Diamond Eyes (16 page)

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Because the ghosts disappear when I close my eyes, and even though I can’t see myself, I can see the differences in both worlds as my eyes are closing.’

‘That’s called blindsighted, Mira. You think you can still see even when you can’t. It’s just your mind playing tricks after your fall.’

‘Now you sound like a psychologist. So much for not being blinded by the light of your own experiences.’

‘Sorry. Forget I said that. Just let me try to get this straight. From your perspective, there’s you, there’s ghosts and there are invisibles. Is that right?’

‘See? That wasn’t so hard. Now let me ask you a question?’

‘Go for it.’

‘Okay, well. If I can see people I can’t hear, and hear people I can’t see, which ones are really my hallucinations?’

Ben chewed on his lip as he reached the top. ‘From your perspective, I suppose they all are.’

‘Bingo!’ She clapped him on the shoulder. ‘If I’m crazy, you’re part of my insanity. The only way I’ve been able to cope is by obeying the rules of the ones that can hurt me.’

‘That’s invisibles, like me?’

She nodded again.

‘Whoa!’ he cried as he turned around. ‘What a view!’ He could see over the orchard and the trees of a low sand dune to a private crescent beach and the quiet cove of Halls Bay. ‘I didn’t realise you owned your own beach! I thought this whole inlet was swampy.’

‘You’re so lucky, Ben.’ A light breeze played with her hair as she pulled out the band to release her ponytail. ‘You’re so lucky to really see it. I miss it so much, but at least it still smells and sounds the same.’

‘Ah yes, there’s nothing quite like the tang of a salty breeze.’ He chuckled and walked to the nearest timber wall to peer through cobwebs and dirt on the window into a dusty kitchen and dining room.

Mira wrinkled her nose. ‘The ocean always smells like dead fish to me, but it’s home.’

He walked from one end of the balcony to the other.

‘The bedrooms are over in those two trees.’ She pointed while keeping one hand on the rail. ‘There’s a TV and lounge in the tree opposite us, but I’ll need to check the solar panel still works before we try to turn on the power. The bathroom and laundry have their own tree too.’

‘Do you have plumbing up here as well?’ Through the kitchen window he’d seen taps and a sink, but couldn’t remember seeing any pipes underneath.

‘Yes, each roof has its own water tank and the waste water is piped down to the vegetables. Except for the toilet water — that goes through an old compost system that filters the solids and soaks it into the orchard. The fruit trees must be dead from thirst by now, I guess.’

‘Overgrown more like it.’

‘Really? Well, then maybe... Follow me. Maybe we can taste some fruit.’

She followed the railing around a creaking section of floorboards until she reached an overhanging branch from a neighbouring tree; a mulberry. Beside it grew an orange tree and a passionfruit vine, all within reach at even distances along the rail. Deftly, herfingers stroked the mulberry branch until she found the blackest, softest fruit. She slipped one into her mouth.

‘Mmmmmm. It’s sweet, like freedom. Here, try one.’

‘I don’t know; how can you tell when they’re ripe?’

‘Like this.’ Her hand caressed the mulberry branch again and two of the darkest, softest berries dropped willingly into her hand.

She offered the fattest one to him. ‘The best way to eat a mulberry is to hold the stem with your fingers like this, put the whole berry in your mouth, then slide all the flesh off the central stem.’

He obeyed, but the touch of his lips against her fingertips startled her and her hand recoiled, leaving the berry dangling awkwardly from his teeth.

‘Sorry!’ they said in unison.

Mira giggled, and Ben chuckled.

‘Can we try that again?’ He ate the berry that was already in his mouth and pulled the stem out between his teeth. Juice escaped down his chin. He wiped it off with his hand, only to discover that his fingers now bore a dark purple stain. ‘Uh-oh.’

‘Stains?’ Mira guessed. ‘That’s easily fixed. You just rub a green mulberry over it and it disappears.’ She caressed the branch again until she found two smaller, hard, green and reluctant berries that needed firm encouragement to let go of the tree. ‘Try these.’ She handed them to him and he followed her instructions.

‘Amazing.’ He plucked a dark ripe passionfruit from a neighbouring vine, split it open with his thumb and sucked it out. ‘This is paradise, and self-sufficient to boot.’

He walked to the nearest suspension bridge, tested it with his foot, but wasn’t game to put any more weight on it.

‘It used to be so wonderful living here.’ Mira edged her way blindly across the platform to stand beside him, but this time, without a railing to guide her, she seemed to be following his voice, testing each footstep along the way as if frightened that she might step off and fall.

‘Until when...?’

‘Until my father died when I was twelve. Not long after, the first ghost people appeared. I buried him under the vegetables, and I lived here — just me and the chickens and the ghost people — until the invisibles came to take me away. I wonder what happened to my hens? Escaped into the forest, I guess. My father never caged them; he just had a low fence that kept them in well enough so long as we kept their wings clipped.’

‘Tell me more about your parents? There’s no mention of them in your file, except a brief note that your father had died about a year or two before you were admitted to your first orphanage. It must have been very hard for you, living here alone for so long. Didn’t you have any friends or relatives?’

Mira shrugged. ‘If I do, I’ve never met them. Except for ghosts and invisibles, I haven’t seen another living being since my father died — aside from the chickens and wildlife. A goanna used to come to eat the chickens’ eggs sometimes, and a family of wallabies often visited me from the forest.’

‘I have dune wallabies near my house too. That’s still a recipe for loneliness, though, Mira.’

She nodded. ‘I could write the Braille book on loneliness, but it would be a horror story and page one would start the day I left here.’

‘What about your mother?’

‘Well, I think I was nearly nine. Soon after I started to lose my own sight, my father told me thatshe’d turned into a seagull and flown away. I don’t know what the truth is. All I remember is that she was very short-sighted, much worse than I was before the blue fog came. He made all the notches for her, to help her get around more easily.’

‘That was clever of him. Makes sense too: Fragile X syndrome is usually inherited from the mother. Perhaps she just wandered off and got lost. Disorientation is a common symptom. How soon was it then before your father died?’

‘I’m not sure. A year, maybe two.’

‘And then you lived here alone for a year at least after he died... before the invisibles — people like me — came?’

She nodded again. ‘Two winters and the summer in between.’

‘Didn’t anybody notice you missing from school?’

‘My father stopped me from going to normal school when the world started to turn blue. He taught me in a little stone church over the hill that used to be a school in the convict days but I learned more from the ghost teacher than from him. I told you about that already, didn’t I? The ghost town is part of this property, but it’s in ruins now. A few days before the invisibles took me, I saw two ghost boys arsoning around all the buildings.’

He smiled at her misuse of the noun. ‘They burned it down?’

‘I couldn’t stop them.’

‘All the better, Mira. If the ghost people are real in my world too, we should find burned ruins there that are invisible to you but visible to me — if that makes sense. We can visit there next time, when we have more time.’

‘Oh, yes, please!’

‘Tell me more, though. You’ve hooked me. What happened the day the invisibles came?’

‘Which day do you mean? They came many times before and after my father died. Sometimes they were only voices out on the water. Sometimes they drove in here, lost, or they asked to walk through the gardens. None of them bothered me much. But eventually some came asking for my father — they said he owed money for unpaid land taxes or something. Then I heard them discover his grave and soon afterwards the whole place was swarming — with ghosts and invisibles. Too many of everyone, and no room left for me. I really did start to feel crazy then.’

‘No wonder. And that’s when they took you to the orphanage?’

‘That’s when an invisible woman tackled me, but I tripped and fell out of the tree. I don’t really know where they took me after that. When I woke up, a whole new bunch of invisibles said it was a hospital, but they blindfolded me. My whole body hurt, and they said it was because I’d broken nearly every bone, including both of my eye sockets. Then they shifted me to a new place — I don’t think it was an orphanage either. I was always by myself, in an invisible room high in the clouds over an old village. Don’t laugh! Everything in my room was invisible, including the floor, the furniture — even my food and toilet! At first I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, but you’re not supposed to feel pain in heaven, are you? Or frightened? And I certainly don’t think you’d need a toilet!’

‘I’d hardly think so.’

‘I didn’t know what to think. It was terrifying. Honestly, I was so high in the sky, one day I even saw a little ghost plane with propellers fly through my room. But I couldn’t see anything that was holding me up there. I had to feel my way around to make sure I didn’t crawl off an invisible edge. And I couldn’texplain what I was seeing — not even to myself — without sounding as if I was stark raving crazy. I screamed myself hoarse every day for weeks in that place, begging them to let me back down to the ground, but they were deaf to me.’

‘That’s when they sent you to the Serenity Centre?’

‘Not right away. They shuffled me to a few different places, all at different heights in the air, until they finally sent me to live in the jail.’

‘Old jail,’ he said, correcting her.

‘They made me walk in air there too, at first. And the things that happened in each of my rooms were horrible. They wouldn’t let me wear a blindfold to make it less painful, either. Some light really does get in. I tried ripping my clothes and sheets to make my own blindfold, but they kept taking them away from me. Do you understand now? I didn’t want to see anymore, no matter if it was real or hallucinations. So I begged the invisible called Freddie Leopard to stop me from seeing anything. Actually, I begged him to cut out my eyes completely, but he told me that he already knew what he had to do.’

‘Why did you trust him? Especially when, from your perspective, he’s invisible too?’

‘I
didn’t
trust him. I was desperate. I’d reached a stage where I didn’t care if I lived or died. But Freddie was so calm about it. He’s the only one who’s ever understood me; so well that he seems to know my thoughts before I know them myself. Did you know he was in the garden waiting for me the first time I tried to escape? Of course, he tried to convince me that my disability is really an
ability
that has been deliberately bred into me by Nietzscheans trying to create a race of superhumans — maybe he just meant normal people. But he’s also convinced that if I ever leave the island, I’ll be doomed to a fate worse than death.’

‘That sounds like Freddie all right.’

‘If this is hell,’ she grinned, ‘I’m moving in.’

‘And I’ll carry your luggage. You do know you can trust me now, right?’

She shrugged and chewed on her lip. ‘To be honest, the only things I can really trust are the things I can hear, smell, touch and control myself, which isn’t much, obviously.’

She sniffled and swiped a salty tear away from her stitches.

‘What’s wrong?’ He stepped closer and touched her shoulder.

‘Don’t!’ she snapped. ‘Please,’ she added, more kindly, ‘don’t touch me unexpectedly. It scares me.’

‘Sorry.’ He retreated a step. ‘I didn’t realise.’

‘That’s how they tripped me out of the tree. They crept up on me. And they’ve done it every day ever since — invisibles, I mean.’

‘Touch you? Do you mean inappropriately? The same way you meant it at the bus shelter?’

‘Tram station, and yes. It
is
inappropriate, isn’t it, to sneak up on people and touch them? You might as well scream “Boo” in my ear.’

‘Phew! I was worried you meant something much worse after all.’

‘Sometimes it
is
worse. I just wish you’d warn me before you touch me. please?’

‘Sure, okay. I should have known that anyway. But I’m still wondering what made you look so sad just now?’

Mira took a long time to regather her composure. ‘If I knew,’ she said, staring blindly out over the bay, ‘if I had any idea that I could come back here, even for this short visit, I never would have asked Freddie to make me blind.’

‘You’re blind anyway,’ Ben reminded her.

‘Only from your perspective. What’s more comforting, though? To be blind or to
think
I can see my beautiful view even if its through a blue fog?’

‘So open your eyes.’

‘What?’

‘Open them. I’ll help you. I’ve got a first-aid kit in my car. The stitches and cuts are still fairly fresh, so it shouldn’t hurt much. The matron’s probably going to make you get them taken out soon anyway, so why not do it on your own terms?’

‘She can’t force me!’

‘She can, actually. As your legal guardian, she can order any surgery that her medical team recommend — as early as tomorrow, if that’s what suits them.’

‘And does it? Is that what they’ve got planned for me?’

‘Probably. But that’s not the issue, is it? If you want to see your beautiful home from your own perspective, why not do it now, before you have to go back?’

Mira snatched the sunglasses off her face and held both hands over her eyes like a frightened child. ‘I can’t go back with my eyes open! It’s too. scary, terrifying, paralysing. Those words are all too tame!’

‘I think that’s from sensory overload, Mira. I’ve been listening very carefully to everything you’ve told me, and I think your brain is trying to process too much information at once. The doctors called it blindsighted, which, from their perspective, is another way of saying that your brain is very confused about what it can — and thinks it can — process. But either way, I think I can help to fix it, temporarily at least.’