I cut him off and tried to call the Headquarters but they’d perhaps had some sort of warning too. They were apparently in blackout.
I started to run, skipping through the traffic. Tessa was all I could think of.
I reached the headquarters and flashed my Police pass and headed for the elevators. Tessa was on the fifth floor but the lifts seemed to have been shut down. I headed for the fire stairs, shouting to the security at the front desk, ‘Bomber in the building! Sound an alarm!’
They stared at me, stunned. Where did they get these dopes?
I was clearing the stairs two at a time and then three at a time and I was doing it well.
Tessa!!!!
I pushed open the fire stairs door and there he was, in a uniform, beardless but recognisable. He was standing in the corridor outside the doors to Tessa’s workplace. He turned to me in surprise.
I shouted, ‘Tessa!!! Get down! Hit the floor, darling!’
He was reaching inside his jacket and he faced the doors and moved towards them. I had my pistol out and shot him in the head. I saw the red splash and then a blast of fiery air hit me and lifted me off my feet.
25.
I was blinded.
A lot of times, as traumatic events are happening, the victim doesn’t remember anything, as with the car smash with the Cubans. I didn’t remember anything except running for the Police car.
But I swear that I saw my shot hit the Jihadist bomber and felt the gust of hot air lifting me off my feet. I was told that that was the blast of his bomb and that it moved me, at velocity, to thud back-first against the fire stairs door, which had already slammed shut behind me. It was a strong blast because the doors to Tessa’s section were bomb-proof. I’d copped the reflected blast but ironically, he’d shielded me from most of the shrapnel and the force in his single small bomb. It was surmised that he had a small shrapnel bomb because he intended to be among people. He was planning to be amongst the eavesdroppers, of which Tessa was one. My appearance forced his hand.
How he knew where to go, and where he got the uniform were all subjects of a big inquiry. But Tessa and I were not part of it.
I was slightly scorched—minor burns--- and had huge bruises on my back and arms, and my head had been knocked about.
But the main injury was that I was blinded.
We didn’t know that for quite a while, Tessa and I!
I had bandages on so, naturally, couldn’t see. But I suspected. I didn’t say anything to Tess. I just lay there absorbing the pain, despite the drugs, and let Tessa kiss me and whisper to me how much she loved me. I really couldn’t respond, although I was responding in my mind.
Then came the Day of the Removal of the Bandages. There were medical staff but Tessa, in charge, requested that only she should be present with the necessary doctors. No spectators. Dennis had visited, and departed.
They slowly unwrapped my eyes. I opened my eyes---and just darkness. No, not darkness, just a sort of blankness. Nothing was out there.
I said, ‘Sorry, Tessadonna!’ and she put her head gently on my chest. She felt so good.
The Princess took over and she began to cross-examine the doctors, hard. She was Her Royal Highness again. They responded courteously and frankly.
They’d do tests but at present had no idea what had caused it. The concussion, obviously, but scans had shown no damage in my head.
‘Time, Mrs. Corrigan. He needs time!’
‘I’ve got plenty of that,’ I said. ‘But I’m not encouraged by you blokes. I will see again. I guarantee it. But it will be me and my wife fighting this one. May we be alone, please?’
Then Tessa got up on the bed with me, her head on my shoulder and said, ‘Now, hear this, my darling. You will see again! You will! But now, it’s not Barton and Tessa. It’s BartonTessa—one person fighting this and living the life ahead. You haff…have, bugger it, HAVE been my stone before. Now I will be your stone, never moving from you.’
‘I think that’s rock, darling, not stone.’
She reared up, I think, and said, ‘Oh, you beautiful, beautiful person. You’re smiling… in all of this?’
‘They can only do to us what we let them do to us, Your Royal Highness. Try to get us home together as soon as possible, please. They don’t let you make love in this place.’
She leaned close, beautifully warm and sweet and said, ‘I’ll take you home and we’ll be together, always. It will be another honeymoon. I’ll be with you constantly and I’m going to learn from others how you can work with all of this and then I’m going to teach you. You have always been my life and now, you will be every second of my life. I’ll take you home tomorrow, darling.’
****
We went home to our unit and Tessa was in charge—boy! Was she in charge?
My lessons on living a self-sustaining life began almost immediately. No time for reflection on my bad luck; no time for self-pity; no spoon-feeding. Find your own way! I had this big stick and I had to find my own way around the apartment, tapping and feeling. I knew I was safe because she was with me in an instant if a hazardous situation loomed.
At times we went to the Blind Institute where we both received instruction on our particular roles in this situation.
From the apartment, down to the parklands and, after a while she sent me off to negotiate on my own—short walks and then long walks. I knew she was watching over me but it was still a bit testing.
Then came the great day when I left her sitting on a park bench, did a circuit of the big central lake, and arrived back to her. Once, in a big open space, I couldn’t find a marker, and she called, ‘Left, darling, and then ahead,’ and I found my way. A fair way away I could pick up her perfume and judged when I was near. I stopped and extended my arms with a big grin and I was enveloped in her arms.
‘That was a glory to see,’ said a lady nearby.
The dinner table, while perhaps the simplest, had the most hazards. Tessa insisted on serving red wine, despite all the dangers. I expressed some concern about this and all the damage that I’d cause if I knocked the glass over.
‘Well then, darling,’ she said, very reasonably, ‘don’t knock it over!’
Professor Bostock had issued an invitation for me to attend lunch with him at his club. Women were not permitted so I was on my own, except for his unskilled supervision.
He was waiting when Tess dropped me off outside his club with a ‘Go, get ‘em, my Barton’. I felt alone. It was the first time without her.
Things went well. We had an excellent waitress and she cared for me as Tessa would have. When I was in doubt as to the correct implement she gently put it in my hand and then guided my hands to the plate. Without permission, she changed the red wine for white, chastising the Professor for his decision in that regard, although that was Tessa’s decision, not his. The young-sounding waitress was wonderful!
Tess collected me and demanded a full run-down on the event. I didn’t mention the wine.
Tessa and I worked out hard in the big gym in our block of units and my physical condition improved quickly. Then came the great day when she announced that all my bruising had healed.
‘No longer the blue and yellow man, sweetheart. And I had big plans to put you in a sideshow,’ said the unsympathetic highness.
And then she eased her restrictions on visitors. She’d worried over that, keeping all but the most favoured away. And, like drafting cattle through the gate into the stock-yard, she now allowed a few through at a time.
I enjoyed the visits and, while my wife mostly left us alone to talk, I knew she was always near, watching.
One day, I went out to our big balcony, overlooking the parklands, sat in the warm sun and just enjoyed the moment. My thoughts drifted to the time when the plump girl had flattened me into the mud, out in the bush, and I had come to love her. What had happened there? She was plump, with bad teeth but wonderful green eyes, rich honey-blonde hair, wonderful complexion and she was a person ready for love. And I was there.
The outer girl didn’t really count. It was the inner one with whom I fell in love, deeply. We’d had a wonderful marriage and love affair and now it was coming to me, sitting on the balcony, what an exceptional girl I had found and made mine.
She was my angel---my caring angel and my love for her that morning absolutely overwhelmed me.
Her kindness, her goodness, her care and her selflessness flowed all around me, and I was determined to see again but, in the end, that didn’t control me. Tessa and I couldn’t have been happier, despite the handicap.
When she came out to check on me, I took her in my arms and kissed her…for a long time. She knew. She kissed me back longer. Two lovers!
When we broke, she said, in that soft princess voice, ‘We are doing well, sir knight, and I have never loved or admired you more. That’s what that was about. No?’
‘Yes!’
26.
She knew me so well, confined as I was in that single dark room. She worked hard at helping me see things inside and outside and I worked hard at seeing them.
There were times when my patience wore thin, but this angel deserved nothing but gratitude and love and I’m proud to say that I never once became the surly Police Inspector that I could become.
She knew me so well.
One evening, sitting on our balcony with our evening drinks, I heard her glass set on the table and then she took mine and put it on the table. Her sweet voice said, ‘Brace yourself, my love. I’m going to do some lap-dancing.’ This was her version of sitting on my lap to make some momentous announcement.
‘I want to buy us a cattle station further north. Not a big one, but that’s where you need to be, and I need to be there with you. May I ask Dennis and Jim Leslie to find one for us, near a town and not far from transport, and perhaps near the sea, where we can swim? We haven’t swum in the ocean for a long time. May I ask them? Then we’ll go and have a look.’
She knew me so well. I’d been thinking of that, but backed off the burdens that would impose on her.
And the words, ‘then we’ll go and have a look’ were not as silly as might appear. Now, I was seeing a lot through her eyes and her descriptions were great. She was now my eyes, and my heart and my soul.
Soon after I was blinded and we were settling into our different life together, I could sense, one night, that a full moon was shining. In our marriage we’d kept up our sharing of our moon, begun in the jillaroo days, and on this particular night, I sat up in bed, certain that the moon was shining through the window, onto us.
Tessa jerked awake, a little alarmed.
‘The moon, darling! It’s here, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is. Our moon. Can you see it? Is something happening?’
‘I’m sorry, but no. But it’s a comfort. Drink it in for me, darling.’
We lay together awake for a long time that night and then I said to her, ‘That terrible day, sweetheart, tell me what happened.’
‘I’ve been waiting for this. You got to the building with your pistol. They didn’t have a warning, darling, at least not a full one. Someone thought they’d seen him and suspected. They were just beginning the shut-down, apparently, but you were quick. Then they were just startled by you. You were lucky you weren’t shot by them. The doors on my section were closed fast, with thick glass doors, and, don’t ask me how this happened, but I heard you calling. Through those big glass doors. I was at a filing cabinet and I ducked down as the blast happened. It was gruesome. He was all over the door. Then I ran out and saw you, sitting against the fire door, flattened and covered with sooty stuff, some of it him, I think. I thought you were gone and I was ready to go with you. But they took you away and I spent the next four weeks beside you. No need for me to die. You were so strong that you were going to recover. The blindness came as quite a shock.’
She was going to die, if I had. How? No, Tessadonna. Never!
And I got another medal, for bravery. I wasn’t brave. I was trying to save my wife. But I accepted it, being invested at Government House, beautiful wife at my side, white cane, dark glasses and Police uniform and all.
Each day Tessa described to me what she was wearing and how she was dressing me. This particularly applied on occasions such as the investiture when I knew she’d be stunning. I was in my Police uniform with medals up. It all helped me to picture life with my wife.
The Governor was astonished to discover a real live European Princess living in Queensland so we were invited to Government House for dinner. I was relaxed now, because of Tessa’s training and never made an error, although I knew Tess did a few things around me, probably to protect the Vice-Regal settings.
There were questions, the obvious ones about me and Tess, and that took care of the dinner conversation for the rest of the night. Tessadonna told them our whole story, and was listened to in silence. Not a question! Nobody knew what to say, so we went home.
‘Did I talk too much, darling? They were all very quiet.’