Read The Blind Eye for Free Online

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    It was Pearl who had told him that the house was on the sea front. Finding the pub empty when he woke, he had gone to her in search of food. The chips he had bought were so stale as to be inedible, and as he scattered them to the gulls, he noted the dilapidation of each place he passed and braced himself for what he would find.
    From the gate, he could see a caravan with ‘Tricia’s Treasures’ painted on the side, the house beyond slowlycrumbling into the garden, the caravan itself leaning lopsided into a ravine. He could only presume that someone had squatted there, and he struggled to push the gate open, the pathway beyond almost completely overgrown, the weeds sticking to his calves as he made his way towards it. When he peered through the ruffled daisy curtains, he saw clothes still hanging on the racks, sheets on the bed, dishes in the sink, all coated with fine yellow dirt. The cactus garden that bordered the track to the house was overrun with prickly pear. Tiny bleached bones that looked like they belonged to rats or feral cats crunched beneath his feet as he hastened away, past the unused well now choked with brambles, and up to the deserted building beyond. His mother’s house.
    There was a bath. It was out the back in the open air, and over one end was draped a flannel. It looked as though it had just been used, as though the person who lived there had just gone, wanting only to get out of the place, not caring what was left behind, and for one moment Silas wondered whether he was, in fact, intruding.
    Suddenly uneasy, he ran back down the path, over the bones, the gate falling off its hinges as he opened it, the rust staining his hands, his breath short as he stumbled onto the emptiness of the road.
    He had no idea why he had come to this place. He sat in the gutter and wondered at the strangeness of owning ahouse that meant nothing to him. It must have been where his mother had gone for holidays when she was young. He could not imagine her as a child; he could only see her as his mother, always adoring, always in a slightly inebriated haze, the ash from her cigarette crumbling into her drink as she pressed him close and recounted his latest antics to whoever happened to be there for lunch.
    It was his father who had done the deal, selling off the station and all its holdings shortly after his grandfather’s death. Somehow this place must have slipped through the net. He looked back at it. This was to have been his project. That’s what Silas had told his friends, and he had painted a picture of a rambling seaside home where they could all come and stay, anyone, anytime.
    I, too, saw the house and I smiled to myself as I remembered how Silas had recounted picking himself up from the gutter, wiping the grit from his hands, determined to convince himself that it was not impossible, no, not impossible at all.
    What a place
, Silas told Pearl, standing by the cool of the refrigerator.
    Not the way it always was
, and she shook her head as she peered at him through her thick glasses, taking his measure, up and down, with an unfaltering stare.
    But not completely irretrievable
.
    She just grunted in reply.
    Crossing the road in front of her shop, he saw Mick at the entrance to the garage.
I’m Silas
, he said, trying not to step on the tools that littered the floor of the workshop.
    They clasped hands, awkwardly, and he could see the question – Silas, what kind of a fuckin’ name is that? – there on Mick’s face.
    Stayin’ a while?
    Think so
, he told Mick, as he would tell evervone who asked.
    He could hear his own footsteps as he walked the streets, peering into empty buildings, trying to see through the gap in the curtains, the rip in the blind, fascinated by the extent of the desertion, and he began to walk a little faster, down towards the jetty, not wanting to admit that he felt strangely vulnerable by himself, as though he were being watched. It might have been that car he had seen on the