Blind

For the past seven days I have not been able to see. Something got stuck in my left eye, some sort of dirt-piece, a bit of dust, or a grain of sand, or a smidgin of stray mitochondrial DNA, or, quite likely, a snippet of random toenail. Either way, the upshot of it was that by nighttime seven days ago my eye was bloodhot, swollen, almost squashed shut, and pissing forth liberally with fluid, presumably tear-water. I couldn’t open the eye, looking at any light source bigger than a lit match was excruciating and impossible, and I was in agony. It was like someone stabbing needles in it.

So the day after it happened I spent the whole day inside the house, sitting in the dark,  wearing sunnies on my face and a towel over my head to block out the light. I pulled any and all blinds I could find, squeezed my eyes shut and whiled away seven hours straight playing music with my eyes closed. I played the bagpipes, the whistle, the banjo, the mandolin and the guitar, comprehensively pissing off all the neighbours and clearing out the street of any lifeforms except the old blind and mangy dog from across the road, who, in addition to being grey, arthritic and worn-out is also, so it would seem, as deaf as a doorpost.

I went through my entire repertoire of popular and, in the case of the neighbours, unpopular music. I played marches, strathspeys and reels on the pipes, jigs, slip jigs and polkas on the banjo and the mandolin, and on the guitar played every single well known and famous as well as every obscure and unheard of song Stevie Wonder ever put out in his entire life, right from when he was an 11 year old boy wonder playing the harmonica to his most recent release a few years ago. I covered eternal masterpieces such as Uptired, Superstitchup, You Are The Sunshite Of My Life, Isn’t Shit Lovely, Master Blarseter Jamming, Sir Dupe (featuring the immortal lyrics “music is a world within itself, with a language no one understands”) and the smash hit “I Just Call To Say I Hate You”, an old busking favourite of mine. I had a quiet relaxing interlude and a welcome break from the exigencies of a Performing Arsetist when I got to the song “Ebony And Ivory”, and, only barely managing, in the nick of time, to crawl to the dunny with shaking legs, knocking knees, cold sweat and rattling teeth, enjoyed a quiet, private and deeply satisfying bout of violent projectile vomiting. It always does that to me, that song. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, shoved my head deeper into the dunny bowl and flushed the contents of the cistern over my head. Aaaaah. They just don’t write them like that anymore, do they. Those were the days. Music nowadays just can’t hold a torch to timeless classics like that.

Having thus thoroughly refreshed myself and reinvigorated my take on The Music Of The World I returned back to my perch in the darkness, picked up my guitar again, closed my eyes behind my sunnies of the deepest darkest black again, tilted my chin back, shook my head erratically to and fro to a beat unheard and unperceivable by anyone but myself, and launched myself with gusto into Happy Burpday To You, a celebration of indigestion, stomach cramps, gluttony and heartburn the world over.

It was at that precise moment that my partner came home.

Her name is Fiona. She is Scottish, violent and alcoholic, and on her father’s side distantly related to Shrek. At night she turns green.

She stomps up the outside stairs.

‘Galoompff galoompff galoompff.’

The windows rattle and the glass of the door shakes dangerously.

She steps through the door and slams it shut behind her.

‘Bang.’

On the opposite wall a picture of her mother at her wedding to her fifteenth husband wobbles on its rusty nail, falls of the wall and shatters on the ground in a thousand pieces. Toxic black smoke slowly coils up from the shards of glass and pieces of shredded photograph on the ground. It momentarily takes on, a trick of the light on my unseeing eyes surely, the shape of a taipan with fangs bared, then with a hissing sound strings itself out into a thin wisp of venomous nothingness and disappears. Overhead three redback spiders, a funnelweb and a wolfspider drop dead out of their webs.

She strides over to the table, and with one wide fell sweep of her arm clears it of all the cosy acoutrements of our domestic happiness: three empty wine bottles, an empty glass, five dirty dinner plates with attendant crockery, half a dead kangaroo and a laptop. They smash on the ground in a pleasing cacophony of crunching glass, breaking bone and disintegrating silicon. I shrug stoically and philosophically. It was all hers.

She lowers herself down into her chair, a gigantic throne-shaped structure made of marble, basalt and reinforced concrete, with the words “Da Kween” engraved in goldplate lettering across the top of the back of it. She plonks her arse down into it with a sound of tectonic plates shifting quietly on the other side of the planet. The house tilts sideways and three of the western stumps sink a couple of inches deeper into the sand on which the house was wisely built.

She glares at me and gnashes her teeth. A thin rivulet of blood runs out of the left corner of her mouth. I stare back from the vacant surfaces of the black lenses of my sunnies. Then twist my head 90 degrees when I realise I’ve been looking in the wrong direction.

‘Right!!!’, she snarls, and reaches deep down into her handbag, a place where last were seen disappearing into unknown depths and cavities filled with unspeakable horror were five members of the SES on a search and rescue mission, two complete firetrucks with crews, and a barefoot Aussie Rules football team from Arnhem Land.

She pulls out of the hideous crevasses of her bag a bottle of red wine and slams it down on the table between us.

‘Bang!’. Cracks appear in the table top and spider off into five directions.

She leans forwards and fixes me with a menacing death-glare.

‘Right’, she says again. Then looks me square into the sunnies and says:

‘Let’s get blind.’

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.