Blindsight Read online

  I sat in my car and buried my face in my hands. ‘What am I doing?’ I moaned. But I understand Richie now. He was making sure the boys loved him. He knew what he was about.

  The way to get what he wanted from me, which wasn’t love, was to treat me like dirt. I’ve thought a while about that phrase. It’s not a lazy choice and it isn’t easy. I mean women were base material. I was the handful he had picked up – and better quality than he’d found before: no clay in the mixture, good rich soil. So, for a while, Richie cultivated me.

  It’s an absurd metaphor and doesn’t hold up. But the truth in it is that I began to feel like something he held in the palm of his hand and ran his thumb through to feel the texture. I knew that he could toss me aside any time he wanted, so I worked at being more and more the thing lying in his palm. I practised the Alice Ferry who pleased him most. So I’ll let it stand.

  I rented a flat in Nile Street, with the Maitai River running at the bottom of the garden. I sat on the bank in the evenings, or on weekend afternoons when Richie did not want me, and heard the water sliding over stones. I admired its silkiness and the easy turning with which it found its way. A child floated by on an inner tube. He smiled at me as though I were part of the world. Those times were like an argument against Richie, stronger than the arguments of friends, who deplored him, found him the rudest, most arrogant etc., saw that he was using me and ruining me, saw that I was ill with him. A trout, speckled on its back and cream on its underside, held itself in the current by the flicking of its tail. It told me I should free myself from Richie. It lived entirely in its element.

  I opened my book and took up residence for a chapter or two. I thought about work and how I might publish my next paper without the Harvey director adding his name. I worried about Gordon for a while. His letters were friendly and full of chat (he had bought a motorbike and something had gone wrong with it, he couldn’t get it started) but said nothing about Marlene and nothing about him and me. I cooled my feet in the water, listening to radio music over two hedges – a flute breathing and a harp plinking – so on, so on, afloat above my yearning for Richie Ayres.

  I was driving to his place that evening to cook dinner. Before perhaps, but certainly afterwards, we would make love. I would creep out of his bed at four in the morning. and drive home, careful not to wake or compromise him. I was a woman of thirty who had had, and used in her way, half a dozen lovers. I was helpless in Richie Ayres’ hands.

  His flat was in Tahunanui, close to the beach. I drove there at six o’clock, with T-bone steaks bought the day before and a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape supplied by a publican who thought it was plonk (he showed me a dusty case in a backyard shed and told me to suggest a price. We settled on one and six a bottle). I meant to surprise Richie and wanted him to say how clever I had been. The sun was setting behind the Arthur Range. Huge grey clouds turned purple and red. I hurried up his path under rhododendron trees, with agapanthus leaves stroking my thighs. I was hot with anticipation, and was a little mad. I meant to drag Richie to the window, show him the black mountains and the tumorous clouds, then slide my hands inside his shirt, round his furred back, and take him, wrestle him into his bed. Wine afterwards, steak later on.

  The flat was dark. He had thumb-tacked a note on his front door: Sorry Alice, had to go out. Might see you tomorrow. R.

  I can hear the sound I made: a bat-shriek of diminishment and despair. The sky darkened and pressed me flat. I believe that for a while I lay insensible on his porch. Later I found myself sitting on his doorstep, and there I stayed, hour after hour, ten o’clock, midnight, two o’clock. I shivered. I hugged myself smaller and smaller, I shrank like the incredible shrinking man, and held on to a sense of my being only through glints of light from the moon and through attenuated sounds: waves slapping on the sea-wall, hissing on the beach, a girl far away laughing like a bird. It was like the consciousness that’s left when you know – but barely know – your nightmare is a dream, when you hear the distant whisper: I can wake up.

  Three o’clock. I slid from one side of myself to the other. Richie was coming; he would not come. I should be ready for him; I should be away and showing no anxiety or bother. I hated him. I loved him, needed him, had to have him. Psychic orgasms, psychic murders, tormented me. Finally, knowledge that I was a mess drove me away. He must not see me ravaged and swollen-eyed.

  I left the bottle of wine on his doorstep and fled in terror. On the way home I stopped the car and threw the T-bone steaks into the sea. Exhaustion should have stopped me cold after that, but I could not climb into my bed. He enveloped me, he was wrapped around my mind. It was instinct that took me down the cold lawn to the river. I would lie in an element not mine. I would be a fish. In my nightclothes I sank into the water, not to drown but to be other than myself. I did not go in deep but let the current bounce me on the stones. Every cold touch was a washing free. I entered a kind of sleep, half in my body, half in my mind, and each half stopped the other from floating away.

  It seemed to me that hours passed. I looked for the dawn as I walked dripping to the house, but the clock in the kitchen had moved less than ten minutes. I would have died from hypothermia otherwise. I stripped off my nightie, wrapped myself in my eiderdown and went to bed, dived into sleep. It was mid-morning before I woke. I sat up and yawned and stretched my arms. My mind was empty. I put my feet on the floor, and then, two-legged, upright, back in my life, said: ‘Richie. Where is he? Where are you, Richie?’

  There are ways to free yourself from obsession. I came close but he was too strong.

  I waited for him in my sitting-room, wrapped in my chair. Neville Kite walked past the window. I heard him knock, heard him call my name, then saw him back at the window, peering in with his hand shielding his eyes. It took him a moment to find me, then his look bored into me and he understood. He went back to the door and let himself in.

  ‘Alice? Are you all right?’

  I made no answer and he took my shoulders and rocked me gently back and forth.

  ‘Alice. Come on, girl, pull yourself together.’

  I told him to go away, I was expecting a friend.

  He crouched in front of me and made me look at him. ‘No one’s worth it,’ he said. ‘No one’s worth drowning in. Believe me, Alice.’

  If I could have spoken I would have told him it was no good talking like that. Neville had no entry to my world – my grey thin world thickened into life by Richie Ayres. Neville was a wind-up toy whirring with clockwork sounds and moving with mechanical steps, jerkily. I told him again to go away. Instead he made me a cup of tea. Years later, when we were married, he apologised for putting sugar in it. He never apologised for refusing to go, even when I screamed at him – ‘Get out of my house, you stupid old man’; even when I threw my tea at him. He got a towel from the bathroom and dried his face, then wiped the back of his chair and the wall behind it.

  The tea had gone cold by the time I threw it. ‘No,’ Neville used to remind me, ‘lukewarm.’ Shall I say now who he was? Just the bare facts because Richie still has two months to go. Neville Kite, entomologist, lepidopterist, conchologist, soil chemist: all-purpose scientific man. He was twice my age when I married him. We did the arithmetic and it worked out almost to the day. He was older than my father – but oh how like a boy Neville seems when I stand them together in my mind.

  He had little schooling; left when he was fourteen, learned his science on the job, and became the best entomologist the Harvey ever had – published more papers, did more work, helped everyone, as well as being our jack-of-all-trades, our maintenance man and encyclopaedia. Yet there were scientists in the place, young and old equally, who were scornful of him because he had no qualifications. ‘No. None. Not even School Certificate. I think I came top in nature study at Central School. And I won the sack race.’

  The day I arrived at the Harvey, the director, a pompous, lazy, ambitious fellow called Doctor Staines (who pinched other people’s research) took me roun
d the labs and offices to meet the staff. ‘We needn’t bother with Kite,’ he said, passing an open door where a man in a white coat with the sleeves too short was poking at something under a microscope. Neville’s whisper followed us down the corridor: ‘No schooling at all.’

  I went back and introduced myself when the tour was over. Neville was dissecting out the stomach of a sandfly.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘To see if I can do it. Have a look. This one’s empty. He must have been trying to feed on our director.’

  We became friends – better than friends, intimates. He learned most of my secrets. He watched my bad behaviour with understanding one day and bafflement the next. My need for love, if that’s the word, with fortyish men was explicable. He said he thought he could see what I was chasing, but didn’t it lie off the mainstream of experience? He did not want to generalise, was dead against it, but people could not be happy in dead-end streets. There must be a view into the distance. He carried on but stopped before I grew bored. Neville made me think for myself, and made me laugh – something Richie was never able to do.

  Shortly after I threw my tea at Neville, Richie arrived – walked straight in. He never knocked. He said: ‘Gidday, Doc. I hope you’re leaving.’

  ‘It’s Mister, not Doc, my boy,’ Neville replied. ‘Alice, would you like me to stay?’

  ‘No, go. Please go.’

  He took the tea-stained towel with him and left it in the wash-house.

  ‘What did he want?’ Richie said.

  ‘Nothing. He just came on a visit.’

  ‘The old bugger wants to get into your pants.’

  I used to believe Richie invented that phrase. It amuses me when I hear it – knickers, pants – for it reminds me how little Richie knew, what a simple organism he was. I’m not saying he was wrong about Neville, but he could not begin to imagine the other things ‘old goat balls’ wanted with me.

  ‘French wine,’ Richie said, holding up the bottle.

  ‘Only one and six. He didn’t know.’

  ‘Smart girl. Got a corkscrew?’

  I fetched it and we went on from there. I did not ask where he had been the night before. I made no reproaches, but boasted that I’d gone for a midnight swim in the river. I tried all ways to be the one, and there were moments when I almost settled into focus for him. That afternoon was probably the closest I came. We made love many times and I spoke soundlessly as he slept from his exertions: This is the very best thing. I put my lips against his ear and whispered: ‘I love you, Richie.’ Repeated it, repeated it, believing it might work subliminally and echo back with his name changed to mine – ‘love you, Alice’ – if I tried harder, kept on trying.

  ‘Love you, Richie.’

  I laugh angrily as I think of it.

  There’s little more to say about Richie Ayres. Well, his muscular rudeness, his quick brain, I could add a dozen little paired-off things like that, but in the two months we had left his infinite carelessness of me was the thing I learned.

  End of term was coming at his school. He would spend Christmas in New Plymouth with his mum and dad. I understood that (I was going nowhere; I did not want to be with other people, which was how my family appeared to me now), but I begged to meet him afterwards. I’d take my holidays and some unpaid leave and we’d go where we could be by ourselves.

  ‘Hey, take it easy. I’ll let you know.’

  But it was the Harvey secretary, Bonnie Haley, who let me know. Her vein of malice was buried deep but little chipped-off bits emerged as snide merriment.

  ‘He’s a popular boy, your Mr Ayres.’

  ‘He’s not mine.’

  ‘There’s weeping and wailing up there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At the school. He’ll leave a big gap. But I guess you can’t pin a young man down. Not when he’s as fit and spry as Mr King Kong Ayres.’ She smiled at me. ‘You didn’t know? He’s given notice. He’s leaving at the end of term.’

  I turned to go. She called after me: ‘My boy Darryl’s in his form. He broke it to them yesterday.’

  And would not have broken it to me until he had squeezed every last drop out.

  I drove to Tahunanui and waited on the footpath outside his flat. Trucks like roaring beasts went by, followed by hooting sedans; then Richie cycled through the misty rain, wearing the black slicker that fitted him like a carapace. He dismounted and made a flat gesture with his hand, slicing me out of his day.

  ‘No, Alice. Not now.’

  I followed him up the path, pleading at first, then screaming at him, and he hurried me, bundled me inside and slammed the door.

  ‘You stupid bitch. I have to live here.’

  ‘Richie, you didn’t tell me. I could have finished my job too …’

  I won’t put it all down, it’s demeaning. Just say that he told me he was getting out of teaching for good. He had worked out his bond: ‘Thank God I only had it for one year.’

  ‘But you’re not leaving Nelson?’

  ‘Sure I am. Why would I stay in a one-horse town? OK Alice, I’m going overseas. I’m booked on a ship called the Castel Felice, leaving Auckland at the end of January. Think of your boy in London, eh? They’ll know I’ve arrived.’

  ‘But I can come. I can buy a ticket.’ I told him we’d get married and see London together. I had lived there. I would show it to him – Hyde Park, Tower Bridge …

  ‘Have you ever heard me say the word marriage?’

  ‘I thought … I thought …’

  ‘Well you thought wrong. Do you think I’d saddle myself with a wife six years older than me?’

  I must have looked like a fish, my mouth opening and closing, and no sound coming out.

  He said: ‘God, Alice, you should see yourself. Why don’t you go in the bathroom and clean up? Then we’ll have a farewell one. What do you say? One for the road.’

  I backed away from him, and heard him say: ‘I’ve been doing you a favour, Alice.’

  I ran down the path, got into my car. I don’t know how I drove home without crashing. Then I was sick, both ways: down on my hands and knees on the kitchen floor, retching time after time; and sick in my head for months after that.

  I never saw Richie Ayres again. What poignant words, what an echo of grief – except that I’m inclined to cheer. And in fact, last year, I did see him. We passed in Lambton Quay, and what a barrel of a man he had become at sixty-five. What a pug-dog, hungry, empty face. He’s Sir Richard – squeaking in before the Labour government got rid of ‘Sir’ – for his career in property. But enough of him. We passed in the street, as in life, and went our ways. I saw him first and blanked my eyes; saw him recognise me and felt the little blow my non-recognition dealt. I scored a hurt to his self-esteem. It elated me. I walked on smiling and never looked back.

  There are better people than either of us walking the Wellington streets.

  I’d like to describe my life as Dr Ferry and Mrs Kite but have a bridge to cross before I reach it. I’ll call my sickness by the name my doctor gave, nervous prostration, and change the metaphor from bridge to plain, or desert perhaps, a sandy waste. I stumble into pits of amnesia recalling it. How did so many months go by? What did I do all day? I wasn’t simply lying in bed. I’ve some memory of the people who cared for me, Neville especially; and I remember river picnics and bush walks when I became almost happy. Then Richie struck in me like a gong and his terrible dark vibrations sounded on and on and on …

  What else? Another dark sound started in that time, but this one reverberates still. It is ten o’clock in Wellington. The weather is windy but dry. Gordon has filled in for a night-shift porter whose car has broken down. He takes a bus from the hospital to Manners Street, then walks up Willis Street and round the corner into Ghuznee Street. Men stand in a group outside his place, where two police cars seal off the roadway. I see him in the overhead light, frozen in mid-step, weakened, unmade. The image sits in my skull, vibrating like a cymbal. He changes from Gor
don then into Gordon now.

  He runs up the street. A policeman stops him at the gate in the iron fence. ‘I live here,’ Gordon cries. He sees men crouching by a body on the ground. ‘Who is it? Is it Marlene? Marlene,’ he shouts.

  I don’t go forward from there; I go back to the Willis Street corner and Gordon’s face. Always, that is where I go. There are pits of forgetting on either side. Some protective force is responsible. I don’t believe I dug them by myself.

  Father telephoned from Wellington. He and Mother had flown down from Auckland to be with Gordon, and they wanted me to come across. The call came in the morning, to the Harvey, and Bonnie Haley, supposing, perhaps knowing, more than she should, fetched Neville Kite to the telephone. He told Father I was not well, then admitted it was serious; I was off work and no one knew when I would be back – but friends, good friends, were looking after me …

  I had talked with Neville about Gordon several times, describing his innocence and carelessness and his unfitness for ‘getting on’, then his silliness with the girl, Marlene (denying fiercely to myself my own silliness with Richie Ayres). I explained how close we were and how I loved him. Neville understood all that, perhaps as well as I. He asked Father what had gone wrong.

  ‘The police found a body in his yard. Stabbed to death. They don’t suspect Gordon. He was at work. But of course he’s terribly upset.’

  ‘I read about it in the paper. I had no idea it was Gordon’s place,’ Neville said.

  ‘So Alice knows?’

  ‘I haven’t seen her this morning. But I don’t think you should tell her about this. She’s not well enough.’

  Mother hurried across the strait to nurse me. Father stayed with Gordon. They, poor innocents, made things worse. Gordon was in a state like mine. Every word Father spoke, each closeness he attempted, pushed him further away. ‘I couldn’t get near him,’ Father complained for the rest of his life. As for Mother, she sat by my bed and talked and talked; she followed me from the sitting- room to the kitchen, to the bathroom, to the back porch, declaring: We’ll do this, we’ll do that, and Gordon too, when you’re well, when you’ve both pulled yourselves together. I sat by the river. She followed me. If I had walked in and floated away she would have floated by my side.