Authors: K.C. Finn
Tags: #young adult, #historical, #wwii, #historical romance, #ww2, #ya, #europe, #telepathic, #clean teen publishing, #kc finn
The Mind's Eye (9 page)
Eyes shut. In and out and in and out.
I tried to
remember the German’s great hairy hands, the billows of smoke from
his cigar, the nerves he felt when his commanding officer pointed
to the map. Pointed to that jagged coast, that little red dot
marked Oslo.
It was a grey
day, wherever I was. Great silver clouds hung low in the sky as I
looked out into a city through someone else’s eyes. It wasn’t
England; I knew that by the grand old buildings in red brick or
cream coloured stone. They were not the slate grey spires of
London; there was something much more traditional to their style.
The eyes I was looking through belonged to someone standing at a
second floor window looking down into a wide boulevard lined with
huge green trees.
I had a
feeling I had not found the hairy handed German I was in search of,
the emotions running through this body were far easier for me to
interpret than his had been. The body was quivering against the
cold air streaming in from the half-open window, a steady but
quickened pulse racing in its veins. One look down revealed a pair
of hands wringing together nervously. They were smooth and a little
tanned with the lightest dusting of brown hair starting at the
wrists, climbing up to two strong arms. A male, for certain, and
quite young judging by the lack of blemishes on his skin.
The fearful
young man gazed out into the grey street again where I noticed
there were very few people out and about. One small clump of
pedestrians gathered under the leafy trees, looking expectantly out
into the road, which was totally devoid of traffic. They were
waiting for something. Somebody spoke in the room I was in and the
boy turned his head to glance at the speaker. The room looked like
a store room for fabrics and such; it contained a crowd of some
two-dozen people who were all craning to see out of the window into
the silent street. They muttered nervously in a guttural sounding
tongue that I didn’t understand. Not German, I decided; my attempt
to focus on the specific target had failed.
But I wanted
to stay all the same; I had to know what this foreign mass was
waiting for. What did they expect to come down their beautiful
boulevard? And why did they await it behind bricks and glass? The
boy I inhabited grew more nervous by the minute; I could feel him
rubbing his palms together, his keen eyes expanding as he spotted a
disturbance at the far end of the street. He pointed, shouting
something foreign in a rich, smooth voice. Everyone crowded closer
to the tall glass windows for a better view.
A procession
of vehicles was traveling slowly down the boulevard from the far
left of my field of vision. The first few cars were beautiful
creations in glinting silver, open-topped to display a series of
military personnel in their full regalia. I recognised the
grey-green shade of their dress and the flashes of red on some of
their collars. My boy’s mind grew suddenly angry. He clenched his
fists.
The grand
vehicles came to a halt right in the centre of the road almost
directly below the building we were in. The remainder of the convoy
was made up of covered canvas trucks in varying shades of green
that spread out into different positions, including some on the
wrong side of the road. Someone in the crowded store room said
something that sounded an awful lot like the word ‘Nazi’. Other
people muttered their anxious replies. My boy nodded his head
silently as the canvas trucks began to open one by one.
I saw their
shiny black boots first as the soldiers hit the empty pavement pair
by pair. They all wore spherical helmets obscuring their heads,
making them look like one never-ending line of identical toy
soldiers during the disembarkation. They formed precise, tight
ranks at once as their commanding officers came to appraise them;
they had alighted from their more stylish transports. Where minutes
before the grand boulevard had been almost empty, now at least a
hundred soldiers convened on its empty roads. The grey-green mass
saluted without a word, followed almost instantly by the clicking
of a hundred pairs of polished black boot heels. The sound was
eerie on the deadly silent street.
Then out of
nowhere bursts of colour exploded through the grey. In the middle
of every neatly-ordered pack of soldiers came a flash of red
fabric, revealed moments later as the standard of the leader under
which they marched. The red, white and black of the Nazi flag was
raised above every unit as some inhabitants from the very first car
fired single shots into the air. They had arrived in this place,
perhaps for the first time, and they were keen to make it known.
The boy who I occupied let his strong stance deflate, his anger and
fear fading off to give way to sorrow. He raised one smooth hand to
his temple, rubbing the space above his ear.
“
Min elskede Oslo,” he whispered.
Oslo!
So something had gone right in
my practice after all.
“
Hvem sa det?” the boy said, looking around him frantically.
The rest of the crowd gave him funny looks, some shook their heads.
I felt his eyes narrowing in suspicion, his ears pricking as he
continued to look around. Had he
heard
me? I focused hard on him and
what he was doing. It felt like deep concentration, like listening.
He closed his eyes, turning my viewpoint black.
Oslo
, I thought again.
startled. His eyes flew open and once again he looked around for
the source of the voice, but the females in this room were older
women who were all staring out at the display on the street. My boy
pushed his way through the crowd and out of the room, into a poorly
lit corridor with a buzzing electric bulb. I didn’t know what to
do, but I felt I owed him some kind of explanation. I thought of
what my mother would do if she were addressing someone from foreign
parts.
Hello
, I thought,
Do you speak English?
out an audible cry as he scanned the corridor around him. It was
totally empty. So now he knew my voice had no body. I didn’t know
if that was a good or bad thing.
“
Some English, yes,” he answered. He was more nervous now than
when the Nazis had arrived. “Please miss, where are you speaking
from?”
loaded question, but I decided on honesty.
Great Britain
, I replied.
“
But that is impossible,” he whispered. I liked his accent,
the way he pushed his vowels out of his mouth with
stress.
true.
“
Why can the others not hear you?” he asked, his nerves
abating a little once more.
I’m afraid I have used your mind to see what’s happening in
Oslo.
It was true enough; he didn’t need
to know it had happened accidentally.
“
You have powers,” he began uncertainly, “Synsk… I do not know
the English word. But this is very, very impossible.”
it better than I thought he would, which told me he had enough
sense about him not to think himself mad for hearing voices. He
believed that people like me existed, however afraid he might be of
the idea. I was about to speak again when that familiar cold shiver
started to creep up my spine, the dark little corridor was fading
in and out. I panicked, focusing hard to maintain for a few seconds
more.
Your name
, I demanded,
Please, I have to go, but give me your name. I
can find you again with your name.
I clung
desperately to Oslo, hoping what I’d just said was true. And then I
realised that perhaps he wouldn’t want me to find him again. I
started to sink away despite my efforts; almost everything in the
corridor was gone when one last sound reached my ears.
“
Henri.”
exhausted from the length of the visit to focus on finding Henri
again right away. I went to bed that night hoping my mind might
take me there anyway, but had no such luck, and the next day there
was no peace to be found at all at Ty Gwyn. Mam was intent on
mending the impenetrable rift that had built up between Blod and I
during my eight months thus far in North Wales; she thought a nice
trip to the cinema was the solution. Blod only agreed because my
wheelchair meant that she would most likely get a seat right at the
front of the picture house.
Unfortunately Mam also made the insane decision to break a
piece of bad news to Blod on the way to the cinema, namely that she
couldn’t have the dress she wanted for her
21
st
birthday. Blod hit the roof shamelessly as we went down the
uneven streets of Bryn Eira Bach, but for all her complaints there
simply wasn’t enough money in the family to give her what she
wanted. Fabric was in short supply and necessary for the war
effort, so the few new dresses that remained in Evans the Tailor’s
window had more than tripled in price since the start of the year.
By the time we reached the ticket booth Blod had a face that could
summon stormclouds and though we did get our seat at the front of
the tiny screening room, she slumped back into her chair, crossed
her arms and stared at the screen determinedly even before the reel
started to run.
thing that popped into life on the screen was a news reel detailing
the current state of the war. At first there were some flickering
images of our boys in ranks, saluting and waving their sweethearts
goodbye. People in the picture house cheered all around me. But the
atmosphere dropped into a sombre one as the great black and white
screen was overtaken by the Nazi swastika flying high. The narrator
of the bulletin erupted into a deeper, darker tone.
“
But out in Greater Europe our allies are falling to the great
German threat.”
photographs appeared of people being flung out of their houses by
German troops, children crying in the streets and properties
smashed and destroyed. Until one image flickered into focus, an
image that made me gasp aloud. Oslo. The boulevard that I had been
looking down on with its leafy green trees and the lines of
soldiers in their big black boots next to the open canvas trucks.
Except that now those soldiers were dragging people away, and part
of the street in the forefront of the image was smeared with
something dark. Blood.
“
The occupation of Norway began this week seeing hundreds of
innocent residents in the capital city of Oslo taken away. These
propaganda photographs released to the European newspapers claim
that the Nazis are hounding out traitors and resistors to their
cause. The Norwegian government has been overthrown and replaced
by…”
bear it anymore. I closed my eyes and my mind to the cinema screen.
Henri was there in that awful place. He’d have seen the blood on
the streets; he might even have been taken away. I had met with him
for less than half an hour, but I knew he was a good young man. I
considered my state carefully, deciding that I was no longer as
tired as I had been in the morning. Perhaps I had rested enough to
reach him. Blod was still sulking to my left and Mam was in the
chair on the other side of her, engrossed in the newsreel still. I
sank back into my wheelchair slowly, putting my head out of their
field of vision.
My arms and
hands took their usual position as I nervously began to shut out
the sounds and sights of the screening. Perhaps if they saw me,
they would just think I had a headache, or even that I’d nodded off
to sleep. With a nervous, thumping pulse building behind my ears, I
took my two deep breaths, thinking hard on the scenes I had just
witnessed, the young smooth hands of the boy in the store room. His
voice and his name. Henri.
When I opened
my eyes I was at a table sewing on a button. Or more precisely
Henri was. I recognised the trickle of the nerves down his spine as
he tried to concentrate, the sight of his hands filled me with
glee. If I had had the physical strength to leap for joy this would
have been the moment to do it. I had the found the right mind at
the right time for once. I watched him for a few seconds as he
continued to attach the button to a man’s brown suit, but I
couldn’t resist the urge to make contact for long.
Hello Henri
, I thought.
stabbed himself with the needle as he jumped half out of his skin.
He looked up into the same store room he had been in when I saw him
last. There were a few other stations for tailoring among the
swathes of cloth, but he was alone.