After we dock the Sea Rose at the CYC, we cross the road and walk up the hill a little way to Mac and Maggie's apartment. The sky is a tangle of grey clouds, hot pink at the edges. 'What a beautiful evening,' Maggie says in the dying light.
I look at her. 'I don't mean to be rude, but …'
'But how do I know the sky looks beautiful right now?'
'Is that a stupid question?'
'I have synesthesia,' Maggie says. 'It's where you see colours when you think of or hear sounds, words, numbers—even time.'
Mac chimes in. 'Cool, huh?'
'My sight degenerated when I was in my forties, and I was blind by fifty. But I still see colours that don't exist in the real world. I see space in colour, voices in colour.'
I think of my cries, creamy blue. The number one, pale yellow.
Wednesdays, blood orange. Maggie, velvet lilac.
'I see colours with all those things, too,' I say, and Maggie holds out her hand in the direction of my voice. I clasp it in mine.
Softly, she says, 'I knew we'd made a special friend.'
***
Maggie and Mac's apartment is like an art gallery. They have everything from Australian landscapes painted by First Nations Peoples, to prints of Matisse's dancers, modern minimalist works, and contemporary photographs of blackened glaciers. Sandstone sculptures of breasts and arched hips. Maggie explains that her parents were artists and that she'd been a curator in London.
'A very good one,' Mac adds.
She tells me how when Robynne disappeared, she flew to New Zealand to get Mac and bring him back to London with her.
'She saved my life,' Mac says.
'And then he saved mine,' says Maggie, describing the deep depression she'd fallen into when she started to lose her sight. Mac, by then living back in Australia and building the Sea Rose, had gone to London for Maggie, eventually bringing her out here to live with him. In their own way, they guided each other through grief, through the dark, back into colour.
Mac makes pasta while Maggie and I drink tea in the living room. Wafts of hot garlic fill the room. On the shelf behind Maggie are more books than I've ever seen in a home. Cascading over them are vines that hang from the ceiling. It's a library of words and flowers. And all along the windowsills are glass jars with succulents, their roots like tentacles in water flowerbeds.
Maggie says, 'Mac tells me you're an artist.'
I laugh. 'Kind of. I mean, I liked painting in school. And drawing. I wanted to study art, but I haven't painted myself in ages.'
'Do you know what makes an artist?' she asks. 'Or a work of art?'
I shrug, then realise she can't see me shrug. 'Not really.'
'An artist is a person who can see the world from a different angle,' she says. 'So I think a piece of art is an object as complex and as multifaceted as reality.' She takes off her sunglasses. Her eyes are milky sky. 'Oli, tell me: which is your favourite?'
I look around the room, my eyes settling on a framed Yves Klein print.
'The blue monochrome,' I say.
'Why?'
'Because it's … I don't know. Because it's everything and nothing.' She laughs. 'It's my favourite too.'
'Why?'
'Like you said, it's everything and nothing. Because no matter how brilliant and bold and present the blue is, it is always about absence, always about something unknown, something beyond you.'
'Exactly!' I say.
Mac calls out from the kitchen, 'Glad that made sense to you, Oli, because I've got no idea what she's talking about.'
Maggie chuckles, shakes her head.
'You know, I think being blind is a little like the monochrome. The absence of detail. People fear it. They fear going blind. But when you've lived with blindness for as long as I have, you realise there is still seeing, it's just seeing differently. In that way, being blind is an art.'
'You see the world from a different angle.'
Mac sticks his head out of the kitchen, and says, 'All I see when I look at it is the ocean.'
'I've never seen the ocean that blue before,' I say. Maggie smiles. 'You haven't been to the Coral Sea then.' I shake my head. 'Where's that?'
'Queensland,' she says. 'Mac takes Sea Rose up every winter. We do Hamilton Island and Magnetic Island race weeks. Though we're not really racing; we always come last.'
Mac interrupts to insist, 'This year will be different!'
'He says that every year. Really, we just go because we're old and, well, why the hell not?'
I stare into the monochrome and imagine diving into that blue. Being in it. 'I'd love to go one day.'
'Why don't you come with us?' says Maggie.
I open my mouth to speak. Hesitate.
'When are you leaving?' I ask.
'At the end of next week.'
'How long does it take to get there?'
'It's possible to do it in a week, but at the pace we go it tends to be more like three.'
'I start my internship in two weeks.'
Maggie frowns. 'I thought you weren't going to do it?'
Mac comes into the living room with two plates of pasta, hands one to each of us. 'I said she was considering not doing it.'
'Well,' Maggie says, 'the offer stands.'
'I'll think about it,' I tell her.
'I hope you do. The Coral Sea is magic in winter.'