The Blind Eye (4 page)

I have to at least try to be honest with myself; I have to at least admit that my preoccupation with Silas is not just due to the fact that he was a patient I found particularly interesting, it is also because he was responsible for bringing Greta back into my life. Because the truth is, each time I remember him, I am also drawn back to her, and I flinch, uncomfortable with her renewed presence in my consciousness, unable to leave it alone, yet still not knowing how to make peace with this particular aspect of my past.

I knew her over ten years ago (I was twenty-one at the time, and so very different to the way I am now), and I did not know her for long. But she was, I suppose, a turning point in my life. Sometimes I wonder whether all that happened between us marked the line between the person I once was and the person I became, which is not to say that I took a completely unexpected path; I didn’t. I already knew I wanted to do this kind of work, that it was right for me, I was already the type to throw myself in with too much intensity. After Greta there was, however, a fear, an anxiety
about failing others that grew, creeping, dark and intangible, at the back of all I said and did, tempering me, constricting me, never letting me forget its presence.

When Silas first mentioned Greta’s name to me, I did my best not to react. It was, in fact, right at the beginning of our first appointment. I asked him who had referred him and he told me that it was someone he had only recently met.

Greta
, he said,
Greta Sorenson
.

And I wrote her name down in the appropriate space on the form, without glancing in his direction.

He had sat behind her in the reading room of the State Library for three months before they talked. Later, she told me that she had found it curious that he always picked the seat directly behind hers. Wherever she was sitting, he would follow, seeming to choose her as a marker, as some kind of stable point in the enormity of that room, without ever really being aware of her existence. As far as she knew, he never did anything. Occasionally he had a book open in front of him and, even more rarely, she would hear him take out a piece of paper and pen, but most of the time he just sat there.

Greta was researching the life of a little-known sculptor for an academic. When I saw her again, shortly before I came out here, she told me that work such as this, along with brief stints in galleries and the odd hours in art-supply shops, was how she earned a living. She didn’t enjoy research (it was the solitude that she found difficult), but it
was far better paid than most of the other jobs she could get, and she had begun to find a certain pleasure in taming a life into a neat row of categories, her pages ruled into columns with headings such as ‘Work’, ‘Travel’ and ‘Love’ marked across the top.

Sometimes she would catch herself leaning backwards, trying to see what Silas was doing. Other times, when he went out for a cigarette, she would get a little bolder, turning right around in an attempt to find some clue as to who he was, but the only thing he ever wrote was the beginning of a letter, the same two words scrawled across the page –
Dear Rudi
– only to be crossed out, and then repeated, over and over again.

She was sitting on the front steps, her back warm in the early autumn sunshine, when they first spoke. He asked her if she had a light.

He told her his name and took the step below her, cupping his hands over the end of his cigarette as he tried to stop the match from blowing out.

Greta was never shy with people she did not know. She was, in fact, at her best with strangers, disarmingly attractive in her ability to strike up a conversation with someone she had only just met, and she grinned as she looked at Silas and told him that she had wondered when he was finally going to speak to her.
I’ve been curious about you
, she explained, and she asked him what it was that he did.

Nothing
, he told her, aware of how strange his answer sounded. I
guess I’ve just been thinking
.

In the glare of sunlight bouncing off an office block, his eyes were dark green; hazel when he turned away.

About anything in particular?

He shook his head and traced the tip of his cigarette along the edge of the step.
What about you?

She told him about the project she was working on, and the academic who had employed her.
She is trying to prove that this woman was at the forefront of a particular artistic movement, that she was an unrecognised great. The problem is, her work was fairly ordinary
.

She took out a photo to show him and he smiled as he looked at the piece.
It doesn’t look too flash
, he agreed.

Greta’s phone rang, and as she searched for it in her bag, Silas stubbed out his cigarette and raised a hand in farewell. She watched him, tall and thin, taking the stairs two at a time as he made his way back to the entrance, and she thought it was strange that he always wore a jumper, the sleeves never pushed up, even though it was still warm.

They soon found out that they lived only a couple of streets away from each other and they began to leave at the same time, either walking across the rapidly darkening park-lands together, or catching the train. I can only guess as to what they would have talked about, I can only take the
pieces that I know and join them myself, but this is the way it will have to be if I am to form a coherent whole.

She would have told him that she had been brought up by her grandparents in the country, that she had moved to the city when she was seventeen, and that she wanted to live in New York.

Just for a while. Just to see if I can
.

She wanted to be a curator. She was not good enough to be an artist herself, she had learnt that a long time ago, and she would have smiled slightly as she told him that she wanted to work overseas because she had a constant need to test herself, to push beyond the boundaries of the safe worlds she knew. Leaving the country town where she had grown up had been the first step. Going to New York was the next. But it was not just geographical boundaries, and she would have laughed; she had a tendency to push herself to the limit in all she experienced. She would have blushed then as she realised she had once again revealed too much, only to find that he had not told her anything about himself; in fact, after several days of walking home together, she would have to admit she knew no more about him than she had on the first day they had talked.

Despite this, she still slept with him, only three weeks after they met. I do not know whether she did so hoping she would get to know him more, that this would be the start of a relationship, but I would guess so. Most of us want to be
loved. Some of us go to extraordinary lengths to hide this need, others of us have it on display, naked and awkward. Greta was always looking for the person who would save her, who would love her enough to make everything all right, and she was always disappointed.

As she and Silas had been about to part on the usual corner, he had stopped her. She was surprised when he had suggested a drink, when he had suddenly seemed to want to be a part of the early evening, the street lights flickering on overhead, the rush of people heading home carrying food and flowers, the bars opening their doors, and she had followed him across the street and down the back alley.

His footsteps were loud in the lobby as, some hours later, they both stumbled into his apartment building, arm in arm. She saw herself in the elevator mirror and she hated the flush across her cheeks, the haziness in her eyes, and the lurid orange of her mouth under the fluorescent light, but then he was kissing her, his lips moving up to her ear;
Greta, Greta, Greta
, he whispered, and she knew he was drunk too as he dropped his keys twice at the entrance to his flat. That was when she remembered that she had meant to finish writing up the first part of her notes, but she just thought
fuck it
, this was what she wanted, and as she felt the brush of his lips on her neck as he led her through to the bedroom, there was a moment when he seemed about to say something, but she
didn’t let him because, whatever it was, she was pretty certain she didn’t want to know.

In the soft light of the next morning, Greta sat opposite Silas and wondered why she hadn’t just gone, grabbed her bag in the middle of the night and gone. She supposed she had been so confused, so uncertain as to whether what was happening was in fact happening, that she had been unable to act. But that was not all there was to it; she had also been worried about leaving him alone.

Now, sober and exhausted, she was scared, wanting only to leave, but feeling that she had to somehow go through the motions of attempting to talk.

Do you have any idea what you did?
she asked him. Her mouth was dry from the alcohol and cigarettes and she did not want to look at him because she did not want to see him for what he really was: a stranger.

He did not answer and she glanced at the wounds he had been cutting into his arms when she had found him, there on the kitchen floor, alone in the darkness. He was watching her and his eyes were black in the paleness of his face. He looked away.

Has it happened before?
She did not know why she wanted to cry and she bit her lip.

He told her it had.

Often?

A couple of times a month
.

The intimacy of having had sex was close and raw enough. Attempting to have this conversation was too much for either of them.

Why?
And her voice was small as she shook her head.
You should have warned me
, and she was aware of the ludicrousness of her comment as soon as she made it.

He smiled for the first time that morning, the expression on his crooked mouth sheepish as he told her it wouldn’t have been much of an enticement in getting her up to his place.
I hoped it wouldn’t happen
, he said.
I really did
.

As she rubbed at the sleep in the corners of her eyes, she said she thought he needed to get some help.

He had already tried; he had been to psychiatrists, to doctors, there had been meditation, naturopathic treatments, diet, acupuncture, and as he listed each attempt he had made, she just wrote down my name,
Daniel Lehaine
, and the place where she’d heard I had my practice.

She reached for her bag. From his kitchen window, she would have been able to see how the sky stretched, soft blue, over the impossible perfection of the day. The first autumn leaves would have floated past, and with the sun behind them, they would have shone, translucent.

She kissed him awkwardly, wishing she hadn’t as soon as the moment passed, and she told him she would see him around.

Later, when I asked her why she had sent him to me, I was surprised by her answer.

She smiled.
He reminded me of you
.

Really?
I asked her, trying to keep my voice level.

Not what you are now
, she told me.
What you were then
.

2

Port Tremaine has a main street and five back streets that make up the grid of the town. Only the main street is bitumen; the rest are dirt, eventually petering out into either the surrounding scrub or the mangrove swamps that border the gulf.

Silas could remember it all in sharp detail. He could mark each house and tell you whether it was deserted or occupied, and if it was occupied, who lived in it. He could tell you which of the businesses still opened their doors to customers and which were boarded up, the owners having long since given up on any hope of surviving in a town that depended on a country now laid bare and empty, stretched out, silent and wasted, beneath the vastness of the sky.

He even told me about the giant palms, their growth stunted by the tyres around the base of their trunks; they sit, squat and ugly along the centre of the main street, like discarded overgrown pineapples. It is a street that stretches down to a jetty, the jetty reaching for over a kilometre into the still, silvery waters of the gulf. Built to accommodate
a tide that sucks out and out, leaving tiny crabs scurrying across the sand and clumps of weed drying to a salty crisp under the harsh glare of the sun, the length of that jetty is the only claim to fame the town has.