The Blind Eye (6 page)

I saw the pub that Silas stayed in when he first got to Port Tremaine. It was, surprisingly, still open for business despite being completely deserted. I remember calling out, hoping to find someone to whom I could talk, but no one answered. I waited for a moment, and then decided that I would keep going. I wanted to make it out to Rudi’s garden and back before the chill of the evening, and if I had no luck there, I would try to find the owner later.

Silas told me he spent his first two days in that town crashed out, sweaty and exhausted, finally waking to find himself in a room that was, as the owner had promised, suffering from the fact that it had been uninhabited for some time.

He remembered a woman called Martha bringing him a set of sheets, worn with a faded cornflower print, a single blanket, a pillow with a cigarette burn that went through to the stuffing, and a threadbare towel. When he woke, they were all where she had left them, there at the end of the bed. He had slept fully clothed on the mattress, unaware that night had passed to day and back to night again.

Walking down the main street, with the address of his mother’s house written on a scrap of paper, he saw, as I also did, the extent of the desolation. At first glance it appears like a perfectly preserved country town, the stone buildings golden in the brilliance of the sunshine, the awnings shading the footpath; but where you would expect to find people resting out of the heat, talking to neighbours they have known for years, it is empty, always empty. It was, Silas once said, like being in a Western. All of the shops, apart from Pearl’s General Store and the garage across the street, were deserted, the displays faded in the windows, the plastic grass in the butcher’s no longer a brilliant green but the true yellow of the country, the shelves at the back of the haberdasher’s still stacked with bolts of cloth, rotten to the touch, some doors creaking open, others locked with ‘Keep Out’ scrawled across in red paint, the rooms beyond ransacked, even the floorboards pulled up, leaving nothing but an empty rotten shell.

It was Pearl who had told him that the house was on the sea front. Finding the pub empty when he woke, he had gone to her in search of food. The chips he had bought were so stale as to be inedible, and as he scattered them to the gulls, he noted the dilapidation of each place he passed and braced himself for what he would find.

From the gate, he could see a caravan with ‘Tricia’s Treasures’ painted on the side, the house beyond slowly
crumbling into the garden, the caravan itself leaning lopsided into a ravine. He could only presume that someone had squatted there, and he struggled to push the gate open, the pathway beyond almost completely overgrown, the weeds sticking to his calves as he made his way towards it. When he peered through the ruffled daisy curtains, he saw clothes still hanging on the racks, sheets on the bed, dishes in the sink, all coated with fine yellow dirt. The cactus garden that bordered the track to the house was overrun with prickly pear. Tiny bleached bones that looked like they belonged to rats or feral cats crunched beneath his feet as he hastened away, past the unused well now choked with brambles, and up to the deserted building beyond. His mother’s house.

There was a bath. It was out the back in the open air, and over one end was draped a flannel. It looked as though it had just been used, as though the person who lived there had just gone, wanting only to get out of the place, not caring what was left behind, and for one moment Silas wondered whether he was, in fact, intruding.

Suddenly uneasy, he ran back down the path, over the bones, the gate falling off its hinges as he opened it, the rust staining his hands, his breath short as he stumbled onto the emptiness of the road.

He had no idea why he had come to this place. He sat in the gutter and wondered at the strangeness of owning a
house that meant nothing to him. It must have been where his mother had gone for holidays when she was young. He could not imagine her as a child; he could only see her as his mother, always adoring, always in a slightly inebriated haze, the ash from her cigarette crumbling into her drink as she pressed him close and recounted his latest antics to whoever happened to be there for lunch.

It was his father who had done the deal, selling off the station and all its holdings shortly after his grandfather’s death. Somehow this place must have slipped through the net. He looked back at it. This was to have been his project. That’s what Silas had told his friends, and he had painted a picture of a rambling seaside home where they could all come and stay, anyone, anytime.

I, too, saw the house and I smiled to myself as I remembered how Silas had recounted picking himself up from the gutter, wiping the grit from his hands, determined to convince himself that it was not impossible, no, not impossible at all.

What a place
, Silas told Pearl, standing by the cool of the refrigerator.

Not the way it always was
, and she shook her head as she peered at him through her thick glasses, taking his measure, up and down, with an unfaltering stare.

But not completely irretrievable
.

She just grunted in reply.

Crossing the road in front of her shop, he saw Mick at the entrance to the garage.
I’m Silas
, he said, trying not to step on the tools that littered the floor of the workshop.

They clasped hands, awkwardly, and he could see the question – Silas, what kind of a fuckin’ name is that? – there on Mick’s face.

Stayin’ a while?

Think so
, he told Mick, as he would tell evervone who asked.

He could hear his own footsteps as he walked the streets, peering into empty buildings, trying to see through the gap in the curtains, the rip in the blind, fascinated by the extent of the desertion, and he began to walk a little faster, down towards the jetty, not wanting to admit that he felt strangely vulnerable by himself, as though he were being watched. It might have been that car he had seen on the first night, slowly circling the back streets, leaving a trail of dust in its path, the windows wound up high, the engine a deep throttle, slowing down as it approached him, passing in a cloud of smoke and then nearing closer again, this time from another direction, another road.

Just Steve
, Thai said when he asked her about it later. She was wiping the snot from the nose of her youngest child with the back of her hand.

She had a cottage at the rear of her place. Martha had told him about it when he had returned to the pub at the end of
the day. She was microwaving a plate of grey roast lamb in the cavernous pub kitchen, built for an era long past. He had looked at the food longingly because, unappetising as it had appeared to be, he had not eaten for two days, and as she sat and ate it in front of him, he had asked her if she knew of anywhere he could stay for a while.

Matt and Thai Wilde. End of the main street and turn left
.

There had been no need to give further directions, even a street number. Theirs was the only occupied place on the block, right next to his mother’s in fact, the front yard littered with chickens, broken-down cars and rusted toys, a parched vegetable garden out the back and, beyond that, the single-roomed house that Silas could have for five dollars a night, ten if he wanted food.

Saw you walkin’ round
, Thai said when he came to ask her about the room.

When she grinned, he saw that she had probably once been attractive. He watched as she brought in the washing, her still-taut body visible beneath the batik dress she wore, and he wondered what she would be like to sleep with.

When he offered to help her, she looked at him like he was mad. She had the transistor radio propped up on the verandah steps and, unable to maintain any semblance of stillness, he picked up the youngest child, a girl who was only just beginning to walk, and danced her round the clothesline.

Where the fuck do you get your energy from?
Thai asked.

Silas dipped the child down low and deposited her into the basket of dry clothes.
Don’t know
, he grinned.
I was born with it
.

But eventually the heat got to even him, and early that evening after dumping his belongings in his room, he walked out into the stillness of the gulf, his body drained by the fierceness of the sun. The sand was cool beneath his feet as the water lapped against his ankles, licked his calves, and seemed to progress no further until, far from the shoreline, the slow lick finally reached his knees, his thighs, his waist, and at last, he could submerge himself. Taking another joint out of the plastic in which he had wrapped it, he floated on his back, and that town, with its decrepit buildings and, behind them, the darkness of the ranges, was a surreal vision.

Incredible
, he whispered to himself, momentarily aware that he couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t been stoned.

The first striking evidence of electromagnetic fields associated with the human body came not from research but from observations of unusual cases in which the field was exaggerated beyond normal experience:

Perhaps the most impressive of these cases was that of a fourteen-year-old girl in Missouri, who, in 1895, suddenly seemed to turn into an electrical dynamo. When reaching for metal objects such as a pump handle her fingertips gave off sparks of such high voltage that she actually experienced pain. So strong was the electricity coursing through her body that a doctor who attempted to examine her was actually knocked onto his back, where he remained unconscious for several seconds. To the young lady’s relief, her ability to shock eventually began to diminish and had vanished completely by the time she was twenty.

Quoted in S Krippner and D Rubin (eds),
The Kirlian Aura
,
reproduced in George Vithoulkas,
The Science of Homeopathy

1

I am wary of being consumed by my own thoughts, my memories of Silas and all that I associate with him. I have been trying to make more of an effort to spend time with the others and not just be on my own but as each day progresses, I invariably find I have drifted off by myself, yet again.

Jeanie, one of the other supervisors, has brought her cattle dog, Sam, with her and Sam seems to have become my main companion. On our third day here, I took a burr out of her paw. I had seen her limping down the path that leads to the wood shed, and I ignored her growls as I took her leg in my hand and felt the soft pads of her feet. Since then, she has taken to sleeping on the end of my bed and coming for walks with me, some misshapen stick always gripped in her mouth. The hopeful expression on her face is always enough to make me relent and throw it for her even though I know that if I give in once, she will be still more persistent, dropping it at my feet every few metres.

She normally doesn’t like people
, Jeanie told me last night as
she watched Sam stretching, preparing to follow me up to my room.
Maybe she senses that you’ve become even more of a loner than she has
, and she looked at me quizzically before turning back to her crossword.

Conscious of her comment, and slightly shamed by it, I tried a little harder this evening, staying up with some of the others to play a game of Scrabble by the fire. In the brief time we have been here, people have already begun to relax with each other; tonight there were even some joking attempts at guessing what it is that everyone will be taking. Neither I nor the other supervisors should, strictly speaking, encourage this, and the others knew it, grinning at me shame-faced as I told them their guesses were as good as mine.