✲

Beneath the date, Tuesday, 23 May 2017, the poster had said 5 p.m. But people were already coming through the door shortly after four o’clock, enquiring whether they were in the right place. ‘The Woolley Building,’ they said, ‘lecture theatre N395,’ they said, as though it were some sort of a riddle.

‘Just here,’ the event organiser said, pointing at a door crowned by a red-brick arch. ‘But you’ll have to come back in a bit. We’re not open yet.’ Maybe watches running fast, he thought as he showed them back out. If any students still wear watches. Or perhaps they were regulars come to claim the best seats. He hadn’t been with the University of Sydney long enough to recognise them if they were.

While he was wondering about this, another person had arrived. A blind student with short-cropped hair who followed his cane towards the brick arch. ‘We’re not open yet,’ the organiser called out hastily. G’day, he was about to say to him then, to offset the sharpness, before checking himself. It wasn’t a him. The hair, he thought. That would be the hair’s doing. Then he almost said to the student, You right there?, imagining her lost. But of course she was not lost. Not at all.

‘Les Murray,’ she said. ‘I’m here for the reading.’ He led her along the white-painted corridor and deposited her on a bench. The same bench to which, some minutes later, he escorted the poet. The old knees playing him up, apparently. All the way down from Bunyah. But at least he had got down here in one piece and that was the main thing. The student and the poet started talking and he left them to their discussion.

More people wanted to enter now, angling to break in on the conversation with the student. Staff from the English and Lit departments, going by their shoes and jackets. Their classes, too, with the poet’s books, quite a few of them read ragged.

Not a bad turnout for a poet. Not shabby at all.

At ten to the organiser opened the door.

The blind student got up and the poet gave her an arm into the hall.

✲

‘So,’ said Bruce. His voice was smiling. ‘How was it?’

He and Amanda were sitting in the kitchen of his apartment, at coffee o’clock (late morning, to me or you). The mugs on the table warmed their hands, and she heard him push her favourite chocolate biscuits towards her.

Bruce wasn’t just her partner, he was her, well, most other things. He had become her memory for appointments, and class deadlines too, occasionally her alarm call on the mornings she overslept, always her assignments’ first reader (after the computer program which read aloud every word as she typed). He read her work in Braille, sometimes putting an apologetic finger on a typo – the fault of the word processor far more often than Amanda.

They had met on an Internet mailing list for the blind, back when Internet mailing lists were a thing.

‘Yummy,’ she said. ‘The biscuit, I mean.’

She was still pinching herself. Murray’s reading had very nearly passed her by. She had learned about it by chance thanks to a last-minute email. Afterwards she had returned to her flat quite a lot later than planned. It had taken her half this morning – like every morning since the concussion – simply to collect her thoughts – to piece together who she was, where she had been, what she had been doing, and with whom. Half-hour by half-hour, with mounting excitement and disbelief, it had all come back to her. The sheer luck and joy and delight of it.

She was getting round now to telling him what, not an hour earlier, she had told herself, ‘I met Les! Oh, you should have been there, Bruce, you should have heard him.’

When she was dropped at the place – it was on the campus of the poet’s alma mater – someone had directed her to a bench, and whom had she found waiting to go inside but Murray himself. No, hang on, he had joined her on the bench. That was it. She had heard his voice nearing as it spoke to the same someone. Felt the bench absorb a second weight. The two of them, Amanda and the poet, side by side.

She was speaking more rapidly than usual. Excitement had that effect on her. Perhaps, as well, because she had plenty to recount.

‘One second,’ said Bruce. ‘You found yourself side by side with the subject of your thesis?’

‘Glad I’m making sense,’ said Amanda.

‘And what did you say to him?’

‘Well, hi, for starters.’

She hadn’t felt tongue-tied in his presence. She’d been so forward as to introduce herself. Listened to herself telling him about the thesis, not as straightforwardly as she might have hoped – that had been the adrenaline talking. Aspects of autistic thought are especially conducive to creativity, she’d said, notably literary creation. Inventing and playing with words; speaking – or writing – at length on a favoured topic; revelling in rhyme and the repetition of sounds; listing, arranging, classifying.

A thing she’d always loved about Murray’s poetry was the layers, the rich delineation of his characters’ worlds slowing the pace of each text, inviting the neurotypical reader to experience all the fine detail and resulting sparks of idea and memory that autistic perception provides. She had in mind his emu poem, as she called it, the poet’s ode to an emu. In this work, which she’d spend many pages of her thesis analysing, the curious, omnivorous, remarkable bird becomes autism’s defiant emblem.

Early days, she’d said, though her project already had a title: ‘Never Towing a Line: Les Murray, Autism and Australian Literature’.

When she’d finished speaking, he’d made a low guttural sound in his throat. The sound had been warm, encouraging, conspiratorial. This young woman’s going to get a lot of academics’ backs up, the sound had said, and good for her. He’d said nothing else just then. He hadn’t needed to.

Bruce was about to ask if he had been the same in person as he was on the page. But he did not get the sentence out before she said definitely, he was, is.

‘Call it an autistic energy,’ she said. The same watchfulness that she found in his poems; the same restraint. Wanting to reach out, but doubting it’ll be worth his effort, since his effort would need to be so much greater than most other people’s. She knew the feeling only too well.

How long had she had the poet to herself? A quarter of an hour, it would have been. An opening exchange between them and then … She tried to remember precisely. And then. And then, something like a crackle. A faint crackle around Murray, like static, telling her he required a moment to himself, the peace of this little corridor. Not that she had minded. Amanda, who was versed in sharing silences, leaned back and obliged.

She was not, in ordinary circumstances, much of a talker herself. She recalled all the years she had spent with her brother, blind from birth as she was, but also non-speaking. His silence had never been oppressive, but accommodating. She had always felt at home with him.

And anyway, you couldn’t expect to get much more out of Murray just then, she thought, not before the reading. Not a question of nerves; it wasn’t that, more an adjustment. A moment to absent himself from the proceedings, retreat into a corner of his mind and return readied. Amanda could detect the difference when the crackle left him. He was present again. Serene. They were minutes now from going in and the reading starting.

Amanda let another minute pass and then she said quietly, ‘It’s always been my experience that what we do with our minds, we do with our whole bodies.’

Murray said, ‘Definitely.’

‘I almost forgot,’ she said to Bruce. ‘Someone took a photo of me with Les. I heard a click and felt the flash. Lucky thing I’d dressed up for the occasion.’

She had heard people advise sitting absolutely still for photos, even stiller than she would have been sitting then, or else smiling to show all your teeth, or perhaps both at the same time. She had also heard it said to stay natural and to be yourself, whatever that was supposed to mean. The somewhat peevish tone in which all this advice had been given out had made her think that photography must be something particularly complicated, capricious, even treacherous.

She wondered what it was the photographer had thought to record of them in that moment. Something for the snapper to show later to family and friends, a souvenir of the evening. A ‘sweet picture’ as it might be called, of two peas in a pod, two originals.

The companionable silence between them had continued for another splendid minute or two. It had been broken only by the new arrivals, eager for the poet to sign their books. ‘To Peter, please, Les.’ ‘For Susan, happy retirement.’

Suddenly, the poet was getting up.

‘May I?’ Murray had said to her.

She said he might.

Take her arm, and lead her in towards her seat.

✲

Something else, after thinking of her brother, had surfaced in Amanda. Another scene from her childhood.

Nippy out. The wind, when it blows hard, as cold as could be. Brittle, crackling leaves carpet the ground. They crunch underfoot. Towards the tail end of a Queensland autumn, this would be, late in May.

At that time of year grown men might still go about in shorts, in denial of the cold. To hear them talk you’d think they have only mislaid the summer. They leave out the mozzies when they speak like this, and the heat that made them sweat buckets; the temperatures that drew instant converts to the cool shade of a church.

Amanda doesn’t miss the heat; she never could stand it. Never missed pushing back the fringe of perspiration she grows along her brow. Nor summer’s awful stickiness. All those tacky Christmas beetles that seem to make a beeline – a beetle line – for her.

She is in high school, not long there, but already she knows her way around. It is lunchtime and she is walking through the grounds, and dressed for them in a jumper. She is with her teacher, the rare one who seems to understand her, though he is sighted.

‘Let me have a word with the principal about your books,’ he says. He is considerate that way. Her textbooks in Braille are strewn with misprints, she has discovered, or else impart information that is long out of date.

They are passing by the outdoor swimming pool, which has lately been drained and cleaned for repairs.