She asks about the pool: would it not be interesting to go in while it is empty, but full of sound, and the teacher says he has never thought of that – a pool of sound – but it could be arranged.

He never says her thoughts are odd or weird or batty, as others do.

A day or two – that is all the time he needs to make the arrangements. The key to the pool gate turns once, twice, and he lets her in.

The pool steps bring her down into a long wide space that goes on and on in a rectangle. A compact volume of air has replaced the buoyant water and she ventures into the sound waves, leaning against a wall as the floor slopes towards the deep end. She advances slowly, because of the slope, and she prefers to take her time, anyway, to explore. The wall, her hand notices, has an agreeable give to it, the surface both firm and springy. These walls grow with every step she takes – where she is standing, the absent water would already be shoulder-high.

‘How are you going down there?’ asks the teacher, standing poolside.

‘Good,’ she says. She listens around her, not to the litter of leaves but to the falling notes her heels make, and the further down she goes the more the air seems to thicken as the walls exhale a smell of chlorine. When she reaches the deep end and hears her muffled steps come to a halt, an eddy of indecision catches her leg, but she shakes it free. She is more curious about the pool than she is anxious of slipping on its floor, so she lets go of the wall now and crosses every would-be lane.

She will get herself out of breath walking widths, and then lengths.

The teacher is patient and lets her be.

✲

Minutes after meeting the poet, there she sat in the first row, the deep end of a packed lecture theatre. The closed door refusing admission to draughts. Murray, who had taken his place at the carpeted front, was holding his book close to his mouth as he read aloud, the words softening as they passed through the pages. At that moment, everyone was listening to ‘It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen’.

‘Sounds familiar,’ said Bruce in his kitchen.

He was back up at the coffee machine for a refill. Such an intriguing title for a poem, one closest to Amanda’s heart. Murray, the autistic father, paying homage to his teenage autistic son. (The son would have to be in his forties by now.) Bruce listened now as Amanda recited it from her Braille notes. As she read the lines in which the father admires his son’s progress, and the son, contemplating the future, says, I gotta get smart, Bruce thought he heard her voice quiver. That closing line, she said afterwards, her voice recovered and gently self-mocking. It never failed to get her.

It moved her in the hall too, the night before, though she had heard it more times than she could dare to count. Around a year ago she had tracked down a recording of Murray on stage in Paris and in it he recites this very poem – all four minutes and four seconds of it (counting the six seconds of applause before the video cuts out). She caught herself comparing the two versions, the recording she knew so well and this live reading, while she listened. She was pleased with what she heard and not surprised. The Murrays were the same in Paris as in front of her, putting on the same accents – now the father’s, now the son’s – and accentuating the same words. So that the differences, subtle as they were, in timing and in intonation, produced in her a thicker, richer, layered sound.

The acoustics in the hall were as good as she could have hoped for. From where she sat, Murray’s voice came over loud and close and warm. After listening to every poem, as the poet paged through his book, or helped himself to a glass of water, Amanda let her ears travel the hall, hearing how high the ceiling rose and how far up behind her the rest of the audience’s seats climbed. Along the wall that ran parallel to the street, she could pick out pairs of curtains, heavy and long and there, she surmised, to keep in the heat and keep out the gaze of any passers-by.

Creak, creak, creak went the hall’s rows of wooden seats – sounding their age – as the occupants shifted their weight between poems.

But whenever Murray cleared his throat and began again, she never took her ears off him.

He would read eleven poems that evening – Amanda tapped the title of each in turn on her Braille note-taker; she couldn’t trust her short-term memory with them, or with much else, for that matter.

✲

Long gone was the woman who had flown regularly on her own as far as San Francisco (the conference hotel’s rooms, she remembered, had all been numbered in Braille), the woman who thought of everything, who never had enough hours in a day. Two years on, the side-effects of her concussion still lingered. Probably they were permanent. Doctors could not fully explain it, but then again all her life there’d been plenty about her that doctors could not explain. She found that rather reassuring.

And the effects had not been all bad. There was something to be said for letting go. When she thought of her life now it was without any weight of expectation, and she knew to make the most of every instant. Just to take a taxi out and feel herself in motion. To leave herself in chance’s charge for an hour or more. Just to sit in a lecture hall, all ears, taking each line of poetry as it came.

Her flying days were over, but this did not mean that the world could not come to her. The suburbs of Brisbane, where her parents still lived, sometimes came to her. And now, on this surprise visit, the poet’s rural Bunyah. The Bunyah of bush and paddocks and cattle tracks.

When Amanda began at WSU, her professor had read to the class some bush ballads. Not any by Murray but some compulsory Henry Lawson. It was Lawson who would give Amanda the idea for her thesis, though he had died in 1922. Lawson, she learned, had lost his hearing to an ear infection in a boyhood without antibiotics. His deafness, to read Lawson tell it, had driven him into himself and made a writer of him. But this story was little known outside of disability studies; generations of Australians were unaware that the verses they grew up reciting had been composed by a deaf man. It made Amanda wonder which other authors had had their invisible differences erased, smoothed over, ironed out. A whole side of their life’s work silenced. This thought would keep coming back to her, until the day she read Murray and knew at once that she would write about him. Because, in his own way, over forty years, from various angles, he had been writing about her.

An emu’s ‘alert periscope’ and a bat in a cave – to Murray, a ‘tufty, crinkled ear’ – could receive all of her attention; likewise his whales who ‘sing into sight’. Who ‘peer in long low tones … to river-tasting and oil-tasting coasts’. She was moved by a gum tree’s leaves in windy autumn, ‘swapping pace and place in an all-over sway’. As she was by the poet’s admission that his awkward body never danced, save for his hands ‘on bits of paper’.

Naturally it wasn’t all plain reading. Some of the poems had a reputation for being difficult. Certain words might trip up her fingers, cause them to backtrack. Words that were never meant for her (or so people might think) – Gaelic, Aboriginal, colours. But she remained unperturbed. Foreign words she could check in a dictionary. ‘Feallsanachd’ is philosophy. ‘Gnamma’ is a desert rock hole. ‘Yellow’ – which sounds and spells like something out of a native Australian language – is warm like the sun, she knows. Fluffy and honey-smelling like the golden wattle. Happy – quite a few sighted people say – ‘a happy colour’. Loud, say others – ‘that T-shirt is loud’. Having been raised by sighted parents, in a sighted society, Amanda has absorbed all this and more. Absorbed that ripe – but not unripe or overripe – bananas come in the same colour – unlike apples. That mixing yellow paint and blue makes green. That the night confers nearinvisibility on black cats. That colours in poems can be read in multiple ways.

✲

So many marvellous lines the poet recited that evening in the hall, alternately moving and slyly humorous, inviting tears, then laughter, and answered with each.

A bittersweet nostalgia was conveyed in the lines Murray recited to close the reading. Sydney in the fifties. The poet as a fresher from the sticks.

‘When Two Percent Were Students’

Gorgeous expansion of life

all day at the university,

then home to be late for meals,

an impractical, unwanted boarder …

She hadn’t planned to stick around once the reading was over. She would make straight for the door, flag down a taxi on the street and get herself home, still full of the poet’s words. But where on earth were all the taxis when you needed one? While she was waiting with arm outstretched, the reading’s organisers and their guest had followed her out and asked her along to dinner.

‘That’s one invitation I can’t refuse,’ she had said, after a moment’s hesitation, doing her best to keep the nerves out of her voice, since she hardly ever stayed out these days. Indeed, it seemed to her like forever since she had last gone and sat in a restaurant.

Not far to go, luckily. Someone had opened the door and she could hear the drinkers and diners inside, their hubbub as echoes of walls, tables and bottles. She fastened her ears on these, the better to navigate the room, as she entered and let the commotion engulf her.

Amanda could tell from the way the voices at her table gave their orders that they were all seasoned restaurant-goers.

She could scarcely distinguish the voices that addressed her. Nor easily reply to anyone. Words disappeared in the general clamour so that you had to lean in and raise your voice to be heard.

The men (they were all men) had made an effort to include the poet. They had repeated themselves. Yelled, ‘Come again?’ when he failed to speak over the restaurant noise. But his gruff voice would not carry, and in a short time the men retreated to their plates, so that the table divided into two groups, two atmospheres: the men on one side, Murray and Amanda on the other. One side shouting talk and the other staying silent. Not a good silence, Amanda felt, or, at least, not one that was altogether comfortable. Not like the silence they had shared just before the reading. She sensed a desire on the poet’s part to speak, now that the reading was over and he had some food inside him. ‘Nice hall for it, I thought, good sound, don’t you reckon?’ she imagined him saying. If only everyone and their raucous cousin in here would let him get a word in edgewise. The place was getting so loud that she could barely hear herself think. Fortunately, that wasn’t her habit, to hear herself think. Rather she felt her thoughts and the words they formed prickle inside her.

He wouldn’t ask her what she had made of the reading. He wouldn’t ask her when he knew already.

When they had put the poet in a taxi, and shouted hoarse farewells, one of the men said to the others, ‘Perhaps he’d’ve rathered gone somewhere less noisy, Les.’

Amanda repeated to Bruce what the man had said about Murray: ‘He looked really crook.’

At first she thought she must have misunderstood, but she heard the others chiming in, saying, ‘Yeah, poor bloke, didn’t look well, did he?’

‘He is getting on. In his seventies.’

‘Put on even more weight.’

But the poems, thought Amanda. The hour’s worth of poems. All those words that opened rooms within rooms within rooms inside you. Words that took your mind in at least five different directions at once.

She wished the men would say, ‘I loved the line about …’ but they said nothing like it.

The longer they had talked, the older and balder and fatter and sicker a man they turned the poet into, the higher she could feel her temper rise.

What had the poet’s old man looks to do with anything? He hadn’t come for a medical, or to rouse anyone’s pity.

‘Poor Les,’ they had said.

‘Poor Les yourself,’ she had felt like saying back.