Diamond Eyes (26 page)

‘Never mind the colour,’ Ben said. ‘Which walls have changed, Mira?’

‘That one ahead by the elevator. And back there, the nurses’ station was much shorter and didn’t have an archway in the wall beside it.’

‘Told you,’ Neville said. ‘She must have heard the tradesmen.’

‘I can see it!’

‘What about yourself?’ Ben asked. ‘Can you see yourself yet?’

‘No, but...’ Mira drew her hands up to her face and stopped them about half a ruler’s length away from her sunglasses. ‘I can see everywhere they’re not, much clearer than I did with your hand at the treehouse.’

Ben leaned over as he pushed her along and held two fingers up close to her nose. ‘How about now?’

‘Two, but.
Stop!’
She cringed as he pushed her towards the glass doors at the end of the hall. ‘They’re shut!’

‘They’re automatic.’ Ben pushed her closer until the doors responded with an audible
shisss.
‘Hear that? They just opened.’

‘I heard it, but they didn’t move. Wait!...
Please?
Somebody’s coming through.’

‘Nobody’s coming through,’ Neville argued.

Ben paused anyway.

‘Now!’ Mira cried. ‘They’re open! Go now!’

Ben shoved the wheelchair forward, then accelerated down a ramp into the garden. At the verge of an internal road, he paused to let a delivery truck pass by with a load of marquees and fete tables.

‘Wait,’ Mira said, as he started crossing. ‘There’s a ghost truck coming.’

‘Weren’t you in a hurry?’ asked Neville.

‘To arrive safely, sure,’ Ben agreed. ‘But I’ve never been hit by a ghost truck and I’d like to keep it that way.’

‘This one’s a refrigerated truck,’ Mira said, ‘with a picture of cows, sheep and chickens on the side.’

‘That sounds like the meat truck,’ Ben replied. ‘If it looks real, Neville, it might as well be real as far as the scare factor’s concerned.’

‘Meat truck only comes Wednesdays,’ Neville said stubbornly.

‘Safe now,’ Mira said with a wave to Ben.

He obliged, bumping her chair over the kerb and across the bitumen to a smooth concrete path, where he started to jog, pushing her faster past the workers who were preparing sites for the stalls and tents for the weekend festival.

‘There are my flowers!’ Mira clapped and pointed to the start of the hedge of brown boronias. ‘And that must be the administration building! Is it, Ben? I can’t hear any typing at the moment, but I can see the sign to reception and a line of happy faces on the ground.’

‘That’s right. No detours this time, though. We’re going straight past it to B-block.’

‘What about the working bee?’ Neville said. ‘They’re right there... Can’t you hear them?’

‘I can hear buzzing — sounds like someone working with a power drill. Ah!’ she squealed. ‘I see the main gate! I can see it, Ben. I really can! The line of happy faces goes all the way down to it. They can’t keep me locked up in here anymore if I can see all that now, can they?’

‘There’s nothing. we want more. than to get. you out of here...’ Neville puffed.

Ben slowed his pace, allowing the older man to catch up and recover his breath.

‘Phew! I’m out of shape. Our whole aim, lass. is to help you.’

‘Help stun and sedate me,’ Mira replied. ‘Sorry, Ben, I’m biting my tongue now.’

They entered B-block by a small door at the end of the building and headed for the elevators.

‘Stairs!’ Mira cried as if she’d just spotted a long-lost friend. ‘Oh, stairs!’ She leapt out of the wheelchair and hugged the banister. ‘Oh, it’s so long since I’ve seen any. All those times I was stuck in the sky, and not a single stair anywhere to get me down. Can we use them, Ben? Can we? I hate elevators, they’re so scary!’

‘Why?’ asked Neville. ‘They’re safer than stairs.’

‘Try closing your eyes and imagining yourself in the sky,’ she snapped. ‘Then falling out of it. Or shooting up into nothingness.’

‘Careful,’ Neville warned. ‘She’s starting to go off.’

‘I am not!’

‘She’s fine,’ Ben said. ‘Are you really up to it, though, Mira? We need to go up three flights.’

In answer, she danced up three steps, down three, up two, down two, up three and down one. ‘How’s that?’

He chuckled and parked the wheelchair against the wall. ‘Knock yourself out. I’ll be right behind to catch you if you slip.’

Neville groaned and grabbed the wheelchair. ‘I’ll brave the elevator.’

Mira could smell Neville waiting for them at the top of the stairs. Leather. Always leather. His belt, his shoes; even his hands smelled of it.

The wheelchair creaked and she guessed he’d moved it towards her.

‘I want to walk,’ she said. She heard Ben reach the top step behind her. ‘Please,’ she added for his benefit.

‘In your bare feet?’ Neville protested.

‘In my bare feet that can feel the bare timber of the floor I can now see!’

‘Suit yourself,’ Neville muttered. ‘After you.’

‘No, after you,’ she insisted. ‘Where Ben can see you. You can see each other, can’t you?’

She heard Neville grumble as he walked ahead of them, the sound of his footsteps taking him as far as a pair of large ghostly brown doors. They were closed and a similarly brown ghost stood guard — a handsome young man with muscled arms and a friendly face. Neville’s footsteps didn’t pause to open the doors, though. Within seconds, she heard him greeting familiar voices inside.

‘Is the door really open?’ Mira whispered to Ben.

‘It is. Do you want to wait; see if a ghost opens the ghostly version of it?’

Mira shook her head. ‘I can do this.’

She walked right up to the closed ghostly doors, where she smelled a familiar mix of soap and gun oil.

‘Hello, Mira!’ Matron Sanchez called from inside the room.

Mira stopped, still unable to see anything except the ghostly door and the ghostly guard she’d have to walk through to get inside. She tried to sidestep him, but bumped into something else.

‘Are you okay, ma’am?’

Mira yelped in surprise. It was the ghost — almost. The voice came from close beside him, as if he had an invisible shadow that could talk. She touched the ghost’s shoulder; didn’t feel anything and pushed through him timidly until she reached his middle and found a warm invisible shape.

‘Ma’am?’ he asked again.

Mira startled and pulled back her hand.

‘Ben?’ she whispered, knowing he was still close behind her. ‘Is there only one guy here or two?’ She couldn’t smell or hear anyone else.

‘One, but he won’t hurt you.’

‘And the door’s definitely open, right?’

‘I’ll prove it,’ Ben said. ‘Give me your hands.’

She did and he transferred them to hook onto his arm and elbow.

‘Now close your eyes and follow me.’

She obeyed and promptly found herself on the other side of the wispy translucent barrier.

‘Hey, wow! I just walked through the door!’

‘It’s a miracle,’ Neville muttered, a short distance to her left.

‘Did she give you any trouble?’ asked Matron Sanchez. Her voice came from Mira’s right, where someone had scrawled a maths formula on the ghostly brown blackboard.

In the centre of the room, desks had been arranged into the shape of a horseshoe, where two ghostly men worked with an assortment of equipment and talked silently to a grossly overweight woman. She sat on a chair in the middle of their horseshoe, attached to their equipment by wires from her head, neck, chest and arms.

Nearby sat a leathery-looking man, much older than the others, with a much lighter shade of skin. She noticed the pattern of Braille dots stamped on the toes of his leather shoes and startled, realising exactly whose ghost she was looking at.

‘That depends on your definition of trouble,’ said Neville. His voice came from the opposite side of the room to where the ghost sat. ‘It was an experience, all right, but I can’t say she was aggressive.’

Two of him!
Mira trembled.
One each side of me!

‘No trouble,’ Ben confirmed. ‘She’s still a little jumpy, though. The docs just have to be careful to warn her before touching her.’

‘You’ve got it,’ said Van Danik.

His voice came from the same direction as the large, broad-chested ghost sitting at the horseshoe table. On his left sat a long-haired Asian ghost.

Mira walked timidly towards his voice to get abetter look at the two ghost doctors and their ghostly equipment. There was a laptop with a sticker on it showing a computer being warped and sucked into a weirdly shaped whirlpool in the slanted shape of a figure eight, with the words:
Warning, do not divide by zero!
She giggled, remembering the first day her father had taken her to the old schoolhouse, where she’d seen the stern ghostly teacher throw chalk at one of his students for failing to recognise the sleeping figure eight as the symbol for infinity.

‘Matron,’ Ben said behind her, ‘those sunglasses I gave her seem to help so much I’m beginning to think she might be blind from some kind of oversensitivity to glare. Is that possible?’

‘I think she’s been diagnosed with just about every eye disorder at one time or another,’ Sanchez replied. ‘So it may be a factor.’

Mira leaned over the shoulder of the skinny longhaired Asian ghost for a better look at the strange equipment he was using. It looked a lot like the binoculars her father had often used to look for bikini girls sunbaking on boats in the bay. Bird-watching of a different kind, he’d called it. Except these binoculars were much bigger and set up on a tripod. It seemed as if the ghost was using them to magnify the insides of the fat ghost lady’s eyes.

Strangely, she could smell the ghost of the Asian doctor — his hair smelled like pine needles!

‘This is my seat,’ he said, startling her. She leapt away. ‘You’ll need to sit over there.’

‘How did you do that?’ she snapped.

‘Do what?’ asked Ben, and she realised everyone must be looking at her. Everyone except the rude ghosts, as usual. They kept playing their silent games.

She pointed at the long-haired ghost. ‘He talked without moving his lips! They don’t talk! Ghosts never

talk. I always have to read their lips. And he smells nice. Ghosts never smell like anything.’

‘What’s she on?’ asked the Asian ghost, again without looking up from his work or moving his lips.

She recognised his voice as Dr Zhou’s, but it didn’t make sense — unless the invisible version of him was sitting in exactly the same place as the ghost.

‘I don’t mean that in a derogatory way,’ he said. ‘How much has she had, of what and when?’

‘We can’t discuss medication in front of clients,’ Neville replied. ‘There shouldn’t be much left in her system by now anyhow. Her last dose was last night at eight. I’ll bet that’s the problem, though. She’s missed two doses so far today.’

‘I’m not hallucinating,’ Mira said. ‘I’m not crazy either! He talked! He was invisible the last time I saw him, so now he must be sitting inside a ghost!’

‘Mira, honey,’ the matron said, ‘listen to what you’re saying. He was invisible the last time you saw him?’

Mira kept her eyes on the ghost. He started to move his lips as if speaking to the other ghosts — but no sound came out. She had to lean around in front of his face to lip-read what he was saying, and realised that he was asking questions about the fat ghost’s age and parentage — and not getting any responses except for the constant silent mumbling of numbers that didn’t make any sense.

‘If anyone’s crazy in here, it’s her!’ She pointed at the ghost woman.

‘Nobody’s calling you crazy, Miss Chambers,’ said Zhou.

She leaned closer to the Asian ghost and noticed that his ears were scarred. They looked as if they’d fallen off, melted a little and been stitched back on.

‘Would you like to take a seat just there?’ he asked,startling her with the proximity of his breath — so close that she could smell he’d had salmon for lunch. ‘We’ll try to fathom the difference between what you think you can see and hear.’

Mira nodded, but was shaken. ‘Can we wait until she’s finished? I don’t want to sit in her lap.’

‘In whose lap?’ Ben asked.

Mira pointed to the central seat.

‘We need a few more clues than that,’ said Van Danik. Like Zhou, the invisible version of him seemed to have merged with his ghost, except his ghost had just bitten the head off a stretchy snake-shaped lolly.

‘There!’ Mira insisted. ‘The fat lady who’s mumbling numbers really fast.’

‘Moaning Joan?’ asked Neville.

‘Neville!’ Matron Sanchez scolded. ‘I’ve told you before — do not speak in a condescending manner about clients!’

‘Sorry. I mean Joan Gilders. Moaning Joan is her.
was
her nickname. She’s not there, though, Mira. Nobody is.’

Mira pointed again and snapped her fingers. ‘I can see her sitting right there, as clearly as I see the desks and chairs! She’s got a mole on her right cheek and two more on her neck!’

‘You only think you can see her,’ Neville argued. ‘From your memories.’

‘Are you sure?’ Sanchez said. ‘Mira was blind when she came here so she couldn’t have known about Joan’s birthmarks. could she?’

‘But she did hear me telling the docs about her,’ Ben said, ‘so she knows that Joan mumbles answers to complex maths calculations.’

‘No, no, no!’ Mira said in frustration. ‘I know because I can see her. She’s right there!’ She leaned closer to read her lips. ‘She just said “If a equals for and bee equals five and n equals six then...” Oh, look! I know!’ Mira clapped her hands and pointed from Joan to the blackboard. ‘She’s working out that sum on the board! Silly me, it wasn’t the word “for", it was the number “four".’

‘What sum?’ Sanchez asked. ‘The blackboard is clean.’

‘It’s not!’

Van Danik sucked in his breath. ‘Trace over it for us,’ he suggested.

Mira laughed. ‘You don’t think I can do it, but it’s just like the horizon, isn’t it, Ben?’

‘Show them what you mean,’ he said. ‘You have to admit, it does sound a little strange from their perspective.’

Mira nodded and bounded across the room to find a piece of chalk. It wasn’t where she could see it, though, just like some of the things at the treehouse, so she fumbled blindly along the chalk tray until she found a piece big enough to write with.