Page 51 of The First Time I Saw You
The picture swirls as she moves the scanner, and there, lying on its back, is Bean. The white outline of its skull, large belly sticking up, legs – cramped but perfect – shine from the screen, but Bean is still. She moves the scanner a touch and smiles, pointing to the screen where the flashes of Bean’s heart can be seen.
‘Baby is fine, Sophie, just asleep.’ Charlie’s hand tightens around mine as I begin to cry, relief escaping and rolling down my cheeks. ‘Let’s see if we can wake baby up, oh there we go.’ Bean’s mouth begins to open and close, ‘Look! baby is having a little drink, and . . .’ Bean shifts, kicking legs and moving arms, ‘looks like it’s having a natter there, look.’ She points to its little mouth: open, close, open, close. ‘Your baby is going to be a chatterbox!’ I smile through my tears. ‘Would you like to know the sex?’ I’ve thought about this, but I have decided that I would rather wait. Bean is Bean and it doesn’t really matter to me whether it is a boy or a girl.
‘No, thank you. I’d rather wait.’
I turn to look at Charlie. I’d almost forgotten that he was there, but his face looks different, and I realise that I shouldn’t have let him come in. His own despair is written on his face. I think about that feeling that I had just minutes ago and realise that what I have just experienced is a fraction of the pain he deals with. How does he have the strength to make it through each day?
‘Charlie, I’m so sorry—’ I begin, but he is already rising from his chair.
‘I have to go.’ He drops my hand and walks out of the room.
‘Charlie!’ I call, but the door closes behind him.
Week Twenty
Samuel
I have visited a new eye specialist. She is officially called a consultant ophthalmologist, but I have named her Mrs Cheerful. Mrs Cheerful gave me a series of tests, some testing how much of my sight (the picture at the end of the tunnel) I could see clearly, and another where she checked my field of vision (the tunnel walls). I came out with a score that put me firmly in the severely sight impaired bracket. I have a certificate saying this. This irritates me. Shouldn’t certificates be to celebrate something? This thing should be a . . . a sentence.
She has confirmed what I already know: I’m losing my peripheral vision and I’m losing it quickly. Mrs Cheerful tells me (like it’s a good thing) that I will get concessions for public transport use, as though the fact that I can never drive my car again is actually a good thing because I’ll get money off bus fares. I even get money off my TV licence, she tells me in her cheery voice; I mean really? That should be free – I won’t be able to see the TV!
I can still see a fair amount, really; if you make your fist binoculars again but leave a small gap about the width of a tiddlywink to see through, you can get the gist of what I can see.
Once I had my ‘certificate’, suddenly I was visited by people from various disability departments. I’ve had white cane training. I’m not joking; someone came around to the house to show me how to use it, even though I keep telling everyone that I can still see. It has an end that looks a bit like a marshmallow and it rolls against the floor.
‘Thanks, but I don’t need it yet,’ I told the woman as she showed me how it concertinas in on itself, so I can carry it inside my pocket.
‘You may not, Samuel,’ she said, ‘but it helps people around you. If you bump into someone and they see you’re holding a cane, they know that you are sight impaired . . . If they don’t know the reason you have bumped into them, they might just think you’re being an arsehole.’ I wasn’t entirely sure if she was implying that I was, in fact, being an arsehole – she had a point – but I still hate it. It prods about inside a world that is shrinking: darkness surrounds my every move, my every action; it’s swallowing me whole. But. As I walk through the busy airport, I know it hasn’t eaten me yet. I’m still alive.
‘Sorry,’ I say for what feels like the hundredth time as I bump into a teenager; the girl is wearing denim and the strong smell of cheap perfume clouds my senses. As I track my vision upwards, gigantic headphones fill my circle of light.
‘’S’OK,’ she answers as I bump into another person, then another, until reluctantly, I pull out the cane from inside my pocket.
Da wanted to come with me; Mam wanted to come with me; Sarah and even Duncan had wanted to come with me . . . they don’t get it. I don’t need their help. I want to do this by myself; Ineedto do this by myself. I have to believe that I can be blind and still independent.
You watch the news and it is full of poisonous stories of the decay of mankind, but as I tap my way through the airport, seven people have stopped to ask if I need any help. Because as much as I thought I could do this on my own, I’m realising that I can’t do it without the help of others. This is not a bad thing: people are generally happy to help me, and I start to think that maybe my life isn’t being taken away from me after all.
At the check-in desk, I’m offered a guide. I decline again. I can still see a small amount, I explain. I’m trying to do all the things I would normally do. I walk into the bar. I can hear Da’s voice: ‘A blind man walks into a bar . . . and a table . . . and a chair.’ I smile to myself as I order a pint and sit at a table where I can watch people pass me by. From here I drink it all in: the woman in an orange puffer jacket that completely swamps her; the tired children swinging from their parents’ hands, the garish holiday shirts; the crumpled business suit hanging over the arm of an overweight man. I try to commit it all to memory so that when my sight does completely go, I will be able to still picture it.
My flight is called. I drain my drink, extend my cane and tap my way towards the gate. A flight attendant appears by my side, making me jump.
‘Would you like some help boarding the plane, sir?’ her eyes and perfectly outlined eyebrows ask me.
‘That would be great. Yes, please.’
‘We’ll get you on before the other passengers if that’s OK?’ She has a small hooped earring and I think of Sophie and why I’m doing this.
‘That would be grand.’ I smile. You know, as I take her arm, I’m thinking that if I didn’t have Sophie, then this blind thing might have its benefits after all; my eyes might be broken but it looks like my smile still works.
This is the part of the journey I have been worrying about, stepping on toes and knocking into people, not being able to find my seat, but I needn’t have worried. The perfect eyebrows help me on to the plane first; I fold up my cane, listen to the chatter of the other passengers and then watch through the window. As Belfast shrinks away, and the plane heads towards the middle of England, I’m reminded of the telescopes that line the seaside promenade, the ones that you have to put twenty pence into: the view black until you hear the clunk of the shutter opening, the horizon revealed inside a small circle . . . How long will my twenty pence last? When will the shutters close and the out of order sign be hung around my neck?
When we arrive, I’m guided out of the building by Ken, who tells me about the house in Italy he is renovating; through passport control I learn that his mother is Italian, and he has always wanted to move there. As he walks alongside me to the taxi rank, he tells me he is going to propose to his girlfriend. I shake his hand, wish him well and then give the address of the hotel I’m staying at to the taxi driver.
The room is small. Really small, but this is a blessing in disguise. I can navigate myself around it without too much bother; the bed takes up most of the space. My head is killing me from the airport beer; I’m guessing that my brain has to work twice as hard to be able to keep me on the straight and narrow . . . Will I have double tunnel vision if I get plastered?
I’m drifting off to sleep, my head sinking into the pillow, as my sight returns to me. My eyelids block out the darkness as my mind’s eye opens and smashes down the tunnel walls. Jumbled up stories of myself fill me with technicoloured pleasure, but my pleasure is stolen from me by the siren, the sound forcing through the walls and into my room, shaking me and opening the tunnel door. I look around the room, the disorientation of sleep mixing up my childhood memories of pretending to hunt the horizon for bandits with the inside of a kitchen roll. I feel along the bed for my cane and sit up. I can’t find my shoes, panic fills me as I hear the other rooms in the hotel opening and closing, rushed footsteps descending the stairs. I decide that I’ll have to go barefooted. The memory of the white-hot light scorches my body and terror propels me from the room, my hand skimming walls as the kitchen-roll tube leads me outside. I don’t know where to go; I have no idea where the meeting point is. I follow the sounds of others until I look down and see a hand, the wrinkled skin paper-thin, resting on my forearm.
‘This way, I think,’ he says. I open my mouth to thank him, but no words come out.
