Blindsight

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘Who? My brother?’

  ‘Didn’t Earl tell you? He said he would. But I wasn’t quite sure he understood.’

  ‘You saw Gordon?’

  ‘Oh yes, I saw him.’

  So my brother came to me through the graves, as if, now that Father was dead, he could show himself. I felt his presence behind me and swung my head wildly to see; and he was not there – was lodged somehow in Mrs Imrie, who grew afraid as I demanded when and where, my hand biting her forearm, my questions striking hot clenched punches at her face. The bruiser in the car called out: ‘You all right over there?’

  ‘Yes, Roland, I’ll call you,’ Mrs Imrie said. ‘Alice dear, it was him, I’m not gaga, you know. I’m good with faces. But he was – Alice, I told Earl – he was a tramp. His clothes were all filthy, there’s no other word. And he looked about a hundred and five. Earl probably didn’t hear me properly. Poor Earl, he was sick, and of course I never saw him again. But really, Alice, he was a sight – your brother, I mean. He was wearing a sort of filthy woollen cap and whiskers all over his chin. And he had this bucket with things in it …’

  ‘Where? Where was he?’

  ‘In Lambton Quay. The main street. And when I asked my friend she said: “It’s one of the street people. He’s called Cyril.” But I knew who it was. I didn’t follow him or say hello. My friend said he never talks to anyone or even meets their eye. Not that I would have, of course, because – how do I say it, Alice? – he had this smell …’ She beckoned her boyfriend.

  ‘How long ago? Now he’ll be gone.’

  ‘No, Alice,’ she said, putting out her hands to have him pull her to her feet. ‘She said he’s been there for years and years and years. She said he’s famous. Do you want to come for a drink, dear? You look as if you could use one.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to hurry,’ and I started for my car and beat Roland out the gate. I drove home deaf and blind (there’s a phantom driver takes control), but after Pleasant Road and the hill to Titirangi began to understand I had no home any more, and for the rest of my drive, and walking up the path and opening my door and lying down on my wide double bed, I pulled and bullied Neville to my side and worked to have him displace Gordon there. He gave the sort of smile I had rarely seen, denying me, and in spite of my calling his name receded into the small, still place I’ve been able to visit since that time only when everything else is put away. I lost my name, widow, and shrank to sister, and heard myself wail with diminishment. Neville left with a silver flash. Gordon, in his many shapes, usurped his place – Gordon the child, Gordon walking on the sculpted paths, Gordon turning into Ghuznee Street on that night …

  I lay on the bed with my brother for an hour. Then I stood up in the empty house and phoned for an airline booking and prepared my clothes – and my self – for Wellington.

  There are growing pains. There are shrinking pains too.

  Perhaps having piercings makes one sharp. Bets, for all her broadness of face, cuts like a knife. She was wearing a bushman’s singlet today, her large breasts unrestrained inside, and a wrap-around skirt and sandals held together with rivets of industrial size. Her get-ups, her plain-ness, lead me to mistake her for dull, but I need only five minutes of her company to become aware of her clever brain shredding into finer bits everything I say.

  ‘Why shift to Wellington if you worked in Auckland and Nelson all your life?’

  ‘Not all,’ I said. ‘I was three years in England.’

  She marked that down as evasion.

  ‘Most people want to retire in Nelson. I would have thought you’d go there.’

  ‘It’s a nice place but I like something bigger.’

  ‘Auckland’s bigger.’

  ‘Too big.’

  She’s like a woman with a basin of eggs, suspicious that one of them isn’t fresh. I pretend we’re making small talk, but hear the hesitation in my voice, so move from evasion to attack.

  ‘What a nosy girl you are. I mean, you’re from Napier and you’ve come here. What’s your reason?’

  ‘Mind your business,’ she said.

  ‘You mind yours.’

  ‘Adrian came to find his grandfather.’

  ‘And do my course,’ Adrian said. He was uncomfortable at our bickering.

  ‘You can’t have had many friends here,’ Bets went on, ignoring him.

  ‘I’ve never needed friends. Well, one or two. The rest are clutter.’

  ‘Wellington,’ she said. ‘Stuck up here on a hill. You’re all alone, Alice. You must have known lots of people in Auckland.’

  ‘I came because it’s where my brother died.’

  ‘Yeah, Bets, cool it, eh,’ Adrian said. ‘Hey, Alice, I’ll take the car if that’s OK. We want to have a look in the One Eye Gallery up in Paekakariki.’

  ‘It needs petrol,’ I said, looking at Bets.

  ‘We’ll put some in,’ she said.

  They drove away and left me trembling. The woman has sniffed out something false in me, but has no knowledge of the huge complexity of the simple thing she might uncover, as round and shining as a pearl. She’ll make a mess. She wants a mess. She’ll never believe I’m acting out of love.

  After they left I took a bus downtown, hoping to see Gordon passing by, but Saturday is not one of his days. There are rooms where he sits in a corner, drinking tea, and I don’t intrude. They’re part of his weekend beat. I know mainly Molesworth Street and Lambton Quay, which I think of as a groove he follows. I keep in the groove, making my behaviour natural – a neat lady in a trouser suit and plain shoes, walking behind him and passing with a glance, or sitting on a seat as the world walks by. Here is Gordon. He is watchable. I watch. My conversations with him make no change in my face.

  It was different when I first came to Wellington – but no, I won’t go into that.

  Adrian and Bets have not come back. I worry about the traffic on the dangerous strip of road into Paekakariki. But I suppose they’ve gone to her place, where they’ll make love. A gallery in their day, then food and coffee, music, sex. I walked on the wharf for my treat, enjoyed the spring sunshine – the sun makes love to me – and the sea. As always when I’m happy, I was able to find Neville. It’s easier now than it was when he first went away. I made room for him and we sat beside the harbour with our shoulders touching and his hand over mine. For a warm hour there were just the two of us. Then I stood up and said goodbye and took the bus across the crooked hill and through the tight cutting into Wadestown.

  It’s a calm night. Down in the city Gordon sleeps on a narrow bed. Or perhaps, because it’s warm, he has walked to his shelter on the other side of the hill and lies with his hands crossed on his chest while the pine trees whisper overhead.

  I imagine Marlene keeping him company. He finds his resting place in her.

  Chapter Seven

  Three weeks have passed since I wrote in this book.

  Now our troubles start. I’m confused by love and resentment: love for Gordon and Adrian, the former pure but marked with a stain, the latter careful (that’s care-full) and auntie-ish, although penetrated with intensity. My resentment is for the clever, pushy woman who has brought us – Gordon, me, Adrian – to this. I’ve got the feeling that she and Adrian are long term. She’s not overheated, as I was with my young lover, Richie Ayres. She cares for him, which almost makes me care for her. But see what she has done with her interfering.

  I am paralysed by fear.

  I wrote that when I woke in the night. Now, in the morning, I am even more afraid. Adrian helped me to bed, then drove to what I suppose is now his home – Bets’ flat in Berhampore, shared with two fellow art students. Yesterday we dropped her there. I told her I wanted to talk to Adrian alone. What I had to say was none of her business. Then I fired a parting shot: ‘That skeleton isn’t a cat, it’s a possum. Which rather spoils the whole thing, don’t you think?’ Her broad cheeks blushed like the halves of a Doris plum.

  The place, the paintings, seem im
plicated. I had not known the building existed or that such mad abundant making went on. It’s an exhibition of student work held at Erskine College, a nunnery and girls’ school formerly, at Island Bay. The Learning Connexion uses the building – and what a place, four storeys of workrooms and studios with high ceilings and creaking floors, linked by echoing staircases and half-lit corridors. Adrian drove me down the long road, and in the building Bets became our self-appointed guide. She maintained a cool proprietorial air, clipping her explanations short and watching for incomprehension with submerged belligerence. I grew dizzy turning into rooms, turning out – with image, colour, shape, with awfulness and excellence. There’s probably no better way than one of these exhibitions for putting human diversity on show. Such an abundance of places in the mind and ways of seeing. Such mad self-belief and stupidity, with beauty emerging here and there, and courage, delight and despair. My susceptibilities were churned up. By the time we reached the top floor I was seasick.

  Bets’ installation was in an end room. She turned her back while I looked at it – more likely from strong-mindedness than cowardice. We circled the thing, Adrian and I, in different directions, and I saw from the keenness on his face as we passed that he ‘got it’ and was impressed. I got it too. ‘Truth and Falsehood’ was the name, and it was supposed to mean that nature is cruel but, by definition, natural, and man is unnatural by failure and design. Something like that. Bets had spread a tarpaulin on the floor and covered it, left to right, with sand, pebbles, artificial grass and slabs of asphalt. The asphalt was the human end. A little cardboard city of skyscrapers stood on it. Toy trucks and petrol tankers travelled along roads drawn with chalk. Toy warplanes waited on runways. The proportions were wrong but Bets wasn’t worried by that. On the grass plastic cows grazed in geometrical paddocks. Plastic trees grew in straight lines, dwarfed by a set of false teeth and a Steinlager can. There was also a condom, which seemed to have been used. Natural things appeared where the grass and pebbles met: driftwood, feathers, a fern frond, a weta, a paua shell. The sand was scattered with pipi and cockle shells, and a bare patch of tarpaulin at the end was painted in loops of blue for the sea. The cruelness and naturalness of nature were represented by the skeleton Bets took for a cat (in her defence, it was incomplete) lying on the sand with its claws embedded in what we at the Harvey used to call a flat rat.

  I have to say my first thought was: Oh dear. It’s my final thought too.

  Adrian wrapped her in a bear hug. ‘It’s great, Bets,’ he said.

  She loosened his arms to see me over his shoulder, and I gave a smile I hoped would be taken for approval.

  ‘So?’ she said.

  ‘It’s quite a story,’ I said.

  She didn’t like that.

  ‘It’s conceptual, Alice,’ Adrian complained.

  ‘But it spells everything out. And with that title too. I like the cat.’

  ‘The title’s a mistake,’ Bets said. ‘Anyway, let’s leave it. Shall we go and sit in the car? There’s something I want to say.’

  I knew instantly that she’d found me out. Her face was refined by determination.

  I said: ‘I think I just want to go home. I’m not feeling well.’

  ‘Alice?’ Adrian said, peering at me. ‘Yeah, you’ve gone white. Is there somewhere she can sit down, Bets?’

  ‘I don’t want to sit down. I want to go home.’

  ‘What about a drink of water, eh? Can you get one, Bets?’

  He helped me out of the room and along to the head of the stairs. I thought: I could fall down here and break my neck. That might be best.

  Bets came out of a room full of wooden tubs, carrying a cup of water. I sipped it, although the cup was stained like old false teeth.

  We went down flight by flight, with Adrian supporting me and Bets in front in case I should fall. The paintings I’d tried to take in went by in reverse order – red hills, savage crows, lovers, fish, motor cars, a wide-open cherry-red vagina. I’m in a madhouse, I thought, and Bets is going to tear me open. The ground floor steadied me. I got ready for stubbornness, for sewing my mouth shut.

  Adrian helped me into the back seat of the car. I leaned back and closed my eyes, then felt the car settle as Bets and Adrian climbed in front.

  ‘No,’ she said, blocking him from inserting the key. ‘Alice –’ turning to me – ‘I think you’re only putting it on.’

  ‘Hey, Bets,’ Adrian said.

  ‘Well, she is.’

  ‘You stupid girl,’ I said. ‘It isn’t some little squabble. I’ve been in this thing for forty years.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, what’s going on?’ Adrian said.

  ‘Start the car,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Bets said. ‘It’ll take ten seconds for what I’ve got to say.’

  ‘Say it then. Say it. And whatever you think you’ve found out is wrong.’

  ‘OK. I’ve been looking in the papers for 1962. No one got killed on a motorbike on Brooklyn hill.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. And another thing. The Brooklyn trams stopped running in 1957. So your brother didn’t go under a tram.’

  My eyes had, of course, come open. Bets and I were shooting at each other.

  ‘You shouldn’t have talked to her, Adrian,’ I said.

  ‘Just as well he did,’ Bets said.

  ‘I’m going home now. You can get out at your flat.’

  ‘No way. We’ve got a few questions we need answers to.’

  ‘We?’ I said. ‘Will you start the car, Adrian? Or I’ll drive myself.’

  ‘Is this true about the trams?’ he said.

  ‘Probably. I didn’t have time to do research.’

  ‘So what’s it all about then?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when you’ve got rid of her. Now I’m not saying another word. In fact, I think I’ll just lie down.’

  Which I did, on the seat. It’s uncomfortable, and a short way along the road to Berhampore I sat up again. Bets and Adrian were shooting each other now. He was saying it wasn’t her business any more and she was insisting it was; she’d done all the work and she wasn’t giving up until she knew. I thought: This will break them up – or else they’ll come back together with flashing lights. I did not care which. Gordon, I thought, I won’t let them hurt you, I promise you that.

  As Bets got out I told her that her cat was really a possum.

  ‘You getting in the front?’ Adrian said.

  ‘No, I’ll stay here. And don’t ask, Adrian. Not until I’ve had a cup of tea.’

  He drove home, remarkably self-controlled. Didn’t say a word, even when I felt compelled to say: ‘I really like Bets. Please don’t think I don’t.’

  In the house I asked him to put the kettle on. ‘I’m not going to feel like dinner tonight, so if you’re eating here you’d better order a pizza.’

  ‘I’m not eating here.’

  ‘Do you mean ever again?’

  ‘That depends. Is he alive?’

  ‘Yes, he’s alive.’

  I went into the sitting-room and took my chair looking over the harbour. Yachts with pumped-up sails competed in a race. Everybody wanted to win. Wanting to win is one of the things that drives Bets along. But, of course, there’s more to her. Perhaps it’s curiosity. Perhaps it’s love. Meanwhile, Gordon … There is nothing to say. He compels silence.

  Adrian brought me a cup of tea. He must have been thinking while the kettle boiled, and the magnitude of my lie had bullied him away from his desire to know into a perception of me, the run of my life over the forty years I had flung at Bets. He looked at me as though I was ill and steadied the cup and saucer in my hands.

  ‘You all right now?’

  ‘Yes, Adrian, there’s nothing wrong with me. But I want to be quiet while I drink this.’

  He sat down, and after a moment said: ‘I thought it was a possum too.’

  ‘It doesn’t necessarily spoil it,’ I said.

  We were quiet again. I finished dri
nking and put my cup on the coffee table. The yachts had gone from sight, except for a slow one with a yellow sail shaped like a pear.

  ‘I don’t suppose he had a motorbike,’ Adrian said.

  ‘Yes he did. But it didn’t go. He was going to fix it up and take Marlene for rides.’

  ‘So where is he now?’

  The question brought enormous relief to me, and a flush of pleasure so intense I almost fainted. At last someone was sharing Gordon with me. But dread sounded too, like a nail scratching on tin.

  ‘Can I just tell you some things and ask you not to say anything?’

  ‘Yeah, all right. But Jesus, you’ve been stringing me along for the last bloody year. What is he? Some big lawyer, some fat accountant? Is he going to be ashamed of me?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s nothing like that.’

  ‘I’m finding him for my father. I’ll just tell him Dad’s name and say goodbye.’

  ‘You won’t tell him anything.’

  ‘Why not? Why the mystery? Why all these fucking lies, Alice?’

  ‘Don’t swear at me.’ I’m offended by some of the words people use today. The ‘f’ one – which I used once to my father – is by no means the worst. They pick them up from American movies. I’m no prude. I hate the feebleness more than the ugliness – I mean the impoverishment – and it pains me when I hear someone I love sliding down there, even when he’s moved by strong feelings. I said: ‘I want you to sit still and hear what I’m going to say. Then you can say “damn it” if you like’ – trying to help him with a joke – ‘but I’m not taking questions, Adrian. Not tonight. There are reasons for everything I’ve done and you’ll learn them when the time is right.’

  He told me to get on with it.

  ‘Gordon lives here in Wellington. He’s not Gordon any more, he’s changed his name.’

  ‘Why? What to?’

  ‘That’s a question. I said none.’

  ‘So where does he live? What does he do?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Is he married? Got kids? All of that?’

  ‘Adrian, I won’t answer. Soon I’ll let you find out for yourself. All I’m doing now is – motorbikes and trams. Are you going to listen?’