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blind before, and I’m lost on the protocol. I’m gonna say the wrong thing every so often, and you’re just gonna have to swallow it. I try to take people at face value, and give them as much rope as I can. Don’t like it when people stereotype me, and so I try not to do it back. If I fall for the blind stereotypes, you can pick me up on it, and I’ll learn where I can go and where I can’t. And if you read me wrongly, I’ll sure as hell come down on you like a ton of I bricks.
    ‘You know more about blind people than me, you know what it feels like to be blind, and I can only guess at it. But I know more about my own game than you do. I know that if someone is following someone else around, II then they usually have a good motive for it, and it’s my job' to discover what that motive is.
    ‘I wasn’t suggesting that a blind man was stalking you. But you might have upset a blind man and his friend who; has perfectly good eyesight. Whatever. I don’t have answers at the moment. At this stage we have to take all possibilities into consideration. Then we start eliminating them until there’s only one left. You wanna play or not?’
    While he had been talking Angeles had moved back to the table and poured herself more coffee. Now she held the thermos out to him, and he came to her and took it. She listened as he trickled coffee into his cup. ‘Is there * enough?’ she asked.
    ‘I think you know exactly how much there is.’
    ‘I was being polite.’
    ‘You wanna play or not?’
    ‘What if I call you Mr T?’
    ‘That kind of thing makes me militant.’
    ‘Sam, then. But my name is Angeles. If you shorten it, I’ll spit.’
    ‘Deal.’
    She didn’t answer. She felt him move away from her, back to the desk where the computer was still humming away to itself. He was fascinated and frightened by Braille. He knew it was saying something, but he’d never know what it was.
    ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘A couple of other things. You drink spirits during the day, you’re gonna end up in trouble.
    And don’t feel like you have to apologize. I’m used to people insulting me.’
     
    Nice house. Everything neat in there. Nothing out of place. Sam made a pot of tea in the kitchen. Checked to see he’d put everything back exactly where he found it. Went outside to have a look at the swimming pool, wondered if it was heated. You kidding? This is England. Remembered to lock the back door again when he came inside.
    Upstairs was the same. Everything in its place. There was nothing thrown on the floor. Not one single object.
    The carpets didn’t show it, but it felt as though there should have been tracks worn into them, along the regular routes she took. If she hadn’t been blind and lived in that place, you would have thought she was obsessive. But maybe she was obsessive, could be that was what blindness did to you.
    He stopped himself there.
    OK, leave aside the stereotyping. Blind people are just people who’re blind. Some of them’ll be obsessives, but there’ll be scatterbrains among them as well. Some blind people probably live in houses where they can’t find anything, their clothes are all over the floor, every time they get out of the chair they fall over and break a bone. When they go outside they get lamp-posts running into them, post-boxes; and dogs and cats and street kids get tangled in their legs.
    And some of them’ll drink.
    This is a woman who looks good. She makes no secret °f the fact that she finds him attractive. Ignore the deep irony there; just let it go past. She’s into some kind of militant wing of freedom and independence for the World’s unsighted, tinged with feminism. She is completely blind at night, and during the day she can see shadows in a blinding snowstorm. She’s capable of losing her cool and spitting like a snake. She wears high-fashion gear, expensive threads, which would suggest taste as well as money, except this afternoon she is wearing a bra with false 1 nipples.