Shooting in the Dark

to accept it as a fact. Her alcoholism meant staying away from booze. If she didn’t, her life fell apart. And her blindness meant that she had to use a cane or a dog to get around safely. As soon as I begin to ignore the fact that I’m blind,’ she said, ‘then I get hurt or in trouble.’
    Yeah, there it was, coming out of somebody else’s mouth, somebody else’s experience. You have to take the treatment, and treatment primarily involves not taking a drink.
    Pigeons strutted about the square, quick to pounce on any scraps the people left behind. Every couple of minutes one of the American kids would rush them, and the square would erupt into a flutter of rushing feathers. The birds flew up, out of range of the children, and immediately alighted again in another part of the square. The pickings were rich, fatty and stuffed with protein.
    The Japanese woman finished her fish and dropped the paper with the remains of her chips into a waste bin. She wandered off, round the corner into Church Street.
    As if on cue a madman stalked out of Goodramgate, his mouth full of strange oaths and curses. He was tall and thin with a stoop, but his body was animated, his long arms waving around, seemingly out of control. His face was strangely elongated, unshaven for three or four days, and the light covering of hair on his head was long and unkempt.
    He stood in his army greatcoat, which had no buttons, and addressed all four points of the compass, muttering incomprehensibly. He was like a mystic at prayer, Sam thought. But the guy wasn’t praying. He was hallucinating. Maybe talking to the ghosts of some of those ancient Romans who used to live here. Constantine the Great? Maybe he was Constantine? The American kids moved in close to their parents.
    The guy went straight to the waste bin and came up with the discarded chips. He sat on a low stone wall and opened the packet. His eyes shone. He paid no heed to anyone else in the square, just downed the chips one after the other in quick succession. Sam wondered if they’d retained any heat. Probably not.
    The madman screwed up the empty paper and threw it across the square. Then he was back in the waste bin. There were more chips there, and the heel of a fish, all of which he put away within a few seconds.
    Sam glanced down at what remained of his own dinner, wondered how he could pass it over to the guy without seeming to patronize him. He could give him money instead, let the guy go buy himself a packet of fresh. Except the guy wouldn’t buy food, he’d already eaten. He’d buy booze, something to help him forget he was a prince with the world at his feet.
    Sam’s musings took only a few seconds, but when he looked up again the guy had gone. It was a busy life, harvesting the streets. You couldn’t hang around one spot too long.
    The tourists on the other side of the square were becoming animated again now that the perceived threat had disappeared. The American couple were whispering comfortable lies to their children. They and the Norwegians were up on their feet, ready to move on to the next museum or heritage site. It was a busy life treading these historical pathways. You couldn’t hang around one spot too long.
    Sam tossed a cold chip to the pigeons and they tore it apart in seconds. The city was a place of contrasts, but the dissimilarities were modified, intensified by their relationships to each other. The homeless and the tourists were all displaced. Difference was the homeless followed a route that the world didn’t recognize, while the tourists were on a circular trip, return tickets in their back pockets.
    The biting wind intensified and by the time he arrived home Sam’s ears and nose were glowing pink. His lips were blue in the bathroom mirror. He’d picked up a paperback on the psychology of perception, hoping it’d give him some insight into Angeles Falco, but it was too technical. He thumbed through it for half an hour, but there wasn’t much he could use. He read that our perceptions of the world were always delayed because of the speed of light, and because of the time taken to get messages to the brain; that our perception of the sun is over eight minutes late. What this adds up to is that we can never perceive the present: we always sense the past. Knew that already though, before he’d bought the book.
    What he also knew subliminally, but which he needed the book to spell out for him, was that light was only a small proportion of the