Hindsight

by AA Bell

  He made all the sounds of hurrying to gather up the clothes. ‘Come on, I’ve just decided the best room for you.’

  ‘Not hers, I hope?’

  ‘Furthest from it, actually.’

  He led the way, timbers creaking beneath him as he climbed the stairs — beautifully carved stairs that Mira caressed all the way up with her hand, riding the smooth curves with a smile that grew as she reached the top.

  ‘My father made those stairs himself. Built the whole house, in fact.’

  Following his voice along the balcony towards the ocean, Mira noticed that the balcony ran parallel to the spine of a stained cathedral ceiling. The first four bedroom doors along the balcony were closed but the one at the end was open. She followed him inside and found herself inside a large ocean-facing room dotted with pinball machines, beanbags and rugs, and with only one timber wall which stretched behind her, across the full width of the home. Like the living room downstairs, this room also had three glass walls to take in the views of the sandy point, with surf to the right and sheltered lagoon to the left. A wrap-around patio on this level, like the one below, also offered additional sunlounges and a timber table outside to relax and soak it in.

  Ben turned her around twice until she saw a spiral staircase in the furthest corner, which led up to a mezzanine.

  ‘Up here,’ he said as his disembodied voice climbed the stairs. ‘There’s a waterbed with four drawers underneath that I’ve never used. Watch yourself coming up. The stairs are a little tight.’

  ‘They’re fabulous!’ She skipped up them with a grin, turning her feet sideways on each tread to avoid catching her heels.

  ‘Still got a thing for stairs, hey? I thought you were scared of heights?’

  ‘I am, but stairs can bring me down to safety. So long as I can see them. Imagine waking up in mid-air, in a multi-storey building that wasn’t built yet — not as far as you can see anyway — and then imagine trying to find your way down. Ghostly stairs are a beautiful thing.’

  She turned around, admiring the craftsmanship of the builder. The mezzanine level hugged the stained cathedral ceiling beautifully, with glass walls on each side and a ghostly rail of timber fingers that prevented her from falling into empty air. The view was all purple, overlooking the low dome of the treed dunes, beyond which she could see almost three hundred degrees of placid water.

  ‘Nice,’ Mira said, hearing drawers open under the bed as Ben stashed the pile of clothes out of her way.

  ‘Killer used to love it up here,’ he said, referring to his old Rottweiler. ‘Better than his doghouse, apparently.’

  Mira tried to smile but couldn’t. His dog had been shot the same fateful day, while trying to protect them.

  ‘Would you like a puppy?’ she asked, unsure if she should dwell on such a painful subject for so selfish a reason as trying to move past it. ‘Or too early yet?’

  ‘Replace Killer?’

  She heard him slump onto the far side of the ghostly bed and stroke down the quilt as if smoothing out the dog’s imprint from the pattern of starfish and seahorses. ‘I doubt that’s possible, Mira. For all his training, the goofy old fella was just a pussy cat.’

  ‘Perhaps a cat then?’

  Ben laughed. ‘The last time I got a cat, my mother moved out … So I guess it’s not such a bad idea — but not yet. We’ve still got some things to work out, her and I.’ He huffed as if there was far more to the story, but either he didn’t wish to explain it yet, or couldn’t.

  ‘Private issues?’ Mira sat softly on the nearest bed corner, but grew swiftly alert to every twitch and shift of his weight through the jelly-like mattress. Could he feel her too? She sprang back to her feet, embarrassed to realise how intimately closer she felt to him in this room. His bedroom. She could feel him all around her now, more intense than ever, as if she’d stepped into part of him, or melded all at once with all his yester-week ghosts.

  She wondered how many other girls he’d led up to this place, and blushed to think of what he would have done with them when the only furniture on this level was a bed.

  ‘Are you okay?’ At once he was at her side, cupping her elbow in his gentle hand and steadying her by the shoulder. ‘You look pale enough to faint.’

  ‘Big morning.’

  His nearness made it worse. ‘I can’t …’ She was going to say breathe, but he was already stretching to open a sliding glass door to the patio.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ he said as he ushered her out into the refreshing breeze.

  Still overwhelmed, she kept her eyes open. Walking through ghostly glass wasn’t nearly so unnerving as walking through a door made of timber or steel. She needed to reach the rail to steady herself.

  ‘Sure you don’t want to lie down?’ he asked.

  One glance over her shoulder to the bed, though, and she doubted if she ever could. Not in his bed with all the slow light that was still emitting from all his previous nights in it. She didn’t need to see them to know they were all there.

  Did he sleep in the nude like her parents?

  She shook her head clear. ‘I don’t suppose I could sleep in a closet?’

  ‘Standing room only.’ He chuckled but she frowned, wishing he could see that she was serious.

  ‘Oh, I get it,’ he said. ‘You need to sleep where you can see yourself alone. Sorry, I still have to pinch myself that you can do that.’

  ‘I don’t want to be any trouble. Just let me crash in the laundry? Or the garage or even the doghouse? I don’t care, honestly.’

  ‘You’ll be more comfortable up here. Killer slept here more often than I did, so be thankful he didn’t have fleas.’

  ‘But this is your room.’

  ‘Not any more. My clothes and gear are still in the room I grew up in. Besides, after so long in a cell, I prefer the freedom of being a lounge lizard all night in front of a movie.’

  ‘You do?’ She’d often seen her father do that, but never been allowed to do it herself.

  ‘Unless I’m out under the stars. A blanket and sun-lounge is all I need, but I don’t think I’ll be out there for a while.’

  Nightmares, Mira guessed, since that’s where he’d been standing when the bullet stole ten days and nearly his life.

  ‘Can I be a lounge lizard too?’

  ‘I wouldn’t recommend it. Wrecks your body clock. Besides, sleeping with a light on is supposed to be bad for your health in other ways. Much better if you sleep up here, where there are no walls for prying ears.’

  ‘What prying …? Oh,’ she said, realising that he was talking about his mother. ‘You haven’t told her all about me yet?’

  ‘No, and I don’t intend to. What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her and can’t be blabbed around the whole island on the grapevine.’

  ‘What can’t be blabbed?’ asked Mel from the doorway below, ‘and what are you doing up there? I’ve already cleaned out the spare room beside mine.’

  ‘This one suits her better, Ma.’

  ‘Together?’ She sounded offended. ‘Next you’ll be sharing soap and the bloody toothpaste!’

  ‘It’s not like that, I told you. I’m taking the spare room.’

  ‘You’re a grown man, and the house is yours. Sleep where you want, baby, but don’t tell me one thing and do another.’

  ‘Ma, this isn’t the time. Can we do this later?’

  ‘Later? Always later with you!’ She stormed out and stomped away.

  ‘Mellow, huh …?’ Mira grinned. ‘Did she just creep up on us?’

  ‘She’s feeling a little put out, I’d say. Or jealous, maybe.’

  Mira laughed. ‘Jealous of me? She knows I’m blind, right?’

  ‘Sure, but she nurses geriatrics all day, so she expects I’ll have to spend that level of time and care on you, too.’

  ‘Have to?’

  ‘Don’t be like that. You know it’s going to take a lot of hard work before you can graduate as normal — no, that didn’t come out right. I
mean independent, with all the social skills it takes to stand up for yourself. You know I’ve already pledged to help you with that, so please don’t go all tender, taking it the wrong way either. I really do want only the best for you?’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’ Mira turned away to gaze at the beach, wondering yet again what he hoped to get out of taking her in. ‘I won’t be any trouble,’ she promised. ‘Gaining my independence is my goal, but it doesn’t have to be yours entirely if you have your own.’

  ‘Sure it does. Our agendas serve each other. My mother has her own too, obviously, but they’re tinnocent enough for any mother. We just have to recognise it’s going to be a delicate balance for all of us for a while.’

  Mira chewed on her lip, bewildered. ‘My mother’s goals peaked when she tried to fly by leaping out of a Moreton Bay fig tree, so I can’t even begin to imagine what Mel’s might be aside from caring for you and your wound.’

  ‘Okay, well let me try to explain it. On the one hand, she knows that working with you has helped me to hone my skills and regain my confidence since gaol. But on the other, she wants to see my career back on track with full-time work as soon as possible. She’s also a little slow to get comfortable with new people in her space.’

  ‘In your space. Or did your dad leave the house to her, too?’

  ‘It’s mine — house, land and all bills each month. As a ferry owner, Dad had houses on both sides of the bay. She inherited the one on the mainland, which is now her rental ever since she started house-sitting here with Killer while I was away all those years. Only we never quite got around to dissolving the arrangement. She works nights mainly, and I worked days at Serenity, so she virtually saw more of me while I was locked away.’

  ‘She can’t love her boyfriend as much as you or your wound if she’d rather stay here than live with him.’

  ‘Go easy, Mira. If your mother was still alive, I dare say she’d be overprotective of you too.’

  ‘I’m hitting the waves,’ Mel called from the hall, ‘and for the record, I am not overprotective.’

  SIX

  In the candlelit darkness of his wine-cellar-dungeon, Fredarick sat on an empty beer barrel, with another two that supported a plank as his table. No sensor lights or intruder alarms to disturb him any more; he’d disarmed them, so in this loneliest place in Serenity, he was as free as he could be to prepare for the coming battle.

  With the borrowed weapon set up and waiting, he tapped at the M key once, like a kitten testing a snake.

  It didn’t bite, so he tapped another key and another, until his fingers fluttered feverishly and he realised the venom was already within him, needing to bleed out onto the page. Safer there, he dared to hope, since a small dose had once served as its own antidote — and now he had three lives to cure, including his nemesis.

  Dangerous in the wrong hands, so he bled out in code, chords of Braille keeping his venom indiscernible by outsiders — and keeping the future invisible, though not soundless.

  As always, he donned a new face to help shut out the noise, needing the concentration of a sage to hear the truest whispers beneath the scream of competing futures. And so he concentrated — so hard and for so long that he became the code, embossing himself upon the page. His eyes were closed, his fingers flying across a keyboard that swiftly became a part of him, or him of it. Strike him, did he not bleed? Yet he knew it would never be him who’d be labelled as the victim, for in writing and attempting to edit the future, he knew he would be accused of authoring everything — even if he couldn’t yet hear the echoes of those accusations or all of the repercussions. He’d been bitten too many times by those over-confident few who’d failed to heed his earlier warnings, and each time, he’d fractured under the strain of frustration. A new personality emerged from the broken pieces each time he failed.

  For him, the future had become a snake with many heads, and all the heads were his now — with every fang venomous and deep-reaching. Yet the softest hisses amid all those future echoes were always the closest to biting, so he took dictation from the whispering echoes — and tried every now and then to sneak in a little editing.

  Predictive tampering; it had worked once before — almost. Ben may have been shot but his beloved matron now believed that a deaf man could hear.

  ‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ she had said, but so many heads can whip about so unpredictably — and he knew now that his spike-haired angel was one of them; saying one thing and doing another. Even so, amid all the noise, the one future was already written, and if he paused to consider the futility of fighting it, the noise of all the others would overwhelm him again. If they weren’t still on the brink of happening, he’d be unable to hear them. So he tapped and tapped again, until he glanced down to see the first line of words that had come to him unbidden:

  To Mira, my dear. Tis time to look behind you.

  A small hand touched his shoulder, and Freddie turned to find his sweet cherub there, reading over his shoulder. Her expression betrayed her worry; her smile faded, but she nodded and caressed his bald head with her cool fingers. For a moment, he melted into her, longing to prolong that single heartbeat of intimacy, but he’d heard the echoes of her warning too long and didn’t wish to fail her.

  Fredarick, honey, I need to know the whole story.

  Mira sat naked on the beach all afternoon, wrapped in a bath towel, her mind in turmoil as she recalled her argument with Ben — about how much of a burden she might be and his pledge to ensure she changed into a real woman.

  If not real to him now, she wondered, then what was she?

  With her back to the sand dune, a line of paperbark trees offered lengthening shade as she watched the tide retreat and wash home again, but no answer came to her — at least not one that she cared to consider, since she’d already suffered a decade of sedation, where every night had been a blur that left her teetering on the cusp between death and reality. Surreality. Little different to sitting on a beach, staring into so many hazes of yesterdays. Same mirror, different reflections.

  ‘That looks familiar,’ Ben said when he finally joined her.

  Mira knew he must be looking at the scratches she’d made in the sand as the tide crept in, and was relieved that he didn’t say they looked crazy, even though they probably were to some extent: Rµv — 1/2gµv R = 8/GTµv. She didn’t know how to work it out, and didn’t care, since memorising it provided comfort enough.

  ‘Isn’t that one of Doc Van Danik’s formulas for proving God exists?’

  She nodded but preferred to think of its alternative uses, and for her situation in particular. ‘He called it string theory; said it was discovered while predicting explosions for atomic bombs or something. I love it though, because it also proves that I’m real.’

  ‘You always surprise me with your memory for details,’ he said, sounding amused. ‘But how do you figure it applies like that to you?’

  ‘By proving that anything and everything is possible as time approaches infinity. It comforts me sometimes to know there’s a reason why I am how I am. You can’t imagine what it’s like, being blind to your own body. Numb to it too, sometimes. Like today, it seems as if the whole world is an illusion and nothing really exists. Then I think, well, at least I can’t see how big my butt is.’ She laughed and he did too, but that didn’t prevent her from feeling more embarrassed than ever. Somehow, trying to speak like a normal girl didn’t sit comfortably with her at all yet. ‘I’m just glad I can feel, or else I’d never be able to feed myself. Wouldn’t I be a terrible burden on you then?’

  ‘If you were that irredeemable you’d still be at Serenity.’

  Irredeemable? She hugged herself, feeling a chill enter the breeze, but no more able to see herself or her own yester-ghosts than she had been since losing her sight as a ten-year-old. Yet how much had she changed in that time, and how much would always be the same? Like the shifting sands of the malleable coastline, how much of herself could grow or erode from outside influenc
es beyond her control, and did any of it really matter in the end anyway, when her life was so insignificantly short in the grander scheme of things?

  ‘Now what are you thinking?’ Ben asked. ‘You’ve got such an unreadable look on your face.’

  With a frown, she worried how often he tried to read her that way. ‘It’s too surreal. You’ll think I’m silly.’

  ‘Try me. I’ve experienced enough surreal thoughts myself when I was in gaol — and out there, one on one with the ocean, I go looking for the surreal.’

  She nodded, having already seen his ghost out there at dawn, simply sitting beyond the breakers, watching the sun bleed new days across the water.

  ‘I was thinking about time,’ she confessed, ‘… about how pointless it is trying to fight it or change to suit it, because we’re already caught up in it, like a tide, and we’re just the fish. Close your eyes and you might even feel it, the breeze travelling through time like a current, taking our scents and memories with it.’

  Silence answered her for a long moment. ‘Oh, yeah. Kinda makes me feel bigger, like I’m part of everything.’

  ‘Sometimes, sure,’ Mira nodded. ‘But when I open my eyes, Ben, I disappear. Sedated at Serenity, it nearly sent me crazy, especially at night. Now here I am, still little more than a scent on a breeze, or a little fish swept along — and all those scratches I made in the sand will be gone by morning. So please don’t get upset, but I can’t help wondering if my life can ever have any lasting purpose to it, regardless of whether or not I can change to be something better.’

  ‘That sounds like the after-effects of your meds talking. A little depression is expected, which is why I brought this. Only be prepared to feel worse before you feel better. Hold out both hands, Mira. It’s heavy.’

  Intrigued, she did, and soon felt the cool, smooth surface of a ghost-gum branch, about the size and shape of her arm and dotted with the small, domed welts of golden thumbtacks.