What Stands in the Blind Half

By the fourth day I had stopped pretending I was only minding a generator, and started keeping notes the way I used to keep them in theatre, in a small spiral pad with the date underlined and nothing in the entries that I could not have read aloud to a consultant without my voice shaking. That was the trick of it. If I wrote it like a nurse, it stayed a thing that happened to a patient. If I wrote it like a woman alone on a rock, it became a thing that was happening to me. So I wrote it like a nurse.

08:40. Cellar bulb dead again. Replaced (third). Holds when lit by hand at the fitting. Fails within the minute once I withdraw. No fault traceable to wiring (continuity good on the meter). Note: torch beam still terminates approx halfway down stair. Beam edge sharp, not diffuse. The lower steps are not there to the eye.

I read that last line back twice. The lower steps are not there to the eye. That was the closest I let myself come, in the pad, to the truth, which was that the dark in the cellar did not behave like the absence of light. It behaved like a thing. Light is supposed to lose itself by inches as it travels, to thin and grey and give up gradually, and the dark is supposed to be only what is left when it has gone. But the dark down those steps had an edge to it, a clean wet edge, the way the sea has an edge against the air, and my torch beam stopped at that edge the way your hand stops at the surface of a full bath, and I did not put my hand past it, and told myself that was good sense, on wet stone, in a strange house, with one eye.

That was the other thing I was keeping notes on, though I did not write that part down. I was keeping notes on how it used my eye. I should say it plainly, the way I would to a frightened patient, because saying it plainly is the only weapon I have ever had against the dark. I have one good eye. The right one shows me a soft grey nothing in the centre of its field, a patch the size of a thumbnail held at arm's length, where eight years ago my retina lifted away from the back of itself like wallpaper off a damp wall and took the picture with it. It is not black, people think it is black and it is not, it is the colour of no information, the colour your hand would be if you tried to see it through the back of your own skull. I have never once been afraid of it. It is mine. I have carried it across nineteen years of operating lists and around a flat full of lamps, and it has never been anything but a small dull patch of nowhere riding in the middle of my own looking.

On Maren Skerry it stopped being nowhere. It started small, the way the retina went small at the beginning, a curtain you tell yourself is tiredness. I would be doing something with both hands and the light good, refilling the hurricane lamp with the kitchen blazing, and I would become aware, in the patch, that there was something in it. Not a shape. The patch cannot make shapes, it has no cells left to make them with, that is the entire point of it. But awareness does not live only in the cells. You can know a person has come into a bright room behind you without turning. You can feel the held quality of a space that has someone in it. And I began to feel that held quality sitting precisely in the dead centre of my right eye, where I could not turn to check it, because to turn my head to put a thing in my good eye is to take it out of the bad one, and the held quality always went out of the bad eye the instant the good eye swung toward where it had been.

The clinical word is unhelpful here but I clung to it anyway. Scotopic. The eye in the dark, rod cells only, no colour, no detail, a starved instrument inventing pattern out of grain the way a radio between stations invents voices out of hiss. I had explained it a hundred times to patients waking in a dim ward, terrified by the shapes crowding their new sight. Your eye is hungry, I would say, and a hungry eye makes things up, it is your own machinery and not the room. I said it to myself now, out loud, in the empty kitchen. Your eye is hungry, Imani. That is all.

My own machinery did not stop.

By the fifth night I had worked out the rule, and I am a great one for rules, I come from a woman who had a rule for every bulb in the house. It never came where my light fell. Wherever the torch landed it was simply an empty cold room, wet stone and the smell of paraffin and weed and the long grind of the sea coming up through the floor. It waited at the edge. At the exact line where the lamplight gave out and the room's own dark began, that was where the held quality stood, and it stood there the way a person stands just outside the open door of a lit room at night, in the hall, not coming in, only there, and you go on with your reading and you do not look up, because if you look up there will be no one in the hall and you will feel mad, and if you do not look up there will go on being someone in the hall and you will feel watched, and there is no third option, ask any child.

And it moved when I blinked. I tested it. God forgive me, the nurse in me tested it, because data is the railing you hold when the stairs are dark. I sat in the watch room with the hurricane lamp throwing its soft ring of light, the dark standing all round at the edge of the ring, and I held my good eye open and counted the dark, where it lay, how far back, and it lay where it lay and did not stir. Then I blinked, one ordinary blink, a fortieth of a second of my own eyelid, the smallest darkness there is, the darkness we all live inside thousands of times a day and never notice. And in that fortieth of a second the ring of dark came in. Not far. The width of a hand. Then it held still again, innocent, as if it had always been there, as if I had measured wrong the first time.

I blinked again. It came in again.

I stopped blinking. That is a thing you cannot do for long, hold your own eye open against its own nature, the lid wants to fall, the eye dries and burns and floods and you blink, you always blink, the body insists, and that, I understood sitting there with my eye streaming, was the whole of it. The dark only needed the gaps I could not help giving it. It only needed the dark I carried inside my own blinking. It had nothing but time and I had a body that had to close its eyes, and between those two facts there was no contest at all.

It was the sixth night that it stood in the cellar doorway.

I had gone down to fetch the spare paraffin from the scullery, lamp in hand, and I had to pass the cellar door, which I kept shut now, which I had taken to passing the way you pass a kennel with something in it, quick and to the far side and not looking. The door was shut. I am certain the door was shut. But as I came level with it, in the swing of the lamp, in the corner of my looking where the good eye trails off and the bad eye begins, in that smeared border country between the half I trust and the half that is gone, the doorway was open and there was a child standing in it.

The feeling came first, before the thought, the way it always does, the way I had taught a thousand patients it would. A cold ran up the backs of my legs and into my belly and my whole skin tightened at once, every hair lifting, my scalp crawling backward off my skull. My breath stopped without my stopping it. The lamp jumped because my hand jumped, a hard involuntary jerk that sent the light slewing across the wall, and only then, a half second behind my body, did the thought arrive, small and stupid and useless, a child, there is a child.

She was Esther's height. That was what the bad half gave me, height and outline and stillness, a small upright dark standing in a darker doorway, the exact size my sister had been the last night I had a sister, nine years old in a nightdress on the second step. She did not move. I did not, the bad eye cannot, see her face. But I knew the set of her, the way you know the set of someone you grew inside the same body as, and the knowing did not come through the eye at all, it came up through the floor and through the years, and I turned my head to put her in my good eye. You always turn toward the thing you love. That is the cruelty of it. The one eye I trust is the one eye I had to take off her to look at her.

The door was shut, paint scarred, the iron latch down, exactly as I keep it, and there was no child and there was no open dark, only the closed door and the lamp shaking in my hand and my breath coming back ragged and loud, and I stood in the passage and said, out loud, in the calm ward voice that had gone now to pieces, your eye is hungry, that is all, it is your own machinery, and I did not believe it for the first time, and the not believing was worse than anything I had felt yet, because the rational railing had been the only thing between me and the long fall, and my hand had come off it.

I did not sleep that night either. I sat in the kitchen with every light I had going and the curtainless window black against the brightness and Eorsay's lit houses far off across the water, and I watched the automated beacon throw its cold flat sweep over the rock every ten seconds, lighting nothing, only proving the dark in the gaps, and somewhere past three, the part of the night my mother called the outer dark, the wind dropped all at once the way it does out there, and the sea went from a roar to a long slow breathing, and into the new quiet, faint, from under the floor, from the cellar where the light has never reached, came two notes of a tune.

I knew the tune before I knew I was humming it. It was the song. The one my mother taught us for the dark, the little circling thing she made us sing on the landing when the power went, hands held, do not stop singing, the dark cannot come where there is singing, sing, girls, sing. I had built my whole life as a wall against this exact sound. And here it came up through the granite in a child's high clear voice, unhurried, going round and round the way it always went, and between the verses the voice stopped and asked, conversational, gentle, the way you would ask anyone, is that a light. A pause. Are you coming.

I should have run. I knew I should run, every cell I had was a child screaming at me to put my back to a wall and not move till the sun came, I had spent thirty-five years arranging never to be anywhere near a moment like this one. And I did not run. I went to the top of the cellar stair with the lamp, and held it out over the edge of the dark that my light could not get past, and I did the thing I had done once before, at this same door, with the scratched wall still developing behind my eyes, and had promised myself never to do again.

I called her name down into the dark.

Esther, I said.

The singing stopped.

The quiet that came after it was not the quiet of a room with no one in it. I have stood in a great many empty rooms. This was the quiet of something that has heard its name and is deciding, and the lamp trembled and threw its useless ring of light down onto the upper steps and got no further, and out of the dark below the edge, up over the lip of where my light gave out and into the very rim of it, came a hand.

A child's hand. Pale, small, the fingers slightly curled, the soft creases of a nine-year-old's palm turning slowly up to the light, opening, lifting toward me out of the black, palm up, waiting, the way a hand waits on a stair in the dark to be held.