Patreon Exclusive Fiction: Pavonine by Leigh Loveday

The eyeballs that nobody else can see, the hazel eyes that cling to his hair and the solemn grey eyes cold under his shirt...

Pavonine

By Leigh Loveday

The eyeballs that nobody else can see, the hazel eyes that cling to his hair and the solemn grey eyes cold under his shirt collar and the ice-blue eyes that huddle against his neck heavy as wet rats, show him the souls of people who pass through his life.

Through the eyes he audits friends’ and neighbours’ habits, inspects their insecurities, solicits their secrets. He violates the privacy of strangers in their droves whenever he leaves the house. None of them know. None of them will ever know. It’s an awful business.

He remembers a time before the eyes, and nothing of their arrival. They have a purpose, an agenda, but he is not privy to it. He serves. He is not asked to add colour or comment to the information he collects, any more than a lab specimen critiques the chemicals that hiss in its blood.

Systems exist to keep him in service. If he needs a resupply, it is left for him late at night, in a battered box brought to his doorstep by someone or something that he knows, perversely, he will never see. The box holds more eyes. He kneels to let them mount him, holds still as they find their place, rolling in their acrid secretions.

These eyes replace the ones burst or left behind in flight or lost in ugly brawls. He doesn’t crave violence, but it happens; triggered on rare occasions when he is indiscreet, or when a target of his attentions proves too perceptive. Little consolation that they only suspect the most squalid, mundane motives.

Equally infrequently, he cuts into the orbit of others like him. He feels sure he’s seen them before, but not like this. The bag lady with the dead stare and phallic tentacles, necrotic-looking, unwinding from raincoat sleeves to caress strangers in the drugstore. The girl laughing among classmates by the fountain in the park, bare midriff embalmed with a crone’s distended face, parroting stolen snatches of conversation in a voice tendon-tight with pain.

They both sense him, look quickly away, registering the same captive wildness he sees in them. The familiarity breeds dissent. Both times he fails to approach them and he does not encounter these other sufferers again.

He wishes every day for it all to end. The ends he would be prepared to accept become darker, rougher. He would atone in a heartbeat, if he knew what he had done.

The eyes cavort against his nape and scalp as he goes about his business. Whoever’s business. He becomes rigid with distress whenever a stranger’s gaze lingers, first fearing aggression and then choking down the urge to grab them and scream do you see them, do you see these fucking things on me but they don’t, they don’t, and he has learned not to draw attention.

It goes on.

One night, after a searingly bad month that leaves him on the brink, befouled and threatened and exhausted, sick of everything from the filth of this damned surveillance to the acquaintances imploring him to get help even though he has never confided in any of them, an ending finally comes.

A box arrives on his doorstep. This time, as he kneels to open it, the moment is different, intensely charged. He knows the box will be empty. With a plummeting sensation of something like loss, he braces himself against the first movements of abandonment.

The hazel eyes emerge from his thinning hair. The ice-blue and grey eyes drop from his shoulders like faeces. They land in the box and sit dormant. He waits for what feels like hours but must be only minutes, then replaces the lid, goes back inside and closes the door.

Nothing else happens. The box is collected in silence that may be thick with spiteful significance or may have no meaning at all.

He catastrophises in ways that endure for days, then weeks, then as the weeks become months and the months edge into years, he finds himself unconsciously reacclimatising. He begins to live normally, quietly, gratefully. When others approach him to speak, he reciprocates without fear of harming or condemning them. Acquaintances nod their approval.

He meets someone; she neither asks about his past nor volunteers anything of her own. It suits him.

Years go by in lush, insipid domesticity. He works in retail, never climbing far up the ladder, shifting sideways to other roles instead. The aversion to recognition proves difficult to shake.

He meets no more sufferers, doesn’t pass them on the street or in shops or in parks. He is never allowed to remember what he did.

In time, he opens himself up to the idea of family.

One year later he sits by his wife’s hospital bedside, tearful, cradling a tiny pink newborn. He is suffused with a euphoria that he never expected could be his. It blossoms into a true connection, a certainty that his daughter already knows him to his core as her cries diminish and she opens her eyes to the world for the first time, one, two.

Three.

Five.