Dear Diary V

Dear Diary V

1. January

Kirsty sat on the bed in her bedroom, which looked considerably better than her old bedroom at her mother’s house, even considering that some of the time she couldn’t see it very well, which was in former times thanks to imperfectly corrected vision. All that was a thing of the past, though: she still wore thick glasses to see, but at this moment she had other, much harder things to bear. Limply she held a paper tissue in her hand, on the bedside table nearby sat a box half full of them, whilst in and around the bin were other tissues, damp, scrunched up and discarded. Behind her thick lenses, her eyes appeared small, but also red and puffy from crying: she exhaled a miserable sigh, then pushed up her glasses again to wipe away tears.

Glumly she leant forward, putting her chin in her hands, desperately trying to think happy thoughts. There really only was one: she straightened up then touched her growing tummy, feeling the life inside it. She wrung a smile from her face: knowing that there was something left of Mike inside her was worth a lot. Five months ago she’d become pregnant, some time later she’d known it was a girl, and then, oh how the thought stung, Mike had been taken from her. Somehow he’d got involved in some pile-up on the motorway, was pulled out alive but unconscious, then slipped into a coma and died two weeks later, only six weeks ago. Even fleeting thoughts about it left her sobbing helplessly.

The pain was worse today: it was a Saturday, and she didn’t have think about work: there was none of the important but currently meaningless busyness to keep her mind away from the dark thoughts that flickered across her mind in quiet moments. She went through a couple more bouts of crying, recovering, dabbing dry then thinking and longing for it not to have happened. Then she opened a drawer and pulled out a new Diary, opened it up, picked up a pen and sat staring and blinking at the blank paper, thinking about all sorts of things before starting to write, hesitatingly at first, then more fluidly.

‘Hello new Diary. My name is Kirsty. No doubt you have heard of me. I’m 23 years old, female and as you can see, well, I know you can’t see, so I’ll tell you: I’m pregnant. It’s something I didn’t really think would ever happen, not previously, nor did I think I would ever have a decent boyfriend. Well, I did, but he’s gone now.’ Kirsty stopped to choke back a sob. Miserably, she thought “this is hard to think about,” then endeavoured to block recent painful events from her mind. Having recovered her composure as best she could, she continued ‘I can’t talk about what happened to him. It still hurts too much.’

Instead, she thought about her family, and things became considerably easier to think and write about ‘I’ll tell you about my family. It’s not so good, not all of it, but anyway. Mum is still our mum, but I don’t know how much more she can take. She won her case with her employer, but didn’t get that much out of it. Instead I think the whole experience has really got to her and ground her down more than she was anyway. Plus, she’s steadily getting blinder. Not like Melissa and Amy, but still, not good. Poor Mum, she’s had so much to cope with what with looking after me, and all the rest of us. And then, there’s Emma.’

‘She got herself into all sorts of trouble last year, yes I know she’s born for trouble but she really outdid herself last winter. Got herself arrested, and she’s now in prison. I don’t know exactly what for, and I’m not sure I want to know, but I can guess. She’s asked me to visit her in prison, she’s written to me a couple of times, some of it her usual blustering stuff, but in other parts, she seems quite scared. I decided I didn’t want to see her in prison. Maybe that’s cruel? I’m sorry, but I can’t deal with that right now.’

And now for the good news. Amy and her boyfriend and their little kid Joey are doing just fine. Err, that’s the good news. Oh, Melissa is living back at home with mum after being dumped. And Louise no longer wears a patch - she is SO glad to be rid of that and I’m glad I don’t have to play camp commandant in order to get her to wear it! Other than that, she’s got a good friend with that girl Michelle. Glad I don’t have to worry about her so much! Perhaps I need to worry about myself now and again… I’m pregnant, I need pampering!’

A few days later Louise lay on her bed, on her front, fitfully trying to write in that awkward position. ‘Dear Diary, it’s me, Louise again. If you remember me from my last Diary, you’ll know I’m the youngest of five girls. Thankfully, at last time seems to be going by and I’m growing up, so I’ll get out of here and get myself a job. And you’ll know that at last I’m no longer the patched princess.’ She stopped, and put her hand briefly over her good eye and the lens she needed to see clearly with: this habit had been forced upon her by her bad eye’s penchant for turning itself off. But now, at last, it seemed OK. But then, she happened to swap her hands around, and cover her bad eye - she blinked, then looked around, especially at things in the corners of the room. The thought occurred to her “am I dreaming? Or is this real?”

She shivered with realization and recognition; after all that unfortunate messing around with patching, she well knew the difference between clear and fuzzy vision. And, as it seemed to her, the vision out of her good eye wasn’t as good as she remembered. Maybe it was just because she was tired, she briefly mused, before deciding that might not be the whole truth. She was at the age when her older sisters experienced large changes in vision, so why not her too? For once, the reason did not really bother her quite so much as might have been expected: this was because it implied that her lenses might be equal in strength again, and she might not ever have to go through any more patching. She noted this point in her Diary with some pleasure.

She then continued in a similar vein ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am to get rid of that damned patch, it was just sooo horrid, it makes me squirm to think about it. And the kids at school, they didn’t let me forget it! If my glasses will be equal, that’s great news. I’d prefer thin glasses, or none at all, but equal glasses and no patch, that’s a pretty good start.’

‘I got to tell you about my Mum. She seems like she’s just sooo tired all the time, even worse than before, I think, I suppose it’s because of all that stuff with Emma, it really took a lot out of her, and then there was Kirsty’s boyfriend getting killed, that was so so terrible and sad, and I don’t think Mum really took that well either. She was like hoping that at last Kirsty had found someone really good, but, well, it wasn’t to be. Kirsty’s kinda wobbly about it all, sometimes she’s like normal, other times she’s just falling apart. Goodness knows what will happen when she has her baby. I reckon she’s going to need some serious help.’

‘Did I tell you about Michelle? My friend from school? She’s really kind and friendly, even if her stutter sounds kinda silly. It’s not her fault, I know. Anyway perhaps I should tell you the strangest thing. She’s grown and changed, no longer small and pimply, now, she’s like me, with curves, and all that, but last week some boy asked her out and she turned him down! I mean, she’s still wearing those lightbulb glasses of hers! I’m kinda pinching myself, because I think I’m dreaming, because nobody’s asking me out, and although I wear glasses too, hers are worse than mine, loads worse! I just don’t understand her at all. She told me that she didn’t like him, that’s up to her, but if I was her, I’d not worry so much. I have the feeling my best friend Michelle might just be mad. Help!’

About a week later, Melissa was floating around in the kitchen, attempting to tidy up after some culinary experiment during her day off from work, when she heard footsteps, then her mother calling, ‘hello!’ She turned and saw in her distance lens the familiar distorted, blurred shape of her mother. Without the voice, recognition at that distance was a problem for her; at least with any certainty. Her mother appeared to rub between her rather large but sagging bust - for Melissa this appeared to be rather a persistent itch, rather than what her mother knew it to be: a certain tightness in the chest that had appeared a few months ago, vanished and then reappeared recently. Nor was the highly myopic Melissa aware of her mother’s suitably pained expression: if she did, she’d know exactly what was going on, being a nurse. Thus Melissa, being registered blind, was completely unaware of what was afoot. All she was aware of was that she was grateful that she had a mother who would take her in, and care for her after having her boyfriend dump her so callously over a year ago.

A week later Melissa was off duty at home watching TV one evening, after her fashion, sitting close and taking as much notice of the sound as possible, her vision alone being inadequate for this and many other purposes. Louise was upstairs toiling through her latest batch of homework, or at least Melissa thought she was. Melissa sighed inwardly at the thought of homework: she had study of her own to do. Being a nurse wasn’t easy. For now, though, she rested, waiting for her mother to return home from work. A vague sense of disquiet fell upon her, and it didn’t take her long to realise why: her mother was late. For a moment she was puzzled as to why she felt so anxious, being as her mother could be late as well as anyone else.

Time passed, but no mother appeared to assuage her discomfiture. She began to seriously worry, then fought with herself, silently telling herself to “get a grip.” Rationality took hold, thus she started to think more clearly in terms of what to do about the situation at hand. It occurred to her that perhaps she could go out to look for her mother, but a moment’s serious consideration led her to dismiss that idea: she was not equipped for such an enterprise. In good light, she was registered blind, her impression of the world shrunken, deformed and blurred. In darkness she saw nothing beyond those punctuations caused by street lights, which appeared to her balls of bright but indistinct illumination, floating eerily in a sea of blackness, occasionally giving tantalizingly vague hints of their immediate surroundings. She possessed a white cane upstairs in the event that she wished to go out at night, which mostly she really didn’t. Then she considered asking Louise if she would go and search for her mother instead. That idea was also instantly fit to be dismissed: the thought of sending out a 14-year-old girl out on the streets, alone, didn’t enthuse her. For a moment she sat frustrated by the lack of sensible options. She considered that perhaps both of them could go searching, but then thought that perhaps her mother would then arrive back home safe and sound, find them missing, then go out searching, and they’d spend half the night looking for each other. There was only one option remaining: to do nothing but sit and worry. After a while Louise caught the worry bug too, having realised Mum was very late, and came downstairs to help with the uncomfortable job of waiting.

Then the phone rang, jarring into their worried thoughts. Melissa jumped toward it first and answered: it was the hospital, which was where she worked - but it wasn’t about her, it was about their mother. Melissa listened with a strange mixture of clinical detachment and horrified realisation as she realised what had happened, then told Louise, who was avid for news ‘Mum’s in hospital. She’s… Not well.’ ‘Did they say what’s wrong with her?’ ‘Yes - it’s her heart.’ The blood and hope drained from Louise’s face: even Melissa could see that, being as her youngest sister was close by, listening attentively for any information she could glean. Melissa put the phone down, then solemnly told Louise to get ready: although she could find her way to hospital after sunset if absolutely necessary, it was always much easier when guided by someone who could see in the dark. And it seemed highly unlikely that their mother would come home tonight, find them missing and then go out again.

Melissa’s internal turmoil of concern and faint relief led her to forget her white cane, so once Louise had come down dressed for outside, she locked the door and took her arm: within a few steps, she was in a useless darkness, dependent on her youngest sister’s assistance. Although she knew the way, in her present emotional state she was glad of the guidance: she had to devote all her thoughts to worrying about her Mother. After some time, Louise led her to the bus stop, and a bus soon came: Melissa could see it as a faint glowing thing, ethereal, like some alien spaceship floating down the road. Once inside the bus, the internal lighting relieved her of complete blindness to some extent, giving her mind something to focus on other than concern. Soon they were there: once inside the hospital, Melissa’s vision was restored to its full level of relative clarity, enough to make guidance unnecessary. And besides, she’d been here many times, so didn’t need to be able to read the signs; which was just as well, being as they were difficult to interpret with her visual acuity.

Once beside their mother, they were told she was in a coma. It transpired that she’d had a heart attack on the way home from work: Melissa glanced at the unfamiliar blur of a nurse, listening for a voice she knew, but failing to recognise it. She looked at Louise, and was unable to read her expression, then looked closely at her mother, lying equally helplessly in bed, as unaware of her surroundings beyond the immediate as she was. Melissa could see that she had no glasses on; for just a moment the thought flitted through her mind pointlessly that she could see better than her mother. But although it was the truth, it was entirely useless. Melissa did her best to calm both herself and Louise, who looked on with alarm at her seemingly abruptly frail mother. For a moment the two sisters embraced, afraid of the meaning of what they were witnessing.

Melissa then enquired of a nurse, ‘have you called my sister Kirsty?’ ‘No, but if you give me the number, I’ll do it.’ Melissa gave her the number, then was distracted by her mother: she seemed to be stirring, reaching up into reality and consciousness. Faintly Melissa heard her mumble ‘Kirsty….? Kirsty?’ Melissa didn’t realise her eyes were open, and that she was gazing at her through half-open eyes. She squeezed her hand and leant closer to her, so as to allow them both to see each other more clearly. Quietly she informed her mother, ’no, it’s Melissa. Kirsty’s on her way.' Her mother swallowed, and then told her, her voice quiet, quavering, ’tell Kirsty… Tell her… I did my best. And now, it’s up to her. You understand, don’t you? She’ll have to look after you all.' Melissa watched her eyes close, and began to sob: she knew what that meant. Despite her desperately poor vision, she knew death when she saw it. A moment later the bell rang for assistance: her mother’s heart had stopped.

Melissa got Louise out the way as the medical staff got to work trying to restart her heart: Louise watching avidly, Melissa more listening, the whole scene for her blurred and twisted by tears and feeble vision. Someone else took them aside, and for Melissa that implied only one thing: it wasn’t working. They were taken into one of those small, impersonal rooms where anxious relatives were left to wait for news of the fate of loved ones. An indeterminate time passed, during which the two sisters sat in desperately forlorn silence; then some faceless doctor came in, asked who they were, in the sort of barely-controlled calm voice that Melissa had used herself many times. He then sat with them, and told them with professional calmness ‘I’m sorry, we did all we could, but the damage to her heart was too severe, and so we were unable to revive her.’

Just after he’d said that, and barely after the two sisters had even begun grieving, a shape appeared at the window: the door opened, and it resolved into a shape that Melissa knew - even she could tell it was Kirsty, because she knew few people who were as pregnant as she was. Kirsty asked desperately, urgently, ‘what’s happened?’ She saw their bleak faces, their broken expressions, then continued, ‘oh, please….No!’ She glanced at the doctor, and in that instant knew exactly what had transpired; but for some reason he felt that it was necessary to reiterate exactly what he’d just said, which did nothing to help the situation. After that, they ignored him completely, and began the task of comforting each other in their state of miserable bereavement.

A few days passed while the girls variously heard the news, and then began to absorb what had happened. The first to write something about it was Louise. ‘Dear Diary, I’ve got to tell you this, and I’m sorry, of course I am, but right now I don’t have a mum anymore. Yes, we have each other, and that’s good. There’s none of us who’ve taken this well. I can’t stop crying. Melissa is the same. And Amy… Well I’ve only seen her once since mum died, and she was crying then, so that’s three of us. Kirsty, well, I’ve seen her looking lost, but never like this. It’s like when she lost her boyfriend last year, all blank, unable to take it in. She doesn’t need this. She’s pregnant and it’s wearing her out, all this… loss.’

Some unnumbered days passed. Kirsty became the default leader of the grim-faced little family that now resided in the house they knew as home. She felt herself unable to cope with her own grief and loss, for her twice over, being as the loss of her boyfriend still weighed heavily in her thoughts. Yet, after Melissa had passed on that which their mother had said to her, Kirsty had made a huge effort to grab hold of herself, and decided that she had to make the best possible attempt at caring for what remained of her family. She touched her growing bump wistfully, wondering if they would help her too.

And so the day dawned for the funeral. For Kirsty, this seemed like an action replay, or a recurring nightmare: grimly she wished something good would happen, and soon. She dressed herself in her smartest and darkest trouser suit, elasticated at the waist, and heard the doorbell ring. Nobody else was ready, so Kirsty went to get it. At the door stood a young woman, slightly shorter than herself, wearing an evidently brand-new but cheap and slightly ill-fitting dark suit, itself awkwardly and incompletely concealing her ample curves. Kirsty gaped at her for a moment, and then recognized her: the thick glasses were a giveaway, as was the air of confidence and despair she carried with her. Rather foolishly, she asked ‘Emma! What are…’ ‘They let me out for today, big sis. Gotta go back when it’s done, OK?’ Kirsty instantly forgot that she wasn’t so keen on Emma, considering what she’d led her into, and gave her a hug.

For the twins, the service, and burial, passed in a blur; as for the other girls, it was something oddly similar. Afterwards, Emma approached Kirsty again, an appearance of careful uncertainty about her. She talked a little meaninglessly at first, comforting her eldest sister, but then she turned her conversation to her own situation. ‘Kirsty… I’m coming out of prison soon, did you know?’ Kirsty wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know, but feigned interest out of politeness, and out of respect for the situation they found themselves in. Emma then said boldly ‘I’d appreciate some help…’ She let that hang in the air, but Kirsty gave a tiny sigh, and said, ‘sorry, Emma, we’ve got too much going on right now to talk about this. I’ve got a baby on the way, you see?’ Emma glanced at her ever-growing bump, and grimaced; Emma said nothing more, and stomped off. Presently Kirsty saw her talking to some uncle, or somebody; she didn’t really care as much as she perhaps ought to, but then she was exhausted and struggling to keep from bursting into tears.

2. February

Early in February, Kirsty sat alone mulling her new life: in some ways it appeared to be a repeat of the loss she’d suffered a few months ago, but now the fallout was much greater. At least - and it wasn’t really that much of a comfort - it was only herself that had that suffered; this time, it was everyone she knew. There were many problems that needed untangling, which would take time and attention, the first of which was where everyone was living. Melissa couldn’t afford the rent on the old family home, not alone, but Kirsty and her together could, so Kirsty had given in her notice to her landlord and was now getting ready to move back home. Besides, Kirsty thought that Melissa needed the company: she was off work what with watching, after her fashion, her mother slip away like that. So, she took her Diary, and plonked it into a bulging cardboard box full of her belongings, then waited for the removal men to come.

Once Kirsty was home, it seemed as if the natural order of things had been only slightly disturbed: Kirsty was the new mum, and would be on her own account in three months time anyway. Thus proceedings were put in place to start making Kirsty the legal guardian of Louise, at least until she was old enough not to require one. She stood once again in her old bedroom, gently touching her bump, wishing that her mother could have lived to see it born: a futile thought, but entirely natural. She blinked tears away, then heard Louise call “Kirsty!!!” Kirsty sighed…. Was this what was in store for her? She’d forgotten what a pain younger sisters were at close quarters: and now there was certainly no running away and leaving her mum to resolve their problems. It was all down to her.

Around a week later, it was the early morning rush hour, and as often happened, Kirsty had to travel into the city centre for an appointment: she had quite an important job in the insurance company where she worked by now, but not so exalted that people came to see her that much. It was still her doing the work, even in her increasingly pregnant state. At least it was morning: although she was slightly sleepy, at least it wasn’t late afternoon, wherein she would be invariably exhausted, her back and feet aching from the effort of carrying a child near the end of its term. She stood in the busy SubGround station awaiting a connecting train, and noticed a couple of her fellow travellers who stood out for different reasons. One was a woman of her own age, a little taller and slimmer, wearing a rather sombre and businesslike suit like her own: in fact, like many of the people here heading for work. The reason why she caught her attention was because she wore glasses; a bit weaker than hers, but hardly what she’d call thin. For a fleeting moment she felt self-conscious, and briefly fiddled pointlessly with her own glasses. The woman met her gaze for a moment, lacking in all expression, plainly thinking only of getting to work on time. The other was a dark-skinned man wearing a jacket; his dark eyes flicking around furtively, accusingly, his hands buried in his pockets, waiting with evident impatience. Kirsty related to that feeling quite easily.

Presently, a train wooshed into the station, then groaned to a halt, the doors slid open complainingly and some people rushed out, which allowed Kirsty and the other people waiting to enter. Being pregnant, she didn’t particularly want an elbow in the stomach, but knew where to go in order to avoid that sort of thing: in a corner by the window. It curved outward slightly, and she did too, at least in parts, and that really was the best place to put her precious, vulnerable bump on a crowded train. So, she hurried as best she could to the least busy side of the train, and turned to protect it. She heard and saw other people come in behind her, all standing. The doors reluctantly slid shut, and the train started off. She turned her head and saw the tallish woman next to and slightly behind her: she was looking in the wrong direction. Some distance further down the carriage stood the man with the jacket: he’d obviously got in through another doorway. Kirsty ignored him, but for some reason stared at the back of the tall woman’s neck as the train started off then rattled along down the dark tunnel. Every so often she would get a glimpse of the world through the outside edge of one of her thick lenses, but Kirsty wasn’t particularly interested in that. She had her own thicker, stronger glasses to look through anyway.

A cold, harsh female voice announced blandly “the next station is Kingsbridge,” and scarcely had that sound died away, when there was a loud bang, rather like a loud firework, and a flash; Kirsty felt a vague “tap” feeling against her left lens, then it was gone, to be replaced by chaos and screaming as the lights failed and the train screeched protestingly to a halt. It was all but dark apart from the emergency lighting: Kirsty couldn’t see much, but could see the tall woman in front of her clutch at her face, then heard her cry out ”my glasses, where are my glasses?” Kirsty looked down, grateful she still had hers on, but couldn’t see those belonging to the woman. Then someone pushed past her, and she heard a crystalline “crunch.” She couldn’t tell if that was the woman’s glasses, or just a bit of broken glass, but whatever it was, it wasn’t helpful.

The woman became tearful and panicky, due to being deprived of glasses in the dark with bombs going off, so Kirsty spoke to her, trying to calm her down and tell her someone would come soon. Well, when they did come, it wasn’t a moment too soon, being as Kirsty was getting worn down from her attempts to soothe this woman’s frayed nerves. Someone helped them out of the wrecked carriage, and they were led down the track to the next station. Once in the light, Kirsty could see far better - but something wasn’t right. An odd dark blurry shape distorted her vision out of her right eye. For a moment, she thought it was her eye, but then she touched the front of her lens with her finger, and felt something damp. Water? No. When she looked at her finger, it was red. Blood. Kirsty felt weak at the knees, then quickly got hold of herself, grabbed a tissue and wiped the front of her lens clean. Beside her, her tall friend stood watching, squinting in desperate hopelessness, looking utterly distraught. She’d lost her glasses, and a few blood spots covered her face. Kirsty lent her a tissue; with it she wiped herself clean. But then she said to Kirsty, ‘can you help me? I can’t see very well without my glasses!’ Kirsty nodded, saying, ‘yeah, I know the feeling. Do you want me to guide you somewhere?’ She looked very grateful, if rather ashamed, and told Kirsty, ‘yes, please, I have a spare pair at home.’ She shivered a little, glad to have someone to help.

After reassuring the police and medics that they were OK and basically in one piece, Kirsty walked with her new friend up some stairs and to a different line on the network. During this process, Kirsty learnt her name: Lisa. She seemed chatty, friendly, but nervous because she’d never been without glasses for more than for a few minutes in the bath before today, and of course hadn’t ever been nearly blown up before either. Before long their talk turned to glasses again, as they stood waiting for a train: Lisa had about -9 in each eye of myopia, and some astigmatism in one eye that made it harder to see. She walked up to the electronic sign telling when the next train was due in, then gave up and admitted that she couldn’t read it at all. She stayed close to Kirsty all the way home, until that time arrived whereby she could take her spare glasses out of their case and revert to her accustomed clarity, which greatly relieved her.

She looked at Kirsty, smiled, and exclaimed, ‘so that’s what you look like!’ Kirsty smiled politely, and then Lisa peered more closely at her, and said, ‘There’s something on your lens… No, it’s a chip. Something must have banged into it, like it did my glasses. Except you were luckier than me: it broke mine in half, yours, only a scratch. Kirsty took her glasses off to inspect them: with her poor uncorrected vision it wasn’t easy to see, but she could see that it was a small but quite deep gouge. It was in an area of her lens near the corner, but Lisa warned her, ‘cracks like that can spread, and your lens might fall in half, I’d get that sorted out if I were you.’ Some time later Kirsty said goodbye to her new friend, and Lisa thanked her yet again.

That weekend Kirsty had a tiny slice of time in which to attend to her own problems, and that included glasses. She took them off, checked them, and found that indeed the crack had grown, just as Lisa had predicted. Kirsty didn’t want to be deprived of glasses, but in all the hubbub and chaos of moving house, she couldn’t put her hand on a spare pair. She spent half of Saturday praying that her lens wouldn’t suddenly fall out. Then she had a brainwave.

Upstairs she went to her mothers old room. She’d tidied it up a bit, and had thought about getting rid of some of the more useless things once belonging to her mum: but would need time she didn’t have to do that properly. She rummaged around, hoping to find something that would at least keep her going, visually speaking, over the weekend. And there, in a drawer, she found them; four old glasses cases, not as many as she thought, but enough to try. She checked each case to see what they contained: each of them contained a pair of old glasses belonging to her mother. None of them were what she would call fashionable, but they’d have to do for now. One at a time she tried them, then eliminated one pair because they plainly weren’t right for her. Then another pair. Annoyingly the last two pairs seemed to get one eye just about right and the other tantalisingly not quite right. She plumped for the left hand pair, and put them on. Her vision seemed to swim a little: the myopia being about right, around Kirsty’s minus 14, but the astigmatism correction was a little awkward, the wrong angle and a bit too strong. Kirsty went downstairs wearing her “new“ glasses, and nearly fell down them.

Louise caught sight of her, gave her a strange look, for a moment not quite comprehending what she saw. ‘Kirsty, I know you are kind of my mum now as well as my sister… But there’s no need to go that far!’ Kirsty shook her head, denied that she was going crazy, then explained, showing Louise the damaged lens of her own glasses. Louise nodded, and said, ’that’s a good idea!’ Thankfully Melissa, when she finally came home from work much later, being drastically poor sighted, didn’t even notice them.

Kirsty spent the rest of the weekend wearing her mum’s old glasses. Sometimes it felt very strange, other times just right, and the former wasn’t entirely due to the fact they weren’t her glasses. Most of the time, for distance work, she wore them, and got reasonable vision, but sometimes going up and down stairs made her feel giddy, which forced her to grab the rail with her hand, and of course close work and reading were hard work, being as the astigmatism wasn’t right. She swapped her borrowed glasses for her own on Sunday evening, hoping they would stay in once piece long enough - her eyes were aching from the wrong prescription - and wrote in her Diary

‘Hello again, I’m sorry I’ve not written for a while, I’ve had some really bad things happening in my life. Despite the fact I’ve lost my mother, I feel like she’s still around looking after me, because I could have been blown apart. Anyway, I helped this woman called Lisa, she got her glasses smashed, looking back on it, it seems kinda funny really, because I got away with just a scratch on my lens. I need new glasses, but they’ve lasted this long. And to help till Monday and new glasses, I’ve borrowed a pair of my Mum’s. I’m sure she’d let me use them. Dear me, it reminds me of when Emma got hand-me-downs, boy did she not like that!’

“Mum’s glasses aren’t right for me and give me a headache, but I suppose that’s because they’re not for me. I feel dizzy whenever I put them on. Anyway, I’ll ask the optician to put in the toughest lenses he can in my new glasses, I don’t want to be doing this again soon! I’m having a baby in April, and as you can imagine, I’m getting really big. I don’t want to worry about my lenses falling in half while I’m trying to look after her. Ummm… Did I tell you it was a she? I shouldn’t be this excited, I suppose, after all this death and horror, but it sure does help.”

The next day, Monday, Kirsty went along to the optician, had her eyes tested, found they hadn’t changed, then asked the optician to make her the toughest lenses possible in her new frames. He baulked a little, because with her kind of prescription, it wasn’t easy to make them attractive in the generally accepted sense. He even suggested myodisks, but Kirsty would have none of it. What she got was her usual roundish-oval style metal frames, the rims more like bands than the slim metal strips someone less myopic could have, holding lenses that were slightly smaller than her old pair, but noticeably thicker, well over 15mm at the edge, with the corners ground to disguise the thickness.

Kirsty didn’t really see the thickness: she was so myopic that without glasses, things like that were hard to see anyway. All she saw was the way things looked while gazing through them: clear and sharp in the distance, if a little tunnelled and distorted. She was well used to that by now. The optician also suggested that she try getting herself a headband to keep them on, because her baby might grab them off her face. Kirsty wasn’t impressed by that idea - she didn’t want her nice fluffy feminine hairstyle ruined by a headband pressing it against her head.

After that she went to work, then went out for her lunch break. Things seemed different to her: of course she could see, perfectly well, but it occurred to her that the stares had got a little more frequent and a little longer. She sighed to herself irritably: hadn’t they ever seen a woman in glasses before? Well, the truth was they probably had, but not with lenses quite as thick as hers. She felt like running and hiding, felt like swapping back to her old damaged but thinner glasses, felt like putting her hands over her glasses and hoping for the best. Instead, she carried on walking back to work; but then she heard laughter, so turned her bespectacled gaze toward its source, and saw someone pointing at her, helpless with mirth. She hurried away back to work; once there, she buried herself in paperwork all afternoon.

That evening she sat wondering if her new tough glasses were worth the trouble: she started to fiddle with them, feeling the way they were so thick at the sides. On an impulse she got up, found her old pair and swapped them. She thought “that’s much better!” A moment later she turned her head, and her damaged lens fell out: it hit the floor and snapped into two pieces of crystal. Kirsty cursed, took them off, then put back her new glasses. She then found the old pair belonging to her mum, then started trying to get along with them for a while instead. Half an hour of giddy headache-inducing not-rightness then followed, after which Louise saw her and asked, quite innocently, ‘did you break your new glasses already?’ That was enough for Kirsty - the eyestrain was getting to her, so she went back to her room and reverted to her new thick glasses, then put her mother’s old glasses away in a safe place.

3. March

Early in March, Emma found herself outside the prison gates walking toward the nearest bus stop. She wore the same clothes that she came in wearing, except that they were just a little baggier: a year of none-too-nourishing prison food had caused her to lose weight all over, and the net result of that was a trimmer and curvier Emma. In other ways things hadn’t really changed: she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do now. Ordinary work such as her elder sisters did never appealed to her, but going back on the game, well, that wasn’t what she wanted to do right now anyway; getting involved in that maelstrom of drugs, porn, trafficking and other such illegal stuff she’d been caught and punished for held no immediate appeal for her. She stood at the bus stop and waited for a bus, as usual, relying on glasses that were thick and strong to see into the distance whether it was coming or not. No, she didn’t want to get involved with her old network, and Kirsty had pushed her away. Thus Emma felt uncomfortably lonely, even vulnerable, standing there as the wind sighed around her, brushing litter around in uncaring heaps and piles. She shivered, not just at the cold, but the feeling of not knowing quite what to do next.

A few days later, Louise wrote in her Diary “Hey Diary, Louise here again! I’m the one with the uneven glasses, you know. Anyway, I’ve got tell you about Michelle, my friend. It’s just that, yes, she’s been really nice to me, and all that - and I know, it’s a bit hard to tell with her stammer. I’ve been trying to help her with that, telling her to relax and try not to talk too fast, but she’s still quite bad at speaking. Mmmm, what shall I say? When she talks, she often saves up what she’s trying to say for something really meaningful, because speaking is such an effort for her. It’s just that yesterday she told me she loves me. Well, maybe I’m lovable, maybe not. She’s a nice girl too, a good friend, but there’s the way she looks at you with those big fluttery eyes of hers. Well, that’s the glasses for you. You either like them or hate them, and I don’t hate them because I’ve got the same problem myself. Perhaps she’s confused, or something, because she doesn’t have a boyfriend, even though with the glasses she really ought to be in with a chance at least.”

A pang of unexpected realization hit her. After a long pause she wrote “I must be stupid, because I just remembered something. All this worrying about Kirsty, my Mum, Melissa, Emma, and everyone else. I forgot, I don’t have a boyfriend either. Maybe that’s why Michelle is interested in me. Maybe - I don’t know and don’t dare ask her - she wants to be more than friends with me? Oh my… Oh my oh my… Oh, I don’t dare ask her, she might not want to be my friend anymore, and she IS my best friend. My bestest best friend ever. What if I ask her, and she is what I think she might be? What do I do?”

One evening about a week later Kirsty heard the phone ringing, so told Louise to answer it, being as getting out of her comfy armchair was hard after work, especially when eight months pregnant. After a few minutes Kirsty called impatiently, ‘who is it?’ ‘Emma!’ Kirsty gave an irritated sigh: bleakly she hoped Emma might just go away, she was one big problem that seemed to come into her life repeatedly, mostly at the wrong time.

Kirsty shoehorned herself out of the chair, then walked slowly out of the lounge into the hall; her seemingly elephantine body preventing her from getting there with anything other than a ponderous, awkward gait. She arched and rubbed her back as she moved achingly slowly toward Louise and the phone. Louise meekly surrendered the phone to her, then Kirsty put it to her ear: it was indeed Emma, but it didn’t seem remotely like the Emma she knew. She heard Emma say with breathless expectancy “Kirsty? Is that you, Big Sis?” “Yes, it is,” replied Kirsty with barely veiled disinterest, which Emma didn’t pick up. She sounded - upset, distraught, desperate, as she asked ‘Kirsty, you gotta help me, I’m in trouble here.’ Kirsty sighed, and said with forced calmness ‘Emma, what have you done now?’ ‘Me? Nothing, well, almost nothing; a couple of girls here in the hostel they’ve put me in tried to beat me up, the warden came and saw it, and now they want to bang me up in prison again, because they’ve got nowhere else to put me - the warden just thinks I’m a troublemaker. I can’t go back to prison, I did my time, I’m sorry for what I did, please, Kirsty, can I come and stay with you?’ Emma gave a little sob, and as she did so Kirsty’s resolve wavered. Kirsty then said accusingly, ‘you did bring all this on yourself…’ Emma started to cry, and gasped out between sobs, ‘please, Kirsty, I’ll do whatever you want at home for you, I’ll be a good girl now. Just give me a chance.’

Kirsty stood for a moment, her pregnant body insistently demanding to be allowed to sit down and do nothing. For a moment, she nearly told Emma “no, you’re too much trouble,” which was perfectly true. Then she thought that now Mum was gone, she was Mother now. Would Mum have sent her packing? On reflection, she thought that she would have taken her back. She told Emma flatly ‘OK, OK, come and live here. But… Oh, never mind.’ Emma was a gush of thanks and promises, so Kirsty had to cut in and tell her to stop talking and come home as fast as possible, “so I can go and sit down again for a while!”

Kirsty “helped” Louise make up Emma’s bed in her old room, and once Melissa appeared, enlisted her as a cleaner in spite of her difficulties telling dirty from clean. It was the best that could be done in the time available, especially considering who’d done it: a heavily pregnant woman, a legally blind woman, and a teenage girl who was far more interested in watching TV than making beds.

Before long the doorbell rang; Louise answered the door, leaving Kirsty to get up and walk as best she could in that direction. Louise was really glad to see her elder sister home again after so long. After embracing her, Emma caught Kirsty’s eye and looked at her with considerable sympathy, ‘boy, you’re getting really big!’ ‘Yeah, I know, thanks for reminding me, I was about to run down the street and do a cartwheel!’ They embraced gently, Emma being careful of Kirsty’s bulge. Emma then started to cry a little, but Kirsty told her not to worry about “stuff” tonight, just to relax “like I want to, but never can these days.”

Kirsty lay in bed that night, her baby kicking inside her. She thought to herself “I wonder if Emma knows anything about babies, I mean, any more than I do? Maybe she could look after my baby while I go out to work. I think it might be worth a try - it might teach her some responsibility. She sure seems different from when I last saw her - kinda like eating humble pie all the time and looking rather shaky. Imagine, Emma needing building up! Who would have guessed that? And she mentioned my thicker glasses - she thought my vision had got worse suddenly! Had to give her the full story - she actually seemed to care. Now that isn’t the Emma I knew!”

Towards the end of the month Melissa complained of a sore throat, then a day or two later a headache and feeling “yucky”. Louise told her, ‘it’s what you get for working in a hospital, with all those sick people!’ Melissa stuck her tongue out, thus causing her to dissolve into a coughing fit. Kirsty by now was off work with her maternity leave, but really wasn’t fit for much other than feeling big and heavy, moaning about her back and having to get up and go to the toilet more than usual. Emma was being oh-so-helpful, doing her best to be useful, even though she wasn’t actually that good at routine housework: she’d been used to getting other people to do such menial things. Kirsty advised Melissa to “take some time off work,” which she wisely agreed to.

Melissa took the next day off, and made it known she was feeling particularly lousy, staying in bed most of the day with the shivers from flu-like symptoms. The next morning Kirsty heard someone banging on her door early in the morning: she moaned, and then called out, ‘go away, I’m tired and pregnant. Leave me alone!’ She heard someone at the door who sounded like Melissa: she seemed quite distressed. Kirsty sat herself up in bed, found her glasses and put them on, then called out, ‘come in, then.’ Melissa knocked again, which confused Kirsty, so she called out again.

Melissa opened the door, and Kirsty could see her looking dishevelled, and rather more confused than she was. She stood in the doorway, sniffing from her blocked nose, and squinting at her. Kirsty asked her, with a note of impatience in her voice, ‘what’s wrong?’ Melissa said nothing for a moment, and then announced rather miserably ‘Kirsty, I can’t hear. I can’t hear anything.’ Kirsty blinked in surprise, and asked, ‘are you sure?’ Melissa said nothing: for her, Kirsty’s face was a distorted little fuzzy pink blur at ten feet. She wasn’t even aware that Kirsty had said anything. Kirsty quickly realised her problem, so waved her over - she could see that, she knew. Melissa sat on the bed in front of her and looked, trembling and squintingly, at Kirsty’s face. Her attempts to lip read were quite useless; so Kirsty instead found a piece of paper and pen, then wrote down her question, and handed it to her sister.

Melissa held it within six inches of her face, and then said, ‘yes…’ She began to cry, which hardly helped her vision. Kirsty didn’t really try to ascertain exactly how deaf Melissa was, but told her to go and see a doctor - perhaps Emma might take her? Kirsty thought she could manage here alone, and if the baby came, she’d just have to sort it out herself. Quite soon Emma came in herself, wearing an ill-fitting borrowed nightdress: being as there was no-one in the family with quite the shape she possessed, it was quite tight on her in certain areas. She asked, ‘what’s wrong?’ ‘Melissa’s gone deaf because of the cold she’s got.’ ‘Oh…. OH! Now that’s a problem!’ Indeed it was. Melissa’s vision, like that of her twin sister, was pretty feeble even with correction, and limited in distance: she could tell who someone was about 6 feet away most of the time, but as for detail, she needed to get in close. She had spent the last 5 years or so of her life relying on her hearing to take up the slack. And now, without hearing, her vision wasn’t so much to rely on. No wonder she was scared.

Emma escorted her to the Doctor, and he told her to “rest, take flu remedies and paracetamol, then see what happens.” In fact, after a couple of days, Melissa started to hear a ringing sound in her ears, which was maddening, worse for her than the silence, but then it faded. She then started to hear muffled sounds from around her. A day or two later the muffling was just about gone, and she wasn’t having to read written notes, nor say “pardon” all the time. But one thing remained with her: she was still scared, and thus thanked her lucky stars she could hear again.

4. April

A few days into April found Kirsty waiting rather impatiently to give birth. It wasn’t quite the wonderful experience people had told her about, at least not so far, just a lot of discomfort and generally feeling tired and awkward. She was astonished at how big she got, too. Then a day passed, and she was in hospital giving birth in the afternoon. Melissa was at work, Louise at school, so she only had Emma for company. For someone that Kirsty didn’t really quite trust, or even respect that much, she did OK, but then she was her sister, and she was trying her best to be a normal 19-year-old, not a prostitute who’d just been let out of prison. Some time later Kirsty sat holding her new baby: Annabel, aka Annie. She looked absolutely perfect, as all babies do. Kirsty looked suspiciously into her eyes for a moment, wondering if she had anything wrong with them. As if Kirsty could tell: they looked perfect, as did everything else about her appearance.

Some days later Kirsty wrote in her Diary ‘Phew! I’ve given birth to my baby and now feel a whole load lighter. She’s just perfect and I’m sure she’s going to be a beautiful girl when she grows up. She appears to have perfect vision, which is a surprise given our family history. The Nurse said to try her out with following objects in a few weeks, because right now she can’t do it. And what’s really impressed me is Emma. She is really trying hard. She does stuff for me and Annie mostly, but helps Melissa sometimes too. Without her I’d be completely lost too. I just wish she wouldn’t dress like a prostitute so much. I wish I could tell her but she might get annoyed and leave, and I’m kind of depending on her. I thought I might be having mum look after Annie, but she’s not around anymore, so it’s Emma.’

About a week later Louise was at school, just having returned from the Easter holidays. Whilst walking along with her friend Michelle she became distracted by something on the playing field, so went around the corner in order to get a better look, thereby temporarily leaving Michelle behind. Louise then heard a cry, a little scuffle, and then a louder cry, “m…my g…g…glasses!” Louise scampered back around the corner to find Michelle minus her glasses, looking around confusedly: she looked at what she hoped was Louise, and said brokenly, ’s..s…someone t…t…took m..m..my g..glasses!’ She began to sob a little, so Louise guided her to a seat, looking to see if the “someone” was still around: there was no-one remotely near enough, even if they had run like the wind to get away, so she sat trying to comfort her instead.

Once Michelle had calmed down a bit, it turned out “it might have been a girl”, “or a boy” which didn’t really help. Louise had by now learned that Michelle didn’t see much without her glasses: her prescription was around the plus 9 mark and climbing. Her eyes without glasses seemed oddly small, being as Louise hardly ever saw her without them, simply because she couldn’t focus well at any distance, but especially close up. In the circumstances, Louise could do little but offer to guide her around: the first place to take her was to a teacher of some description with the intention of reporting the incident.

Louise spent some time guiding Michelle around, who held onto her arm tightly, feeling helpless and lost in the distorted, unfocused world she now saw. There was an attempt at a search, but nothing was found; in the meantime Michelle’s eyes were getting tired from struggling to focus, so after one short lesson she asked to be allowed home. Louise had no problem guiding her home, after Michelle had told her which way to go. There was nobody there at first, so Michelle asked Louise to stay a while, in order to assist her. They were both in the kitchen talking when Michelle stumbled on something, put her arms out with a cry of alarm, then knocked against Louise’s chest, her hand briefly pressing against her bust. Louise was almost as shaken as Michelle, but Michelle couldn’t see it anyway. Thankfully before anything else could happen, Michelle’s mum came home and took charge. Louise was relieved to be able to go home.

A couple of days later Michelle was back in school with new glasses. She instantly sought out Louise, and was awash with thanks and appreciation for helping her. She then kissed her on the cheek: Louise recoiled a little, clearly not expecting it. Michelle looked a little abashed, saying, ’s…S…Sorry…. I… t..t..t..t..thought y..y..y…' Michelle’s shoulders drooped: she was struggling to say something and getting nowhere. Louise gazed into her oversized gaze, fluttering expectantly behind her thick lenses. She said, ‘calm down and don’t try to talk too fast - now - take a deep breath.’ Michelle still couldn’t say it: her speech seemed to stumble before she’d said the first syllable; then the school bell went, and it was off to class for the both of them.

Once Louise was home, she wrote in her Diary “I’m confused. My best friend Michelle, the one with the stutter and the glasses that make her look bug-eyed, well, the other day - she lost her glasses, and was blind. She kind of - touched me. On my breast. I know it was an accident, but… now I’m really thinking she might like girls more than boys. Now, I’m thinking to myself, what do I do now?'

She sat deep in thought for a while, not sure what to write because the thoughts she had weren’t making sense. Then she continued ‘You know, Diary, I don’t see anything wrong in Michelle liking me. Maybe we could go out together, it would be fun. I think I’ll have to do the talking. I’m thinking to myself, there is something about Michelle… what is it? Is it the glasses? I don’t know. On a boy I wouldn’t go near him. Actually I haven’t seen them quite like hers on anyone my age. And the stutter… again, never heard anyone like her. Goodness knows what she’s trying to say sometimes. Yet, it’s quite nice, in a way. Makes her seem kinder and friendlier and nicer than she might otherwise. I don’t know how to put it. Yep, there’s definitely something about Michelle. What I don’t know is if all this is me dreaming, yes, dreaming about Michelle and going out with her and whatever else might happen. Or whether it’s real. And what I can’t say is that I like girls more than boys myself. It just sounds wrong, but, maybe it is just Michelle.’

The next day at school came, and Louise went in, again with her head reeling with uncertainty and confusion. Michelle was there, waiting for her against the wall by the playground, peering at her through her thick, light-catching glasses. She smiled, and waved, and in response Louise gave a “hello” in a cheery manner quite at odds with her feelings. Michelle didn’t attempt to say anything - this was common with her, saving her clumsy, halting speech for when it was necessary or important. She stood blinking at Louise in the bright spring sunshine. Louise looked around suspiciously, hoping no-one would hear her. Then she began, almost as haltingly as Michelle did, ’err… Michelle… I got something to ask you.' Michelle nodded, but attempted no speech.

Louise gathered her thoughts and herself, and asked, ‘do you… like boys or girls best?’ Michelle looked rather awkward, as if she were embarrassed and rather afraid, and stuttered out as best she could, ‘g….G….G….’ She didn’t complete the word, but Louise got the answer in one: it obviously wasn’t boys. She asked, ‘girls?’ Michelle nodded, an anxious look now spreading across her face.

Again Louise had to gather her mind into a tight knot of purpose in order to ask, ‘do you… Fancy me?’ Michelle hesitated, and nodded slowly. Louise could only reply, ‘oh.’ Michelle tried to say something, but she got nowhere: the stress and anxiety she felt stopped her dead. Again, it was up to Louise to help her out, because her apparently big eyes were now blinking away tears. Louise sighed, and then said, ‘don’t worry…. I’m still your friend.’ Michelle wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, having to push up her glasses to get at them. With quite an effort, she ground out, ’d…D….D… Do. You….. F….. F…. F…. ' ‘Fancy?’ Michelle nodded, and then finished, ‘me?’

Louise considered for a moment, and then said, rather regretfully ‘I’m not sure. You’ve got to give me some time to think about this. I’m quite confused.’ Michelle’s big eyes looked like they were going to burst into tears again. To forestall her, Louise quickly explained, ‘you’ve got to give me a chance to catch up. I know I think a lot of you, because you were so kind to me when I had a patch on my lens last year. Please don’t cry. I’ll be your friend, don’t worry.’ Michelle started trying to say something, but again the school bell rang, thus making any conversation impossible.

Louise walked back to the school building alone. She felt as if she had done something nasty, because she thought that Michelle was expecting her to fall in love right away, whereas she wasn’t certain she wanted to do so. She sighed, then thought of Michelle trying to chat her up. It seemed doubly bizarre, being as she wondered how far she’d get, and how much guessing words and helping her out she’d have to do. But then she had a minds-eye vision of Michelle’s big eyes, and it occurred to her that they looked quite nice, in their way. She wondered what it would be like to have big eyes, instead of her own shrunken eyes. With a jolt, she realised she was day-dreaming about Michelle.

Unfortunately Michelle had got the impression Louise was saying no to her, thus was feeling very unhappy, such that she didn’t wish to be found by Louise at lunchtime. When Louise did find her, she glowered at her for a moment; Louise stopped in alarm, then asked innocently, ‘what’s wrong? What happened?’ Of course, the answer took time to tease out of her. She felt rejected, that was the gist of it. Louise promptly snuggled up to her, then put her arm around her, as she’d done several times before. Before long, Louise found herself saying, ‘you know, Michelle, I was thinking, maybe I do fancy you a bit.’ Michelle looked dubiously at her, but could say nothing. Louise then told her, ‘give me a chance, hey? I’m new to all this.’ Michelle looked around her, and then kissed her on the cheek. Then, again, the school bell rang and that was that, time for more lessons. Before Michelle went, she made a little heart sign on her palm, then pointed at Louise. Louise smiled, and said, ‘yeah, I love you too.’

A week before the end of April found Melissa on the bus on the way home from work: she’d learnt to use the bus in spite of her poor vision. It was easy because only one bus stopped at the hospital, and only one stopped at the stop near her home, it being one and the same. This was just as well, since all bus numbers looked exactly the same to her: a sort of dark blur somewhere in her restricted, distorted visual field. At night she used a white stick regularly, sometimes using a guide when she needed reassurance or something was badly wrong, or when happenstance demanded that she go somewhere she wasn’t sure about and needed to get there as quickly as possible. She was entirely used to her feeble vision, and depended heavily on her hearing to help differentiate one blurred figure from another.

The bus she was on tended to meander around somewhat before arriving home; this time it stopped to pick someone up. Melissa was used to seeing the world in terms of landmarks rather than fine detail, and hence knew it wasn’t far to home. She looked up at the person advancing up the bus toward her: it appeared to be a man, but she could be fooled by a tall woman or a small man, and these days women didn’t wear skirts much to help her distinguish between the two possibilities. She thought to herself that if she got any blinder, she might start making some embarrassing mistakes.

She looked as best she could at some of the other people dotted around the bus in singles and pairs, unable to tell much apart from that they were there or not. Two nearby heads seemed to be pointed in her direction, and she thought she heard, in hushed tones, sounding like girls a little younger than herself, ’look at her, she looks so weird.’ Melissa was well used to that sort of comment. But then she overheard ‘I bet they’re fake, just to get attention.’ Melissa tried her best to look impassive, but inside felt herself squirming with indignation and anxiety. She felt herself alternatively feeling angry, then wishing they’d leave her alone. She looked out into her distorted view of the world as it went past, hoping they’d get off or have something else distract them.

She had no luck with her wish: one of them called over to her, ‘hey, can you see through those crazy things?’ The other stuck her tongue out at her: Melissa didn’t notice it, and a moment later she heard, ‘she can’t see…’ Melissa didn’t see her nasty smile either. Instead she heard, ‘hey, blindy, are you deaf, too?

Melissa fervently wished they’d just leave her in peace, or just go away: she was too tired from work to be taunted regarding her feeble vision. The next stop wasn’t far away, so she thought that if they didn’t get off at it, she would be forced to. She didn’t exactly relish a long walk home, but it would be better than spending more time on the bus with these two idiots. Melissa told them sharply ‘I’m not deaf or blind, so you can just leave me alone, OK?’ One of them let out a derisive ‘Oooooo!’ But then they fell into an awkward silence. A few minutes later the bus shuddered to a halt, and for mercy’s sake, they got off. Melissa squinted, trying to make out some detail in case she ever saw them again, with the hope that she might be able to avoid them in future: alas as usual for her, distance and poor vision combined to render her efforts all but useless. She could tell one of them wore a sort of pink jacket, for Melissa an indistinct pink blur; as for the other, there was no detail she could discern that would help distinguish her from any other young woman similarly dressed.

Once home Melissa told Emma what had transpired: Emma got extremely angry, not with her, but with the two girls, vowing to “beat the shit out of them” if she saw them. But then, Melissa reminded her calmly, ‘I couldn’t see them very well, you know, and you can’t go beating up the wrong people.’ Once Kirsty found out, she firmly told Emma not to be so crazy, but also privately hoped that it was just an isolated incident.

5. May

Kirsty was back on the SubGround system one morning early in May: she was sitting reading a newspaper on the way to work, and her gaze happened to fall on an article entitled “Natural Vision”. It was a piece about some woman who had been myopic all her life, and worn thick glasses to correct it, just like her, but had gradually reduced her dependence on glasses to the point whereby she felt that they were no longer necessary. This possibility fascinated Kirsty for some time after reading it: the woman had worn weaker glasses than her, but by no means feeble ones: perhaps there was something to be said for it? She mused about it intermittently for days, before deciding that she didn’t have the time to explore it. However, she vowed she would try it one day.

A few days later Emma was playing with her big sister’s baby daughter Annie, who it was generally agreed was a good baby if ever there was one. Emma felt very happy caring for her, finding a caring, loving sense she’d not known that she possessed before now. As far as Annie was concerned, she now knew Emma very well - in fact almost as well as mummy. One afternoon Emma was playing with her, holding a toy dog and making “woof! woof!” sounds. For a few minutes it was all carefree fun between her and her little niece, but then Emma became sure of something she’d been half aware of whilst playing with her: she felt that something was wrong with Annie. Emma saw that her eyes seemed to cross; although Emma was no optician, she had enough experience of poor vision to realise something wasn’t quite right.

The other thing that she noticed was that Annie didn’t seem to be following the toy doggy with her eyes. Furthermore, when she hid it, and then produced it at random, with no “woofs” to help her locate it, that began to seal her impression that something was indeed not right. She then hid, then appeared without making a sound; it took a long while for Annie to realise something was happening. She then tried further away - and Annie didn’t look at all. Emma then said “Hello, Annie,” and thus she instantly zeroed in on her, turning her heavy head to look at her Aunt, squirming and cooing happily as she recognized her Aunt’s voice. Emma was now sure something was wrong with Annie’s vision, and at this point had a brainwave.

She went upstairs to her mother’s old room; after some rummaging, found her mother’s old glasses. She selected a pair at random, then took them downstairs. She spoke to Annie, ‘here, I know these don’t fit you, and aren’t in fashion, but bear with me. I think you’ve got a problem, kid!’ She proceeded to place them on Annie’s face, who wasn’t keen at all, but could do nothing to stop her beyond some mild whingeing. Emma saw an instant transformation: Annie’s behavior changed markedly. She began to follow the doggy, and could see her Aunt too, considerably further away than without her dead grandmother’s glasses. Emma took the glasses from Annie: she wailed a little, so had to be comforted. Emma was particularly good at that.

Later that evening Kirsty arrived home. Emma had been worrying about Annie all afternoon long, wondering how she’d tell Kirsty that her daughter had a vision problem. But then, Emma was a sort of upfront kind of a person, so didn’t really beat about the bush when it was important: Annie was very important to her, let alone her mother. She said ‘Kirsty, I’ve found out something about Annie.’ Kirsty was instantly interested, wondering exactly what Emma found out, even slightly suspecting that Emma had done something stupid. Instead, the news simply floored her. She whispered urgently to her sister, ‘are you sure? How do you know?’ Emma described her little experiment with their Mother’s old glasses; as she did so, Kirsty began to be convinced, then decided to try it herself in order to be certain.

After some of her own experimentation, she admitted to herself and Emma that she was right: there really did appear to be something badly wrong with Annie’s vision. She fought to keep herself calm, and thanked Emma for her cleverness and simply for noticing. But now, it was a problem that she didn’t need after all that had happened recently. Kirsty had to work out what to do next, and the next thing was to arrange to get her checked out by someone who could find out why her vision wasn’t right, and maybe, hopefully, do something about it.

A couple of weeks later found Kirsty and Annie sitting in a waiting room in a hospital. This wasn’t the ante-natal clinic that Kirsty was expecting when she gave birth: rather it was a unit devoted to eye problems, surgery, and suchlike. Annie wriggled and gurgled unconcernedly whilst Kirsty looked around her, trying her utmost not to worry, and not really succeeding. Idly she looked up at the notices on the far wall, relying on her thick lenses to transform them from a meaningless, confusing blur into clarity; but even then some of it was hard to read. Her vision was 20/20, but the way things looked to her was something that had to be got used to: it wasn’t natural.

She glanced around her at those waiting for appointments: there was an old woman with very thick glasses, like two glass balls in front of her eyes: She noticed how her head moved constantly, but could not think why. There was a young girl of about seven or eight, wearing glasses much weaker than her own, but with one lens patched, who when she first saw her reminded her instantly of her youngest sister Louise, and thus felt glad that was all over for her. And over there, a slim young woman her own age of Indian descent wearing metal-framed glasses, with lenses nearly as thick as her old pair which had been damaged in the bomb attack. Kirsty stared at her, but then the woman happened to look at her, so Kirsty looked away. Her thoughts turned to her present troubles and worries: of course those relating to Annie were particularly difficult to ignore.

Presently Annie was called in - of course, with her mother pushing in her baby buggy. The specialist doing this was male, middle-aged, and seemed briefly to look her up and down slightly longingly, then happily met her bespectacled gaze. For the briefest moment, Kirsty thought that he was more interested in her than her baby, but soon forgot that as he got on with testing Annie’s eyesight with all due diligence. Firstly he looked into Annie’s eyes with a light to check for cataracts and look at her retinas. Once he’d convinced himself that these were all OK, he told Kirsty, then hooked Annie up to the EEG machine: he explained he would show Annie some cards and measure her response.

Annie wasn’t desperately keen on having things stuck on her head, but she could do little about it except moan intermittently and wriggle a little whilst being held by her anxious mother: he got on with showing her some cards. One was plain grey, the others had checkerboard patterns of various sizes on. He’d previously told her that any change in her brainwaves would indicate that Annie could tell the difference between various cards as opposed to the grey one, which he labelled as “the boring one”: apparently babies weren’t all that interested in grey cards. He started with a card bearing a small checkerboard pattern, which elicited no more response on the EEG than the grey one. Kirsty could see it clearly, and she assumed that so could the consultant, but that wasn’t the issue. He then tried a succession of cards with larger and larger checkerboard patterns on them, with no better result. The EEG didn’t move, but Kirsty’s guts began to twist. What did it mean? Kirsty feared the worst: that her daughter really couldn’t see anything. This went on until the largest one, and still nothing happened. He then brought that one closer and closer, confirming Kirsty’s fears. At last, Annie looked at it, and the EEG twitched.

He put the cards down and said, ‘mmmm… She appears to be very poor sighted… It’s hard to determine exactly why at this stage… I would suggest myopia, being as you are also highly myopic. Is there family history?’ Kirsty nodded, then explained Emma’s rather odd-sounding eye test. His eyes popped open for a moment, and then he nodded, replying, ‘That’s unconventional, but very good thinking - yes, that could be it. She may well have congenital myopia. I’ll try to ascertain how much.’ Again his attention focused on Annie’s eyes: this time he put some drops into her eyes to dilate them, then he used another hand-held instrument to determine what level of myopia she had.

He seemed to breathe a little heavily, thus Kirsty looked at him full of nervous anticipation. Then he told her, ‘it’s between minus 18 and 20. Erm, I assume you know what astigmatism is?’ Kirsty nodded impatiently, being as she knew a lot more than she’d have really liked to know about that. He continued, ‘she appears to have some of that too.’ Kirsty felt a tremor of dismay go through her as that news sank in. Shakily she asked, ‘what does that mean… I mean, she’ll need glasses? Can you give her glasses?’ With a little uncertainty, he replied, ‘well, yes… I think she’ll need some glasses as soon as possible, that is what I would recommend. Of course, the prescription will be approximate, so she won’t see as clearly as a normal baby even with them on, but it will help.’ That was hardly what Kirsty wanted to hear; she swallowed a little sob as he wrote out a prescription for Annie, saying that minus 18 would do for now, and as for the astigmatism, that was a bit more a guess. Kirsty asked unhappily, ‘why can’t you give her minus 20? She might be able to see better.’ ‘Well, she might see worse with it too. It might make her hyperopic: babies tend to grab things and look at them quite closely more so than adults. Therefore, it’s best she can focus close up as well as possible. You know, of course, that approximate correction is better than none at all?’ Kirsty knew all about that situation: she remembered that time some years ago when she’d had to go without new glasses for too long. Nervously she fingered her own thick glasses, then she noticed that he followed her movements rather more avidly than might be considered normal. She briefly wondered, as he advised her on baby glasses, exactly why he’d become an optician. Perhaps he was one of those men who liked girls in glasses. She then snapped back to attention, trying to concentrate on Annie’s needs rather than her own needless speculation.

One afternoon near the end of the month found Emma pushing Annie in her pram down the garden path to the door, after a walk to the park and back. Annie was wearing her first glasses, which had been bought for her only a few days before. Emma glanced at them again: for any other family they would seem quite out of place, even bizarre. For this family, they actually seemed completely normal. Whilst at the park, Emma had shown her the toy dog again, and now Annie followed it quite easily. But those glasses had to be tough and hence thick, being as they were on a baby’s face, with bendy plastic arms to keep them on her face so that she could look through them at the world, Emma or indeed any toy dogs in the vicinity. Every so often Annie would clumsily grab at them, curious about the cause of her new-found visual clarity. Emma soon realised that thankfully she couldn’t get them off: she thought that Kirsty would kill her if they were lost or broken. Aside from the glasses, playing with Annie was fun again, even more so now being that she could see most of what was happening.

She opened the front door, pushed the buggy in, then called out to Melissa, hoping that she was up after sleeping most of the day. Melissa happened to be on the night shift, so during the day it was up to Emma to care for Annie, and do whatever else needed doing. She heard no reply. Annie started to wriggle and complain a little, so Emma picked her up and comforted her, and whilst still holding her, called up the stairs again. She then heard a noise upstairs, then another, like someone walking around, which wasn’t unusual. A door opened: that of Melissa’s bedroom. Melissa walked out the door in her pyjamas toward the bathroom. Emma called out, rather jokingly, ‘hey, Melissa, you gone deaf again?’

Melissa didn’t respond. Emma thought that perhaps she’d had a rough time sleeping, so left her alone and put Annie back in her cot, hoping that she’d sleep so she could relax, or at least think of things nothing to do with babies for a while. Her mobile vibrated silently in her pocket, thus she ended up talking for a while with an old friend who wanted her to go out for the night sometime. Emma did still go out, but rarely: she had a child to look after, even if it wasn’t her own, and she was supposed to be doing it so that Kirsty could have an easier time. What Emma got out of the deal was board and lodgings, and the Parole Board off her back. Things could have been much worse.

Emma heard a cry from upstairs, which caused her to finish her phone call quickly. She got to her feet and looked upstairs, as she’d seen her mother do so many times with her and her sisters, wondering what the problem was now. She called up ‘Melissa? Is that you?’ There was no immediate answer, but she then heard a howl of frustration and anger. Emma knew what that was all about; she’d experienced the same herself, but of course she had to establish who it was and why. It couldn’t be Louise, so therefore it had to be Melissa. She called Melissa’s name again, but again there was no answer. She glanced back at Annie, now sleeping in her cot, then went upstairs to find out.

She heard someone, whom she assumed to be Melissa, in the bathroom: it sounded like she was crying. As Emma got near the ajar door, she knocked, and said, ‘hello?’ At that, the door slammed shut, whacking Emma in the arm, the blow cushioned only by her ample bustline. Confused, she knocked again, but again there was no answer, only a wail, and then ‘I’m deaf…. Again!’ Emma thought she heard her banging something against something else, for what reason she could barely guess at. She pushed the door open, and found Melissa sitting on the toilet, sobbing. Even with her feeble, distorted, shaky vision, she could tell when the door opened, but couldn’t readily discern who was doing the opening. She asked, her tiny-seeming eyes blinking tears away, ‘who is it?’ ‘Emma.’ ‘Eh? Oh, never mind. I think it’s Emma, because nobody else would be here right now. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, coz I’ve gone deaf again. I know, it’s shitty, and I know, I have no idea what you are saying. All I can hear is a sort of buzzy sound. Come here if you want to say something to me.’

Melissa waved her closer, so Emma did: she had to crouch by the toilet. Melissa and her twin Amy had several inches on all their sisters, being easily the tallest, and just as easily the most unlike Emma in terms of shape. However, down here by the toilet bowl, that didn’t matter at all. Emma spoke to her evenly and as clearly as she could, in what she thought would be within Melissa’s visual range - a couple of feet, maybe a bit more, ‘what do you want me to do?’ Melissa looked at her as she could do nothing for her, but then realised that wasn’t quite the truth ‘I think you’d better phone work for me: I can’t do my job like this, at least until I’ve seen a Doctor about it.’ ‘What are you going to do after that?’ ‘Go and lie in bed, sleep a bit more, and hope I wake up hearing.’ Emma dutifully did as Melissa asked.

That evening Kirsty wrote in her diary ‘Hello, diary, sorry I’ve not written for a while, I’ve been desperately short of time. There’s been so much going on, and for a change most of it doesn’t directly involve me. It’s just that because I’m now honorary mum, that means it DOES involve me. I can’t begin to tell you how bad things have been for me recently. My only escape has been work, and even having a baby hasn’t helped that much, because Annie, although she is wonderful, has given me a whole new heap of problems, namely that she’s got really bad vision. She now has to wear glasses, it seems so unfair to me, but there you go, that’s life. It’s certainly been my life.

Then, there is Melissa. Remember she lost her hearing recently, well, she’s lost it again. I don’t know why this time, but I do know it’s driving her nuts what with having to try to lipread people. If ever there was someone who didn’t need it, it would be her. Watching her struggle to understand you talk is heartbreaking. I suppose with all the other heartbreak I’ve know recently, it’s just more on the camel’s back. But I must do what I can for her, it’s just so frustrating because I can’t do anything. Now that sounds like me and Annie, but there you go.

Lastly, but by no means least is Emma. I know recently I’ve been telling you how good she has been with looking after my daughter, and helping out at home generally, but tonight she really spoilt it. Because I’m the wage earner around here, well, me and Melissa, to be fair, Emma gets an easy ride in some ways. But tonight, she asked me to pay her mobile phone bill! We had a bit of a row, which wasn’t good with Annie around, and now I realise that she depends on me just as much as Annie does. Its just that - I can’t afford all this, even after getting promoted at work. I told her I’d pay this, but next time, she’d have to pay her own phone bills. She looked at me so reproachfully - but she’s a grown woman, and I know she’s my free childminder, but Annie will grow, and you know, she’ll go to nursery or something. She ought to try and get a job during the evening while I’m around to care for Annie. But, what sort of job would Emma stoop to? She’s used to doing what she used to do, and being in charge, and all the rest. I do hope she won’t be tempted to go on the game again just because of this. Maybe I’ll have to somehow find her a job, just to keep her out of trouble. Compared to the rest of our family’s problems, that seems almost easy. Sort of.’

6. June

On the first Saturday evening in June, whilst Emma was busy getting dressed, Kirsty went in to see her; being able to do this on account that Annie was asleep, and Louise and Melissa were around to care for her if she did unexpectedly awaken. Not that Melissa was up for much: she was in a pretty miserable state, being still unable to hear. Mostly she could hear a sort of ghostly, distorted, distant and unintelligible version of people speaking; at other times, nothing at all, either way it was very difficult for her. Kirsty, Emma, and Louise were getting used to going right up to her in order to speak to her. Kirsty assumed a somewhat motherly pose and tone, asking Emma, ‘well, where are you going - and when are you coming back?’ Emma looked at her sharply, not expecting her elder sister to behave so parentally. Slowly, she answered, ’told you, out with my mates… Can’t I enjoy my time off? Kirsty admitted to herself perhaps she could, and then nodded, ‘well, take care of yourself, I need you at the moment, otherwise I’ll have to look after Annie myself. And everyone else here.’

Emma nodded, then carried on getting dressed. As normal, she wore quite rampantly sexy clothing: a brightly coloured, close fitting, low cut top revealing plenty of her ample cleavage, and a short skirt, fishnet stockings and high heels. The only difference was that this set of clothes were newer than normal. Kirsty watched her with a sense of vague disapproval and concern, hoping that she’d not do something stupid. Then Emma stood before her old, cracked mirror, admiring herself, smiling, then wondering aloud, ‘perhaps I’ll pull tonight…’ Kirsty didn’t quite know what to say. The sort of man she’d pull would be just like the types she used to “pull” out on the street.

Then Emma turned to Kirsty, pushed her glasses onto her face, and asked ‘Kirsty, you know that I’ve been a good girl recently - erm - well…’ She paused: Kirsty knew she wanted something. Slightly harshly, she said, ‘what do you want, then?’ Emma looked slightly embarrassed, then said, ’erm, can I have some money? I’ve barely got enough for the bus ride into town…’ Kirsty’s eyes rolled behind her thick glasses: she was initially inclined to tell her to get lost, but then wondered if she didn’t help her, would Emma walk home? Emma was tough, but things could happen to her whether she wanted to them or not. Emma might really pick someone up, and who knew what sort of trouble that would lead to? And of course, Kirsty felt a lingering gratitude to her for spotting the problem with Annie’s eyesight: she often wondered how long it might have gone undetected otherwise. The specialist had told her that early detection would help her considerably. With a veil of reluctance, she went to fetch her purse: from it she gave her enough money to allow her to have some fun. A little while later, just before Emma left, Kirsty was lecturing her wayward younger sister again, reminding her not to do anything silly. ‘Yes, mother,’ was her reply, which didn’t entirely convince Kirsty that all would be well.

Kirsty didn’t wait up specifically for Emma, but was up anyway caring for Annie when she heard voices at the door, laughter, and a knock; Kirsty went to see just as the door opened. In came Emma, who looked rather dishevelled as she looked at Kirsty; she then burst into laughter, and walked into the wall. Something had happened to Emma’s glasses, and it wasn’t the wall that had done it: the left lens had disappeared, leaving her with a curious appearance, one eye big, staring uselessly and confusedly into the blur, the other, small, perfectly but thickly corrected as usual. Emma giggled, and her friend said apologetically, ‘sorry, she’s had a bit too much to drink.’ Well this was true of her too, but then she didn’t need glasses to see. Kirsty helped her half guide, half carry Emma into the sitting room, and then left before Kirsty could scold her for letting Emma get completely drunk.

Once she was gone, Kirsty turned to Emma, who looked apologetically up at Kirsty with what vision she could muster. She hiccupped, then Kirsty boiled over ‘Emma, you shouldn’t go getting so drunk! What the hell happened to your lens? If you can’t see, how are you going to look after Annie? Kirsty’s rant went on for a bit, with her complaining about the phone bill again, until Emma waved her hand and, with her voice slurring with intoxication, said, ‘don’t worry about me…’ Kirsty bit back a venomous ‘I’m not!’ Then, she ordered her to get to bed and sleep it off, and told her that they’d work out what to do about her glasses tomorrow. Emma got to her feet unsteadily, staggered to the bottom of the staircase, took a few steps then puked on the carpet, thus causing Kirsty to seethe again; judging by Emma’s state she wasn’t capable of cleaning it up, so she simply pushed her bulk upstairs and into her bedroom, then set to cleaning whilst doing her best not to get too angry.

The following morning Emma emerged from her inebriated hibernation, wearing her singular glasses, looking slightly ridiculous as well as feeling tired and hungover. Kirsty was in her bedroom holding Annie, when she heard a knock at her bedroom door. It was Emma, looking awkward and uncomfortable as she came looking to apologise for last night. She sat at the end of Kirsty’s bed, feeling it with her hand as if to reassure herself that it was really there, that her confusing vision wasn’t deceiving her. She blinked at Kirsty, and commented ‘It’s really weird looking at the world like this, it’s making my headache worse… I think.’ Kirsty tut-tutted, and once Annie was comforted, said, ‘yeah, we’ll have to get you to the optician as soon as possible, because you’re looking after Annie again tomorrow.’ Emma nodded, and then said, ‘about last night, I’m sorry…’ ‘Yes, OK… But if you want to chat to your friends on your mobile phone, and go out drinking, you’ve got to pay for it yourself from now on.’ ‘How? I’m supposed to be looking after Annie, isn’t that enough?’ After an awkward silence, Kirsty suggested, ‘perhaps you could get a job somewhere, to pay for your fun.’ There was an even longer silence. Emma certainly didn’t know what to say: she’d never had a normal job in her life.

Kirsty put Annie into the cot near her bed, turned to Emma and suggested, ‘perhaps you can borrow mum’s old glasses for a day or two, just until we get yours sorted out? I’m taking Louise to the optician on Monday, perhaps I can get him to fit you in somehow?’’ Emma didn’t look exactly delighted by that idea: it brought back unpleasant thoughts of something of that ilk occurring while she was back at school. But she followed Kirsty into her mother’s old room, and together they went though the various options. For Kirsty, they were generally slightly too strong, and certainly wrong in terms of astigmatism correction. For Emma, they were worse in both departments. She found a very old pair that were weaker than what she needed, but tried them on anyway. They didn’t fit her well, but really none of them did, being too small. Kirsty maintained a tactful silence about Emma’s big head. Emma found that by turning the glasses in front of her own empty frame, she could get better vision. But she couldn’t wear them like that. So, she voiced a suggestion, ‘can I take this lens out and stick it in my frame?’ Just for a moment Kirsty looked shocked at the thought of wrecking her mother’s glasses, but then nodded. Emma carefully pushed the lens out of the plastic frame - it cracked slightly, telling both girls it was never going back in. Emma held the lens up against her empty frame again: it didn’t fit, being a sort of egg-shape compared to her squarish-ovals. Kirsty found some tape, and once Emma had confirmed she was seeing as well as she could, Kirsty helped her stick it into place. Emma looked around with her mismatched vision. It wasn’t anywhere as bad as without the lens, but not really what anyone would call perfect. After that Emma went out, whereupon Louise caught sight of her, and couldn’t stop laughing until Kirsty told her to stop, get dressed, and get on with her homework.

In the late evening of the day after, Kirsty wrote in her Diary ‘Today two of my sisters got new glasses. Louise’s good eye is catching up on her bad eye, so the optician is saying: her right eye is at minus 13.25, the left at minus 9, which is a difference of 3.75. That’s certainly better than it’s been for a while. It does mean Louise might not have to have patched lenses again, which she likes the sound of, I’m sure. But I think she’d prefer both eyes at minus 9, or better still no glasses at all. Sorry Louise, this family doesn’t do good vision.

And then, again, there’s Emma. She was simple, because all she needed was a new lens. The optician gave her a odd look - well, with Mum’s lens there instead of her own, she looked quite funny. Now she’s looking at the world just as she did before, with two minus 14.5 lenses making things clear for her. I wish everything else was clear with her, because I can’t cope with Emma going out on binges and all the rest, sorting out her problems and paying her phone bills. I’m going to have to try to get her a job for Saturdays: thing is, what can an ex-prostitute do? Especially if they’re as feisty as Emma? Going to have to look around, I think.’

A couple of days later Louise went to find her friend Michelle. So many times and things they had shared together at school, yet outside that environment, they had barely met more than a couple of times. Now, when they met, they embraced, then Louise summoned her new-found resolve ‘Michelle, I want to go out with you… I don’t know where, even if it’s just a walk around the park. Nobody will know, they’ll think we’re just two girls having a walk - what do they know about how we love each other?’ Michelle nodded enthusiastically, her enlarged eyes blinking, watching Louise, blissfully happy. As always, conversations with Michelle were rather one-sided, Louise talking, Michelle agreeing, or disagreeing, or stuttering out something that almost invariably needed educated guesswork to decipher. Louise had by now convinced herself she knew exactly what Michelle meant all the time, which helped, at least when she got it right.

On Saturday, Louise went out ostensibly “to see a friend” and went straight to the appointed meeting place: in the local park, in a covered seating area disguised none too well as a small thatched house, looking out onto a football field, and beyond that, a play area for small children with swings and suchlike, and to one side, a cricket pavilion with a scoreboard. After sitting for a few minutes, she heard footsteps, then a familiar figure came into view: it was Michelle. She waved, and smiled, and said, ‘hi!’ Which happened to be one of the few words that she could say without a horrendous stutter. Her eyes fluttered, inflated to bambi-like proportions by her lenses. She sat down beside her “friend”, then they kissed and hugged each other.

After some girl-talk, as usual Michelle stuttering along painfully, with Louise filling in the gaps, Michelle said ‘G… G…’ She touched her glasses with her right hand, feeling the outward-domed profile of them, and then reached out, and touched the flat front of Louise’s thicker lens, being minus 13.25, then Louise said ‘I got new glasses, I can see into the distance as well as you now…’ ‘P… P…. Prove it!’ Louise challenged Michelle to a contest, reading numbers off the scoreboard of the cricket pavilion, seeing various things far away, etc. Inevitably Michelle asked to look through the new glasses. She’d looked through the old ones, and found things far away a horrible blur, especially with the right lens, but these made her eyes ache, so she had to give up. She didn’t dare look through them without her own glasses: she’d tried that before, and it made her eyes cry out. Michelle herself was rather less willing to give up her glasses, being quite hyperopic at plus 8, but didn’t mind doing so for her special friend. Louise found Michelle’s glasses just sent her back into a familiar blur: she’d tried them without her glasses on, but couldn’t see a thing, except really close up. She exclaimed, ‘how on earth can you see through those?’ Michelle stuttered out that she could see fine. Louise then asked her, ‘how do I look?’ Michelle shrugged, because she couldn’t focus on Louise very well, and Louise couldn’t really see the shrug. Louise held them, and felt the lenses again, sure that Michelle couldn’t see what she was doing, and sure that she wouldn’t mind as long as they came back in one piece. Gently, carefully, she cleaned them, as she would have done her own, and handed them back.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Louise would do some odd things, such as sneaking out the window, climbing down and then over a fence into the next door neighbour’s garden, thence out to see her dear “friend” Michelle, going round to see her, clandestine meetings in the park and similar illicit activities.

On the last Saturday morning of the month, Emma went off to work: Kirsty had found her a job as a cleaner. Rather uselessly, Kirsty had told her to dress appropriately: Emma had, as usual, dressed as she pleased, which was her usual attire of tight, skimpy clothes barely covering and certainly not concealing her ample curves. Kirsty was surprised to see her back early: she asked, ‘you’re early, what happened, did you work so hard they let you go early?’ Emma shook her head, looking a little shamefaced, and muttered, ’no, they sacked me.’ She shrugged, so Kirsty exclaimed, ‘what? Already? What did you do?’ ‘Nothing really, I just got pissed off with it and the manageress got angry with me, and I got angry back.’ After a pause, during which Kirsty glared at her, Emma said in a small voice, ‘sorry…’ Kirsty had to force herself not to yell at her errant younger sister.

7. July

A few days after that, Kirsty was at work, minding her own business and working away fairly happily, which considering how much she had to worry about, was no bad thing really. When she returned from a visit to the toilet and had returned to her desk, she found an internal email on her computer: it was from some man in another section, asking her out to dinner! She blinked in astonishment, wondering how this was, and what to do about it. Questions floated around inside her head: Am I interested? Have I got time for romance? Is it too early? What do I do? She sighed, wishing her home life wasn’t so complicated. His name was Dave, anyway, and when she got home she asked the first sister she found for advice. It happened to be Melissa, who as was normal for her at the moment, wasn’t so good at understanding what Kirsty was asking her, but when she did get it, was enthusiastic and supportive. Then there was Emma, who overheard without difficulty and gave an opinion without being specifically asked: she simply advised Kirsty to “go for it”.

The next day she emailed him back, saying, ‘yes, I’d be delighted to go out with you for dinner!’ There was a frenzy of emails each way, with him explaining that he’d seen her around for weeks, and thought she looked nice, so wanted to meet and date her. Quite soon Friday came, and as before, Kirsty did her best to make herself look attractive, without being a taller and slimmer clone of her riotously sexy sister Emma: wearing a clingy black dress that ended at her knees, with a bit of cleavage on show. Emma smiled at her, and told her she might be her twin sister, which caused Kirsty to shiver a little, at least to herself. With a pat of her thick glasses into place on her nose, she was ready. The doorbell chimed, she scampered downstairs, ready and willing for her first date in months.

Kirsty came home late, and found her sisters - Melissa, Emma and Louise, all lazing around, waiting for her to come home and tell them what had transpired. She could not resist a satisfied smile: it seemed that her face wasn’t used to smiling of late, so her mood surprised her as well her sisters. Three pairs of bespectacled eyes watched as she sat in an easy chair. For a moment nobody said anything, then Emma asked, in an oddly quiet tone, ‘well… How did it go?’ Kirsty smiled a little more, and then started up, ‘he was really nice, I had a really nice evening. He’s really kind and, well, kind of sexy and all that too, and also, he likes girls in glasses, he said so, even thick ones like I wear.’ She paused, and then said, ‘he said he liked the way the lights reflected off my glasses,’ whilst looking at the light reflecting off Emma’s similar glasses.

Emma then asked boldly, ‘are you going out with him again?’ ‘If he asks me.’ Emma looked a little disgusted: she thought her eldest sister was tougher than that. She asked peremptorily, ‘why don’t you ask him out? Go on, what harm will it do?’ She replied uncertainly, ‘well…’ Louise jumped in, and added, ‘you can ask people out you know. It does happen, you did it before, you know.’ Kirsty regarded her youngest sister, meeting her mismatched gaze with some curiosity. For a moment, it occurred to her to wonder who she might have asked out. Then Melissa waved her hands, tugged at Emma’s sleeve, then asked her to repeat what had been said, thus causing Kirsty’s thoughts to move from Louise back to Dave.

A few days later, Kirsty was out with her new friend Dave again: it was certainly a boost to her morale, but was it more? This time, she invited him inside, having told her sisters to “make themselves scarce” before she left. Thankfully they kept out of her way as best they could; Kirsty saw Melissa but Dave didn’t. She wondered what would he make of her, Emma, and all the rest. She shrugged, went back into her room, and let him - eventually - make love to her. She heard Annie crying next door with Emma; she’d not told him she was a mother, and therefore rather naughtily let him believe it was Emma’s. Perhaps next time she might tell him. Yes… Yes…

The next time she brought him back from a night out, her sisters were much more in evidence. This was only fair, being as they had lives to lead, and of course, it was their house too. The first one he saw was Emma, who was acting innocently for a change: preparing Annie’s bottle. But she turned, saw him, smiled, then winked. He stopped in his tracks for a moment, beholding this slightly shorter Kirsty-but-not. Her glasses were thinner but not thin, stronger but not vastly so. Her face seemed oddly like Kirsty’s, equally attractive but younger, and her body, well, prison had done nothing to change her ample curves, and as usual, she wore virtually the tightest and most revealing clothes she possibly could and yet somehow still appear dressed. For a long moment he was trapped in her bespectacled gaze, and then he heard his new girlfriend calling his name, and the spell was broken.

Emma took Annie into her room, and dutifully fed her older sister’s baby. For a while she pondered her situation, and that of Kirsty: she seemed much luckier, in some ways. And, a question came to her out of the blue: “what is like to have a boyfriend? A lover, not just a man to be used?” For some reason, she felt the urge to find out. Putting Annie into her cot took a moment, and straightening her clothes and hair a little more, she then heard the door to Kirsty’s room open, and voices - he was going to the toilet! She waited until the door locked, and then sauntered outside, leaning against the door frame, automatically assuming a posture she’d adopted many times before: bust stuck out, as if she needed to, being as it was naturally well stuck out anyway, a hand innocently adjusting her hair, and when he came out, fiddling with her glasses. He glanced at her, and at that moment Emma did that thing she was so skilled at: she made her plano-fronted lenses flash at him: she knew exactly where the lights where here, and had become an expert at judging the right angle to move her head to reflect them straight into his eyes. It was something she’d learnt long ago: that some men liked plano-fronted lenses flashing at them, it had got her quite a bit of business. He stopped and looked rather longingly at her for just a moment, and then went back to be with Kirsty. Emma looked disgruntled, but shrugged and left them to it.

A couple of days later, Emma went out with Annie, ostensibly to the park: she’d let slip that Annie wasn’t hers, oh no, she was Kirsty’s baby. That was quite a shock to him, anyway. But Emma more than compensated for that: she was by now an old pro at the sex game, although she didn’t tell him that - she didn’t want to give him another shock. She hummed happily to herself on the way home, pushing Annie along, thinking how pleasant it was, and also rather guilty at what she’d done. Later that evening Dave arrived to see Kirsty - and flashed Emma a little smile. Emma grinned back, and stuck her chest out just a little to ensure that he’d been noticed, but not enough so that Kirsty noticed.

After Kirsty had said goodnight, she noted in her Diary ‘This feels strange. He’s very nice, I told you that, but - today he seems distracted. Surely he’s not going off me already? Could he be seeing someone else behind my back? Some girl without glasses? But, I thought he said he liked glasses on girls. Sheesh, Men!!!’

For the next two days Emma, Dave and Kirsty carried on in this manner, with Kirsty gradually noticing his decidedly limp sexual performance. On the day after that, Melissa noticed something too: she was not so blind that she could fail to miss Emma’s absence, and after three days of her “going to the park with Annie”, something clicked in her mind - it was far too cold to go walking about in the park today, in her humble opinion. “What was Emma up to?” She wondered to herself: she was also worried about Annie, so resolved to find out what was going on. As soon as Emma had left, she scampered upstairs, got her shoes, coat and handbag containing essentials such as mobile phone and collapsible white stick, and went outside. Carefully, she shut the door, whilst hoping it wouldn’t make a noise that she couldn’t hear, and went down the short garden path to the street. Further down the road was Emma, or rather a figure she assumed to be Emma: it was the right colour and the right sort of shape. Melissa had considerable experience of having to “guess who or what” with her shrunken, blurred view of the world. She walked slowly and furtively along behind her.

For a Nurse, Melissa was pretty good, once you could get her to understand what was wrong. As a spy, she would certainly not be anyone’s first choice: her fully corrected vision was worse than that which would send a school age child into wearing glasses fulltime. For the last few weeks she had been unable to hear anything, apart from occasional tinnitus: either an irritating buzzing or ringing sound. Visually, she could recognize people about 8-10 feet away, beyond that the guesswork steadily took over. She hovered about 40 or 50 feet away, about the limit of her vision where she could at least guess at some idea of what they were doing. Every so often she thought to herself “this is crazy - I am trying to stalk Emma, but she could turn her head, see me and I wouldn’t know about it.” But then her determination to find out what Emma was up to took over, and it forced her to carry on regardless of doubt.

She followed her for some time, at least 20 minutes, as she did so beginning to suspect that perhaps Emma wasn’t headed for the park as she had said: instead, she was headed into town. Melissa began to wonder whether she ought to bother, because if it were busy in the town centre, she might easily lose Emma. But she felt she had to try, so carried on regardless. Soon after Emma, and then Melissa got to the town centre, and Melissa could tell that it wasn’t too bad: she thought she had a good chance of keeping Emma within range of her poor eyesight.

Just as Melissa walked innocently past the door of a shop - she could read the sign but not much else, and certainly could see nothing of the window displays - someone, an older woman, came hustling and bustling out of the door and straight into the unsuspecting Melissa, who, with her limited vision did not see her in time. Melissa got knocked sideways, and her attention went abruptly from following Emma to avoiding falling over, and then trying to find out why it had happened. She didn’t really understand the woman’s apologies clearly, but dusted herself down, shrugged, and then turned her attention to Emma. There she was, standing by the side of the road about 50 feet away, for Melissa, a small but familiar fuzzy dark shape. Melissa hovered as far away as she dared - just far enough to be certain it was Emma with Annie in the pram. Emma crossed the road, up another street, and then turned a corner. Melissa knew where she was, despite the fact she couldn’t begin to read the street name plate bolted high up on the walls of convenient houses.

Just as Melissa turned a corner, she saw movement to one side. She turned her head to look, and found herself looking at a woman of about her age, with a pram. With a rush of realisation, it dawned on her that she’d been following the wrong woman! She looked at Melissa with a mixture anger and puzzlement - she was put off by her strong, odd-looking glasses for a moment, before she said sharply, ‘why the hell are you following me, you four-eyed freak?’ Melissa apologised, saying she thought she was someone else, so quickly walked away, back towards the town centre, now thinking that she had no chance of finding Emma, and might as well go home. But as she walked through the centre, she changed her mind, dawdling a little, looking as best she could at the things on offer here. It helped pass the time, and she hoped that perhaps Emma might come back this way.

Some time passed, and she went into a bookshop: there she picked up a book on nursing. It seemed a little distant, thinking about her job, when she wasn’t in a position to pursue her career, due to her deafness. While she was standing there reading, she felt that she was being watched. She looked up, but saw nobody nearby. Seemingly a moment after returning her gaze to the book, a hand touched her arm. She looked up, and saw a young man a little older than herself. Her squinty, poor vision saw that it was Dave. He seemed slightly red-faced. He smiled, and said to her, ‘hello, Melissa… Did I ever tell you, you wear the most fantastic glasses, they look great on you.’ Melissa snapped the book shut, glared at him, her eyes tiny but fierce behind her thick lenses.

She gave a small sigh, and the thought crossed her mind “he does like girls in glasses, doesn’t he?” She felt a little strange, softly wondering whether he might be more interested in her than Kirsty. Then someone else appeared behind him, pushing a pram: it was Emma, looking surprised and dismayed, but Melissa could not see her expression too well. Nor could she make out her petulant “20 minutes ago you liked me best, now you’re after my sister?” He vehemently denied that he’d said anything more than “hello” to the bemused Melissa. Melissa herself went up to Emma and demanded to know what was going on, asking why was Kirsty’s boyfriend going around chatting up all the bespectacled girls he could find?

Emma confessed to her what had happened: she’d rather mistakenly got involved with him, despite knowing it was a bad thing to do. Melissa looked and was unimpressed, so told Emma sternly, ‘you’re definitely the stupidest sister I’ve got!’ With a “humph” she crossed her arms, glared at Dave, and told him, ‘you’d better get lost, quick!’ Returning her absurdly small-eyed but grim gaze to Emma, she told her, ‘you’d best be grateful that I won’t tell Kirsty about this.’ It was Emma’s turn to be shocked, then grateful. She asked, ‘why won’t you tell her, then?’ ‘Because….’ Emma could not get the reason out of her, no matter how hard she tried, so had to drop it. Melissa silently fumed to herself all the way home: cursing men, reflecting angrily on how weak and feckless they were, how easily their heads were turned. She dared not tell Kirsty about it because she’d turned his head so easily, so didn’t want to be implicated in Emma’s deception. No doubt he would have been chasing after the next bespectacled girl within 20 minutes anyway. That was the last that she or her sisters saw of Dave.

It was the last week of the month, and a Monday morning. Kirsty had gone to work as usual, and as usual Emma and Melissa were late up. Emma had been awake during the night caring for Annie, as usual, but Melissa simply said ‘I can’t hear the alarm clock.’ But this morning Melissa woke up with a start: something had woken her. Things had woken her before in the last few weeks of silence, but not much; usually one of her sisters shaking her. But this time it was different. A strange sensation filled her mind - and she found herself hearing a faint sound. As she concentrated on it, it faded, and then grew again. She listened hard, and swore to herself that it sounded like Emma talking. She clapped her hands, and gave a little smile just because she heard it. Sound! She groped for her glasses, as faint sounds met her ears and did not get lost, instead, they found her brain!

She sat staring at the far wall, and said aloud ‘I can hear!’ The sound she heard was muffled, distorted, and sounded like someone talking from down a mine shaft or tunnel, but it was recognisable as speech nonetheless. Excited, she got out of bed, and ran into Emma’s room, where she lay snoring. For a moment Melissa stood listening to this normally annoying sound with a smile, laughed, and heard that too. Before long she was waking her sister up, who grumpily acknowledged her sister’s good fortune and went back to sleep again without bothering to put her glasses on.

8. August

One Friday afternoon early in August found Melissa downstairs watching TV, when more sound intruded on her world: her hearing had slowly improved to the point where she usually didn’t need to lipread people if they spoke clearly enough and there was not too much background noise going on, hence she could understand the TV. The other sound was speech, so she turned to look. It was Emma, she could tell that, and she could tell she was talking on her mobile phone, but with the TV on it was hard to concentrate on one or the other. Emma spoke quietly, too softly for Melissa to hear most of it. Melissa heard, ‘you’ll have to come here’ and then, ‘don’t worry, it’ll be OK.’ After that Emma remembered that Melissa could hear, so went outside and carried on chatting.

The next day arrived; whilst Kirsty was downstairs caring for Annie the doorbell rang. Kirsty went to the door, but Emma rushed downstairs in a suspicious hurry and opened the door. Standing on the doormat was a tall, slender woman, who had the look of rather bedraggled, careworn beauty and poise to her, her hair tied roughly behind her head. She looked tired and drawn, her clothes were unkempt and ill-fitting, and she wore glasses - oval silver metal frames with plano-fronted lenses that glinted defiantly in the morning sun. The rucksack which she had carried sat beside her on the doormat.

Emma knew her, of course, but Kirsty, who stood holding Annie in the hallway, also recognized her, despite her rather dowdy and down-trodden appearance. Inwardly she gave a silent groan. Emma turned to her eldest sister, and said, in a sort of wheedling, plaintive tone ‘Kirsty, you remember Silver, don’t you?’ ‘How could I forget?’ ‘Aow, don’t be like that. She’s not all that bad. And, look at her…’ Kirsty looked at her again. Silver smiled weakly, and said, ‘hello, Kirsty….’ Kirsty said hello, but did her best to sound unwelcoming.

After an awkward pause, Kirsty asked Emma, ‘well, what does she want?’ Kirsty had half an idea what the answer was going to be without being told. Emma asked, ‘can she stay for a few days? Look, she’s in a real bad way.’ Kirsty blurted out, ‘you’ve got to be joking!’ ‘please, Kirsty…’ Kirsty shook her head, so Emma tried a different tack, asking, ‘can she come in for a bit? Just for a cup of tea?’ Kirsty was half minded to tell her to get lost, and take Emma with her. But, well, another long glance at Silver told her she wasn’t in a good state: she looked hungry. She ignored the little voice that cried out “don’t do it!” ‘OK, she can come in for a cup of tea - and give her something to eat.’ Silver gibbered out thanks, and came in.

Kirsty went about her business for a time, then returned having put Annie to sleep. She found the pair of them in the kitchen, where Emma was making her sandwiches. Kirsty swallowed her dislike of what she was, and forced herself to see only a hungry, dishevelled, down-on-her-luck woman. And honestly, she wasn’t such a bad person really, upon further reflection. Kirsty sat with her, and asked politely how things were with her. Silver grimaced, as if the thought of her recent life was a source of physical pain, then grumbled, ‘oh, not too bad apart from having no money, nowhere to go, people treating me badly, stuff like that.’ Evidently Silver had tried to carry on without Emma after she’d been put in prison, but it hadn’t really worked out: she was all alone, and couldn’t find anyone to work with her. She’d then worked for some thug who’d treated her badly, so she had no choice other to leave. Quickly her money and luck ran out, she then found herself in a hostel for a bit, but she kept trying fitfully to earn money the only way she could; they didn’t like that, so threw her out. She had been sleeping rough for the last few nights, trying to find Emma again. Eventually she found her through a friend of a friend, and here she was: impoverished, glad to see Emma again, wondering what to do next, and hoping for some kindness.

Kirsty eyed her silently as she ate and drank, and Silver at length realised she was being studied. She blinked a little, but said nothing. Again ignoring the voice that told her not to do it, Kirsty heard herself saying ‘I think it would be best if you did stay here. Perhaps we could find you a job.’ And so Emma prepared a room for her friend, and “business associate”, Silver.

Kirsty sat in her bedroom that night, and wrote in her Diary ‘I cannot quite believe what I have done. I have 2, repeat two! Prostitutes living here now! I am very glad mum isn’t here to see it. Oh, and sorry for calling Emma a prostitute, she’s my sister too.’ She stopped, and remembered dimly she’d had tried herself too: it didn’t make her feel happy upon further reflection. She hoped that Emma’s experience with Annie would make her more responsible. Then she remembered something else, and wrote that in her Diary too ‘Oh yes, my friend Lisa is coming to visit next week. You know, that woman I helped after the bomb attack on the SubGround system? It’s going to get crowded here!’

The next time Kirsty saw Silver, she looked considerably more like the Silver she used to know. She talked enthusiastically about getting a job, and thanked Kirsty for the umpteenth time for helping her out. Kirsty waved aside her thanks, and went to work herself. After a day or two Silver announced she’d found a job: nothing great but a start, she said, and would like to stay and pay rent if Kirsty didn’t mind.

That evening an exhausted Kirsty wrote in her Diary ‘Hello again, I am amazed, because Emma has offered to pay me rent! Surely she isn’t back on the game again, no she can’t, can she? Surely you’d tell me? No, you’re just a diary. Well, it’s not like I don’t need the money.’

As it turned out, Kirsty had been deceived: Silver was in nowhere near as bad a state as she’d pretended. Emma had gone along with it being as she was sick of having no money and missed her old friend Silver. Whenever Kirsty went out, Silver or Emma had “clients” around to visit, making sure that Melissa wasn’t around and Annie was cared for. It was difficult, and Emma hoped one day she could talk to Kirsty about it and make it more legitimate. Well, as legitimate as it could be, considering what she was doing.

On Saturday evening a few days later a tallish bespectacled lady came walking up the drive. Outside the door stood a man smoking a cigarette; Emma and Silver knew who he was, but Kirsty wasn’t aware of him. He smiled at her, and she gave a tiny smile back, not quite expecting anyone other than Kirsty to be around. Before she could reach for the doorbell, he said to her, ‘so, are you here to give people a good time too?’ she looked at him, curiously, and said, ‘pardon?’ He looked slightly confused, and then asked, ‘are you with Emma?’ ‘Who? No…’ ‘Oh… Sorry… But, you look so good in glasses…’ She met his gaze, now somewhat confused herself, but then looked away, back at the door. He walked away, wondering who this woman was.

Lisa somehow put this at the back of her mind, and greeted her friend Kirsty some moments later with warm recollections of how she’d helped her. She did seem surprised at the thickness of her glasses, so Kirsty explained the reason why: she was worried about them getting broken. Lisa didn’t seem totally convinced it was a good idea. Once they were in town, eating at some pleasant restaurant, Lisa told her of the man outside the door, and at first Kirsty explained it away as “probably somebody delivering junk mail or something,” but then she realised what it meant: it was that Emma and her friend Silver were getting up to their old tricks, and what was worse, they were doing it from her house! Kirsty seethed impotently all night long, all but missing Lisa talking about her husband Paul. Apparently, he was attracted to women wearing strong glasses, but apart from that was a decent and loving man. Kirsty sat wondering why she couldn’t find such a man: “just unlucky, I suppose,” was her thought on the matter. The bill then arrived, causing her to remember how Emma had offered to pay her rent: it would be helpful, she admitted to herself. Then she felt sick at herself for admitting such a thing. Oh, what to do? She was so good, looking after Annie while she was at work. Finally she realised there was nothing she ought to do. But, perhaps she could play the game too, pretending that she didn’t know what was going on. For some reason that gave her a perverse pleasure, as she sat cleaning her thick glasses with the table napkin, looking at the world with her uncorrected vision, wondering which blur was the waiter. That sort of question, for her, needed glasses, so she put them back on.

Louise went to school the following Monday morning, and as usual her friend, or more than friend, Michelle, came to find her. This time she seemed agitated, waving at Louise animatedly. Louise hurried up to her, and asked, ‘hello Michelle, what’s the matter?’ Michelle’s stutter instantly went from bad to appalling. Louise took her somewhere quiet, got her to calm down, which had the effect of changing her stutter back from appalling to merely terrible. It took some coaxing and much sensible guesswork, but the gist of it was that Michelle’s mum had heard from someone that Michelle had been hanging out with a “girl with glasses” a lot, at the park, and elsewhere. Michelle had denied it, but asked ‘W….w….w…what…. n…’ ‘What now?’ Louise nodded. Michelle looked like she was ready to cry, wondering what Louise might say next.

Louise thought for a moment, and then told her, ‘perhaps I can be a girl without glasses instead.’ ‘B….b…b….’ ‘Yeah I know, I can’t see very well without them. I’ll just have to improvise.’ Michelle gave a little laugh, and smiled in relief. With a little help from Louise’s interpretation, she commented, ‘rather you than me’, which was quite understandable, because although Michelle could see considerably better in the distance without her glasses, it was a confusing and headache-inducing experience for more than a brief look. Close up was just a nightmare of blur and distortion. Louise at least could see something at close range, but her mismatched vision gave her depth perception problems without her glasses. Although Michelle said no more, she anticipated problems.

A day or two later Louise had escaped from her house and all that boring homework, and made her way to an area not too far from the park where she was going to meet Louise. She stopped, pulled her glasses from her face, and stowed them in the pocket of her jeans. Instantly the world collapsed into a distorted blur, causing her to squint uselessly. Thankfully she knew the route to the park, but people and other things around her were just unknowable. Crossing the road was dangerous and scary for her; she could hear the cars, but they were just blurs - thankfully no cyclists happened by, being as they were particularly difficult to see, and moved quite quickly. She found the park, ignored the black blur of the sign displaying notices detailing what should and should not go on there, and walked purposefully towards the shelter where they usually met. She mused to herself that the sign probably didn’t prohibit going without glasses.

In the shelter she saw movement, and a dark blur, then heard a sound, a cough. She asked uncertainly, wishing for her glasses, ‘Michelle?’ A husky male voice came out of the shape, ‘hello, pretty girl. Come and say hello to me…’ Louise couldn’t make out much, but the dark blur seemed to grow and change, so she turned around and ran. The shape came after her, running just as fast as she did. Louise panted in terror, wishing she dared stop to get her glasses out, but looking at the man would be a luxury, although seeing where she was going would be more helpful. Before she could stop and do so, she had fallen and grazed her knee: the man almost caught up with her, then she got up and ran as fast as she could, stopping to go around a hedge, pull her glasses from her pocket and jam them on her face. Now she could see perfectly well, certainly well enough to know where she was and to avoid tripping up on the uneven paving stones.

She made for another hedge, and then around it, then collided with someone else: it was Michelle. Breathlessly she cried, ‘run!’ And Michelle followed her. She knew this area just as well, if not better: she pointed down a twisting alley, ran down it, with Louise following her. She dashed along to a gap in the wall before the first turn, went through it, and again Louise followed her. They both stopped, panting, and Michelle put her finger to her lips as the man ran past. Louise did her best to avoid panting, holding her breath even, with the hope that didn’t hear them. Then he was gone, and they heard and saw no more of him. Michelle said P…p…p…p…’ Which Louise took to mean ‘Pervert’.

Louise started to recover from her chase, then noted that Michelle’s large eyes were on her heaving chest. Michelle tried to say something ‘N….n…n..’ but gave up, so instead pointed at Louise’s bustline. Louise gave a slightly uncomfortable look, then reached out and embraced her dear friend, and kissed her on the lips as hard as she could, and then thanked her for saving her from the “dirty old man”.

9. September

On the first evening of September, Kirsty came home on the SubGround system from work, and happened to pick up a copy of the free newspaper that floated around on the various trains. Here she found the usual political wranglings, TV listings, etc, and on one page, the classifieds, something else: an advertisement for a Dr Smith, who promised “to cure your myopia or your money back”. Well, that was an interesting promise for Kirsty, who wore thick glasses, the lenses being made of plastic; she hoped that they would not be broken as easily as her friend Lisa’s were some months ago. The idea of managing with weaker glasses appealed to her, but the related idea of not needing them at all really appealed to her. Once home, and having had dinner, she rang the number in the advertisement. She spoke to a pleasant-sounding woman who booked her in for an appointment the following week. Kirsty felt determined to keep quiet about this.

She told her Diary ‘I’m not telling anyone about this. Hopefully the first time my sisters notice this will be when I appear without glasses. Oh, that’s a brilliant thought, I’ve been dreaming of that for years, my experiences with contact lenses and all, and now this. I can’t wait for the result!’

Before that could happen, her daughter had another appointment to check her vision, “probably the first of many,” thought Kirsty grimly as she sat holding her in the waiting room at hospital. Of course, she knew what a lifetime of myopia would be like; for Annie, it would be worse, being as she’d started out at minus 18 instead of zero. Now that Annie was six months old she was beginning to take more interest in the world around her, but it seemed to Kirsty that her interest was limited to what she could see, and that seemed quite close up. Her glasses, although thick, might be too weak, she thought.

As she mused over her several challenges and problems caused by her various sisters, and mainly those associated with Annie, she sensed she was being looked at. Someone as myopic as her needed thick glasses to make sense of the world around her: without them, she saw the world as an unyielding blur. For a moment she endeavoured not to appear to take notice of it, but then she looked up casually, first at the notices on the wall, and then, by turning her head, at the person staring at her. It was a man, almost middle-aged and quite innocuous-looking. He sat some distance away but across the far side of the waiting area, staring at her constantly. Even when she stared back, for a long, long moment he stared, blinking. She wondered what was he looking at, “my tits?” Kirsty wasn’t as busty as her younger sister Emma, but was quite curvy herself, but no, he didn’t seem to be so interested in those. Of course, her glasses. She looked away, feeling quite uncertain.

“What is it with men and glasses?” she thought to herself with considerable irritation, “either they hate the damn things or are obsessed with them. Nobody seems to not care either way about them.” She tried to look out the corner of her eye, but for some years her thick glasses had made that increasingly difficult, and now with her tougher and even thicker glasses, much more so. Was he still looking? She looked around slowly, not at him, but at the others here waiting for whatever they wanted: there were a few, some young, some old, but none wearing glasses quite as thick as hers, nor carrying a baby. For a moment she had an insane urge to pull them off and give them to him. Then it occurred to her - did he wear glasses? She looked, and saw that he didn’t: there were no marks on his nose to suggest that. What was he doing here, if he didn’t need glasses? Was he… Just here to check out those who did? No, no, that seemed insane. Why would anyone just spend their days gawping at thickly bespectacled people such as herself? She felt a rising feeling of unease, and felt herself being looked at again. What could she do? If she told anyone, would they believe her? Maybe he was here in cahoots with the consultant she saw last time? She wished silently “oh, please let them call Annie’s name next so I can get out of this place.” Every second was a torture, with Kirsty not daring to look at the man again, but still feeling his constant gaze on her.

Finally Annie was called in, with Kirsty holding her. The consultant this time was a middle-aged woman who seemed to have no interest in her figure or her glasses, which consoled her greatly. Instead, she concentrated on Annie’s vision, which was what she was there for. She seemed more efficient, clinical, exactly how Kirsty imagined a doctor ought to be, perhaps even a little cold and unemotional. Kirsty started to feel reassured by her thoroughness, care and attention to Annie’s problems. She looked at her for guidance, even for hope. She did speak, but said nothing about what she thought, only about what she was trying to ascertain; as if the result were of purely academic interest to herself and did not involve Kirsty at all. At the end of the examination, Kirsty had to ask, ‘so, is there any change?’ ’no, not at the moment.’ Kirsty gave a sigh of relief, took Annie out and arranged another appointment for a few months time, thinking that at least something in her life wasn’t getting worse.

The next week came, and Kirsty went to keep her appointment with Dr Smith. The place where she went was an elegant surgery in a well-off part of town, with a metal sign, which of course she could read quite easily. For some reason she giggled, wondering if opticians had signs like eyecharts, big letters at the top, small at the bottom. This one wasn’t. Inside, there was a receptionist in the small waiting area. No-one else waited to see the much-anticipated Dr Smith.

And then he appeared, holding out a hand, trying not to stare at her bust or her glasses too much, but instead making eye contact with her, smiling and chatting amiably, oozing charm, persuasion and conviction. For a moment, Kirsty thought she’d come to see a politician. He led her into his office, invited her to sit, then offered her a coffee. While he told her all about what he could do for her, she looked around. His office seemed much like that of a normal optician: but he didn’t seem like a normal optician. His objective was to get people seeing a “different way” rather than through thick glasses, and made a polite observation about Kirsty’s thick specimens. With the merest hint of amusement, he said to her, ’they are particularly thick, I can see. I do hope you don’t mind me saying so.’ Kirsty shook her head: she’d got well used to all the negative comments by now. Breezily he exclaimed, ‘well, we’ll soon have those lenses getting thinner and your visual system relaxed!’ Which, more or less, put Kirsty at her ease.

He directed Kirsty to sit at the chair with the phoropter, then determined her prescription: Kirsty’s glasses needed to be thick to correct her minus 15 of myopia or so in each eye. They were quite recent, and her vision wasn’t changing so much these days, so there was no problem there. Then, he asked to look through it with her glasses on. This was new to Kirsty, because every time she’d been to an optician, it was to ascertain what her level of myopia was for new glasses. But then he asked her, while she was looking at the eyechart, ‘do you drive a car?’ ‘I know how to, but I don’t bother owning one, too much trouble.’ ‘Yeah, tell me about it.’

He then revealed to her exactly how her vision would be relaxed. ‘I’ll have to reduce the power of your glasses, in order to allow your eyes to relax.’ It took a moment for that to sink in, and when it had, Kirsty started. She started to say ‘I’m not too sure about that!’ But didn’t get the chance, because he broke in, and told her ‘I’m sure you’re thinking “hold on, I’m not sure about this!” Well, let me tell you, there was woman just like you last year, she was more myopic than you, and now she’s walking around without glasses! She didn’t like the idea of having poor vision, but I persuaded her to persevere, which she did, and now, she can see perfectly well without glasses, using just her natural vision.’ Kirsty gave a tiny snort, not entirely convinced. He finished by saying, ’this is the way to get rid your glasses. Go on, give it a try.’ Kirsty ignored the tiny but insistent voice of doubt in her mind, and instead focused on that long-time goal of hers: “no glasses”, that thing she had wished for, schemed for, saved for and so far had not achieved. She nodded, then said ‘OK. I’ll try it.’

Kirsty then embarked on an eye test quite unlike any she’d ever known: instead of the optician trying to correct her vision, he was trying to make it blurry. That became apparent when he plonked a plus 0.5 lens in front of each of her own lenses. Kirsty said rather cautiously ‘I can see only to the 20/40 line.’ he swapped them for another pair of lenses, this time plus 1.0. ‘Now I can see only down to the 20/60 line. It’s quite blurred, are you sure this is going to work?’ Patiently he explained to her that she would get more and faster results the more she weakened her lenses. Some of his spiel went over her head a bit, but she coughed, and said ‘OK, OK, I get the picture, the more fuzz now, the less later. It makes sense, anyway, like exercise.’ ‘Yes, that’s it. Just like exercise, now you’re getting it. So, how much more would you like?’ Kirsty hummed, and then said, ‘give me a little more.’ He put in another -0.25, so Kirsty replied, ‘yeah, that’s enough for now.’

He took her out into the waiting room, where the receptionist smiled vacantly at her. About 45 minutes later, he reappeared, and announced ‘I’m ready to fit your new lenses now, Kirsty.’ Kirsty went in, and gently he deprived her of her glasses. The whole world went to its familiar uncorrected fuzziness, that which Kirsty usually avoided. “What would this be like,” she wondered?

Soon he came back, for her a dark blurred shape. In a few moments, her glasses were back on her face and her eyes looking through her weakened lenses. Everything within 2 or 3 feet seemed normal, but beyond that, it was all quite blurred. Her eyes blinked at him. He reassured her, ‘yes, I know its all quite strange. Don’t worry, it’ll be OK. Soon, in a few weeks, you’ll be able to get rid of your glasses for good.’ That idea almost erased the thought of what she imagined was going to happen to her. She thought “weeks of this? Uh-oh, what did I do?”

He spoke to her again, reassuring her, which mostly worked, but as she went outside, she was again assailed by doubt. She thought for a moment to go back in and ask for her old lenses back, but he’d locked them away in order to encourage her to try the new ones. Her fingers explored the edge of her new glasses. Were they thinner? Her fingertips seemed to be saying that. That excited her, but the blur was still there. She shrugged and headed for work. Thankfully nobody there noticed, but Kirsty certainly did. Every so often she was minded or needed to look into the distance for something, and every time instead of the casual reliance on glasses, she had to squint, struggle or make an educated guess. By the time she was on her way home, standing in the SubGround station, she felt quite low. She heard someone calling her name, and saw someone waving, but could not make out who it was. She had to go closer to realise it was her friend Lisa. She took her mind off her vision with idle chat.

Once home she confided in her Diary ‘oh my, what did I do today? I got my vision messed up, I just hope it works! At least nobody noticed. But, I think my vision’s worse that Annie’s!’ She gave a sigh and looked around her room. Up on the bookshelf was another diary. To her, with her reduced vision, it looked rather like an indistinct pink blur. Distantly a memory seethed in her mind. She gave another sigh, longer and deeper, and continued ‘This is just like 10 years ago when I couldn’t see the blackboard. If you can’t remember, go look in that diary up there!’ She was sorely tempted to fetch that old diary, and thus remind herself of those tormented days, but as her hand reached up, Emma’s voice called out ‘Kirsty! Kirsty!’ Duty called, and her diaries were forgotten.

A few days later, Melissa was out in the park enjoying the autumn sunshine and gentle heat. She looked at the sun, for her a sort of undefinable yellow glow, the cause of natural light. She had seen it when she was a young girl - and her mother had warned her not to look at it directly, because it would hurt her eyes. Now she could look at it as much as she wanted, not because it was dimmer, but because her blurred vision tamed its brightness. Alas, that was about the only use for her feeble visual powers. Looking around her, she could see people in the distance, when she could see them at all, as indistinct dark shapes. She heard them, though: her hearing had improved to just about normal, with only a little occasional distortion: it was annoying, but she hoped it would go away. There was always hope while the sun shone, she felt.

It was just as she was staring at the ground in front of her, counting the daisies that she could see, when she heard someone, no, two people, coming up toward her from the side, crunching along the gravel path that ran past the bench she sat on. She turned her head to look, but relied on her hearing more to get an idea of who they were. At first, she could only see them as distorted blurred shapes, then as they crunched along toward her, they got nearer and bigger, and with that, she saw colours. One white, then white and blue at the bottom, the other pink and similarly blue at the bottom. Girls, she thought. She turned to look at the ground instead, but then a thought struck her, an unpleasant memory. Pink? She remembered someone wearing a pink top teasing her a few months ago on the bus. She turned to look again. Of course, she could make out little except the colours, even squinting. She thought to herself, “Is that her? Oh, please, don’t let it be them. If they are, let them not recognize me.” At that moment, she heard one of them speak to her, ‘hey, blindy, do you recognize us? Or can’t you tell?’ Melissa’s heart sank as they slowed and laughed at her. She still couldn’t recognize them, but then she’d never really seen their faces first time around. But she knew the voices, the laughter.

Melissa got up and walked away as fast as she could, but could hear footsteps and stifled giggles behind her. She started to run; she heard them follow her. Inadvertently she ran off the path into a patch of ground devoted to floral displays - she heard a voice call out, ‘hey, blindy, can’t you read, it says don’t go on that bit!’ There was more laughter, which helped because they had less breath for running. Melissa looked around her: as usual her feeble vision gave her an idea of which way she was going, but not much more. She ran towards a green blur, and found it was a hedge, no, two hedges in parallel with a pathway between them. She ran along it, turned a corner at the end, and ran into someone!

This someone caught her, and said to her, ‘Melissa! Hold it, hold it!’ It was Emma. She had someone with her, someone big and male. Then somebody else appeared, a tall woman, pretty but with a hard expression to her features. Another burly man appeared behind them, trapping her tormentors. Emma led her away, saying that her “friends” would “deal with them”. Once away from whatever was happening behind the hedge, Melissa burst into tears, complaining how life wasn’t fair, people kept making fun of her, and it wasn’t her fault. She even said, ‘mum told me it would stop when I grew up! Why won’t they stop?’ Emma couldn’t reply to that, so simply hugged her and hoped they would stop now. At least this pair of pests, anyway.

The following Saturday there was a fun fair, so Louise begged Kirsty to take her. Melissa didn’t feel like going far in case the “terrible twosome” found her again, and hadn’t taken heed of the warning they’d been given in the park. Emma was ostensibly looking after Annie, but actually looking for an opportunity to make money the only way she thought she could. So that afternoon Louise went with her big sister, having a go on all the rides and those things where you throw three darts and win a prize. Louise didn’t win, but didn’t much care. Then she saw the bouncy castle, and instantly wanted a go on that too. Kirsty looked at her curiously, and commented, ‘you’re a bit old for that aren’t you?’ ‘Aow, but I always wanted a go, please?’ ‘OK, but you’ll have to leave your glasses with me, in case they get smashed.’ Louise paled a little, wishing for the thousandth time she’d had better eyesight. Calmly, she pulled them from her face, and let Kirsty guide her to the bouncy castle.

Once on it Louise jumped about a bit, and soon realised that perhaps it wasn’t so great after all: not being able to see clearly certainly didn’t help. She got bored of it, so went to the open side where she’d got on. Where was Kirsty? She squinted, called out, but no familiar voice called back. She saw someone else nearby - with little idea of who it was apart from being young and female, she guessed - and went over to ask for help. The figure spoke to her ‘L… l… l….’ Louise recognized that voice: nobody spoke with a stutter that bad! ‘Michelle! What are you doing here?’ Well, of course, it took a while to get out of Michelle was she was doing here, or anything else remotely complicated: she was here with her mother, but not around at that moment. Louise asked Michelle to locate Kirsty for her, so that she could reclaim her glasses. Once back in the world of the seeing, Louise vanished, then could soon be found kissing and cuddling her girlfriend behind one of the rides. It seemed that only a moment had passed when she realised she’d taken too long, so was obliged to find Kirsty, who was worried and displeased at her kid sister’s “bunking off act”. Fortunately, though, she’d not seen Michelle, and Michelle’s mother had not seen Louise either.

That evening Louise wrote in her diary ‘Hey Diary! It’s me again, Louise. I have myself this lovely girlfriend called Michelle, you know, I told you about her. She’s kinda sexy with those curves of hers and those big alluring Bambi-eyes. Much better than how my piggy little peepers look behind my glasses. I just love to feel those lenses of hers, they make me go all gooey inside! She’s so sexy I could… well, who knows? Ha, ha, tell you next time!’

She closed the diary and put it down, then took something from her pocket. It was a lens, taken from an old pair of Michelle’s glasses. She held it against her cheek, and then began to stroke it with her fingertips, taking note of its smoothness, its curvature, how it fitted into her palm so neatly. A smile spread slowly across her lips and face: as she did so, she began to feel very warm and pleasant inside.

10. October

About lunchtime one day early in October Emma sat in a car: she’d owned cars before, but previously had someone else drive them for her. It wasn’t that she couldn’t drive them herself; one of the first things she’d done when she’d left home a few years ago was learn to drive, although she’d never done so legally. Of course, though, she made sure her vision was good enough - she couldn’t abide her vision being incorrect. She saw in the door mirror whom she was about to give a lift to: her older sister Melissa, walking down the garden path to the distorted red blur she was told by Emma was her car. Emma called out from inside it, telling her she’d got the right car. Melissa was all smiles as she got in: it was a long time since anyone had offered to drive her anywhere, and it had never been her family.

Emma drove off, talking amiably to Melissa. Melissa then commented sadly ‘I wish I could drive a car. I’ve seen trucks and big stuff go by so often, I wish I could have a go.’ Emma caught herself, because she was about to ask her “why not”. Of course, she knew why not: Melissa and Amy were far too poor sighted to get a driving licence. They’d get laughed out of town for trying. Then she considered herself: she’d never actually formally passed a test herself, although for her neither vision nor skill were problems. Distantly, she heard herself saying, ‘you could drive this car if you want. I don’t mind.’ Melissa gasped in surprise. If someone had told her a cow had just successfully jumped over the moon, she might have been about as astonished. Nervously she said ‘I know you’re my sister, but there’s no need to…’ ‘Oh, don’t worry, big sis, I meant it’, said Emma, trying not to let her uncertainty enter her voice.

Melissa talked while Emma drove to some out-of-the-way spot. They all looked quite similar to Melissa, who talked and argued, ’no, Emma, don’t bother… I can’t see very well, it’s dangerous… I’m not sure…’ Emma stopped the car, then got out; they were in a quiet country lane that would probably only see Emma’s car that day. She went around to the passenger door, opened it and said, ‘comon, Melissa, let’s try it. You said you wanted to have a go.’ Melissa started to get out the seat, stopped, then said, ‘oh, I don’t know… it’s not a good idea.’ Emma put out her hand, and said, commandingly, ‘comon, I won’t do this again!’ Melissa got out, then made her way round. By the time she sat behind the steering wheel, Emma was ensconced next to her in the passenger seat. She asked, ‘you do know what to do, don’t you?’

Melissa had some idea, but not much: Emma had to tell her to press the clutch pedal, start the engine, help her get it into first gear, and then, raise the clutch and be ready with the handbrake. Melissa started to panic, but Emma told her it was OK and that she was doing fine. Melissa got the car into first gear with a little bit of juddering and complaining from the engine: of course, she wasn’t used to the clutch, that being no great surprise, being as she’d never done this before. She put her foot on the accelerator, and the car moved away fairly smoothly. Excitedly, she cried out ‘I’m driving! I’m driving! This is mad… But, wow!’ Curious, she peered at the speedometer, asking, ‘how fast am I going?’ ‘Watch the road!’ She jerked her head up; a rush of confidence hit her, so she changed up to 2nd gear. Emma looked at her with a mixture of admiration and concern. She wondered if Melissa knew where the brake pedal was, or whether she could actually see it. For a moment, Emma panicked, and bit back a scared cry.

Melissa drove Emma’s car along at about 15 to 20 mph: it was thankfully a fairly straight road, at least as far as Emma thought they would go. Melissa couldn’t see the bend, but that wasn’t a shock to anyone. She put her hand on the gear lever again, but Emma’s hand got there first, saying firmly, ’no, you don’t. You’re legally blind, remember?’ Reluctantly, Melissa nodded, concentrating on what she could see of the road. After a couple of minutes, she asked, ‘is that a corner ahead?’ ‘Yeah, you’d better stop before we get there.’ ‘But you can’t see around bends any more than I can.’ Emma had to admit she had a point. But…

It was too late to stop before the bend, but Melissa tried anyway. The car skidded, a front wheel went over a pothole and she lost it a little, the car slithered a bit then bumped into the hedge. Emma rolled her eyes, then got out to inspect the damage. Melissa got out too, and peered hopefully at what Emma was looking at. She commented hopefully, ‘it doesn’t look too bad to me.’ Emma let that pass, as she knew Melissa probably couldn’t tell much by looking anyway. She stood up, and said ‘I think it’s time to go back. And - I’m driving.’ Once inside and on the move again, Melissa apologized for the bump, but thanked Emma for letting her try. Melissa knew full well that even the kind of dodgy, illegal driving she’d just done would probably be impossible at some time in the future.

Louise got home from school piled high with homework and coursework a few days later: there were other things in her life right now that were important, too, but not doing homework wasn’t a good idea. She looked at her selection of tasks, then decided on the history. She’d been reading about the various Roman poets - goodness knows what that had to do with life now, she thought, but she had to write a poem in the style of one of them, but relating to her life. She sat thinking about her life for a moment, and her hand went to her pocket where she found that talisman of her girlfriend; Michelle’s old lens. As always, she marvelled at how it shimmered and reflected the light. It wasn’t as good as having Michelle here, but then, she couldn’t always be around. In fact, she barely could be around at all, and certainly not here in her bedroom. She sighed, and wished she dared “come out” to the world. But then, she had been obliged to “come out” as a girl with glasses, and they hadn’t always been received gladly or kindly by others. She propped the lens on the desk in front of her, and pushed her thoughts back to business.

She picked up and glanced through some of her textbooks. Virgil? She smiled at what that word sounded like. After a moment’s thought she wrote “of glasses and the girl I sing, who, forced by myopia…” and then stopped, thought for a moment and scribbled it out. Then she wrote “of glasses thicker than thick I sing…” And then glanced at the lens in front of her. It was a thick lens, but not so thick as the ones she wore now. In her mind’s eye she saw Michelle’s eyes, inflated by her lenses, blinking and fluttering alluringly.

She picked up the lens and held it in both hands, cupping them so she could only see a part of it. She thought of Michelle’s curves, looked at the curvature of the lens, and smiled. She pressed it against her own body. On a strange impulse, she opened her blouse a little and slipped the lens into her bra cup: It felt odd in there, so she took it out. She wondered whether Michelle would mind what she had just done. She then rubbed it gently against her lower body, as if cleaning it, but instead just curious as to what would happen. Again, it felt warm and pleasant: she was puzzled at this, being as it was only a lens. It occurred to her that perhaps it was who it belonged to was what mattered most. She put down the lens on her bed, stood up, then started to loosen her skirt: a thought had occurred to her, something to try. Just as she did so, she heard Emma call out ‘Louise! Dinnertime!’ Louise sighed, and momentarily reflected on the problems of being a lesbian in this household. She rearranged her clothes, picked up the lens and put it in her pocket again. Even that seemed to make her tingle inside as she went downstairs.

Some days later, Silver went out on her own to meet some friends who were in town. As far as Kirsty was concerned, it was her affair, but Emma seemed a little agitated. Silver and her went back a long way together. Emma was woken in the early hours of the morning, not by Annie’s crying, but by her mobile phone. Sleepily she pushed on her glasses and answered ‘Silver?’ The voice on the other end of the phone wasn’t Silver. It was a nurse from the local hospital, sounding tired and irritable, saying, ’there’s a girl here called Joanne Cramer, she is asking for you. Can you get here as soon as you can?’ For a moment Emma wondered who Joanne Cramer was, but then realised it was her friend Silver. How long was it since she’d heard that name?

Emma got herself dressed in her usual overstated way, low cut top with a short, tight skirt: she didn’t care what people thought of that, she never did. She got in her car, drove to hospital, ignored the drunks in the waiting area and asked for her friend by name. Emma had been to hospital with her employees and business associates before, it was never fun but part of the game that had to be accepted with the rest of it. Someone else took her down a corridor, then into a small bay with a few other women of various ages. Some were asleep, some had visitors, one of them was visiting his wife and couldn’t take his eyes off Emma’s large, exposed bust. She ignored him and looked at Silver.

She was lying propped in a bed, as if not quite sure whether to sleep or get up. Her left eye was patched and bandaged; other injuries, cuts and bruises marked her face. Her right arm from her hand to her elbow was in a plaster cast. She squinted up at Emma with her unpatched eye. Although she was short sighted, she could see quite a lot better than anyone in Emma’s immediate family. She wearily asked ‘Emma?’ ‘Yeah, it’s me.’ ‘Thought so, only you could come to a hospital dressed like that!’ A moment later, a tear ran from her eye and down her cheek. She choked back a sob, and told her ‘Emma, someone beat me up and raped me.’ She started to cry, so Emma went to comfort her.

Emma brought her home, and some hours later lay trying to sleep while Melissa looked after her and Annie. Emma didn’t want to impose, but she was dead tired, and Melissa was insistent, pointedly saying “I am a nurse after all!” However, Emma found it hard to sleep: what had happened to Silver had deeply unsettled her. She began to worry, and wonder “is my turn next? Would a knee in the dangly bits work if there were several of them?” Emma tried not to think about it all, and after a while, fell asleep snoring loudly.

About a week later Kirsty took some more time off work to make another of her secret trips to see Dr Smith, by means of the SubGround system. She found herself looking into the distance a lot as she had done quite consciously, occasionally covering one or other eye when she was reasonably sure that no-one was looking. Her vision wasn’t the pin-sharp clarity she was used to, but it seemed better. Her thoughts fell into concern about Silver and Emma, and as she looked up for a moment, it seemed that her view of the world was just as blurred as when she’d first started Dr Smith’s methods, but then it clarified a bit. She found it all quite perplexing. Was her vision better or not? She wasn’t entirely sure.

Once she arrived, there was again no-one else there apart from the smiling receptionist and the charming, reassuring Dr Smith. She told him what had happened, namely that her vision seemed to vary sometimes, he replied ’that is normal, quite normal,’ in a tone that suggested that whatever she told him would be thus described. She was able to read down to the 20/50 line if she squinted. Oddly, it seemed that what she was seeing was rather more important than how she was doing so, but that didn’t occur to her until later. All she saw was progress, and she wanted more: he again told her that the more she took off the quicker her progress would be. Being as she’d got somewhere, she was ready to do more. Some time later she walked out of his offices with her vision reduced by another whole diopter, giving her around 20/100 vision. She didn’t like the blur, but did like the way it seemed to be leading. She found the fuzzy vision irritating, but tried not to let on that anything was wrong. For a while, she managed OK because people generally expected that if you wore glasses, you could see fine - at least, if they hadn’t met Melissa or Amy, her half-blind twin sisters.

Melissa sat watching TV one afternoon towards the end of the month. In her case, “watching” meant deciphering the movements of the various distorted fuzzy lumps that she saw on screen with the aid of what she could hear. It was a long time since she could really just watch it normally, anyway. But today, it was different: she’d felt quite tired the day before and had thus gone to bed early, but had woken up feeling generally OK. She sat listening and watching, and unconsciously turned the sound up. “Darn TV” she thought, and then sat wondering. It didn’t take long for the thought of hearing loss to scare her. The thought “is my hearing getting worse?” Sprang into her mind, and she began to feel panic. Emma was out with Annie and Silver, leaving her to mind the house alone: it seemed awfully quiet. She went to the front door, opened it and listened: she was hoping that outside would be noisier, and if she heard nothing, then it couldn’t just be blamed on a broken TV. At that moment a car drove past: she saw it as a reddish blur. But it was what it sounded like that really scared her: it sounded quite faint and distant, much like things did when her hearing recovered the last time. Another car drove past, and this one sounded fainter still. She held back a sob, then went back indoors. Now the TV was barely audible: she turned the volume up really loud, and so could again hear it well enough to make out speech. Slowly, steadily, though, she noticed that by degrees it became quieter, more distant, more muffled and distorted. By the time the programme finished, it was just a murmur for her. A couple of minutes later, she was in silence; even turning the TV volume up to full volume did nothing. She gave an anguished scream, but didn’t hear that either.

11. November

A few days into November Louise wrote, after doing her homework one evening and before bed ‘Hi, Diary, it’s your friend Louise. I’ve got some stuff to tell you. Firstly, it’s about Melissa, my sister. You should see her, she is in a real state, her deafness has come back and now she’d can’t hear a thing. You have to go close to her so she can lipread you - she’s not very good at that either. Poor Melissa. She’s been to the doctor again and she told her that she doubted her hearing would recover. Something went wrong in her ears or something, caused by the flu bug she had a few months ago, it’s amazing she recovered before and the doc reckons it probably was a fluke. Well, for Melissa that was the last news she wanted. Amy got herself checked out but her ears are fine. Melissa is in a right miserable grumpy mood, her work has put her back on sick leave and they’re harassing her about it too.’

Louise changed tack, and wrote rather excitedly, making her normally neat handwriting rather scrawly. ‘You know that lens that Michelle gave me, well, I used to keep it in my pocket, but I’ve been doing something else with it for the last few days. It’s in my knickers, I could say to keep it safe, but it means so much to me. You’ll think I’m insane, I know, but it feels so nice down there. I haven’t told Michelle about it yet, I am thinking maybe she might be shocked. All I know is that I like it and love her. Hopefully it will be alright.’

‘The other thing is about Kirsty,’ she wrote her eldest sister’s name with loving, respectful care, ‘whom I also love very much in a different way. She is more like a replacement mum for me - and all of us. Anyway, I’ve noticed something - odd. As you know Kirsty wears thick glasses, but I’ve noticed that she seems to be having trouble seeing into the distance sometimes, a bit like me when I have old glasses. I do hope she’s not going the same way as Melissa and Amy. We don’t need 3 blind girls in our family, I know they can’t help it, but no more… please!’

Louise then shut the diary and started day-dreaming about her lovely girlfriend. She had some of the charms an attractive girl normally would be expected to have, but also some rather unusual ones that Louise found very interesting.

A day or two later found Kirsty sitting watching TV one evening. Melissa was upstairs trying to ignore everyone; utterly fed up with not being able to hear, and Silver was around somewhere, trying to get herself back together after her ordeal. Emma was sitting across the room looking through photographs, some of which were of Annie, who was laying asleep nearby. Every so often Emma would stop and smile at one, and perhaps show it to Kirsty. She happened to look up at the wrong moment, and saw Kirsty pressing her glasses against her face rather more firmly than would seem normal. Emma started to say something about it, but then pretended she hadn’t noticed. For anyone else, they might not realise the significance of it, but for Emma, who had been forced to see through inadequate glasses, she knew what that implied. She wondered “what was going on here?” She decided to find out: she held up 2 or 3 more photos at random, and said things like “isn’t she a lovely little girl” or something else not really relating to the photograph. Whatever Kirsty said, it was in agreement with Emma, thus Emma confirmed what she’d thought: Kirsty couldn’t see through her glasses very well. After a moment Emma found what she was looking for: a photo of Joey, Amy’s kid. She showed it to Kirsty, and again said something about Annie.

She put it on top of the pile, and asked, ‘do you want to look?’ ‘yeah, OK.’ Emma walked out, and gave them to her as she went past. She turned, and saw Kirsty look at the topmost photo, then give a horrified, slightly wondering look, then glance up at Emma, who was no longer going outside, but instead stood there watching. Kirsty gave a little sigh, knowing she’d been rumbled. She’d so hoped to keep this a secret: she’d have loved to see her sisters’ faces when they saw her bare-eyed and seeing clearly. Emma went to sit down next to her, and waited patiently for Kirsty to say what was going on.

Kirsty started, ‘yes, I can’t see very well at the moment, but I hope one day soon can see clearly - without glasses.’ Emma’s eyebrow raised in curiosity. Intrigued, she said, ’tell me more…' ‘There was this advert in a newspaper for a clinic that promised to make me see clearly without glasses. What this optician did was reduce the lens power of your glasses, and make your eyes relax, and you’d see clearer.’ Something stirred in Emma’s mind - she’d heard about this. She asked, patiently, ‘what was the optician’s name?’ ‘Dr Smith.’ ‘Oh, you idiot, Kirsty, don’t you watch TV?’ Kirsty glared at her younger sister, then said, ’no, not as much as you. I’ve got a full-time job, you know. So what is it with Dr Smith?' ‘He’s a con man. There was a programme on TV about him a few weeks ago, he’s just a smooth-talking guy who used to sell cars, learnt something about vision from somewhere and preys on high myopes like us, selling us highly-priced lenses that are too weak. Oh, I can’t believe you fell for that!’ Kirsty looked slightly abashed and confused, as if she wanted to believe her sister and Dr Smith simultaneously. Emma told her firmly ‘Kirsty, you have to get your old lenses back. I’ll come with you if you want.’ Kirsty shook her head. She didn’t really need her forceful younger sister to do anything stupid, so said, ’no… No, I’ll go on my own… Are you sure he’s a crook?' Emma glared at her, causing Kirsty to wilt a little, knowing that when her sister was right, she was really right. With that, she resolved to go back and check Dr Smith again. But without an appointment.

The next day she got leave from work to go and see Dr Smith again: when she got to the premises, the front door was locked, the lights were out and nothing seemed to be happening. She went around the side, saw a window and peeked in: the whole place seemed deserted. She got around the back and peeked in the window there, and saw that it was “Dr Smith’s” office, where she’d had those weird eye exams. There was nothing in the office; no sign of the phoropter, desk, chairs, etc, all cleared out. There was a notice pinned to the door, a white sheet of paper printed with something, but with her reduced visual powers she had no hope of reading it. There wasn’t any sign of the locked cupboard where her old lenses were kept either. She went away feeling disgruntled and angry, and resolved to get her vision back to normal as soon as possible.

She went to a one-hour opticians and got them to redo her lenses for her frames. In order to avoid awkward questions and potential embarrassment, she had to concoct a story about her lenses breaking and these being old ones she’d stuck in to help her see. It satisfied the optician there; although he found it odd, he didn’t say anything. A few minutes after getting her new lenses put in, Kirsty was walking back to the SubGround station, enjoying with a great sense of relief her newly clarified vision. Her vision had got worse by 0.25 diopters in each eye, so now her lenses were even thicker than before. She thought to herself “perhaps I should think the way Emma does, and not worry too much about glasses!”

The following Saturday came, and as usual Louise was quietly busying herself with her homework. As far as Melissa was concerned, she was quiet, but for her these days everything was. As she was the only other one in the house, she didn’t hear the doorbell ring. Kirsty had told Louise to listen for it, not knowing that she would do so anyway, being as her dear “friend” Michelle was coming over. A little while before she arrived, Louise got a phone call on her mobile - it was quite obviously Michelle, because to most other people she was bordering on the incomprehensible. Louise trotted down to the door, opened it, and there stood her girlfriend, wearing a loose, short jacket, partly zipped up, over a tight top pale blue top and with tighter jeans. For Louise, she looked fantastic: with the big thick glasses, it was even better. She fixed her bug-eyed gaze on Louise, who just melted. She embraced her as soon as the door was shut behind her, kissing her on the cheek, just in case Melissa’s eyesight miraculously improved enough to see them at this distance, then took her by the hand and pulled her upstairs.

Once upstairs any pretence of doing homework or just being friends was gone: they were on the bed, kissing and fondling as two lovers ought. Michelle uttered, ’d…d….d…' Then was lost in pleasure. Melissa didn’t hear the moans of pleasure from Louise’s bedroom, nor the soft creaking of her bed. If she been outside and peeked though the keyhole, she wouldn’t have seen much that would have told her what was going on within, simply because her distance vision was so limited. Thus she was entirely unaware of any of this, not even Michelle’s hurried departure, which was just in case Kirsty or Emma came back before they were due.

That evening Kirsty wrote in her diary, after looking around her room for inspiration, ‘Dear Diary, I’m so glad to be seeing clearly again after those weeks of frustration and blur. I can’t believe I was conned that easily. I feel a bit silly really. I know I said this before, but - I’m glad it’s over. It would have been nice to dump my glasses, but I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.’

She sighed, and again looked around the room. Her vision settled on an old photo of Louise with her lens patched. Kirsty knew she hated that, but at least it was all over now. But there was more to think about regarding Louise now ‘I’m worried about Louise. Yes, I know, I’m usually worried about everybody, but particularly about her. I am a bit surprised she’s not got a boyfriend yet. She’s pretty and nice-looking, are the boys turned off by the glasses, like what happened when I was her age? She seems plenty happy enough - happier than I was, anyway. Perhaps she’s hiding how she really feels, or perhaps she has a boyfriend she’s not telling us about. On second thoughts I hope I and Emma aren’t that stupid. Well, if she does have got a boyfriend, she’s more devious and cunning than I would have guessed. I just hope he doesn’t get her pregnant or something daft like that. I think I’d better have a careful word with her about contraception, just in case.’

‘Then, as normal, there’s the problems with Emma. I know and you know that she is real pain in the backside and has, and is, causing our family such a load of grief - as if we need anymore grief this year of any kind. Okay she’s done me and Annie some favours, but I can’t keep her and prostitution isn’t exactly my idea of a career. So, I told her the other day to either get a proper job or leave. She was very angry and upset with me, but I can’t have that going on in my life here, I have Louise, Melissa and Annie to worry about and this is not a brothel. It was so embarrassing when someone thought Lisa was one of Emma’s associates! As for her friend Silver - there’s a decent enough person in there, so I told her she was welcome to stay until her arm was better, then we’d help her sort herself out as long as it was nothing to do with her previous “business”. But I can’t deal with anyone else’s problems right now: if they’re adults, they’ll have to sort themselves out. As far as Emma is concerned, I may have to threaten to not buy her new glasses the next time she needs them. What do you think, should I tell her that?’

‘One other thing I need to warn you about: this is the last year I’ll be writing a diary in a book. I’ve now got a laptop and will be doing all this on there instead. Don’t worry, you won’t notice it.’

With that, Kirsty put down her diary, lay back on her bed, staring up at the black mark on the ceiling that she’d gazed many times in the past, wondering yet again whether she ought to paint over it. Then she fell asleep.

12. December

During the evening of the first Tuesday in December, Emma took Melissa to the local college for an adult education course. Her work had forced her to do a lip-reading course: it was either that or give up nursing altogether. As it was dark and unfamiliar to Melissa, Emma had to guide her from the car to the right classroom. Melissa had her white stick with her just in case someone thought she might not be registered blind and struggling to work out what the rest of the world was like. Emma promised to come back for her, but got talking to Silver on her mobile, endeavouring to prop up her flagging spirits, thus Melissa was obliged to wait at the doorway rather helplessly, unable to hear, only able to see dimly where there was light spilling from the foyer and windows, and vague shapes and shadows rapidly giving way to meaningless darkness beyond that. She felt dispirited, and as she waited for Emma, steadily more angry. Finally a shape appeared in front of her, waving: colours blended into dark or light very easily with insufficient light, but a moment or two later, she realised it was Emma. Perhaps it was the amount of flesh she kept on show that gave her away. Bitterly, she asked, ‘where have you been?’ Melissa concentrated on her mouth, but it wasn’t easy for her to read her lips in this light. Impatiently, she said, ‘oh, don’t bother, just take me home.’

Emma listened patiently while driving home about Melissa’s first night at the lip-reading class: it had not been a particularly pleasant experience for her. The teacher hadn’t quite reckoned on having to teach someone with such poor vision as her, and thus was ill-prepared to do so. He’d done his best, but beyond a few feet it was just pointless, being as she couldn’t see a thing. And knowing her luck she was about the only one who had no hearing either; most of the others in the class of about 10 had a bit of hearing, something to assist their efforts to understand what was being said. The teacher could not devote all his time to helping her, having other struggling students in his class who needed guidance, assistance, etc. Melissa was scathing of him for not helping her enough. Once home, Melissa went upstairs in a huff, and later, she could be heard crying. Emma nearly went to see what was wrong, but didn’t want her head bitten off again. Kirsty went to try comforting her, but it wasn’t easy. After that, Melissa vowed not to go back; condemning the teacher as “useless” but when the next week came, she had accepted it was worth a try, that was if she wanted to be a nurse. The second lesson wasn’t so bad, Melissa came away having learnt something about mouth shapes and stuff that would help. She’d even drawn some in a book. She felt happy… After a fashion, since she now began to grasp exactly how hard things would be for the rest of her life.

A few days later found Louise playing indoor netball at school. One of the drawbacks of being as myopic as her was that seeing the ball, competitors, net, etc was pretty difficult, not that Louise had ever actually tried it, thus she wore her glasses for this too. And with all the jumping and elbows and other not so sporting manoeuvres employed by the opposition, it was only a matter of time before her glasses got a knock. Last year they’d been knocked, but not seriously so, but today was the day they got bashed “accidentally” from her face and trodden on. It was doubly unfortunate, because Louise wasn’t a bad player, and of course, she needed the glasses to see many things other than netball posts. She screamed a bit, calmed down, was guided off the court, and then taken to the dressing room. While she dressed, her friend Michelle appeared, and in her way offered to help her. The teacher looked at her as if she was the one needing help, but she didn’t realise the bond that there was between them. Louise pretended to be more upset than she was, so that she could have Michelle with her for longer, before she was taken home to Emma and Melissa.

The next day Louise went to the optician with Emma and Melissa to get a new pair made. Louise had been through several pairs of glasses, but never so destructively as this: her new prescription was right eye minus 13.5, left eye minus 9.75, negligible astigmatism in both. Louise seemed happier now, because her left eye was really starting to catch up her right eye, and perhaps soon she would have equal lenses instead of odd-looking eyes, one larger than the other. Michelle seemed to like it, but then she liked everything about Louise.

Emma then asked about protecting her glasses: she’d been asked to do this by Kirsty, who was glad to hand over the responsibility to someone else for a change. The receptionist showed her some things like blinkers, such as those worn by a horse. Louise took one look at them and laughed, then said ‘I’m not wearing those, I’d look stupid!’ Emma glared at her, and said, ‘well, you’re not paying for the glasses, it’s either this or no more netball.’ Louise looked hard at her not-so-elder sister. In some ways she was like Kirsty, but in others, not at all. Since she’d disappeared for a few years of her earlier life, she’d been not so close as she was with Kirsty. To her, Emma seemed a little scary, which was not unreasonable since Emma could be very tough if needed. She gave in, and quietly agreed, ‘Oh, OK….’ The receptionist also showed her a headband, which she suggested Louise wore. Louise shook her head, and said, ’no way. No, no way….' Emma’s hard stare didn’t work this time.

Kirsty noted Emma’s efforts to do what needed doing with gratitude when she came home from work. She noted in her Diary ‘I reckon Emma’s got something in her that hasn’t been tapped. I mean, she’s feisty and hard as nails, but she sure can get what she wants. Perhaps I can suggest to her she gets a job in charge of some other poor souls, and boss them about for all she’s worth.’

In fact, Kirsty didn’t need to. Melissa had got her to apply for a job at the local hospital where she worked. The job was to be in charge of a group of cleaners. Emma asked coyly ‘I don’t have to do any cleaning, do I?’ ‘No, probably not, only if they mess it up, if so you just have to shout at them and they’ll do it properly anyway.’ That sounded rather good to Emma, so she applied for it.

Kirsty came home from work one day and got the shock of her life. Emma was downstairs showing off her new clothes. Kirsty asked her, ‘what happened? Did someone kidnap Emma and replace her all the sudden with an imposter?’ Emma stared at her for a moment, and then smiled, ’no, no… Melissa told me my normal clothes wouldn’t go down well at a job interview. So, I bought myself this.' Emma wore the smartest suit she’d ever been near, let alone worn. And for a wonder, it showed very little cleavage. In fact, none at all, once she put the jacket on. Her bountiful curves were abundantly obvious, even if disguised. Kirsty simply said, ‘wow!’

Emma went to the job interview the next week, seriously impressing the interviewers - and none of them were male, making this even more of an achievement. A few days later, she got a letter in the post: Kirsty heard her crying out in pleasure at her achievement ‘I got it! I got it!’ Kirsty fought the urge to say, ‘don’t give it to me then!’ She let Emma tell her that she was starting in the New Year. That called for a celebration, so they all went out to dinner as soon as everyone was ready.

For Christmas, Emma got another surprise: a small package from her little sister Louise. She opened it: it was a Diary! Emma gave a mock-serious glare at her, this time peeking over her glasses for no good reason, perhaps only to make her eyes look the normal size for once. She said, jokingly, ‘what do you think I’m going to do with this? I’ve never written a diary in my life!’ Kirsty tut-tutted, and said, ‘well, you just have to say what you think. And, I hope nobody will be nosy and read them. I’m sure there’s something you’d like to get off your chest.’ Emma glared at Kirsty in that odd semi-serious way, then said, ‘ha, ha, ha, just because I’ve got big knockers, that’s a good excuse to make lousy jokes, is it?’ Kirsty apologised, and Emma gave a little grin, before saying, ‘Aow, never mind, I was only joking too…’ Kirsty then promised her ‘I will never pry into your diaries - that goes for you too, Louise. I’m hoping that if you have something really important to say, you will say it to me, not a diary.’ Both of her younger sisters readily agreed to that.

That evening Emma opened up her first Diary. She sat staring at the blank page for some time, fiddling with her pen, not really knowing what to say. But then she forced herself to start: being as it wasn’t quite the start of the new year, she started in the front where people wrote notes, addresses, lists of their favourite vintages of wines and suchlike. Here she wrote, rather hesitatingly at first ‘Hello, Diary.’ ‘My name is Emma.’ ‘I’m the sister with the big…. Well if you’re any sort of a diary at all, you’ll know what’s big about me.’ ‘I’ve done some strange things in my life so far. Now, I shall do something that is strange for me. I shall try to use only my mind and not my body to get what I need out of life. It’s very hard to explain. The more I sit here and think about it, the more I realise that I’ve never really thought about things before, I always just jumped in and hoped for the best. Now after what happened to Silver, I don’t feel so comfortable doing what I did. I think it might happen to me. I used to think I was clever enough to avoid it, and tough enough to get over it. Silver seems devastated by it, and I wonder if I would be OK if someone raped me. I feel torn in half about it, because what I did seemed so right and so comfortable, yet now it seems it might lead me to despair. So, perhaps it would be better to start again. Bossing people around sounds kinda fun. No, no, you are saying to me, you’ve got to be more responsible in life. Yes, yes, I get you. But one thing doesn’t change. You and nobody else is getting me wearing those awful contact lenses, I am still a proud girl with glasses!’

She raised her head, looked around, her shiny glasses glinting and gleaming in the light from her table lamp and shaded ceiling light, sticking her chin out defiantly, as if waiting for the world to challenge her.

https://vision-and-spex.com/dear-diary-v-t616.html