Blind Man's Buff Read online

  BLIND MAN’S BUFF

  by

  VICTORIA GORDON

  © Victoria Gordon 1982

  CHAPTER ONE

  There was no footpath along Walker Street where it separated the college from the southern edge of the show grounds. And not the best of street lighting, either, thought Rena as she stumbled for the second time since putting the bright lights of the college entrance driveway behind her.

  Ahead of her, the road dipped slowly towards the creek that formed the western boundary of the college grounds, and most of the houses on her left were as dark as the night around her. The headlights of the oncoming traffic were more hindrance than help, blinding in their intensity, and she cursed idly as she stumbled yet a third time while crossing the rutted driveway to one of the darkened houses.

  ‘Item one: remember to bring a torch next week,’ she told herself, and then smiled, nodding her head like a perky robin in pleasure at the thought. It was, she realised, one of the first occasions in two long years when she had actually begun to plan ahead, to begin the evolvement from the day-to-day existence she had been living.

  Perhaps, she thought, it was an omen. Perhaps taking this creative writing course was the right thing to do, the first real step towards a more normal existence. Perhaps ...

  Certainly her song-writing hadn’t helped. Not, at least, in the one area that really mattered — getting Ran Logan out of her mind, out of her past as well as her future. Maybe she could do it with prose.

  ‘You could do it easily if you weren’t such a sensitive, gullible fool,’ she told herself aloud, wincing visibly at the truth of her own words. Even with two years and nearly a thousand miles between them, Randall Logan had the devilish power to stride into her mind without warning and fiendishly kick apart her every attempt to put her life back in order.

  He was ever there. In the poetry of her songs, songs that her audiences seemed to love for their poignant, passionate, heartrending honesty. It was his eyes and his voice that tugged at her heart-strings as she sang. When the words and rhythm of the poetry formed in her mind during the long hours of almost nightly sleeplessness, it was his touch, his very essence that turned pleasant, happy melodies into tragic epics of lost love and ruined virtue.

  Rena wondered as she neared her destination, the old wood-frame building called the ‘staff house’, if somehow this writing course might help her to sort out her feelings for once and all, to put her hurt and her disillusionment into proper perspective, to help herself live again.

  It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision to take the course. She had paid little attention to the advertisement in that morning’s newspaper, yet somehow the title “creative writing” had seemed to leap from the page, clawing at her awareness. A telephone call from work had provided the rest: she could enrol that evening during the first of the ten weekly lessons, then sort out the paperwork later.

  She stepped ahead more quickly as the bright lights of the staff house beckoned, lighting her way through the vehicle gate and round to the front entry, where narrow steps led up to a wide veranda and the bright-lit hallway leading from it.

  Rows of student desks, each of them little more than a stool with attached folding table, filled the large double room on her left, and Rena guessed it must originally have been the lounge-dining room of the house.

  Trying to shield her eyes until they adjusted to the harsh fluorescent lighting, she paused in the doorway, aware of half a dozen people already seated and two, perhaps three more walking up the hallway behind her. Not an overly large class, she thought, and was grateful for that. In truth she had no idea what to expect of the class, but certainly smaller numbers would allow more room for individual attention from the instructor.

  Flickering her long eyelashes in a final bid to adjust to the lighting, she stepped forward a single pace. Then her gaze fixed in wide-eyed shock on the figure behind the large table at the front of the room and she halted, fixed to the floor as if glued. A great shiver rippled through her body and she choked back the sudden upsurge of bile that rose bitter in her throat.

  Ran Logan! It couldn’t be—but it was! Rena didn’t need her astounded eyes to tell her the truth of it; her body fairly screamed recognition, tingling with the memories she had been so vainly trying to throttle these past two years.

  ‘It can’t be!’ Some elfin voice in her mind screamed the phrase over and over .and over in an endless litany so loud she feared she had also screamed it. But it was ... it was ...

  Ran Logan! That same unruly mane of hair, hair the colour of milk chocolate and the texture, she knew only too well, of soft copper wire. That same prominent, slightly crooked nose, with flaring nostrils above a wide, sensuous mouth; a mouth that could evoke heaven with its touch ... or sheer desperation with its words. And behind the reflective lenses of the sunglasses he wore, Rena knew, were those unique. copper-hued eyes, deep set but alive to every nuance of human behaviour.

  Eyes that at this moment were fixed upon her! Rena wanted to scream, to run ... fleeing both present and past before it engulfed her in renewed pain and agony. She wanted to disappear, to faint, even to die. Anything — so long as it meant escape.

  But she couldn’t move. Even when those behind her lost their patience and gently began to prod at her, she couldn’t take a single step either backward or forward. Her own eyes were welded to the shimmering surface of those sunglasses; her feet as firmly welded to the wooden floor beneath them.

  Would he speak? Could he dare to speak, after what he’d done? He could, Rena knew. Ran Logan would dare the devil himself should it suit his purpose. But could she answer? She doubted it. She was a statue, no longer alive, no longer warm and breathing but only a pillar of ice as cold as the heart within her.

  ‘Are you going in, or what?’ a feminine voice hissed in Rena’s ear, hoarse with impatience and barely audible. But it was loud enough. Ran Logan’s head lifted slightly, his nostrils trembling like those of a spirited stallion.

  Then he spoke, his voice that once-loved, melodious deep voice that could — and did — bring goose-bumps to Rena’s bare arms. It rumbled like the drums in some hidden, forbidden jungle, like the surf on a lonely beach, like the thunder of her own terrified heart. Only louder.

  ‘Please come in and take a seat,’ he said. ‘I may not be able to see, but I assure you I don’t bite or anything, and my blindness isn’t contagious.’

  Blind? Rena stood in shocked disbelief, oblivious now to the growing impatience of those behind her. Her dark blue eyes searched across the room, seeking the lie but finding only the reflected disguise of the sunglass lenses and then, suddenly, the ivory whiteness of the walking stick propped beside his long, muscular legs.

  ‘Come on!’ A not-so-gentle nudge almost sent her flying off balance into the room, but Rena caught herself in time to twist aside so that she landed instead in the nearest empty seat.

  Blind? But how? When? What had happened? The questions scurried like mice, nibbling at the fringes of her concentration and diffusing her ability to comprehend.

  It couldn’t be true. And yet it must be. He had looked directly at her, but without the tiniest hint of recognition. And not even Ran Logan could be that cold, that callous. He simply couldn’t fail to recognise her.

  Or could he? Rena thought hard, focussing her mind on the picture of herself she had skimmed over in the mirror before embarking from her small flat earlier that evening.

  A great long mane of sable hair, not the tight-fitting cap of two years earlier, but now a flowing tide, worn loose and casually ... no make-up, or at least none by comparison to that she had worn when singing in Sydney as Catherine Conley, but Ran had seen her without make-up—on one too many mornings. Slimmer? Much, she decide
d. The slender but shapely twenty-year-old was now a bone-thin woman of twenty-two, but she still didn’t look all that different.

  She had the same dark blue eyes, topped by thick, down-sloping eyebrows and fringed by enormously long lashes. The same tidy nose, neither long nor snub but just right for her face, the same soft, vulnerable mouth and firm but not overly defiant chin. Only the shadows were different; those beneath her eyes now were permanent reminders of poor sleeping, not just the occasional late night. And those below her cheekbones now existed because her cheeks were slimmer, less full, less youthful.

  Her eyes swam back into focus. Ran seemed still to be looking at her, but she realised then that he was looking at everyone and no one, his coppery eyes hidden behind the reflective lenses and only his other senses at work.

  He wore a turtle-necked silken jersey beneath the light, well-cut sports jacket, and around his neck gleamed the chain of a medallion hidden in a fold of shadow. Then he moved, and she had to still a gasp of amazement.

  It couldn’t be! (God, she thought, could her mind say nothing else?) But it was. Rena knew that medallion — intimately. It had been she who chose it, she who bought it, paid for it with her own money, she who had first hung it round his strong neck, sealed its arrival with a kiss. It was a wafer of silver on a silver chain, a wafer imprinted with the month of July. Only the fourth, a Saturday that year, had been punched out and replaced with a tiny sapphire.

  It was, he’d told her half-jokingly, an engagement ring for him. Hers, he had said, was being made. Rena, fool that she was, had even believed him. Diamonds and sapphires, he had promised — the diamonds for tradition and the sapphires because that was her birthstone. She was a Virgo, although only just, with her birthday on September the twenty-third.

  And not even that, any more. Virgo . . . the virgin was no more. Not since the day his medallion honoured, the day she had given him what no diamond, no sapphire could replace.

  Rena shivered, feeling the white froth of hatred as it seared up from somewhere inside her. She had traded her virginity for deceit and lies and abandonment — and now this bastard wore the rest of her gift like a badge of triumph, a visible, tangible announcement to the world of how he had misled and deceived her!

  She trembled, fingers clenched into fists so tight her long nails drew blood from her palms. And her eyes burned out her hatred to a man who could no longer see it.

  Her mind, however, was less able to fixate itself. Instead of a singular, undiluted approach to the situation, it seethed and frothed and foamed with unanswered questions. What was Randall Logan doing here, here in this small provincial Queensland city so far from his Sydney base? How had he been blinded? What in the name of heaven was he doing teaching creative writing on a one-night-a-week basis?

  He was famous. He had been famous, although perhaps less so, when she had known him. One of the nation’s top journalists, then, working in the combined media of radio, television and print and considered the fastest-rising media personality in Australia.

  And now ... since his blinding? She wondered ... he was even more famous for his critical, incisive personality profiles, and yet again more for his books. There had been only two and Rena had forced herself to read them both, hoping for some internal effect, some physical or psychic purging of her own wounded soul...

  ‘... perhaps wondering how I can effect to teach creative writing without being able to read,’ he was saying, ‘and I won’t pretend it will be easy. To be honest, I’ve never attempted such a thing, not even when I could see. Indeed I’m not a teacher at all. I’m a writer — a working journalist with nigh on twenty years’ experience and now a relatively successful novelist. I write for money.’

  He paused, then, and once again Rena had the inexplicable sensation that he was looking at her. Worse, that he was actually seeing her. But he couldn’t be.

  ‘Not all of you will be here with that in mind,’ he continued. ‘Indeed, some of you, I suspect, don’t know why you’re here in the first place. So let us understand each other right from the start.’

  Understand each other? Oh, I understand, Rena thought. I understand only too well.

  ‘I can’t teach you to write. Nobody can teach you to write except you yourselves,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a basic course in English grammar, nor is it some airy-fairy course for the appreciation of English literature.’

  He paused, as much for effect, she suspected, as to allow the murmur of surprise to ripple across the room and then subside.

  ‘I’m presuming you’re here because you want to write. I honestly hope most of you have already tried, in which case I guess it’s more correct to say you want to write better. Well, there’s only one way to do it. You learn to write by writing.’

  Another pause. He was, Rena noticed, playing his audience with all the skill of a dedicated fly-fisherman. And he was succeeding. Even without his vision, he was totally attuned to the sounds and the feelings of the ten people in the room. Including ... her?

  ‘Some of you won’t finish this course.’ Was there that oh-so-familiar hint of a sneer on his upper lip? And did he realise it was there? His mouth quirked as if in answer to her silent question.

  ‘It could be as many as half, I estimate. And those who do finish will more than likely hate my guts by the time we’re done.’

  One of us already does, Rena thought, and immediately twisted in her seat, wondering who might have heard her; the thought had been so clear, so vivid, she feared she had spoken it aloud.

  ‘But personally,’ that velvet voice continued, ‘to quote one of the most famous of fictional characters: I don’t give a damn.’

  There were titters at that, and the predictable voices, one whispering and the other loud enough to be heard by all: Rhett Butler—Gone with the Wind.

  And you forgot the frankly, my dear, Rena thought, but then you wouldn’t know the meaning of that word, either. Now that the initial shock was over, other parts of her mind were returning to life ... most obviously the voice of survival crying: ‘Get out!’

  Ran Logan didn’t so much as smile. If anything, he looked more sombre, the planes and angles of his face harsh in the vivid lighting. He’s thinner, Rena thought. Thinner and ... harder? Not physically hungry, but that emaciated, tired sort of hungry you see on the faces of Asian refugees.

  Soul-hungry! The word leapt to mind even with the built-in denial. How could he be? He hadn’t got a soul. But she wished he would take off the reflective glasses so that she could see his eyes. Were they empty now? Or still alive with their depths of dark, old-copper colouring?

  ‘Get out!’ The survival voice was screaming, now, raging against the bastions of curiosity, hatred, anger and agony. She should obey it, she knew that, but cursed herself for a masochist and stayed in her seat.

  ‘There’s an element of masochism to all forms of writing, I think,’ Ran said then, and Rena shivered again. Another omen? Or just her conscience thrashing about aimlessly?

  He didn’t wait to let her find out. ‘Because rejection is almost as much a part of the game as the writing itself,’ he continued. ‘For every successful writer, in any genre, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, who never make the grade. Most never would, but there is a percentage who are simply too sensitive; they couldn’t take the criticism, couldn’t handle the rejection.’

  Oh, I know all about that, Rena sighed to herself, and already was on the verge of listening to that survival voice. Certainly she couldn’t handle the rejection. Two years ... and still she hurt at so much as the thought of his betrayal, his rejection of her!

  ‘Now I don’t know ... yet ... if any of you are near to selling what you write,’ he went on. ‘Perhaps none of you. I imagine there may even be one or two who wouldn’t dream of writing for money, and I have no argument with that philosophy. I don’t care why you write, so long as you do it. And at the risk of embarking upon a chicken-or-egg argument, I will simply suggest that without a reader ... or readers ... there sim
ply is no writing. If you’re the only person who’s going to read what you write, why bother? You might as well talk to yourself; it’s easier.’

  There was a murmur, a thin, trailing thread of sound that ran muted through the audience and died as Ran held up his hand.

  Rena wasn’t surprised. Far from it; she knew only too well the commanding, dominating power of his personality.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Somebody is going to say that writing helps to clarify their thinking, helps them to truly portray their feelings in a way that thought can’t. Perhaps that’s true; I hope it is. But to that person I suggest that there is a reader: yourself. Because I honestly hope that if you’re going to such extremes to clarify your thinking, then you’ll read what you write — not only once, but again and again. And that you’ll rewrite it, because that will help clarify things even more.’

  He smiled then, but it wasn’t the old Ran smiling. There was no humour in the gesture, Rena thought. Only a wry, tattered bitterness. Like his two books. However brilliant they might have been, and she tried honestly to believe they were quite brilliant, they too had been steeped in bitterness; they had reeked, she suddenly realised, of cynicism and pain and anger and even rejection.

  His blindness? It must have been. She could imagine no woman, no normal human being, with the power or ability to hurt Ran Logan very much at all. And certainly not herself, much as she dearly wished she could.

  ‘Writing,’ he said, ‘is easy. Rewriting is the hard part of being a writer, because it means going back over things that are important, reliving old mistakes. None of us likes to do that, I suspect, but a professional writer must!’

  Then I’m halfway there already, Rena thought, tasting the acid of her own two-year-old bitterness. More than halfway. She had done, it seemed, little else during the past two years but review her mistakes, and the biggest one of all had been her involvement with Randall Logan.

  She watched as he lifted a hand, almost wearily it seemed, and touched his brow above the rim of the sunglasses. Long, slender fingers, the fingers of an artist, she had once thought, probed lightly at the lock of hair that had fallen across his forehead.