Diamond Eyes (2 page)

‘Please... Ben.’

He touched the hairbrush gently down on her palm.

She clenched her fingers around the handle, knowing he was beside her now, the most vulnerable part of his body roughly level with her elbow, just as Neville had been when she’d last tried to escape.

‘Okay, be good now,’ he warned as if he realised his vulnerability. ‘And let me untie your bandage.’

‘No!’ Her hands slapped up to protect her face. ‘You made a deal!’ She hunched forward, one hand clutched firmly onto the blindfold and the other coiling the brush in close to her chest like a knife, ready to protect herself.

‘You don’t need it anymore, Mira. I’m told the stitches should have stopped bleeding yesterday.’

‘I can still see light and dark through my eyelids! I promised I’d be good, I did! Please, don’t take it off me.’

‘Okay, okay!’ He took a noisy step backwards. ‘We don’t need to take it off completely. Hold it over your eyes until I’m done with your hair. Our deal is a two-way thing, remember, Mira, so calm down and behave now, please, while I untie it, so I don’t have to call for an extra dose of your medication.’

Static crackled and she knew he’d flicked the button on his two-way radio as a warning that help would come running if he chose to ask for it.

Mira hugged herself, rocking backwards and forwards in the chair that rolled gently in time with her. She wondered why he didn’t rush to immobilise her like the others usually did, twisting her arms, pulling her ponytail or using the Taser.

‘And for the record,’ he said, ‘in case your head isn’t in the right place at the moment, I haven’t hurt you yetthis morning, have I? Sure, it’s only my first day with you but I can assure you I don’t intend to hurt you either.’ He chuckled. ‘Unless maybe you enjoy that kind of thing?’

Mira shook her head cautiously, then straightened herself in the chair, still keeping a tight grip on the handle of the hairbrush.

‘There now. That’s a good girl. Calm all the way down. Think of your favourite place, maybe. Does that help?’

A white flash stung the darkness inside her blindfold. Memory of pain seared through her eyes to the back of her skull and hot flushes rippled over her skin. She saw a vision of her favourite place: in her father’s forest, a treehouse overlooking a secluded bay. But that was so long ago, before he died, before the soldiers and government doctors came for her, and before those rude ghosts appeared to torment her each time she opened her eyes.

‘Mira, I asked you a question. Did you hear me?’

She nodded, and drew the brush up to her bedraggled ponytail to pull out the cropped tangles below the blindfold, the ends still annoyingly uneven since the last time she’d woken to find her curls stolen.

‘Well, that’s a start,’ he conceded. ‘But you’ll have to do much better than that today. We’ve got special visitors.’

The brush snagged in her hair. ‘Doctors?’ Her hand trembled.

‘Specialists,’ he replied, as if that made any difference. ‘And before you start freaking out on me again, they’re not here to pull out your stitches. These guys are only conducting a survey. In fact, they’ll be doing checkups on everyone this week, staff included.’

‘Doctors for you too?’

‘Specialists,’ he reminded her. ‘They’re not even going to touch you.’

Liar.
‘How can they do checkups if they don’t touch me?’

‘They just want to make observations while they ask a few questions. Look, if it helps to set your mind at rest, I’ll go first and you can hold my hand while they run through the process. How’s that?’

‘No pain?’

‘No pain,’ he promised. ‘Come on now, we have to hurry with your hair or we might be late. What say we test our friendship a little more this morning?’

‘So long as I don’t have to —’

‘— take off your bandage. I know. But I have to check there’s no blood or pus at some stage today.’

‘There’s no pus or I’d feel it.’

‘Okay, for now I’m happy to take your word for it. But we still have to brush your hair. What if you hold the bandage so it doesn’t fall away from your eyes while I undo it?’

Cautiously, she nodded, but as his fingers touched the knot, another white flash of pain stung through her eyes to the back of her brain.

‘Mira, are you ready? I’m going to release it now.’

She nodded again, but also clamped her eyes shut tight behind the blindfold to prevent any trace of light from making it through her eyelids. The stitches snagged on the soft felt and she whimpered.

‘Relax. You can trust me.’

That’s what
he
said,
she thought. She’d heard the same words in another time, another place, and remembered the soldier wading through floodwaters with his three-man team to reach her. Then she saw herself as a nine-year-old, soaking wet and naked except for a bath towel as she huddled against the largest tree in the bayside grove that had become her family’s tombstone. A pair of silver ghost gums towered over her, their slender branches sparkling with intricate goldpatterns of Braille poetry. She heard her mother reading; her voice fragile, like an angel’s hymn whispered to the wind. Then she glanced at the soldiers again and knew what would happen if she couldn’t stop them from wading closer. She clutched both hands over the blindfold, still holding the hairbrush, and clamped her eyes shut even tighter, trying not to remember what happened next.

‘I won’t hurt you. Cross my heart and hope to —’

‘No! That’s what
he
said!’ Her stitches snagged again and her pain shot to agony.

‘That’s what who said?’

She twisted her head away from him.

‘Mira, that’s what
who
said?’

‘Him!’ She pointed to the ghostly soldier as he waded towards her, so close now she could see the bristles of his beard. ‘Keep away! Please, no! Stay away from me!’ She wielded the hairbrush wildly like a sword to chase them away.

‘Mira, you’re safe,’ Ben replied, trying to soothe her. ‘There’s nobody here but you and me. You’re hallucinating.’

‘No, they’re real! More real than you! They’re in the water, can’t you see?. Get away!’ she shouted to the soldiers again. ‘You have to leave me!’ Rain and hail stung the air, but not her skin. She saw the first soldier disappear beneath the swirling flood waters and she screamed, but the howling wind stole her voice away.

Static prickled behind her. Salty tears burned like acid through her fresh wounds and stitches, but still she kept her eyes clamped tightly shut behind the blindfold. ‘Go away,
go away!’

‘Hey, Neville,’ Ben whispered into the radio behind her. ‘Can you ask Matron Sanchez to send over another dose of meds for Mira? I think she’s going off with those fairies you mentioned.’

‘They’re not fairies!’

Yet as Ben deftly caught, disarmed and immobilised her flailing arm, she knew she had no way of convincing him.

‘Better than that,’ replied the voice riding the static. ‘I’ll bring Steff and she can teach you a little trick with a Taser that sometimes brings her out of it.’

‘Hey, I don’t think she needs —’

‘Relax,’ replied Neville’s crackling voice. ‘It’s not as bad as it sounds. And not nearly so bad as what she went through getting them stitches.’

Again, from another room, she heard a scream.

Fredarick’s straitjacket was warm.

His headphones were slipping, though, killing his music. Now jackhammers drilled inside his head; voices, screaming, echoing. Every sound permeated from every tomorrow, rippling back to him through time like raindrops on a pond, ever dissipating as ripples do, until each of the weakest whispers break the soft end of the sound barrier.

Hugging the padded wall, curled up like a human ball, he had managed to stay deaf to it most of his life.

‘Dysfunctions of his inner ear should guarantee it,’ they’d said; six decades of specialists. ‘Basilar membranes just don’t shake this way.’

Yet as he glanced to his rubber-coated door with its super-safe circular window, he saw Matron Sanchez and knew that she was different. By now, she would have read the staff reports about that incident — what he’d done to Mira’s eyelids — her sweet face warning him that she suspected there was far more to the situation. Perhaps she could even see it; a deaf old man and a young blind woman, reflections of each other in the distorted waters of a turbulent gene pool. Together, they were trapped in a tragic triangle with the matron,who suffered her own problems in addition to suffering his and Mira’s through empathy.

Sanchez had watched him all the night through the full moon of his window; his spike-haired angel. The white light behind her in the hall appeared to him as her halo, but he couldn’t bear to look at her; porcelain pale.

She stroked the glass moon with her petite hand — curled by the childhood foe of polio, long defeated — to remind him that he was not alone in his zoo of mime artists. He knew that she would also reassure him, if he would only turn his head long enough to read her lips, that as the new matron of Serenity, she would leave no rock unturned in pursuit of a little peace for him. Even a heartbeat of true silence would be bliss. Yet already the pain of failure had etched his sweet cherub with tears that seared even deeper into him.

It’s my fault she suffers at the sight of me; my fault she lacks the truth of what I am and what’s to come for her. And for Mira.
He scolded himself time and again, and bumped his bald head into the corner, trying not to hear the screams which still echoed back to him from tomorrow’s tenants — until time slid by enough that he noticed his own sobbing had become ominously absent from the racket.

He glanced to the glass moon, and she was there again, just as he feared: Matron Madonna Sanchez. She was trying to smile, but her precious mouth was already trembling. Fear made her lips so hard to read, but he’d listened to the echoes of this moment for so long, there was no need.

Her eyes lingered too long on the damp stain on his pants, so he guessed that she must suspect it too; the time had come to confess the evil he’d committed upon Mira. Only then could she permit his release.

*     *     *

Entering the rubber room, Madonna Sanchez took care as she stepped up onto the soft floor, since the heel of her right shoe was four inches taller to compensate for a lack of length in one leg. An elastic knee support also helped, but she gave no greater thought to her own aids, nor to the weakness of her shrivelled left arm which could barely open the door without an extra nudge from her healthy hand. As matron and psychologist, her thoughts were already firmly focused on the client ahead of her.

She chose to leave the door open — not for a quick exit, since she feared no personal harm from him, but as a promise of release if he chose to cooperate and stop tearing at his ears. According to his file, he hadn’t needed either a straitjacket or padded room since his first year, six decades ago, when Serenity had still been known as the Likiba Isle Benevolent Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Not that raiding a neighbour’s chicken coop while stark naked should have been crime enough to commit him as an adolescent six decades ago. Still, here he was.

‘Hello, Freddie,’ she said as she squatted beside him — although until he answered, she couldn’t be sure if it was a sulking Freddie Leopard she addressed, or one of his quieter alter-egos known as Fredarick, the sage.

‘Neville has a bet going that you’ve clammed up for another sixty years, but if Ben and I made you laugh once, I figure we can do it again. I’m betting on us, and you don’t want me to lose money, do you?’

He continued to watch her with his weepy eyes, and his mouth opened as if he might break his latest silence, but when he moved his lips, she caught no more than the breath of his whisper.

‘You’re Fredarick?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry that to punish one, I must punish all of you.’

Taking her own white tissue from between her breasts, she dabbed a strand of saliva from the cornerof his mouth and straightened his headphones. Such an odd thing for a deaf patient to need, she thought, but since most of his personas cherished the idea of music so much and cared for no other little luxury, she could hardly bring herself to take them off him except in punishment, and only then for the most heinous crime.

‘I can’t let you keep them for long,’ she said, ‘unless you tell me which of you did that terrible thing to Mira. And why.’

A tear escaped his eye as if he regretted it.

‘It was you?’

He nodded, but she couldn’t set him free until she was sure he wouldn’t try anything so cruel again. Not against any other resident, let alone Mira Chambers, who would be bearing the marks of what he’d done to her for many days, if not years, psychologically.

He glanced to the door but made no attempt to move for it. He remained slumped in his corner, moving his mouth like a fish out of water.

Mira, Mira,
she read from his lips.

Sanchez tipped his head until his eyes rolled from the door to her face. ‘You need to speak clearer, Freddie. I can read lips too, but you can’t just keep repeating her name.’ His clumsy tongue made it difficult to understand him at the best of times, and although he’d spoken to her often since she’d made him laugh, he’d barely spoken enough for a whole sentence in the six decades before that, so his mouth moved as if he’d forgotten how to shape words — almost as if he was still sucking his fist.

Mira, Mira, on the floor. Who’s the sanest one of all?

‘Louder, please.
You
put her on the floor.
You
stitched her eyes shut, and I need to know why. She was already blind.’

He shook his head. ‘Mira, Mira,’ he said as another tear fell. ‘I looked in her eyes and saw myself staring back at me.’

‘She’s blind, honey. Her eyes are more crystalline than they should be. But she’s very touchy about it, so if your paths ever cross again you must promise not to stare or go near her.’

‘But she’s like me!’

Sanchez stroked his back, knowing that her lightest touch had become like balm to him. ‘She’s blind. You’re deaf. And you both suffer a mild intellectual handicap.’ Both also argued hotly with staff and had developed their refusals to cooperate to a fine art. And although Freddie had fractured into multiple personalities recently while Mira was still on the verge of breaking, Sanchez chose not to remind him of any such negatives that could be turned around eventually.