arm, but she shook her head and pushed away.

  ‘I need out of here!’

  ‘Take her!’ Sanchez shouted as she turned down the music. ‘I wish I could come up too, Mira, but I need to secure him.’

  A button clicked near the wall and static warned that more staff had been summoned down to assist her. Mira didn’t wait. In seconds she was back in the elevator and halfway up to the ground floor, tugging Ben by the shirt all the way.

  Swinging around him in the elevator, she found the emergency stop button, and punched it.

  ‘Hey, why here?’ he asked.

  ‘You tell me — what’s going on, Ben? I’m in the dark here!’

  ‘Join the club.’

  ‘Join it? I’m the founding member and president! I want to know what’s happening. I respect you a lot — you know that — but I’ll fight to the death if you try to lock me up again!’

  He laughed. ‘You’re kidding, right? You don’t really expect me to do that?’

  Mira chewed on her lip, feeling silly for indulging that story for as long as a second. ‘What about Freddie? What was that all about?’

  ‘Beats me. Honestly, Mira, he stumps me. I
know he’s presented multiple personalities before, but he’s never let me see that one. Looked like a hunter. No wonder he ditched his surname for Leopard. His spots changed so fast, it caught us off guard.’

  ‘Do you know what set him off?’

  ‘Who can say? With Freddie it could be as simple as getting the wrong coloured juice for breakfast.’

  ‘Regardless — you’re taking me past my old room when you know how much I hated it! The damn thing didn’t have so much luxury as a window!’

  ‘Come on, you don’t still think of it as a gaol cell? Or that I might shove you in at the last minute?’

  Hearing it from him like that made it sound even sillier, and yet: ‘The thought did cross my mind briefly.’

  He chuckled and rubbed her arms. ‘I don’t doubt it. Listen, Mira, there are two main exits and four fire escapes on the next level, so if you really want to avoid your old room, just say the word. If you want to sneak out without being seen, we can do that too; just give me a second to skip ahead and disable the surveillance cams at the nurses’ station.’

  ‘Uh oh,’ Mira gasped, and grabbed his hands for silent finger braille. Did you just tell him I’m leaving?

  I don’t think so. ‘You’re changing rooms today. I say it’s time to let loose your gymnast and do it in style.’ He brushed a wild strand of hair from her face. ‘This is your big day. Leap at it and show the world what you’re made of.’

  She turned her cheek until she found his hand, and nuzzled against it, enjoying as much warmth and comfort as she could draw from him. ‘I don’t care what the world thinks of me.’

  ‘Sure you do.’ He pulled her against his chest and stroked her hair, making her heart race. ‘I’ve seen the books you read. I think you care, even when the world doesn’t deserve you.’

  ‘I can’t go back to that room.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’ He leaned away just long enough to punch the elevator up again. ‘We’ll arrange for someone else to get your things.’

  Doors chimed, and the electronic voice announced their return to the ground floor. Scrambling out, Mira dashed for the nearest fire exit, not caring about any of her old belongings.

  ‘Hey, wait up!’ Ben called, lunging after her.

  ‘Yesterday is history, Ben! From now on I’m shunning it.’ She plunged through the ghostly door, rounded the corner outside and quickened her pace up the road towards the main security gate.

  ‘Mira, slow down!’

  She heard him groan, remembered his injury and stopped in her tracks. ‘Oh, sorry, Ben! I didn’t mean to make you rush too. You okay?’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s just …’

  ‘Hey, it’s Mira!’ called a childlike voice from the hanging tree. ‘Everybody, there she is!’

  Petal Price rallied her troops with another battle cry. ‘Attack!’

  ‘Uh oh,’ Ben said. ‘Cat’s out of the bag now.’

  Party whistles bleated, feet stampeded, wheelchairs creaked and skidded, and in seconds, Mira was surrounded by a wave of clapping hands, and bustled amidst a cacophony of voices, most of them elderly. Cobwebs of streamers hosed over her hair, and another whistle bleated close to her ear. Jostled, patted and stroked by the frenzied swarm, she found it difficult to count how many. At least forty.

  ‘Go! Go! Go!’ they all chanted, even moaning Joan, who repeated it so fast, she sounded like she was gargling.

  ‘Ah, you’re all crazy!’ Petal shouted from roughly waist-height to Mira. As the shortest client at Serenity, Petal caught Mira’s attention in her usual fashion, by swiping out with her GPS walking cane and striking Mira’s shin. ‘You’ve got it made here, sister! And, to think I never got a chance to take you sky-diving! Wind in your hair. You don’t know what you’re missing!’

  ‘I think I can bear the deprivation,’ Mira replied glumly.

  ‘Muh! Muh!’ grunted Phoebe Fingelly as she pushed closer to Mira, a bent old woman, whose breath always smelled of mud and whose hair bristled daily with fresh twigs and flowers. Mira had only crossed paths with her twice since transferring to Serenity, yet the elderly resident pushed a posy of soft wilted flowers at her, and the scent of lemon told Mira they were her favourites. Only one place on the island they grew, and that was the hedge of brown flowered boronias at the front gate, which led down the driveway to freedom.

  Mira buried her nose in them, unable to count how many times she’d tried to escape using the scent of those flowers to guide her.

  ‘We also got you this —’ Petal shoved something that felt like a padded box against Mira’s stomach. ‘Neville said it’s pointless wrapping gifts for the blind, but it’s half the fun, right? The bow is crepe and the rest is bubble wrap. Check it — funky, hey?’

  Mira covered her mouth, not knowing what to say. She explored the gift, half expecting to find something sharp. Instead it felt fun, but she returned it anyway. ‘I can’t. You have so little. And I didn’t want anything. Honestly, I just want to slip away quietly.’

  Needed to, more like it.

  ‘How did you know?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Yeah, big secret,’ Petal laughed. ‘Math is a bitch in Braille, baby, but one and one still makes two. Or in this case, packing boxes minus a hearse. I’m blind, not stupid.’ She pushed the gift back to Mira. ‘It’s rare to graduate here, but a keepsake is still tradition. You want to be normal, right? So go ahead, open it.’

  Reluctantly, Mira popped and unravelled the gift, releasing two leather-bound Braille books — the broadest cover embossed with A Millennium of Classic Poetry and the thickest titled The Scarlet pernel — the missing letters worn so much from a Braille-reader bookstand that only the most sensitive fingers could detect the last word was really Pimpernel, a small wildflower and fictional hero from the late seventeen hundreds.

  ‘Thanks but …’

  ‘Your favourites, right?’

  ‘Yes, but …’ Mira shivered at all the memories that went with them; all the dark nights of solitude and century-old delusions which had forced her to seek escape by closing her eyes and dissolving through her fingertips into their pages.

  ‘I know them off by heart already.’ She handed them back to Petal.

  ‘You might as well take them,’ Petal argued, shoving them back again. ‘Nobody else ever borrowed them. Not this century anyway.’

  ‘But I didn’t …’

  ‘Want to hurt our feelings? Too late. Be a snob. You’re only making more work for the poor guy who has to write them back into stock again, and hurting yourself, and crushing our feelings, and wasting a perfectly good opportunity to party, and …’

  ‘Oh, if I must! Thanks, I guess.’ Mira tucked the books and ribbon under her arm, planning to dump them outside the gate on her way out, but a small voice deep inside her cried out for her to keep them. For too long, they’d been her precious treasures, with wide magical worlds encoded within the chords of their beautiful Braille.

  ‘Okay, make way, make way!’ Petal ordered. ‘Escapee coming through!’

  Mira grinned. She couldn’t help herself. Then she heard the familiar growl of Ben’s Camaro revving to life in the staff parking lot.

  ‘Hey, who’s in my car?’ he complained.

  ‘Guess,’ Petal said, nudging them closer to the kerb. ‘Ding’s been hot-wiring cars since he was nut-high to a battery terminal.’

  ‘Oh, that fills me with a lot of confidence!’ The car wheels squealed in chorus with a louder racket; sounded like long chains of tin cans filled with metal bolts or pebbles. ‘Oh, crap! And Phoebe’s decorated it with Just Escaped, I see. Perfect. No chance of getting pulled up by police.’

  ‘Knew you’d love it,’ Petal said. She struck Mira’s shin again with her walking cane.

  Mira opened her mouth to complain, but felt a swell of emotion that made her feel like crying, and not just for her shin. She’d never expected a send-off. She hardly knew any of them, having been locked in her room most of the time and sedated. Closing her eyes, she bu
ried her nose in the posy, determined not to cry for fear of the tears’ effect on her sight, and sniffled.

  ‘Yeah, well don’t go all mushy now either, sis.’ Petal herded Mira through the crowd with her cane — the blind leading the blind — and ordered Ben to get ahead and open the door for her.

  He did and as Mira climbed in, he bounded around to encourage Ding out of the driver’s seat. A brief struggle followed, the car backfired and the crowd screamed.

  Someone smacked the roof twice, and Ben accelerated slowly, as if pushing a bow wave through the crowd. Shouts turned to cheering, and Mira held her breath until they were through the security checkpoint; every heartbeat suspended in anticipation of someone leaping from the shadows to stop them.

  ‘Phew!’ Ben said, as he sped off downhill to the bridge. ‘I’ll bet you’re relieved too now?’

  ‘You bet …’ However, relief didn’t come in the huge rush that she’d expected. Instead, Freddie’s warning started playing over and over again in her head.

  The lie is true.

  And if it wasn’t already, she feared any plans Freddie might turn his tortured mind to conjuring to ensure it, even if he hadn’t fore-heard any of the sounds of her going away party, he’d soon learn about it from Petal and his other friends, just as soon as he started talking to Sanchez and she released him back into their tight-knit community.

  Mira chewed on a fingernail, hoping the extent of his interference would stay limited to the island now that Sanchez was fully aware of his obsession.

  Tucking the Braille books under her seat, she tried to put all thoughts of Freddie behind her as Ben levitated her away into the violet haze in his invisible car. However, the further she got from the little dark hole in Serenity that had once been her room, the more she felt as if her shadow was stretching back to it like a rubber band stretching away towards its breaking point.