Eyes of the Blind

by Alex Tresillian

  She had got as far as these conclusions before and yet she kept coming back to it. Her curiosity would not let it lie.

  What had she really got to lose? She keyed in the number.

  “Hello?”

  “Is that Rebecca Blackford?”

  “Yes. Speaking.”

  “It’s Miranda Leman. Susannah to you probably.”

  “Miranda! Fantastic! Hi.”

  Should she admit to not remembering her? Or pretend that she did?

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “I’m fine. I’m great. How are you?” Rebecca said.

  “Better than I was,” Miranda said.

  On her end of the line Rebecca wondered whether to pretend to a memory or two or just ask for a meeting.

  “I couldn’t believe it when I saw you on TV the other night,” she said.

  “Did you recognise me?” Miranda asked.

  “Well it was the name first,” Rebecca said, lying frantically. “I heard them say ‘Susannah Leman’ and I thought ‘God that’s a name I haven’t heard in years. I wonder if it is the one I knew.’ Then they said about you having been blind and I knew that it must be.”

  “But did you recognise me?” Miranda asked again.

  “To be honest, no, not really.” It was nice to be able to filter a bit of truth in amongst the lies.

  “You could come and see me,” Miranda said. “If you’re not busy. I’m stuck here in hospital at the moment not going anywhere.”

  “That would be fantastic,” Rebecca said. “I’m not busy. I’m doing a teaching degree but they gave me the rest of the year off because my brother was killed in an accident.”

  “Oh my God! I’m really sorry.”

  “Thanks. I’m living with it, but it’s hard. That’s why seeing you made a really nice diversion. Got me out of my own thoughts.”

  “I’m glad,” Miranda said. “Come to Moorfields whenever you like. We can talk about old times.”

  “Thanks. Thanks so much.”

  Rebecca felt like a worm. The call ended and she weighed up what she had done. Lied through her teeth, with the prospect of more to come as she created some back-story for the two of them that would convince Miranda she was suffering from memory loss. And then used Joe’s death to get her sympathy.

  “Rebecca Blackford, you are a bad person,” she said out loud.

  Juliette Warwick tried to analyse her feelings. Katrina’s response to her righteous indignation had been an uncharacteristic outburst about a lack of love in their relationship. Then she had burst into tears, packed a bag and left. God knows where she had gone. To her visually impaired aunt, maybe.

  And Juliette was left to reflect on her day.

  The police had been the easy bit. She had convinced them it was all a complete misunderstanding and of course she, of all people, would have stopped if she had accidentally hit a guide dog. They were even quite apologetic in the finish.

  But she hadn’t expected to be called to Sullivan’s office and asked to resign.

  “Won’t that make me something of a loose cannon?” she had said.

  “We need you to be efficient and invisible,” he had replied. “In this instance you have apparently been neither.”

  “And if I don’t agree to go quietly?” she had asked.

  “There are other ways,” he had said, smiling.

  “Don’t you think it will look a bit like an admission of culpability?”

  “Yes,” Daniel had said. “That’s exactly what it is. You knocked down a guide dog. That makes your position here untenable.”

  “But I’m not admitting anything.”

  Daniel had said nothing. She had got nothing more out of him. But she had refused to resign on the spot.

  “I’ll think about it overnight,” she had said to him.

  “Bring it with you in the morning,” had been his response.

  And now she wondered how she had ever allowed her fierce loyalty to the organisation she had worked in for eleven years to lead her down the path she had taken.

  Still, no point crying over spilt milk. Katrina was gone. Her job was gone. It was time to think about where her loyalty lay now.

  “Jamal, my office.”

  Jamal Daghash broke stride in the corridor and looked up at Duncan Clark. He knew that Clark had few airs and graces, but he had never before addressed him as peremptorily as this.

  “If you can spare the time,” Clark added. “Welcome back from the States and all that.”

  Jamal shrugged, looked quizzical, and then followed the other consultant without a word.

  Clark closed the door once they were inside.

  “Is this about my star patient?” Jamal asked.

  “The miracle girl? Yes,” Clark replied.

  “Thank you for everything you’ve done to keep her stable in my absence,” Daghash said.

  “I’m not after your thanks,” Clark said, “and the truth is I’ve done very little. I have to hand it to you, Jamal, your impossible operation seems to have worked.”

  “Except...?”

  “Except nothing. And that’s why we have to talk.” Clark settled himself back into his chair, tilted it as he leant back and put his hands behind his head. “I have driven that girl mad with my attention to her over the past several days. She thinks I dislike her and everything about her but all I’ve been trying to do is understand the inside of her head. Because there is absolutely no physiological reason why she should have stopped seeing, why her body should have started rejecting the eyes. We get her under observation and supervise her medication here and everything is fine. Incredibly fine. There’s absolutely no need for her to be in here. So I assumed a psychological factor and I have made notes on every one of our conversations which are here and you can read them.”

  He tossed a manila file across the desk to Daghash.

  “Like you I’m not a trained psychologist, but we get to know a fair bit about the psychology around sight problems and I also discussed it with Faith Hodgkiss, who is nobody’s fool.”

  “Indeed not,” Jamal said.

  “We think the girl is sound. We don’t think she is doing this to herself.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That somebody else is.”

  “What?” Jamal looked like a man punched.

  “Things that can’t be explained have an explanation,” Clark went on. “That’s the founding principle of all knowledge, and the driving force of science, isn’t it? It’s all about finding the one that fits. The one that makes sense in theory, and then putting it to the proof.”

  “What are you saying?” Jamal was floundering. “That someone is trying to sabotage Miranda’s operation? What on earth for?”

  “Well,” Clark said honestly. “Take me, for instance. Staked my reputation on the fact that it was a stunt. Will be very embarrassing for me if it proves a triumph.”

  “Is this some bizarre confession?” Jamal asked.

  “No.” Duncan Clark laughed. “No. In the last ten days I could have finished her chances of seeing off once and for all. I’m a man of science, Jamal. Where I am wrong I patiently and humbly admit it and move on. I admit it now. You have achieved something I never thought possible. Hats off to you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I was merely pointing out that there might be people with reasons to want the operation to fail.”

  “I can’t imagine who or why,” Jamal said, still stunned by the notion.

  “You are a good man who lives in a chocolate box world where everyone’s motives are good,” Clark said. “How you manage that when you grew up in the Middle East is beyond me. But for now let’s not fret about why or even who. Let’s look at how.”

  “There is only one way,” Jamal said.

  “Precisely. If Miranda is taking her medication as prescribed and instructed...”

  “Then the problem is in the medication itself.”

  The two men looked at each other.

&n
bsp; “Damian?” Jamal said incredulously.

  “Would certainly be worth talking to,” Duncan Clark said.

  It was one of those moments when Daniel Sullivan decided to review the status of everything in his life. It was a practice he enjoyed, because generally the review presented him with a great deal to feel satisfied about, but this time as he sat behind his desk having told his personal secretary that he was busy so she should hold his calls (a partially sighted woman who was besotted with him and whom he had had sex with on about a dozen occasions) he seemed to have a lot less to feel pleased about than normal. So much so that he wondered whether it might be worth making Bridget’s day by calling her in and working up a sweat on her now. It had to be more satisfying than playing squash.

  The Susannah Leman project was at a total standstill. She was completely unattainable whilst she was at Moorfields under the watchful eye of Duncan Clark, and the last time he had visited she had been so infuriatingly frigid that he had come close to losing his temper with her. It was clear even to a man of his ego and self-possession that she didn’t find him remotely attractive, and was not swayed by his links to the famous and powerful either. The only way he was going to get to have sex with her was by plying her with so much alcohol she barely knew which way was up, and there was nothing satisfying in that. Nor could it happen while she remained in hospital.

  He was still out of favour with the top brass at BAB, who felt that he had let them down on This Is Now and were not ready to forget about it because nothing else had yet come along to equal it for ineptitude.

  Penny was starting to pall on him. Her Welsh accent irritated him. She spoke to him like an equal. She had even dared to tease him on occasion, and these were not qualities he looked for in a courtesan.

  And then the Great Project, which had seemed foolproof and utter genius, was being undermined by idiotic over-reaction to a minor irritant that was now threatening the long-term success of the whole venture.

  Manure whichever way you looked. He had dropped enough hints to the right people in the right places to have expected at least an MBE in the New Year’s Honours, but once again nothing had materialised. The knighthood that he hankered after was as far away as ever.

  Bridget knocked and walked in on him.

  “I thought I told you not to disturb me,” Daniel said irritably. “Holding my calls means I don’t want to speak to anyone, including you, he added unpleasantly.

  “I’m sorry,” Bridget muttered in her wheedling, flustered tone. “Juliette Warwick is here and insisting on seeing you.”

  “Can’t she just leave what she’s brought with you?” he snarled.

  “I don’t think she’s brought anything.”

  Daniel Sullivan sighed. Everyone was petrified of Juliette Warwick. It was why she was perfect for putting the frighteners on people.

  “OK. I’ll see her,” he said, and Bridget withdrew. He composed himself and prepared for the onslaught.

  Juliette walked in, making a great show of being completely relaxed, but it was only a show. If there was one thing that he was an expert at it was reading women, even women who had embraced the other persuasion and looked and acted a lot like men. “She’s got bigger balls than I have,” he had occasionally remarked to the Director General. Balls that he was going to enjoy crushing in the course of this conversation.

  “I’m not resigning,” she said without preamble. “So what’s next?”

  Daniel sighed and made a point of looking sad.

  “This is very foolish,” he said. “Nobody wants you to suffer.”

  “Of course not,” Juliette said scornfully. “But you’ve got nothing on me if you’re fancying the disciplinary route. And I suppose there’s always a danger I might sing like a bird.”

  Daniel gave her a look.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” Juliette said.

  “And I am certainly not afraid of you.”

  “That’s good,” Juliette said, reaching into her handbag and pulling out a CD-Rom. “When you’ve got a minute you can put this in your computer. Don’t worry, there’s only one file on it so it won’t take you long to read. It just documents with dates and times. Every communication I have ever had from you or anyone else with regard to – shall we call them ‘extramural activities’ -for the Association. I have dozens of copies. Now you can dismiss them as the fabrications of a deranged and bitter lesbian when they reach the press but it will still make for a rather nasty smell around BAB, which might not suit your long-term plans.”

  Daniel looked at the CD on the desk in front of him. She was right. He could deny any and all of what was on it, but that kind of thing didn’t matter to the chairman or the DG. Any whiff of anything and their policy was fire first for the reputation of the Association and deal with the repercussions later. And being fired would not suit his lifestyle.

  “Perhaps you could arrange for me to have a tragic accident,” Juliette was saying. “I’ll have to take my chances. But right now I’m going back to my office. I like my job and I’m good at it.”

  Daniel continued to stare at the CD. He wondered whether he could persuade Bridget to level a sexual harassment charge against Juliette. Public sympathy would back a respected Blind charity over an oversexed lesbian, surely.

  “We’re going to let you out again,” Jamal Daghash said to Miranda. She sat nervously in his consulting room, wondering why she felt nervous, wondering why Duncan Clark was also there, why he was still a part of her care now that Mr. Daghash was back.

  “Will you go back to Faith Hodgkiss’s?” Clark asked her.

  “Well,” Miranda said, “I will if she asks me.”

  “She’s fine with it,” Jamal said. “We’ve had a good long talk with her. It’s good for us, actually, that you should be there, under the eye of a professional. We’re still trying to understand exactly what is happening with your eyes. Her being on hand can only help.”

  “OK,” Miranda said. It would be good to get out of the hospital. It would be good to get back to Niall. But now that he had put his conspiracy theories into her head she was unsure about Faith and the advantages of her being ‘on hand’.

  “Do you have any questions?” Mr. Daghash asked.

  “Will it be the same as before?”

  “Yes. Essentially. We may change the way you get your medication, but we won’t do anything without checking with you first. We want you to try to live as normal a life – within sensible bounds – as you can.”

  “OK,” she said.

  “Five minutes later she was back in her room packing up the few things that were hers that had accumulated around her during her stay in Moorfields. She heard footsteps and turned to see Faith walking in.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello. I’ve come to take you home,” Faith replied.

  “Thank you. You’re so kind.”

  “Nonsense. We started this convalescence, we had a bit of a hiccup, now we’re going to get it back on track. Niall’s waiting for you back at the house. He’s prowling around like a caged tiger with Hugo unable to take him out. He’ll be very pleased to see you.”

  “I’m not exactly Hugo,” Miranda said.

  “Hugo is lovely,” Faith said. “But he is only a dog. You’re far better company.”

  Miranda wondered if that were really true as they travelled back to north London. Whether Niall ever thought about her in the way that she thought about him. She knew that everyone would pour scorn on her feelings, would tell her he was the first man she had ever properly met, that he was the equivalent of the boy next door, but the fact was that she thought about him almost constantly. She wanted to be with him, she wanted to listen to him talking, hear his take on the world and everything in it. People would say it was infatuation. Maybe it was. But it was a nice feeling. She liked feeling it. She had never felt anything like it before. It would be very special to know that he felt something similar about her, although she realised that was unlikely. In fact, she wasn’t
even sure that he really liked her that much. She had started out as a story. With his belief in dark goings-on beneath the surface of her operation she continued to be a story. Maybe that was all she would ever be to him. And yet he had been very upset when she had gone to the ballet with Daniel Sullivan. It was crumbs of comfort of that kind that kept her hoping.

  Niall meanwhile was puzzling over two cryptic text messages he had received from Simon. “Goings on at Victory” had been the first. Then there had been “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” Which had stopped him in his tracks just as he had been about to ring. The fact that Simon now had a job was something of a pain in the arse. It meant that he couldn’t be hassled on a whim at any hour of the day or night. Doubtless there were occasions when he was travelling around between appointments, but Niall never knew when those were. So now he was left in limbo, some carrot dangled tantalisingly in front of his nose and then snatched away – and Simon was irritatingly obtuse and vague at the best of times – waiting for Faith to bring him his sighted guide so that he could get back on the trail. No, that was unkind, he reflected as he drank raspberry tea. Miranda was a lot more than that. He thought of her as a friend now, a partner who was at least prepared to humour him and see this thing through.

  His phone rang, but it wasn’t Simon’s ringtone. In fact, it wasn’t anyone he knew.

  “Hello?”

  “Niall?”

  “Maybe. Who am I talking to?”

  “It’s Simon, you prat.”

  “What happened to your phone?”

  “I bought this one in case anyone was tracing yours or my calls.”

  “Bloody Hell,” Niall said, impressed. “You’re good at this cloak and dagger stuff, aren’t you?”

  “I have my moments,” Simon said. “Don’t bother to save this number because I’m going to try to get a load of SIM cards.”

  “You must think it’s serious, then,” Niall said.

  “I haven’t got a clue mate. I just don’t want to get taken out by a car if I can possibly avoid it.”