The Blind Eye

by Georgia Blain

  Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.

  The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.

  Georgia Blain has written a number of novels for adults including the bestselling Closed for Winter, which was made into a feature film. Her memoir Births Deaths Marriages: True Tales was shortlisted for the 2009 Kibble Literary Award for Women Writers.

  In 1998 she was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists and has been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the SA Premier’s Awards and the Barbara Jefferis Award. She lives in Sydney with her partner and daughter.

  GEORGIA BLAIN

  The Blind Eye

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

  First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd in 2001

  Copyright © Georgia Blain 2001

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  ISBN 978 1 74331 388 6 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 74343 084 2 (ebook)

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  A True Constitution

  The First Consultation

  The Field

  Spider

  Pearl

  Belladonna

  Snake

  The Direction of Cure

  The Unknown World

  Sources

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book was completed with the assistance of a grant from the Australia Council and a fellowship at the Varuna Writer’s Centre. It wouldn’t have been possible without the help of both these organisations.

  I would like to thank Peter Tuminello, who answered all of my questions about homeopathy with considerable patience. I want to stress that this book is a work of fiction, and that the proving and process of cure I have referred to may differ in some respects from what I believe is the usual practice.

  Thanks also to Jinks Dulhunty who gave me access to her library of homeopathic texts. I hung on to them for a long time and hope I haven’t returned them in too decrepit a state. I am also very grateful to Rosie Scott, who has always been the mentor that everyone hopes to find. Rosie, Anne Deveson, Andrew Taylor and Peter Bishop from the Varuna Writer’s Centre all had the unenviable task of reading earlier drafts and having to tell me the truth. I am grateful for their honesty. Thank you as well to Louise Marsh, who gave me advice on medical matters.

  Finally, I also want to thank Fiona Inglis, my agent; Fiona Daniels, who edited the manuscript; and Julie Gibbs, Ali Watts, Sophie Ambrose and everyone else at Penguin who worked very hard in getting this book to its final form.

  a true constitution

  . . . we have only to rely on the morbid phenomena which the medicines produce in the healthy body as the sole possible revelation of their in-dwelling curative power, in order to learn what disease-producing power, and at the same time, what disease-curing power, each individual medicine possesses.

  Samuel Hahnemann, Organon of Medicine

  1

  I, of course, have no idea what it is that we are testing.

  There are twelve of us here, including myself, and none of us knows. This blindness, both on the part of the people who will be taking the potential remedy, and the four supervisors (two men, myself and Seamus; and two women, Jeanie and Samantha), is essential if we are to build up a picture of the true nature of the substance we are proving. Any knowledge on our part would only distort each of our responses. You can imagine how it would be. We would not be able to help ourselves. If we heard the word ‘venom’ whispered, we would immediately begin to suspect our own bodies of displaying the toxicological effects with which we are familiar; we would find ourselves exhibiting a certain expected nature on all levels, the low mean strike of repressed passions spitting forth a venomous poison. Even our dreams would be tainted by all that we bring to that word. Or perhaps it is a plant we know, a mineral, maybe even a diseased tissue that we are testing; in each case we would see what we think we should see, we would bring all that we associate with that substance to this process, and our time would have been wasted.

  There is, of course, a director. She is not here with us, but she does know what the remedy is. I met her several times before I decided to leave my practice for a period so that I could take part in this trial. I had been wanting a break, a change in my life, and when I heard of the scale of this particular proving, and the manner in which it would be conducted, I was curious to find out more. But it was not until the director told me the location for the first phase of this experiment, that we would be staying about three hours north of Port Tremaine, that I made up my mind to take part.

  She, and the others who work with her, chose this country because the air is dry and the water clean. It is also close to an ideal level above scawater, approximately 400 metres. The food we eat is organic and we are far from the stresses of a hectic urban life. Although the experiment will not be conducted solely in these conditions (it is essential that we also obtain a picture of the remedy within each subject’s normal environment), this initial testing will help ensure we get a more reliable set of results than we would otherwise have obtained.

  For the first two weeks, the purpose of being here is simply to raise the health of the subjects to as, high a level as possible before the dosage is administered. We need to know the nature of each person’s true constitution. As part of this process, everyone has been keeping their diaries as instructed, meticulously noting each deviation from their normal state at least three times a day, as well as any possible causes for these changes. This will continue when the provers commence taking the potential remedy (or placebo, in the case of some) and this is when my job will become more demanding. I am meant to monitor my two subjects, to be available for discussion, and to ascertain if and when a dosage should be discontinued. But at this stage I have less to do, and I have had moments of coming close to the quiet I have been craving.

  During the days, we walk, write, read and talk, some of us preferring to be with others in the group, some of us wanting to be alone. At night it is cold, a sharp chill that sends us to bed early, so that we wake when the first light reveals a brittle frost across the flatness of the high country, low tufts of grass crunching beneath our feet, each step imprinted dark against silver.

  I have been taking time to be by myself, sometimes walking for hours through the prehistoric gorges that surround us, hearing
only the sound of my footsteps on the rocks and the occasional cry of a bird in the brilliance of the cloudless blue sky. On other days, I sit out on the verandah that wraps around the house in which we are staying and I look out at the vastness of this land.

  The truth is, I have had Silas on my mind. Far more so, since I came here. But that is hardly surprising, considering our proximity to PortTremaine and the fact that I ultimately chose to be involved for that very reason. No matter how much you try to guard against it, there are some patients whose stories do not leave you, and the reasons why this occurs may not be ones that you expect, nor may they be particularly rational or readily explicable.

  When I stopped at Port Tremaine on my way out here, I wanted to know if Silas had gone back as he had indicated he would the last time I saw him. I also wanted to see it for myself, the town that he had told me about and, more so, the garden in which Rudi and Constance had lived. It had been some years since he had been there, and the differences between what he had described and what I saw could, in certain instances, have been attributed to the passing of time. There was still so much, though, that may never have measured up against the visions he had conjured up for me and the stories he had told.

  As I drove away, heading towards the smear of wheat-coloured sky above the darkness of the ranges, and the beginning of my time in this place, I found myself attempting to piece together the fragments of everything I had learnt about him, both from our sessions together and from information I have since obtained elsewhere.

  The last time I saw Silas, I told him that an illness returns to its source before cure.

  We look to what the very first symptoms were, I explained, and we are not surprised to find them reappearing as the healing process nears completion. This is the direction that cure takes.

  He had looked away.

  I need to go back, he had said.

  And although at that stage I had not completely understood the reason why, I had hoped he would meet my eyes, that I would see some realisation of the strength he had found in having reached the point of making such a statement, but he had kept his gaze averted from mine.

  2

  It was, in fact, four years ago that Silas first went to Port Tremaine. He was, as he once tried to explain, a different person before that journey. He was like a tight coil that suddenly whipped up from the ground; a whirlwind that took leaves with it in a flurry; a wind that only died to start up again, picking up rubbish this time, a discarded piece of paper, cigarette butts, string, and dying down once more, only to appear seconds later, with no sense or purpose to its path.

  He was twenty-four and had never had a job of any consequence. There was no need. He had a trust fund, and access to other sources of wealth that had been carefully secreted away from the authorities’ eyes for many years. He came from a family that I had heard of, that most people would have heard of, and although his surname was one that was associated with bankruptcy under dubious circumstances (and with considerable shame), he did not flinch as he spelt it out for the receptionist.

  Silas was living in one of his family’s apartments at the time immediately preceding his departure, a huge place that had previously belonged to his grandmother. His parents were in Rome, a city his mother always found stifling in its conservatism, particularly after their years in Barcelona. She would ring late at night, often drunk from several afternoon Camparis, to complain about the expected tedium of that evening’s dinner party and to tell him how much she missed him.

  If she found him at home, he had usually only just come in, invariably with a group of friends, all of them out of it, and he would put her on speaker phone, so that they could all talk; his enthusiasm for the dinner they’d had, the bar they’d been to, the conversations (or lack of) that had made up the evening, always out of proportion to the reality of the occasion.

  She would ask him how Rachel was and he would say that she was fine, everyone laughing now because it had been several months since they had split up, and she would tell him that she was pleased; put her on, Silas, darling, and someone would start talking, start pretending to be Rachel, even if they had never met her in the first place.

  In those days, he was rarely alone. With more money than he could possibly know how to spend, he found that people gathered around him, aware that he could, and would, provide food, drugs and entertainment for all. Silas knew this, and it never bothered him. He wanted the company, he needed people to affirm his existence; unless, of course, he was in one of those times.

  What times? I asked him during one of our earlier sessions together, when we were still laying down the basis from which we could begin to work.

  When I was shutting down, when I couldn’t bear to see anyone.

  When the whirlwind died.

  And it had a periodicity? I asked.

  He did not know what I meant, and I explained. Did it come up regularly, this depression, did it occur at the same given times?

  He thought for a moment and told me he wasn’t sure. In the case of his slump just prior to his departure, it was his mother’s death that had triggered the incident.

  But I guess I was heading that way anyway, he said, looking out the window.

  Throughout the time he had lived in a different country from his parents, Silas had only maintained contact with his mother. When he heard she had died, he felt, he told me, as though he was without anchor, completely adrift. He stopped answering the phone, he stayed at home by himself, he drank too much, and he took more drugs than usual (dope, cocaine, whatever, he explained). A friend of his father’s had booked him a ticket to go over to Italy, and although he had intentions of going, at the last minute he changed his mind.

  Not consciously, he said. I just didn’t get on the plane.

  When I asked him what eventually prompted him to go to Port Tremaine and make such a radical alteration to his life, Silas told me that he supposed it was a conversation he’d had with a friend of his, Jake.

  Jake was a yoga teacher who lived in the apartment building opposite. He and Silas had sex, not often, just sometimes when they ran into each other walking home at night, or heading out on a Saturday morning.

  Three weeks after he received the news of his mother’s heart attack, Silas saw Jake out on the street. There had been a storm. Hailstones, like oranges, had hurtled out of the sky, pummelling cars and shattering windows, bringing everyone out in its wake. The road was covered in debris, car alarms wailed and people wandered around like spectators at a carnival, amazed by the damage. In the sparkling stillness, Silas just observed the mayhem and breathed in the sweetness of frangipani and lemon-scented gum, flowers and leaves pulverised by the ice.

  Jake told him that he looked terrible, which he did.

  You could do with a retreat, he suggested and he stretched out on the parquetry floor of Silas’s bedroom, legs in the splits, as he reached for his big toe. This was the kind of thing he did after sex, and Silas smiled wryly as he told me that it was one of the reasons why their relationship had never gone any further than it had.

  Why don’t you get away? His body bent in the other direction. Take some time out, find out what it’s like to be without all this, and he waved his hand around the room.

  It was a throw-away suggestion, but it was one that stuck.

  Silas wanted to keep moving, he had to, it was the way in which he survived, and at that stage he would have clung to anything that seemed to hold any possibility of pulling him out of the state he was in.

  In the days that followed, he began to toy with the idea. He had received a list of his mother’s assets from one of the family’s solicitors. It was the value of the house that he noticed first. The solicitor had scrawled a figure, $15 000, followed by a series of question marks next to the brief description, ‘four bedrooms, dilapidated’. Silas could not believe anything could be so cheap, and he searched maps for the name of the town.

  It was three hours south of the country in which she had grown up, a stat
ion that is probably not far from the place where I am staying now. Silas had seen faded black and white photographs of her childhood home – bleached barren land, country that rolled for miles under flat, hard skies – and as he traced his finger around the coastline, he read names like Cape Disaster, Desperation Point and then, finally, the far more ordinary Port Tremaine.

  He began to spread maps across the floor, splashing red wine across the terrain, conjuring up visions of who he would be, what he would do when he got there, convincing himself that this was a possible direction to take; but more than that, it was the answer to the stultifying emptiness that was threatening to crush him. And, if he hated it, if it was a wrong move, well, he could always just come back. There was nothing to hold him anywhere really.

  As Silas told me the story, he glanced up at the clock. In those initial appointments, I could see his discomfort each time we began to discuss Port Tremaine, as well as his desire to talk, both at odds with each other.

  I am not a therapist, I told him during our first session, that is something you should understand. If you feel it’s therapy you need, or if you just want to confess all your crimes and misdemeanours, I may not he the person for you.

  He looked away as he shifted in his chair.

  It’s just that I’m not equipped to guide you in the ways you might be expecting. I knew I needed to be gentle with him, because he was, like so many patients, uncertain as to why he had come and fearful as to what he would find himself revealing. The help I offer is remedies. Remedies that will hopefully alleviate not only the physical symptoms, but the mental and emotional as well, if that’s what you need. In order to choose the remedy, we may have to visit the past, but we will be doing so in a particular way.

  Silas nodded, trying to look as though he understood, as though he had nothing to hide.