Blindsight Read online

  ‘You told me about changing his name.’

  ‘Yes, that much. Now I’m going back. He worked at the hospital and lived in the bach in Ghuznee Street. Marlene was his girlfriend. You know all that. What you don’t know is – in 1959 a man was found dead in his front yard. He’d been stabbed.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘An old alcoholic. A street person. Gordon used to make friends with them and give them money. This dead man was one of them.’

  ‘Who did it?’

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. ‘No one knows. They never caught anyone. But the thing is, Marlene was the one who found the body. Gordon used to leave a key for her in a pile of bricks. She was getting it out when she saw the body lying by the wall. She’d been ill, Adrian. You know about the psychiatric ward. It was where Gordon met her. When she saw this body lying there she – flipped.’ I made a sound of disgust at the stupid word. ‘She ran away and people found her in the street with blood on her. So, for a while, the police thought she’d done it.’

  ‘Who did? Was it Gordon? He’s been in prison, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No, no, no. I told you, they never caught the person. Gordon was at work. He was working late. And they soon found out it wasn’t Marlene. But her family grabbed her, they wouldn’t let Gordon see her. They took her down to Christchurch. That’s where your father was born. You know all this. The baby was adopted. After that Marlene killed herself.’

  ‘Jesus. Jesus.’ Lost for words.

  I said: ‘Pour me a little sherry, Adrian. Have one yourself.’

  When he didn’t move I got up and did it myself – not little ones either.

  The harbour was empty, the last yacht gone under the hill. The sea was white, but it darkened as I watched. Light from the setting sun flashed from the windows of houses in the bush above Day’s Bay.

  ‘Gordon was gone by that time,’ I said. ‘They told him Marlene was in Australia so he went there.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘My parents came down. They tried to help him. They told me what was happening.’

  ‘I would have thought you’d come across. For your brother.’ He kept it to only a small sneer.

  ‘I had troubles of my own,’ I said.

  I told him Gordon had written letters – short letters, postcards sometimes – telling them which part of Australia he was in. Then they stopped. For more than thirty years no one in the family knew where he was. Our parents died without knowing.

  ‘I don’t know when he came back. But he’s been here in Wellington most of the time.’

  ‘When did you find out?’

  ‘The year my father died. 1991. So I came down and saw him –’ choosing my words carefully – ‘and found out where he’d been all that time, and when I retired from my job I shifted permanently. To be near him. I bought this house.’

  He was watching me. I sipped my sherry. He hadn’t touched his.

  ‘Yeah?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. It’s a good house. Neville would have been happy here.’

  ‘So what’s the thing you’re not telling me?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, and sipped again, ‘I’m telling you nothing at all. You’ve been a good boy. You’ve been kind to me. And I know you were good to your father. But I don’t actually have to tell you anything. I’m almost persuaded to let you see for yourself.’

  ‘See Gordon?’

  ‘Yes, see him. But you’d have to promise not to speak to him.’

  Then I drew back. I was giving too much away. And I had not persuaded myself. Yet I could feel a kind of blind necessity at work, and hear a voice saying: End it. Whose voice? It hung between us like love, and I thought: I’ve got to do it, but I don’t know whether it’s for them or against.

  I said: ‘I think I can eat something after all. Will you go and order a pizza? You know the sort I like.’

  ‘Are you saying he’s gone gaga or something? Is he sick?’

  ‘Will you do what I say.’

  ‘Why all the guff? Motorbikes and trams? Why the fucking lie?’

  ‘Please, Adrian. I’m going to cry.’

  It wasn’t for long. I dried my cheeks and finished my sherry, then started on his. He came back from the kitchen with a can of beer and sat nursing it and sulking for a while. Two sherries on an empty stomach made me light-headed. I kept on thinking: I’ve done it now, and felt fear and relief in equal parts. Another sherry would have made me sentimental, and I might have started thinking that Adrian would say some magic word and Gordon’s lost years would fall away, and I would stand forgiven at his side …

  Adrian said: ‘I’m going to tell Bets.’

  ‘If you have to.’

  ‘I know you don’t like her, but she’s the best girl I’ve ever had. She’s sensible.’

  ‘That’s because she’s not a girl, she’s a grown-up woman.’ Except for her installations, I might have added. ‘Do you mean she’ll tell you what to do?’

  We might have quarrelled, but the pizza man arrived. We ate in the sitting-room, off our knees. For something to say, I told him pizzas hadn’t existed when I was a girl, or Kentucky Fried Chicken or Big Macs or Coca Cola, all the things that had been there for all of his life. And fries were chips, and chips were better. And you could buy oysters for one and six a dozen.

  He said: ‘Don’t start.’

  ‘Crayfish too. Crayfish were cheap. Gordon wouldn’t eat them when he found out you boiled them alive.’

  ‘Gordon was a wuss.’

  I asked him to explain the word, then agreed that Gordon had some of that, but he was more, much more, more, more, more …

  ‘That’s three sherries, Alice. You’d better slow down.’

  He made mugs of tea and sat keeping me company late into the night. I kept dozing off and waking up and telling another story about Gordon: Brahn boots, I told that, and his drawing for the Boyles and, to show he wasn’t really a wuss, his football injuries and winning at the inter-school athletic sports. I told him about our parents’ marriage. Then went back to when Gordon was only eight and he played the part of the king in a play Standard Two put on at the Loomis School fancy dress party in the town hall. He sat at a table, wearing pyjamas, slippers, a dressing-gown and a cardboard crown pasted over with gold paper. He sorted florins and shillings into piles. ‘The king was in his counting house counting out his money,’ Gordon said. The queen wore a long dress and a silver crown. The maid wore an apron and a cardboard nose. The girl who was the blackbird had black wings. Why was Gordon in pyjamas and a dressing-gown? I don’t know. He wore them not just for the play but right through the party; and told me on one of my trips to Wellington that he still had nightmares in which he found himself dressed in pyjamas in the street or on buses and trams, and sometimes he wore nothing at all.

  ‘We all have those,’ Adrian said.

  ‘Do we?’

  ‘Sure. Ask your shrink. You probably need one.’

  ‘He said it was the worst night of his life, dressed in pyjamas.’

  ‘What were you?’

  ‘Maid Marian. Standard Three did a play too.’

  I went to sleep in my chair and woke to hear him washing the dishes.

  ‘Come on, Alice. Time you were in bed,’ he said, coming back.

  ‘I don’t need help. You can take the car. I think I might give it to you.’

  He looked startled. ‘Tell me when you’re sober.’

  ‘If I’m drunk it’s not with sherry. I need the bathroom.’

  He helped me there. At the door, maudlin, I said: ‘Be kind to her, Adrian. She’s a good girl. But make sure she’s kind to you too.’

  ‘Shall I run a bath?’

  ‘That would be nice. I think she’s not quite as kind as she should be.’

  ‘Shut up, Alice,’ he said, in a friendly way.

  I remember it all clearly, but don’t remember the bath. I imagine he waited outside the door in case I drowned – drowning was a possibility.
I’d slipped sideways from Gordon, helped by sherry – another glass with my pizza – into the kind of safety that produces tears and soft focus and no real knowledge or feeling at all.

  Then I was in bed, afraid again, with the warm sort of fear that makes its own forgetfulness. He said, from a distance: ‘Goodnight,’ and the car – had I really given it to him? – made cat-purring noises and went away.

  I slept as though fingers had pulled my eyelids down, and woke with a dry mouth and a headache in the small hours. There was nothing to soften my fear. ‘I’m frightened,’ I said, and turned on the light and drank the glass of water Adrian had left on the bedside table; then reached for my book and pencil from the drawer, and wrote: Now our troubles start …

  It’s afternoon. Yachts are racing again, on a blue harbour sprinkled with confetti. They are crowded together, dipping their sails at each other as though they don’t care about competing today. I walked in my garden, seeking freshness, a while ago, but I’m stuffed with fur, with cotton wool, and can’t seem to touch anything. I shouldn’t have eaten that warmed-up pizza for lunch. I feel sick.

  Did I really say all that last night?

  I am paralysed by fear.

  Chapter Eight

  Gordon walked back to Marlene waiting on the footpath. I stopped a short way up the street and watched. He put his arm around her, perhaps for the first time in such an easy way, and she put both of hers around him and they went into the hall, Gordon upright, not looking back, and Marlene in the awkward way hugging women have, leaning into him, with her hip-bone in the way.

  We passed out of each other’s lives, or so it seemed.

  More than thirty years later I walked behind him up Lambton Quay and Willis Street, past the building that had been the St George Hotel and over the Dixon Street intersection. He came to the traffic lights at Ghuznee Street. I’m not sure he knew how to signal for the green man, or that the exit road from The Terrace tunnel ran over the spot where his shack had stood and where Marlene had found Cyril Handy’s body. He did not turn his head left or right but knew enough not to step into the traffic.

  I had waited for him at the central part of Lambton Quay, opposite Kirkcaldies, where Mrs Imrie had seen him. It took me three afternoons. I ate a sandwich and drank take-away coffee in Midland Park, and poked around in shops, buying little things to ward off suspicion and keeping my eyes on the street. I stood on the footpath, then followed a beat, fifty metres up and fifty metres down, and if I had not been so plainly respectable might have been taken in for questioning. Would I have had the wit to say: ‘Sometimes I eat scones’?

  I don’t know where Gordon had been that day – possibly to some place that dispensed cups of tea. (He did not sleep in his shelter on Tinakori Hill until summer had set in.) I was under the walkway roof at Midland Park, watching the opposite footpath and wondering whether it was time to go around social agencies and night shelters when I saw him beyond the cars and buses – saw an apparition with my brother inside. He walked on the edge of the pedestrian flow, slowly, head down, and I knew at once, by revelation flashing from the years we had been together, that he was not cast out but was where he had chosen to be. It was as if he had shifted half a second outside time, and was ahead of, or perhaps behind, the people passing – their heads turning, some towards him and some away – and that the fragment of time, Gordon’s step aside, made an unbreakable wall between him and all that went on commonly: between him and me, Gordon and Alice. I came against a barrier at my sight of him, was stilled as though by a shouted order. I was full of recognition of all things – all things – about my brother. So I did not shriek his name and run at him through the traffic. I said, or groaned – a birthing groan – ‘Oh. Oh,’ so loudly that a man next to me stepped away. I crossed to the centre of the road to be closer, then waited for the pedestrian light and crossed the rest of the way. I followed Gordon, ten steps behind, up Lambton Quay and Willis Street.

  I had no idea where he would lead me or where I was going in time – through the wall, into the place where Gordon lived? I said: I want to go with you, I don’t want you to come with me. I knew I must not, must never, want that. Gordon would die.

  When the green man appeared, Gordon crossed. I passed him and waited on the other side. He wore sneakers with the laces taken out. They went flop flop as he walked. His trousers were made for a shorter man, showing rumpled socks and a hand’s width of white shin. He wore two jackets, the inner one an ancient quilted vest with a broken zip, the outer cast off from a pinstriped suit. He, or someone else, had scissored off the sleeves below the elbow. Underneath was an orange and brown checked flannel shirt, the sort made in China. He carried a bundle tied with twine under his arm and a plastic bucket in his other hand. Inside were a new-looking thermos flask and a woollen hat.

  I waited for him to look at me but he passed without a glance, his eyes on the footpath. His margin was ten feet, and feet were all he saw of other people. I quickened my step and passed again, said: ‘Gordon,’ as he approached, the way one says a child’s name, calling him easily to table. He stopped, not at my voice, but because he could not move around me. My shoes, my knees, perhaps my waist, he saw.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. It was a voice with everything taken out.

  ‘It’s Alice,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ a man passing said.

  ‘Mind your business,’ I said.

  ‘You all right, Cyril?’ he asked.

  ‘Thank you,’ Gordon said.

  I stepped aside and he went on.

  ‘He never talks, lady. You can’t do him any good.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  I trailed behind my brother, held on a thread, and when he stopped at the crossing by the Bar Bodega, looped it in until we stood side by side.

  ‘Hello, Cyril,’ I said, hoping that giving him his chosen name would somehow lead him to ‘Alice’, but he replied only with a sinking of his head.

  I thought: He’s moved me out. He wouldn’t know how to let me in if he wanted to. And I heard my voice agreeing, in acceptance and grief: Well, that’s all right. I’m where I belong.

  ‘Shall we cross?’ I said.

  Drizzle, hardly more than a mist, began to fall. It stood in tiny drops, like dust, in his eyebrows, which had bushed out in an elderly way. The middle part of his head was bald, with hair from the sides streaked over as though painted on.

  I said: ‘Why don’t you put on your hat?’ but then decided to say nothing more for fear that even his two-word response brought him closer to other people than he could go without feeling some sort of discomfort, even pain.

  We went into a narrow street at the top of Cuba Street. I let him move ahead in the thickening rain. There must be a room in one of these houses, I thought, some dry place where he belongs, and someone who helps him with food and looks after him – surely some person he connects with.

  The house he turned into was a two-storeyed villa with its fretwork and finials gone and veranda posts rotting. Oxalis and wild parsley grew in cracks in the asphalt yard. The front door was open. He went along a hallway into the gloom and turned into a room that the food smell identified as a kitchen.

  A woman’s voice said: ‘Hello, Cyril. Had a nice walk?’

  ‘Hello,’ Gordon said.

  ‘You’d better cook your chops tonight. They won’t last another day,’ she said.

  By the front door, two steps in, I waited for his reply. Could he say more than Thank you and Hello?

  ‘Put your thermos here, love. I’ll give it a rinse,’ the woman said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Silence after that, except for kitchen steps, woman steps, on lino, a tap turning on and off, a cupboard closing. I walked along the hallway and looked into the room. Gordon was gone.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said to the woman at the bench.

  ‘Shit,’ she said, putting her hand on her chest. ‘You gave me a fright.’

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nbsp; ‘I’m sorry. I should have knocked’ – taking her in: a swollen-ankled woman with a lopsided face, jaw pushed sideways, red-dyed hair springing in that direction too. My first thought was: an ex-tart. But not, I thought, someone Gordon had taken up with. The cupboards behind her had names in marker pen: Ted, Angus, Cyril, Ron … a dozen or more.

  ‘Is this a boarding house?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Ambrosia House, would you believe? I call it Fry-up House. Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Alice Kite. The man who just came in …’

  ‘What about him? What did he do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I followed him to see where he lived. I used to know him.’

  ‘That would have been years ago,’ the woman said.

  ‘Where’s he gone?’

  ‘Up to his room. You won’t see him out of there till tea time. How come you know Cyril?’

  ‘I was –’ I needed to sit down. ‘May I?’

  She frowned, then picked up my distress and angled a chair out from the table.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Your hair’s wet. Here.’ She opened a drawer and gave me a tea towel. I wiped my face and hair. Then I did not know what to say, for it seemed that Gordon was returned to me whole, missing no parts, yet was utterly changed, missing everything. I knew his life, could pick it up and turn it around, yet I had no facts. He had come to this. I understood how. Yet what was ‘this’? I felt that he had been gone from me all these years not from his own choice only but from my neglect, and now I reversed it, picked him up and held him tight – but could not see him, could not know. It was like the condition called blindsight, where your vision is knocked out on one side, yet another pathway allows you to put your hand on things you cannot see.

  ‘It’s time for my afternoon cuppa,’ the woman said. ‘Do you want one?’

  ‘Please.’

  She switched on a kettle and took two mugs from a cupboard without a name.

  ‘My name’s Sheena.’

  ‘Mine’s Alice. I’m …’ I did not know what I was. ‘Are you the owner here? Is it all men?’