Crime and Punishment
- Misuse of Assets
Cheryl Barker, or “Cherry” as she liked to be known, was quite a girl: spirited and feisty, one who could be relied on to make people smile with delight, especially if one happened to be male. Alas, she’d fallen under the spell of quite the wrong people. She’d ended up as a “lady of the night” at the somewhat tender age of 18 and was a really good “sort” if you know my meaning, of moderate height, curvy hips and large bust: if only she’d thought to use her brains and big smile another way. She’d fallen in with a most disreputable pimp who’d got her hooked on heroin, as he did to all his ladies, just to keep them from straying. Money was still a problem despite her prostitution, so she took to theft to supplement her income, and on those rare occasions she tried to leave, the need for theft grew stronger as her need for heroin required satiation. She lifted things from people’s wallets and pockets, who then soon realised who was doing it and didn’t go back to her.
Of course, such a way of life can only lead one way: disaster, and thus it happened a few days after her 24th birthday: she stole some seemingly poor unsuspecting guy’s Rolex one day, hoping it would keep her going if she could sell it. But her hopes quickly changed to shock and dismay when policemen came calling the next morning with a search warrant. For this Rolex was not what it seemed: it had a transmitter inside, and the man she stole it from was an undercover officer in a scheme designed to catch petty thieves like her. And, of course, it was a fake anyway. The police began their search, and soon found a lot of other items that she’d stolen with the intention of selling them: then there was her drugs cache. She protested loudly that it wasn’t hers, but they were really not in a mood to believe her. Eventually Cheryl was handcuffed and dragged into the back of a police van along with a heap of evidence. The policeman arresting her advised her she’d have “the book” thrown at her. As it turned out, that was an understatement, something more like the whole library was more apt.
After a few humiliating days in prison, denied the freedoms she was used to and certainly denied access to her heroin, she was in no fit state to argue about anything. Thus when the trial came, she simply had to go along with whatever the lawyer said: in fact there was little point her having one. She’d been caught “red-handed”, as the saying goes, and consequently was dealt with severely. The judge obviously didn’t find her appealing in the slightest, so gave her a prison term of 30 years. She was sobbing by the time she was led out of court, but really she’d brought it upon herself, thanks to her rather “loose” way of life.
- Punishment
By the time she was 26, she’d been inside nearly two years and that was plenty enough for her. She’d got over the heroin at last, forcibly, but the dull, strict lifestyle there was beginning to grate on her, and in addition there were beatings she got from other inmates: they insulted her, calling her “melons” and “tart”. She didn’t think she could bear another 28 years of this.
One day Cheryl got a letter from her lawyer. She was surprised, being as she got very few letters: seldom were they really worth reading, and never contained any good news such as early release. In it he mentioned something called the “PDS” or Punitive Disability Scheme. She read on: it concerned a scheme designed to reduce prison overcrowding by means of selecting candidates for alternative methods of punishment. The idea of it sounded outrageously barbaric, harking back to medieval times, with candidates given various disabilities and suchlike in lieu of a prison sentence. Normally this scheme was reserved for those with long prison sentences like hers. She was heartily sick of prison at that point and thought that this could be a way out.
Cheryl replied, stating that she wished to be considered for the scheme. She wasn’t entirely sure what sort of disability it actually meant, but that became clear in time: she was called to attend a meeting involving her lawyer and a couple of people described as “surgical referrers”. Her options, none of them pleasant nor appealing, were laid before her: she could have been made into some kind of amputee, but the length of her term would leave her very badly disabled. She didn’t want bits chopped off her, she said forthrightly. Another possibility was some kind of hearing impediment, but this proved to be of little use to her, being as it would only reduce her prison term by ten years at the most. The last option they offered her was “high myopic vision”. She listened hard to this one: basically she would have a given amount of high myopia induced into her eyes, and would also have a target range of visual acuity to aim at. She asked, not knowing a thing about myopia, high or otherwise, what that meant. She soon realised they meant for her to be so poor-sighted she’d have to wear thick glasses to see the world. Just how thick and strange-looking she could only guess at.
She had plenty of time to consider her position, and certainly wasn’t going anywhere whilst doing so. She quickly made up her mind, writing in a letter to her lawyer that she wished to be considered for the “high myopic vision” option. She went along to another meeting with her lawyer and one of the surgical referrers, whereupon he checked her vision. He found she had perfect vision, and could therefore take the minimum minus 28 dioptres that he proposed to have induced on her, which was equivalent of the number of years in her original sentence minus those two she’d already completed. He offered her the chance to forgo some of the myopia and have it as years in prison instead, but she vehemently rejected the idea: she wanted her freedom as soon as possible, exclaiming, ’this place is driving me crazy!' He told her that assuming the full myopia had been induced, then she would be allowed parole immediately. There was some filling in of application forms and suchlike, but her lawyer helped her with that.
A few tortuous weeks later a letter arrived saying that she had to attend a clinic to have the “alteration” of her vision performed. The waiting was a real strain on her: she was nervous about the procedure and not keen on having to wear glasses, but she felt she no other good choice. Eventually the day came, and she went to the clinic: taken in a black prison van and guarded by a burly, no-nonsense prison warder. Once inside the place she vanished, but the staff there weren’t there for nonsense either: they soon had Cheryl on a bed and were preparing to administer her eyedrops. She saw lots of equipment that seemed like a normal opticians: various eyecharts on the walls and suchlike. She’d been occasionally but had never needed any correction in the past.
Then the doctor leaned over her, and a nurse held her left eye open. He brought a small eye-dropper over containing some clear liquid, handling it with some care. Then he put a small, measured drop into her left eye. It seemed to smear her vision very slightly: he told her to blink, and after that all seemed clear. The process was repeated on her right eye. After that she was taken down to a prison cell: “nothing changes,” she thought unhappily. There was nothing to do down there, as usual, so after a while she laid down on the bunk, gazing at the door, wondering when the “alteration” was going to start. Little did she know that this was the last time she would ever see clearly. She felt a slight itching sensation behind her left eye, then her right eye. She ignored it, and it seemed to go away. Then she fell asleep.
A couple of hours later the staff at the clinic heard a shriek that ran rapidly up and down in its dynamic of anguish. They didn’t bother themselves worrying about it, because they’d done this sort of thing several times before at varying strengths, and Cheryl’s wasn’t the highest of these. She soon stopped screaming because there was nobody around to scream at. After a while she heard someone come to the door and a scraping sound as the peephole moved. She looked blindly up at the pale-grey smear that she knew was the door, and cried out, ‘hey! You didn’t tell me it would be like this!’ The reply to that was, ‘just wait till you get your glasses!’
After a day or so some blur of a white coat with a male voice came in, and held something out for her to identify: she had no idea what it was from her sitting position, and said so. That more or less proved the punishment had succeeded, thus the task of fitting her with glasses began. She was led through to the other room and sat in a chair. Something big and black was swung in front of her face. The same male voice told her to look through the holes provided at the eyechart. Her left eye was covered up, so she looked at the apparently featureless wall opposite with just her right eye. He flipped in a thick lens in front of her eye and something appeared in front of her: it was recognisably an eyechart, but everything was shrunken and distorted by the strength of the lens. She complained ‘I can’t read the bottom half of the chart at all,’ then demanded, ‘put in a stronger lens.’ He shrugged, and said, ‘it might not make much difference. Depends on what your visual acuity is.’ ‘My what? Oh, never mind just put it in and show me.’
He put the slightly stronger lens in. She found things just looked different not clearer, certainly not bigger. He did the other eye, and then announced, ’that is roughly how you will see the world now.’ ‘Can’t you do any better? I can’t see very well.’ ‘With glasses you might see a little better. I estimate your visual acuity is something like 20/150.’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘Well, 20/20 is perfect, and 20/40 is required for driving.’ ‘That means I can’t drive?’ ‘No.’ At that news, she looked very disgruntled, and her shoulders slumped. She’d never expected this, and told him ‘I wish someone had told me it would be like this. I would probably thought longer about it, maybe never gone through with it.’ ‘Yes, but when your glasses come, you can go free. You can go now, but I think you’d best stay around because you’re too short-sighted to see much.’ She replied sourly, ‘you’re telling me!’
- Struggling
Ten days later Cheryl got her glasses; they were left eye: minus 28.25, right eye minus 28, with some incidental astigmatism, about which nobody seemed to care, being as she was still technically a convict. She sat in a chair while the white-coated blur offered them up to her face. They were gold-metal framed, just off round, with 16mm thick myodisk lenses. He said to her, ’these are quite heavy glasses, so I suggest you try using a head strap to hold them on.' She really didn’t care at that moment, thinking that the overall effect wouldn’t look too bad: her thoughts were focussed on seeing, then getting out of jail and enjoying her freedom.
Two rings of distorted but much clearer vision floated toward her face, then were pressed gently against her nose. As he fastened the strap over her blonde hair, she saw the office straight ahead of her with some clarity. But as soon as she turned her eyes to look elsewhere, everything vanished into a white smear. He noticed her confusion, so told her, ‘you’ll have to look through the bowls to see. Try turning your head instead.’ She looked around, and after a moment started squinting and straining to see things in the distance, and unhappily not so far away too. She complained ‘I can’t see very well…. are you sure this is the best you can do?’ She rather fuzzily saw him nod. She looked at his face, fought to discern his features from a couple of feet away, and failed. She asked, ‘can I have a mirror?’ He produced one, then handed it to her. She held it up before her face, and looked: she was still Cheryl as before, but with a couple of heavy myodisk lenses on her face, she looked quite frankly awful compared to her original simple prettiness. Those thick lenses shrunk her eyes right down to fuzzy dark lumps, difficult to see properly behind those shiny flat fronted shields. The head strap squashed her blonde wavy hair down awkwardly. Her expression fell once again into a drawn, unhappy one. She put down the mirror, and forced herself to give a little smile. She said, ‘at least I can see something. Thank you, I suppose.’
With that, he escorted her outside. She needed a little help to pilot herself around, but with her vision now mostly restored, it wasn’t too awkward. She was soon reunited with her possessions which had been taken from her at her arrest, and given a car ride back to her old home. Once inside, she sat and cried. The next day it was time to start her life over again: this time it would not be so easy, but she was determined to get a proper job this time, not go on the game. The glasses made a mockery of the latter possibility, so she went out, not seeing the grime and dust in her flat no matter how close nor hard she peered, and went dressed in civilian clothes into town. She wore a tight top, short skirt and heels, with a long coat in an effort to appear a little more modest. Looking at the world was very odd, and actually not an easy thing. Her view of the world was devoid of small detail beyond a couple of feet. She went into the employment & welfare agency; it took hours to resolve, but she got her welfare on condition that she looked for jobs, which was fair enough in her opinion. Then she looked at the jobs on offer: good they were not. Her poor eyesight obviously ruled out driving jobs. Unhappily she soon realised that the sort of job she could get would be poorly paid and hard work, if she could get it. Ex-cons don’t make the best of employment candidates.
She sat before some barely-interested young girl sitting before a computer terminal and asked about some pretty cruddy cleaning job. The girl looked at Cheryl rather strangely, but she didn’t really see her expression properly, being as she was just a little too far away. Cheryl, despite her new look, got an appointment to see someone about the job. The next day she went hunting around an industrial estate looking for the company. Perhaps it was just as well she couldn’t see that well, because the place looked pretty dire; not the sort of place that offered meaningful, long term jobs with prospects of advancement. She found her way in and gave her name, and was taken to see someone in a suit who asked about her history. Then came the inevitable question about her glasses and eyesight. He seemed surprised at her appearance, but his main problem was her prison record and what it was for. Despite that, he gave her a week’s trial. Cheryl was given a spare, ill-fitting uniform from the store and was sent out to some offices one evening to clean it. She did her best, but after all, she was never that good or interested in cleaning, and couldn’t see the dirt that well, or at all in some places. The office complained to her employer and this was passed on to her. Cheryl simply shrugged and said she’d done her best. Unfortunately her best was pretty poor, so when she arrived for work the next day they’d decided to let her go. She was disappointed, but not entirely surprised, and in fact somewhat glad to avoid such menial work.
She found herself back at the employment agency, peering closely at the jobs on offer on the boards. There was one company asking for “packers.” She went and asked what that meant, and it transpired that the job was stuffing envelopes for a direct mail company. Cheryl thought to herself sarcastically “yippie!” Again she arranged to go and check the job out. This time it was just as hard to find, but not quite as shabby as the last place. The building looked just like a big dark lump to her, but inside was thankfully brightly lit. She was given a 10-minute interview, then asked if she wanted to stay and help. Being desperate for money, she agreed, so went down and was shown how to do it. She struggled at first because she couldn’t see that well, even looking down on the table she was working on, but after a few hours was getting faster. However it was frustratingly, depressingly boring work. Talking to the other women there was fine, but after a few weeks they seemed just as tedious as the work.
At least she had some sort of income to pay her rent, although she came home exhausted every night. She went out the first night she got paid and got very drunk, then came home and started eating chocolates. This was a pattern she repeated over the next few months, until her 27th birthday and beyond. She’d never comfort eaten in her life, instead relying on illegal drugs in order to dull the pain caused by life, but now she felt she didn’t want to try them again: so instead she tucked into the yummy chocolates and booze, and consequently piled on the pounds. Her old, rampantly sexy clothing no longer fitted, thus she wore comfortable, loose jumpers to cover her now even larger bust and some rather less sexually appealing curves she’d by now acquired.
- Hope
I walked into the classroom and sat down. I was there in my official capacity as a monitor: someone paid by the local education authority to assess the quality of the various computer courses that were run by adult education colleges in the area. Of myself, I had a broad knowledge of computing and in particular applications programming. Of course, I had to play-act somewhat, so that the teachers would not catch on, acting a bit dumb and asking questions that I full well knew the answers to already. This was a basic computing course, therefore I certainly didn’t want to give the impression that I knew very much. I sat at a computer near the front: I thought this the best thing to do, so that I could ask questions, and also see the preparation the teacher had done for the lessons. I remember a teacher in a Java class I sat through for a few lessons: unfortunately, he was hopeless at preparation. Anyway, as I sat waiting for this class’s teacher to arrive, in walked this woman: she was about 5'5" inches tall, blonde haired and looked decidedly tired. She wore a baggy jumper, and jeans that covered her rather large bum and thighs. But the jumper didn’t disguise her intriguingly large bust.
She looked at me though her immensely thick and ugly-seeming, yet fascinating lenses of her glasses, as she seemed to slightly grope her way around the table. She smiled uncertainly at me, then fumbled her backside onto the chair, and said cheerily, ‘hello!’ She seemed both a figure of jollity and sadness in all senses: a sort of person who hid their discomfiture behind a fragile veil of jollity. She turned her head to peer into her bag, and in doing so presented me with a fine view of the sides of her lenses, sticking out back and forth from her frames. They must have been at least 15mm thick, but I think taking a ruler to them might not have gone down so well. The whole lot was held against her face by a rather-too-obvious head strap. She did have quite a small nose, so I imagined they’d fall off fairly easily without it. I watched her get out a pen and pad, then she looked at me and said, with a slight quaver in her voice, ‘my name’s Cherry.’
With that we were on first-name terms. She hustled herself over to me, looking straight at me through her thick lenses. She said softly ‘I know this sounds stupid, but you can read the blackboard, can’t you?’ I said yes; she smiled, and then said ‘I’m partially blind, I can’t read it. Can I copy your work?’ I tried to make it appear as if I would be glad to do so, although in fact I thought that this would make my job harder. Fortunately, she did not seem to notice the thoughts running across my brow.
Then the teacher came in. Cherry pushed her office chair closer to her computer, her bust wobbling until it was pressed firmly against her desk and keyboard. He was a pretty good teacher, helping us though the boring theory stuff and into the practical exercises. At all times when he wrote on the blackboard, Cherry at first squinted at the writing, then gave up and shimmied over to me to see my version of what it was. It was all quite new to her, but she seemed to lap it up, and asked perhaps surprisingly intelligent questions of the teacher: I was really quite impressed. I went away thinking that I’d like to stay for more than the two lessons that I‘d been contracted to attend, simply so that I could see the visually stunning Cherry.
The same day and time the following week found Cheryl sitting in the same chair, looking at the door expectantly. At every arrival she squinted hard at the person walking through the open door: her means of being completely sure of who had just entered was whether they came to sit next to her or not, what with her being not the best at recognising people beyond 2-3 feet or so. Then I came in and saw Cherry sitting there dressed much more explicitly than last week. I walked behind her and sat beside her, and smiled. She looked slightly uncertainly at me, undecided as to whether I’d smiled or not, unable to read my expression clearly. She wondered for a moment whether she’d made a mistake, being as she was wearing a short skirt and tight low-cut t-shirt, with a denim jacket over the lot. She leaned forward as if to say ’look what I have…..' Her large, generous lips shone with red lipstick: this was more like the Cherry of old. The whole image was certainly enticing to me and I said to her, ‘you look very good tonight.’ That got a huge, delighted smile and I thought, “right, we’re off!” Just then the teacher came in and spoilt the whole thing. Thankfully we soon got onto practical work, during which I made the mistake of helping Cherry a little too much. She obviously started to realise that I wasn’t as much of a computer dummy as I’d made out: she asked me questions such as “how come you know that?” I had to say “guesswork” but she plainly wasn’t convinced by that.
There was only one way to get out of this: despite her high myopia, she was a perceptive and intelligent woman, therefore I realised I’d have to come clean. But I also wanted to ask her out, so at the end of the lesson, I did exactly that: she gaped at me for a moment, as if I was talking Chinese: despite her many sexual partners, she hadn’t been invited out by a man for many a long year. She responded, ‘yes… yes of course!’ ‘Pick you up tomorrow?’ ‘Yes. Yes please!’ Rather breathlessly she scribbled down her address, and phone number “just in case,” and handed it to me.
- Revelations
I parked my car outside Cherry’s flat and rang the door. Some moments passed, then I saw a shape come to the door: it opened and there she stood. Such a vision of beauty and loveliness I had rarely, if ever, been treated to before. She wore a ravishingly slinky, clingy grey dress with a large but sparse flower motif, stretching over her ample bust but doing nothing to disguise it. That, high heels and her denim jacket simply looked fabulous, but the best thing was her glasses; in this light they seemed thicker and more mysterious in their shimmering depth and complexity. She smiled at me, and said, ‘well, do I pass?’ I assured her that she did.
We soon arrived at the pub where I was taking her that night: she seemed a little out of place there, but what of that? As soon as we fell into conversation, her veil of uncertainty caused no doubt by her poor vision fell away, leaving Cherry the bright intelligent ex-prostitute. Thus it came to my revelation. I said to her ‘I have something important to tell you. I’m not what I appear to be.’ ‘Really? So have I… It’s more to do with what I once did and how I got these.’ She pointed at her glasses. I was intrigued, but I insisted on going first. I then explained that I’d been in computers for something like twenty years now; I was currently working for the local authority, etc, etc, and was basically a computer expert. She gazed at me constantly as I told her this: once I’d done so, told me firmly, ‘well, at least you’re not married or something shit like that. But… I knew there was something interesting about you.’
After a pause, she then started to unfold her little secret. I couldn’t believe that such a wonderful, intelligent woman felt she needed to do such things and I told her so: that really shifted the shadows from her face. But then came the big one: how she became a high myope. It was an incredible and cruel story of mischance. She’d fully admitted her mistakes and accepted her punishment, and couldn’t bear to be back in prison again. After all that had transpired, she was slowly trying to build a life again, starting with taking a computer course to improve her job prospects. I looked sympathetic as I absorbed all this, then after a pause offered to teach her programming. Her reaction was scornful, ’no, I’m too stupid for that.' ‘Nonsense, it’s not that hard. I believe you can do it.’ ‘You know, that’s the first time anyone’s believed in me.’ ‘So? Come to my flat tomorrow and we’ll get started.’
The next day she appeared wearing her “look at me, I’m an ex-prostitute” gear again, except that her bust seemed to stick out even more. It was quite amazing: I was torn between ogling her bust and her glasses, what a horridly lovely dilemma! From the first she sat beside me, pressing her big warm bust into my arm like some soft flesh-and-blood cushion. That bothered neither of us, least of all her. Even more surprising was the way she lapped it up, all the Java keywords, syntax and even object orientated programming. It was like being at college again, except I wasn’t sitting there learning, I was by contrast telling my busty high-myope friend Cherry about it all. Within a few weeks she’d got very good at it. And she’d shown me that in bed, she knew everything there was to know about that, too.
- Epilogue
Well, here we are a couple of years later: Cherry is still the myopic girl I met at a computer class, except for two things: she’s my partner in our software company, and also is currently slimming down to fit into a wedding dress. I say slimming: there’s one part of her that seems as big as ever. I can’t wait to see her walking up the aisle toward me, light dancing off the plano fronts of her lenses. Between then and now there’s the experience of sitting next to her as she taps away on the keyboard frantically typing in program after program… you can imagine the way her bust wobbles, what a sight! And then there’s the view of her spectacularly thick glasses from the side, just enough to tear you away from that thought…