Diamond Eyes (14 page)

‘Why not?’ He paused with his hand on the ignition key.

‘It’s all in my head. There are no such things as ghost people, are there?’

‘Don’t give me that psycho-babble. I’d really like to know what you think.’

‘Drive, please. You’ll understand everything soon enough.’

‘I’d rather talk on the way.’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘Don’t you like to talk when you’re excited?’ He gunned the engine and reversed onto the road.

She grunted and screwed up her nose. ‘Talking always gets me into trouble.’

‘Not with me,’ he persisted.

‘Not with you
yet.
Besides, I have enough to worry about with outsiders staring at me.’

‘Self-conscious, hey? I can help with that...’

He reached into a small storage compartment between the seats and fumbled through the contents until his fingers recognised the shape of an old set of sunglasses. They were dark and heavily scratched across the lenses, but he knew their condition wouldn’t bother her.

‘Open your hand,’ he said. ‘You can hide your eyes behind these.’

She explored the glasses with her hands, then nodded and put them on. For a fleeting moment, he thought he glimpsed gratitude on her face.

‘Is that better?’ he asked.

‘Much. Looks like night now, so it hurts less... I guess I should say thank you?’

‘Looks like night, huh?’ Ben studied her for a long moment before turning a corner. ‘For someone whose eyes are stitched shut, you certainly seem to see a lot.’

He turned another corner and slowed down through a new suburb that hugged the freeway until he came to the on-ramp. ‘So tell me,’ he said as he joined the thicker traffic, ‘how did you know my car’s red?’

Mira sighed, staying silent until he asked again.

‘You don’t give up easily,’ she complained.

‘Come on, if you can’t talk to me, who can you talk to?’

She sulked for another long moment before relenting. ‘Okay, but you have to promise not to repeat anything I say back there. I don’t want to get in trouble again. I just want to get out and stay out, the fastest way possible. Deal?’

‘Deal! So spill the beans already. Are you faking it? Can you somehow see out through your stitches?’ He’d been staring at them all day, but glanced at them again now through the corner of her sunglasses.

Mira shrugged. ‘A little, if I’m not careful to keep them tightly closed in bright light. But that’s not the kind of vision you’re talking about, is it?’

‘What other kind is there?’

‘My hands can read.’ She raised them in front of her face as if she could see them. ‘Braille and shapes, but also colours; more colours than my eyes over the last few years, because the main colour I saw with my eyes was blue, same as the ghosts.’

‘Hang on.’ He accelerated onto the freeway, following the coast north. ‘Are you telling me you can
feel
most colours, but you can only see blue?’

Mira nodded. ‘I wasn’t
always
blind. I lost my sight slowly.’

‘Leaving only blue things visible? And what else in between them; gaps of black nothingness?’

‘No, silly.
Everything
went blue. Dark blue, light blue and all shades in between. That’s when the ghost people came.’

‘Back up, please? Matron told me you lost your sight suddenly after a major trauma. Your file says it was after your father died?’

‘I guess that’s true from their way of looking at things. I wish they would accept my way, though. The psychologists keep telling me it’s not physically possible to see the things I do. that I used to,’ she said, correcting herself. ‘They can’t feel the difference in colours either, so if they can’t do it, it can’t be possible, can it?’

‘I can’t play the guitar,’ Ben argued, ‘but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.’

He saw the exit for Bells Creek Road, which would take him to the secluded end of Halls Bay, and swung onto it.

‘I tried that explanation already. They didn’t buy it. Sometimes the doctors and psychologists are blinder than me — blinded by the light of their own knowledge, I think.’

Ben glanced at her, awestruck by the similarity to his own suspicions about the medical profession consistently diagnosing patients according to preconceived ideas, and only rarely keeping their eyes open for new diseases or conditions.

‘What’s your success rate at feeling colours correctly?’ he asked.

‘That’s hard to tell; they always try to trick me. Or lie to make me think I can’t do it. Shades are harder than strong colours, but today I learned that I’m not always right with strong colours either.’

‘Oh? And how did that happen?’

‘This morning in the survey, I heard Doctor Zhou mention your parentage.’

‘I knew you were listening. So now you know I’m an Afro-Aussie.’

Mira shrugged. ‘What do I care? African, Aboriginal, Asian, Anglo — makes no difference to me. You’re either sighted or unsighted. That’s what really matters. I only mentioned it because I had a picture of you in my head and now it’s changed. You’re still the same, sort of, just a different shade. What is strange is that I couldn’t tell by myself.’

‘Is that because I don’t talk like a hood from the hood, yo mama?’

She giggled at the exaggerated accent. ‘I suppose, but that’s not what I meant. I can usually tell by feel. But I couldn’t feel that your skin is dark, and if you’re Negro, whole or part, then you do have much darker skin than me, don’t you?’

‘Sure, but are you saying that black skin feels different? As in rougher? Or smoother?’

‘No, silly. Any skin can be rough or smooth. It’s just... I know this sounds crazy, but I really can feel colours — and not the way Freddie Leopard feels colours or smells sounds after he’s licked a toadstool. I mean the energy from your skin when you’re really close to me feels nearly the same as mine, so I thought we must be the same colour, just like I knew your car was red; a dark red. It’s hard to explain, but some colours, like red and dark blue, feel hot or warm, and some feel cool, like yellow or pale blue. It doesn’t matter what texture they are. I don’t really touch them. I just hold my palm very close and I can feel their temperature, like faint electricity.’

Ben remained silent for a long moment, causing Mira to shift uncomfortably in her seat.

‘I knew it,’ she said sulkily. ‘You think I’m crazy. I suppose now you’re going to take me back?’

‘Hardly... Sorry, Mira, I was quiet because I was thinking.’

‘Yes, thinking that I’m a fruitcake.’

‘Actually, I was thinking that light
is
energy. Have you ever used a battery-powered colour detector?’

She shrugged and shook her head.

‘I saw one years ago — a toy in the children’s ward. That was before I was in jail, but surely it would have been perfected for general use by now?’

She shrugged again.

‘Oh, well, a colour detector reads light energy and translates it into words to describe colours for kids. Look, we both know you’re hypersensitive to many things, so it really isn’t so hard for me to believe you can feel colours.’

‘Not very well today, though. I must be very white after so many years locked away.’

Ben chuckled. ‘You would be, I guess, if the lights in your room weren’t therapeutically enhanced to ensure that you receive a healthy level of simulated sunlight. It’s our job to make sure your environment is the best it can be, remember? You’re actually a very healthy olive.’

‘I’m dark too?’

He laughed. ‘My father was a bronzed Aussie and I take after him a lot more than my mother, so I’m probably not as dark-skinned as you suspect. In fact, to look at us together, it’s not such a stretch to imagine us as brother and sister.’

‘Impossible!’ Mira’s lips curled into a cheeky smile. ‘If you were my brother, you couldn’t be driving. You’d have Fragile X and you’d be even more damaged than me.’

‘Hey, not
all
FX guys are severely disabled. Some only suffer as much as, or even less than, their sisters.’

‘Any of them well enough to drive?’

Ben shrugged. ‘Now who’s blinded by the light of their own knowledge?’

Mira turned away and folded her arms.

‘No need to sulk,’ he apologised. ‘You’re right.’

She kept her nose turned away without replying.

‘You can wind down the window, if you like. Maybe your superhuman nose can tell me how close we are to your home?’

‘Close.’ She patted an air vent on the dashboard. ‘I can already smell the forest and roadside weeds through this.’

‘Weeds?’

‘The milkweeds. I never liked them.’ She wrinkled her nose, then wound down the window anyway. ‘My mother and I used to pull them out of the garden, but we had a very big garden. Nearly five acres that was cleared from a much bigger forest.’

Ben whistled. ‘Five acres is huge for a garden. Was it for vegetables or flowers?’

‘A wild-bird sanctuary. You’ll see. My home makes the world we left seem bland and grey.’

The road narrowed to a single lane that led into stunted coastal forest, where the sealed road ran out and the sandy gravel began.

‘Nearly there!’ Mira announced.

Ben drove for another three minutes, then slowed for a dip and drove through a shallow, sandy creek. On the far side, he saw a well-rusted sign for a bird sanctuary. It had been cast aside next to a gate at the end of the road, which stood open, with fresh bulldozer tracks leading up to — and past — it.

He decelerated, not bothering to mention the tracks to Mira, and crossed over the threshold into her childhood home. As they followed the grassy track towards the bay, the forest opened into a wide field of wildflowers; overgrown, but blooming in all colours and shades.

Ben braked to a halt. ‘Wow! It’s... magnificent!’

He didn’t have the heart to tell her about the bulldozer tracks that had ploughed an ugly scar across one edge of the field towards a gash in the forest on the other side. His eyes lingered instead on a narrow sleeve of orchard trees, which were interlaced with a vineyard that led downhill to the towering centrepiece of the gardens: a crown of large trees that blocked much of his view of the placid bay. Mostly broad-boughed Moreton Bay figs. He also saw three silver branches of a ghost gum stretching taller than the rest, like the fingers of an old woman tickling the sky. Then he caught sight of the most wondrous feature of all — perched in the crown of trees, like rusted jewels, were a series of timber rooms, all linked by rope bridges, which from a distance looked like one big nest.

‘See the treehouse?’ Mira pointed, as if she could see it too.

‘That’s a treehouse? It looks like a whole grove of them.’

‘I suppose it does. Each tree has a room with a balcony. If you follow the track around to the other side of the circle, there’s a gap in the aerial roots of a strangler fig — a bit like an arched gate — that lets you park inside the shelter of the house. You won’t have a roof over your car, but the tree canopy is nearly as good.’

‘Strangler fig? Charming. Is it safe?’

‘Safe as houses. It’s even bigger and stronger than the tree that it ate, which, my grand-pop told me, was over a hundred years ago. The old tree’s rotted out and hollow now.’

Ben drove slowly through the grass and flowering shrubs that encroached regularly onto the old tyre tracks. He would never have found his way without

Mira’s directions, but it took only a few minutes under her guidance.

‘When you said treehouse, I didn’t realise you meant a whole house in a tree!’ he said.

‘What else could I mean?’

‘Well, some parents build little treehouses for their —’

‘Watch the stump! It’s there in the long grass, to your left.’

Ben swerved just in time to miss it. ‘You really can see?’

‘Not now, silly.’ She tapped her temple, reminding him of her stitches. ‘That stump was from a tree that my great-grandfather cut down while my father was still a little boy. It was too big to dig out with picks and oxen, so they carved it into a picnic table and chairs. I expect it’s overgrown with long grass now, though?’

‘It certainly is. Thanks for the heads-up.’

‘Can you see the gap in the aerial roots of the fig yet? It should be where the treehouse rubs branches with the biggest tree in the orchard — a mango tree.’

‘Sure.’ It was directly ahead of him, where the groundcover thinned to a light scattering of leaves and twigs at the edge of the canopy.

‘It should be clear enough to drive through,’ she said, beginning to wind up her window. ‘The figs are fierce competitors for nutrients so hardly anything ever grows underneath them. You might want to wind up your window too.’

‘Cobwebs!’

Too late. They coated his windscreen. Not thick, like he’d seen in countless horror movies; these webs were more like tripwires — long, strong and nearly invisible as they crisscrossed the shadowy entrance.

‘Oh, great!’ he muttered. ‘They’ll take forever to clean off my paintwork.’

‘I’ll help. They’re hardest to get out of your grille and lights, but the good news is that they won’t be there when we back out. The spiders only spin them at night.’

Back out,
Ben noticed.
She’s accepted the fact she has to return with me.

‘You should be proud of yourself,’ he said as he braked the car to a halt. ‘You really earned this. Wait there for a second, though, until I come around. I’ll help you out.’

‘I’m not a cripple!’ She unlatched her seatbelt, shoved open her door and by the time he reached her side, she was out and closing the door.

She tripped over an old tree root, but recovered her footing quickly. Stretching her arms over her head, she sucked in a long breath of fragrant fresh air, then relaxed. ‘Home!’

Her arms swept wide and she pointed to one of the large trees that supported the bayside room of the circular treehouse. ‘Look closely at that one, Ben. It’s my favourite, but it’s really two silver ghost gums that have grown together.’

‘So they have. So what’s with all the gold bumps on its trunk and branches?’

Mira grinned and urged him to take a closer look.

‘Thumbtacks,’ he said a moment later. ‘Somebody’s pushed gold thumbtacks into the bark.’