Diamond Eyes (7 page)

He chuckled and moved his feet again. ‘Ouch!. No, that’s not it.’

‘Stop teasing me then and sit, or else drag me away and be done with it. Just don’t stand there laughing at me. I hate that more than anything.’

‘Sorry. I’m not laughing at you.’

‘Oh, and now I’m deaf?’

‘I think you’re scared. It shouldn’t be of me, though. If you could see anything between those stitches, you’d see why. I’m totally shitting myself.’

‘I can’t smell that. Only blood, and why so much of it, by the way?’

‘Not that type of. Oh, er. there’s a dead bird on the road.’

‘Now I smell another lie.’

‘You think so? Matron Sanchez is going to wring my neck. Or sack me, which is probably worse, given the state of my finances.’

‘That’s not my problem.’

‘Trade you my problems for yours then? At least you have round-the-clock staff assigned to help solve yours.’

‘Not if I can help it!’ She pushed her hands down to clasp one another in her lap, wondering how long it would take him to read her change in body language, forced or not.

The planks of the seat creaked as they took his weight. ‘In fact, I might as well run away with you. I should have enough change to pay for our tickets. Unless you’ve got some cash on you?’

‘You’re serious? You’re not going to force me back?’

‘Mira,’ he said, ‘forgive me for laughing, but if we go back up that hill, I can guarantee it will be you pushing me in your wheelchair.’

‘As if!’ she snorted.

‘Right. So you can relax, can’t you?’

They sat in awkward silence for a long moment, listening to sporadic bursts of distant trucks as they rumbled over the new bridge, back and forth to the mainland.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘In opposite directions.’

‘On the same bus? That will be a good trick.’

‘You have no intention of letting me go.’ She sniffed at the breeze, but couldn’t detect any others coming yet. ‘You’re just stalling. Be honest and admit it.’

‘Maybe you’ll believe me after I pay for your bus ticket?’

‘Tram ticket.’

‘Bus ticket,’ he corrected gently.

‘Tram ticket!’

‘Bus ticket, Mira. Trams and cane trains haven’t run to this island for nearly a century.’

‘Stop treating me like I’m stupid! Trams have steel wheels and buses run on rubber. I can hear the difference, you know. And I’ve seen them.’

‘Seen trams — where? Not here, surely, unless you mean in your hallucinations?’

‘They’re not hallucinations! I saw...’

No such thing as ghost people. I can’t walk on air.
The mantra shot into her head and the unexpectedness of it caused her to bite her tongue.

‘Nothing,’ she said, turning away.

‘Mira... think logically. You’re blind, even before that butcher did that to you, so what could you possibly see — or imagine that you saw — that would make you disbelieve the evidence from your own ears and other senses?’

‘I’m not allowed to talk about that, so don’t blame Fredarick. I begged him to do this to me.’

‘You’ve stunned me,’ he said. ‘Why would you want your eyes stitched shut?’

‘You can’t trick me. I’m not allowed to talk about the ghost people.’

‘A lesson learned from your correctional sessions with Neville and Steff?’

Mira turned her nose further away.

‘Okay, so don’t answer me. Listen for yourself. Trams run on rails, so they’d make a squealing steel-against-steel noise, wouldn’t they? Can you hear that?’

‘Of course not. That’s why we’re waiting.’

‘In the distance then. Any coming?’

Mira turned her nose to the teasing breeze again. ‘Yes, actually. There is!’ She pointed in the direction of the bridge. ‘I told you.’

‘That’s roadworks. They’re building a steel column for the new bridge. And you still haven’t answered me. What — or how did you see anything that made you think there were trams here?’

‘I’m not answering that. You’re still trying to trick me.’

‘Hardly. I’m trying to figure out why you’d want to run away from the only people who can help you.’

‘Help me? Ha! I looked after myself for over a year at home after my father died!’

‘Oh, I get it. You’re trying to go home.’

Mira yelped and punched the bench seat with her fist. ‘See? I knew you were trying to trick me!’

‘Trick, schmick. It’s no concern of mine anymore. I’m leaving too, remember?’

‘Liar.’

‘Makes no difference if you believe me or not. Here’s the facts. I can’t go back up there alone without losing my job. And there’s no way I can convince you to come back willingly. So I might as well leave now while it’s still my choice.’

‘At least you have a choice.’

‘Says you.’

He left her in silence for a long moment until she grew nervous, wringing her hands in her lap.

‘Maybe you can help me understand something?’ he asked. ‘It’s something I’ve wondered a lot in the last six years.’ He waited until she turned her head a little more in his direction. ‘Do you think freedom is out there?’

‘Well, it sure isn’t here.’
How stupid can he be?

‘But if freedom is out there, how did you get here?’

‘I wasn’t ready when they came for me! But I will be next time.’

‘Sure, that works for me. Planning ahead is good. It can work. But you agree there’ll be a next time. And in any case, how do you explain the vast majority of clients who are happy here, and wouldn’t live out there if you paid them?’

Her mouth opened as she tried to fathom that herself.

‘Could be a hole in your plans then, perhaps? I don’t know, Mira. But if you’re going out there alone, wouldn’t you be doing yourself a favour to find out all the facts first so you can face them as well prepared as you wish to be? For starters — and as cold as this may sound — you’re blind. You’re a ward of the state. And you’ve been declared unsafe to others as well as yourself. So where can you go that you can’t be found and brought back here; forcibly, if that’s what somebody else decides?’

She shifted uncomfortably as he let her think about that for a long moment too.

‘Have you thought far enough ahead to wonder who will be the first to find you? Police maybe, or hired goons from social services?’

‘If
they find me again.’

‘But when they do, maybe not this week, maybe not this year, will they bring you back here to familiar surroundings, where at least the gardens have your favourite flowers and the breeze is fresh from the sea, like your home? Or will they send you inland to the new steel facility in the desert for clients who keep escaping with criminal intentions? And which would you prefer?’

‘I can’t stay here! You don’t know; you can’t.’ She sniffled and wiped her nose with a clenched fist, fighting tears that would make her stitches sting. ‘You simply can’t imagine what it’s like for me.’

‘Don’t bet on that.’ His tone darkened. ‘I know exactly what it’s like to be locked up. For six years, freedom became a concept that survived only in my dreams.’

‘You must be really dumb if that’s how long it took to train you to work with children!’

‘Actually, I spent that time in jail.’

Mira shivered, feeling a brief surge of empathy for him at the same time as revulsion. ‘You’re a criminal?’

‘Never. That was a mistake; one that I’ve had to endure, like you have to endure this.’

‘I don’t want to endure anything here! I want to escape!’

‘I understand that. In time it should be possible, but if you don’t learn the skills that you need to conquer your demons here first, they’ll only follow you out there, wherever you go. Here, I can help you defeat them. Here, I can help you plan ahead thoroughly so you never have to worry about your past creeping up on you. Tomorrow starts today, with everything we do or say.’

Mira shook her head. ‘I can’t stay here! It’s far worse than a jail for me.’

‘I know it must be much harder being blind but —’

‘It’s not that! It’s how they. how they. ‘ She sucked in a breath, growing uncomfortable as she sensed him waiting, watching. or worse, reaching out to her. ‘It’s how they touch me!’ She shrivelled away from him, hoping that any hand he might have extended had recoiled back to him.

‘You mean,’ he said, faltering, ‘... inappropriately?’

‘Inappropriately? What does that mean? They touch me; touch me all the time, everywhere, anywhere, and always when I’m not expecting it!’

‘Oh.’ He sounded relieved. ‘I thought you meant someone had touched you... er... privately.’

‘Yes, that’s what I said. They’re always invading my privacy. Like you are now.’

‘No, I mean, has anyone — any man, or woman either, I guess — ever been alone with you when they’ve touched you in a way that’s made you feel uncomfortable. sexually?’

Mira trembled, her mind filling with the image of a man looming over her. He peeled back her bedsheets and reached for her feet, but her blurry memory seemed just as real as her first experience of him and now she couldn’t be sure if he’d been real or just a nightmare.

Ben touched her arm gently but his skin stung like electricity. She recoiled away from him.

‘I can’t help you, unless you explain your problem to me.’

‘I don’t need your help,’ she shouted. ‘I want to go home. That’s already more than you need to know. Unless you really are lying about letting me go?’

‘I’m not. For your sake, though, I’d rather watch you go when you’re so well prepared that you won’t ever have to come back. Wouldn’t you prefer it that way too?’

‘Can you cure these?’ She pointed at her mutilated eyelids. ‘Or the sickness behind them? It’s in my genes, Ben! Fragile X syndrome. Don’t you know what that means?’ She laughed hysterically. ‘It’s hopeless because
I’m
hopeless! Just get away from me.’

‘Hopeless? That’s not true, or you wouldn’t be out here hoping to find something out there that isn’t back up the driveway. Think about that, Mira. In all your

life, where has your hope been the strongest? On this side of the wall? Or back there, where it burned so hot that it drove you out here?’

‘That wasn’t hope, it was desperation!’

‘Are you sure? It seems to me that there’s more hope, and chance for more hope, concentrated for you
inside
Serenity than anywhere else. In fact, I think that’s probably the real reason why you ended up here and not out there in a cemetery. Because there are plenty of people — in the government and society as well as here — who care enough to ensure that you get the treatment you need.’

‘Pah! I’d prefer the cemetery!’

‘Would you really?’

No,
she thought, but didn’t admit it. In her mind’s eye, she glimpsed herself standing in the breeze of an open window and began to wonder how different her life might have been if Ben, or someone like him, had been assigned to work with her from the very beginning.

‘It’s too late!’ she argued. ‘Nobody has been able to help me. Not here, or anywhere else since the orphanage.’

‘I’ll argue with that too,’ he replied cheerily. ‘I’ve been with you how long today? It’s not even morning tea and we’ve already made more progress than you’ve had with anyone else in your file. Or am I wrong somehow?’

Mira swiped another sniffle away from her nose with her fist. ‘My life is a prison. In there, out there. You said it yourself. I’ll never be free. Not anywhere.’

‘Define freedom. And take me for an example. I’m no longer in jail, but I still have to live by all the rules of employment and society. We all have to learn how to cope.’

‘How can you teach me anything here? By teaching me Braille? Or how to walk with a cane? I alreadyknow those things! I learned out there, copying my mother for years before I developed my own symptoms!’

‘That’s great, but there’s more to it, Mira. We can do things, go places and learn new skills to help rebuild a fresh life for you. Meet new people too. Wouldn’t you like that?’

‘I’m a freak! Are you blind now too? There’s only one place I can go where I can be myself, and that’s
not
here.’

‘That’s what I mean too. So long as you have somewhere you desperately want to go, you have two wonderful things: hope and a goal. These also give me the foundations and direction I need to help you focus to achieve your dreams. Come on, admit it. Haven’t you already pictured yourself at home, doing something that helps you to fully appreciate it?’

Mira saw herself again standing in a breeze, this time high on the broad branch of a gum tree.

‘See? I knew it. Your face just relaxed, so there’s no point denying it. You can do this. You can go home.’

‘My home, though. You’re talking about my home, right? With the treehouse where I grew up?’

‘Of course. The wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, Mira. I didn’t see anything in your file to suggest it’s been sold yet to pay for your medical care.’

She grappled for his chest, found his shirt and pulled herself closer. ‘You’re serious? You’d really take me home?’

‘Hey, careful.’ His feet shuffled noisily. ‘Yes, yes. It won’t be fulltime at first. We have to start with a day trip.’

Her heart pounded higher in her chest with excitement. ‘Why hasn’t anyone ever mentioned this?’

‘I’m sure they have, but perhaps you weren’t ready to listen?’

‘Too drugged more like it.’

She bit her lip and pushed away from him, instantly recognising her mistake. Too late to take it back or hide it. It wouldn’t be long now, she guessed, before he realised that she was far more awake than she should have been by now, and he’d remember the portions of breakfast that she’d left untouched: the cereal and the strawberry jam on toast that tasted bitter and gritty. Then, next time, he’d mash the dose of tablets more thoroughly, like the others.

‘Trust me,’ he said as if he’d read that thought from her expression too. ‘Or don’t trust me. That particular choice is one that’s already yours and always has been. But I really feel as if we’re making more progress, and if you could just relax enough to let me through that rawhide barrier of yours, I believe we could get to the meat underneath and what’s really eating you.’

‘I knew it!’ she said, recoiling inside as well as away from him. ‘You’re just like the others. You beg and plead and manipulate me. Then it’s slap, bam, needle, ma’am, and I’m flat on my back in a straitjacket.’