The Blink That Killed the Eye Read online

  Then I saw it. Right there in an instant. The first sign of weakness from Rupal Shah. A small pearl of a tear broke out from the corner of her left eye, the same eye that previously had looked at us with such sharp authority, but was now rapidly becoming something else. It looked hot and lonely, sunken and defeated rolling over the both of us as we stood head-on to face the calamity. I glanced over to him in what must have looked like a superficial attempt to seek some type of guidance, something of a proposition as to what we should be doing in a situation such as this. Nothing. He positioned his feet so as to have them slightly apart, placed one hand over the other allowing them to rest authoritatively in front of him. I recall thinking amidst such a tense and uncomfortable situation that these tears of Rupal Shah’s seemed to resemble a community of small rocks all tumbling down the body of a giant volcano. In this context he was the volcano or maybe the situation might have been, I hadn’t really decided, I couldn’t, I had a job to be getting on with.

  Despite trying to not notice the direction of her tears I couldn’t help but watch them move as if they were free to travel any part of her face, without restriction, without needing to identity themselves to anyone. I thought about that while he continued the very painstaking, almost clinical shake of his head – the proverbial mast of rejection, the never-ending insolence we both knew so well. No. No. No. I do this thing. I still do, even after all this time. I always look at a person’s ears when they move their head repeatedly, especially when those moments are born out of sticky confrontation. No. No. No. There’s something very infantile about ears, something unthreatening and helpless. Watching his just cling to the side of his head like that despite his skewed scar seemed almost as intriguing as the list of quaint crystals which by now were running uncontrollably down the side of Rupal Shah’s face, clashing with all the confidence of her glossed lips, adding a new kind of grief to the bright red which was so sure of itself a mere ten minutes ago.

  In a desperate blubber of unmanageable sound she demanded to see the building site-manager. All the emotion, all the swearing and pleading hadn’t worked, so as a final resort the idea was to now get bureaucratic. The manager was a man named Keith O’Conner, or Con as we called him. I pulled out the walkie-talkie, turned up the little black dial and radioed in. Within minutes the lift door opened with its usual symphonic glide to reveal Keith, a hefty man who was paid far more than any of us to drink worrying amounts of coffee while watching the CCTV screens from the spy-dens of the main security office, and occasionally yell orders down the radio if guards appeared to be slouching or distracted. Approaching us he was all stomach and keys. Clipped onto his waist the fat set jangled and clinked as if in parody of the musical dissonance one might expect from an office building security manager. As the three of us stood there, Rupal Shah began to relay her side of the story. How she had left the house in a frenzied rush to catch her train. How she’s having a really tough time at the moment with her husband, how the meeting she’d spent the last few weeks scheduling had started ten minutes ago, a meeting with a group of willing investors from China that she’s now most definitely missed. She stressed how we both knew her; how we saw her on the mornings we worked. She even included the story of the shawl, which did touch me, although I would never bring myself to show it.

  Keith, turning down the volume to his walkie-talkie listened attentively. He had a fantastic listening face. Sincerely contorted, with perfectly assured head-nods automatically appearing after each narrative sentence fell from the lips of the very animated Rupal Shah. He however remained as voiceless as the polished shoes we stood in. He knew the rules too well. Keith, with his professional mannerism, let her finish speaking, until suggesting she should try to call her boss and see if he could perhaps grant her the permission required to pass through. Her face rediscovered itself. Her last lifeline. She took out her phone making a few shuffling steps away from where we stood. Exchanging a hushed combination of short words with the person on the other end she removed the device from her ear returning to her irremediably sad expression. ‘He’s not in the office. The secretary just told me he’s out having meetings all day.’ That was it. Done. Nobody else had the authority to bypass security regulations. If silence wanted a corporeality of its own then it would have been fine to appropriate the one we were now all embodied in. It was uncomfortable seeing her standing there so desolate. Suddenly I was struck by the thought to sign her in as a visitor, that way we could curtail the regulations, then that too would have been of little use as she had already made it known to everyone that she was an employee of GDS. There were no other permissible ways for Rupal Shah to enter. She was going to have to go home.

  All this was stipulated procedure documented in the Building Six security handbook. We’d all undergone a mandatory day of training aimed at preparing us for situations such as this. I still have the handbook somewhere. Keith looked on while calmly roving three chunky fingers around the edges of his chin, rubbing as if he were the one trying to edge himself back into a state of comprehension. With a very gentle clearing of the throat he could do nothing besides confirm that his colleagues were in fact right, that the defeated Rupal Shah, with her exposed quarry of drying crystal tears, would have to venture back home if she wanted to be let into Building Six. ID cards were a strict requirement. Obligatory. There were to be no exceptions. All this sat in accordance with the direct orders decreed by Mr. Cohen himself – he was the property tycoon who owned the entire building.

  Catching a glimpse of her apparent despair Keith went on to affectionately retell an incident involving a man who was let into the building with no official ID back in March. He told how this intruder turned out to be the crazed husband of a woman who’d been subjected to extreme bouts of domestic violence at the hands of the aforementioned. I could see how her eyes immediately started to focus in on the story. Keith knew he wasn’t really allowed to elaborate any more. I remember thinking to myself he’d already said slightly too much. Still, he was the boss, he had more authority than us ordinary guards and so he went on. This maniacal husband had connivingly told the security on the door that his wife was diabetic and had forgotten her insulin. He claimed emphatically it was no joke and there was no time for second thoughts. The guard on the door had only been working for two weeks. Naturally he was inexperienced at knowing how to tell the phony from the sincere, so he let the scumbag straight through with a set of assisting directions mapping out the quickest way to get to the floor the poor woman was working on. It was all caught on camera by Paul who was working the CCTV upstairs. We heard later on how earlier that morning her husband had found out she was having an affair, and so had really only come to Building Six with the scandalous intention of shaming her up in front of the entire office then probably beating her when she got home. The police weren’t called but we sent the recordings over to them anyway as things of that nature had to be officially reported and logged. We heard how the incident even made its way into the local papers. Since that unfortunate day Mr. Cohen specifically stated any staff without the proper forms of identification must be refused entry, irrespective of status or company. Keith apologised. Tilted his head to one commiserative side and let his mouth force a smile for both his fat cheeks. I don’t know how much of the anecdote registered with Rupal Shah, but what I did know was how her head shook itself in slow and painful disbelief.

  Keith left us to face what our dogged application of building law had cast upon the morning of Rupal Shah. There was no more coffee; that was definitely cold. Her phone was now lying useless and abandoned somewhere inside her handbag, mascara smeared like a melted night around her eyes. I could see she may have been a lot younger than I originally had presumed. People always look younger after they’ve been able to cry properly. He was standing looking beyond Rupal Shah. Maybe out of culpability but more likely out of indifference. The door’s electric slide received the final herd of panicked late workers. A cold burst of wind hit the three of us, entering the buil
ding wrapped in its traditional November skin only to be tackled by the entrance heater as it ran into the path of its small blowing. The fan working indefatigably from the top of the door. She regained her composure. accepting the inalienable truth that she would have to make another tiresome commute back home just to fetch a totally irrelevant ID badge to access a building she’d been working in for over two years. An ID card so irrelevant in the grand scheme of things it may as well have not been issued at all. Pointless. To put it in perspective, once the day drew to an end, she and all the other two thousand odd people working within Building Six would forget their passes in places where mystery itself wouldn’t even care to acknowledge. Pointless. These two stupid, inconveniencing little men with their pathetic plastic badges and their soulless, hysterical, brainless jobs which a bloody traffic-cone could probably do better have purposefully become the root to all this totally unnecessary aggravation. This is what Rupal Shah’s brain was most likely contending with during the moments leading up to her saying this.

  ‘I have a baby who’s nine months old at home with the only friend I have left in the world. I’ve a husband who shows me the insides of his own hell every night, and the only man who could have saved me from it all is dead. I come to work each day, to an office which reeks of cheap furniture polish, coffee, bad breath and the latest duty-free perfumes but I’ve learnt to keep my problems to myself. I want to work hard and get the promotion I need, the one to make everything alright again, for me and my little son.’

  Pausing, she blew her nose into the penultimate tissue she’d unraveled from her thin and crumpled travel-pack.

  ‘Can I ask, do you have children?’ She asked him with all seriousness. He didn’t answer. He just kept looking straight ahead at the door. Then she asked me the same question. I replied bashfully that I didn’t. I also said her story sounded sad and I was sorry for the type of morning she was having. In response she smiled with the only smile she had left, one that happened in only half her mouth while trying to frantically wipe away the crusty lace of tears which by now had desecrated the triumph of her beauty. She must have known if he weren’t there I would have let her pass. I think that hurt her more than anything else. Moving closer to him, brimming with venom and war, like a tank monstrously sizing up some remote village house and with the muscles in her face recoiling to form their initial defensive bastion she said scornfully, ‘I don’t think you have a wife. In fact I don’t think you have anyone you really love. You take this thing you do so seriously you can’t see what your pathetic hang-ups do to people. You’re on a power trip, you all are, because you know the moment you step outside this building and that square you stand on gets taken back by whoever owns you, you’re reminded how insignificant …’

  She stopped there. Maybe because she was now looking at me or maybe for another reason. She wore the tenuous expression of someone who was hurting more than the person they were trying to hurt. Her invective onslaught running out of the hate needed to sustain it. Neither of us took offence. I kept looking straight ahead in the same way he was doing. Professional. Unaffected. Authoritative. All he cared to say was when you have your ID you’ll be able to pass with no hassle. Inferably she nodded, followed by an exhausted sigh. Turning her back, she took two steps towards the door then turned to face us. I knew she would. She had too much to say, she could have spent hours talking about the people who had let her down, which for us would have been fine, seeing as we were both standing inside all the time we would ever own. We were non-entities in the multifaceted ranks of life and status and maybe she felt safe in that knowledge – we didn’t really exist as real people who anyone should take or did take too seriously. That particular thought upset me. Why was she telling us all this? What she really seemed to want to do was tell us the story of her eyes. Both of them. It’s what most sad people yearn for. To let strangers into the tumultuous world they inhabit alone behind the giant facade.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for all that to come out. It’s just been a very difficult time for me. I’m sorry.’ She stopped to dig awkwardly at her clear nails, picking away at the cuticles until saying, ‘do you have a name?’ He didn’t reply. His face hadn’t moved throughout the whole period she stood there, scolding and degrading us, so she turned to me.

  ‘Can you tell me your friend’s name?’

  ‘Alex,’ I said, ‘his name’s Alex.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m Rupal, I work on the fourth floor for a finance company called GDS.’

  Everything was changing again, new characters, a turn in the plot, new ways to manipulate and bully by utilising a different set of emotions to evoke a more profound sense of guilt. She sounded younger, like a lost teenaged girl asking for directions in the hard-lands of a foreign city. ‘Alex, what do you do when you’re not at work?’ That was when I felt sorry for him. I wanted her to leave him alone now. I wanted to tell her to stop, but I didn’t. She was gaining traction, working her way into the same place I myself had wanted for so long to go, a place I was denied by the fear I had of being too intrusive. She was drilling, rumbling his walls, aiming for the opaque shields he kept staunchly intact. This was the part of him that lay lightless and undiscovered, invisible in its own obscurity. Rupal Shah was standing at the doors of his most famous mystery, a place where ID badges were as useful as keys are to a cave.

  ‘Do you have a hobby Alex? Do you like football, cars, weight training?’ Her tone slightly mellowed into a dallying probe with fluttering intonations. She had reversed what should normally be happening in a situation such as this. Usually one would expect hints of patronisation from the victim, from the person wronged, but her questioning seemed to flow in a more cordial way. Maybe it was the crystals that still lingered around her face, maybe it was the story she shared or maybe I was adding my own hints of piteous idealism to the situation. Either way she hadn’t morphed into the type of person that would reinforce the reasons why he took so much pleasure in denying people entry into the building, although he said before they all had it in them. To talk to us like we didn’t exist. Like we didn’t matter. To say what they pleased. Here Rupal Shah was showing a new kind of initiative, one that left him facing the skinned heart of his own emptiness.

  Then she said, ‘This may sound a little strange but what the hell, do you have a garden?’ Silence. Both of us. Silence. She continued, ‘You know gardens can teach you a lot about things that like to stay quiet. We have a garden behind the flat, nothing special really, but my son seems to enjoy the hours we spend back there. When I was on maternity leave he would sit in his pushchair looking straight at all the colours. My husband’s a gardener. We bought the flat because of the little plot of land. One section is his, the other mine. It’s something quite beautiful to watch, the way all those wild things bloom from nothing, from just a tiny seed, small and insignificant enough to get washed down a bathroom sink but big enough to fit into the whole world.’ Her face became a fairground, each element enjoying its own particular ride and sensation; she was travelling now and had us with her. ‘How can such natural life happen so quietly and perfectly around us, without anyone stopping to notice its virtue? During that summer I saw things you would never have known existed. I built something sacred. I mean, I still don’t know all the names of the flowers, the families they come from, but that doesn’t bother me. Each one seemed happy just being acknowledged. Just being marvelled at by some stranger. Every single shape satisfied to be held up by some kind of light. The more you start to notice these things the more they all begin to grow in your direction. If only life could be as simple as a garden, right?’

  I gestured only with my head trying hard not to seem too interested in what she was saying. I wanted her to leave, but then I wanted her to stay forever too. His face still anchored to the robotic doors up front. The receptionists at the main desk could be heard talking and taking messages on the phone. The postman cut past us, the smell of the outside tattooed onto the fabric of his red winter coat. City pi
geons could be seen pecking at stale crumbs, their plumage the same colour as exhaust fumes. It was business as usual, everything stuck in the artifice of its time.

  ‘As a young girl I spent years trying to find a way I could define myself. I wasn’t happy being just a woman, just a daughter, and then eventually having to become someone’s wife and mother. I felt there was so much more to me than just that. I had things, qualities nobody cared to notice because of who I appeared to be; my looks, my skin colour, my gender, the way I spoke or what God I believed in. In the corporate world you see how people deal with their preconceptions. How hard it is to become bigger than your stereotype. Recently I started to notice the way flowers grew. They had no real idea they were flowers, it’s a name we’ve given them. They didn’t feel the need to define themselves in the ways we do. They held no prejudices, there was no violence encaged within them, no jealousy or malevolence. All they needed to know was they could keep growing towards the light. That was it. Just grow towards the light.’

  Snapping my badge up I rushed to swipe it across the barrier so as she could pass but his hand was already on my wrist, pressing down tightly, leaving four white lanes on the surface of my skin just above the veins; his eyes an ancient mausoleum inside mine. My pass fell back. I cowered, hating him more than ever. I wanted her to rip him apart. To tear out his heart just to prove he had one, but she didn’t, she never could. She was too grand a vessel in a world ambushed and flooded by misery and fear.

  ‘No please, don’t worry, it’s fine. I’m going to head home anyway. I’ve taken up too much of your time as it is, plus I know you’re both just doing your jobs. It’s out of character for me to act like this. On the plus side though at least I won’t have to worry about intruders forging their way in here. I’ve missed my meeting now anyway. Maybe I’ll just take the rest of the day off. Jesus, look at me, what a disaster.’ She turned to face the outside, away from us.