Free The Crime of Huey Dunstan by James Mcneish Page A

it’s not my best shirt.”
    “Iron’s a bit hot, that’s all. Who are you being rude about?”
    “I’ve just been listening to what Huey’s headmaster said in court. Lawrence reminded me. The man was asked if there might be something sexual at the root of it. Was it possible the boy had been molested? Know what the headmaster said. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘if it’d been anything like that, he would have told me.’ Bloody hell he would. I think I’ll go for a walk.”
    “Good idea. But take a coat. They’re predicting gales.”
    I found a coat and got my cane from the hall stand.I said going out, “By the way, he isn’t going to appeal. Lawrence has changed his mind.”
     
    I closed the door and climbed up the steps leading from the house to the road, then down the zigzag path that gives on to the waterfront and the bay below. Mugglestone Way is cut into the hillside in one of those bad-tempered engineering feats that give Wellington its character; there is a handrail and eighty-six steps, two of them broken, and I am forbidden by Lisbeth to use the path in bad weather. Naturally I ignored this stricture—I needed a challenge to rid my mind of irritants like the headmasters’s comment. Anyway the path is a short cut. It gets me on to the Parade in eight minutes. I don’t use the handrail. I use the cane. I count the steps. I know every bend, every dip, every corner. It’s automatic. Everything is laid out in my mind. On the way down I passed Bill Cornish, one of our neighbours, coming up. “It’s about Force Seven down there,” he said, and laughed. “You’ll love it.” He’s right. Bad weather is food and drink to the sightless. A ruffian wind is bliss, the blind man’s comfort station. When I get tired of walking around it, I can always lean against it.
    Halfway down, I could already sense a change of tone in the atmosphere. Leaves whizzing about. My toes started to squirm. I could feel it behind the eyelids, in the pores of the skin, in the tip of the cane vibrating as it responded to the changing landscape. Contrary to popular belief, a cane is not a walking stick, nor the ears to the sightlessmere receptors of sound. I once read a book, before I lost my sight, about a man named Holman. James Holman was known as the Blind Traveller. Not a lot was known about blindness then. Holman lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was an English naval officer who went blind at twenty-five and then, with little money and quite alone, explored half the world from Siberia to the Australian outback. He did it, so the author of the book claimed, by teaching his senses “to read the landscape”. It was a smashing adventure tale, and I didn’t believe a word of it. But I do now. Today it is received wisdom that going blind renders your remaining senses more acute. Nonsense. My hearing is no better because I can’t see. Familiar sounds take on a different meaning, that’s all. One listens for the half-notes. Nor has my sense of touch improved. It has merely learned to play on other instruments. Its repertoire has increased, that’s all. It’s hard to explain.
    I was offered a seeing-eye dog once, and said no. I don’t like props. I find that the best way of being blind is being invisible. I use a long cane like a shepherd’s crook. It’s long and thin and discoloured. You can barely see it in a crowd.
    At the bottom of the path I crossed the main road and turned right. The afternoon traffic from town was already dense, the wind and wet arriving in scuds from the northwest. I imagined a few brave souls out pushing prams, and even swimming. After a few steps I got a buffet on the chest and thought, wow. All the sounds that are normallythere for navigating had gone, swept away by the wind. The cane was no longer vibrating and sending me messages as I flicked it casually from side to side. Casually? I had to grip it very tight and use my whole arm as if it was part of the cane. The wind had spun