The Blink That Killed the Eye Page 3

  Soon, I will return to my job. To the offices. The corporate escalators of the ambition and endeavour you set for me. My smile will be new. My clothes pressed and clean. This being the only part of your dream that is still speakable. The part that has yet to wear a nightmare. All will appear fine. My colleagues will speak of their beloved families, the achievements of their children and the successes of their husbands, partners and lovers. I will remain quiet up until they ask me about him, then the words I speak will resemble those that weave fairytales, those I read your grandson before bed. They will want to know about holidays and intimacies and I will give them a truth I’ve never known. They will ask why my hands tremble at the sound of rain and I will blame the wretchedness of the season.

  The downpour has stopped. The warm street outside cleansed of its filth. I’ve put your grandson to bed and the Anderson’s have closed the curtains to their home.

  I put the radio on low.

  The poetry in the song. The hymn inside the ballad. The distant choir of a love unfound.

  I’ll let you into a little secret shall I? Shall I Rupal? If you died tomorrow nobody would miss you. Nobody would give a shit. I’ll be the only person at your funeral. Just me and the boy, nobody else.

  I turn up the radio, opening the window fully.

  You stupid cunt. Look at me. Look at me. Nobody wants you. Nobody will ever want you.

  The music crescendos. Second chorus. I stand up on the table, the one where I write to you. Breathe in the full body of night. Climbing.

  ‘You wanna do something do you? You want something to do? Throw yourself out of that fucking window. Go on, see if you can fly. I dare you. Do it. Learn to fly, for me.’

  One foot scuffs the other. Edging sideways. Both palms flatly pressed against the wall. Barefoot. Leave slippers on the bedroom floor. Night in between my toes. In my hair. Bones. On the ledge looking down. Shaking. Unsteady.

  ‘Keep still!’

  Keep still.

  The baby cries something new. Like a siren. A wail. A dangerous call aimed only at me. Made from the ambulance of the lungs I gave him. Lungs that at one point would expand and fill then push and kick in fear while my baby remained trapped inside me, wanting escape, wanting end. For one so young he’s been here before. He knows this place. Stop. Please stop. No more. Please. No more. His mother’s lungs. Then, in the space of seconds, I see myself. My name. Your name. Our family and the love that holds my heart in place. The song on the radio ends. Adverts.

  I clamber back into the bedroom holding onto all my body – shivering numb. My mouth feeling as dry as the city’s moon. The air puts away its knives. Shaking. I run over to my wailing baby knowing all I’ll ever love will grow to outlive me.

  Building Six

  There are those among us who have managed to forge a certain kind of contentment out of the whimsical temperament of life, a private sort of treasure accompanied by a long and nestled sleep. That was the first topic of conversation on that particular morning; sleep. Usually, I would have a new question for each day. That’s how I liked to keep it back then. He would stress you can tell a lot about a person by the speed in which they can fall asleep. Not a half-sleep, but a real dead-state of unconsciousness. When I asked how long it took him to find that kind of slumber he fixed his gaze on me for what grew to be a discomforting amount of time – as if he half-expected me to already know the answer. He always did that, prolonged his response to something which didn’t take his immediate fancy, or instead of trying to at least truncate his reply he would prefer to let the silence sit awkwardly between us both, while he culled a more precise language from somewhere inside that aberrant demeanour of his. Then at other times there was no answer. That’s what found us on that November morning – he didn’t answer at all.

  Unlike him, I was rockingly impatient in those days, loaded with an attitude that lacked the patience for his esoteric games, so with a slight hesitance I pitched my question again, how long does it take you to fall sleep at night? He paused, blank-faced. A wide look that seemed to be noticing everything apart from me, then in a bewildered tone he asked me to repeat what I had just said. Now, I should state here that we’d both been awake since around 5am. For the next month our shift was scheduled to start at 6am every morning, so adopting any kind of primary focus wasn’t exactly easy during those inorganic hours. Regardless, his capacity to maintain attention, or centre himself around one specific thing was often alarmingly dismal even at the best of times. On occasions I would catch those vacuous eyes of his winding themselves up against the verticality of the building, gradually climbing to meet the high ceilings until at last they would fly clear out of the double doors – as if orphaned and wild and belonging to nobody at all. When I asked him once why that tended to happen he said he wasn’t exactly sure. Perhaps he suggested it was all the hours he’d spent watching doors that had instilled in him a kind of escape mechanism, a phantasmagorical hypnosis allowing him to make quite extraordinary things out of very ordinary situations. He often spoke like that. A fitting analogy I thought, one reserved for people like us.

  People like us. What most fail to appreciate about the nature of security work is that you quickly develop a propensity to enlarge and dramatise even the smallest, most insignificant of happenings as they become the only things able to assuage the long tedium of standing and having to keep vigilant. Most of the workers leave the building at around 5pm. He and I stand by the door wishing people a good evening, smiling amicably while they scurry past us obliviously, holding up their ID passes to which we say thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Goodnight. Thank you sir. Goodnight madam. Goodnight. Thank you sir. Yesterday a group of office workers were too heavily engrossed in their conversation to remember the rules. As they walked past two of the men failed to show their ID’s, they merely swiped the metallic strip along the card reader, automatically opening the barriers then unconcernedly strolled out the doors. They had to show us their ID’s. It was mandatory. You had to show us before the swipe. He called out, excuse me. Softly at first, then with baritone authority. However their conversations seemed far more pressing, far more interesting than his command to halt. They waltzed through the doors letting out a mighty laugh presumably related to their conversation’s subject. He shook his head in the way men do when they’ve reached the end – the end of everything that is somehow destined to last forever. For the rest of the shift he devoted himself to the walls, his facial expression burying itself in the mud of his mouth, his have a goodnight sinking down into the mute valleys of his throat.

  Today was a new day yet I couldn’t help but wonder if he was still hung up about all that. Just before I opened my mouth to bring it up he confessed he’d stopped listening to anything I was saying. He said I spoke too much in general. Nonchalantly he remarked how he could see the wending routes my mouth took whenever I asked my questions, the mime of redundant speech he called it, your lips knocking tirelessly against the doors of your crooked teeth, releasing words void of anything distinctively sufficient. That’s how he phrased it. He always said things in that way, verbosely crushing without shame. Another thing I noticed over the short time we worked together was how there always appeared to be a discernible lapse of concentration revealing itself moments before his attention would become lost completely. His eyes would dart off like a set of gambler’s dice being thrown into a corner of his mind, a place I liked to believe was capable of offering him some kind of solace; a world he felt lucky to be alive in perhaps. A space lambent with living hearts that had come to beat just for him. A place to feel a little important in as everyone likes to every once in a while. I can’t remember exactly when but I did ask him once what it was like having such a terrible attention span. He said it felt easy, with an emphasis on the words light and uncomplicated. I stayed thinking about that for some time while the day trudged absently through us.

  On another occasion I asked him how he dealt with the latent banality which establishes itself when workin
g on the door. The reason I asked was partly because I myself always found the boredom overtly torturous and also because he looked to be at relative peace with the pointlessness of such a position. You’re probably thinking I’m mad, or I’m slightly in love with him or something, but I’m not. It’s just in those days he was the most fascinating man I’d ever met. My imagination he would declare shiningly. That’s where it all goes. A place only he alone could access. His imagination. His sanctum. A realm he could fall into when he decided it was time to conjure up his mind’s lucid medicine. He would often say he was making notes. Writing with the pen of his eye. Writing. I didn’t know people still did that kind of thing. Kept notebooks and diaries and such. We weren’t allowed to use pens or to even write things down on the door, unless it was related to a specific incident, so instead he would internalise everything – writing with the pen of his eye. It was a way for him to be whoever he wanted to be. Through writing he could win any battle, he could have any woman he wished or be the most important person left on earth. He was a fantasist. I didn’t know that then, but I do now. Whenever I tell people about him the first thing they say to me is he sounds like a right weirdo. They don’t even have the decency to pick another word for him. A dreamer they might stretch to say yet he was so much more. More than any of them would ever amount to, but then again how were they supposed to know. Those are the real tragedies, when greatness gets murdered by the long invisibility we ourselves create. Thinking about it now, he could do this thing where he would blur the lines between fiction and fact, to the point I myself wasn’t sure who he was or if anything he ever told me was true. He once referred to himself as a child of colour and mind. It resonated in such a way I had to write it down come lunchtime on some tissue. That same afternoon he saw me scribbling something else he had just said, leaning into my ear he murmured words along the lines of you should never be scared to write anything down mate, even if you don’t understand it at the time, grab it in its abstraction. Writing should always be the last thing you fear.

  But now back to the question at hand, the one about sleep. One would assume that anybody who asked you to repeat at 6.30am something as basic as how long does it take you to fall asleep at night would follow it up with some kind of apology. Etiquette. That’s what any dignified person would do, but not him. On this morning, while we stood waiting to receive the usual throng of corporate workers with my question still unanswered, he seemed more introverted than usual. I mean, he was never the most convivial of characters but you wouldn’t exactly label him hermetical either. He seemed contemplative. Maybe he hadn’t slept well. Maybe he’d been arguing with his girlfriend, or maybe he didn’t have a girlfriend, but then if he did she couldn’t have been that important because he never spoke about her, or perhaps she was so important he couldn’t bring himself to share her brilliance with someone like me. Those were the kind of thoughts I was having back then, before now. With hindsight, all these particular intricacies seemed to act as the perfect segue into what was about to unfold.

  An employee from the 4th floor had forgotten her pass. She worked for a finance company called GDS. This sort of thing was a usual occurrence, but what was about to happen was one of those incidences you couldn’t just brush off after a beer and a cold shower. Due to this quite unfortunate staff member arriving with no official identification we weren’t permitted to let her into the building, despite the fact we both saw her repeatedly on the mornings we were on guard. We knew her face well enough to have been able to grant her the benefit of the doubt if we found it in us to do so. I even remembered her names, both of them, but I didn’t tell him. He was firm. Possibly angry about something as I said, standing there like a roguish general yet still managing to look correct. A thin looking scar trailing just above his right ear proved he could survive altercations if he had to. She was short. Maybe she was in her late twenties or early thirties. I wasn’t sure. She had neat black hair that appeared conservative yet sophisticated suggesting she most probably valued who she was in life. Her position. Her job. The face she met in the mirror each morning. Maybe. Her mouth had a certain weight which gripped both the edges. She wore a standard red lipstick as was common with the women of Building Six, along with what appeared to be a freshly applied coat of lipgloss. This addition gave those sections of her poor smile a sort of positive, bright sheen, yet what struck me most about her was the sharp authority in her left eye. I don’t know how else to describe it. That one observation continued to speed around my mind vertiginously – a sharp authority in the left eye.

  Prior to this she would walk past us each morning with a cup of fresh coffee in one hand and her mobile phone in the other, thumbing over the screen or speaking confidentially to someone. She hardly ever looked up to notice our faces. Her pass always remained fixed onto her suit jacket, a small plastic ID card clipped neatly onto the pocket just above her hip. Rupal Shah. That was the name printed in bold capital letters just under the discoloured passport-size photo which made a disastrous attempt at trying to resemble her. She looked much better outside the photo, then again, most people always do.

  On this particular day he looked at her in the same way he looked at me after I had asked about his sleeping tendencies. The question he still hadn’t answered. In a low, frank tone he said Madam, I need to see your ID. Usually such assertions would begin with the word sorry or excuse me but today he omitted all that before proceeding to notify her for the second time that her pass wasn’t visible. In startled disbelief she hastily knelt down placing the coffee-cup on the floor. Her mobile phone gripped tightly by the right hand, the one which proudly showcased her wedding ring. I noticed streaks of finger sweat begin to spread over the black screen, probably from panic.

  Now he and I were the guardians at the royal gates, the heroic voices besieged by the walls and she was stood there bringing us to life in a blind cruelty; endowing us with function and purpose in the exact way a cheap garden slug relies desperately on the prosperous array of plants and earth in order to recognise its own putrid carrion. Even if that means its only function in life is to absorb the dark ridicule of being subjected to crawling and slithering across every colour, every shape and shade the earth had delicately invented. And he hated her for it.

  She looked up at us both. Stones lodged between her scintillating eyes. No. He didn’t let her through. He remained adamant he needed to see some kind of official identification. We were a nuisance. Seething through her clenched teeth with red lipstick burning, her voice scaling higher. Incredulous. Bringing round the handbag that fashioned her shoulder she began to briskly rummage through its mixed contents. I spotted a half-empty packet of travel tissues. What I presumed was a make-up bag. An assortment of pills. Energy tablets. A white phone charger. A baby’s dummy. A few old chocolate wrappers torn down the middle. But no pass.

  She swore. Once into her bag then twice into the air when the realisation properly took hold. One that made it clear that at 9.13am on a cold Thursday morning, she would have to make a pointless commute back home to retrieve her pass. An inconvenience induced by the two stupid men who stood in front of her. Men who simply wouldn’t let her walk into the same building she’d been walking into for over two years, long before they both happened to be standing there checking ID’s for a living in suits far less impressive than hers, and for a wage far more comical. When she felt the sobering reality working itself against the several sips of coffee she’d had prior to this encumbrance her shoulders fell loosely back. Her head tilted up towards the ceiling while she simultaneously bit down on her paper-white teeth, causing the lower contours of her jaw-muscles to push out the side of her face, to the point I could see them announce themselves in that delicate beauty of hers – like some kind of special guest at a gala full of dull and haggard people. She found both our faces looking at her plain and languid adding to the indignation we’d both burdened her with.

  She swore again, only this time it was loud and direct, a magnificently executed mo
nosyllabic word in its plural form – cunts. Vociferously she expelled all her pent-up vehemence steering it to land directly in the centre of our ocean-blue security badges, right inside the heart of our names. My eyes shamefully pitted themselves against the heels of my shoes while his face remained unabashed by the jagged tirade of her profanity. His eyes were fixed and sure in their attempt not to get swept away by the salty waters beginning to engulf hers. That handsome expression of his remaining unspoilt. Rupal Shah so obviously had failed to understand this was his stadium. Not mine. Or hers. Or the Prime Minster’s or God’s. But his. And right now he was the only person who needed to be here. The light recognised him and him alone; as if this was the anticipated come-on he’d been waiting for his entire life. I marvelled at the spectacle and indeed a spectacle it was. That was the job. To close your eyes to names and faces of people who were so obviously familiar. To remove yourself from any possibility of making someone’s day that little less stressful.

  Her tone changed again. She was softer now, affirming with both hands clasped that we knew her, maybe not by name but definitely by face. She was sure of it. Ever since she returned from maternity leave we had greeted her with a hello or a good morning. That I even ran after her to hand back the shawl she dropped the other week, but all this changing of method and technique proved futile. He was unyielding, obstinate in his role as security guard of Building Six. The lightness in her voice began to ebb away, almost as if admitting to itself that all other alternatives were now rendered ineffective, like the final moments a doctor steps in to inform a family their loved one has only moments left to live. The workers by now would be neatly tucked behind their desks, huddled in their meeting rooms with cups of warm tea and coffee or babbling away on phones and responding to emails, while the three of us stood there in our bizarre showdown, impervious to sympathy and shame.