The Blind Eye Read Online Free PDF Page B

have mentioned it.
    It’s fine
, I assured him, and he looked relieved.
    I paused for a moment in my note-taking, sipping thewater in the glass next to me, in the hope of creating a space that he would fill with words, but Silas kept silent.
    So
, and I smiled,
how about your general energy?
    It was low, Silas said, and he shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
    What about your relationships with other people?
    He did not know what I meant. He was not in a relationship with anyone, he hadn’t been in one for a long time.
    I told him that I was talking in a more general sense; I wanted to know about his family, his friends.
    He said that his mother was dead, and his father, from whom he had been estranged, had also died a year ago.
I suppose I spend most of my time alone
, and he looked out the window at the plumbing from the opposite building, the rusted pipes the only possible distraction from the intensity of the interview.
    I could see that the facts of his life, laid bare like this, did not seem as though they belonged to him, and I waited for a moment before I asked my next question.
    It was sleep I wanted to know about, and as Silas opened his mouth to reply, his face blanched. It was the tightness in his chest, the constriction, ferocious enough to render him incapable of answering.
    How is it? Fitful? Deep, disturbed, any regular dreams, night wakings, difficulties going to sleep, waking up?
    It took me an instant to see that he was in pain, and the moment I did, I reached for him, my hand on his sleeve asI told him to breathe, it would be all right, it would pass. As he leant forward, I tried to get him to meet my eyes.
    Slowly, Silas sat up. He touched the spot where I had been holding him, gently, carefully. I could still feel it, the burning tightness there in my hand.
    So that’s the pain?
I asked.
    Silas nodded.

     
5
    I saw the pub that Silas stayed in when he first got to Port Tremaine. It was, surprisingly, still open for business despite being completely deserted. I remember calling out, hoping to find someone to whom I could talk, but no one answered. I waited for a moment, and then decided that I would keep going. I wanted to make it out to Rudi’s garden and back before the chill of the evening, and if I had no luck there, I would try to find the owner later.
    Silas told me he spent his first two days in that town crashed out, sweaty and exhausted, finally waking to find himself in a room that was, as the owner had promised, suffering from the fact that it had been uninhabited for some time.
    He remembered a woman called Martha bringing him a set of sheets, worn with a faded cornflower print, a single blanket, a pillow with a cigarette burn that went through to the stuffing, and a threadbare towel. When he woke, they were all where she had left them, there at the end of the bed. He had slept fully clothed on the mattress, unaware that night had passed to day and back to night again.
    Walking down the main street, with the address of his mother’s house written on a scrap of paper, he saw, as I also did, the extent of the desolation. At first glance it appears like a perfectly preserved country town, the stone buildings golden in the brilliance of the sunshine, the awnings shading the footpath; but where you would expect to find people resting out of the heat, talking to neighbours they have known for years, it is empty, always empty. It was, Silas once said, like being in a Western. All of the shops, apart from Pearl’s General Store and the garage across the street, were deserted, the displays faded in the windows, the plastic grass in the butcher’s no longer a brilliant green but the true yellow of the country, the shelves at the back of the haberdasher’s still stacked with bolts of cloth, rotten to the touch, some doors creaking open, others locked with ‘Keep Out’ scrawled across in red paint, the rooms beyond ransacked, even the floorboards pulled up, leaving nothing but an empty rotten