My Friend the Visionary

I love Lee because she will look and look at things until she can see everything that’s there.
Right now she’s resting her head on the blanket opposite me, talking about the tiny creatures she can see scurrying between us.
“There’s more and more,” she tells me, “the longer you look for, the more they appear!”
I keep looking, unable to see anything yet, then give up and ask her if she wants a sandwich. She tells me she’s too busy to eat at the moment and I so I just take one myself, settle down to watch her peering into the grass.

Lee has always been special because she can really see. When the rest of us were disregarding a portrait or venerating a painting, Lee would just stand with her hands in her pockets staring at the piece, moving her eyes across it purposefully and quietly. She’d put her head to one side and blink a slow, considered blink before saying something so insightful about the work that the people around her fell into silence. Eventually people would just wait until she had spoken, to save themselves the embarrassment.

Back then, she used to be everyone’s darling.
But then the looking started to change and she started seeing things that no one else could see. Her comments were no longer so insightful that they rendered people silent, but so off the mark that they made people feel unnerved.
Looking at a painting of The Artist with her Dog, Lee would talk about bottomless lakes and volcanoes. A series of photographs of a South African township would leave her worrying about the crows in Chatham.

At first they found her amusing. She fitted in with the eccentricities and bohemia they were trying to cultivate, even if she had lost the accuracy that made her invaluable before. She was still fun to have around.
But then Lee started to dress differently, a track suit one day, a netball skirt the next. She threw her mobile phone into the duck pond and smeared mud like a warning onto her front door.
The invitations stopped arriving at her flat.

These days it’s just me and her looking at things. I try to bring her out as often as I can, when the kids are at their dad’s and I’m not at work.
“Look at this one!” she says. “He’s got six legs! And a little bow and arrow on his back! He’s Robin Hood as an insect!” She starts singing then, about Robin Hood and his six legs until the little ant scurries away.

The old crowd still send me the odd invitation, but I never take them up. I prefer things Lee’s way.
I ask her if she wants some cider, but she tells me that she’s too busy at the moment, just keeps staring into the grass. I take another gulp from the bottle and lie down on my front to join her.