The Blink That Killed the Eye Read online

  Wilton mentioned how many great writers began reading their work at nights such as these. Poets, novelists, playwrights, all reciting sections of their stories and poems to random audiences. He told me how at the end of each reading the crowd would applaud out of sheer politeness, so if I was to read I shouldn’t see the gesture as the barometer with which to gauge the success of my writing. The piece I thought to perform was one I’d written linking the process of building a wall to the art of crafting a poem.

  From the outset walls can appear quite disenchanting and average, similar to the way a poem can, but with closer inspection they both have the ability to transcend the ordinary. It was only after labouring for these months that I began to see how a wall is in actual fact the ancient poetry of stone. Architects, builders and bricklayers are in a sense all creating an alternative kind of poetry. Each brick acts like a single word, one constantly relying on the other to properly define it, then line by line, its shape and form is provided by the structure it finally comes to stand inside. From what I’ve understood poetry is more about the words a writer doesn’t use than those she or he does use, just like the bricklayers who at their disposal have a limited number of bricks which they use to build the wall that eventually becomes the impenetrable body of the entire building. They will cut away at parts too wide in the same way a poet will refrain from using words which are unable to fit around the abstract images of the mind – manipulating tenses and grammatical categories which in turn will give birth to new definitions and concepts, those which were previously unheard of. Hunched over their wall the inward bricklayers depend on the learned arithmetic and symmetry of their straining eyes, while across the road the working poet may too be sat hunched at his or her keyboard, pulling at those inventive aesthetics, playing with the various forms of metre so intrinsic in giving the writing its distinct pattern and velocity.

  I read the piece to Wilton; he liked it. I think the audience did too despite them applauding me in the same sluggish manner they did the elderly gentleman who gave the impassioned outpouring of several short poems themed solely around bugs. Overall the night was a success, I jumped on the last train home in high spirits and for the first time in months I wasn’t thinking about her or the building site.

  Twenty-five minutes have gone. The remaining wooden beam is swaying stubbornly around the wind and rain. I look down into the garden. The ladder. No sign of him. The lower part of my back’s beginning to release a slight tingle. Focus on something else. Something without pain. At around fifteen minutes after midnight I arrived home. She was already in bed. She liked to sleep but she didn’t like to sleep alone. I put the television on mute, moving some of her paintings off the coffee table to place them carefully against the wall. They were still drying. Flicking to the wildlife channel I made myself a cup of chamomile tea in the usual ritualistic way. For the first time in as long as I can remember my whole body felt as if it were smiling. My mind still in that little poetry basement, filled with cheerful people who only wished to say nice things to one another. How amazing it would be to wake up each day and write. Then I started thinking of work and of labouring again; soon my meagre fantasy retreated back into my mind’s private box. The rain’s coming in directly now. Hitting my face. The first edge has twisted itself loose – the one with the drill and rusty hammer over it. There’s nothing I can do. I look around at the other two corners and notice the intermittent gusts trying to tackle the helpless stack of bricks. I panic a useless panic. Know your worth he said. What am I even doing here? She wakes from her sleep shuffling into the living room to ask where I was. I tell her about the poetry show. The old man with his poems about bugs. How Wilton had suggested I should go to read. How they gave me an applause. She presses two fingers into each of her temples. Massaging. Closing both eyes. Keeping the pressure on. She asks when I’m coming to bed. I say after the documentary. I ask her to sit down and watch it with me. I tell her it’s about endangered species knowing how much she loves animals. She doesn’t respond, keeping the pressure on her temples. I ask if she wants a herbal tea. She takes the two fingers off her head to rest them on her hips. Her thick white dressing gown half undone exposing her blue nighty with a colourful Disney character I’m unfamiliar with. She’s not wearing slippers. She tells me to come to bed. I explain how I’m just trying to let the adrenaline from the show settle then I’ll come. The countenance on her face caves inwards. She says I’m neglecting her again. Not showing her enough love. That my poetry and my books are what’s really important to me. I assure her that’s not the case. Her voice grows louder. Fierce. She’s no longer dazed and soft from sleep. My voice falls lower. Whispering. I mention the neighbours. We shouldn’t shout. I remind her of the couple downstairs with the baby. She ignores me. Her eyes becoming wet and dangerous. On the other side of the roof the first stack of bricks comes undone. Two wild edges of tarpaulin are now whipping themselves against the fury of the storm. I look at the solitary beam of wood trying to support the precarious structure. It’s still there although now it looks weak and afraid. The rain pelts relentlessly. I’m drenched. Cold. The sky is a warship grey. I shiver. Storming towards the coffee table she picks up my mug of chamomile tea, the television flashing muted images of a group of fishermen off the Japanese coast spearing a family of terrified whales. The last remaining corner has three bricks on it. It’s looking strong. Hope redefines itself. I’m contemplating using my foot to pin down my corner so as I can try and put the drill, hammer and fallen bricks back on top of their sides. I don’t know if I can stretch myself all the way across. I put my foot down. She picks up the mug of boiling tea and throws it in my face. I shoot up from the sofa. Panicked. Screaming. In pain. She smashes the mug over the side of my head, just above my right ear. Her paintings fall flat on the floor as if too beautiful to witness such ugliness. I grab her wrist. I’m unable to reach over to the bricks. They’re too far away. The roof is too wide. Too big. Bigger than me. I can see the blue plastic slipping away. I lunge back to my corner and push down hard with both hands. Everything hurts. I feel sick. Tears discover my eyes. I throw her onto the floor howling down into her face. My head pressed down hard onto hers. Hot saliva splattering after each syllable. Blood ruins what’s left of her infuriated beauty. She screams her nose is broken again. She kicks me in the stomach. I fall back into the wall. Looking at her. At the blood. I say I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry. That I didn’t do it deliberately. I hold back tears but my eyes crack. I try to explain how she pushed me. I reacted badly. That she smashed a mug over my head first and I would never have hurt her intentionally. She runs over to the bathroom to look in the mirror. I push down harder. Cursing. Hot saliva splattering after each syllable. I can’t tell the difference between tears and rain. My body shudders. Her nose is fine. She feels it all over. Looking for blood or bone. Nothing’s broken. She stands in front of the mirror baffled. Her face changes. Her mouth sinking as she says the words oh no and sorry repeatedly. Reaching out in a half-dead motion she touches the side of my head, the side gushing blood, then with both her hands cupped over her mouth she hastens out the front door, out into the blindness of the night. I replace her face in the mirror. I scream. I cry. For help. For assistance. I’m on my own. The only person here. The storm’s all around and there’s nobody with me.

  I’m letting it all go. I can’t.

  I release.

  The last beam drops like a shot-down guard as the blue tarpaulin soars up towards the sky with all the aggression of a wild thing, drifting back down to fall into the garden below where it wraps itself around the solid body of an old tree. I’m laying flat with my back against the cold roof looking up. The wooden beam dead and wet beside me. I see the rain as it should be seen, falling purposefully on my face – naked, cruel and dumb. Stretching out my lower back I attempt to expel the pain, steadily trying to breathe, closing both my eyes waiting for my uncle to return.

  Keep Still

  Father, since your death I have come to k
now the weight of his metal, and all its hopeless magic. The way it loathes gravity. How it exasperates the stitches of respect that could exist between two people. Each night the darkness unpacks itself keeping the distressed shape of all my secrets. How it can grip them by the throat, whispering death in the language of sweat-filled fists, of intoxicated madness spurred on by shadows that bark, while a curled, meek woman prays to the God of air for salvation, for rescue. Most nights repeat. Repetition becomes life’s supreme torturer. I believed you when you said this would be best for me. That I must go forward. That I would be safe with him, that our home would be a place I could leave all age in; raise children in, conflate dreams with adoration. In my mind it worked, like most things do before they get handed over to reality.

  For so long I buried my anguish beneath the colour of each bruise he marked me with. Never could I find the courage to tell you. How would you respond? You were ill. Everyone knew. Your frailty. There’s a war which rages on unreported. A war that will be given to no epoch, no book, no scholar’s acumen. A war that murders the self. The invisible war inside the heart – this I know now. Everything learns the nature of dying, as we all must, but these sensations weren’t to come until later, when he came, with all his thunderous ways, leaving them to blaze in the passivity of mine.

  It’s June and it’s raining. Androgynous beads, malleable and blind, fall from cosmic darkness – the infinite roof of the world. The petrichor perfuming the wet skin of earth. At night I listen to the dissonant tune of his sleep. He’s here and you’re not. I find him sprawled out in the bed, alive, full-faced, round and distant, like some ancient monster mythology was too afraid to authenticate. Cryogenic blood, a beast that somehow came to elude extinction. It’s strange, I remember you telling me when I was a girl that sleep was supposed to be peaceful. You said it worked as an impartial realm where the spirit could go to recalibrate and atone for the sins it might accumulate throughout the day. I see how his sleep appears to work as a hurricane incessantly reproducing itself. Over and over. Those deep heavy rocks lodged tight in his chest, screaming to get out. That bruised sky cracking in his throat. His body wet from the night’s heat. Punishment. That’s why I adore this breed of darkness. Not just for the uncomfortable way it disturbs his rest, but also for the unending times I’ve managed to scurry into its vast cloak, forcing my body into a trained stillness.

  Afraid. I’m always afraid. When he’s close, approaching home loaded with all the fine principles of hell. Scuttling, I forge an alliance with the unseen corners of the flat, despite the hammer in his mammoth voice, despite the war-drum in his step I wait hidden. Away. Crouched. Still as a nun’s prayer, for the moment he gives up the search, drifting away unsatisfied. At the turn of his sleep’s sound I emerge from those unnamed shadows and weep back into the musky blanket I took refuge in. Not because of him or what he’ll do to me tomorrow or what he did to me yesterday, but for the shame, the letdown, the gradual collapse of the dreams you made for me. I will come here to this very spot, where I’ll think of you in this broken bracket of a home and I’ll ruminate into the frozen pipes of my voice, until finally I lose hold of my eyes and wait for sleep to offer its ancient salvation – like a commander thrusting me into the rapture of all the unconsciousness of antiquity.

  ‘Get up off the floor. Stop crying. Stop crying I said. You’re gonna wake the fucking baby.’

  But there is a hope. Your name father, your earth-filled name assures me that tomorrow will be warm and effulgently alive. Even if the summer rains want to hound, I’ll be fine in the knowledge that beyond the turmoil your name exists high up where a single sun hangs like a religion seeking veneration, beautiful and golden in its hoisted luminescence. A sun that prohibits the dead from having to witness the malice of the world. To die is not to be at peace but to embody a formless spirit branded with two sleeping eyes which perfectly mitigate the eternal act of dying. He will go to work, to his flowers and gardens. Using the same brutish hands he handles me with, he will kneel to plant a thousand unborn things. There he will labour with friends and come lunchtime he will listen to the stories they tell of their wives. How living with them is a battle only warriors prevail in. He will eat. Crunch down on ripe fruits. Feel the weather in his thick hair. Wet his mouth on juice. He will speak of his great ambitions; how he could have amounted to more had circumstances favoured him. How he was destined for fortune had it not been for the draft hounding his neck. Then he will put my name, the one I share with my mother, under an unsweetened tooth, biting down to repeat, again and again, repetition is life’s supreme torturer.

  A few miles away from his hard exhalation I will be living with my own mute flowers, at home with a son, your grandson, in a garden he has no business in, a land where he holds no command. Leaning into the ears of the verdant vines, the ephemeral irises and tulips I’ll whisper my stories and woes. I’ll create cities where each life has a proper name, where animals are free to sing and flowers become the artists that paint the walls of the world. For that brief moment, contained within the basket of hour and dream, I will feel the earthy hand of something that loves me. I will join its journey to feel it traverse through the torn fibres of my reticence, until on a day unknown it will finally give itself to the shores of my white voice and I will bloom with every colour yet to be sighted and named. I may cry. Most days I do. But the tears of the day are not the same as those of the night. They are so much more brilliant. Cool and sure. Owned entirely by my own face. Cascading to water the dry soil where so much of this comfort is found, tucking it safely away, because tonight, on his return, a storm will dock and I will attempt to evade the dying again, the fatal lance of the invisibility only I know. You see father, my stars have all been marked and exiled. My moon hangs like a pierced mural leaking sulphuric blood into each of my new mornings. My voice, a dry whisper borrowing what it can from the ripped pockets of some cancerous lump. I am here but in thirds. I am night for us both, always.

  He hasn’t been home for two days. Sometimes he does this, stays away, saying the thought of coming home to me is nauseating. Depressing. The baby lives oblivious as babies are born blessed to be. He can never fully acknowledge the son he conscripted into this. The baby’s facile smile, tender and easy in the way that yours used to be, but one conceived under the silent ducts of catatonic beatings and gnawings, of pulling and ramming within a theatre of appalling rain.

  The flat is as clean as it always is. I walk over to the spare room, the one that stays forever empty but with sheets I still wash at the end of each week despite nobody having slept in them. I imagine the voices of people we both love, of family and friends reverberating like music off the walls. I imagine how the bed-sheets would look in the morning after people had slept in them, made love in them, dreamt in them. It’s just gone seven and I must feed your grandson again. The one who on the day of his birth had you announce proudly that he looked so much like him but cried like me.

  Outside, the night is the poor owner of a few struggling stars. I’m over at my window with baby Robert on my lap. He smiles when I feed him – toothless but with a full mouth. A happy mouth. People are beginning to arrive home from work. To the right I can see the Anderson family. She’s standing by the stove cooking, dressed in a grey tracksuit – the kind someone might put on after having spent an hour exercising. He stands by the sink in a white shirt, Mr. Anderson, his collar loose and easy. His posture reminding me of yours during the days you would come home tired but satisfied, when I was just starting to grow aware of the subtle harmony two fine people can create between them. He washes something. I can’t quite make it out, my view hindered by the angle they move into. Something gets said. His shoulders roll back in a fit of laughter. The tap streams. Whatever it is she’s saying to him it seems light and jovial. Playfully he flicks the water from the end of a celery stick causing her face to scrunch in on itself, eliciting a lover’s jaunty giggle. Daintily she swats his arm. Love always looks like a lie when it’s not your
own.

  In the living room a young boy rocks back and forth, chuckling intermittently to the flicker of a cartoon on a television screen. I kiss Robert’s warm forehead. I smile at something I don’t want to understand. In about an hour the Anderson family will shut the curtains to their life and I will take the baby to bed, handing him over to those saccharine dreams. He is only months old and I’m yet to hear him cry during sleep. I will kneel over his cot, as if paying homage to the part of myself that’s still unblemished and pure, the part still able to hold another’s hand without the semblance of sewage and dirt. Where memory falls absent to the tattooed world of knuckles and flames.

  ‘You and your fucking window! Keep still! Shut up or you’ll wake the baby. Stop moving around. Look straight. Keep looking straight ahead you filthy fucking bitch! Good. Keep still I said or I’ll bury you out in the garden, I swear to God!’

  I can’t hate you for leaving me here, how were you to know? I can’t even hate him for what he makes of my body and blood. It wasn’t your fault. The other night he caught me at the window. I knew he would. I couldn’t find a place to hide in time. Cocaine makes him more vigilant than usual. The baby was asleep. I was in a daze looking out the window, at the neighbours cooking and talking. My fault. If I were to speak of his methods, the cruelty and function of his sickness I’m sure it would rob the peace from your grave, crumble the sky from under whatever heaven you sleep in. On that night, your grandson cried for the both of us, for the first time, toothless and purple-faced. Into each other we screamed while he ripped me apart with only the boiling rain watching on, sounding like a swarm of insects offering their useless musical to the blind stage of my window. You aren’t to blame.