I turned up at Mitch’s house wearing my new jeans, so tight I had to lie on the bed and wriggle into them. Heavy black lace-ups, a fake leather jacket. The army-green, externally framed pack dug into the muscles on my back. Mitch was the boy I’d loved in high school, the boy who had no interest in me but who took pleasure in my interest in him. The boy who played me. I couldn’t get enough of him. The jeans were for him. I wanted him to notice, to wish I wouldn’t go, to make promises to me. But I was going, whatever he said, however much he begged.
He said nothing. He did not beg.
He offered me a ride up the coast on the back of his motorbike.
Newcastle, New South Wales. Only two hours up the highway, but two hours closer to the end of the country, two hours closer to escape. Everything there is borrowed or stolen. The name itself was taken from the northern English city that marks a shift from the low hills of Northumbria to the peaks of Scotland, obliterating the original name—Muloobinba—as though the Worimi had never been there. Even the name of the state—New South Wales—is a reminder of Welsh miners who could see only the dull grey-green that defines the interior, blinking against the luminous-yellow sandstone, unable to see what was before them, what had been taken. It does not resemble slate-grey quarries and the wanton green of Wales, but those long-gone men could see only the absence of their own country, a life of hiraeth—the longing for home—stretching ahead of them.
My own longing was unspoken and endless. I clung to Mitch, letting my helmet rest against his leather-clad back. I wrapped my arms around him and pretended he loved me. Dolly magazine had photo shoots of girls on the back of motorbikes, hands on the riders’ waists, never on the handlebars. I could be one of those girls. Wind on my face. On the road, baby! Fucking Kerouac. I could be one of his girls.
Outside of Newcastle, I leaned into Mitch as we turned onto a ring road. My pack was heavy on my shoulders and I shrugged slightly to ease the pain of it. Perhaps the road was wet. Perhaps a car in front slowed down. Perhaps I leaned back, losing balance, changing the weight on the bike. Only this is clear: the crack of the tarmac, the shred of skin, the tumble of sky-black-sky-wheel-grass. My pack bouncing under me, proving on the downward turn a landing pillow, and on the upward turn a weight against me. I landed on the grass verge, arms still in my pack, skin shredded. Above me, a woman’s face. ‘Can you hear me?’
I heard her but I couldn’t answer. Instead I shouted Mitch’s name again and again, unable to understand where I was, what had happened. Somehow, there was an ambulance. Now, years later, I cannot think how it came to be there. We travelled without mobile phones, then. Someone in one of the houses, I suppose. A driver running, worried, losing breath, hammering on the door of a house, asking to use the phone. Pointing back at the road, at the cars slowing as the drivers carefully steered around the prone motorbike, the two figures lying on the grass, the small audience.
Later, in the hospital, I wore a starched cotton gown. Mitch came to visit, showing me the patch of skin that came from his hand, the only injury on him. I couldn’t walk. White sheets scratched beneath my skin; my toes, painted a cheerful celebratory red, poked out at the bottom. I asked one of the nurse’s aides to untuck the bottom of the sheets: ‘Please,’ I said, ‘I feel so stuck, I feel like I’m in prison, like I’ll never escape.’ I’d started crying, big hiccupping tears, saying it again: ‘I’ll never escape. I’ll never get out of here.’
The aide was young and wide, skin folding over her elbows, over her neck. Even her hands, as she lifted the sheet from the end of the bed, seemed padded. I’d spent the weeks leading up to the trial not eating, counting calories the way I did in high school, contemptuous of those who needed to eat. After the verdict, I went to a Chinese restaurant and ate two serves of deep-fried honey king prawns. Honey and oil slicked across my face, my hands, down the front of my specially-purchased-to-look-like-you-might-be-a-public-servant cover-up dress.
Mitch left me the dried piece of skin from his hand. It was the size of his palm, tightened into an opaque circle. I held it over my own hand until the nurse came. She pursed her lips at me, with my red toes, the shred of an indifferent man’s hand sitting in my own palm. She said, ‘We had to cut your jeans off you, they were so tight.’ She flicked a glance at my arms, round, unmuscled. ‘No one needs to wear jeans that tight.’
Shame, that familiar flame, burned beneath my skin. It was always there, waiting for a word, a look, a breath, to fan it back to life. My constant companion, my night-light, my day-shadow. The year before I’d read Blake, sitting in a cafe, holding the book up high in hopes of an audience, peering at the pages. If mercy was the human dress, shame was both my underwear and my overcoat. Disgust drifted down from the nurse’s face, sprinkling like dandruff onto my neat hospital sheets. I was too fat, too needy, too young, too me.
She huffed slightly as she sat me up and tightened the starched gown around my waist. The aide with the blonde hair and the lipstick and the cascading flesh wheeled a chair over to the bed. Deep orange lipstick made a lightning stripe on her teeth when she smiled. They stood on either side of me, their hands under my arms, while I wriggled to the brink of the bed, my feet dangling below me. My red toes seemed impossibly far away; the bed seemed ridiculously, unnecessarily high. Underneath my arm, in the soft part, the nurse pressed her hand.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Your ring, it’s hurting me.’
‘I can’t take my ring off for you. Come on, Kacey. The more you fuss, the longer it will take.’ She nodded to the blonde aide, and the two of them heaved and hefted, lifting me down from the bed and into the chair. The aide made a guttural grunt as she lifted. They had to turn me around once my feet touched the floor, and for some reason I couldn’t remember how my feet worked, how to make them turn, how to make my body obey my commands. It wasn’t the first time that my body had been frozen, not the first time that I failed to make my limbs work.
They shuffled, the two of them, with a bit of grunting and a bit of sighing, until I was turned, butt facing chair. Cold tiles scorched my feet as I lowered myself into the chair. There was a pause, almost musical, a suspension, while the nurse gave a glance around the empty ward, and then the aide began to push.
Inside the X-ray room, the smell of polish filled each corner, thick and solid as lard. The nurse and the aide laid me down on the sheets, scratchy white but with the smell of clean. I thought of the night the bass player came to my room, the crumpled sheets, grey with unwash, dribbling onto the floor, fluted like sand dunes. I thought of the earlier night, too, returning to that room as the sun came up, my mouth dry, my make-up smeared like a smack across my face, a sheaf of Helpline pamphlets creased in my hand.
In the hospital, though, it was a relief to lie on those clean sheets, to feel the cool hands on my arms, my hips, my face. I don’t remember the X-ray. I imagine it like a film, a cancer film, with me staring up into the white column as I slide through with a musical accompaniment: something choral, something magnificent. Arvo Pärt perhaps. But Arvo Pärt, and magnificent choral music, is from my life later, from the life where I know such things, where I do not mispronounce Somerset Maugham, where I am not daunted by boys with too much money and not enough manners. Magnificence, yes, this comes later, like the colours busting from black.
In that room, there was just this:
The shutter whirr of the machine, the slicing light travelling the length of my body. I thought about my rolls of fat, the thickness of my hips. I wondered if the doctors would see the fat on the negative of my body, if they would gather, pointing, pretending to themselves and to each other that they were not disgusted.
The radiograph showed a small crack on the bone at the base of my back, my coccyx. The doctor who told me this was red-haired, with muscled arms. Freckles smattered on his nose. Watching his mouth move as he told me about this bone in my lower back—my bum bone, I thought of it—I imagined him as a boy, when his muscles were not developed, when his red hair was ungroomed
, his freckles broader, redder. His mouth kept moving. Light fracture. Stress point.
The bone that holds me together.
I turned my head from him. Shadows formed shapes on the wall; I could see flickers of green outside, glimpses of leaves lifting in the wind. The light grew longer, and the red-headed doctor kept talking about hairline fractures, but I knew I was already broken. While the light flickered and arched against the dull green wall, I tried to form words in my head. I tried to craft a promise.
In primary school, I found an abridged and illustrated retelling of Don Quixote. The illustrations were watercolours, soft pastels bleeding out onto the page, the paper thick with a rich inky smell. At lunchtimes I sat in the corner of the temporary classroom that permanently housed the school library, and I breathed in the smell of the ink, gazing at the pearly colours. In that hospital room, instead of seeing the shadowy green against the wall when I closed my eyes, I saw the thick pages, the cream faux-leather cover of Don Quixote. And, inside, the sketch of Don Quixote, a long skinny man with a drooping moustache dragging an unwilling horse out from the stable. In the illustration, the surrounding hills are painted a dusky mauve, and the horse’s spine droops in the middle like a badly tied hammock. On the ground, a pile of battered, rusty armour rests at the horse’s feet and the text below the picture says: Rocinante. Formerly an ordinary horse. In that grey demountable building, I breathed those words in, the possibility of them, chewing on them like cud: formerly ordinary.
Beneath my green hospital gown, the vinyl of the chair was cool. Near the top of my thigh, there was a slice in the seat, as though another occupant had dug at it with a nail file, or a knife, in an expression of desperation. An escape plan, hatched under pressure, badly thought out. My own nails worried at the upholstery flap, lifting it up and down, scraping at the velvety underside.
The red-headed doctor asked me to stand, to put the weight on my feet. Cool tiles pressed against my soles; my hands were tight against his forearms. His muscles flexed beneath my palms. ‘Okay?’ he said, and slowly released his hand, stepping back so that I stood without support, still reaching out for him.
The blindness came suddenly, in a terrible rush. With one breath, the world, the floor, the faces all disappeared while my hands thrashed about in dark air. It didn’t descend. It didn’t rain down on me, or close like a curtain. It was there, everywhere, as though it had always been there. Instead of the doctor, there was darkness. Instead of the nurse, there was darkness. Where the walls were, where the green shone bright against the shadows: darkness.
In kindy, we painted with glorious blobs of colour, squirted them across the page from plastic bottles: red sliding like blood, yellow as vivid as a cartoon. The magic came when we folded the page, rubbing each side together. Behold! A twin-sided multicolour. Mrs Noble pegged the paintings out on the school porch, and we watched the bright colours flap in the sun. The next morning we painted over the glorious twin blobs in black, covering the whole page, mystified by her gleeful instructions. The black dried quickly and, when it did, she gave us knitting needles with which we could scratch the picture. Underneath the black, the bright colours lurked, ready to burst out in radioactive squiggles, codes, secret messages.
In that curtained hospital room, I understood that it was the other way around. I understood that the black waited beneath the bright.
My sight went as quickly as that sentence, as quickly as a breath, and without it I had no sense of my own body in space. Without light, without sight, I could not measure distance, could not measure the feeling of my own legs, my own feet, my own arms. I floated in darkness, fell in nothingness. Someone shouted. My own voice, disconnected. I could barely make sense of my own words. Terror rose up, so swiftly, so fiercely. Other voices, not mine, joined the shouting. Hands gripped my arms, nails slicing into my skin. Voices. Without faces, without sight, I couldn’t understand distance—were they shouting at me from the other side of the room? From next to me? From space, where they floated, bodyless and faceless?
‘Calm down,’ one of the voices intoned. ‘Calm down, Kacey.’ She sounded out the syllables of my name, slowly. Kay. Cee. Calm. Down.
I’ve never thought of myself as an especially visual person. Often, I wander through the world slightly oblivious to what surrounds me, I am so immersed in my own thoughts. But without sight I was lost. I could not find my footing, I could not stand, was sure I was falling. And falling not just to the floor; falling through space. Perhaps even through time.
I could hear them shouting back at me, instructing me: it’s there, just stop, breathe, the chair is behind you, hold your hand out. But where was my hand? Which bit of me was my hand? Without sight, even the word—hand—seemed meaningless. Hand. What is it? Somehow, I flapped it, flailing wildly.
Someone—the nurse?—grasped it, clasped my palm against hers. Something brushed against my arm and I felt my body lower, felt the solidity of the wheelchair beneath me.
Now, I look back at her, this shouting creature, her thrashing arms, her panic tumbling, and the metaphor is so obvious as to be ridiculous, like those dreams that are hilarious in their lack of subtlety. I had one recently where I was juggling too many plates, terrified they would smash. And there she is: this twenty-year-old me, pummelling the air, terrified of all the things she does not wish to see, all the things she must make herself blind to, simply to survive.
Hysterical blindness. That’s what they called it. Perhaps men, boys, could go blind in this way too. But it would be girlish, womanish, of them to do so.
But whatever those voices intoned, they were wrong. Calm was not what I needed to be. Not then.
I lost count of the days in hospital, but it can’t have been more than five. Crisp starched sheets held me above and below, so tight that it felt like I was stitched in. During those days when I could not see, I was pliable, letting the nurses manoeuvre me upright, my muscles softer than the sheets. Holding my hand, showering me; I could only feel their kindness then. Later, they would bring me back to my bed, my feet shuffling carefully on the ground, my head angled forwards so I wouldn’t fall. Some mornings I could feel the brush of air against my bum where the gown was tied too loosely. I let the nurses and aides guide my hand to spoon mashed potato into my mouth, as though I were a soldier, returned from the war with shell shock. And it was a kind of shell shock, what I had, though my war was fought with fewer battalions.
I waited, and I waited, until the empty dark felt normal and I was not afraid. I waited, and I waited, until I felt again the comfort of the empty page, until I returned to neutral. And then, out of nowhere and without fanfare, I could see again. I woke in the hospital bed one morning to the creak of the trolley being wheeled across the tiled floor. Eyes closed, I counted the seconds, listening to each rotation of the double wheels, squeaking gently up and down the ward. Something chimed far away, a low sweet note, perhaps in another ward, and, without thinking about it, I opened my eyes to the light. For a second, the return of sight was as frightening as its loss and I contemplated turning over, face to the wall, and pretending that I still couldn’t see.
I understood that I had made myself blind. The diagnosis ‘hysterical blindness’ was there, in black ink, on the hospital reports; it was there in the discussions with the slightly bored doctor who stood at the end of the bed. Blindness, then, was something I’d invented, one more story in my ever-growing catalogue of stories, distortions and lies. Yet another thing that was, essentially, my fault.
I believed that story, and I carried it with me.
Recently I heard an actor on a talk show, a male actor, speak about going blind suddenly. He leaned back in the chair, his thin arms making circles in the air as he recounted trying to learn how to skate, which culminated in him tumbling arse first onto the ice and smashing his coccyx. He smiled at the audience, slightly sheepish as though he realised belatedly that his punchline was a little low on laughs. ‘And as a result,’ he said, ‘I went blind.’ The host la
ughed awkwardly, and the actor followed up with a punchier anecdote. How strange that a blow to the coccyx would result in temporary blindness.
After the motorbike crash, my coccyx had—has—a hairline crack at its tip.
Neither hysterical nor invented, after all. Just the body responding to a blow. Blindness is a natural response to trauma.
For five days, I lay in darkness and fear. I had been blind long before then. I’d chosen men who were dangerous, failed to see the risks. I’d stumbled from one bad choice to another, though not all my disasters were of my own making. I was blind, but in that room, cocooned in darkness, something opened in me.
On the lids of my eyes, there were no shapes, no pictures, no electrifying images of colour bursting through. There was only emptiness, a dark blank page, unwritten. In that hospital bed, with my sight gone and only the sound of scuffling shoes, of shushing and the whisper of wind outside, right there I decided that I did not want it, that story I was in. Not that one, my birthright, the story in which I drifted, flotsam, penniless, hopeless. Lying there, I decided I would make a different story. I would write on the blank page and make it new.
Before my mother left my father, we had a prison in our backyard. A lock-up in which the drunks or vandals sobered up, lacing their fingers through the bars, singing mournful renditions of Johnny Cash songs while I sat on the back step with my cat Whiskey on my lap, listening to the singing.
Each day after school, I dawdled home alone, scuffing my feet, chatting to the sky or to myself. When there were prisoners in the lock-up, my mother cooked for them—beans, eggs, toast, bacon—sending the food out on enamel plates. Prisoners’ plates, we called them. Prisoners’ spoons were the silver ones. Battered, slightly misshapen through years of use, but gratifyingly heavy. My father would rap on the lock-up door as he strode past, his arms loose, his chest puffed out. I never saw the prisoners when they got out; I only heard them, or saw their hands emerging through the bars at the top of the white wooden door. They might have been formless men for all I knew—strange creatures made of hands, singing soulful drunken songs, faces pressed into stripes through the bars. Long noses, eyes peering out. Sometimes a voice not just singing but speaking, too: ‘Little girl, are you the little girl who lives here? Did you go to school today?’
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