I climbed on to the parapet, feeling like a swimmer at the beginning of a race. I bent from the waist and stretched my arms out past my ears. Then peered down. A drop of thirty metres, maybe more. I wasn’t tempted. Those thoughts of suicide that Visser had predicted, they’d never be mine. I had to reshape my life, that was all. I would live the way people lived in primitive societies, only the other way round: I’d get up when the sun went down and go to bed when it came up again. I was glad it would be winter soon. What good was daylight to me? No good at all. It was an obstacle, a hindrance — the last thing I needed. I remembered Claudia’s idea — how she wanted to look after me. I imagined her constant presence, her careful ministrations. I shuddered. It would have ruined everything.
‘Martin?’
I jumped.
‘What are you doing, Martin?’
I saw Nurse Janssen standing by the door to the roof.
‘Nothing,’ I called across to her. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’
I straightened up and watched her walk towards me, the wind flattening her thin cotton nightgown against her belly and thighs. Was this another of her routines?
‘Aren’t you cold?’ I said.
‘Don’t worry about me.’ She stepped up on to the parapet and stood beside me, looking out into the darkness.
‘Careful,’ I said. ‘It’s a long way down.’
She laughed, though somewhat breathlessly.
‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘You could fall.’
‘And I suppose you couldn’t?’
I turned to face her. The way she looked just then, I could have kissed her. Her eyes were so dark that I could only see the core of silver in the pupil. Her dark hair, which was usually pinned close to her head in a tight, sexless coil, now hung loose, touching her shoulders lightly, the way willow branches touch the ground. Her face, a little blurred, still held the memory of sleep. I wished I could ask her about the night she walked up to my bed and took off all her clothes. Did she do that kind of thing often? Or was it just for me? (For me, I hoped.) What was the pleasure she derived from it? I remembered how she smiled when I came; not gratified exactly, not merely amused either — a smile that was as enigmatic in its way as that moustache of Visser’s. I had so many questions, but each and every one of them was dangerous. Because they weren’t really questions at all. They were admissions. Confessions. They were keys turning in locks, nails in my coffin.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked her.
‘You know my name.’
‘Your Christian name, I mean.’
‘Maria.’
I smiled. It suited her.
‘Do you think it’s wise,’ she said, ‘coming up here?’
‘Wise?’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’ I stepped down off the parapet and leaned on it. ‘It’s just, I’ve always been a private person. I don’t like crowds.’ The wind had dropped; I wondered how long it was till dawn. ‘It’s hard being on the ward sometimes. All that breathing, people talking in their sleep. I wanted some air.’ I looked up at her. ‘Are you going to report me?’
She thought about it.
‘No,’ she said at last. ‘It can be our little secret.’
I looked at her sharply. Did she suspect? No, I didn’t think so. She was just being light-hearted, conspiratorial.
‘Shall we go back?’ she said.
I took her arm in the correct manner and let her lead me across the roof. I glanced at her as we approached the door.
‘You didn’t think I was going to jump, did you?’
She didn’t answer.
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ I told her. ‘I know the doctor sometimes thinks I’m depressed, but I’m not. Really, I’m not.’
I felt her squeeze my arm. I didn’t think she believed me, though. And how could I convince her without giving anything away? It must have been disturbing, now I thought about it, for her to see me standing on that narrow parapet some thirty metres above the ground.
‘I was only practising,’ I said. ‘You know, getting ready for the world outside.’
‘I just hope it’s ready for you,’ she said, and we both laughed at that, and passed through the doorway, back into the building.
A Friday morning, ten o’clock. The moment had arrived. I could sense the autumn sun against my face as I moved down the clinic steps. There was hardly any warmth in it. It was October now, darkness eating into the day. My time of year.
My cane touched concrete, concrete, then touched gravel. The driveway. And, beyond it, the future. Excitement crackled through the lower layers of my skin. I felt as though I was playing poker and I’d just been dealt a hand that was unbeatable.
At the bottom of the steps, Maria greeted me. We’d grown used to one another, she and I; we’d spent so many hours together. I smiled past her shoulder, drew crisp air into my lungs.
‘The pine trees are smelling particularly good this morning.’
‘Oh, Mr Blom,’ she said, ‘I wish I’d never mentioned them.’
At first it surprised me, this use of my last name. Then I understood. It was actually more intimate, conveying precisely what it appeared to deny; it was like pretending that the night she took her clothes off never happened. I was sure that she was smiling, too. With her arms folded, probably, and one of her feet, the left one, pointing away from her body. I’d often seen her stand like that.
Visser stepped up and shook my hand. He was exhilarated by my progress, he told me, and full of confidence about my rehabilitation. He didn’t think he’d ever seen a recovery quite like it. I told him that I couldn’t have done it without him (not strictly true, of course, but I was building on that old feeling we had, of mutual congratulation and dependency). I thanked him profusely. There was nothing more to say.
I’d called on Visser about a month before and tried to explain what it was that I was experiencing. He listened to my description of the night in the gardens, my subsequent investigations. I admitted that I’d lied to him on a number of occasions. His eyebrows lifted. Lines appeared on his forehead, lines that echoed the venetian blinds behind him. When I finished, Visser didn’t speak. He had his elbows on the table. His chin rested on his hands. I heard air rushing downwards from his nostrils into his moustache. I thought of the way wind moves a field of grass.
At last, he said, ‘I did warn you, didn’t I?’
‘You mean it’s some kind of hallucination?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ Visser shifted in his chair. ‘What you’re experiencing is a phase of denial. Temporary, I’m sure.’
‘But it’s so real, Doctor —’
‘You see? You’re denying your condition. You’re blind, Martin. You always will be.’
‘I really can make things out, though. Well, some things, anyway.’ I paused. ‘But only at night, of course.’
‘Only at night.’
Visser allowed another silence to fill the room. Those silences of his were like people gazing at you with affection and shaking their heads. They were like gently mocking laughter. They were a bit like pity. And the lines were back, the ones that went with his venetian blinds.
Only at night.
Those silences were such fertile ground for reconsideration. If I’d had any doubts at that moment, they would have multiplied. But I didn’t. Have any doubts.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said.
Looking back on that meeting with Visser, I thought that maybe I didn’t want him to understand. I wanted him to tell me that I was mistaken, deluded. Then I could go on secretly enjoying the power I had. It was as if, in attempting to explain it to him, I’d absolved myself of some of the responsibility.