Looking out on the Unseen

Looking out on the unseen

At first I didn’t realize anything out of the ordinary had happened.

We were in Diana’s grey car, sleek and fast, coming around the corner away from the city centre. I looked up and saw the advertisement for Heineken beer painted onto the façade of the building, an apartment block looking down onto the narrow street. Shades of frosted white, black and lime green.

“It must feel so strange living behind windows painted over,’ I said to Diana. Seeing something in the mind’s eye.

She looked up at the building and said. ‘But the windows aren’t painted over, just the wall – wait, I see what you mean. That window right at the top.’

I looked harder and saw that two windows were painted over, white as the surrounding wall. ‘Yes,’ I said. She thought I was talking about flat dwellers living in an apartment with the windows painted over, painted windows visible from the street.

But I had seen something else. A darkened room, narrow, with a desk and an ashtray on the desk, piles of cardboard boxes, a filing cabinet. An office, not a flat. The windows painted over, the room obscured. I was looking towards the window from within the room, looking out with borrowed vision.

There are courses and workshops offered all over the place on developing psychic talents or gifts. I would rather find out how to quieten mine down. The moments of seeing or knowing are beyond control, unsought and of no use to anyone as far as I can tell. They happen and I am left none the wiser.

Years ago in Mutare, I was riding my bicycle in the yard at dusk. I was about 12 years old. The flamboyant trees were scarlet with pungent flowers and deep green foliage. The bullterrier dog began to bark near the gate. I paused, got off my bicycle and walked to the gate. The dog was growling. I could see the old metal hinged gate and the emptiness. Dusk was falling with hedges of plumbago going all grey and dim. But there was a presence at the gate, someone carrying a basket or grass mat, something light. A gesture in the air, fleeting, a voice talking to another person. Not me. An old person’s voice in the country dialect of Shona. I didn’t want to seem impolite, so I waited and the voice asked about family and the health of the other person, a querulous voice, faint and hard to catch. A question asked, asked again in the hope of an answer. Then it was quiet in the yard and the dog wandered away. The fragrance of the frangipani tree was strong. The yard very dark and still. I stood there perplexed, my heart beating fast.

Once, years later, I visited a supposed medium, a psychic healer. She lived in Kenilworth and I made an appointment in advance. It was a rainy afternoon and the trains were late, but I arrived just in time. She was late. A tall dark-haired woman in a red cape, actressy and disappointed I wasn’t more forthcoming. She told me I was an old soul. That I would be called to explore my inner child’s psyche soon. I looked at her and saw nothing, felt nothing. At the time, I was in great emotional pain from the ending of a relationship. I would lie awake reading stanzas from John of the Cross and despairing, until the dawn light came into the bedroom and I could go to sleep. I felt as if I was reaching out to people who had nothing to offer me.

Months afterwards I had a waking dream of Kathleen the psychic. She had her money in a small safe hidden in the wall behind her bedstead. In my viewing of her, she was in tears and wringing her hands because her son had stolen her money. Then I looked more closely and realized he had not stolen anything, that she was giving him money and could not help herself. The interior of the small safe in the wall was plushy and cushioned in blue velvet, like a Victorian child’s casket. It was empty except for a lock of greasy white hair, tied with a piece of straw. Kathleen could not see the hank of hair tied with straw. She could see only the missing money she had given to her wild son. She sat on the edge of the bed in a linen smock, her hair loose on her shoulders. She was wringing her large white hands and her eyes were dry, but anguished.

I was not sure if this daydream was about my own loss or about Kathleen. I did not see Kathleen again, afraid I might see her strained and unhappy and feel that I should be able to help when I could not. Afraid I would feel like a voyeur. She had not seen anything of my hidden self, had not detected anything out of the ordinary. It seemed to me that she was lucky enough to be an ordinary woman who could playact the role of a seer.

Some days I walk past terraced homes and enjoy the sight of topiary, climbing creepers, or bright calendulas in window boxes, The warmly lit sitting rooms and doorways, the drifting snatches of music or laughter that reach me are light and comforting. Other times I walk past and I will wonder who has the ungainly brown sofa with the old bloodstain, who has the child crying uncomforted in the upper bathroom, who lives with the smell of burning and scorched clothes from the plastered-over fireplace – and I will walk a little faster. Once or twice I see images of a child not unlike myself at an unguarded window and I wonder how much has to do with memory, my own ghosts within being projected into a great sad world of unfinished presences. And then on very different occasions, I am caught unawares by the whim of the unanticipated. The heady scent of jasmine in winter, a piano sonata overheard in a crowded airport, a tartan jacket left out on a shop counter that seemingly only I can see. These may not be messages from the far side of existence. They may be fragments of memory, the memories of others, falling randomly through time and space, rare and unexpected flickers of almost meaning given to the chance observer.