The Blink That Killed the Eye Read online

  ‘Why are you here?’ I asked.

  ‘I was stabbed,’ he replied.

  ‘No, why are you here?’ I asked again.

  ‘Murder,’ he said.

  Robert Shah, with little reluctance, went on to recount the many incidences that made up the bulk of his wasted life. The events presented me with enough evidence to know him before he killed his wife. Before he was hated on and in turn was taught to hate viciously back. A progeny of violence and fear, he spoke for nearly thirty-five minutes about what he would come to call his life. His voice finding strength and pace, regaining that smooth able musicality which for so long had been stagnant and undisturbed. I remained on the edge of the bed listening to the wickedness and horrors of his childhood; the rape and irregular torture inflicted by his older cousin, the lack of resistance, the fight for authority, the need for power and dominance between his parents and his uncles. How all this was borne in silence. I listened in the same adiaphorous way he had done. At the closing sentence the strength in his voice began to suffer the punishment of frailty for its rebellion. Even monsters at some point had to have loved something outside of the violence they so frequently invented, so finally I asked what his job was.

  ‘I am,’ he corrected himself, ‘ I was, a gardener. Had my own little business. A few blokes working for me, about six all together. Left school, needed a job, my neighbour needed help, said I could work with him for a bit. Raking leaves, weeding, simple shit. Two years I was there, taught me to do it all.’ He stopped, his mouth dry, his words sticking to his gums. Extending a hand he slowly reached for the glass of water beside him, grimacing from the pain. His extension unable to clasp the half filled glass so I got up, putting the water into his hands again, trying to steady the tremor as he took down small infant sips, nodding to signal he’d had enough.

  ‘Everyone has one recurring thought in here don’t they?’

  ‘One? I don’t think anyone’s that lucky mate,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe I am. When I was a kid I remember always hiding in the back of my old mum’s garden, away from all the fights and her dirty boyfriends. It felt safe there. All them colours. You know how kids do stupid shit? I used to think each flower was like a mate, a girlfriend or something. I used to cry a lot in those days, especially in the back of the garden. Summers were the worst. All the flowers would start to spring up. I would tell myself all the fucking tears I cried were causing these flowers to pop up from the ground. I tried to make myself stop, but I couldn’t. Like tears were these mad little seeds that would burst into things the moment they hit the ground. It’s weird. Over time I learnt to be delicate with flowers. I had patience but my missus…she was the most dangerous flower of them all. The only one I couldn’t rip out and tear up when I wanted. I was reckless sometimes, pulling out and stomping on everything I could, the more beautiful something looked the more it drove me mad. I wanted it dead. The boys would ask what the matter was but I’d say nothing. I’d be ripping out what I wanted when I wanted. But mate…my missus, she was fucking wild and I hated her for it. The way she could take herself away like that. Disappear completely. In her mind. Always writing shit down. Always looking fucking peaceful. I’d come home and she’d be staring out the window, at the parked cars, the people in street, writing, writing, writing, all the time, never asking how my day was, never saying she missed me or she loved me. I never got that. That’s when I’d lose it, you know. Bit by bit, it started off with a little slap then I just wanted to get heavier. You think one more hit, one more and I won’t hate her anymore, but I just couldn’t hurt her enough. For all the time I’ve been banged up in here that’s all I can think about. Maybe all I ever wanted was to sit on her side of the garden, under her sun, but she just wouldn’t show me how to get there.’

  We’d both said enough. The warden who was keeping guard outside came in to escort me to my cell. Within days news regarding the prison stabbing started to spread, as did more details surrounding the atrocities of Robert Shah’s violence. Having learnt where he hid his last bit of luck, the three inmates who attempted to take his life returned not long after he was acquitted from the infirmary. Robert Shah was found hanging in his cell by the guards at around 7.35am. A putrid pool of faeces and urine shimmering beneath his feet with a face beaten raw and bloody. The hospital bandage around his stab wound still absorbing those daubs of pointless blood. Righteously the men nailed a cutout of St George’s Cross into his chest, the same side where his heart would have thumped its final beat. I told them to put a fresh yellow daffodil in his trouser pocket once they were done, for his wife.

  Cowboy

  There were nights when her mother would stand by her bedroom door just to watch her. She was of course supposed to be asleep, but when a mother has to work late it grants the child an opportunity to take advantage of the big night and its inviting solitude.

  We could see her dolls meticulously aligned in the corner of her room opposite the window where the curtains were always kept widely drawn. Blonde dolls, more female than male with pinkish skin and coarse hair placed up by the skirting. Each one’s frame resembling the other with its factory set of small rounded breasts, protruding bottom and flat beach-like stomach. All favourably ranked in order of popularity and beauty, while being made to purposefully appear as if they were forever holding hands. As the line fell into the shadows, we could see the dolls which bore the forsaken marks, scars and blemishes of those old and least preferred, buried in the room’s sunless corner where they remained forgotten by everyone except time.

  With the plastic of their skin and bones she had created the perfect panoply of a family life she knew must exist, however this wasn’t what worried her mother. Rather it was the sight of seeing her young daughter play tirelessly with one particular plastic figure. He, like the others, had pinkish skin, cinematic blue eyes, blond hair, and a broad hexagonal chest with thick muscular legs. He wore a white and blue cowboy hat with a gun lodged brazenly in the holster around his waist. His grin dictating to the rest of his facial features what they should always be doing. Her mother tried hard to remember who brought the toy for her. Maybe her father had, one of the few gifts he ever surprised her with. On this particular night she interrupted the young girl’s play by what we assume was her asking why she wasn’t in bed, and why she was up so late playing with her dolls and cowboy. Here, one might expect a young daughter to grow mildly effervescent at hearing the voice of a mother she hadn’t seen all day. Not her. Instead she aloofly reeled the figure into her pyjama pocket, remarking with the candour of the young, that she really wished she could be a cowboy.

  As the years developed we know her mother was forced to change jobs several times, although no substantial reason was ever given as to why, which could have helped to appease the growing tensions between them. She kept few friends, her repose finding itself in the introverted hours she would spend drawing alone. Most of her illustrations consisted of white unicorns, bright hot-air balloons and tropical fish. Things indigenous to one’s imagination, the massless air or tepid oceanic shallows.

  Her best friend’s name was Holly. We know that from the summer days they spent skipping and playing in the front garden until being called in for tea. Their mothers met one year at a school committee meeting where they were brought into a conversation about property development and the benefits of gentrification. Her mother liked Holly. That was known. She seemed bright and intelligent. Sociable and duly polite. The perfect balance for someone like her daughter, who most of the time appeared to posses all the sad qualities of a person who was, by and large, socially inept.

  Within the tombs of silence and seclusion there is a certain kind of clarity. From quietude’s expansive tunnels the ear and soul’s most poignant faculties rouse those enchanting senses, the ones unattainable to the mass of people who prefer the fanfare and clutter of everyday living. In her early teens she gradually adopted a capacity for hermeticism. She noticed how her mother would start arriving home later and la
ter from work. How she skipped meals, settling instead for a bottle of red wine and a flickering television screen that spoke often but said nothing. On the few occasions the young girl wasn’t home, we assume she was staying over at Holly’s house. It would be here where she probably noticed a similar turn of events to the ones she encountered at home. The only difference being Holly’s mother could fall promisingly into the comfort of the arms that wrapped themselves around her, delicately kissing the crown of her head. A sight she had only partially seen in the plastic world of her dolls and their innocuous sensibilities.

  This was continuous throughout the next few years that she lived at home with her mother. Then, just like that, she grew into the shape of a young woman, one whose exact age remained frustratingly unknown. Her childhood toys turned dead and grave-less, scattered somewhere in the buried lengths of her mother’s attic. From what we know by this time she had kissed one boy, as well as having learnt to fix bicycles, repair punctures, install brakes and wear her hair in different ways. The kiss itself happened out on the street around five years ago and only a few yards away from her mother’s front door.

  It was summer, so understandably everything was looking to be loved. The young boy had complimented her by saying she had nice lips and how the smell of her hair reminded him of his sister. Coquettishly she returned the compliment remarking how he had nice coloured eyes, and how he reminded her of a toy cowboy she once had when she was a girl. That’s when he leant forward to kiss her. Both of them feeling like new stars discovering the immortality of the universe. His hands starting their precarious descent down into the parts of her female body he had only been allowed to visit during hot masturbatory nights, ones where his older brother was either out or asleep. With a steely grip she motioned his hand away, as if placing something that wasn’t ever needed back on the shop shelf. Firmly, she said something along the lines of you might look like a cowboy but that doesn’t mean you should act like one.

  It wasn’t long before the young cowboy disappeared for good. His parents moving to another part of the city, taking with them her first kiss and the eager hands she so surely denied. After that awkward encounter the young girl said to herself that boys weren’t important. She thought of her mother and the way she dealt with loneliness and longing. She thought of her father and his perpetual absence, then finally she concluded there were perhaps other things teenage girls could concern themselves with. However, to maintain such a staunch, iconoclastic philosophy was difficult, especially when boys were always the main subject of conversation among her small group of friends. Growing tired of such senseless chit-chat she chose instead to draw and paint, using an abstraction of colours capable of reflecting her various moods. An aberrant, mystified solace was discovered, gradually nurtured by the whirling currents of art and hue. Laying on her front each night she could effortlessly summon whatever was envisioned within using the body of just one simple colour, just one swaying stroke. Soon this was to become her greatest past time.

  One night she walked into the living room to speak with her mother. Instantly she was struck by the way the candle’s flame could make her mother’s wine glass materialise into something supremely rich. A shimmering pool of maroon suspended sombrely over the candle’s balmy gold. She stood watching. On the sideboard there lay one of her many notepads, unlined, with a black biro attached to it. She drew what she saw, letting the minutes amble past her until the flame eventually flickered and died, leaving the bottle to loom in its transparent emptiness. The glass now looked repellently stained, tainted with the bodiless blood of her mother’s French wine. Who would now want to sketch such a poor aesthetic? The young girl stood inanimately, steady in the gallows of her own private sorrow, her etched illustration begging for more life, begging to be completed. She observed sadly the way her mother’s vinous sleep almost crushed her distinguished beauty, the pride of her shoulders, the articulacy of her speech. Her suit jacket still on and crumpled. Her mouth agape with teeth the colour of a cremated sky. Her breath godless and rancid. Then came the clawing urge to ask her why? Why was she doing this to herself? Why wasn’t she in bed? Why was she up this late? Why was she letting the thing within destroy her so easily? Habitually she looked around the room for the plastic figure of a toy cowboy but there was nothing, only bits of chic furniture that nobody would ever come to admire. She stubbed out the thoughts on the ashtray of her fate, the same one where so much quantifiable ash had accumulated to linger and putrefy. Glancing down she ran her eyes over the sketch she made. It looked rough and inaccurate. She hated it. Turning off the television, then closing the living-room door, she made her way to bed, leaving her mother on the sofa, drunk and dreamless.

  After some months the mother attacked her daughter. She broke her nose with one barbarous jab. Like most devastating events, it was the kind of thing that happened within seconds but had been ominously manifesting for months, or perhaps even years. Her mother was by now almost constantly intoxicated and morbidly lonely. From what’s known, it’s believed the first signs of trouble began to manifest when the young girl brought up the subject of a boy she was dating. One evening, while eating dinner, the two spoke affably about the day’s events when in mid-conversation the name Alex was voiced by the young daughter. This was the first time her mother had heard her daughter say a man’s name at the dinner table. Alex. With an unripe lemon in her throat she asked who this boy was and how they had met. The young daughter casually responded saying they’d known each other since college, that he was a good friend of Holly’s boyfriend and they were now officially a couple.

  News of the boyfriend was relayed roughly a week before the assault, meaning her mother would have had sufficient time to dangerously ruminate on the impending reality which was propelling her daughter closer towards finding her one true love – a love she herself was in desperate need of. Within the next few days there were numerous bouts of unresolved conflict between the two. Everything grew discernibly tense. Each feud found its motive in the most trivial of incidences. The mother developing a twisted compulsion to undermine her daughter’s life-long ambition. Dreadful things were expressed, screamed and repeated. She would scorn her daughter for being who she was, or worse still, for who she wanted to become. She referred to her, in the heat and slur of words poisoned by wine and misery, as some mediocre artist plagued by indolence, branding her a spoilt rich-girl, one who had only been afforded the luxury of her apparent artsy aspiration through the diligence and privilege provided by her own single-handed success. Collectively her words ripped at the young girl’s darkened eyes, until the warring sky containing all her sorrows was at last ruptured, opening the way for a successive rush of salt-water that drowned everything she desperately fought to conceal.

  The assault itself occurred on a Wednesday night at around 10.30pm. Earlier that evening her daughter announced she would soon be leaving home. She said Alex and her were in the process of making plans to move in together. Another heated dispute followed, one that was to segue into the daughter raising the very sensitive and volatile issue of her mother’s uncontrollable drinking. She was aware that in the course of the past month her mother had already called in sick five times, a truism which helped strengthen her belief that her alcoholism had now become frighteningly insuppressible. Haughtily her mother stated those days were in fact not sick days but holiday-leave, and the time taken off was time officially owed to her. Sharp gambits were rapidly exchanged cutting through the neighbourhood’s stillness. Harsh and vulgar words such as Bitch, Liar, Disgusted, Whore and Shame were all cast upon the other indiscriminately, until finally the daughter passively capitulated, allowing the mother to reclaim her much needed dominance.

  Peevishly, with wine wading through her system, the mother lit her final cigarette, flinging the empty packet across the glass coffee table, inhaling deep, absorbing drags from the stick’s orange-speckled butt. The bickering escalated until the mother’s punch launched itself straight into the daughter’s e
nraged face. A shambolic hullabaloo epitomising the disastrous and exasperating tie a family such as theirs had come to engender. The last thing the daughter heard was the boorish tonality her mother raged in before shrilling the phrase Little Bitch, accompanied by an enervated, inexact strike of her right arm. The daughter spilling back into the neat parade of kitchen chairs, her body no longer hers, covered her face while wailing down into the clean terracotta tiles. Realising what she’d done her mother came floundering over. Crying. Blubbering stifled sounds. Blood on both their white tops. Deep red splurges coated the pine furniture making it quite clear their relationship had now reached its anticipated end. The mother may not have intended to break the daughter’s nose, or kill whatever remained of their timorous bond, after-all, that part may have been accidental – alcohol having played such a pivotal role in the turn of these tragic events. Yet what assumably took the mother over the proverbial edge wasn’t the boyfriend, or even the comments regarding her drinking, it was in fact the stark announcement that her daughter would soon be moving out of home to start a new life with the man who she apparently loved. The man whose name was first aired at the kitchen table a few days prior to the incident. The man whose name we know to be Alex.

  All this change undoubtedly proved to be way too much for her mother. Unbeknown to her enamoured daughter who was up until then still addled by the nature of such exciting love, were the undisclosed feelings her mother had painfully amassed over the course of those few days – even before any mention came of her daughter and the boyfriend moving out. Feelings that most likely emerged on the evening she found out her daughter was now lost in the undertow of insensible love. A silent truth which deprived her of a whole night’s sleep, involuntarily spending those nocturnal hours wide awake, fatefully steeped in expensive wine, envisioning the two of them both laying in a bedroom naked, her painting as he did whatever it was he did. He wasn’t important. He didn’t matter. It was his arms that troubled her. His touch. His affection. The amorous ways he would be kissing her before they began making love. His face in the morning, waking up next to hers so as to make love all over again, but obviously she couldn’t let the daughter know the way her jealousy styled itself.