Dear Diary II

Dear Diary II

1. January

Kirsty walked slowly around the ladies clothes section of Lacey’s: a large department store, in which normally she’d be only slightly interested being as the fashions there were quite old and a bit dowdy, being the sort of things she in her youth considered entirely suitable for middle aged women, or her mother more specifically. No, the real reason why she wasn’t paying attention to the clothes was that when she looked around, everything from nearby to away in the distance was clear and sharp: she had just been to collect her new glasses. Not just lenses, as last time: she still sighed at that unpleasant memory, but instead complete new glasses. She smiled distantly while she looked around, enjoying the clarity. She then reached up with her hand to touch them, as if she couldn’t quite believe from the effect they had on her vision that she was indeed wearing them. The frames were a sort of squashed circular shape, bordering on oval. The wire sections that held the lenses in place were more bandlike than the old ones, which allowed them to carry thicker lenses. And they certainly were thick: over half an inch of thickness, rolled around and ground to appear a little more pleasing from the side, assuming that was what might be more pleasing to the beholder. All that thickness was required to correct her myopia of around minus 12.5 in each eye. They were undoubtedly thicker than the old pair, but thanks to the frames being more suited to the job than the old ones, they looked marginally better, after taking into consideration that the frame style somewhere near fashionable, if not really the latest thing on offer.

‘Kirsty! Kirsty!’ Her mum called out to her, puncturing her preoccupation. She walked over with a rather tired look on her face. Her mother had seen all her daughters, with perhaps the exception of her twins, doing something like this plenty of times in the past: looking around with curious, open expressions of pleasure that came from just getting new glasses, slightly oblivious to the nearby and here-and-now. Her mother didn’t even ask if she could see clearly: it was more than obvious. She said to her daughter imperatively, ‘come on.’ Kirsty followed dutifully.

Once outside, Kirsty spent her time looking into peoples faces as she walked past them. Oftentimes they would look away, or glance furtively at her thick glasses, sometimes looking sympathetic, other times looking blankly at her, as if her glasses were nothing remarkable; and from a just a very few young men, a little bit of curiosity as she walked to the bus stop with her mother. Once there they waited: Kirsty watched her mother looking for buses in the distance in a manner she hadn’t been able to do for certain a few months ago, but last year she’d decided to get herself new glasses. Until then, she’d relied on whoever with her had the newest glasses to identify buses and anything else too small and distant. “Now it’s different,” Kirsty thought, as she glanced at her mother looking through her new lenses. Not new frames, however: she still wore the “glasses from the dark ages,” as Kirsty thought, being big wide oddly-shaped plastic frames, graduated from dark brown at the top to light at the bottom: “fashionable when dinosaurs were around,” she thought mischievously. Her lenses still stood out starkly in their thickness: her mother needed about minus 14 of correction in each eye to see clearly. Kirsty wondered if she would one day need glasses as thick or thicker than her mother. The optician thought she might go up to minus 16 or so in a couple of years, and had suggested myodisks: Kirsty wasn’t keen on that idea, to say the least. At last the bus came, and by means of which they went home, Kirsty again looking into the distance for all she was worth as they went.

Kirsty plopped herself on her bed as she had done so many times before, and looked around her. The last time she had seen this clearly was two years ago, and the difference was obvious. The decor and furniture seemed to benefit from her myopia in some subtle way: the gradually encroaching shabbiness was lost on her this morning, whereas now it slammed straight into her eyes and brain in full force. At least, she thought, the difference was less this time. It was true: her myopia was slowing down. When it would stop, no one could say.

Kirsty reached under her bed, pulled out her latest diary, still relatively unmarked from use, being as it was only ten days old. She flipped it open, found the right page, and began ‘Dear Diary, Well, here I am again with new glasses! I can see clearly again! It’s going to be so great going to school and not having to squint to see the blackboard. It’s been so hard, you know. The fuzziness didn’t get as bad as last time two years ago, and there was no washing machine going wrong this time around, but no Paul either to help read the board. I think I got away with it. I don’t want them people at school knowing I have crud vision. I know, they can see my thick glasses - they’re hardly difficult to notice! And now, they are thicker. Perhaps no-one will notice the change?’

After a moment, she continued: ‘The optician suggested myodisks to my mum and me. Ohhh…. I don’t want them. He said I might end up with minus 16. I don’t like that, sounds like mega thick ugly lenses for me whichever way. I don’t want glasses like Amy and Melissa. They have really really bad vision now. Did I say that already? Well, they can’t tell me from anyone else far away, I hope that’s not in store for me. They will never drive a car, but I hope I can next year. I don’t know what’s worse, not driving at all, or doing it for a bit, and then being told, sorry, you have to give up now. Anyway… I have new glasses now! I can see clearly! '

The next day she wrote ‘What a surprise! Mum told me what she wants to do with my old glasses. I thought “bin them” or something like that, but no. She wants to give them to my younger sister Emma. Woah! She hasn’t told Emma yet. I doubt she’ll be happy about that. She’s getting blind as a bat now, so needs new glasses desperately, just like I did a couple of years ago. Mum can’t magic them out of nowhere, so maybe this will be OK. But I doubt it. I think Emma is getting quite an attitude, she doesn’t hold back when someone makes her angry. So I’m sure I want to be around when Mum tells her.’

A few hours later Kirsty wrote ‘Just what I thought, no it was worse. Emma threw a massive wobbly and screamed at mum, she’s in her bedroom crying her eyes out now. Sounds just like me 2-3 years ago. She keeps saying “it’s not fair” and stuff like that. Yeah it’s not fair, but life’s like that. She hasn’t even tried my old glasses for size. I think she feels a little cheated and insulted, but what else can mum do?’

At that, there was a knock at the door, and moments later her mother came in looking even more tired and exasperated than usual. She choked a little, and then asked ‘Kirsty, can you come and talk to Emma? Perhaps you can calm her down, and we can get her to try on your old glasses? Surely when she gives them a try she might accept them?’

Kirsty, with some reluctance, agreed to attempt this. She went out, leaving her mother in her room and knocked at her sister’s door, which was festooned with pictures of Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends. There was a sort of choked “hello” from inside, so Kirsty entered. Emma looked up at her through teary eyes and her 18-month-old, quite inadequately-lensed glasses at her, and asked bitterly, ‘who is it?’ ‘It’s me, Kirsty… can’t you tell?’ Kirsty knew all about that experience: She’d been there herself two years ago, and a month ago too, but it wasn’t so bad as back then. Emma’s sobs seemed to subside, then she blinked away the tears that were doing nothing to clarify her vision. She then asked in a small, desperately unhappy voice, ‘wha-wh do you want?’

There were times Kirsty when rather wished she wasn’t the big sister, and this was certainly one of them. She began boldly but rather softly, saying, ‘Emma, Mum says you can have my old glasses if you want.’ ‘Don’t want them. I want new glasses…’ Her bottom lip began to tremble, ominously presaging a new bout of crying and sobbing. Kirsty didn’t quite know what to say next, so said as tactfully as she could, ‘Mum can’t afford them yet, you know that.’ Emma gasped out brokenly, ’not fair… it’s not fair.’ and collapsed against Kirsty’s shoulder crying again. Kirsty hugged her long and hard, telling her she’d be OK, just wait till August, she’d get new glasses, but in the meantime, couldn’t she at least try her old ones? She patiently assured her that they would be better than her current pair, being nearer to her requirements. In the end Kirsty said, ‘Emma, just try them. You don’t have to wear them if you don’t want to.’ Emma said nothing as Kirsty got up and returned to her own bedroom, found her mother and asked her where she could find the old glasses: they were in one of her mother’s drawers.

Some minutes later Kirsty plonked them, in their case, on Emma’s rickety bedside table and repeated carefully, ‘you don’t have to wear them, just try them,’ before retreating back into her bedroom, whereupon she saw her mother again. She looked somewhat relieved, saying, ’thanks Kirsty. I don’t think I could have done that.’ They waited a few long minutes, but there was no more sobbing. In her bedroom, Emma was quietly trying on her hand-me-down glasses, looking around at her bedroom through them. But when she came out for dinner, there was neither sign nor mention of them.

2. February

Early in February Kirsty wrote in her Diary ‘There’s this gorgeous boy in my Biology class called Mike and I really fancy him! But I suppose all the girls do. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, I think. I wish he’d look at me for a change instead of Karen Wilmot. She is such a tart!’

Actually the “gorgeous Mike” wasn’t quite the movie star or boy band material Kirsty thought, but he wasn’t bad looking at all, well-formed and tall with dark hair and soft brown eyes. She waited impatiently outside the locked biology classroom door with her classmates a couple of days later: when he came into view she stared through her thick glasses at him, willing him to look so she could flash a smile at him or something, or perhaps stick out her leg from beneath the too-short and too-tight skirt of her school uniform. But alas he only spared a glance at her just before the teacher came to let them in, and although Kirsty gave him a smile, it didn’t register. She felt so disappointed, but resolved to keep on trying.

Once inside, it seemed to her that he purposefully and awkwardly refused to be looking at her whenever she was looking at him and ready to smile, but when her smiles did eventually coincide with his glances in her direction, she got the impression that there was a glimmer of interest on his face, enough to encourage her to continue her efforts. “Perhaps smiling isn’t the answer,” she wondered. Outside after the lesson, the aforementioned Karen Wilmot seemed to be hovering around him: he actually seemed to be properly interested in her, which in Kirsty’s opinion wasn’t fair at all. “Never mind”, she thought, “I’ll get a chance”.

That chance came entirely unexpectedly a couple of days later. She rounded a corner and bumped straight into him, causing her to drop her school bag in surprise and knock her glasses slightly awry on her face. He glanced at her, grunted “ooops” flatly, and carried on, leaving her to straighten her glasses and gaze wistfully after him. She lifted her school bag, and trudged off to her next class, feeling more than a little unhappy. She wondered to herself “Why doesn’t he like me? What does Karen Wilmot have that I don’t?” Once in class, she slipped her a discreet look through her thick glasses, thinking “Look at her, the stupid cow. How could he fancy her? What is it about me that he doesn’t like?” The answer came to her pretty quickly, too.

Kirsty sat on her bed writing in her Diary that evening ‘It looks like he fancies that slag Karen Wilmot. He won’t look at me twice, and I’m not ugly. Just because I wear glasses. It’s not fair.’ She put down the Diary, then stared at herself in the mirror, silently contemplating her face, thinking unhappily about the way her lenses pushed in her face, and shrank her blue eyes down to absurd-seeming little flickering things lost in a sea of coke bottles and reflections, again wishing there was something she could do. Then she turned to her Diary again, and wrote ‘Perhaps I might be able to wear contact lenses. Maybe he’ll look at me then.’ She paused to give a hollow laugh, and continued ‘I’m joking, you know. Mum can barely afford to buy us glasses, let alone contacts. But, if I don’t ask I won’t get them at all. If I do, then there’s a chance. About like if hell froze over, but still a chance.’

She plopped the Diary down, and went out to find her mother. She was in bed, exhaustedly trying to sleep after another long day at work, and in addition caring for her children with their various levels of vision and a multitude of other problems. Kirsty knocked at the door, and when invited in, sat at the end of her bed, her plano-fronted lenses flashing at her mother, who flashed back in kind with the assistance of her bedside light. She yawned and asked sleepily, ‘what do you want now… I’m tired…’ Kirsty drew breath, and then with uncertain boldness uttered her request, ‘Mum… Can I have contact lenses?’ Her mother’s face had that sad, pained look of someone who had been asked of too many things too often in life, and for Kirsty she didn’t think she really needed to give an answer, but she did so anyway ‘I’m sorry, darling, but I can’t afford them. Why do you want them, anyway?’ Kirsty gave a little sigh. The “no” wasn’t a surprise. The “why” was something she’d have rather kept to herself. But her mother knew anyway ‘Is it a boy?’ Kirsty gave a little nod. ‘Don’t worry, Kirsty, someone will love you one day, glasses or no glasses. Look at me.’

Kirsty was about to scream “No! They are so ugly, so horrible, they make me look awful!” But an instant later she realised her mother was and had been in the same boat as her, and she’d found four different men who’d found her attractive enough to have sex with her. In the awkward silence that followed, her mother interjected, ‘don’t worry, Kirsty, you’ll be fine.’ Kirsty didn’t look nor feel totally convinced that being fine was a real possibility, but went away and to bed without further question or comment.

A week later she sat contemplating her bespectacled gaze, and then turned to her Diary and wrote ‘Emma’s been trying her new glasses. Well, they’re new for her. She isn’t best pleased to be stuck with them instead of what she hoped for when Mum said she’d get new glasses, but overall she seems OK about it. She says she’d tried them in class - I don’t think I would do that, but never mind - and she can see the board pretty well. Mum got her to try them on again a few days ago and she could see quite well, almost clearly. But after a while of wearing them she complained of headaches. Not surprising, she is wearing someone else’s (my) glasses and they aren’t meant for her. But perhaps it’ll help her schoolwork. She needs to see the board the way I did two years ago, and as far as I know, she has no friendly kid next to her to help her out. Poor Emma, she’s a really nice girl and loves her Winnie-the-Pooh stuff even though she can’t see them so well with her old specs. They look a bit strange on her. Yeah, but they looked strange on me too! Mum had to bend them a bit to help them fit her head. Hers is smaller than mine!’ She glanced wistfully at her reflection in the mirror, and then continued ‘I’ve got the thicker glasses, but at least I can see clearly with them.’

An instant later she dropped her Diary and looked up at the window. She saw that it was dark outside; fluttering down from the sky was the tail end of a heavy snow shower. She got up and went to look: it had been snowing for some time, but she’d been too preoccupied with her homework, diary and glasses to notice. She smiled as she looked around across the roofs and gardens around the house, all white and lumpy with a thick layer of snow. As for the way the light bounced around and was accentuated by the light snow rather than the usual dull-coloured world outside, that wasn’t lost on Kirsty either, thanks to her thick lenses giving her fully corrected vision.

3. March

The snow came and went, and then came back again. As might be expected, they made a snowman. Then there was a brief snowball fight that had to be stopped because little Louise got hit by one in the face and ended up crying, having had her glasses knocked off. Mum stepped in to prevent anyone else having this misfortune happen to them, especially Amy and Melissa who were poor-sighted enough with them and didn’t do well in a snowball fight anyway due to their poor corrected vision. This sort of thing had happened before: last time it was Amy and she had to have her broken glasses strapped back together with sticky plasters, which left them and her looking rather stupid.

A few days into March the snow finally went, never to return that year. Instead of playing around in snowball fights, Kirsty busied herself trying to make herself look prettier: whilst looking at herself in the mirror, she played with her hair, pushing it up, tying it back, curling it around her fingers and then letting it dangle. She then tried rehearsing smiles, but soon realised they were rather artificial things, being as they lacked real emotion to give them any meaning. And obviously, there were the glasses: she wondered what could she do beyond just wear them and put up with them. She tried a few minutes trying to cope without glasses, but found that her 12.5 dioptres of uncorrected myopia were more than sufficient to make her vision just about useless, and that was just within the confines of her small but familiar bedroom. Groping around all day long outside did not strike her as a practical proposition. The reflection of her face in the mirror without glasses was a fuzzy, unintelligible glob of pink not much more than 6 inches away; she estimated she could tell if someone was looking at her maybe about a foot away if she was lucky. She sighed deeply, and pushed her much-needed glasses back onto her face.

The next weekend she spent some time doing her hair. She wanted a new style: a sort of fluffy, curly cascade of hair around her head. She couldn’t really see it without glasses, but that wasn’t such a big problem, she’d made up her mind she needed to see, and glasses were for moment, the only way for her to do so.

She wrote in her Diary ‘You should see me now. Well, sorry, you can’t see me, so I’ll tell you what I did. I curled my hair and kind of draped it so it covers the top of my glasses. I have to remember not to brush it away. With my hair brushed forward, I can cover up the top and sides of my frames fairly well. The push-in each side is still there, but I’ve covered some of it up, and I can’t do much about the bottom edge of my glasses, unless I grow a beard like Santa Claus. They stick through my disguise there and in other places. I’m trying to make the stupid thick ugly things a little less obvious. It’s worth a try.’

She spent Monday trying to catch Mike’s attention, and got nowhere fast. She came home grumpy and frustrated, and wrote in her Diary ‘Well, that didn’t work. He didn’t look twice at me like this. What do I have to do to get him to look at me?’ She pulled her hair back to roughly speaking where it was before the weekend, and slapped her diary shut.

The next lesson on Wednesday was worse than ever: she started sliding her glasses down her nose, trying to pretend that she didn’t need them all the time, taking them off occasionally and leaving them on the desk. She prayed she or someone else wouldn’t knock them off and break them while they sat there. But of course, she had to keep putting them back on to have a look at him. Despite all her antics, not once did he pay her the slightest attention. Then something strange happened on the way out: upon mingling with the kids from the other biology class next door, one of the boys looked at her and gave her a nice friendly smile. She ignored it, being utterly obsessed with Mike at that moment, and wondering if she dared try going without glasses out here in the corridor. She had her friend Alice wait with her in the cloakroom section, wearing glasses but ready to whip them off at a moment’s notice if Mike happened to appear.

Eventually he came past, her friend said “go”, on cue Kirsty pulled off her glasses, put them in her bag, and then pretended to nonchalantly wander past him. He did look slightly surprised, but that was all, and after all Kirsty couldn’t tell that anyway. He continued past, and was gone, leaving Kirsty in her blur. She turned, squinted back at where she thought Alice was, walked toward that place, stumbled on something she couldn’t see, which thus caused her to trip and fall completely flat on her face, and as a result looked quite ridiculous. Alice helped her up, saying, ‘Kirsty, put your glasses back on and forget him, he’s not interested in you. I saw him kissing Karen Wilmot yesterday. He’s taken.’ Kirsty squinted uselessly at her. Alice commented drily, ‘you look really silly without glasses, you squint so badly and really obviously can’t see a thing. No-one, not me nor him would ever believe you are not short sighted.’

Kirsty choked a sob back, rummaged for her glasses, found them and shoved them onto her face, saying angrily, ‘it’s all because I wear glasses!’ ‘You don’t know that. It might be something else.’ Kirsty stared at her through her thickly refractive lenses, obviously not wanting to believe that. Alice then said helpfully, ‘I think James Smith likes you.’ ‘him? He’s ugly!’ ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe ordinary-looking?’ ‘Nah, no thanks.’

That night she reflected on her misfortunes with the aid of her Diary ‘Well, I can see that Mike isn’t interested in me. My friend helped open my eyes to that. But she told me James Smith was interested in me. I don’t know him at all, except what he looks like, which is ugly. Why can’t I do better than that? I know I wear glasses. Yes, I wear thick ugly glasses, so I must have an ugly boyfriend? No, that’s not fair on me. I want… well, I know when I see him. But does anybody good-looking want me?’

A single tear ran down under her left lens and plopped onto the diary. Irritated, she wiped it clean, and threw it across the room, and then instantly went to pick it up, and wrote ‘Sorry for that’ She then sat wondering whether Paul was a one-off, liking her and her thick glasses as he did, or could there be another? But surely not as ugly as… And then there was a knock at the door, and Emma came in. She was wearing her old glasses, and asked ‘Kirsty, come and watch TV with me.’ Kirsty got up and went downstairs to watch, whereupon Emma solemnly took out and donned her “new” glasses in order to see it more clearly. Kirsty asked her how she liked her new glasses, and Emma replied ‘I can see clearer now, not quite clearly but almost. But I keep getting headaches. Did mum tell you when I would get new glasses?’ Kirsty couldn’t remember being told, so admitted ‘No, she didn’t tell me.’ Her mum had mentioned to her that she might hide the old pair with the hope that Emma would get used to the new ones more quickly. But that would have caused major rows her mother couldn’t have coped with, so she didn’t go any further than talk with that.

On the 25th of March she wrote

‘Hey… it’s my Birthday, I’m 16. Maybe I can have a present of a nice boyfriend who likes girls like me in glasses. Or if not then magic contact lenses that are free. Dream on, girl, you say.’

4. April

Kirsty stuck her head out of her bedroom window to get a better look at the world outside: as always, she wore her thick-lensed glasses to see it clearly. The wind whipped her not quite so curly hair over her face and flat-fronted lenses, momentarily interrupting her view. She pulled it away from her face, and found herself on the point of smiling. “Perhaps glasses weren’t so bad”, she thought, “after all, they keep my hair out of my eyes.” Then, “and they help me see”. Actually “help” wasn’t the right word: in her case it was more like “allowed” or “made possible” the act of seeing. She shrugged, and settled down to write in her Diary.

‘Today is the day before Easter. Wow, how exciting. Yeah, I’m not excited at all, but at least I’m off school. I’ll tell you what is strange, it’s that some boys like girls in glasses, but finding them is a real pain in the rear end. If you are a girl who wears glasses, then if you find one then you’re really lucky. Otherwise the whole world thinks you are just ugly and stupid for wearing these thick awful glasses. I wish Paul hadn’t gone away. But maybe I can find someone else. I spent most of last month chasing around after this guy called Mike who wasn’t interested in me. Perhaps I shall try James Smith instead.’

The day after Easter Kirsty went to school, armed with her new-found determination to find James. No-one seemed to know where he was. Eventually she discovered that he wasn’t around, due to his being sick with the flu or somesuch ailment. Kirsty had to wait till the end of the week before he appeared. She tried to act casual as he walked toward her: he favoured her with a timorous smile, but when she said “hello,” he suddenly didn’t seem so interested, the reason why eluding her despite some considerable thought. Later, she caught up with him on the playing field: he seemed to look around nervily as she talked at him meaninglessly about nothing in particular. He did engage in eye contact with her, and didn’t look away in embarrassment as some did when confronted with her thickly bespectacled gaze, but Kirsty could tell that he didn’t seem too interested. She came away bemused.

That bemusement didn’t last long. She saw him with another girl in the corridor: she didn’t know her name, but to her she seemed quite ordinary. But from the viewpoint of any other observer, she was the whole world to him. Kirsty walked past them, looking at them as she did so; the girl looked at her, briefly meeting her curious gaze through the thickest pair of glasses that she’d seen in ages. Like a pair of blobby eggy lightbulbs, she thought, her eyes inflated into huge flickering things floating in front of her face. Kirsty looked away, and hurried off.

That evening she wrote in her diary ‘Today I saw James Smith with some girl wearing the ugliest glasses I ever saw, and that includes my own, so they must be really strong! She must have terrible eyesight! And he is interested in her? Arrgghh!!!! Why?????? Is he blind? Or stupid???’

Kirsty still felt confused the next time she saw them together, again holding hands and looking at each other as if there was no-one else on the planet. Kirsty just felt so confused: she just about comprehended that some boys liked girls in glasses, albeit a rare minority, but for someone to be attracted to someone else wearing those awful things? In her opinion, that seemed impossible: but here it was in front of her, and it riled her that he had chosen “miss-blobby-eyes,” as she labelled her, instead of herself. She did her best to stay calm and walked away as quickly as she could, trying to think of anything else except boys.

Kirsty wrote in her Diary ‘This whole world is mad! Either that I or I am! I wish I could get contacts. It’s not fair! How many times have I said that? Two years ago it wasn’t fair that I couldn’t see clearly, and now I can, but I want to do it wearing contacts not thick ugly glasses with sticky-out lenses and coke bottle lenses. Why me, why my poor face, why my poor eyes with their terrible vision? Arrgghh! None of this makes sense! I want that boy James Smith who likes girls in glasses, but the stupid idiot has gone off with someone with even uglier lenses than mine (I can’t believe this, but it’s true, someone has worse vision than me!) Maybe I’m the stupid one for chasing around after Mike when James was interested in me. Duh, aren’t I stupid?’ After a pause she continued ‘No, I’m not stupid, just because I wear thick glasses to see. Just unlucky. Perhaps I ought to try attracting James Smith, smiling at him and stuff. If he’s into girls with glasses, that might work. Perhaps he might prefer me to Miss Blob-Lenses herself.’

Towards the end of the month she had an opportunity to try out her plan: the aforementioned pair were together, with eyes only for each other as usual. Kirsty deliberately barged into the girl, saying “sorry”, whilst meaning nothing of the sort. The girl looked surprised and certainly very displeased, and even more so when Kirsty didn’t immediately go away and leave them in peace. She saw Kirsty smiling and swishing her pleated grey tartan skirt around at James, sticking out her bust at him and fluttering her eyes behind her thick lenses in what she hoped was an alluring fashion. It was too much, way too much, for the girl to take: she rounded on Kirsty, angrily telling her, ‘get lost you tart!’ Along with a selection of other such expletives.

She shoved at Kirsty, and Kirsty pushed her away. James tried to intervene but somehow got ignored in the short but violent scuffle. The girl managed to get herself off-balance, so after a brief melee, there was a shriek of dismay; Kirsty now looked down at the girl, who had fallen, or rather had been pushed, over. The girl’s glasses were on the floor near her: Kirsty could see the fall hadn’t done them any good whatsoever: a big spider-like crack ran across the left lens. Her opponent groped uselessly on the floor for them, when they were restored to her by James, she shrieked even louder at Kirsty, ‘you broke my glasses! You BITCH!’ As James gallantly helped her up, the broken bits of her lens promptly fell out of the frame, hit the floor and broke up into too many pieces to be worth any attempt at repair. She screamed and shouted angrily at Kirsty, who stood looking numbed and uncertain as the girl glared at her with her oddly misshapen gaze. James addressed Kirsty angrily, ‘Kirsty, you stupid idiot, look what you did!’

There were others around to witness what had transpired, and very soon a teacher too: he should mayhap have been entirely neutral, but because one of the girls involved had had her glasses broken, he perhaps strangely sided with her. Kirsty was taken to an office, and after some time there was something resembling an inquisition into what had occurred, run by one of the deputy headmasters. He decided that Kirsty was the “party in the wrong” and had “started it”. Perhaps that was true, but the girl had been more than a little hot-headed in her response to Kirsty’s clumsy attempts to steal her boyfriend. Of course, James certainly sided with his girlfriend, and that certainly wasn’t Kirsty. It was her hard luck that she’d failed to take him up on his previous interest, and in addition, her hard luck that he preferred hyperopes over myopes, but that little facet was lost on her.

Some time later her mother appeared at the school, and once informed as to what her daughter had done, she flew into a real temper with Kirsty. After she’d calmed down somewhat, she spoke to her, saying, ‘I’ll have to pay for the new lens now, and do you think I can afford it, you stupid girl?’ Kirsty looked ashamed and downcast, but made no reply. ‘Well, I’ll tell you how I’ll afford it. I’ll take the cash from your glasses fund. Going without new glasses for a couple of months might make you behave a little better.’ Kirsty looked shocked, gave a little gasp of disbelief, but said nothing. She’d done and said enough today already.

When she got home, she wrote in her Diary ‘Well, today’s been a great day, hasn’t it? No, it’s been completely shit. I beat up some girl and broke her glasses over a boy, then I got blamed and I have to go without new glasses for a few months to pay for it. What will that be like? At least now I can see clearly still, and my vision isn’t getting bad as fast as it did two years ago. But I don’t need that. I feel really pissed off right now.’

5. May

On the first Saturday in May Kirsty wrote ‘Dear Diary, I’ll tell you about my twin sisters Amy and Melissa. They are 14 now and their vision is just falling down the same hole that mine went down a couple of years ago. Except they are falling further than me. They have really thick glasses, over twice as thick as mine, despite being those awful myodisk things. Fancy that, having to look only straight ahead? No, I don’t, that’s why I don’t want them.’ She paused, sat back, considering her reflection in the mirror, and how wanting and getting were far from related, then continued ‘They asked me to come with them to watch them play tennis. I wondered how they could with such crud vision, but they told me the ball has a bell or rattle or something in it which helps them find it. They hope to play in their school sports day. Those two have really terrible eyesight: my vision hasn’t changed much at all as far as I can tell since I got my new specs, theirs, well I have to keep telling them what things say and stuff. And at night, they have real trouble. Whenever I hear things going “bump” in the night, I know it’s not a ghost, it’s Amy or Melissa groping around. I don’t think they can see very much in the dark, even with the right glasses.’

The next day Kirsty went with them to the local park, which happened to be a short bus ride away. These days they had to be helped a little with such things as spotting buses: Melissa liked red buses best, being as they were easier to see and her favourite colour to boot, but perversely Amy preferred blue ones. Kirsty didn’t really care what colour they were, as long as they went where she wanted to go and were on time. They weren’t all that good at spotting or recognizing people in the not-that-far-distance either: when they got to the park and had gotten themselves ready Kirsty was sitting outside waiting for them, but they promptly missed her, which required her to call out and wave at them. They turned and came back to her, all squinty-eyed and apologetic, eager to impress their beloved big sister. Amy then waved the ball at her, saying, ’look, Kirsty, this is the ball I told you about.’ Kirsty took it, curious, and shook it: indeed, it made the jingling sound she’d been told to expect. She handed it back to Amy, then they all went over to the tennis court.

Kirsty watched as her younger sisters banged the ball over the net with gusto and run about after it, guided partly by their fuzzy vision and partly by the insistent ringing of the ball. Then one of them missed it, and it flew over the fence into some bushes, as balls always do, and promptly vanished. The three of them went around to search for it. Amy started rummaging around fruitlessly, followed by Melissa, who complained, ‘oh, why does it always have to go in the bushes?’ Amy replied, ‘at least we’ve got our big sister who can help us find it!’ She then called out hopefully ‘Kirsty, can you see it? We can’t find it!’ Kirsty replied, ‘yeah, I know, you can’t see very well… I haven’t seen it yet. Keep looking, yeah?’ It occurred to her that in future she’d be doing much more for them than hunting for lost tennis balls: probably becoming more like some guide dog with two legs, she thought unhappily.

And then Kirsty, far more sharp-eyed than her two sisters, spotted it nestling against the main stem of a big bush: alas she could see it, but not reach it. She called out to her nearest sister ‘Melissa! There it is. Do you see it?’ ‘No.’ Kirsty pointed, and Melissa shrugged. Amy came over to look in her fashion, and despite her and her twin sister squinting furiously, neither could be remotely sure that the fuzzy greenish blur they were seeing was the ball. Kirsty gave a sigh of exasperation, pushed her way into the bush, finding that as she reached into the space under all the branches, one brushed against her forehead and threatened to deprive her of her glasses. And then she was pulling herself upright, wishing she hadn’t agreed to come with them, but then her poor myopic sisters would have lost the ball and been obliged to pay for a new one, or else give up tennis. So perhaps it was just as well she was there. After that, she watched her sisters play a bit more, before they decided they’d played enough and wanted to go home. Whilst riding on the bus home, they pestered her to accompany them to watch their school sports day in July. As she would have left school by then, she agreed, imagining that she would have little else better to do with her time.

The following Tuesday found Kirsty revising for her upcoming English exam. She had to review some of the books that she had read in the last two years and done some work on: they were usual sort of classic English literature, Dickens, Shakespeare and suchlike. At one point she found she didn’t have a copy of a particular book and had forgotten some of what was in it, so went back into the library to hunt it down. Once there, she got sidetracked, her heavily bespectacled gaze falling unbidden on a particular book with a garish cover: it had spaceships on it, and the title printed on the front was “Lyra Starfire and the Legion of Space”. For no reason she could think of, she opened it: it was the story of some female space pilot who was fighting for the cause of humanity and generally saving the universe, but oddly enough, she happened to wear thick glasses. Kirsty touched her own version of what was described in the book, and then a moment later shut the book, put it down, thinking “what sort of rubbish is that?”

About ten days later she sat her English exam, and struggled, since she ended up sitting in the almost unnatural quiet of the examination hall thinking about boys, glasses, and wondering how and why the two were connected, rather than concentrating on the matter at hand. She started thinking about this distraction as an answer to a question about Shakespeare, and then dropped the idea once the thought “this is too weird for the examiner,” came into her mind. She did her best, but Kirsty wasn’t at her best today and it showed in her answers: she had too much going on for exams. But as she looked up, she thought with satisfaction, “I can see the clock from here. It’s great, last time I did this I couldn’t tell the time, and had to wait for the examiner to call time for me.” Alas, glasses that corrected her vision properly wouldn’t answer questions about English Literature, and thus she was on her own. After what seemed like forever, the examiner did call time, and this time Kirsty didn’t see the clock because she wasn’t looking at it all, being too busy writing feverishly in an attempt to make some answer, useful or not.

And then a few days later it was the nightmare that she’d been dreading: a maths exam. Here the lack of clear vision had hit hard: the teacher had written things on the board that she had been unable to decipher unaided; sometimes she had no help, sometimes she had Paul, sometimes some friendly girl. If the question was related to something that had been lost in a meaningless blur, then she struggled badly or left it.

The next day, at home, she sat reading a borrowed fashion magazine in her bedroom, as so often before sprawled on her bed looking at it page by page. She looked longingly at the clothes and the makeup portrayed there within: it was nice to dream about this sort of stuff, even if it was nothing like the sort of things she could actually do or wear herself. As she went through it, she started to feel a strange sort of unease about it, as if she were missing something. It took her until she was well over halfway through before she realised why: none of the models wore glasses! They were all depicted posing with whatever clothes and/or makeup that was being featured, but there was no sign of glasses on them anywhere. “Of course,” she thought wistfully, “they are beautiful fashion models. They don’t wear glasses. They’d look silly!”

After dinner she picked up her Diary and wrote ‘Today I saw some models in a fashion magazine, and thought “why don’t they wear glasses?” It’s because they would look silly posing in “Cosmo” with all that make up and funny little shrunken eyes like mine look like from in front, or great big blobby ones like that other girl. But it’s not fair… I am just as much a girl as they are. Why can’t people see past the glasses? Yeah I know, some can but they are a tiny minority and unlikely to change the world all by themselves. And finding them, well that’s a problem. They seem to hide in the oddest places and be the most unexpected people - usually the ones I’d never consider at all. . Regards, Kirsty.’

A few days later she wrote in her Diary ‘I had another tough exam today, science. Jeez, I am just so crap at that! What’s an Ester anyway? It’s like all that x and y stuff in maths, totally pointless. One day soon I will have to find a job, and I think that will rely more on what I look like that how clever I am. And that could be a problem, and I don’t have to tell you why I think that.’

She paused to look at herself in the mirror: she was sixteen years old, and although she hadn’t achieved quite the mature look that she would manage in the next 10 years, she was in no way unattractive. In her socks and school uniform she stood 5 feet and 6 inches tall, and her body was shapely without being too overdone in either the bust or hip department. For the record, her bust size was 32D at that moment. She briefly stuck it out at herself, just to see what effect that would make to the overall situation. Her dark blonde hair fell around her head rather messily at that moment, but in a more combed state it reached past her neck, settling a little on each shoulder. The fluffy curls she had put into it a couple of months ago had all but gone, having been supplanted by the gentle waves that came naturally to her. Overall, she wasn’t ugly at all, but that judgement ignored the really blatant fact of her glasses; they dominated her face with their thickness and the effect they had on her grey-blue eyes from almost every angle. Briefly she pulled them from her face and shook her hair even looser than before, then scrunched up her eyes in a pitifully pointless attempt at focusing. Her uncorrected vision was quite useless for recognising or deciphering faces beyond a very few inches, and that included her own reflected in her mirror. She hadn’t really seen much of her face in the mirror beyond close up without glasses for around five years, and for a moment idly wondered what she really looked like. Momentarily she wished that Paul was around to call her pretty, then shoved them back on, and thus the world returned to its normal harsh but far more useful clarity.

She resumed her diary writing ‘How I look is OK I suppose, but my glasses… you know how thick and ugly they are, but I need them to see. I cannot see without them!!! It is so stupid. The worse my vision gets, the thicker they get, the uglier they get. That is the pattern of my life. Whatever I try to make myself look pretty, hair, makeup, clothes, whenever I put my glasses on they take off a good chunk of what I’ve done, no matter what I do. And if I go without glasses? Then I’m ‘Little Miss Squinty’ who needs to be led around like some stupid blind girl. Life is sooo unfair. And I have no boyfriend. All my friends have some boy, all the girls in my class seem to have one, even the ugly ones. Me, Kirsty thickspecs, no, I can’t find a boy who will look at me twice. Why can’t I find one? I am a nice person. I don’t get mad and crazy, well not much anyway, not the way Emma sometimes works herself into. There seems no nice available boy who likes girls in glasses at school at the moment. It’s NOT FAIR!’ She stopped, realising she had worked herself into a frenzy of miserable despair, her writing in the diary not its usual fair copy quality but a rapid, barely legible scrawl, the last two words written large on the bottom of the page.

6. June

Kirsty wrote in her diary one evening in the first week of June ‘My sisters Amy and Melissa are due to have new glasses next week. How thick, how ugly will theirs be? I am so glad that I don’t need them and with luck will never need them. I tell you, whatever my prescription I am sticking with this sort of glasses. I don’t care how thick they get. I’ll never wear myodisks. They are horrible. You have to look through the middle of them all the time, and you can’t move your eyes or it goes all funny, like my sisters say. You have to move your head. Kinda weird, but they got used to them. I don’t really want to do that.’ After another significant pause she wrote ‘How on earth will they ever get boyfriends wearing those? Perhaps if they are lucky, no very lucky.’

Next week came, during which Amy and Melissa became increasingly excited due to their impending date with the optician. They both knew their vision was terrible: they were continually telling their mother and anyone else they could find how, to them “everything was all blurry and shrunken,” as they put it. And because Kirsty was getting towards the end of her exams, and thus was not required to attend school as often, her mum told her she could come along to the optician if she so desired. Actually, as normal, she was dead tired from work and was hoping Kirsty might help the twins if necessary. Kirsty didn’t mind: she would do anything for her sisters and Mum.

And then the day dawned, and they all got onto the bus into town. As usual, Kirsty made better company for the two of them than their mother, particularly when they didn’t feel like talking between themselves in soft conspiratorial whispers, and of course she was much more likely to get involved in a game of “can you see that?”. Of course Kirsty would win such a game easily, having recently got new glasses and being in the fortunate position of her eyes not having noticeably worsened since then. The odd thing was that her glasses were just marginally thicker than those of the twins, even if they were obviously far less strongly refractive.

Their little game carried on until they arrived at the all-too-familiar opticians. Kirsty thought this was very odd: it was a long time since she’d been with any of her sisters. Somehow she thought it would be far from being the last, certainly not with the twins, anyway. There were greetings from the staff there, as they recognised Kirsty, her sisters and her mother. That recognition did not flow quite as evenly in reverse: her twin sisters were now much less good at visual recognition than in former times. Amy whispered to Kirsty, ‘we can’t read that woman’s name badge, please can you tell us who she is?’ Kirsty obliged, before they were guided to the waiting area.

After some waiting, the optician came to collect his first “victim”, which was Amy, on account that she was the eldest. Kirsty was given the job of keeping Melissa company while their mother accompanied Amy. Melissa didn’t need that much looking after, but readily welcomed someone to chat with while waiting. Almost as soon as Amy was gone with their mother, Melissa asked ‘Kirsty, what’s it like to see clearly?’ Kirsty’s shoulders twitched a little, and so did her face, but she answered as best she could, ‘don’t you remember?’ Melissa shook her head rather numbly. She thought to herself “was it only 5 years ago? Had my vision got this bad so quickly?” Then answered ‘I don’t want to go blind. Kirsty, you are so lucky, you can wear glasses and see clearly. Me and Amy have to go to a special school and only meet other blind kids, we look so weird in our glasses. I don’t think a normal boy would want either of us.’

Kirsty didn’t quite know what to say: she was wrestling with a similar problem herself. After an awkward pause, she blurted out, ‘do you have a boyfriend - does Amy?’ ‘No… Yes… sort of.’ ‘Does Mum know?’ Melissa looked taken aback, as if that were none of their Mum’s business. There was a longer and even more awkward silence. Melissa then asked her own burning question, ‘do you have a boyfriend, Kirsty?’ ‘No, of course not.’

Melissa looked quite shocked for a long moment, taken aback by Kirsty’s reply, then said, ‘I don’t understand. You look so pretty, Kirsty.’ ‘How can you tell?’ For an answer, Melissa leant forward in order to peer closely at her, and then said, ‘yep, you’re prettier than me and Amy. And you wear normal glasses, not myodisks, and you are not going blind. Boys should want you.’ Kirsty didn’t quite know what to say, but then said ‘Melissa, listen to me. There are some boys who like girls with glasses, you ought to know that by now. But they’re really hard to find and come in all sorts of odd packages. I’ve met two that like girls with normal glasses like mine, but although I’ve never seen or heard of one that liked myodisks, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were around somewhere.’

Melissa nodded, and then said, ‘just finding them is the problem. But for us it’s a worse problem, because already me and Amy can’t tell if boys are looking at us or smiling at us beyond a few feet. So if they are interested, they have to come and tell us. How many boys actually do that? Say up front that they like girls in glasses?’ Kirsty admitted, ’not many.’ Melissa then peered at her, and said ‘I wish I could have glasses like yours. They look better than mine, and I can look around more. She peered closely at Kirsty’s face, and said, ‘your eyes look so much better than mine. My lenses scatter the light about and make my eyes hard to see even if whoever looking can see clearly.’ Kirsty nearly said “I know,” but stopped herself in time.

Just then a young lad came in with his mother and sat almost opposite them. Kirsty saw that like herself, too wore a thick ugly pair of glasses; not as thick and ugly as hers, but certainly a good challenger, with dark brown plastic frames and plano lenses, about minus 10 or 11 in strength. In her opinion he wasn’t fantastic looking, but he was far from the “three headed green alien” look either. Their bespectacled, slightly shy gazes met somewhere in the middle of the space between them, a gap of about 3 metres or so. His mother wore glasses too, but nowhere near as strong as his.

Melissa squinted valiantly at him, but the distance was too great for her to see much detail of his face. She murmured to Kirsty ‘I think he wears glasses.’ Kirsty whispered back, ‘yes, I know.’ ‘Is he looking at you?’ ‘Yes, well, he did.’ ‘Did he smile at you?’ ‘No.’ ‘Smile at him, then.’ Kirsty gave a small but extremely exasperated sigh. As much as she wanted a boyfriend, two things were stopping her at that moment: one was that she was supposed to be looking after Melissa, not eyeing up the local talent, and the other bigger problem was that she was far from certain that she wanted a boy with glasses rivalling her own in thickness and strength. Irritably, she hissed at Melissa, ‘just leave it alone, OK?’ ‘Alright, alright. You do a great impression of Mum, don’t you?’ That was true enough, Kirsty thought. In doing this little trip to the opticians, she thought she was just coming out to have a bit of fun and a laugh with her younger sisters; instead she felt that she was changing into a sort of substitute or deputy mum, which was hardly what she wanted to be doing at the ripe young age of sixteen.

After what seemed like ages, the door opened and her mother came out, with Amy following her. Both looked more than a little worried, stressed and generally unhappy. The reason wasn’t hard to guess: bad news on the visual front. Amy plonked down beside her sister, but her mum was entrusted with the job of announcing the bad news, saying ‘Amy is partially blind.’ She looked like she was about to cry. Melissa looked alarmed, but Amy seemed to be taking the reiteration of the verdict calmly enough: Kirsty knew this was coming, as did everyone in her family, it was just bad news nobody wanted to actually hear. Her mother sat beside Amy, then Melissa slowly got up to be the optician’s next “victim”. Her mother looked around rather dumbly, and started to get up. Melissa said boldly, ‘Mum, Kirsty can keep me company in there. If the optician wants to eat me, he’ll have to eat her too.’ Her mother didn’t laugh, but nodded gravely at Kirsty who promptly got up and followed her younger sister into the optician’s lair.

Once inside, the big bad optician gave a cheery, encouraging “hello” to Melissa, and bade her sit, and then with a faint note of surprise also said “hello” to Kirsty, instantly realising that in some way she was playing mum for this victim. He engaged her in a little banter with her, mainly asking about visual matters: Kirsty could only answer that everything was fine for her. She didn’t feel like telling him about her varying feelings about her glasses, which fluctuated from “wow I can see sooo clearly,” to “oh my, what do I look like wearing these awful things?” Kirsty sat on a chair in a corner and tried her best to look invisible. The optician could correct her myopia, she thought, but dealing with the solution to that wasn’t really his problem.

She watched and listened slightly absently as the optician did and said things to Melissa that he normally did and said to her: from her perspective it seemed really strange not to be on that chair, peering at the eyechart through that thing that looked like a spare section from a motorway bridge. She noted with satisfaction that she could still read the eyechart from where she sat even though it was at a slight angle and slightly further away than the test subject would sit, right the way down to the 20/20 line. Alas Melissa could get nowhere near that visual acuity: she stopped reading the chart after a couple of lines, and couldn’t even see all the 20/100 letters. Kirsty suddenly felt enormously sorry for her younger sisters; they had such poor vision, and also that they had to wear such horribly ugly glasses and yet still only see only fairly well. He did some other things with Melissa that Kirsty hadn’t ever had done to her: such things that went with the visual territory Amy and Melissa were in. Then he started trying to correct her vision with additional lens strength. Kirsty had been though this before several times herself, but this was different: this time he wasn’t aiming at 20/20, he was aiming at whatever he could get.

After some endless-seeming swapping around of lenses, he spoke to Melissa, and by implication Kirsty, with a grave note in his voice, ‘Melissa, you are now only correctable to 20/70 like your sister, so that means you are partially blind too.’ Melissa shrugged almost noncommittally, as if the news was of little import. It was hardly a shock: biologically she was identical to her sister Amy, and their glasses were usually within 0.25 dioptres in strength of each other, the only difference being that the lens strengths were a mirror image to each other. After all, they were twins. Kirsty felt a little lost as far as knowing what to do or say next, so asked Melissa, ‘shall I tell Mum now?’ ‘No… She’s probably still reeling from the news about Amy.’ The optician interjected, ‘yes, please go and fetch your mother, Kirsty, I need her to sign something for me.’ Kirsty went out and swapped herself over with her mum in the capacity of keeping Amy company, which allowing her to sneak another look at the boy in glasses facing them. Oddly she mused to herself “maybe I should try a boy with glasses.” There was a slight problem with this plan: she didn’t know any well enough to ask.

All in all her mother coped well enough with the second lot of bad news: being as it was virtually the same news repeated, it lost quite a lot of its sting. But even so, when the haggling about new glasses came around she didn’t seem so attentive as usual, instead appearing a little distant and preoccupied, and when it came to choosing new frames for the twins, Kirsty was soon helping out since her mother seemed so distracted. Amy sat trying on new frames: her new lenses demanded them. In doing so, she asked Kirsty her opinion, since she wasn’t getting all she might have expected from their mother. Again Kirsty was almost another mother, excepting that she could hardly make a decision where a question of money was concerned. The twins decided on identical metal frames ideally suited to their new lenses, and also looking not too terrible, mostly thanks to Kirsty. Numbly their mother signed a cheque for the required amount and the process of getting new glasses was set in motion for them both.

When they all got home and Kirsty had a chance, she wrote in her Diary ‘My twin sisters became partially blind today. Well, actually they were since a few months ago, it’s just that now it’s official. Mum was really cut up about it. We all knew this was coming, but nobody actually wants to hear that about their children, do they? I sat and watched as Melissa struggled and failed to get past the 4th line down (I think it was) and it felt so heartbreaking to see her like that. But that’s life I suppose. And the optician told us that their eyes would carry on getting worse for years yet. Their glasses would get thicker and thicker, I think uglier than anything I’ve ever seen, and perhaps even they’d have to use head straps to help hold them on. And possibly a white stick to feel their way around. Yep, it’s been a bad day.’

7. July

On the Thursday evening of the first week of July, Kirsty sat down with her Diary and wrote ‘Today I finally finished my exams, and that also means that I have also officially left school. Of course, that means that I have to find a job and all that sort of boring stuff, but if I do then I can have some money for things like contact lenses and some fun that I don’t usually get. Mum seems to have got over the twin’s poor vision for the moment: once they got their new glasses they actually seemed fairly happy because they could see a lot better. I know how that feels! It’s amazing because at the moment I still can’t see any change in my vision with my new glasses, nearly seven months on. Unfortunately both Emma and Louise need new glasses. We just can’t win in our family. My Mum’s birthday at the end of last month was really quiet, I think she was still brooding over the twins. Poor mum, I don’t know how she copes with us five girls. The twins are the worst, but I suppose the rest of us don’t help. Perhaps now I should help her more. She really needs it.’

Kirsty then heard her twin sisters giggling in the room across the corridor, so went to find out what was so funny. She sat down on Amy’s bed and they told her what it was all about: it seemed that there was this boy at their school who they’d been tormenting for the last week or so, trying to confuse him about which twin was which. Since they were fairly identical, and he had worse vision than they did, it wasn’t that hard. Kirsty looked sternly at them both, a little pointlessly because they had to squint to see facial expressions properly across the bed, and told them, ‘you both ought to be ashamed of yourselves, let him alone. That’s if one of you doesn’t actually like him.’ There followed a pointless episode of Melissa teasing Amy about him, so Kirsty shook her head, shrugged and left them to it. Once outside, she thought to herself “maybe I’m getting old too quick?” She heard more giggling as she went back into her bedroom, and thought she heard “Kirsty’s gone all mumsy….hee hee hee hee hee…”

She sat in her room and started writing again in her Diary ‘My twin sisters now think I’m like a number 2 Mum. I suppose they need quite a bit of caring for, so why not? I’m not sure I want to be another mother to them though. They want me to go and watch their sports day in a couple of weeks - what will that be like? What do blind kids do at sports day?’

A few days later Kirsty went to her first job interview. It was something she’d seen in an agency window: office work at a small insurance broker. She’d got herself dressed up as smartly as she could in a new but cheap grey skirt suit, but hadn’t tied her hair back, not because she desperately wanted to look untidy, but for her it was for a good reason. A few months ago she’d used her hair in an attempt at disguising her thick glasses, with decidedly mixed success, and although now she wasn’t so concerned with hiding her glasses, the fluffy curls in her shoulder length hair were attractive. Exactly what the job entailed eluded her, but she imagined herself as a secretary working for some important and handsome boss. The reality was rather different: the place was small, a bit scruffy and not really that important. She sat in a room looking around, unconsciously relying on her thick glasses to let her read all sorts of boring posters on the wall, a calendar, wall chart, and some such other things typically found in the average office. She didn’t think it looked exciting at all.

She was guided in to see the manager: he was polite at least, but after one look at her seemed reluctant to look at her again, at least not in the eye. Kirsty, well used to and sensitive to such things, immediately felt a sinking feeling inside her: she knew it already, she wasn’t going to be working here. He asked her if she knew anything about insurance, of which naturally she didn’t. Eventually she went home and found nobody there, so wrote in her Diary ‘Had my first job interview today. I don’t think I’ll be working there. Actually it was a bit of a grot-hole so I’m glad, but also I’m worried because the manager wouldn’t look at me more than once. What if he doesn’t like people with glasses? What if all the managers do? Will they turn me down because I look funny and ugly in my thick glasses? Oh…. it’s not fair!!!’

The following week Kirsty went with her mother to the long-anticipated Blind School Sports Day. Her sisters Amy and Melissa would be competing in the Tennis competition, which Kirsty watched for a while, relying on vision rather than the jangling sound the ball made in order to follow it, in contrast to all the competitors who plainly depended on it. She watched both her sisters get knocked out early on, so then they all had to find something else to watch. Kirsty was surprised how much it was like a normal sports day: it wasn’t anywhere near the grotesque spectacle she had imagined it might be. True, there were a few things they didn’t do, but she didn’t miss them at all.

She was sitting fairly comfortably on the grass, watching the long jump competition when her twin sisters came into her view. They were far from the only kids wearing thick myodisks at the school, but were unmistakable due to there being two of them, also being very much identical to the casual observer. They seemed very much like how she was about a year or two ago, she thought, as she watched them squinting around. Kirsty wondered if they were looking for her, and sure enough a moment later Amy called out ‘Kirsty? Where are you? Mum said you were over here somewhere!’ Kirsty was feeling quite relaxed, and wanted nothing more than to sit around undisturbed, but then a little guilt struck her mind, and thus an instant later she was waving and calling out, ‘hey, Amy, Melissa, over here!’

They saw her wave, and quickly came over to sit with her. Or so Kirsty thought: they were all smiles, giggles and happy laughter, and after a few moments, Kirsty asked them, ‘well? What’s up?’ Her query was met with another flood of giggles from Melissa, so Amy was forced to wind her mirth back in order to say ‘Kirsty, there’s a boy over there, he’s looking for a girlfriend.’ Nonchalantly Kirsty raised an eyebrow behind one of her thick lenses, and said noncommittally, ‘really?’ ‘Yeah, shall we show you?’

Being as the twins had such poor vision, they could hardly point and tell her “he’s over there” with anything much resembling certainty. But they did a good job of describing him, telling Kirsty what he was wearing and some idea of what he looked like. His name was Stephen, apparently. Excitedly, detecting an interest in Kirsty that she didn’t really have, Amy asked her, ‘well, are you going to take a look?’ ‘Does he wear glasses?’ ‘Yes.’ Kirsty shrugged, and said airily ‘I might in a bit. Go on, the running’s about to start.’ After more giggling, they got out of her hair. She was amazed how immature they were compared with her lofty age of only about 16 months older, whereby things seemed so different. They would turn 15 next week: she hoped they would grow up, but not as quickly and painfully as she had been obliged to of late.

Some time later, Kirsty stood up from her relaxed position sitting on the grass: the long jump was finished, but more importantly her curosity had got the better of her. She was wondering what this Stephen was like: it seemed to her that it was worth her while to find out, and aside from that had little else to do beyond watch people run, jump and throw things, about which her interest was steadily waning. Thus she went over to where her sisters said he might be found, which was the discus competition. There was nobody there that fitted their description of him, despite her efforts to see as many people as possible in the crowds by the means of standing on tip-toes and peeking this way and that. She shrugged, and was about to move on when she felt a gentle touch in her back, at which prompt she turned to see what or who was doing the touching. When she’d done turning, she saw that it was a boy who, generally speaking, seemed quite a close match to the description Amy and Melissa had given her: he was taller than her, and bordered on the hunky and handsome dream boy that she so often fantasized about without any noticeable effect. And he wore glasses. He said to her, curious, ‘Kirsty?’ Slowly, after a pause, she said, with slight reserve, ‘yes.’

He did start talking to her, and did seem kind and pleasant, but Kirsty shuddered inwardly at the sight of his glasses: to her, they looked utterly awful. She asked herself “What do I do? They are the ugliest glasses I’ve ever seen! Eeeek!” She tried her best to remain calm, looking up him only with a sort of bemused curiosity, then quickly looking away as if something else more important was going on and thus demanded a glance. Her own glasses paled into insignificance in the ugly league beside his: they were myodisks, which she hated, but they were also far stronger than those of her sisters, having ludicrously thick lenses with the tiniest bowls she’d ever seen. She looked away for longer, and felt distinctly uncomfortable. He seemed to realise something wasn’t right, but foolishly thinking she was shy, asked if she would like to walk with him a little. Kirsty answered uncertainly, ‘yes….’ Then her voice trailed away, quavering a little, then she gathered herself and continued, ’no…. Sorry….. Bye….’ She turned and quickly walked away, trembling a little in her discomfiture. Then she paused and turned to look back at him: he was staring after her, but then he shrugged and appeared to shrink a little as he wandered slowly away and vanished into the crowd. Kirsty chewed her lip, feeling at once relieved that she hadn’t got herself hooked up with him, but also rather guilty for letting him down, no, dumping him like that.

A couple of hours later the whole thing was finished, all the prizes awarded and everyone had gone home. Once there, Kirsty helped her mother with the dinner and then sat upstairs writing in her diary ‘Dear Diary, I’ve done a really terrible, mean thing today, I turned down a boy who fancied me, just because I didn’t like his glasses. I hope that means I’m not in for such things in future. I know, I’ve had my share of knock backs and problems in the last few months, but sorry, I couldn’t stand the sight of them. Maybe that’s what non-bespectacled boys think of me, excepting those strange ones who like girls in glasses. I haven’t seen one for ages, where are they all? Did someone eat them all? Or are there not enough to go round?’ She forced herself not to dwell on that last thought.

Just before the end of the school term and the start of the summer holidays something ominous occurred: An old teacher of Kirsty’s happened to be transferred to one of Emma’s classes for a day, and as chance would have it, saw her in her elder sister’s old hand-me-down glasses, looked at her and them curiously for a while, then realised what had happened: that they were Kirsty’s old glasses reused. In ecological terms this was a sound practice, but otherwise not such good idea: he found it alarming, and thus asked Emma about them after the lesson had finished and everyone else had left the classroom. Emma explained that they were the old frames with new lenses: her mother had persuaded her to lie a little for all their sakes, or else the fragile fabric of their home life would all come apart - she hadn’t put it like that, it was more along the lines of “they’ll take you away and you won’t see me again”. Her mum felt extremely guilty that she had to resort to such things as giving a child secondhand glasses, let alone asking her to lie about them, but on occasion she’d previously been obliged to deprive her other children of dearly-needed new glasses through lack of money, most notably Kirsty: there was no other good option. The teacher was far from convinced, and resolved to write to the social services about it.

He did indeed write a letter that evening, then posted it the next morning, but alas it never arrived on the desk of anyone who perhaps should have seen it: instead it was lost in a bureaucratic maze at the local town hall, stuffed into a wad of other papers and correspondence, left for five years to gather dust, then eventually unceremoniously dumped and incinerated with tons of other unwanted paperwork. Long before all that happened, the teacher in question had gone on holiday and promptly forgotten about the whole business.

8. August

The second Saturday morning in August came around, a glorious day: bright, sunny and hot, the sky a cloudless blue and the temperature soaring. There was a knock at the door: it was her two friends, Alice and Jessica, who had come to collect her to go swimming. Swimming for Kirsty was fun, and particularly on a day as hot as this. Dressed in an old, tight t-shirt and cut-off jeans made into makeshift and untidy shorts, she felt a little overdressed. She wondered if perhaps a swimsuit was better, but she’d know soon enough, being as one was under all of that. Her friends were similarly prepared for a quick change and a dash into the pool.

After a quick bus ride, they arrived, paid their dues for a swim and got undressed, then Kirsty’s mind remembered her glasses. She pulled them off, and the cubicle around her vanished into a featureless blue blur. Looking down at the tiled floor, she found that it too had been transformed into a similar blur, in this case brown. Gently she pushed them back on, went out to the lockers, quickly found one that wasn’t in use, and stuffed into it her rucksack which was filled with her normal clothes. She put a coin in the lock, and then with obvious and understandable reluctance, parted with her glasses, folded them and put them in the bottom right corner of the locker and pushed the door shut. Even looking at that seemed just a meaningless blur to her. A brief look around at the world beyond caused her to think that perhaps a swimming session wasn’t going to be quite as much fun as she’d imagined when they’d arranged it. Whilst strapping the key onto her wrist, for which she relied more on her sense of touch than sight, she looked up and saw vague shapes moving about in the distance. She deduced that they were dressed in swimming costumes, as she could tell there was plenty of pink, but whether they were men or women she had little idea. As for any attempt at identifying exactly who they were solely by means of her vision, that wasn’t even worth considering, let alone making the attempt. Hopefully she called out ‘Alice? Jessica?’ There was no answer.

She finished the job of fixing the key to her wrist, then devoted her feeble, extremely limited vision to searching for her two friends. Carefully she stepped forward, with the nervous hope that she wouldn’t fall or slip, her right hand resting on the row of cubicles in case that occurred. She could see people moving around, and could hear an accompanying hubbub of voices, but who they were was a mystery to her. To her, they all looked the same, unless they happened to be standing right in front of her, but none of the figures obliged her. Then she groped around a corner, again relying on touch far more than sight; she peered into the foggy distance, and thought she saw two figures that just might have been her friends… possibly. She called out ‘Alice? Jessica? Is that you?’ The two figures moved, and she heard a familiar laugh, followed by one saying, ‘oh, sorry, Kirsty, I forgot you were as blind as a bat without your glasses.’

She then heard Jessica say, ‘oh, I like your new swimsuit, you look so elegant in it!’ When last Kirsty had seen herself wearing it in her mirror, she was wearing her glasses; if she had done the same in her current visual state, all she would have seen would have been an indistinct blue blob, indistinguishable in shape from that of both her friends. Alice’s was black, Jessica’s purple, stretched appealingly on their slender frames. In a kindly attempt at atonement for her faulty memory, Alice took Kirsty’s hand, but Kirsty wasn’t having that. She said sharply, ‘just tell me which way… thanks.’ In reply, Alice shrugged invisibly, then led them off to the pool. There, they were soon having fun bobbing around: Kirsty had predictable trouble telling them apart unless they spoke to her and thus identified themselves, and when she wanted to swim, one of them had to go with her just in case someone got in her way. Kirsty was a good swimmer, her problem was that her sense of direction was lousy and without a visual check she often strayed off course.

Presently Kirsty asked the nearest blob ‘Alice, what’s the time?’ Jessica replied ‘It’s me, Jessica. Oh, and it’s only ten past eleven.’ Alice asked, curious, ‘Can you tell the time from here?’ Kirsty answered flatly ‘Is there a clock here? Where is it?’ Jessica gaped at her in astonishment, but Alice silenced her with a look. ‘It’s above the third window along on that far wall.’ ‘I think I can count make out the window frames… It’s really blurred for me.’ Jessica said to her ‘jeez, you are blind!’ ‘No, I’m just very myopic!’ Kirsty squinted heroically, but after a pause said ‘I can’t see anything that looks like a clock over there. It’s all just one dark blue area. Perhaps if I go closer I might be able to spot it.’

Kirsty went closer, followed by her two friends. She had to dodge other swimmers, and eventually after much squinting got to well within 5 meters of the end of the pool that had the clock, turned to look at her friends, and told them, ‘yes, I can see it from here. It looks like a sort of white fuzzy patch to me, but it’s there.’ They then swam in formation to the end of the pool, and there Kirsty again peered up at it, commenting ‘I still wouldn’t know it was a clock from here unless you told me so. I can’t even begin to tell the time.’ Jessica said, trying to be helpful, ‘why not go and get your glasses?’ ‘Naw, I’d look silly.’ Alice told her firmly, ‘you look pretty silly now, all squinty eyed and having to rely on us to guide you around. There are some nice boys over that way, and you can’t even see them. Come on, I’ll take you.’

Kirsty wanted to blurt out that with glasses on, she felt there was little chance they’d be interested in her, and seeing them clearly would do her no good overall, but she nodded anyway. This was the paradox of being a myopic girl who relied on thick glasses to see: without, you couldn’t tell what was going on; with, you could see but they instantly shooed away any boy worth bothering with. That really wasn’t really her favourite kind of paradox. She decided not to bother, instead asking Alice to help her back to her locker: without her aid, being as she was unable to read the numbers or direction signs unless very close to them, it would have taken her several ages to find it.

Some minutes later Kirsty stood at the pool entrance wearing her glasses, the world being now accessible to her in sharp detail, rather than being all but invisible to her the last time she tried looking at anything thereabouts. No longer squinting and struggling, she confidently walked back to Jessica, who was still bobbing and splashing around merrily in the pool, and now easily recognisable thanks to her restored clear vision. Except it wasn’t quite: the thin misty shower spray had caught her glasses, so that despite her efforts to cover them and shield them, they’d been sprayed too. She’d wiped them with her fingers, but everything, especially the lights, then had a strange, irritating smear to it.

Once back in the pool, Alice splashed her gently for no real reason, causing Kirsty to squeal and cry out, ‘hey, mind my glasses.’ Alice desisted, leaving Kirsty to again carefully wipe her lenses with her fingers. She missed a few drops, which then clung like small jewels to the fronts of her lenses, stubbornly refusing to run off and thus cease their interference with her vision. Despite that, Kirsty was happier with her vastly improved vision, but then she had lapsed into her usual “I’m a girl with glasses” routine, uncertain and mostly convinced no normal boy would look at her twice. Jessica tried to reassure her, saying to her, ‘oh, don’t worry so much. They are just boys, and those glasses do come off if necessary. You do know what I mean, don’t you?’ Kirsty did know, but for her the problem was getting them to go out with her, be nice to her and all the rest of the human condition, not just the sex bit. Alice sighed and continued, ‘oh, you’re hopeless, Kirsty. You’ve got to get yourself some contacts, that’s the answer.’ Kirsty tried to explain how that wasn’t an easily achievable answer for her, but the details got lost somewhere on its way out to her friends. Before long they were out of the swimming pool and dressed, and glasses didn’t matter quite so much, being as they now seemed slightly less out of place. But they were still thick, and for Kirsty quite ugly; for her that was all that mattered.

Finally, at the end of August, Kirsty’s exam results came in the post: they were not what she’d hoped for, but then she wasn’t the brainiest girl around, if not completely dim. She wrote in her Diary ‘Perhaps I should have done better because I wear thick glasses, because brainy people wear them. Never mind, I’ll have to rely on my looks instead to get ahead in life.’ She looked up the reflection of herself in the mirror and gave a dry chuckle, and then concluded, ‘that’s if I have any looks worth looking at. Perhaps I can distract people with my hair or body.’

9. September

More weeks went by, during which she went for another job interview, this time at a local American-Style Diner. The manager there was far from excited about having such a thickly bespectacled girl on the crew, and came very close to turning her down. Kirsty managed to swing it by making him realise she was still human despite her glasses, and perhaps also he felt a little sorry for her. But mainly it was because it wasn’t exactly the best place to work. It was a tough job: running around after customers, taking orders and bringing them in good time, making insincere enquiries about their health and well-being for no apparent reason other than she was paid to do so, then having to clear up the mess they made afterwards. It was a long difficult job, and Kirsty little realised what she was letting herself in for when she took it on. The other thing she wasn’t prepared for was that she had to tie her fluffy blonde hair back behind her head, utterly preventing her from obscuring or disguising her thick glasses as she often did. Almost as bad was the rather ridiculous 50s style uniform dress she had to wear: it clung to her trim body and ended far above her knees, fitting her even worse than her old school uniform. It was overall a little bit on the overcooked side of alluring and even came within sight of prostitute territory. In addition, it was in a strange looking shade of peach, for reasons Kirsty could not begin to fathom.

Kirsty spent five evenings a week running around after customers: they were mostly kind and friendly to her, recognizing her as the new girl in the place. Like people everywhere else, a few looked away at the sight of her thick glasses and tiny shrunken eyes, some looked disinterestedly at her, but occasionally one gazed at her a little longer. They were all older than her, thus she wasn’t interested in them anyway. And of course, the inevitable happened. She wrote about it in her Diary the day it occurred ‘Tonight some man at the Diner asked me for a thick diet coke bottle, and I nearly fell down flat, I think he had my glasses on his mind. He also said they looked mighty impressive, which surprised me. He must have been, oh about 40 or something! I don’t understand this glasses and dating thing completely. Maybe when I’m 40, maybe I will.’ She sat for a moment, looking at the reflection of herself in her uniform which she had so far failed to take off, largely through lack of energy after a long day. She continued ‘Guess what, I’m earning money. Maybe in a year or two I can try and get contacts. Perhaps I can wait that long before I get a boyfriend. But I want to help my sisters, too. One of my other sisters, Emma, finally got new glasses a couple of weeks ago, she is getting myopic faster than I was at her age, she’s nearly 12 - already - but has minus 11.5 or so in each eye - already! I hope she doesn’t end up like my twin sisters. And one more bit of news, my vision is starting to decay at last, that’s eight months since my last new glasses. I knew it would happen eventually. It’s not much, but I can just see a little blur in the distance where there wasn’t 2-3 months ago. If it goes on like that it is pretty good news, that means the next time I need new glasses they won’t be so much thicker and stronger, I’ll be able to see reasonably well even just before the change, and I hope I won’t need horrible myodisks. Just ordinary thick ones. Or, contacts if I can afford them. No, when I can afford them. I need to make a major effort to save up for them. I feel my life will be much better with contacts.’

The job at the Diner was acceptable in Kirsty’s opinion: she did plenty well enough, her industrious and willing behaviour, and willingness to smile even if she felt like frowning all but completely outweighing her bespectacled state. But one evening she went out to serve and stopped cold in her tracks. This was because someone she knew was there: it was James Smith. He had brought with him another girlfriend, this one more mildly myopic: her glasses were around half the strength of Kirsty’s. He smiled at Kirsty rather slyly, as if he knew that she worked here and had been waiting to rub her nose in this. Kirsty felt quite upset: she didn’t need this. But despite her misgivings, she had no choice but to serve them, getting their order and some time later plonking their food before them. Kirsty had felt like spitting in it before they saw it, but managed to refrain from that tiny fragment of displeasure: after all, she felt that her job was more important than her feelings regarding a stupid boy. They seemed happy to keep up the provocation, whispering and glancing at her, especially the odious James. Kirsty was forced to go and ask “if everything was alright”, smiling with fake sincerity whilst actually wishing he would choke on his meal. In fact, he did complain at some minor aspect of the meal: thus Kirsty was obliged to find him tomato sauce - no sorry vinegar - oh so sorry, brown sauce. Then, when she had supplied the brown sauce, he then asked for salad cream, causing Kirsty to completely lose her composure: she started shouting at him, calling him an “asshole,” then followed that with some choice expletives in much the same vein, which was not an unreasonable reaction in those circumstances. And not unreasonably in those circumstances, that was her goose cooked in terms of that job. She was hauled before the manager and told she wasn’t required there anymore.

When she got home, she wrote in her Diary ‘Well, I had a really fab day today, err, not really. I lost my job because I shouted at a customer. It happened to be that prick James Smith, the one who played around with me, the one I wanted but he went off with someone else.’ She did not pause to reflect on the awkward fact that she had previously ignored him, instead continuing ‘Mum was really angry for a bit, and then seemed to leave me alone, because the phone rang for her. Afterwards she was really nice to me. I didn’t get to the phone, Emma did, and she said some man was on the line asking for her. At first I wondered what that was all about, then I knew. She’s found a boyfriend too. Yeah, she was really nice to me afterwards and said it was OK about my job - quite a surprise!’

A couple of days later she wrote ‘I now know why Mum has been so nice to me about all sorts of things. She wants me to be child minder to my sisters while she goes out with her new man. He’s called “Dave” and she says he’s lovely. I don’t mind really. Perhaps I will get some little treats? Contacts, even? Mmm, perhaps that’s too big a treat.’

10. October

A few days into October Kirsty wrote in her Diary ‘Oh yeah, my little sister Louise is due for an eye test soon. She seems to be having trouble seeing, not a rare thing in this house. I wonder what’s in store for her, thick glasses and no boyfriend like me? Or myodisks and a boyfriend at the blind school like Amy and Melissa?’

The following Saturday Kirsty played substitute mum again: feeding and watering everyone, making sure everyone was OK afterwards, and then doing this and that and lots of other things too numerous and tedious to enumerate. Kirsty sighed to herself after they’d all eventually gone to bed more than a little too late: she wouldn’t wish this kind of thing onto anyone, it was too much hassle in her opinion. She then sat on her bed in her pyjamas combing her hair, looking at herself in the mirror as she had done so many times before, her head bobbing slightly as she pulled out a knot, catching her reflected gaze with her real one, watching how her cheap lenses glittered and flashed light at her: of course, they were plano fronted, just like her mother’s, her sister Emma’s and of course, those of her twin sisters. And just like all of them, there was no anti-reflect coating. Too expensive and not worth it, so her mother had said repeatedly.

Just then there was a noise at the door: Kirsty instantly recognized it as being that of a key being inserted into a lock and turned. She heard voices down below, lowered and sparing, recognizing one instantly as her mother, the other - some man. He had to be this “Dave” her mother had spoken of. There was some more noise from downstairs, a little girlish giggle from her mother, and then Kirsty heard her say to him, ‘come on, come and meet the girls, that’s if they’re awake, anyway. I think Kirsty might still be awake, at least.’ They came up the stairs, Kirsty recognizing her mother’s steps on the staircase from long familiarity with that sound, then once the footsteps reached her slightly ajar door, there was a knock at it. Her mother asked ‘Kirsty, are you awake?’ ‘Yes, Mum…’ She sounded sleepy, because that was her current state of being, but despite that, she was curious to see this ‘Dave’. Her mother came in first, and then Kirsty got her first look at ‘Dave’ as he followed her. He was introduced to Kirsty by her mother, who then said to him, ‘Dave, this is Kirsty, my eldest daughter,’ he smiled and said to her, ‘hello, Kirsty.’ Kirsty smiled a little back, and then started taking in his appearance: he seemed quite old enough to her, but he also seemed a little younger than her mother, being quite tall and handsome enough for anyone who wasn’t extremely fussy. He met her gaze repeatedly, and then looked at her mother, and back at her in a quite curious manner. Her mother seemed not to notice it, but Kirsty did. Once they’d gone outside again, Kirsty heard him say ‘She’s just like you, you know, just as lovely!’ Kirsty could barely restrain her eyes from popping out from hearing that description!

The next week came and the long-anticipated trip to the optician was nigh for Kirsty’s youngest sister Louise. Kirsty, as when she had accompanied her twin sisters, had nothing much better to do with her time, so accompanied her mother and little Louise, now 7 years old but still the kid sister of the family. Kirsty sat outside while her mother went with Louise into the optician’s lair. Kirsty had been in that place so many times, and always to get the same sort of news: her vision was worse and her lenses would have to be thicker and perforce uglier, and once they were ready she’d feel a little worse about the whole thing, except for the better vision that resulted from the whole experience.

After a while they came out, at which point Kirsty noticed that her mother looked a little pale and surprised, albeit her expression wasn’t as bad as that she had worn after hearing about her twin daughters’ partial blindness. She gave a sigh, and said to Kirsty, ‘Louise has got something called amby… amblyopia. It’s like her right eye is being switched off by her brain. The optician had a go at me for letting her go too long without bringing her here, so that he could detect it and deal with it.’ Kirsty asked, ‘what’s he going to do about it?’ ‘He’s going to give her new glasses, she needs them anyway. I have to bring her back next month to see if that does the trick, otherwise, he says she’ll have to have her left eye patched.’

Kirsty saw Louise listening to this, and saw her face fall into a deeply unhappy look at the news. Kirsty remembered the way she’d been teased and mocked about her glasses and poor vision in her younger days, felt those raw memories again, and then felt glad she’d never had to live with the need to have a lens patched. To her, it seemed like the ultimate nadir in the list of all life’s possible humiliations and unfairnesses, much worse than needing myodisks.

The very next weekend they all went out to dinner, paid for by her mother’s new boyfriend Dave: partly it was just a general treat for them all, and partly a “Happy Birthday” for Emma who had reached the age of 12 the day before. He sat gazing at one after another of Kirsty’s assorted sisters with a strange look, being a little bit amazed at the sight of so many pairs of thick glasses. Emma liked sitting next to him anyway: she was still a little too young to realise exactly what he was: a man who deeply loved and admired the sight of women wearing glasses, and the sight of all those various interesting glasses being worn gave him a particularly pleasant feeling. He was certainly very interested in the sight of their mother’s: these being the strongest apart from those of the twins, but he also spared Kirsty rather more than just a glance. She looked away, wondering if he was just another man who would come and go, or whether he might stay around, even before long that there might be yet another sister? She looked at her mother smiling rather dumbly at him, and sighed. She wondered “what was it like to find such a boy, or man who truly adored you, not in spite of the thick ugly glasses, but because of them? Did it make the whole thing worse or better?” As for an answer, she had no idea.

11. November

On a particularly frosty Saturday morning in early November, Kirsty’s mother gathered them all together in the lounge and gave them some unpleasant news: they were poor, which was hardly news to them, but this year, the financial situation was worse than usual. She therefore suggested that perhaps they could all dispense with buying Christmas presents this year, and instead put the money thus saved towards glasses. The result was predictable: all of them save Kirsty were visibly and vocally dismayed at the news. Kirsty wasn’t so bothered, being as she felt that Christmas was a bit of a waste of time, when considered from the point of view of someone steadily advancing into adulthood as she was. Kirsty quickly absented herself from the room, thus allowing the rest of her sisters, particularly Emma and Louise, to get on with pleading, moaning and general whingeing about it for a not inconsiderable time afterwards.

Her mother came in some hours later, and asked her, ‘what’s the matter?’ Kirsty shrugged, so her mother continued, ‘you’re not upset about Christmas are you?’ Kirsty shook her head then replied, ‘it doesn’t bother me. Anyway, I might get a job for Christmas at the local music store. Temporary casual.’ ‘Well, that’s good news. Why didn’t you tell me?’ ‘Oh, too much going on today. Anyway, you can’t give me what I really want for Christmas even if you did have money.’ Her mother started to ask what she meant, and then as realisation entered her mind, stopped abruptly, then continued carefully, ‘maybe they’ll be some nice boy at the shop. Go on, give it a try. You might be lucky.’ At that she went out to attend to her younger and distinctly less resigned children.

About a week later Kirsty wrote in her Diary ‘Tomorrow Louise will go to the optician to see whether she’s going to get her eye patched. I personally bet that she will, because she still seems unable to see so well with her right eye than her left, and that’s with new glasses. Her right lens is a bit thicker than the left, not as thick as either of mine, but then she’s only 7. Oh, I can just imagine her reaction to this, she’s hoping that she can get away with it, but mum’s not saying a word what she thinks.’

The next day came, with Louise insisting that her big sister Kirsty accompany her as well as her mother, as if that would prevent what seemed inevitable to all who knew the situation with Louise’s vision. So she went along with them, but sat outside in the waiting area whilst Louise and her mother were in the optician’s exam room. Another young lad came in with his mother and sat opposite: Kirsty recognized him as the same one that she’d seen a few months ago, and he also quickly recognized her. He smiled at Kirsty, and after a moment, Kirsty smiled back, and thus she felt something akin to happiness. She still wasn’t sure she wanted a boy with glasses quite that thick, but then again it seemed likely he had similar vision and all the other problems thus related, which caused her to think “at least we would have something in common to talk about.”

That pleasant moment was abruptly broken by a distressed scream emanating from the optician’s office. Kirsty gave a little sigh: she knew exactly what that implied, which was bad news. She then heard many varieties of crying, whingeing and pleading from what she reasonably assumed to be an extremely upset Louise, which caused her mother to tell her off, which really didn’t really help quiet her down appreciably. The boy looked at her quizzically, so Kirsty shrugged and looked away, feigning ignorance of the events which had caused those distraught cries.

After some more tense minutes, during which Kirsty half expected Louise to come bolting out of the door and make a dash for freedom, the room beyond the door went quiet. Then Louise started complaining again, this time not so loudly as she had previously, but still easily enough to be noticed by any listener within the shop. Kirsty could hear Louise sobbing, which caused her to feel extremely sorry for her. But then again it could have happened to any of her sisters, and she felt lucky it wasn’t her. She tried to imagine one of her lenses patched, and didn’t like the sound or the imagined look of it at all, let alone the thought of being teased about it.

Then the door opened, and her mother propelled Louise through it. Tears were running down her unhappy little face, and her right eye was red from crying. Kirsty assumed the left was too, but she couldn’t see that, because a neatly cut patch completely obscured the lens and of course the eye behind it. She blinked at Kirsty, wailed and sobbed again. Her mother firmly told her not to make such a fuss. The boy and his mother tried to look invisible, but only succeeded in looking uncomfortable instead. Kirsty certainly wasn’t in a position to disappear, being as it was her kid sister who was crying her eyes out without any regard as to who was in the shop. She went over and took her youngest sister’s hand, trying her best to soothe and comfort her by saying it would all be OK soon, and that it would be just a little while with the patch on, despite the fact that she had no idea how long that might be, and would not have dared broach the subject in those circumstances even if she did have any clue. This went some way towards reassuring Louise, and that this came from Kirsty rather than her unyielding mother also helped. After all, she wasn’t the one actually making her wear the patch, but then again, she could hardly let her take it off.

Kirsty told her Diary about Louise that night ‘Oh, poor Louise, she has to wear her glasses with a patch over the left lens for a couple of months. I feel so sorry for her. Hopefully that two months will go quickly and she won’t have to have it ever again as mum said might happen if she doesn’t do it now. Oh, how she cried! '

Over the next few days Kirsty became Louise’s big playmate, with the intention being that Louise would get accustomed to using her unpatched but fuzzy-visioned eye. Kirsty asked her to try reading or identifying things in the distance - Kirsty herself at that point didn’t quite have perfect vision, but it certainly sufficed for the task at hand. She also did things like throwing balls to her with the objective of getting her to catch them: Louise moaned regularly that she couldn’t see properly with just her unpatched lens despite its relative thickness, and kept dropping the ball. Despite this, Kirsty persevered. Until her Christmas job came through, she had nothing better to do with her time, and of course her youngest sister’s vision was far from unimportant to her.

About a week after Louise’s fateful encounter with the optician, Kirsty walked past her mother’s bedroom. Usually the door was ajar when she was awake, but tonight it was firmly shut: this was because Dave was there. She had seen him arrive, and now heard them in her mother’s bedroom. For some reason she couldn’t quite identify, she paused by the door to listen: she assumed the sounds she heard were the result of them having sex. She’d heard her mother and various men doing this before; for her it certainly wasn’t new or odd to hear this going on. But then she overheard him ask of her, ’let me touch your glasses.’ Kirsty quivered, and walked away, thinking to herself “Is he another glasses-loving man?” She felt utterly confused: it seemed strange enough to think that some boys might like a girl wearing glasses, although she’d swallowed that information a couple of years ago, but now this was just adding to her bemusement. Could glasses be sexy, as well as attractive? It seemed to her that the more she discovered about glasses, the more perplexing the whole subject became. She shook her head as she walked back to her bedroom, trying to put the whole conundrum out of her mind.

In the last week of November, Kirsty got a letter in the post asking her to attend a short induction course at the local record store, which made her really excited: she thought of all those CD’s that she would be able listen to while working behind the counter or wherever they put her, these being among the many things she couldn’t afford to buy at that moment. She also thought that perhaps she’d be able to buy some there too. She would be a casual, so thus wouldn’t get a uniform or anything of that ilk, simply being expected to turn up in smart casual clothes. So she went along dressed in a presentable jumper and jeans, her fluffy blonde hair flowing around her head: she hoped she’d not have to tie it back, being as she liked her hair loose, and also she regarded it as one of her best features, particularly among those above her chin.

She was still excited when she arrived to start work: there were five more young people there, 3 boys and 2 girls of similar age to herself. She looked at them all: none of the boys were spectacularly handsome nor ugly, nor were the girls anything like models, they just seemed to be normal, ordinary young people like herself. Kirsty was the only one wearing glasses, and if she was being honest with herself, she was more than likely to be the only one wearing such thick glasses in the entire shop, casual or not. One of the department managers told them all about what they’d be doing, namely helping out selling CD’s, restocking shelves, and doing whatever the normal staff couldn’t handle in the busy pre-Christmas period. It all sounded perfectly agreeable to Kirsty, especially since one of the boys kept looking at her: Kirsty often felt that being looked at more than once was akin to a minor victory for her in itself. Being rejected on the basis of one’s poor vision and the visible means necessary to correct it was more like her unhappy but usual situation.

Then the other department managers came in to select who they wanted to help in their section. The boys got whisked away in double quick time to help in the warehouse, then one of the girls got snapped up by somebody else, and then a youngish man, Kirsty guessed in his mid thirties, came along and looked at the remaining two girls, one of those being Kirsty. He glanced at the other one, and then looked at Kirsty, came to a decision, smiled at her, and then addressed her, ‘you’re with me, Kirsty. My name is Peter, and I’m in charge of the Classical Music department.’ Kirsty’s eyes showed her surprise and dismay: she had to restrain herself from blurting out “Classical Music! Arrrrgh!!!!” For a 16 year old girl, that was very deeply uncool: but she had no choice beyond saying “no thanks,” then going straight home and not coming back. Briefly he showed her around the area she would be working in, during which she tried valiantly not to listen to some dreary sounding music coming out of the loudspeakers on the walls around her. After that, she was allowed to go home, now at least with some idea what she would be doing for the following 3 weeks or so, even if it wasn’t exactly what she wanted.

It was the last day in November, and somehow Kirsty was being left alone by Louise long enough to be able to write a little in her diary ‘Next week I’ll start work in the CD shop. Well, I never expected or wanted to be in the Classical Music department. OMG that stuff is so dire, so dull and boring. I’ll go mad listening to it!’

Just then her mother came in the front door, and Kirsty heard her sniff. She initially wondered if her mother had a cold, but then again didn’t remember her having any sign or hint of it the day before. She then heard her go into her bedroom, almost slam the door, plop heavily down onto the bed, and lastly she heard the unmistakable sound of sobbing. Kirsty naturally wondered what had transpired to cause this, so went to see. She pushed her mother’s bedroom door open and found her face down on the bed, sobbing and crying, her glasses dumped unceremoniously on the bedside table. Kirsty asked innocently ‘Mum, what’s wrong?’ Her mother slowly got up and turned to face her. Her visage was streaked with tears, looking utterly distraught, as well she might under the circumstances. She collected herself, and then gasped out ‘Dave…. He’s married…’ She then collapsed into another fit of despairing sobs. Kirsty naturally went to comfort her: there was little she could do except hug her and say she loved her, which did help after a while. Her mother groped blindly and ineffectively for her glasses after she’d wiped her eyes dry, so Kirsty fetched them and pushed them carefully onto her face, restoring her familiar shrunken and squashed-in look, trading that for clear vision.

12. December

In the early evening of the first Wednesday in December, Kirsty was sitting in her room when Emma knocked at her door and came in when prompted. She said, with a curious mixture of pleasure and glumness ‘Kirsty, I am going to be a fairy in the Christmas play this year, but look - I have to wear this. It’s such a pain.’ She held up a mask: it was a pale cream colour, with feathers sticking out at the sides and sparkly bits on it, and generally speaking it looked quite attractive. Kirsty looked blankly at her: she was still in the process of trying to recover from a long day working at the CD shop. Seeing that Kirsty obviously didn’t understand the problem, Emma demonstrated. She put the thing to her face, whereupon it clunked against her glasses: it was designed to fit quite snugly on the wearer’s face and nose, and of course any glasses or indeed anything else there already simply got in the way. She took it off, and said with a shrug, ‘see, I can’t wear it with my glasses on.’

Kirsty held out her hand for it, so Emma gave it to her, after which Kirsty tried the same thing on her own face to no better effect. Her glasses were slightly thicker and stuck out just a little more, so the mask looked even dafter on her, which caused Emma to giggle. Kirsty solemnly and carefully took off her glasses, then replaced the mask. It fit neatly, as well it should: unfortunately Kirsty was now in her uncorrected fuzzy, blurry view of the world, which she usually avoided despite the nature and look of the remedy. Emma said to her unhappily ‘I won’t be able to see like that, I’m nearly as shortsighted as you are.’ That was true enough: she was now within 1.25 dioptres of the level of Kirsty’s myopia, despite her being 4 years younger. Kirsty then tried to arrange her glasses over the mask, and quickly found that the glasses wouldn’t fit, which was something of a mercy: she would have quickly discovered that they would have looked even more ridiculous than her first attempt to combine the two items of facial apparatus. Piqued, she took it off and replaced her glasses, remarking, ’that’s stupid, why doesn’t your teacher realise you need your glasses?’ Emma shrugged. She’d tried what Kirsty had done before coming to show her, and failed. So she simply held the mask before her face, with glasses on, turned her back, and asked Kirsty, ‘can you do up the ribbons?’ Kirsty obliged, and then Emma turned back around to let Kirsty see the result. She looked utterly ridiculous: the mask was now perched lopsided on her face and glasses, sticking out from her face and blocking most of her bespectacled vision. Kirsty could only laugh at this sight, and Emma, upon seeing herself in the mirror, joined in. At that the ribbon snapped, thus causing the mask to fall off and break into pieces when it hit the floor. Emma stopped laughing, then said with very obviously feigned concern, ‘oh dear, what a shame, now I can’t wear it.’ She gave another shrug, picked up the pieces and went back to her bedroom.

During the next week things started getting busier at the CD shop: Kirsty ran around restocking shelves, occasionally going in the warehouse looking for CD’s, and also served some customers at the till. At times this proved to be something of a trial for her: they’d ask her about something she had absolutely no idea about, so she’d be obliged to look around for Peter or someone who knew for help. It wasn’t her fault: before she started here, she knew about as much about Classical Music as she did about Byzantine Art or Hannibal’s campaigns in the Second Punic War, in other words, just about nothing. She found some of the music played there just boring in the extreme, but also found she liked some of it, although she doubted she would rush out and buy a copy even if she did have the money to do so. And then there was Peter himself: he, like her, was almost invariably very busy but it seemed to her that he often looked at her in a longing, wistful way. Kirsty thought she knew why: he was another girl-in-glasses lover, albeit an older version.

On the Saturday evening of that week Kirsty wrote in her Diary ‘Today I went shopping for Christmas presents. It was so, so busy, very crowded everywhere! Some woman nearly knocked my glasses off on the bus, the stupid bitch! Anyway I got presents for everyone and told everyone here that Christmas isn’t cancelled this year. My sisters are so happy now, and so delighted that they will get presents. I think mum feels a little ashamed, I’m not sure. It’s not her fault, we are still a poor family struggling to survive and see clearly with thick glasses.’ After a pause, she continued ‘I also went to ask at the opticians about contact lenses, but they are sooo expensive. The woman there told me that it was likely my vision wasn’t stable enough for contacts just yet - perhaps another year and I could go back and have a trial. And then - dump the glasses! Sorry, glasses, I know you help me see so much, because I’m half-blind without you, but you really do make me look so ugly and I can’t find a boyfriend because of that. Oh yeah, after that I want a mobile phone and lots of other stuff like my friends Alice and Jessica. I’m sick of not dressing like they do.’

During the next week, things slowly got quieter at work as the workload wound down: everyone who wanted to buy a Christmas present had by then done so. Towards the end of the week, Kirsty went up to Peter and said to him, ‘may I ask you a question?’ He replied, looking deeply into her shrunken gaze, ‘yes, of course, Kirsty.’ She drew breath and then asked him, ‘why did you pick me instead of that other girl? Did you think I like Classical Music?’ He seemed to hmm and muse over her question, almost appearing to wish that he’d never asked for her. Kirsty smiled gently at him, so he eventually told her, ‘no, no…. It wasn’t that.’ He paused, then admitted, ‘it was because I liked the way you looked more than the other girl.’ Kirsty’s smile broadened, but then Peter got called away to help someone else: it was the last time she ever spoke to him. The next day was her last day; she left with a mixture of pleasure and sadness, thinking about all that she had learnt there in a few weeks, and also a little about Peter and his kindness.

During the weekend, she wrote in her Diary ‘Louise went to the optician yesterday hoping to have her lens patch taken off: she told me she really was sick of it and wanted to be rid of it before Christmas. But no such luck for her. Her vision in her right eye is still crap, not quite such crap as it was, I think. She can read now a couple of lines more on the chart with a bit of struggling. I think she’ll be having patched lenses for months, although I know she won’t want to hear that. And if her vision ends up as bad as mine or that of some of my sisters, she’s going to have patches here there and everywhere in future. That’s my guess, anyway.’

On the night before Christmas, Kirsty wrote ‘Dear Santa, I know you don’t exist, but if there is any chance you do, please can I have a boyfriend who likes girls in glasses, but isn’t ugly or too old. He doesn’t have to come immediately, but soon next year would be good. If you can’t do that, please make my vision stabilise next year so I can get contacts and not have to worry about my Geeky-Miss-Thick-Specs look. I know it did me some good at the record shop, but really, I’d rather do without them.’

Christmas was the usual festive season of fun and rather tired tinsel, much laughter and small presents, except that this time, the presents came mostly from Kirsty.

On New Years Eve, Kirsty wrote ‘I’m thinking about having driving lessons next year, because in March I’ll be 17 and legal to drive. That is if my eyes stay about the same and don’t start getting worse again before I can get new glasses, otherwise I’ll have to forget it for a while. And I do hope that I can avoid myodisks. Both on me and on any boyfriend that might be mad or stupid enough to come near me. I suppose I’m going to be the family taxi driver, especially for my twins. They won’t be driving at all.

Bye bye Diary, see you next year,

love,

Kirsty.’

https://vision-and-spex.com/dear-diary-ii-t611.html