FICTION
The Girl with Remarkable Eyes
And an ability to see
Amber Green was a “sometimes” friend.
In retrospect, I think I befriended her for two reasons only. The first was because her parents owned and lived in an old, working pub. When I was ten years old, I couldn’t imagine living in an old pub in the middle of town. I thought if I got to know Amber, she would invite me to visit. That strategy, as it turned out, was successful.
The second reason for my fascination with Amber was her eyes were two different colours. Later in life, I learned that this was a harmless condition called, heterochromia.
Amber Green had one vivid blue eye and one dark brown eye! I pretended her middle name was Scarlett. Just for colour consistency, you understand.
If we were riding our bikes the same way home from school, or I wanted to play in the park across the road from the pub, then we’d meet up.
The park was the centrepiece of our little country town. It was home to the Returned Services Association Cenotaph where the townsfolk gathered at dawn on Anzac Day. On that day, the children each held a little New Zealand flag and stood very still while speeches were made, wreaths were laid, and one sad soldier blew a bugle to make all the grownups cry.
Most of the kids couldn’t wait to break free and rush to the lush park’s shallow stream which flowed within ground-level rock walls. The water tinkled a soft tune beneath low-hanging weeping willows, calling us and our little tadpole-catching nets. There was a water plant that always grew on the stream’s surface; little green, roundish leaves, beneath which tadpoles lazily turned into frogs. We named the plant, “frog porridge,” although I can find no reference to a plant with that name, these days.
One particular day, I found Amber waiting for me outside the school grounds. She was leaning on her pink bicycle, straining to see through the escaping children who were jamming up the exit with bikes, bags and loitering.
I walked my bike over to her and asked if she was waiting for someone.
“Yes, you!” she replied, emphatically. “Ride home with me, we need to talk!” Her eyes flashed an urgency that I tried to ignore. Strangely, her unique eyes always unsettled me, and I looked over her shoulder to avoid eye contact.
“Don’t do that,” she snapped.
“What?” I feigned innocence.
“Don’t avoid looking at my face. I know what you do.” She began to cycle away from me, knowing full well that I would respond by catching her up.
“Sorry,” I offered, as I cycled alongside her. “Your eyes bother me for some reason.”
“You and everybody else,” she remarked, a little sadly.
“Sorry again.” I smiled weakly, relieved that I wasn’t the only one affected.
Amber shrugged and muttered about having bigger fish to fry and, “For God’s sake forget about my eyes.”
I promised I would, knowing I would never be able to do that.
When we reached the pub, we wheeled our bikes onto the pavement and propped them against the old hotel’s walls. Urgency returned to Amber as she grabbed my arm and pulled me across to the park. I moved to wander down to the stream but she dragged me over nearer the cenotaph and plopped down on a park bench.
The cenotaph clock struck four, somberly drowning out Amber’s voice.
“What?” I yelled, my voice ringing loudly as the last gong faded along a gusty breeze.
Amber treated me to a withering look.
She was jittery, fidgeting, looking over her shoulder, nervously plucking at the hem of her school uniform.
“What?” I repeated, wishing she’d just sit still.
She did her best to hold my gaze. I shifted it.
“I see stuff,” she announced.
I took the underwhelming information on board and nodded. “Yeah, sure. That’s what we have eyes for; even unusual ones like yours.” I scrabbled around in my pocket. “Do you want a gum drop?”
Picking lint off the sticky sweet, I offered it to her. She shuddered.
“Suit yourself.” I shoved the lolly into my mouth, instantly regretting the fur that still clung to the jelly’s surface.
She watched my fingers as they poked around in my mouth, trying to pull fluff off my tongue.
“For crying out loud!” she bleated. “I’m trying to tell you something!”
“What?” I snapped back, irritated with both the mouth fluff and Amber’s tone.
“I saw something at the pub I wish I could forget about.” She squished her eyes and looked me full in the face.
“Better,” I thought. “Well what, then?” I asked, slightly more interested.
“Old Bob, you know, the smelly one in room 23?” Amber whispered conspiratorially,
I nodded.
“He stabbed Rose and threw her in the dumpster out the back of the pub.” Amber was tearful.
“Whaaat?’ I stammered, wondering how anybody could throw the busty barmaid into anything.
“It’s true,” she whimpered. “I saw him do it.”
Horrified, I leaned forward, staring for the first time fully into Amber’s eyes. “Did you call the Police? Did you tell your parents? What happened?”
“I can’t,” she whispered, “because no one would believe me.”
“Surely Rose being missing is enough to report,” I insisted.
“But that’s the problem,” whimpered Amber. “She’s not. Missing that is.”
“I don’t get it,” I sneered. “Either you saw Rose being stabbed by Smelly Bob, or you didn’t.”
“I did, too!” Amber smacked her hand down on the park bench. “I saw it, with my eyes, but it hasn’t happened yet. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I see stuff and it happens in the future but who is going to believe me when I tell them something is going to happen, when it hasn’t already?” Amber spoke feverishly, obviously distressed about something that I couldn’t fully understand.
My mother had a special voice for emergencies. “You’d better calm down and tell me the story from beginning to end.” I mimicked.
“I told you,” snapped Amber. “My eyes tell me stuff ahead of time. I look at somebody, like you for instance, and I can tell what stuff you are going to do in the future.”
I looked at her aghast. “You mean like what I will have for dinner?”
“No, stupid! Important stuff, like murdering someone or having a baby, things like that.”
I grew very hot under the collar. “I’m not going to have a baby! Am I?” I panicked, worried that my holding hands and kissing Marty behind the bike shed had led me into trouble.
“No! God, you are thick sometimes!” Amber blurted.
“Well, what then? Tell me something about my life I don’t know.”
“Marty’s gonna dump you for Marilyn. You’re going to let down her bike tyres which will cause her to fall off her bike and scrape her knees. Badly. You’ll get in big trouble because Marty is going to blab.”
“I knew it!” I screeched. “Marty said he didn’t like Marilyn but I didn’t believe it …” I had a sudden terrifying thought. “If you can see this happening, does it mean I can’t change it?”
“You can change it,” she whispered, “and other people can change it for you.”
I nodded, wondering what else I could do to Marilyn that might have fewer repercussions.
“If that’s the case, why don’t you tell Bob not to do it and let him know you will dob him in if he does.”
Amber shook her head in disgust. “I might end up in the rubbish as well,” she replied.”
“You didn’t see that happening though, did you?” I smirked knowingly.
Amber appeared thoughtful. “You might have a point. I could poke an anonymous note under his door — let him know what I know.”
“Exactly!” I blurted out triumphantly, hoping we could go to the stream now that the important stuff had been dealt with.
I wanted to find a frog to put in Marilyn’s lunchbox the next day.
That was the last time I ever saw my sometimes friend.
That day I arrived home to a huge argument. My father had sold the house without telling Mum because he had debts to run away from. We moved, literally overnight, to the city.
I didn’t ever get to exact revenge on Marilyn which was the biggest regret of my pre-teen life.
The sudden move and the discord between my parents created a great deal of unpleasantness. I had to cope with new schools, warring parents and a new environment.
Thoughts of Amber and her strange ability rarely visited me until I was much older in life, and when they did, I wondered if she had been a little unbalanced. Maybe, I thought, she had caused trouble with Smelly Bob and wound up in some sort of institution.
Much, much later in life, I was planning on revisiting my hometown to catch up with some relatives. Thoughts turned to the cenotaph park, tadpole adventures and, of course, the pub across the road on the corner.
An internet search revealed little relating to the pub and its history, other than it had undergone some renovations. Images of the park appeared much the same. There was nothing to tell me about the hotel’s prior owners over the years until I stumbled upon an archived newspaper article of the time.
The story described how a popular barmaid in a small town pub had been found dead in a dumpster at the back of a hotel. Police were acting on an extraordinary lead that had been anonymously delivered following the day of the murder. The Publican was being held as a person of interest.
Shock ran through my body. Could Amber’s father somehow have been involved? Perhaps she had got the whole “vision” thing wrong and had inadvertently blamed Smelly Bob when her dad was the guilty one. I was perplexed and found it very hard to think of anything else leading up to my visit back to my hometown. And then, through further research, I discovered that Amber Brown and her husband, Jasper Brown were the current owners of my hometown pub.
I was strangely pleased that Amber was continuing the name/colour consistency and, as a bonus, had started a rock collection!
It was a cool, overcast day when I pushed my way into the Brown’s Bar and Bistro. Alterations had been made to “boutique” the pub, but Cenotaph Park had barely changed in the sixty-five years of my absence.
I chose a small table next to a window with a view of the park. Though the day was inclement, children were dabbling in the stream and ran unrestrained through the park and around the cenotaph steps.
“Do you wish to order, dear? Or, should we reminisce first?”
Startled, I glanced up to look at my waitress.
She grinned and winked a blue eye.
“Amber!” I whispered, staring into her still vividly coloured eyes.
“I see you can now look me straight in the face,” she said gently.
I stood to hug my old friend. “Of course. Time changes everything. How did you know it was me?” I queried in astonishment, having not warned Amber of my visit.
“Are you kidding?” She plopped down opposite me and called across the room for two coffees. “I knew you were coming from the day you booked your ticket.”
“I thought you needed to look at someone directly,” I accused.
Amber began digging around in a pocket. With a dramatic flourish, she produced an old photograph she had taken of me in the park. “It works just as well this way,” she explained. “Especially if I was the photographer.” Amber continued to stare at the photo, then at me. A cloud passed across her amazing eyes.
“What?” I asked, concerned.
Amber shook herself as if waking up. “It’s nothing. Where were we?”
Over coffee and cake, we exchanged stories about our lives, Amber insisting that I go first before filling me in on past and present happenings. I rushed through my life events, then settled back to hear Amber’s story.
“I never put a note under Smelly Bob’s door, you know!” Amber began. “I was too afraid of the consequences.”
I raised my eyebrows, encouraging her to continue.
“The Police received an anonymous letter outlining the circumstances of Rose’s murder and where to find her.”
“Then who…?” I pressed.
“Turns out, the letter came from Smelly Bob,” she revealed.
“What? I thought he was the murderer!” I whimpered in disbelief.
“He was,” Amber whispered, a sadness flicking across her eyes, “but…” Amber swallowed a mouthful of coffee noisily and struggled to continue.
A shock of realisation hit me in the chest. “Your father was a person of interest,” I whispered. “Surely he wasn’t involved.”
Amber confirmed my thoughts with a sad nod.
“He was having an affair with Rose but she became too demanding, threatening to tell my mother. Dad was afraid the truth would come out because the pub was Mum’s, a legacy from her father that would eventually be passed onto me. Dad stood to lose everything and when he was sure that that was going to happen, he decided Rose had to go.”
“Oh, my God, Amber. That’s awful!” I thought for a moment. “But how did you not ‘see” that your father was involved.”
“Turns out that I can’t accurately forecast events for people I am close to. I’ve learned to keep it to myself because my information is quite often wrong.
“Anyway, Bob had a Police record for violent behaviour and my dad was letting him stay under the radar in the pub. It’s believed that my father thought their association might come in handy, so he harboured him upstairs in room twenty-three. Dad blackmailed Bob into killing Rose and in return, Bob alerted the Police to the situation, post murder, pointing the finger at my father. The truth eventually came out but Smelly Bob had disappeared. He was never found and my old man died here in the pub ten years ago.”
I muttered my condolences.
“I wonder what happened to Smelly Bob?” I mused, tracing my fingers through cake crumbs on my plate.
“Technically, he could still be alive,” Amber suggested. “We thought he was old because he was unshaven and scruffy but he was only thirty or thereabouts when were ten.”
I was surprised. “I guess a thirty-year-old bum would look old to ten-year-olds.”
“You still do annoying things with your fingers,” remarked my friend, pointedly staring at my plate.
I laughed, abruptly ceasing my finger antics. “Bob would have to be in his late nineties by now,” I remarked.
“Lots of people live that long,” Amber nodded thoughtfully, “although, I guess we’ll never know what happened to him.”
The rest of the afternoon passed pleasantly. I met Amber’s Jasper and they informed me they had two grown kids, neither of which were named for colours, or rocks.
I was strangely disappointed by that revelation.
The day was drawing in when I thanked my friend for her hospitality and phoned for a cab. I arranged to wait in the old cenotaph across the road where I could spend a few minutes watching and reminiscing.
Bracing myself against a cold wintery breeze, I wandered across the park. The clock struck four just as I reached the very bench where Amber had revealed her gift all those years ago.
A sudden chill not attributed to the wind ran up my arms and travelled stealthily into my cheeks, a warning signal alerting me to danger.
Looking up, I spied a very old, dapper, man leaning on a cane on the top step of the cenotaph.
I stopped mid-stride, our eyes locked and I knew immediately who I was looking at.
My mouth dropped open in sheer surprise as the man winked, doffed his hat in an old-worldly manner then turned to shuffle through the cenotaph and out of sight.
The sound of a horn beeping shook me from my fright. My ride had arrived.
When I approached the cab, the driver wound down his window and asked, “You don’t mind sharing, do you, love? The two of you are both headed for the airport.”
I nodded. What harm could it do?
The passenger door opened and I bent forward to slide in next to the passenger already settled in the back seat.
“Afternoon,” greeted Smelly Bob, doffing his hat once again. “It’s been a while!”
