Awakened by His Touch (4 page)

Okay, this was getting ridiculous. Time to focus. ‘Always. We have hives at their vineyard. I like to think that’s why it’s so good.’

‘This wine was fertilised by Morgan’s bees?’

‘Well, no.’ Much as she’d love to say it had been. ‘Grape pollen is wind-borne. But we provide the bees to fertilise their off-season cropping. So the bees help create the soil that make their wines so great.’

‘Do they pay?’

Back to money.
Sigh.
‘No. They get a higher grape yield and we get the resulting honey. It’s a win-win.’

He was silent for a moment, before deciding, ‘Clever.’

The rush of his approval annoyed her. It shouldn’t make her so tingly. ‘Just standard bee business.’

‘So tell me about your focus on organic methods,’ he said to the table generally. ‘That must limit where you can place hives or who you can partner with?’

‘Not so much these days,’ her father grunted. ‘Organics is very
now
.’

‘Yet you’ve been doing it for three decades. You must have been amongst the first?’

‘Out of necessity. But it turned out to be the best thing we could have done.’

‘Necessity?’

Every cell in Laney’s body tightened. This wasn’t the first time the topic had come up with strangers, but this was the first time she’d felt uncomfortable about its approaching. The awkward silence was on the Morgan side of the table, and the longer it went on the more awkward it was going to become.

‘My eyes,’ she blurted. ‘My vision loss was a result of the pesticides we were using on the farm. Once we realised how dangerous they were, environmentally, we changed to organic farming.’

Her father cleared his throat. ‘And by
we
she means her mother and I. Laney and Owen weren’t even born yet.’

She was always sure to say ‘we’. Her parents took enough blame for her blindness without her adding to it.

‘None of us really knew what they were doing to our bodies,’ her father went on, ‘let alone to our unborn children.’

Well, one of them, anyway. Owen seemed to have got away with nothing worse than a teenager’s attention span.

‘Have we made you uncomfortable, Mr Garvey?’ her mother said after moments of silence. ‘Helena said we should have just sent you to town for a meal...’

Heat rushed up Laney’s cheeks as his chair creaked slightly. It wasn’t hard to imagine
Oh, really?
in the voice that washed over her like warm milk.

‘No. I’m just thinking about how many worse ways the chemical damage might have manifested itself. How lucky you were.’

Again the silence. But this time it wasn’t awkward. Surprised was the closest word for the half-caught breath that filled the hush. Was he being intensely dismissive of her loss—and her parents’—or did he actually get it?

And possibly
her
.

Warmth swelled up in her chest, which tightened suddenly. ‘Most people wouldn’t consider it luck,’ she breathed. ‘But as it happens I agree with you.’

‘And, as threatening as it must have been for you at the time, the decision sealed Morgan’s
fate. Put you well ahead of everyone else in organics today. It was smart.’

‘It was a life-changer in more ways than one,’ her mother cut in.

Silence again. Laney filled it with the first thing that entered her mind. ‘I gather we’ll be seeing you again, Elliott?’

Elliott.
The very name tingled as it crossed her tongue.

‘Really?’ His voiced shifted towards her father. ‘You’re happy to have me back?’

Robert Morgan was predictably gruff. He always was when he dwelled on the bad old days. ‘Yes. I would like to hear what you have to say.’

It didn’t take a blind person to catch his leaning on the word ‘I’.

‘And what about you, Laney? You’ll be doing all the escorting.’

‘Free advice is my favourite kind. I’ll be soaking it up.’ But just in case he thought he was on a winner, she added, ‘And weighing it up very carefully.’

Approval radiated outwards. Or was it pleasure? Either way she felt it. It soaked under her skin and did a bang-up job of warming her from the inside out as he spoke gruffly.

‘That’s all I ask.’

* * *

Three hours later they walked together back towards the chalet, an unharnessed Wilbur galloping in expanding arcs around them, her hand gently resting on Elliott’s forearm. Not entirely necessary, in truth, because she walked this trail often enough en route to the hilltop hives. But she just knew walking beside him would be the one time that a rock would miraculously appear on the trail, and going head-over-tail really wasn’t how she wanted him remembering her.

‘It’s a beautiful night,’ he murmured.

‘Clear.’
Ugh, such verbal brilliance. Not.

‘How can you tell?’

‘The cicadas don’t chirp when it’s overcast, and I can’t smell moisture in the air.’

‘Right.’

She chuckled. ‘Plus it may be autumn, but it’s still summery enough that the odds are on my side.’

He stopped, gently leading her to a halt too. ‘Listen, Laney’ he said, low and somewhat urgent. ‘I don’t want every conversation we have to be laden with my reticence to ask you about your vision loss. I want to focus on your processes.’

Was that his way of saying he didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of her any more than she did in front of him? Her breath tightened a tiny bit more.

‘Why don’t you just ask me now? Get it out of the way.’

‘Is that okay?’

‘I’ll let you know if it’s too personal.’ She set off again, close to his side, keeping contact between their arms but not being formally guided.

He considered his first question for a moment. ‘Can you see at all?’

‘No.’

‘It’s just black?’

‘It just...isn’t.’

Except for when she looked at the sun. Then she got a hazy kind of glow in the midst of all that nothing. But she wasn’t even sure she wasn’t making that up in response to the warmth on her face. Because she sometimes got a glow with strong emotion too.

‘It’s like...’ How to explain it in a way that was meaningful? ‘Imagine if you realised one day that all other human beings had a tail like Wilbur’s but you didn’t. You’d know what a tail was, and where it went and what its function was, but you just couldn’t conceive of what it would be like—or feel like—to have one. The extra weight. The impact on your balance. The modifications you’d need to allow for it. Useful, sure, but not something you can’t get by without. That’s vision for me.’

‘It hasn’t held you back at all.’

‘Is that a question or a statement?’

‘I can see that for myself. You are more accomplished than many sighted people. You don’t consider it a disability?’

‘A bat isn’t disabled when it goes about its business. It just manages its environment differently.’

Silence.

‘Are you glaring or thinking?’

‘I’m nodding. I agree with you. But there must be things you flat-out can’t do?’

‘Dad made sure I could try anything I wanted—’ and more than a few things she hadn’t particularly wanted ‘—so, no, there’s not much that I can’t do at all. But there’s a lot of things I can’t do with any purpose or point. So I generally don’t bother.’

‘Like what?’

‘I can drive a vehicle—but I can’t drive it safely or to a destination so why would I, other than as a party trick? I can take a photograph with a camera, but I can’t look at it. I can write longhand, but I really don’t need to. That kind of thing.’

‘Do you know what colours are?’

‘I know what their purpose is. And I know how they’re different in nature. And that they’re meaningful for sighted people. But, no, I can’t create colour in my head.’

‘Because you’ve never seen it.’

‘Because I don’t think visually.’

‘At all?’

‘When I was younger Dad opened up the farm to city kids from the Blind Institute to come and have farm stays. As a way of helping me meet more children like myself. One of them had nothing mechanically wrong with her eyes—her blindness was caused by a tumour in her visual cortex and that meant she couldn’t process what her eyes were showing her perfectly well. But the tumour also meant she couldn’t think in images or conceptualise something she felt. She really was completely blind.’

‘And that’s not you?’

‘My blindness is in my retinas, so my brain creates things that might be like images. I just don’t rely on them.’ She wondered if his pause was accommodating a frown. ‘Think of it like this... Mum said you’re quite handsome. But I can’t imagine what that means without further information because I have no visual frame of reference. I don’t conceive of people in terms of the differences in their features, although I obviously understand they
have
different features.’

‘How do you differentiate?’

‘Pretty much as you’d imagine. Smell, the sound of someone’s walk, tangible physical features like the feel of someone’s hand. And I have a bit of a thing for voices.’

‘How do you perceive me?’

Awkwardness swilled around her at his rumbled question, but she’d given him permission to ask and so she owed him her honesty. ‘Your strides are longer than most when you’re walking alone.’ Though, with her, he took pains to shorten them. ‘And you smell—’
amazing
‘—distinctive.’

That laugh was like honey squeezing out of a comb.

‘Good distinctive or bad distinctive?’

She pulled up as he slowed and reached out to brush the side of her hand on the rough clay wall of the chalet for orientation. ‘Good distinctive. Whatever you wear is...nice.’

In the way that her favourite Merlot was just ‘nice’.

‘You don’t do the whole hands-on-face thing? To distinguish between physical features?’

‘Do you feel up someone you’ve just met? It’s quite personal. Eventually I might do that if I’m close to someone, just to know, but ultimately all that does for me is create a mind shape, address a little curiosity. I don’t rely on it.’

‘And people you care about?’

Did he think you couldn’t love someone without seeing them?

She pressed her fingers to her chest. ‘I feel them in here. And I get a surge of...it’s not vision, exactly, but it’s a kind of
intensity
, and I experience it in the void where my vision would be when I think about my parents or Owen or Wilbur. And the bees. Their happy hum causes it.’

And the sun, when she stared into it. Which was often, since her retinas couldn’t be any more damaged.

‘That sometimes happens spontaneously when I’m with someone, so I guess I could tell people apart by the intensity of that surge. But mostly I tell people apart by their actions, their intentions. That’s what matters to me.’

‘You looked me right in the eye after we shook hands.’

‘Only after you spoke. I used the position of your hand and your voice to estimate where your eyes would be. And the moment either one of us moved it wouldn’t have worked until I recalibrated. I don’t have super powers, Elliott.’

His next silence had a whole different tone to it. He was absorbing.

‘You’ve been very generous with your information, considering what an intrusion my questions are. But it felt important for me to understand. Thank you, Laney.’

‘It’s no more an intrusion than me asking you what it’s like being tall.’

‘How do you—? The angle of my voice?’

‘And the size of your hand when I shook it. Unless you have freakishly large hands for the rest of your body?’

‘No. My hands are pretty much in proportion to the rest of me.’

Cough.

Not awkward at all...

Wilbur snuffling in the distance and the chirpy evening cicadas were the only sounds around them. The only ones Elliott would hear, anyway.

‘I’m tall because my father was a basketball player,’ he volunteered suddenly. ‘It means I spend my days looking at the bald spots of smaller men and trying very hard not to look down the cleavages of well-built women. My growth spurt at thirteen meant I made the school basketball team, and that was exclusively responsible for turning my high school years from horror to hero. It taught me discipline and focus, sharpened my competitiveness and gave me a physical outlet.’ He took a breath. ‘Without that I’m not sure what kind of a man I might have grown into.’

His words carried the slightest echo of discomfort, as if they were not things he was particularly accustomed to sharing. And she got the sense that he’d just given her a pretty fair trade.

She palmed the packed earth wall of the chalet and opened her mouth to say
Well, this is you
, but as she did so she stepped onto a fallen gum nut loosed by the wildlife foraging in the towering eucalypts above and her ankle began to roll. Her left fingernails bit into the chalet’s rammed earth and her right clenched the fabric of Elliott’s light jacket, but neither did much to stop her leg buckling.

The strong arm that slid around her waist and pulled her upright against his body was infinitely more effective at stopping her descent.

‘Are you okay?’ he breathed against her hair.

Other than humiliated?
And way too comfortable in his strong hold.
‘Occupational hazard’ she said, when she really should have been thanking him. ‘Happens all the time.’

He released her back onto two feet and waited a heartbeat longer as she tested her ankle for compliance. It held.

‘I’m sorry, Laney. Guess I don’t have Wilbur’s years of training as a guide.’

Guilt saturated the voice that had been so warm just moments before. And that seemed an ungrateful sort of thanks for his catching her before she sprawled onto the ground at his feet.

‘It wasn’t you. My bottom and hip are peppered with bruises where I hit the dirt. Regularly.’

Talking about body parts suddenly felt like the most personal conversation she’d ever had, and it planted an image firmly between them that seemed uncomfortably provocative.

She released his jacket from between her clenched fingers. ‘Thank you for those basketball-player reflexes.’

‘You’re welcome,’ he breathed, and his smile seemed richer in the silence of evening. ‘Are you okay to get yourself back?’