/ Walnuts

At the top of Camden Road, where the headlights peel off from Highbury, and the buses rush down from Tottenham, at eight in the evening, after the rain, look!

It’s the long finger of my cane.

Watch as it scratches the pavement, how it brailles the concrete, how it probes the gullies where slab meets slab meets slab.

I follow close behind and find the button for the pedestrian crossing. An eye ringed in red. A place of safe passage.

The cane rests. I wait. Across the road the red man waits too.

The cane flashes in the beams of passing cars. A lightning rod. It channels attention, and - if I want to leave my house, walk to the bus-stop, meet a friend - I have no choice but to be illuminated, to stand out, to be called upon and approached, and probed.

“Hello! Are you OK there?”

A man’s voice. Cheery, clear, with a softness to it.

“I’m good,” I call back. “But thanks for asking. I appreciate it!”

How this long stick arouses the curiosity of the sighted. They see us from a distance. They stalk us, eye us up, close in and paw us, snuffling for a prize.

Just to check that we’re OK, of course.

Just to check. Just to check.

Footsteps pass behind me. Strong, hard strides on the paving. Then they stop.

“Do you mind?” the cheerful voice says. “Can I give you something? Can I give you a present?”

Across the road, the red man persists, implacable.

What can I do? He has a gift for me. What will it be? Something I’d like? What if I refuse? Will he get angry? What else might he want from me? And who is this person, anyway, out walking these streets in the dark, approaching blind people, with gifts to give them?

Sometimes I just want to cross the fucking road.

But I’m a public-minded person, too. I believe in the life of the street. The mixing of the city. Acts of kindness. They are appreciated. I welcome this interaction, as much as I’m scared by it, as much as I’m bored by it, as much as I did not ask for it.

(John Hull writes that blindness is a gift. A dark gift, a mysterious gift. Not one that we want, not one that we ask for. But a gift nonetheless.)

The green man appears.

“I can’t carry much,” I say into the darkness.

“Don’t worry, they’re very small,” the man says.

Somewhere in front of me, he takes a step forward. I hear him fumbling in a plastic bag. I hold out my right hand, palm up.

The bag is invisible. His hands are invisible. His face is invisible. The lights of the garage are bright behind him. I see only the shape of a man’s shoulders, the form of his head, that's it.

He places something in my hand. Two things, small, lively almost. I close my fingers over them, but one falls to the pavement.

“Oops!” he says and stoops, finds it, places it in my hand again.

They are hard, irregular. Light.

“What are they?”

“Walnuts!” he says.

“Walnuts!” I say.

And he places a warm hand over mine, and he presses the two spheres into my palm.

“For what’s been taken away,” he says. “And for what you’ve received in return.”

---