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.
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.