when it goes about its business. It just manages its environment differently.’
Silence.
‘Are you glaring or thinking?’
‘I’m nodding. I agree with you. But there must be things you flat-out can’t do?’
‘Dad made sure I could try anything I wanted—’ and more than a few things she hadn’t particularly wanted ‘—so, no, there’s not much that I can’t do at all. But there’s a lot of things I can’t do with any purpose or point. So I generally don’t bother.’
‘Like what?’
‘I can drive a vehicle—but I can’t drive it safely or to a destination so why would I, other than as a party trick? I can take a photograph with a camera, but I can’t look at it. I can write longhand, but I really don’t need to. That kind of thing.’
‘Do you know what colours are?’
‘I know what their purpose is. And I know how they’re different in nature. And that they’re meaningful for sighted people. But, no, I can’t create colour in my head.’
‘Because you’ve never seen it.’
‘Because I don’t think visually.’
‘At all?’
‘When I was younger Dad opened up the farm to city kids from the Blind Institute to come and have farm stays. As a way of helping me meet more children like myself. One of them had nothing mechanically wrong with her eyes—her blindness was caused by a tumour in her visual cortex and that meant she couldn’t process what her eyes were showing her perfectly well. But the tumour also meant she couldn’t think in images or conceptualise something she felt. She really was completely blind.’
‘And that’s not you?’
‘My blindness is in my retinas, so my brain creates things that might be like images. I just don’t rely on them.’ She wondered if his pause was accommodating a frown. ‘Think of it like this... Mum said you’re quite handsome. But I can’t imagine what that means without further information because I have no visual frame of reference. I don’t conceive of people in terms of the differences in their features, although I obviously understand they have different features.’
‘How do you differentiate?’
‘Pretty much as you’d imagine. Smell, the sound of someone’s walk, tangible physical features like the feel of someone’s hand. And I have a bit of a thing for voices.’
‘How do you perceive me?’
Awkwardness swilled around her at his rumbled question, but she’d given him permission to ask and so she owed him her honesty. ‘Your strides are longer than most when you’re walking alone.’ Though, with her, he took pains to shorten them. ‘And you smell—’ amazing ‘—distinctive.’
That laugh was like honey squeezing out of a comb.
‘Good distinctive or bad distinctive?’
She pulled up as he slowed and reached out to brush the side of her hand on the rough clay wall of the chalet for orientation. ‘Good distinctive. Whatever you wear is...nice.’
In the way that her favourite Merlot was just ‘nice’.
‘You don’t do the whole hands-on-face thing? To distinguish between physical features?’
‘Do you feel up someone you’ve just met? It’s quite personal. Eventually I might do that if I’m close to someone, just to know, but ultimately all that does for me is create a mind shape, address a little curiosity. I don’t rely on it.’
‘And people you care about?’
Did he think you couldn’t love someone without seeing them?
She pressed her fingers to her chest. ‘I feel them in here. And I get a surge of...it’s not vision, exactly, but it’s a kind of intensity, and I experience it in the void where my vision would be when I think about my parents or Owen or Wilbur. And the bees. Their happy hum causes it.’
And the sun, when she stared into it. Which was often, since her retinas couldn’t be any more damaged.
‘That sometimes happens spontaneously when I’m with someone, so I guess I could tell people apart by the intensity of that surge. But mostly I tell people apart by their actions, their intentions. That’s what matters to me.’
‘You looked me right in the eye after we shook hands.’
‘Only after you spoke. I used the position of your hand and your voice to estimate where your eyes would be. And the moment either one of us moved it wouldn’t have worked until I recalibrated. I don’t have super powers, Elliott.’
His next silence had a whole different tone to it. He was absorbing.
‘You’ve been very generous with your information, considering what an intrusion my questions are. But it felt important for me to understand. Thank you, Laney.’
‘It’s no more an intrusion than me asking you what it’s like being tall.’
‘How do you—? The angle of my voice?’
‘And the size of your hand when I shook it. Unless you have freakishly large hands for the rest of your body?’
‘No. My hands are pretty much in proportion to the rest of me.’
Cough.
Not awkward at all...
Wilbur snuffling in the distance and the chirpy evening cicadas were the only sounds around them. The only ones Elliott would hear, anyway.
‘I’m tall because my father was a basketball player,’ he volunteered suddenly. ‘It means I spend my days looking at the bald spots of smaller men and trying very hard not to look down the cleavages of well-built women. My growth spurt at thirteen meant I made the school basketball team, and that was exclusively responsible for turning my high school years from horror to hero. It taught me discipline and focus, sharpened my competitiveness and gave me a physical outlet.’ He took a breath. ‘Without that I’m not sure what kind of a man I might have grown into.’
His words carried the slightest echo of discomfort, as if they were not things he was particularly accustomed to sharing. And she got the sense that he’d just given her a pretty fair trade.
She palmed the packed earth wall of the chalet and opened her mouth to say Well, this is you, but as she did so she stepped onto a fallen gum nut loosed by the wildlife foraging in the towering eucalypts above and her ankle began to roll. Her left fingernails bit into the chalet’s rammed earth and her right clenched the fabric of Elliott’s light jacket, but neither did much to stop her leg buckling.
The strong arm that slid around her waist and pulled her upright against his body was infinitely more effective at stopping her descent.
‘Are you okay?’ he breathed against her hair.
Other than humiliated? And way too
