Shooting in the Dark

total electromagnetic spectrum. The difference between colours is simply in the frequency of light, but outside that frequency range there are other wavelengths that we do not see: radio waves, ultra-violet, infra-red and X-rays are just some of them. When you take into account the narrow band of frequencies that actually stimulate the eye and allow us to see, you could say that humans as a group are almost blind.
     
    Geordie arrived with Echo in her pram and Barney on a new tartan leash. Echo was sleeping so Geordie left her in the pram in the garden. After he’d licked Sam’s face, Barney took up position as guard-dog.
    ‘Imagine if somebody kidnapped her,’ said Geordie. ‘I’d go out of my skull. Plus Janet’d kill me for being so careless.’ He looked out of the window, make sure the pram was still there. ‘Before you have kids,’ he said, ‘you don’t think like that. You’re just free. You don’t have to think about things at all, let your mind drift. Know what I mean?’
    Sam nodded. ‘Not sure if I agree with you, though. People who don’t have kids have their worries.’
    ‘Tell me about it,’ said Geordie. ‘Before I started worrying about Echo I was worrying about Janet. Before Janet it was Barney. There’s plenty of times I was worried about you. I’ve been worried all my life. Hell, I worried about Ralph for years. Even when I wasn’t thinking about him, there was a part of me that was worrying away in the dark.’
    ‘Who’s Ralph?’
    ‘Ralph’s my brother. He’s come back.’ Geordie told Sam about Ralph, about how Ralph had been watching him, making sure that Geordie was Geordie. He told about their meeting outside the Banana Warehouse.
    ‘That’s great,’ Sam said. ‘Where’s he living?’
    ‘He’s at our place at the moment,’ Geordie said. ‘Until he gets somewhere of his own.’
    ‘Is that a good idea?’
    ‘What could I do, Sam? Turn away my brother? I couldn’t let him sleep in his cab.’
    ‘What does Janet think?’
    ‘She’s glad for me. It’ll be fine, Sam. Ralph isn’t gonna stay for ever. Just a few days.’
    ‘Yeah.’ Sam picked up a CD case with a picture of Dean Martin on the front, Borsalino on his head. He walked towards the stereo stack. ‘So you’re only marginally worried about it?’ he said.
    Geordie laughed. ‘You think you know me, Sam. You think you can read me like a book. But there’s parts of me you’ll never reach. I worry because I’ve got an active imagination, that’s what Janet says. And Janet should know, she’s there even when I’m asleep, talking in my sleep, in dreams. There was this time before Echo was born, and I saw that Alien movie on the TV and I thought Echo might be born like that. I didn’t really believe it, but when you think it, and then you start to build it up, you get to thinking it could happen. It just could. Like there’s me and the midwife and Janet all waiting for something to happen, waters to break or whatever. And suddenly there’s this cracking sound and Echo comes bursting out of Janet’s chest.’
    ‘You tell Janet about this, when she was pregnant?’
    ‘What d’you think I am, stupid? I mean, if I’d told her about it, she’d’ve gone up the wall. Probably had a miscarriage or something. No, I only told her about it a couple of days ago. And I only told her about it then because I knew that she was ready to hear it. That’s another thing about being a nuclear family. You get to know when you can say things, even things that you can’t normally say. You feel how the other person’s gonna react even before you say the thing that normally they’d react differently to.’
    ‘You been reading those psychology books again?’
    ‘No, but I’ve been to pre-natal classes, and the ones on breast-feeding and ante-natal and how they respond to the spoken word. Natural Childbirth Trust, all those. You got any questions on that stuff, just ask.’
    Sam pushed Lou Reed’s New York into the CD deck and nodded to himself as the first strains of‘Romeo and Juliet’ came through the speakers.
    ‘I need to go into town,’ Geordie said. ‘Wondered if I could leave Echo here for a while?’
    ‘Tell you what,’ Sam said. ‘You go do your errands and I’ll walk her back to your place. Is Janet in?’
    ‘Yeah, and Ralph.’
    ‘Kill three birds with one stone, then. I’ll meet your brother, get to see Janet, whom I haven’t seen for weeks, and me and Echo’ll start to get