EYES
OF THE
BLIND
EYES
OF THE
BLIND
ALEX TRESILLIAN
urbanepublications.com
First published in Great Britain in 2016
by Urbane Publications Ltd
Suite 3, Brown Europe House, 33/34 Gleaming Wood Drive,
Chatham, Kent ME5 8RZ
Copyright ©Alex Tresillian, 2017
The moral right of Alex Tresillian to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-911129-69-1
EPUB 978-1-911129-70-7
MOBI 978-1-911129-71-4
Design and Typeset by Michelle Morgan
Cover by Julie Martin
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
urbanepublications.com
Contents
Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Part Two
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Part Three
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Part Four
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Alex Tresillian
PART
ONE
‘Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened…’
Isaiah 35:5
ONE
Hugo defecated by the back door and then walked nonchalantly into the lounge.
Niall groaned as the all too familiar smell drifted into his nostrils. Hugo’s bowel movements were the bane of his life. Here he was, twenty-five, single, eligible, crying out for a girlfriend in fact, but doomed to be forever tied to a prolifically crapping guide dog. A dog who sat silently by the door when he was desperate instead of making some sort of useful noise to give you a hint. What could you do? Except be glad that your Mum still loved you enough to come round every week to clean the place up. And keep away from that part of the flat. As far as he was aware other people’s guide dogs crapped pretty much to order, but Hugo seemed to enjoy relieving himself with gay abandon as if it were a hobby.
Dogs.
The day before, Niall had lost his job on local radio. ‘Restructuring’, they called it. Niall called it discrimination. They’d loved him at the beginning, loved the feel-good newsworthiness of having a blind local sports reporter: armed him with a lap-top and sent him off to some of the key matches in the Shropshire leagues. And higher. He’d covered the Shrews at the old Meadow and the New Meadow, lived and breathed the ups and downs at Telford, tipped horses at Ludlow. They couldn’t say he hadn’t delivered. But the novelty had worn off, the love-affair had ended, and now they had a girl with Downs Syndrome in reception they were probably easily surpassing their disability quota. Budget cuts meant restructuring, meant no dedicated local sports reporter, meant here’s your redundancy and goodbye.
Sod them.
Niall thought he’d move to London. A garden flat in Telford wasn’t really the centre of the media universe. It was time to make the break, get out from under his parents’ feet, break his mother’s heart so she could be proud of him. Apart from anything else, he wasn’t meeting any girls in Telford.
He boiled the kettle, ripped the top off a Pot Noodle and stirred some water into the pot, checking the level with his finger. He’d had Pot Noodle disasters in the past, when he had totally misjudged the amount of boiling water required, flooding the kitchen floor and scalding his feet in the process. Experiences not to be repeated.
He turned the radio on to hear an interview with a blind girl (‘Patient A’) who was going to have the world’s first binocular eye transplant.
“Bloody blindness,” he muttered. “Bloody blindness everywhere.”
The interviewer brought in the surgeon who was going to carry out the operation.
“A complete, fully functional eye transplant has been the Holy Grail of researchers and ophthalmologists for decades,” he said. “Indeed until very recently most – including myself – deemed it to be impossible.”
“Nice one,” Niall interpolated cynically.
“It was thought that the optic nerve was off-limits as far as transplant and regeneration was concerned. There were many who believed you could probably put in a real eye – as opposed to a prosthesis – but that it would never be possible to make it work. Too much blood, too many nerve endings, too difficult to get at. You’d have a monitor but you’d never be able to connect it to the computer.”
Niall’s monitor had started to pack up at the age of eight, although he had gone on seeing up to the age of twelve. It meant that the world was still a visual space to him; he prided himself on the fact that he still thought visually, that he could describe people and places in such a way that no-one could believe he couldn’t see them. When he first went blind he refused to accept it, refused to enter the ‘blind world’, had ludicrous accidents because he wouldn’t slow down, wouldn’t shuffle about with his hand trailing along a wall, wouldn’t check which way he was facing in a public lavatory. But he learnt, eventually. He didn’t mind making a spectacle of himself but he couldn’t bear the pity: it made him want to hit people. He’d done his fair share of lashing out at the special school his parents had fought the local authority to get him into, until finally a few good friends and two teachers he respected steered him into calmer waters. He didn’t accept his blindness, he didn’t think he ever would; but he saw that the way to defeat it was to build a life – a successful life – in spite of it.
And, until yesterday, that was exactly what he had been doing. He went to university and got into journalism, the career he’d planned for himself even before his lights went out - he was making a decent living. How many of his contemporaries could say that? But the truth was that, despite bottomless goodwill, the world was a sighted world, and blind people were going to be at a significant disadvantage in it.
“A Russian professor at a clinic in Bashkortostan made the initial breakthrough in the year 2000, after thirty years of research,” the surgeon was saying. “He successfully transplanted a cornea and retina together into a young woman who had been blind for twenty years and was able to give her very limited vision. Mostly light and dark. Shapes. Not what you and I would call seeing. But developments in stem cell technology, tissue cloning and microsurgery have brought us from there to this point, where we are ready to dare to try. We have a perfect pair of eyes and we’re ready. To perform the impossible.”
“How does it make you feel when you hear Mr. Daghash talk like that?” the interviewer asked ‘Patient A’.
“I just think about the possibility of seeing,” she said.
“We are medical pioneers here,” the surgeon said. “We truly don’t know what is over the horizon. Some of my fellow professionals have called it the blind leading the blind. But let’s see. This dear girl has nothing to lose by trying.”
“And, Daniel Sul
livan,” the interviewer said to another man in the studio, “the British Association for the Blind, one of our most respected charities, is totally supporting this operation, despite its having been dismissed by many specialists in the field?”
“The possibility is too exciting to ignore,” Sullivan – whoever he was – said. “A charity that exists to champion the causes of visually impaired people must pursue every avenue that may enable people to see again – to not do so would be irresponsible.”
“And the cost?” the interviewer asked.
“Is this the conversation we should be having,” Daghash intervened, “with this brave young woman on the verge of her leap into the void?”
Enough, Niall decided, and switched off.
Leaps into the void. Why did the whole thing sound patronising to him? Why couldn’t he be thrilled by this possible breakthrough in technology? There was nothing patronising about giving somebody a new heart, or a new liver. Why couldn’t he get the ‘Let’s help the poor blind people’ tag out of his head? This wasn’t offering to drag you across a busy main road when you were just stopping to get your bearings, this was medical science striving for a minority. He should be applauding. Instead he wanted to throw rotten fruit.
Why did it matter to them? Why were they doing it? Just to make themselves feel good? Boost their own egos?
He knew his reaction was ridiculous: if they were switching on parts of brains that had stopped functioning he’d be the first to call them miracle workers. It was just eyes. There was something about eyes.
He could write a piece about it, an impassioned plea for less ‘precious’ political correctness about disability. The one thing he’d always sworn he’d never write about. “I’m a journalist, not a disabled journalist,” he always said.
But on the other hand …
Niall was never one to let the grass grow under his feet. Once an idea came to him he pursued it, totally confident that it would come to fruition. And this could be the start of a successful freelance career.
The girl was in Moorfields Eye Hospital. He had connections there. God, he’d spent enough hours of his life in the place going for meetings and check-ups and counselling. If he could find out who ‘Patient A’ was and get an interview with her he could sell it to the highest bidder. He knew that she’d probably made some exclusive deal with a paper for her story but that didn’t put him off. He had a different angle. If he could get in first, before the ‘My First Day of Seeing’ spread appeared in the chosen tabloid, he’d be on his way.
His phone was in his pocket. One of his best friends from school, Simon Roberts, lived in a rented house in Chiswick with his girlfriend and a couple of girlfriends of hers, all of whom were Australian. Simon would never say no to putting him up temporarily, and then with any luck Hugo would charm the girls. He was good at that kind of thing.
“Simon, mate, how’s things?” Simon was a computer-obsessive, but human with it.
“Niall, what are you doing?”
“I’m coming to London. Following up a story.”
“For Radio Salop?”
“No. The fuckers fired me.”
“No!”
“They’ve restructured. Made me redundant.”
“That’s shite.”
“It was time to move on anyway.” You had to put a good spin on these things. “I’m more of an old-fashioned pen and ink journalist. I’m going freelance until The Times beats a path to my door.”
“Right.”
“So I was thinking of coming to stay with you for a bit, while I do the story.”
“What’s the story?”
“I’ll tell you when I come down.”
“It’d be great to see you.”
“Fantastic.”
Settled. He closed the conversation before Simon had too much time to think about it, arranged to come down the next day. While he was dossing for free in Chiswick he could afford to keep the Telford place on. He’d tell his Mum he was going down to London for a week or two, get her to come over and give the place a good clean. Perhaps his step-dad could do the garden. It was the end of September, nearly time to cut everything down and put it to bed for the winter. Niall remembered the bonfires of childhood, the gathering of wood and garden rubbish with his Dad (before he was blind and before his blindness frightened his Dad off into the wide blue yonder), the splashing of paraffin on strategically placed newspaper at the bottom, his Dad leaning in to light it, singeing the hairs on the back of his hand and swearing as the paraffin caught. Crazy days. The crazy days of seeing.
Anyway. Things always fell into place when you shook them up. He woke up his lap-top and listened to its synthetic speech guiding him through buying a train ticket to London. Synthetic speech was – let’s face it – crap but necessary. Irritating and impersonal, robotic but totally subservient. Whatever you typed it would say. Which could be quite amusing in a Word document but didn’t help you get things done on the Internet. Niall had contemplated in his more drunken moments setting up a sex chat line where the voice was just a speech synthesiser. He felt sure it had novelty value. But he’d never followed it up.
He phoned his Mum, fed Hugo and told him a bit about what he should expect from the capital, ate his cold, congealed Pot Noodle, packed a rucksack and went to bed. This was the beginning of the future.
TWO
Susannah wondered how the journalist had got her number. She’d asked but he hadn’t answered. She’d told him she’d already signed a contract with a paper and he’d made it sound like that was why he was ringing. It was all very confusing but when he told her he was blind, when he’d described how Moorfields would look the first time she opened her new eyes, she had been intrigued. Intrigued enough, at least, to agree to see him. Niall Burnet. He came from Shropshire, wherever that was.
Now that he was due any minute she wondered what he wanted to know, what he wanted to talk to her about. Up to now, hers had been the unremarkable life of an average blind girl, she thought. Cherished and protected by her family, a family who had understandably diverted a lot of her disability allowance into putting her fully sighted sister through university and helping her to become an accountant. As her parents kept saying, Amelia needed to be in a top job so that she would be able to help her little blind sister when they were gone. But now the little blind sister wasn’t going to be blind any more. Maybe. And maybe she’d be able to make her parents proud.
Her door opened and a nurse whose footsteps she recognised came in.
“You’ve got a visitor, Susie,” she said.
“Right,” Susannah answered, trying to sit more upright and smoothing her hair.
“Niall Burnet,” said a pleasant voice. A chocolate voice, maybe with nuts. She always characterised voices as tastes. She’d never told anybody. Her father was beef (with horse-radish when he was angry), her mother blackberry and apple. Amelia was minty – somewhere between ice cream and toothpaste.
“Don’t tire her out,” said the nurse. Lemon tart.
“I’m just going to chat to her. No stress, no pressure,” said Niall. “Have you got such a thing as a chair?”
“Here,” she said.
“Thank you.” He sat down, and waited for the nurse to go out. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Niall Burnet. Unless they’ve brought me to the wrong room as part of some elaborate joke you must be Susannah Leman.”
“I am,” she said smiling.
“Good,” he said. “Hugo usually sorts out the introductions but he’s had to stay outside. They thought he might have germs.”
“Is Hugo your dog?” Susannah asked.
“You’re sharp,” Niall said, tongue-in-cheek.
“My parents have never let me have a dog,” Susannah said wistfully. “But I suppose I won’t need one now.”
“Fingers crossed,” Niall said. He let silence deliberately fall.
“So,” Susannah said, uncomfortable with it. “You’re blind and you’re a journalist. That’s amazing.”
“I mean I never thought of blind people really doing a job like that,” she went on.
“You thought basket-weaving and piano tuning were the dizzy heights of blind ambition?”
“Something like that I suppose.” He heard a smile in her voice. “My parents have never really talked about me getting a job.”
“They sound great,” Niall said sarcastically.
“They’ve made so many sacrifices for me,” Susannah said.
“But now,” Niall said, “what are your plans? What are your dreams?”
“I don’t know,” Susannah said. “Actually I’m a bit scared.”
“Of the operation? What’ve you got to lose?”
“No. Of seeing.” It was the first time she had admitted it, to herself or anyone.
“What? Why?”
“Because I know my life the way it is. Because blindness is kind of safe. People look after you. People look out for you. I don’t know how to be sighted.”
“So why did you agree to it?”
“It was my parents really. My Dad I think. Mostly. Well, I’m sure they did ask me. But what would anybody say when offered this opportunity?”
“Why don’t you tell someone how you feel?”
“Who’d understand?”
“So nobody knows you feel this way?”
“No.”
Niall’s story started to take shape. Whilst he tried to reassure the girl that seeing was OK, he drew out the story of a child who had had no life, had been kept in the family home like a hamster - fed, cleaned and played with, but not engaged with as a fellow human being. She had gone to the local school where the staff had no doubt been delighted by her parents’ lack of expectations, sat with a teaching assistant learning next to nothing and making no friends.
The more he spoke to her, the more her sanguine acquiescence in such a pitiful excuse for a life annoyed him. He could think of dozens of blind people he knew who’d make better use of a pair of eyes than this girl, but here she was, in the right place at the right time, with a pushy Mummy and Daddy who couldn’t wait to have the stigma of having produced an imperfect child between them lifted.
Eyes of the Blind Page 1
