Shooting in the Dark

mile high, content and with a smile on his face. The human spirit soars away from the pain of conformity and acceptance, though the cost may be physical extinction.
    I read the story at a sitting, then I read it again. I put the book down and thought about what I had read and wondered at the workings of destiny. What had brought me to Doncatraz where the book was waiting? I read The Country of the Blind a third time.
     
    I check the street through the curtains again. Then I bring some water in a glass tumbler and sprinkle it on the blind woman’s face. She doesn’t move. I check the back garden through the window of the patio door. All is dark and frozen. The swimming pool is a village pond.
    There was an altercation between the prison guard and the hospital authorities. The doctors wanted to keep me in the hospital for another day, but the prison guards wanted me back in Doncatraz. They put me on a trolley and wheeled me down the long corridor to the waiting van that would take me back to my cell. The original guard, the one who saved my life, was still with us. He had a new tie on, there was no trace of my blood on him, but it was the same man. I insisted on standing when we got to the hospital exit. The guard came to help me and I lifted him off his feet and rushed him into the wall. He was on his back on the floor, trying to get to his feet. I grabbed the trolley and rammed it at him, crushing his head between the wall and the heavy metal wheels.
    I turned to take on the hospital porters, but they didn’t want any trouble. Not one of them made a move towards me.
    The blind woman moans and stirs on the couch. I wait until she is fully conscious, then I drag her into a sitting position. There is a feral odour to her and I imagine some kind of vaginal discharge has occurred.
    ‘He should have left you in the dark under the ice,’ I tell her.
    ‘I don’t want to die.’
    ‘He should have left you there.’
    ‘Who? What are you talking about?’
    I laugh. ‘You know exactly who and what,’ I tell her. ‘My father gave his life for you.’
    ‘This is a mistake. No one gave his life. If something happened to your father, I’m sorry. But it has nothing to do with me.’
    I want to cause her pain. I want to go to her and take different parts of her body and crush them. I want to hear her screaming.
    ‘Be careful what you say,’ I tell her. ‘I’m on a knife-edge.’
    ‘Start again,’ she says, placatory now. ‘I’ll try to understand.’
    ‘You and the other one,’ I say. ‘You’re on the ice.’ She looks genuinely puzzled. Shakes her head from side to side. ‘We were children,’ she says eventually. ‘You mean on the pond, when we were children?’
    ‘He comes on a ladder.’
    ‘Yes, the fireman came on a ladder. He saved our lives.’
    ‘You go under the ice and he dives in after you. He pulls you out of the water but he stays behind. He sinks to the bottom. It was your grave and he died in it.’
    ‘He didn’t die,’ she says. ‘This’s a mistake. The fireman didn’t die. No one died.’
    ‘The fireman was my father,’ I tell her. ‘He never came home again. He died that you might live.’ Somehow I am falling apart. My personality is fragmenting. I have to use all my energy, all my willpower to maintain my identity and my purpose.
    ‘No one told me,’ she says. She has been quiet for a while and now, when she speaks, it is in a whisper. ‘But it fits. They wouldn’t have told us. We were too young.’
    I leave her words there. I let them echo. I do not say that I was too young as well, but that no one could hide it from me.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m truly sorry.’
    ‘In the country of the blind,’ I tell her, ‘the one-eyed man is king.’
    ‘Oh,’ she says, as if she has never heard it before.
    ‘If you had been a good woman,’ I tell her, ‘it would have been all right. I would have accepted it. But your life has been useless.’
    ‘I can make it up,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know he’d died. I can try to make it up to you.’
    ‘It would have been better for the world if he had lived and you had died. I’m here to put that right.’
    ‘What are you going to do?’
    I laugh a wild uncontrolled laugh. It is something that I’m not surprised to find inside me, although I never knew it was there. ‘We’re going skating,’ I tell her. ‘Ice skating.’
     

56
     
    Geordie was sitting alone in the house when the police came looking for Rod