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Vivienne Plumb

The Blind Tank

There was the day I walked the whole length of the main city square with my eyes shut. Maybe I had taken a good look at where I was headed in the instant before I shut my eyes, because when I opened them I had barely veered to the left or right; instead I had gained the length of the square with little error.

But what was strange was that no one was looking at me. I had imagined that it would be impossible to perform such a feat of false blindness without arousing interest and curiosity, or even public abuse, but when I opened my eyes no one was watching. In fact it had just begun raining and there was almost no one in the square. Two women and a child entered the public toilets on the far left. A man wearing a deep blue overcoat crossed the square on a diagonal and disappeared. For a moment I was totally alone at my arrival point. I had been blind and not one single person had noticed.

The place I had reached with my eyes shut was the bottom of the stairs that led to the wooden overhead bridge. The wooden bridge is always a good place to stop for a few minutes. It spans a main arterial road leading out of the city; turning to the left one looks back towards the square, to the right is the harbour and a man-made lagoon used for dinghies and kayaks. Beyond the lagoon lies a boat shed. A car park is behind that, and then finally the waterfront.

Two years ago I spent a month on holiday in Dunedin. My boyfriend and I had drunk all the way down on the train. The boyfriend had friends down there, stacks of them, and when we hit town we looked every single one of them up, staying drunk all week as we staggered from pub to pub along streets with names like North Leith, Glenleith, Lowleith, and MacLeith.

One night we made love in the Botanic Gardens while trying to find our way over to North East Valley. We started kissing when we page 112 got to the statue of Snow White in the Children's Garden, and ended up being copulating dwarves beneath her nine-foot copper skirts. Smooching and kissing and rolling in the damp grass, I got funny grassy skid marks on my chin from all the violent movement, and the green stain on the back of my white dress had never totally washed out, but it had been good.

Making love outside at night is like pissing outdoors, there is a remarkable feeling when you look up and see the heavens curving above you. It wrenches you back to some deep primeval beginning and suddenly you feel at one within that natural, savage environment, you feel as if you are doing something that you have been made for.

Steam was almost coming off our bodies by the time we finished. We laughed and helped each other up and beat the grass off our backs while we hugged and loved each other a little more, just a little more for participating in such secret night-time outrageousness.

Later, that boyfriend went off on a plane to America. I had no money for the fare, and so I was left behind to fill in postcards that featured the copper Snow White on the front. In those days I absorbed life like a sponge, soaking up matter for the memory banks, matter and images that would help to form my perceptions of life.

How many people realise that our eyes work just like a camera? The light passes through the eye and its lens and onto the retina, and the lens focuses the image for us. From the retina a rapid process sends signals to the optic nerve further back in the eye, and from there to the brain, and then finally we can perceive what we are looking at. For a human, vision is said to be the most important of the five senses. Loss of vision can lead to anxiety and even mental illness.

I had walked across the square with my eyes shut, but while crossing the bridge with both eyes open I slipped and fell down the wooden steps that led to the street below. I rolled and bounced. Still no one was around. It hadn't stopped raining and the stairs were wet. A little embarrassed, I sat on the bottom step rubbing my sore ankle.

The bridge had been built with old pieces of shipping timber, thick grey lumber studded with rivets and rusted red iron bolts. The side of the bridge facing the road is decorated with carved whales; on the page 113 other side there are two enormous birds with great curled beaks, like albatross or taiko, the petrel that lays only one egg a year but can live up to forty.

Above me was the shark. The newspapers often wrote about the shark. Its skin is a layer of peeling verdigried material, and it eternally faces the sea with its mouth braced open to show off its teeth. The local journalists are fond of using the shark as a kind of gauge with which to measure other events around town, saying things such as But will the Shark respond? or But does it get the thumbs up from the Shark? Or more offhand: Go tell it to the Shark.

The shark has one large eye hewn into its head, an eye as large as a plate, and with this eye it had witnessed me rolling down the bridge stairs like a drunk. I rubbed my ankle. It seemed I was blind only when I had my eyes open.

The next weekend I tried my false blindness out at home. Unable to find my cat in the garden with my eyes open, I decided to search for her with my eyes shut.

The first thing I felt I should do was to get down on my hands and knees in the grass. This would enable me to feel my way and also put me on the same level as the cat. It felt good, being down among the weeds and dandelions and the strong ripe smell of the soil. Wearing nothing but my nightie, I advanced on all fours into the undergrowth. Miaow, miaow, I said. Miaow, miaow. I could hear birds up above me. A helicopter flew overhead, its shadow a flicker that momentarily blotted out the light.

I was down in the dock and paspalum, the wandering willie and buttercups, oxalis and yellow nettle. I could feel dead leaves, and the soil under the leaves was moist, it smelt rich, my pink nylon nightie was getting dirty. Miaow, miaow. I was down on the forest floor weaving my way through the deep green light, above me the wind sighed through the leaves of the apple tree and the climbing banksia roses. I could smell the roses and lemon balm. I kept going. It was darker. Miaow, miaow. I was fine without my sight. Now I could smell the sweet rotting scent of kitchen waste and knew I must be near the black compost bin that was kept tucked in the darkest corner of the garden.

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Miaow, miaow. My mews were more gutteral. I was seized with a desire to roll in the leaf decay and wet earth, to feel the heavens curving above me. I wanted to get that smell in my hair and all over my body, but then I heard strange noises behind me. My whole body froze. Something was approaching from the side entrance into the garden, and it was far too big to be my cat. Someone was laughing at me.

'What on earth are you doing with your bum sticking out of that daisy bush?' It was my friend, Euphemia. I recognised her laugh.

'I am blind,' I said.

'Look at your nightie, you're covered with nature shit,' she told me.

'Miaow, miaow,' I said. (My cat still hadn't turned up.) I was forced to open my eyes. The rush of light hurt my irises. I sat back on my haunches; Euphemia towered over me. Around her the colours of the garden were lush and vibrating. A bee as large as my nose glided past.

'I am being blind,' I told Euphemia. 'When I have my eyes shut I seem to see more than when I have them open.'

'That's because you're in the bloody buggery blind tank, my girl,' said Euphemia. 'Look at the mess you're in. Look at your clothes, your hands, your knees. You want to pull up your socks.'

'I'm not wearing socks,' I said. 'I'm only wearing a nightie.'

'When you're in the blind tank you refuse to see out.'

'So how am I supposed to know that I'm in it?' I asked.

'You know because I'm telling you, and I know because I've been watching you, my girl,' said Euphemia. 'You can't let the downs get to you. You have to get on top of it.'

I knew Euphemia was talking about what had happened with my mother but I wanted to tell her she sounded more like a sex manual, or even a guide to gymnastics.

My mother had been staying with me. She had come on the bus all the way from her pink slate tiled house in another town where she lived by herself. She was old.

When I took her a cup of tea in the morning and knocked on the door of my spare room, she never answered. When I knocked again page 115 she still didn't answer. I opened the door and she was lying there in the bed with her back facing me. Her dressing gown was hung at the end of the bed and her slippers were placed, one, two, next to each other. So precise, so accurate, it was an irritating habit I was glad I had not inherited, this ability of hers to be neat, to plan, and to organise to the ninth degree.

When I approached the bed she still didn't move. I felt trepidation. She was old, after all. My brothers and I had discussed these things at a family meeting last Christmas in a revolting Italian restaurant that my eldest brother had chosen. We had drunk cheap red wine until it had totally gone to our heads and then finally we had been able to talk about the possibility of our mother dying.

I reached the bed and touched my mother's body. She still had not moved. She felt cold, so cold. You never normally think about all those tiny subtle movements of the body and how beautiful they are. The richness, the generosity, the downright opulence that is held in the warm moving body of a human.

I walked slowly around the bed to the other side. Her eyes were shut. I cannot say her name when I think about it. To me she was always more, she was a symbol, like the Japanese kanji character for mother. I had never seen a dead body before. I noticed I still had the hot cup of tea in my hand.

I sat down next to the bed and drank it. It wasn't as hot as I had imagined it would be. It wasn't hot enough. I remembered my mother explaining to me why my tea was always cold. She said it was because I never warmed the cup. Cold cup, cold tea. When she made it she poured some hot water from the kettle into the cup first, left it for a minute, poured it out, and then filled it with tea. Hot cup, hot tea.

When I remembered that I began to cry in strange dry rasps. I was angry that she had left me in this way, in my own house, under my own roof, leaving me sitting remembering stupid blankety blank facts about making hot tea. And instead of seeing her arrival and consequent death here in my spare bed as a politeness, a kindness to me, I took the death as a slur on my house, an impropriety, an embarrassment. I had always felt she would do something like this. And there would be no one again who would ever make tea as page 116 scalding as my mother. It didn't matter that I hated drinking tea that way, because I realised now that when death comes there is a need for a good strong cup.

After Euphemia left my garden I thought about the Blind Tank. I imagined one of those flotation tanks they have in health clinics. You are shut inside the tank, which is then floating in water (inside another tank). They say it takes you back to the womb.

The lights are dimmed so you cannot see out, and so you are not aware of being in a tank. But then I reasoned that you would not really want to be able to see everything, because if you did then you would know that you were in the bloody buggery Blind Tank.