The Rules of Seeing by Joe Heap

Author:Joe Heap [Joe Heap]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

September

SIX MONTHS AFTER SHE left Kate’s flat, Nova slips her hand into her coat, grasps the object in her pocket, and rolls its weight against her fingers. The September air is a muggy haze, and she savours the weight of the object, its solidity and coolness.

The night after the kiss, she had dreamt of Kate’s face. In the dream, she understood it perfectly, and could answer Kate’s question. She knew exactly the kind of person this face belonged to, and she wanted to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come out right. The touch and the image became a single thing – the first thing that Nova truly understood as a sighted person.

‘You are pretty,’ she told her, in the dream. ‘You’re beautiful.’

She did not wake up this time, to cry in the dark. She slept through to morning and woke with no memory of the dream.

In the morning, lying in the darkness, Nova felt as though a decision had been made for her. With Kate, she would have kept trying. Without Kate, there is no point going on. She would give up, starting now.

She would go blind again.

Tears spilled down to Nova’s pillow, as though her extraordinary eyes understood the decision that was being made and were already grieving. From now on, they would be imprisoned behind dark glasses, starved of light, shape and colour – those delicious, nauseating candies – until their appetites shrank away to nothing.

But blindness seemed unimportant to her, in that moment. Kate was gone, and would not be coming back. Nova was already living in that outer darkness, beyond light and warmth. All that remained was to get used to it.

Later, as she was getting ready to go out, dark glasses on and white stick under one arm, her hand had closed around something in the pocket of her leather jacket. It took her a while to understand what the object was. It was small and dense. She turned it over and over, feeling the lines of it, the small ring attached to one end. It was a penknife. Somehow, she knew it must belong to Kate. She must have slipped it into the pocket, a surprise for later, before everything went wrong. Nova wonders over its significance, but cannot remember any conversation about penknives. She supposes, if the kiss hadn’t happened, that Kate would have explained.

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