What the Eye Doesn't See Read online

  You lied. You lied. That’s what she’s shouting at me. We are in the kitchen. Empty wine bottles on the shiny pine of the kitchen table. A blue and red zigzag pattern on the sofa under the window. The glare of spotlights on the ceiling reflected in a mirror above the fireplace. A knife on the stainless-steel draining board, the jagged edge of an open tin of tomatoes. A box of cigarettes, my brand, empty and crumpled. Must remember to take those with me when I go.

  I’m laughing at her because I’ve seen all this before. It’s theatre, and flirtation. Tomorrow things will go on just as they are. I can’t see her face but the pattern on the collar of her wool jumper flashes in my eyes. She’s going to tell Geoffrey. She’s going to tell Fiona. It’s a fake world you live in, she says. A world of illusion. I take her in my arms, but her clenched fists bash against me. I lose my balance. Pots and pans on a high shelf flicker towards me.

  She picks up the telephone. She’s going to ring Geoffrey right now and tell him. I wrestle the receiver out of her hand. She picks it up again. She’s going to ring Fiona. This makes me burn red. I’ve got to find some way to shut her up. I can’t go on like this. Pink fingernails pull open the packet of photographs lying on the table. A picture of Fiona at Abu Simbel in Egypt. Heat and dust. Blonde hair blown in a desert wind. My vision tips. I’m trying to take a box of matches out of her hand. She won’t let go. She strikes a match, burns her hand. Lights another. A photograph, gripped between her fingers, burns and bubbles to nothing. I tell her to take care. She says she doesn’t care if the cottage burns as well.

  Tiffany. Tiffany. I try to take her in my arms. I’m laughing at her, trying to make her laugh as well. Of course you’re special to me. Of course I’m fond of you. But Geoffrey is my friend. I’m married to Fiona. That’s the way it is. You’ve got to stop this.

  She’s going to tell Geoffrey. She’s going to tell everyone.

  There’s nothing to tell, I say.

  Do I love her? Do I love her? When will I leave Fiona for her? If I don’t, then she might as well die. I get angry. I’ve got to put a stop to this. I’ve got to shut her up.

  Blonde hair in the darkness. Below me, on the cellar steps, blurred. Face running with tears, hands fumbling. There are canisters on the cellar steps, she’s stumbling as she reaches for one. She takes the lid off a canister. Red plastic with a label tied on, written in Geoffrey’s writing, smudged by spilled paraffin. The kitchen sink, unsteady. Hard to balance. Although there’s only a drop of paraffin in the canister, I’m trying to pour it away. The stainless-steel tap turns into soap and slips through my hands. She’s pulling the can away from me, it’s spilling.

  The linoleum floor of the kitchen, a pattern of beige and brown. Stumbling towards the rubbish bin. Tiffany slipping onto her knees with the can in her hands. The grid pattern on the sole of her shoes, a brand name in red. Three flames dancing on the floor, one small, one medium, one large. Then a wave of them, rushing away from us. Her face, the last time I saw it. Everything going slow. Miles to the sink. Hours to get there. Movements heavy, lumbering. Stumbling near the sink on an overturned chair. Stop, stop. Please, stop. Tiffany screaming. The fire suddenly close. The heat of it hitting my face, a curtain eaten in a rush of orange.

  I get hold of her. Pull her out of the back door. She’s fighting. Stars and moon above. The night open and fresh. My feet crackle on the gravel. She’s snaking and writhing on the end of my hand. Flames wave from an upstairs window. Let me out. Let me out. I’ve got hold of her arm and the buckle of her wristwatch is digging into my hand. She’s scratching at me, trying to pull free. Then she’s gone and it feels as though she’s taken my arm with her. I stand on the drive, waving an empty socket. Stumbling, I run, shouting. My bad foot turns. I stumble. The door of the sitting room is alight all round. A flaming hoop for a circus dog. Smoke everywhere. Choking in my nose and mouth. Coughing up my lungs and my eyes running. The floor on fire. The curtains. Then a groan. A crash. The ceiling comes down. On my knees on the path outside I hear her voice. You lied. You lied.

  I wake. Gasp for air.

  ‘Max, Max. What is it?’

  I struggle up, breaking the surface, struggling into this familiar room.

  I am gripping Fiona’s wrist. Holding it tight. We both look down at where my fingers are digging into the white of her arm. I release my grip and draw in breath.

  ‘Sorry. Nothing. Just a dream.’

  She holds me against her and kisses me. I am drenched in sweat. She gets up and goes to the bathroom. A shaft of light appears as she flicks the switch. I hear running water.

  Still I feel Tiffany pulling against me. Still I try to hold her. I feel the stretch in my arm, lean my weight against it. In truth, anyone would have been thrown off course by what happened that night. But it was worse for me. Because I’d been there before. That moment when something slips through your fingers. Because of that, I thought I should be spared this. Both times it was the same. Death is so easy. Nothing more than sleight of hand. They say that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. Believe me, it can.

  Maybe if a court convicts me, they would be right. In some sense I did kill her. By making her into a joke, by failing to see what she felt. Problem is that love is hard to take seriously, when it isn’t you that’s in love.

  Fiona comes back with a glass of water. We sit amidst the crumpled sheets. She puts her arms around me. I turn to touch her hair.

  ‘So is your money still on me?’ I ask. ‘Even now?’

  For a moment she doesn’t know what I mean, then she does.

  ‘Yes, always.’

  AUGUST

  Nanda

  All of my life I have been distracted by the ephemeral, I have been confused by the multitude of surfaces … and now I watch the light changing over the valleys, and it seems that I’ve never spent enough time looking, before. My mind has always been searching through the future, or the past, and it’s only now I realise that all that I was seeking is here, now. This should have been enough, always. How strange that one should have to go to the end of experience, and back again, to find the answer here.

  Maggie has come, but at first it’s a struggle for me to focus on her. The visions inside my head get stronger every day so that I can watch myself from other places, and I can see people who have been dead for fifty years, but my external vision sometimes becomes confused. There are moments when I have to decide to see, I have to instruct my eyes to look, and then things are sometimes not in the places where they should be – my feet, black lace-up shoes, propped onto a footstool, appear as two trees, far away on the top of a distant hill, and the valleys stretch across the width of my eyes, so close that I can nearly feel the grass and the earth against my skin … and Freddy’s rows of carrots might be close to me, a few yards away in the garden, or they might be miles away, out there where the sun is setting.

  It’s like that now with Maggie. She appears as a knot of thicker air to the left of my vision, but as soon as my eyes touch her, they flick back again to the far distance, for she is too much in the world and her flesh overflows the normal outline of her body, and she occupies her skin as though it’s spacious. I suppose that once I was also at home in my flesh. Yet I have been waiting for her to come because I need her to help me, and I must ask her today, for I must know that I have got the means to decide … and so I must ask her soon, soon. I should not have to do this.

  ‘Are you all right, Nanda?’ The sound of her voice brings her into focus.

  ‘Yes, dear, I’m all right.’

  ‘Should you go to the doctor?’

  ‘No, no, I’ve already been. It’s just a virus, not much they can do.’

  As I speak something nudges me deep inside and I almost welcome the pain now for it is evidence of the battle for life or death going on inside me. Further down the garden Freddy is working on the wind turbine, by the stream, and she works and works all day now so that she doesn’t have to see what is happening to me. Sometimes that angers
me, but sometimes I am touched by it, and I like to join in her game, discussing what we will do when the wind turbine is finished, talking as always of a grand trip around Europe. Theodora has gone to London, just for the day.

  Maggie sits near me on the edge of her deck chair, leaning forward, her long skirt trailing around her and her wrist clanking with bangles as she pulls her hair away from her face. She’s so like her mother, in those summer weekends when she came to stay and she found a tin bath in the shed and filled it with water and bathed Maggie in the garden, just here, where we are now, and afterwards she put her own brown, broad feet into the water, with her hand holding her long skirt aside, and her eyes shut at the pleasure of it.

  Maggie is swinging one leg and her red shoe flaps on the end of her foot, a strange shoe made of red suede, the kind of shoes women would have worn to a dance when I was a young woman … and I do wish she would sit still. People who live in cities don’t know how to sit still and if she were silent for a moment she would hear the sounds of the evening. I listen for them always – the voices of the birds becoming softer, the sound of water being drawn up from the earth by a million roots, the earth slowly breathing out the heat of the day.

  ‘Nanda,’ she says. ‘Nanda. You know my boyfriend?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘You know, the journalist. Adam. I’ve written to you about him.’

  The flapping of the shoe has stopped.

  ‘Yes, I remember. You went to Spain with him.’

  ‘Yes, well, he asked me if I would … live with him, or even get married to him … But I’m not really sure. I don’t know if I love him that much.’

  ‘Friendship, surely, is more important – for the long journey.’

  ‘But I want someone I love.’

  ‘You know, this idea that all passion should be expended on one person is a modern idea, and very flawed … you should really leave some passion spare for other things. You never know what may take up the slack.’

  ‘But other people who are married? They’re in love.’

  ‘Are they? I don’t know. Marriage is so very private.’

  There’s silence for a while, and the sun has nearly gone, and the sky is purple, except for the white line left along the edge of the hills. I can hardly see her now, she is reduced to a shadowed outline. My legs are stiff and my feet are no longer part of me and there is a dampness in the air and I must get up soon and offer her something to eat or drink.

  ‘At least don’t marry him out of fear.’ I move my stiff legs off the deck chair and feel blood tingle through them for although the evening is still warm I’m cold with sitting still too long.

  ‘It isn’t fear,’ she says and her voice is brittle.

  As I get up I feel that nudging inside me again and I have to tense every muscle to pull myself off the chair, but once I’m up I can move easily, made quick by the pain, shaking … She doesn’t follow but sits looking up at me and she wants something more. I move my legs through into the hall and then the sitting room, and it’s like carrying something that isn’t part of me, and I try not to stumble so that she won’t worry, but I put my hands on the stair rail and the desk as I pass.

  When she comes to the kitchen, the corners of her mouth turn down, and I see the kitchen as she sees it, and it’s disgusting, of course, because flies buzz around the rubbish bin, and the sink is full of unwashed plates, and used tea bags rest in the bottom of cups – and there’s a saucepan on the stove with dried-out baked beans in the bottom of it and a vase of dead flowers. On the floor there’s Bullseye’s bowl, and his basket is next to the stove. The place probably smells but I’ve got used to it.

  ‘Now, I’ve got some vegetables for bubble and squeak.’ I push a rail of washing out of the way and Maggie stands at the door. For myself, I almost take pleasure in the mess, because before too long it will not be my mess any more for even death has some advantages. Occasionally I’m seized by panic, about all the things left undone, and I think about notes I should leave – make sure to get the washer on the tap fixed, and please buy some tomatoes, and check the oven is off before you go to bed. But what would be the point of that? I get a plate out of the fridge which has some cold potatoes on it, and green beans, and cabbage and carrots – there’s a cup of dripping left over from some meat we roasted last week.

  ‘Nanda, I don’t think I need that much to eat, thank you,’ Maggie says. ‘Have you got bread? I could just have some toast.’ On the draining board there’s a plastic packet with a few slices of white bread left in the bottom of it and I switch on the grill and move to lean my hip against the sink, because I feel dizzy … For this pain has been battering against me for days now, wearing me away, so that one day I will crumble and fall, and on the ceiling there’s a flypaper curling down, caked with dead flies – and now the ceiling starts to spiral around the flypaper, and I’m slipping into sleep, and I wonder where the flies are now.

  ‘Will you come to Brussels to see me when you are a bit better?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes. Why ever not?’ The butter is hard and my wrists are weak so that it’s difficult to spread and too late I notice that there are patches of green mould on the crust.

  Maggie steps down into the kitchen and stretches out her hand to me. ‘Nanda, let me do that.’

  ‘No, there’s no need.’ My voice is too loud, and I keep the knife firmly in my hand, and our eyes meet and for a moment I’m drawn in, sucked into the black flecks around the iris, and I know she’s frightened, and my hand starts to reach out to her, but I know that I must not weaken. So I give her the plate of toast and turn my back, as though looking for something, until I can go back into the evening air, for I need to be outside and I move slowly, with pain grating deep within.

  ‘Maggie, dear. I wonder if you could help me with something. I might need some pills, but I’m not sure that I can get them here, but there’s a place in Amsterdam … Would that be too far for you to go?’

  I do not look at her but prop myself against the desk and feel for the paper where I’ve written down the address … I should not ask her to do this for me, but there is no other way. I notice her moving behind me back to the kitchen and she thinks that I do not see her sliding her toast into the full pedal bin, for the young always think that the old see nothing.

  She comes to my side. ‘I’m sure they can send them to you,’ she says.

  The anger is as bad as the pain now – anger that I should have to bargain for death in this way, but I must have the choice, and I cannot wait much longer and so I fumble and fumble in my desk for the piece of paper.

  ‘But of course I’ll go and get them for you,’ she says. ‘I don’t mind going. I’d probably be going some time anyway.’

  I give her the address, and we go back outside, and I’m glad to be out of the light, where I can’t be seen, and although the sun has gone down now, the night is still warm. I turn the porch light on and fold myself into my deck chair in the twilight, and midges begin to buzz and flicker around us in the pale violet air, and in the light from the porch Maggie’s fuzzy black hair stands out around her head like a halo.

  ‘Sorry,’ Maggie says, ‘but I’ve got to get back now. I don’t want to leave it too late. But are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Yes, dear. Now don’t make a fuss.’

  ‘Nanda,’ Maggie says, out of the darkness. ‘You know what you said, about Adam.’

  I can hardly remember – what did I say about that? I am failing her. I want so much to be able to help, but I don’t know if I can, for the space between us is too wide, and I am too tired. After a lifetime seeking wisdom, I have none to offer. ‘Maggie, dear, what I said about fear – we were talking about fear, weren’t we? I suppose that what I wanted to say is that we’re all looking at the world through only one eye, and that’s the way it is … and you have to consider what you don’t know, and what you can’t see, as a source of wonder. That is the only way. If you don’t, then you will live in fear and
that’s what many people do, they cling to whatever illusion of security they can find.’

  It hurts me now to speak, even my lips are twisted with pain.

  ‘They have that phrase now, don’t they? In horror films. They say – the living dead … and you know that’s an interesting description of a lot of people, people who live in fear. Yes, the living dead certainly exist in their hundreds.’

  ‘And the dead who continue to live?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘You know when I was in Spain I went to see my mother’s house.’ Her voice is quiet, and uneven, forced out from a tightened throat.

  ‘Oh, did you, dear?’

  Wind rustles through the trees and an owl hoots. Maggie doesn’t say anything more, but sits quite still, and I know that I have betrayed her, but what else can I do? I am too tired for anything more and, in truth, I do not want to pull the grass back from that hidden footprint on the path, I do not want the wound uncovered … Although, of course, this conversation about Adam is a mere distraction for he is not the man she wants to discuss. Again, from further away, the owl calls, and the evening is cooler, and the midges are gathering around the light on the porch, and my bare legs are cold and my head floats.

  ‘Well, it’s very good of you to come.’ My hand reaches out but misses hers which is stretched out in the darkness and I feel too tired to get up … and pain flashes through my body, and something between a sob and a groan catches in my throat – but in the darkness she has not noticed. Increasingly I feel that all of life has been a struggle to find receptacles into which to pour an excess of emotion …

  ‘Don’t get up.’ She comes to my side and reaches down to me and I want to hold her, I want to … but time pursues us relentlessly, and now the moment has come, and I must let her go into the future, for it is here that our paths divide.