Shooting Star
I was at the gun club one Saturday afternoon when I saw this young woman of about 22 or 23 go into the slot next to me: she wasn’t very tall, say only 5'2" or so, but was quite slim and pretty. For a moment I ignored her, but then she pulled out a pair of glasses. As is so often the case, one of the lenses was patched over in order to allow her to concentrate on one image of the target only. The lenses were pretty feeble really, I suppose about minus 1.5 at most, not enough to oblige her to wear them permanently. I got on with what I was doing and shot my target a few times, and then glanced over as she started up shooting. I smiled inwardly as I was rather better than her at it.
After about half an hour I was done, so I went to the cafe for a coffee. I looked up and in walked the girl I’d seen before. She smiled at me, and asked to sit with me. She was called Clara and was a nice enough girl, I supposed, but without wearing glasses all the time, I wasn’t really keen. We talked about shooting, she said she wished she could improve her aim and suchlike. Glasses helped, but she wanted to control her arm muscles more: shooting small targets of 50mm across at 10 meters distance wasn’t so easy with a wobbly, twitchy arm. I’d made a friend, but that was it. We met up after shooting a few times in the next few weeks, but Clara’s shooting didn’t seem any better. I was hoping rather stupidly she might put on her glasses for a bit, but that didn’t happen either. I missed a couple of weekends because I was away on holiday, but when I got back her shooting seemed to have got better. I remarked on this afterwards, and she smiled, shrugged, and said, ‘practice makes perfect?’ I didn’t quite believe that. There was something changed about her, was it the pallor of her skin, the way she seemed slightly listless, or the way she screamed and shouted at the guy blocking her car in the car park? That didn’t sound like her at all.
The next time when we met she dropped her bag: I heard something rattle. Immediately I knew what was the cause: it was the rattle of pills in a bottle. She was getting better at shooting; she said she wanted to be in the Olympic team, but what was she doing to achieve it? Not merely practice, surely? I acted all innocent as she put her partly-open bag on the chair opposite mine, and as I peeked in, I saw a plastic pill box with the words “Cynafel” and “Anabolic Steroid” on it. True enough, it seemed to have controlled her wobbly arm admirably, but what else was changing inside her?
The next week Clara didn’t come in, but the week after I got a nice surprise! Clara came in wearing glasses! She looked shyly at me through them: perhaps she wasn’t sure what the world would make of “Clara in glasses”, although my part of it was delighted! They were still fairly feeble, no more than minus 3 each eye, but still! She commented ‘I’ve got to wear glasses all the time now, my eyes are getting worse. My optician was quite puzzled, because he thought my eyes were stuck at minus 1.25 for good, and now they’re minus 3 or something.’ She smiled, to which I shrugged as if wasn’t much interested either way.
Clara was getting better and better at shooting, and the new glasses seemed to help too. Then curiously, her performance about a month later started going downhill, and she said ‘Puffin, can you see that target?’ Of course I could, so I told her, to which she complained that it looked fuzzy. She seemed shocked and dismayed, being as she’d only got new glasses a few weeks ago, and now already her vision was getting worse again. After 4 years at around minus 1 to 1.25, her vision had gone up to minus 3 and more in the space of weeks. She came back the next week with a noticeably thicker pair of lenses in her glasses: about minus 5 or so, and her shooting got better again. The shooting gallery was shut the following week due to the gun warden being on holiday, and the following week Clara wasn’t there. I asked around, but nobody knew of any problem, so I phoned her up. She seemed to swing from pleasure that I’d rung, then to worry about something, but I didn’t know what. She didn’t sound as if she wanted to come back shooting, as when I said, ‘see you next week’ her reply of, ‘yeah, OK,’ seemed less than convincing.
I hung around at the shooting gallery, waiting for my slot and also hoping Clara would turn up. I heard footsteps coming along the corridor, and I turned, and there she was, Clara! But Clara as never seen before: her glasses, which had been relatively weak, feeble affairs, now had a pair of thick, powerful lenses in them, shrinking her eyes inward, pushing in the soft curves of her cheeks. She smiled, and pushed them onto her little nose. She gave a small smile, said “hello,” as if daring me to comment on her glasses. My voice stuck in my throat: nothing had prepared me for this. She said ‘I got these yesterday…. my vision’s getting pretty lousy…. I hope I can still see to shoot.’
Once in our booths I sneaked a look at her. She had swapped to a spare pair with a lens patched, but even so, the lenses were very thick! Something like half an inch or so, beautiful crystal shiny shimmery things. Now my arm shook, causing my shooting to become terrible, and you can understand why, being as I was thinking about Clara in her nice thick glasses! She, by contrast was brilliant, hitting bullseyes all the time. She couldn’t see me sneaking glances at her, thanks to her patched lens and the thickness of the pair of them. Afterwards was like a dream: she sat opposite me and I caught her bespectacled gaze full on, oh, I just melted! And I must have sounded like a complete idiot, my speech coming out in ill-timed fragments rather than the usual full flow. She again complained her eyesight was getting worse, and neither her nor her optician understood why. Yet at the moment her vision was fine: when she wore her glasses, that is.
She was fine for a couple of weeks, and practised her shooting to perfection, but after three more weeks it again appeared that she was having trouble seeing the targets. She could hit them, but not necessarily near the middle where the high points were. The next week she came in again wearing another thicker pair of lenses in her glasses, woah! They were way over 15mm thick, and when she smiled at me, it was like a gift. Those coke bottles swam around as she moved her head, and I was only deprived of them when she put on her patched pair to shoot. Again, she was back to normal, well insofar as “normal” was possible.
If you thought that was weird, then listen on. Clara’s shooting got worse again, nothing terrible, and she complained that her wobbly arm was coming back, as if that was enough to convince me it wasn’t her rapidly advancing myopia. Every few weeks she’d come in with new glasses. Evidently the Steroids had stiffened her arm muscles, but evidently had done something similar to her eyes. Part of me wanted to try to stop her, but by now I felt it might be too late to stop what I knew was coming, and part of me wanted to sit back and enjoy the ride. I decided to let her carry on: there was nothing I could do.
The next week came and went, and she again was noticeably worse; she pressed her glasses up and against her face constantly to gain more correction from the thick bit of her lenses. It was quite fascinating and frightening to watch. She came to speak to me after the shoot and confided in me ‘Puffin… I’ve been taking these funny pills…’ I feigned ignorance as normal: it usually helps. I asked, ‘really? What sort?’ ‘Err… Steroids.’ ‘Ahh…’ ‘You sound as if you know something about them.’ I gazed into her imperfectly corrected eyes and said, ‘well, I did suspect. You did seem to get a lot better very quickly, and that’s hard to do, and stay better too.’ ‘Yes, but look. Look at me! My glasses have gone up from almost nothing to this. My optician has gone crazy trying to work out why. I dare not tell him… I think the pills are stealing my vision.’
I looked at her in feigned surprise. I pretended not to notice her increased lens strength, which admittedly isn’t very easy and my attempt at such wasn’t much good anyway. That’s the trouble with being an OO: if the GWG is half awake, they often spot something’s up, and in Clara’s case she connected that immediately with her oddly and rather absurdly increased myopia. To test me, she said, whilst slyly watching my face ‘I’m going to give up the steroids.’ That didn’t bother me, because I knew that whatever effect they had, it took a long time - even forever - for it to go away. It certainly wasn’t because I thought her myopia would stop getting worse and she’d avoid getting stronger glasses in the near future. I smiled deceptively, and replied, ‘perhaps your vision will improve.’ ‘Yes… perhaps it will.’ She gave me a knowing look.
Well of course her vision got worse and her glasses thicker. The next pair were like little slabs of crystal in front of each eye, almost 2/3 of an inch thick. Sitting opposite her in the cafe afterwards was quite something: those eyes of hers seemed to peek out from behind two thick shiny curtains of light and hardness, tiny shrunken blinking things, so odd yet cute looking. I was in a dream here, but then she smiled and asked, ‘what are you looking at?’ I gulped, and said, ’err… you.' Her mouth raised at just one side, and she touched her glasses. Did she know what that did to me? I quivered inwardly and I felt all floppy all over again, well almost everywhere anyway. Eventually she commented dryly, ‘it’s such a pain having to wear these thick glasses… I hate them. I wish I could get rid of them. There.’ She look them off and looked at me, her eyes seeming huge again, but in reality just normal size.
I took them from her, and tried them on. My, I’ve looked through thick glasses before but these were enough to start an instant headache, with barely a glance through them, that is if you weren’t myopic like Clara. I asked her, ‘what do I look like? She leant forward, and I saw her squinting, then my eyes gave up and they refused to focus that close. Too close for me plus her glasses, too far away for her. She shrugged, and said ‘I can’t tell, you’re just all fuzzy and shaky like the rest of the world right now.’ I handed them back to her and she took them from me, then slipped them gracefully onto her face; her eyes blinked and she was obviously back in the world of clarity.
This pair of glasses vanished after a couple of weeks, and no, she didn’t get boring old contacts. No, she turned up with myodisk glasses! These were a glory to behold, an epic of crystal and metal, all dancing and confused light, little blinky eyes lost even further away somewhere in all that gleaming circle of her 40mm bowls. She shot OK too, but by now I didn’t care much about the shooting. Mine was crap, so I gave up and watched Clara instead. She seemed to be OK on the normal targets, but on the smaller target (25 mm across) she had a little trouble. Of course, it was the minification effect of so much myopic correction. Afterwards she explained she could now only get correction to 20/30 with her minus 20 glasses. Curiously it didn’t seem to bother her much, seeing as it would prevent her doing things like entering the Olympic team. I forbade myself from suggesting the blind team at the Paralympics.
The next week was the annual club meeting to discuss really boring stuff, so I didn’t go: there was no shooting. And you know, the following week in came Clara again: she was wearing a thicker pair of lenses in her glasses, again almost half an inch thick, but this time myodisked, which implied a strong lens, and thus they were. It was hard to tell exactly how strong they were, but Clara helped me by saying they were minus 25 each eye and things looked “all fuzzy and tiny” in them. She squinted at the targets and missed them half the time, but that didn’t seem to bother her. At our now usual after shoot coffee, she sat opposite me and got me to read the sign over behind me: again it seemed to not bother her that she couldn’t read it. I asked her what the optician thought now, and she replied, ‘oh, him, he’s given up I think. He says I’m going to be partially blind soon. Well, there’s no point worrying about it, I can’t do much now can I? I can’t un-take the pills, it’s too late.’
I couldn’t resist asking, ‘what about making the Olympic team? Surely you haven’t much chance now? You keep missing the targets.’ She shook her head, and said, ’that’s not so important to me now. I have a new target now.’ ‘What?’ ‘It’s more of a who than a what.’ ‘Well, who then?’ For a reply she looked at me, and said, ‘Dear me, don’t you know by now, you silly man?’
I numbly pointed at myself, and she nodded. Then as if wasn’t surprised enough, she said ‘I spotted the glasses thing early on. Dear me, you’re so obvious, you know. As soon as I got new glasses you kept looking at me, looking into my eyes. Nobody else did, well not male anyway. You did and I worked it out. You like girls in thick glasses. Admit it.’ I sighed, and nodded. I’d been thinking I’d been so careful and cunning, but this time I was caught out. Softly I asked, ‘do you mind? Does it bother you?’ ‘No, no. Otherwise I wouldn’t keep taking those pills to make my glasses stronger.’ I gaped at her. Did I dare ask?
I did. She was still on the pills. I shook my head in disbelief. What a crazy thing to do. But… perhaps it was meant to be, an OO and a potential but unrealized high myope flung together in this way. I told her to stop or else. She asked, ‘or else what?’ ‘I’ll never look at you again.’ She fixed me with her much-corrected gaze and said firmly, ‘Deal!’ Before tossing the pills in the bin. But, you know, it was too late to save her from minus 30+ high myopia, thick clunky glasses and no hope whatsoever of hitting anything with her pistol. After a few months together we married, her vision stabilising at minus 32 and 20/100 visual acuity; the targets she hit at the shooting gallery only by chance or with my help. That didn’t matter to her: she’d hit a different target.