The Gift
I remember my first day working at the bank: my job was to serve the general public, not a wonderful job, but a job nonetheless. During my first day I was introduced to all the other staff there, mostly tellers, managers, clerks, all the normal types of employees. But in one small office I was led into, there was this youngish woman: small, mousey and rather shy. Her name was Jenny, and her job involved totalling up all the receipts and figures at the end of each day: she was renowned for her mathematical abilities, and that was why she was employed there. It wouldn’t have been for her looks: well, she wasn’t ugly, but the thick glasses she wore made her look pretty terrible in most people’s eyes: she certainly wasn’t customer-facing material, for certain. She blinked up at me, and then squinted for all she was worth, her already shrunken eyes becoming smaller: it was quite obvious, to me at least, that she couldn’t see clearly. The lenses in her glasses were myodisked, shiny and glinting in the light of the office: I saw her smile rather uncertainly at me before I was taken elsewhere. Something immediately told me that I wanted to know more about this Jenny.
So, after a few days of doing my job, I walked casually into Jenny’s office, hoping she wouldn’t be too busy to chat. She looked up, then back at what she was doing, which was as usual adding up figures and paperwork, endlessly checking results. She looked a little irritated, but I asked, ‘hello, do you want a coffee?’ This helped quite a bit, it must be said, if only to the extent of changing the direction of her squinty, myopic gaze back to me instead of her work. She smiled in her rather vague fashion, and said distractedly, ‘yeah, OK, thanks…’ I was wondering what to make of that while fetching the coffee, but when I brought it in, she invited me to sit with her.
We got chatting, mostly about the work in front of her. While she did this, I could not help but notice the thickness of her myodisk lenses flashing and glinting in the office lighting, and then her eyes, tiny and much reduced by the extreme power of her lenses. I feigned ignorance, and asked how she could see through such strong lenses. She replied, ‘badly. I’m a high myope, I can’t expect to get more than 20/150 visual acuity from any glasses.’ I drew her into telling me more about what the world looked like from her perspective: beyond a couple of feet it soon began to blur and look distorted. She did tell me her vision was fine up until a few years ago, then she’d contracted a virus which attacked her eyes and wrecked her vision, but I was left with the distinct impression that she wasn’t telling me everything; after all why should she?
My little friendship with Jenny blossomed slowly: she seemed quite reclusive at times, but didn’t go so far as avoiding me completely. It was as if she were in two minds about me, or getting close to me, anyway. I just did my best to stay friendly. It did pay off, eventually: when I asked her out to lunch one day, she put on a strange face, part surprise, part delight. At last I was getting somewhere with the myopic Jenny. Quite how far shocked me, because she had a special secret she wished to share with me. Sitting down in a small Chinese restaurant, she appeared to make up her mind, and then whispered to me ‘I have something to tell you. But you must tell no-one else. Promise me.’ I promised, as she had instructed, so then she began, ‘when the virus attacked me, it didn’t just ruin my vision. It did something else to me.’ She paused, and I sat wondering what it was. Had it turned her into a mathematical geek?
After inhaling, she told me, ‘it did something to my brain. I can pick things up.’ For a moment I wondered why this was such a secret: I was half tempted to say “so can I”. Slightly hurriedly, she clarified ‘I can pick things up by looking at them, and concentrating hard.’ My eyes widened in justifiable surprise as I digested this news. I stammered out, ‘Like… tele-whats-it-called?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘That must be pretty cool.’ For a moment I wondered why she wasn’t out there saving lives or something, like a bespectacled superheroine, not stuck in a bank totting up figures. She shook her head abruptly, and said, ’no, it’s not that great. I can’t do it very well. Not very far. I can only lift things I could lift with my hands, and if I can’t see it clearly, then I can’t lift it. With my vision, it’s hard to see things very far away.'
She looked at me, waiting for a reaction. Slowly it dawned on me that she couldn’t see my face too well, and was waiting for me to speak to tell her my response. I stuttered aimlessly ‘W..Well… that’s a surprise….’ ‘Yeah… I’m a weirder friend than you might have thought.’ That certainly explained her reclusive attitude. My focus returned as I asked, ‘perhaps you could demonstrate?’ ‘Don’t you believe me?’ ‘I’m not quite sure. Can you do something here?’ ‘I’m not doing it here. People would see.’ ‘Perhaps somewhere else? At home?’ She looked quite doubtful at that idea, then shrugged, and said, ‘yeah, maybe. I’ll show you what I can do.’
As it turned out, Jenny’s demonstration of her strange, but limited, power was not quite in the fashion she’d intended. A few days after our little lunchbreak date, during the afternoon, there was a sudden commotion in the bank, followed by a gunshot and the sound of glass breaking. I suppose I should have known that working in a bank, you’d be subject to such things as bank robberies, but as it was only after a few weeks working there, I felt a little aggrieved. However, there was no time for such feelings: I could have been a hero, but most likely a dead one, since the several balaclava-hooded men all carried guns of one sort or another, so instead I hid.
I watched and heard from my vantage point as the rest of the staff were herded up and pushed into part of the main bankvault: I assumed the robbers wished to keep them there locked up whilst they did their dastardly deeds. However, I saw no sign of Jenny. Where was she? I was quite safe in my hiding place, but I was so concerned that I went searching after her, but was spotted and frogmarched down a corridor, then down into the secondary vault: a smaller one containing less valuable items, but still impenetrable if you were human. The titanium-steel bars saw to that.
I was down there quite some time, when I heard a little scream, a cry, and then footsteps. It was Jenny: I think she’d been in the ladies while the bank robbers came in, hence she was toting her handbag over her shoulder. She was unharmed, but struggling a little in the hands of a large bank robber. She was shoved in, then the vault door slammed shut behind us and the key snapped off in the lock: just to make certain we couldn’t get out. Jenny looked at me fearfully: I imagined she’d never experienced anything like this, which was exactly my situation too. She started to shake a little, so I hugged her, which seemed to help. After a short while the shaking subsided, and she gathered herself, then pulled away form me a little. She said quietly, ‘what’s going to happen to us?’ ‘I don’t know. Hopefully they’ll let us go, or else we can wait until the police come.’ ‘Did anyone call the police?’ ‘I don’t know.’
She sat down on an armoured filing cabinet, locked of course, sighed, and said shakily ‘I suppose we’ll have to wait until we’re rescued.’ At that, there was a scream from above: it was impossible to tell who it was, or why it was being made, but it made Jenny all the more nervous. I started to wonder if we would be rescued, or if we had a worse fate in store. I didn’t voice my opinion, but I felt that it might be better if we tried to escape. I sat opposite Jenny, looking around through the bars at the room around us: there were three “cells” in the middle of the room, with bars running floor to ceiling. In the space beyond there wasn’t very much; a couple of old desks with drawers, with a few bits and pieces of old office junk on and beside them, mostly quite evidently useless, at least for the purpose of getting out of there. Jenny looked up at me, squinting as she was prone to, but said nothing as I wondered to myself if one of the drawers might contain something useful, for instance a hacksaw. Then I thought that a hacksaw would never get through bars this thick, and that was ignoring the problem of how to get it; until I thought of Jenny and our little talk over Lunch a few days ago. I hoped that perhaps she could do something to free us.
A moment later, I was voicing aloud that very question. She looked up at me, with a look on her face saying “don’t be silly, I ’m just a little high myopic woman.” She shrugged, and said ‘I’m not Wonder Woman, you know.’ I went to the bars, and said, wonderingly, ‘what’s in those cupboards?’ After a moment Jenny replied, ‘how should I know? I never come down here.’
I turned to her, and said ‘Jenny, you know how you told me that you could move things by looking at them…?’ She looked at me, with an expression that said “I think I wish I hadn’t mentioned that.” Rather slowly and reluctantly, she nodded. I asked, ‘well, can you open those drawers?’ ‘Drawers? What drawers?’ ‘On those desks over there.’
She turned her head to look at the desks, then got up and walked over to the bars next to me, stopped, and squinted hard. She then said ‘I can’t really tell that there are drawers there. Those silvery blobs, are they handles?’ My small hope of getting out of here was starting to founder before it even got going: I knew what she was going to say, and so she did ‘I can’t move things I can’t see properly.’ ‘Try.’ She shrugged, pressed her glasses against the bars, squinted hard, stood immobile for a long moment, then shook her head and told me, ’nothing’s happening. I can’t do it. They’re too far away… my power gets very weak very quickly as soon as things go beyond my clear visual range - which is not very far, only a few feet away.' Those drawer handles were perfectly plain to me, but to her, well, she’d described them as blobs, so I understood her problem. And they were only about ten feet away. Jenny’s poor vision came home to me quite easily, after thinking about what that meant. Still, there was no point in sitting around doing nothing. There was quite a bit of junk around, old computers, an old and wobbly-looking chair, that sort of thing, but hardly things that could help escape. She asked hopefully, ‘do you see anything that might get us out of here?’ I looked, but there was nothing obvious.
Then I moved and looked from another angle. Behind a small pile of old cardboard files and papers that should have been shredded and dumped years ago, I saw the top of what looked like a toolbox. I stood looking at it rather wistfully, wishing it were nearer. I showed it to Jenny, who failed to see it, adding ‘I couldn’t lift that even if I could see it. It’s too heavy for me.’ Rather discouraged, I then asked, ‘can you lift those files?’ ‘Yeah, I think so.’
Luckily, they were within Jenny’s rather narrow band of abilities, neither too heavy to lift nor too small to see clearly at that distance. I watched as, one by one, they floated up, over a few feet and then down, thus making another pile. It was amazing to watch, but I was still hoping - only a little, though, that something might be behind the stack of files. Or perhaps she could see the toolbox more clearly, or something else useful. She smiled gently then said, ’now do you believe me?' I nodded, and let her get on with it, for what seeming little good it would do.
She was about a third of the way down when she lifted a small bundle of papers off, and I saw what was sitting there on top of the next one: a small pair of pliers! Instantly a plan formed in my mind: use them to turn the bit of key left in the lock, get out and call the police! Rather excitedly, I said to Jenny ‘There’s a pair of pliers. We can use them to get out of here!’ She looked at me as if I was crazy - perhaps because of the apparent absurdity of what I was saying, or maybe because she didn’t know there was anything there, and didn’t believe me. After a moment of squinting, she said ‘I’ll take your word for it… I can’t see to lift them…. but I can lift the file they’re on. I just hope they don’t slide off.’
I watched, heart beating, as the file hovered silently into the air, and flew smoothly over to us. It clunked a little against the bars, then stopped. It was simple to reach through the bars and take the pliers in my hand. Quickly I went over to the door, reached around the lock section, trying to get the pliers to where they were useful. I couldn’t quite do it, being as my arm wasn’t like a squid’s tentacle, able to bend wherever it was needed: instead it had bones that held it straight, but made the lock inaccessible. I sighed, and nearly dropped the pliers. Exasperated, I told Jenny, ‘It’s no good. I can’t get the pliers near the lock.’
Jenny, however, had different ideas. She rummaged in her handbag, then produced a small hand mirror. She handed it to me, saying, ‘hold this so I can see the pliers in it - I think I can see them well enough to move them if you hold it close enough.’ So ensued a most curious operation: me sticking my arm between the bars next to the lock area, the mirror in my hand, Jenny pushing herself next to me, holding the pliers outside the bars too, telling me to bring it closer, closer… and then she lifted them, thus she was able to let go of them with her hand, concentrating on the image in the mirror. Oh, it had to be so close to her face to see them, not much more than 8 inches I think. Slowly the pliers floated towards the lock, and the broken-off bit of key.
Now here was a problem. Although Jenny could use this mirror trick to see the pliers, she couldn’t see the bit of key, not with the mirror in any place I could hold it with my bent and now aching arm. She relied on me to see the keyhole, and guide her in. It was a case of “up, down, left, right” over and over again. Eventually the pliers floated into the right place, gripped the bit of key and she made the whole lot turn. We heard the lock click open, then I pushed the door with my foot to let us out. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, and she pulled away from me, looking at me with a strange expression. That passed when I said, ‘we need to get help.’
We crept out of the secondary vault, otherwise known as our little prison, and found the phones were dead: no doubt they’d been cut off. So, we went into the ladies toilet: there I boosted Jenny through the small window. I heard her drop the other side with a little cry - I hoped she was OK - I asked if she was, and she replied, ‘yeah, I’ll live.’ I heard her cautious footsteps walking away down the back alley that led to the staff car park, and thence the rest of the world. I then settled down to wait. It seemed like a long time, I didn’t know if the robbers were still around, but then, just as I was giving up hope, there was an almighty commotion from upstairs. Of course, it was the police, summoned by Jenny, catching the robbers in the act.
Well, you can imagine, we became the heroes of the hour, saving the bank from being robbed and all. How we got out of the vault, well, I simply said I’d used a pair of pliers Jenny carried with her. That didn’t completely stop the talk and the questions, but it did until everyone had forgotten the details. And as for me and Jenny? Well, she found that she liked being pressed up against me, so after a few more Lunches, we progressed to Dinners and a whole lot more besides.