Kitabı oku: «The Sleeping Sword», sayfa 2
CHAPTER 3
INSIDE MY BLACK HOLE
THE NEXT DAY THE BANDAGES CAME OFF SO that the doctor could examine the wound on the side of my head. ‘Good, Bun, very good,’ said the doctor. ‘The swelling’s gone right down. You can open your eyes now.’
It took some doing – they felt a bit gummed up. But I did it. I opened them. The trouble was that I couldn’t see anything. I blinked and tried again. Blackness. Only blackness. I squeezed them tight shut, and opened them again. I felt I was deep inside a black hole, that there was no way out. I was drowning in blackness, unable to breathe, my heart pounding with sudden terror.
‘That looks a lot better, Bun,’ the doctor went on, turning my head with his cold hands, ‘a lot better.’
‘I can’t see,’ I told him. ‘I can’t see.’ There was a long silence. Then I could feel his breath on me, his face close to mine. He was lifting my eyelids.
‘What about now?’ he asked me. ‘Can you see a light? Can you see anything?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘What’s the matter with him, Doctor?’ My mother was asking just the question I wanted to ask, and she was frightened, really frightened. I could hear it in her voice.
‘Well, it’s a little difficult to say at this stage,’ the doctor said. ‘I expect it’s just a side effect of the trauma. He’s had a nasty crack on his head. It’ll correct itself in time, I’m sure. But we’ll do some tests. It’s nothing to worry about, Bun.’ His hand squeezed my shoulder. ‘You’ll be fine.’
If I had a pound for every time doctors told me that in the next few months, I’d be rich, extremely rich. But you can’t blame them. What else could they say? They had to try to reassure me. Everyone was trying to reassure me. When they discharged me and I got back home, it was the same old refrain: ‘Don’t worry, Bun. It’ll be fine.’
To begin with I believed them, because I wanted to believe them, needed to believe them. All the tests – and there were dozens and dozens of them, in Truro, in Bristol, in London – showed that I should be able to see. But the fact was that I couldn’t.
Every morning I opened my eyes hoping and praying, but no longer believing, that this time I’d be able to see something. I never could. Everything else had healed up long ago by now. The plaster was off my broken arm, and the stitches out of my head.
Dan said cheerily, that he preferred me when I’d looked like a mummy. Liam, I could feel, didn’t know what to say, so he said very little. He didn’t know how to include me, so he didn’t.
Only Anna didn’t pretend with me, didn’t feel awkward. She was just herself. She’d sit and talk, talk about anything and everything. She seemed to understand, without my having to tell her, what no one else did: that I felt lost, bewildered and frightened in a strange black world where I was entirely alone. She knew that I just wanted everyone to be normal, as they had been, so that I could still be part of the real world I remembered, their world.
My father was endlessly encouraging, taking me out on the fishing boat as he used to, trying to pretend my blindness didn’t exist. From time to time I’d hear my mother crying quietly downstairs, and I knew only too well why. But when she was with me she was always positive, always concerned and comforting and cuddly, more so than she ever had been, too much so.
No one ever spoke the word ‘blind’, not in my hearing anyway, either at home or in the various hospitals. So in the end I mentioned it myself, to Anna, because I knew she’d be honest with me. ‘I’m blind, aren’t I?’ I said to her, interrupting a story she was reading to me.
‘Yes,’ she replied quietly. ‘But because you’re blind now, it doesn’t mean you will be for ever, does it? I mean, your arm got better, so did your head. Why not your eyes?’
‘What if I stay blind?’ I asked her. ‘What if I don’t get better?’
‘It won’t change anything, not really. You’ll still be the same person. I’ll still be your friend. I always will be.’ I cried then as I’d never cried before, and Anna put her arm round me. It wasn’t exactly worth going blind to have her do that, but it comforted me as nothing else had; calmed my fears, made me feel less alone inside my black hole of despair.
CHAPTER 4
ONLY ONE WAY OUT
AFTER THAT, RESIGNATION GREW IN ME SLOWLY, imperceptibly. I would never see again. Never. There was to be no going back. I was going to have to live with myself as I was, sightless and alone, in permanent unending darkness. For a while I could think of nothing else and sank into a deep sadness, a bottomless pit of bitterness and self-pity. Anna tried to get me out of it, not by pitying me but by arguing with me.
‘It’s like a living death,’ I told her once.
‘You can’t say that,’ she said. ‘You know nothing about death. You haven’t been there and neither have I. We’re alive. All right, so you can’t see. But you can live. We’ve got to think about living.’
Anna came over to see me whenever she could, whenever she was home from school. More than anyone else she lightened my darkness. We’d talk of all the good times we’d had together and laugh about them. She brought me some of her CDs – Robbie Williams, Britney Spears, the Corrs – and some audio tapes as well –The Sword in the Stone, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Arthur, High King of Britain. With their help I managed to banish the hateful silence of my room and to fill my life with sound. This seemed to help, to distract me, to take myself out of myself – at least, for a while. But as time went on I found I also had something else to worry about. I had tried to ignore it, to pretend it wasn’t so. But I couldn’t, not any longer.
At first I hoped it might be temporary, just a phase that would pass. But it didn’t pass. If anything it became worse. It was something I had to hide, something I’d told no one about, not even Anna. Ever since the accident I had been unable to remember things, little things that might not have mattered so much on their own. But there were also, I discovered, important parts of my life that had just gone missing. For instance, apparently we’d all been on holiday to Canada when I was five, to see my uncle Bill, my father’s brother, who lived in Toronto. People still talked about it. I remember I’d seen the photographs. It was the only time I’d been up in a jumbo jet. But I couldn’t remember any of it.
Nor could I recall anything of a trip up to London only a year or so ago, when we’d been to the zoo, and to the Science Museum, to the Tower of London, and to Stamford Bridge to see my favourite team Chelsea playing Tottenham Hotspur. All these events were a complete mystery to me. In fact, I had no memories of even being a Chelsea fan.
My mind, I was discovering, was full of blank spaces, gaps in my memory that were completely unpredictable, so that I was never prepared for them.
The vicar came to see me one day – ‘just to cheer you up,’ as he put it – and started going on about a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat he’d put on the year before in the church, apparently.
‘You’ve a fine singing voice, Bun,’ he said. ‘Everyone said so. You were a wonderful Pharaoh, just wonderful.’
I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. I had no memory of it whatsoever. I covered up as best I could, but how well I had covered up I could never really be sure, because of course I couldn’t see people’s faces to see how they reacted.
As each new memory gap became evident I became more and more terrified, because it made me fear I might now be losing my mind as well as my sight. It was my darkest, deepest secret and I kept it to myself.
There was even worse to come. It was becoming obvious that I couldn’t go back to school with the others on Tresco, that sooner or later I’d have to go to a ‘special’ school for the blind. There was no school for the blind on Scilly. I’d have to go to the mainland. I’d have to leave home.
When the time came my mother tried to break it to me as gently as she could. ‘All the kids have to go to school on the mainland at sixteen anyway, for their sixth form. You know that, Bundle. You’d just be doing the same thing, only a few years earlier, that’s all. And it’s just the right place for you. Dad and I have been to see it. They’ve got all the right equipment, all the specialist teachers you need. Lovely grounds, too. It’s only up at Exeter. Not far. We can come and see you, and you can come back home often. I promise.’
It was the final confirmation that I was indeed different from everyone around me and that, therefore, I was to be treated differently.
‘It won’t be until the end of the summer, Bun,’ said my father, laying a hand on my arm. ‘And it won’t be so bad, honest it won’t. You’ll see. I went away to school at your age, and I loved it. Lots to do, lots of new friends.’
I was to be separated from home, from everyone I knew and loved, my mother, my father, from Liam and Dan, and from Anna, too. It was more than I could bear. I lay there all night thinking it through. By the time I heard the dawn chorus of gulls and oystercatchers, I had made up my mind.
There was only one way out, and I would have to take it.
CHAPTER 5
HELL BAY
NOW THAT I’D MADE UP MY MIND I DIDN’T think twice about it. Still in my pyjamas, I picked up the boathook from the porch and walked out of the house, down the path to the front gate, and out on to the track. I hadn’t been further than this on my own since the accident, and I knew that even with my boathook feeling the way for me, I’d be bound to stumble. The track up to Hell Bay was uneven and stony, difficult enough to climb with eyes, let alone without them. But I’d done it a thousand times before and I knew the lie of the land almost instinctively. I could do it.
I felt the hill rising under my feet as I came up to Hillside Farm, where Anna lived, where she would be sleeping. I stopped for a few moments outside her house. ‘Goodbye, Anna,’ I whispered. ‘Thanks for trying. Thanks for everything. I’m sorry.’ I felt the tears coming, felt myself weakening.
I turned away and walked on, out around Bryher Pool and Popplestones Bay. Here I tripped and fell badly, barking my knee on the ground. I sat there for a while rocking back and forth, waiting for the pain to subside.
I heard a flock of turnstones peeping along the shore, and listened to the surge of the sea as each wave fell and washed up the beach. I knew that it was a beautiful world I was leaving, but it was a world I could no longer see, a world I no longer felt I belonged in.
As I got to my feet I thought I heard someone close behind me. I stood and listened for a while and decided I must have been imagining things. It must have been the wind sighing through the dunes. It was far too early for anyone to be about.
From now on the track was both steep and dangerous, easy enough to follow but narrow and tortuous, in places soft with springy thrift, then suddenly treacherous with loose stones underfoot and slippery wet rock. In places I had to go down on my hands and knees to feel my way forward.
When I came up over the crest of the hill overlooking Hell Bay, the sudden force of the wind took my breath away and chilled me to the bone. I could hear the roaring thunder of the sea. I could feel the whole island tremble under my feet as each wave pounded against the cliffs. I knew exactly where I was, exactly the place I would do it. It wasn’t far now. I was almost there. I moved on unthinking, unfeeling, as if in a trance, as if led by some unseen hand towards the edge of the cliff, towards the end of my life.
A voice spoke from behind me, gentle, ethereal. ‘Don’t, Bun. Don’t.’ Then a hand, a real hand, grasped me firmly by the arm. It was Anna. ‘Come away,’ she said. ‘Come away. You’re too close to the edge.’
I did not resist as she led me away, her arm round me. She helped me down on to a carpet of soft thrift and sat down beside me, letting me cry until I had no more tears left to cry. She did not talk and she did not touch me, but I could feel her willing me to explain why I had tried to do it. She wanted to understand, she needed to.
So I told her why. I poured it all out about the ‘special’ school for the blind on the mainland, how they were banishing me to another world, forcing me away, driving me out. I had nothing to live for any more.
‘Didn’t you tell them? Didn’t you tell them how you feel about it?’ Anna asked me.
‘Yes. Well, no. Not exactly. I tried, but I can’t talk to them like I can to you. And maybe they’re right, in a way. I am different now. Maybe there is no choice. Maybe I have to go. You won’t tell them, will you? About this, I mean.’
‘Course not, Bun. But if you won’t tell them what you feel, then I will. We all will: Liam, Dan and me. We’ll tell them we don’t want you to go, that there’s got to be another way. But you’ve got to promise me something. You’ve got to promise me, Bun, that you’ll never give up, that you’ll never think of killing yourself again. Promise?’
I promised, and I meant it. A promise to Anna was one I would always keep.
We started off back home, her hand holding mine tight all the way.
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