Hindsight (7 page)

‘I’m here,’ Ben reassured her. He hugged her closer under one arm, but she shook her head and pushed away.

‘I need out of here!’

‘Take her!’ Sanchez shouted as she turned down the music. ‘I wish I could come up too, Mira, but I need to secure him.’

A button clicked near the wall and static warned that more staff had been summoned down to assist her. Mira didn’t wait. In seconds she was back in the elevator and halfway up to the ground floor, tugging Ben by the shirt all the way.

Swinging around him in the elevator, she found the emergency stop button, and punched it.

‘Hey, why here?’ he asked.

‘You tell me — what’s going on, Ben? I’m in the dark here!’

‘Join the club.’

‘Join it? I’m the founding member and president! I want to know what’s happening. I respect you a lot — you know that — but I’ll fight to the death if you try to lock me up again!’

He laughed. ‘You’re kidding, right? You don’t really expect me to do that?’

Mira chewed on her lip, feeling silly for indulging that story for as long as a second. ‘What about Freddie? What was
that
all about?’

‘Beats me. Honestly, Mira, he stumps me. I know he’s presented multiple personalities before, but he’s never let me see that one. Looked like a hunter. No wonder he ditched his surname for Leopard. His spots changed so fast, it caught us off guard.’

‘Do you know what set him off?’

‘Who can say? With Freddie it could be as simple as getting the wrong coloured juice for breakfast.’

‘Regardless — you’re taking me past my old room when you know how much I hated it! The damn thing didn’t have so much luxury as a window!’

‘Come on, you don’t still think of it as a gaol cell? Or that I might shove you in at the last minute?’

Hearing it from him like that made it sound even sillier, and yet: ‘The thought did cross my mind briefly.’

He chuckled and rubbed her arms. ‘I don’t doubt it. Listen, Mira, there are two main exits and four fire escapes on the next level, so if you really want to avoid your old room, just say the word. If you want to sneak out without being seen, we can do that too; just give me a second to skip ahead and disable the surveillance cams at the nurses’ station.’

‘Uh oh,’ Mira gasped, and grabbed his hands for silent finger braille.
Did you just tell him I’m leaving?

I don’t think so.
‘You’re changing rooms today. I say it’s time to let loose your gymnast and do it in style.’ He brushed a wild strand of hair from her face. ‘This is your big day. Leap at it and show the world what you’re made of.’

She turned her cheek until she found his hand, and nuzzled against it, enjoying as much warmth and comfort as she could draw from him. ‘I don’t care what the world thinks of me.’

‘Sure you do.’ He pulled her against his chest and stroked her hair, making her heart race. ‘I’ve seen the books you read. I think you care, even when the world doesn’t deserve you.’

‘I can’t go back to that room.’

‘You don’t have to.’ He leaned away just long enough to punch the elevator up again. ‘We’ll arrange for someone else to get your things.’

Doors chimed, and the electronic voice announced their return to the ground floor. Scrambling out, Mira dashed for the nearest fire exit, not caring about any of her old belongings.

‘Hey, wait up!’ Ben called, lunging after her.

‘Yesterday is history, Ben! From now on I’m shunning it.’ She plunged through the ghostly door, rounded the corner outside and quickened her pace up the road towards the main security gate.

‘Mira, slow down!’

She heard him groan, remembered his injury and stopped in her tracks. ‘Oh, sorry, Ben! I didn’t mean to make you rush too. You okay?’

‘It’s not that. It’s just …’

‘Hey, it’s Mira!’ called a childlike voice from the hanging tree. ‘Everybody, there she is!’

Petal Price rallied her troops with another battle cry. ‘Attack!’

‘Uh oh,’ Ben said. ‘Cat’s out of the bag now.’

Party whistles bleated, feet stampeded, wheelchairs creaked and skidded, and in seconds, Mira was surrounded by a wave of clapping hands, and bustled amidst a cacophony of voices, most of them elderly. Cobwebs of streamers hosed over her hair, and another whistle bleated close to her ear. Jostled, patted and stroked by the frenzied swarm, she found it difficult to count how many. At least forty.

‘Go! Go! Go!’ they all chanted, even moaning Joan, who repeated it so fast, she sounded like she was gargling.

‘Ah, you’re all crazy!’ Petal shouted from roughly waist-height to Mira. As the shortest client at Serenity, Petal caught Mira’s attention in her usual fashion, by swiping out with her GPS walking cane and striking Mira’s shin. ‘You’ve got it made here, sister! And, to think I never got a chance to take you sky-diving! Wind in your hair. You don’t know what you’re missing!’

‘I think I can bear the deprivation,’ Mira replied glumly.

‘Muh! Muh!’ grunted Phoebe Fingelly as she pushed closer to Mira, a bent old woman, whose breath always smelled of mud and whose hair bristled daily with fresh twigs and flowers. Mira had only crossed paths with her twice since transferring to Serenity, yet the elderly resident pushed a posy of soft wilted flowers at her, and the scent of lemon told Mira they were her favourites. Only one place on the island they grew, and that was the hedge of brown flowered boronias at the front gate, which led down the driveway to freedom.

Mira buried her nose in them, unable to count how many times she’d tried to escape using the scent of those flowers to guide her.

‘We also got you this —’ Petal shoved something that felt like a padded box against Mira’s stomach. ‘Neville said it’s pointless wrapping gifts for the blind, but it’s half the fun, right? The bow is crepe and the rest is bubble wrap. Check it — funky, hey?’

Mira covered her mouth, not knowing what to say. She explored the gift, half expecting to find something sharp. Instead it felt fun, but she returned it anyway. ‘I can’t. You have so little. And I didn’t want anything. Honestly, I just want to slip away quietly.’

Needed to
, more like it.

‘How did you know?’ Ben asked.

‘Yeah, big secret,’ Petal laughed. ‘Math is a bitch in Braille, baby, but one and one still makes two. Or in this case, packing boxes minus a hearse. I’m blind, not stupid.’ She pushed the gift back to Mira. ‘It’s rare to graduate here, but a keepsake is still tradition. You want to be normal, right? So go ahead, open it.’

Reluctantly, Mira popped and unravelled the gift, releasing two leather-bound Braille books — the broadest cover embossed with
A Millennium of Classic Poetry
and the thickest titled
The Scarlet pernel —
the missing letters worn so much from a Braille-reader bookstand that only the most sensitive fingers could detect the last word was really
Pimpernel
, a small wildflower and fictional hero from the late seventeen hundreds.

‘Thanks but …’

‘Your favourites, right?’

‘Yes, but …’ Mira shivered at all the memories that went with them; all the dark nights of solitude and century-old delusions which had forced her to seek escape by closing her eyes and dissolving through her fingertips into their pages.

‘I know them off by heart already.’ She handed them back to Petal.

‘You might as well take them,’ Petal argued, shoving them back again. ‘Nobody else ever borrowed them. Not this century anyway.’

‘But I didn’t …’

‘Want to hurt our feelings? Too late. Be a snob. You’re only making more work for the poor guy who has to write them back into stock again, and hurting yourself, and crushing our feelings, and wasting a perfectly good opportunity to party, and …’

‘Oh, if I must! Thanks, I guess.’ Mira tucked the books and ribbon under her arm, planning to dump them outside the gate on her way out, but a small voice deep inside her cried out for her to keep them. For too long, they’d been her precious treasures, with wide magical worlds encoded within the chords of their beautiful Braille.

‘Okay, make way, make way!’ Petal ordered. ‘Escapee coming through!’

Mira grinned. She couldn’t help herself. Then she heard the familiar growl of Ben’s Camaro revving to life in the staff parking lot.

‘Hey, who’s in my car?’ he complained.

‘Guess,’ Petal said, nudging them closer to the kerb. ‘Ding’s been hot-wiring cars since he was nut-high to a battery terminal.’

‘Oh, that fills me with a lot of confidence!’ The car wheels squealed in chorus with a louder racket; sounded like long chains of tin cans filled with metal bolts or pebbles. ‘Oh, crap! And Phoebe’s decorated it with
Just Escaped
, I see. Perfect. No chance of getting pulled up by police.’

‘Knew you’d love it,’ Petal said. She struck Mira’s shin again with her walking cane.

Mira opened her mouth to complain, but felt a swell of emotion that made her feel like crying, and not just for her shin. She’d never expected a send-off. She hardly knew any of them, having been locked in her room most of the time and sedated. Closing her eyes, she buried her nose in the posy, determined not to cry for fear of the tears’ effect on her sight, and sniffled.

‘Yeah, well don’t go all mushy now either, sis.’ Petal herded Mira through the crowd with her cane — the blind leading the blind — and ordered Ben to get ahead and open the door for her.

He did and as Mira climbed in, he bounded around to encourage Ding out of the driver’s seat. A brief struggle followed, the car backfired and the crowd screamed.

Someone smacked the roof twice, and Ben accelerated slowly, as if pushing a bow wave through the crowd. Shouts turned to cheering, and Mira held her breath until they were through the security checkpoint; every heartbeat suspended in anticipation of someone leaping from the shadows to stop them.

‘Phew!’ Ben said, as he sped off downhill to the bridge. ‘I’ll bet you’re relieved too now?’

‘You bet …’ However, relief didn’t come in the huge rush that she’d expected. Instead, Freddie’s warning started playing over and over again in her head.

The lie is true.

And if it wasn’t already, she feared any plans Freddie might turn his tortured mind to conjuring to ensure it, even if he hadn’t fore-heard any of the sounds of her going away party, he’d soon learn about it from Petal and his other friends, just as soon as he started talking to Sanchez and she released him back into their tight-knit community.

Mira chewed on a fingernail, hoping the extent of his interference would stay limited to the island now that Sanchez was fully aware of his obsession.

Tucking the Braille books under her seat, she tried to put all thoughts of Freddie behind her as Ben levitated her away into the violet haze in his invisible car. However, the further she got from the little dark hole in Serenity that had once been her room, the more she felt as if her shadow was stretching back to it like a rubber band stretching away towards its breaking point.

B
en veered into the picnic area on the far side of the bridge to extricate the dragging cans and decorations from his car.

‘Did you have to stop here?’ Mira complained. A swarm of ghostly crime-scene investigators prevented her from seeing the bodies beyond the low grassy dune from this angle, but knowing they were down there was enough for her. ‘Forget the café.’ She slipped her hand over her mouth. ‘I’ve lost my appetite.’

‘Ah, but much better to delay here than back on the isle, right?’ He climbed out, leaving the engine running. ‘Your spare sunnies are behind my seat. Why don’t you play while I’m busy?’

She frowned, preferring to avoid any risk of seeing two people kill each other, but curiosity about the glasses drew her hand behind his seat anyway, where she found a solid wall of tightly wedged plastic bags. She wondered how many pairs he’d bought, but as she explored, she quickly discovered that many bulged with the familiar soft textures of tracksuits and t-shirts. Clothes from Serenity! And all labelled
VIP: Visually Impaired Person. If found in trouble please contact Serenity, phone …

She fisted the top two bags and threw them out her window, and another two before Ben caught her and took the fifth from her.

‘Hey, what’s all this?’ He rustled the bag as if opening it.

‘It’s all rubbish!’ She spotted a ghostly bin in the park and made a dash for it with a bag.

‘Well, don’t blame me! Petal and the others must have arranged it!’

‘Then, you won’t mind helping me ditch them.’

‘Seems an awful waste …’ She heard him collect two bags from the ground without following her. ‘Must be a few hundred bucks worth of clothes here. If you must ditch all of them, I suggest posting them back or donating them to charity.’

‘Fine!’ She spotted a sheltered park table and veered for it. ‘We’ll leave them here and you call the matron later.’

Mira hurried past him to empty his car and found a box full of gadgets under the last two bags. The box clanked, betraying its contents: a standard kit of household aids, including a talking kettle, toaster and coffee cup. Feeling inside, she also found a Braille keyboard, mini talking printer and an assortment of tactile games and craft items. A meek electronic voice recited the time, also betraying the presence of a new wristwatch, but most alarming of all, she found a short metal rod with a knob at one end which twisted to make the rod telescope out to full length.

‘A GPS cane!’ She bumped one of the control buttons and another electronic voice responded:
You are five point three kilometres west-south-west of Serenity. Please state your destination.

‘I don’t believe it!’

Ben came to her side and snatched it away before she could break it.

‘I left all this stuff in my room
deliberately
!’

‘They weren’t to know, Mira. They clearly thought they were helping. I would have packed them too if I’d had time. I thought you’d enjoy that sort of thing if it helped your independence?’

‘Sure, on the inside, but out here it makes me feel conspicuous, and I don’t need anything to remind me how blind I can be. I can cope well enough without any of it! And I certainly don’t need a GPS cane reporting my whereabouts back to them!’

‘Mira, be reasonable. Ditching the clothes, sure. I can understand that. I wouldn’t want to wear that Serenity label in public either, but the GPS cane is primarily to help
you
know where you are, and that gear is worth a fortune. You can’t just leave it here.’

‘I wouldn’t care if they were solid gold, Ben. I don’t need them.’

‘You mean you don’t
want
to need them.’

‘Same thing!’

‘I beg to differ. You need to accept your limitations before you can develop sustainably beyond them.’

‘And what if this is as good as I get? Have you considered that?’ She shuddered to think of him sending her back to Serenity eventually like damaged goods.

‘You’ll do fine. Development is a gradual process. Trust me, these tools will help you slide back into normal society. They’re not just for you, they’re for everyone who sees you using them — as a sign to give you a little more space and consideration.’

‘I don’t want to be treated differently! Besides, to slide back implies that I’ve been part of it in the first place. No way. I plan to be a hermit.’

‘
After
you pass the board review.’

‘Yes,
after
I pass the board review.’

‘… and you’re sure you won’t need any of this stuff in the meantime?’

She folded her arms, loving him for caring so much but hating his persistence.

‘What if you leave them in my car just in case?’

‘Three letters, Ben. G-P-S. That’s how Kitching tracked us back to your beach house.’

‘Fine,’ he said, sounding anything but agreeable as he clicked his fingers. ‘Give them here. I’ll take care of them.’

She handed them over and listened to ensure he took them to the table and set them down, but as she returned to the car and fastened her belt without his help, she heard a soft thump, as if he’d opened and closed the trunk.

‘Please tell me you didn’t keep anything?’

‘I didn’t.’ He chuckled and gunned the engine, then skidded off to put the violet ghost of Likiba Isle swiftly behind them. Too fast for Mira at first. She closed her eyes for the first two corners, then opened them in time to witness a car collide with a delivery van ahead of them at an intersection. Ben accelerated anyway, oblivious to the ghost of the dead woman at the wheel and her child, who’d been torn in half as he’d passed through their windscreen. Death everywhere and she always seemed to see the worst of it. Mira clamped her eyes shut, unable to bear the sight of passing through their bodies, and by the time she opened her eyes again, she was on a bridge. Below her, a ten-lane highway gouged a scar through another forest corridor, running parallel between the coast and the inland ranges. A long sweeping curve swept them down into the fast-moving traffic, headed north.

She heard Ben flick the indicator despite having nowhere else to go except a faster lane.

‘Don’t!’ she cried as he veered and dropped a keg of fuel out the tailpipe. Then ploughing into the rear of a ghostly horse trailer, she saw twelve heavily rugged miniature ponies, glimpsed inside the first pony’s stomach — dark, but still discernible — and clamped her eyes shut again with her legs curled up on the seat and her face hidden between her knees.

‘Sorry,’ Ben said as he eased his foot off the gas. ‘I forgot how you feel about driving.’

‘Actually, the faster the better today.’ She kept her head down. ‘I’d ride on a rocket if it could take me home again, but … never mind.’ Even if the developer agreed to sell back some of her parents’ land, no amount of money could resurrect her century-old Moreton Bay fig trees from ashes. Her favourite grove, the central seven, had borne a quaint nest of treehouses, and been embossed in gold along every broad bough with a lifetime of her mother’s favourite Braille poetry. One day she’d conjure the courage to go back there but for now it saddened her to think of them again. Never more would the breeze sing through their leaves now that her ‘poet trees’ lived only in yester-years.

‘Sorry,’ Ben echoed. ‘The best I can manage for the moment is my place.’

Freddie aged into Fredarick and shivered inside his straitjacket. Though he was wearing it again now, it seemed cold to him.

Mira had gone.

He tried to meld back with his corner of Serenity — his headphones throbbing with a steady rhythm in a dim attempt to steady his heartbeat — but her face bled through the walls of his dreams to torment him. No bravery left within him. He couldn’t conjure the strength to cry out with another warning. No need anyway, since Mira had become his wrecking ball, swinging away from him. One tap and his sandstone heart was already crumbling.

He could feel the rumble of the coming noise, and the echoes of tomorrow’s footsteps in the halls. There was nothing left for him now, but to wait for her return amidst the screaming silence — unless …

His mind turned to a tactic which had worked for him once before — not with hardball Mira, whose heart was still so hollow it could smash upon the first reinforced wall of adversity. No, he needed to align his plans with the demolition team who’d soon set her in motion — the ones who’d be seeking to engage her services. Or with Matron Sanchez, the only living soul he’d ever entrusted with a full dose of his foreknowledge.

In the meantime, they all seemed to think that Mira had stretched out to safety, so he needed to fix that. Wrecking ball or rubber band, either way, she would strike home with savage ferocity, unless he could prevent her from stretching out to her fullest potential.

Inspired, Fredarick glanced to his moon window and saw his spike-haired angel was there, watching him.

Sorry,
he said, guarding his silence by sliding out of his jacket again and speaking only with his hands.
I’m good now.
He forced himself unsteadily to his feet.
Do you wish me to prove it?

How?
she replied, guarding the silence too.

In writing.

In Braille, you mean?

He nodded, since there was no fooling her.
I am deaf by birth, mute by choice, and Braille is the only safe code for bleeding my poison into the world.

Waves clapped against the hull of the ferry, making it dance. Decks bobbed to the rhythm and seagulls cackled overhead, but Mira kept her eyes closed, feeling ill.

‘Halfway there,’ Ben said, patting her hand. ‘Only twenty or thirty minutes in this fine weather.’

She nodded, but this was her second trip to his beach house, so she could judge the timing for herself already.

‘It’s not only the motion of the boat, Ben. Your car is wallowing. I feel like I’m riding a drunk duck who’s riding piggy back on another drunken duck.’

‘Maybe you should get off one of the ducks? Get out and stretch your legs, I mean. Even with the window down, the air’s fairly stifled on this level anyway. You need to get your head over the side.’

‘Good idea.’ She clambered out and stumbled across to the invisible rail.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t be moving you to another island,’ Ben said as he joined her. ‘My mother has rented a house on the mainland we could use while she’s at my place, too, but after so long in confined communities, I thought you’d find a city too claustrophobic. Maybe a farm would be a better idea? An old estate maybe, with a house that was built at least a hundred and twenty years ago, so you can arrange the furniture exactly as it used to be. Then you wouldn’t need shades to cope every minute of the day.’

Mira shrugged. ‘I’ll need time to settle in no matter where we go, so no need to disrupt your home life that much for me. I’ll squeeze in and keep out of your way as best I can.’ Out of his mother’s way too, she decided, since Mel Chiron had seemed a bit too cranky and overprotective even before Ben had been shot.

‘No, I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.’ Ben brushed her hand, his touch light and fidgety, as if nervous. ‘Far from it. I want you to feel at home.’ He brushed her cheek next, making her flinch. ‘Sorry, I wish I could tell you how much …’ He leaned nearer and she felt his soft breath against her lips. She ached for him to kiss her, but the seconds stretched longer than she could bear. A lurch in the ferry could have been excuse enough to fall against him, but just as the invisible deck began to heave beneath her, he leaned away and the air turned cooler between them.

‘I can’t,’ he said, confirming her fears. ‘I can’t let myself fail you again.’

‘Fail me?’ She almost laughed. ‘I’m free now thanks mainly to you. It’s me who should be sorriest. You were shot nearly dead because of me.’

‘Oh, this wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t struck my head on the way down.’