Shooting in the Dark

packets of pulses, tubes of Tartex, sugar-free jams and a large carton of soya milk. Other stuff, he didn’t know what it was. From the look of it you might feed it to birds in the garden, but he suspected it had some dangerously high nutrition count. Kind of stuff serious joggers ate.
    He hadn’t said anything about the furniture being moved, or how his clothes were now confined to the far left of the coat rack. But the dried pulses and the bird food being the first thing you grabbed when you went to the cupboard for a mug: that seemed to indicate a moving on, the entering of a new phase.
    ‘Hey, everything’s been changed around,’ he said. He used the nonchalant tone, kind of tone Jack Hawkins or Kenneth Moore might have used in one of those old POW movies. The ones where they’re on the escape committee and they don’t want the stoolie to know he’s been sussed.
    ‘D’you like it?’ she asked. ‘It started off as a cleaning job, but then I found I couldn’t get all the food in the side it was supposed to go, so I swapped it around.’
    ‘They’re the same size,’ Sam said. ‘Both sides of the cupboard are identical. They’re mirror images of each other.’
    ‘I know. The way you had it before, it was organized as if you were left-handed.’
    ‘Is that right?’
    ‘You want the crockery on the left side of the cupboard because you open the door with your left hand and get things out with your right, which is the strongest if you’re right-handed.’
    ‘And the food on the right side,’ Sam said, ‘because you open that door with your right hand and get the jam out with your left hand, which is the weakest hand. It’s not so bad to drop the jam?’
    ‘It’s cheaper,’ Angeles said. ‘A jar of jam comes cheaper than a new plate.’
    ‘Not if you bought it in a Shelter shop. I could replace the lot for less than a fiver.’
    ‘You want me to put it back the way it was?’
    ‘No, it’s OK,’ he told her. ‘I’ll get used to it.’
    ‘After a while you’ll think it’s better.’
    He locked the bathroom door and got a good lather going with the shaving gel. Pants and tights, hand-washed and hanging to dry over the bath. Towels side by side on the rack there, blue and pink. How does she know which is the pink one? Don’t even ask. Matching face cloths hanging on cup hooks from the underside of the shelf. Now these hooks were being used, he remembered, vaguely, a long time ago, screwing them in. He didn’t remember using them, though, not until now. Took someone who was blind to show him where they were.
    Music. He strained his ears. She was playing a Clarence Carter song, something else he hadn’t heard since the Berlin Wall came down. Another little gem from her eclectic collection of blind musicians. They’d already had Riley Pucket and Jeff Healey this morning, and he’d woken up to Sonny Terry’s ‘I’m a Burnt Child and I’m Afraid of Fire’, with old Brownie there belting it out in the background. The kind of song makes you want to hit the day running.
    She must’ve explored every inch of the room with her fingertips, maybe the entire house? Reaching out in the dark, tagging markers and consigning landmarks to memory. Sam didn’t watch her any more when she was in the house. She walked from room to room, up and down the stairs, as if she were sighted. Within a few days she had grasped the spaces inside the old house and like an experienced colonist was rapidly making them her own. Her scent, which had quickly established itself in her bedroom, now pervaded the whole house. Rochas Tocade it said on the small bottle, no price tag, no list of ingredients, not even a sell-by date. Different times of day and night it subtly changed its suggestions: rose, bergamot, cedar. Was there occasionally a hint of geranium?
    There was often a hint of whisky. He’d looked everywhere except her room and not discovered any bottles. What she did with the empties was a mystery. He’d told her she could go to an AA meeting with him, but she didn’t think she had a problem. Maybe she was right. Some people got by on a few shots a day. She was rich and she didn’t have dependants. So who was Sam Turner to get on a moral high horse about her drinking?
    Nobody. But he didn’t see that as a reason to give up. Living with a soak seemed like it ought to be a problem.
    The pants. His arm outstretched as if to deny the connection between self and hand, he took the thin rim of lace between