The Voyage Home
Sara walked down the stairs from her first-floor flat to her front door, opened it and went outside. It was a bright and sunny afternoon, a lovely spring day. Momentarily she wished that she could go to the park so as to watch the world go by for a while, but she had more important things to do; so she walked purposefully toward her car, got in and drove off.
Some people needed to put glasses on to drive, but she already had them on. Without them, her view of the world was pretty much an unintelligible blur of light, shade and colour, mixed and smeared by her myopia. She had long viewed the world through a pair of increasingly strong lenses in order to see it clearly, and at that moment she needed correction of minus fourteen in each eye. This was provided by her strong, thick, plano fronted lenses, ground at the edges in a mostly vain attempt to reduce the edge thickness. Her optician had suggested myodisks, but she wasn’t keen: instead she had to make do with lenses that were a good half inch thick at the edge, with plenty of scope for the “coke bottles” that she’d read about. Her lenses were carried by a pair of largish round black plastic frames, so as to better hide the lenses, and also to match her bobbed black hair: alas it didn’t really work. She had long become more or less accustomed to her appearance, but still got poor reactions from some onlookers.
She turned on the engine and drove off, but as always when she was alone, she ignored the radio. Such a thing in her car was useless to her: no matter how much she turned up the volume, it would always be inaudible to her. Sara was deaf from birth, and from the age of six a permanent glasses-wearer. Plenty of time in which to learn how to lip-read through corrective lenses; that is, if the person involved wished to meet her gaze, although in her experience, they didn’t always.
Sara was going to a job interview: despite being deaf and possessing not the greatest oral skills, she’d learnt to design and draw fashionable clothes. Thankfully such employment required no great verbal communication abilities. The prospective job was in a neighbouring town some twenty miles away, if she was accepted for the position, she’d consider moving, being as it seemed a good place to work. Her impression of the place was confirmed by the way she was dressed: a smart blouse open to near the bust, a short blue skirt that ended above the knee, and high heels. She was plenty tall enough already, but the extra height was a useful boost to her confidence.
She arrived at the neighbouring town in good time for her 4:00 PM interview. After parking her car at the top of a nearby multi-storey car park, she went to the design studio. She’d brought some samples of her work, for they spoke far more eloquently about her skills than she ever could have done otherwise. Indeed events proved: the man and woman thus arranged to interview her did find her hard to understand, but, with a bit of trouble, and some pointing and gesturing in a simple sign language, she got her points across.
She left her work samples with them, and exited the place to head for the car park. She got to the top of the car park where her car was parked, and for the first time took notice of the high buildings she could see around her, perfectly clearly thanks only to her lenses. She walked over to the nearest parapet, whilst still looking, thinking fondly that this might be her new home, or at least somewhere within sight of it. In her opinion, it didn’t seem that bad a place to live. She looked down, and saw that this was the back of the car park, rather a rough place: a walled-off enclosure, as far as she could see, with some bushes and junk lying around.
That short glimpse of clarity downward was suddenly and abruptly curtailed, as her glasses slipped down her nose, and off, falling quickly downward. Instantly her vision was as it was first thing that morning, during that period between waking and putting her glasses on. The world below her became an intelligible blur of grey and green, quite devoid of any useful detail. She cried out in panic: this sort of thing had never happened to her, and she had never even considered that it would. But she was bareeyed: her glasses, somewhere down below her, almost certainly broken and almost as certainly impossible for her to find access to, let alone find.
She shrieked in dismay, and started breathing rather rapidly in panic. Her mainstay of her understanding of the world was gone, or very much impaired. How could she get home now? Then she calmed down into vague hope. Maybe, just maybe, she had a spare pair in her car. She wandered gropingly over to her car, which took a distressingly long time, and once there, felt her way around the lock, pushed the key in and turned it. She jumped in and pulled open the glove compartment, and felt, and felt, and looked, and again felt. But there was no relieving touch of a metal spectacle case there. She’d forgotten her spare pair: her shoulders slumped in despair. She couldn’t drive, not by any bizarre stretch of the imagination. She could barely see a few inches of clarity. She’d have to find another way home: her best option seemed to be to try the studio where she’d had the interview. So, she got out and slammed the door shut, and then looked around, for what it was worth. She considered her options. If she could have heard and spoken normally, the answer wasn’t so hard: simply find someone and ask him or her to help. But she knew people found her abominably hard to understand, especially when she was tired, stressed or both, which she certainly was now. She had to find her own way home.
She had a good idea of which way to head for the lift, but looked for it in order to confirm her thoughts. That grey lump that she squinted and strained to focus on seemed to be it, so she headed straight there, stopping only to bump into a metal crash barrier just below her knees. She felt her way along it, and then around it, then started out again to the lift block. This she found, but it was the side with no doors in. She walked around and went inside. The lift doors were two red blurs in front of her, and the control button something she was forced to feel for, but once pressed, there was nothing to do but wait patiently for the lift door to open, signifying that the lift had come, since the LCD display above the door, showing the lift’s progress, was invisible to her.
After what seemed like at least half an eon, the left hand door opened. A metal grey box met her myopic eyes, to her a misty grey blur. She went in, and the door shut behind her. Finding the control buttons was easy: she found them because they were near the door, not because she could distinguish them easily. She pressed the button for the ground floor, and she felt the lift begin its progress downward. As the lift went down, she noticed some difference in the featureless grey smear that passed for her view of the left hand wall. Her impression was that was a little darker. She went to look, and once within the necessary six inches, she saw the fuzzy dark patch resolve into unintelligible graffiti, although that was the case with or without perfect vision. She shrugged and moved back to her former position near the control panel, wishing that soon it would reach the bottom.
As soon as the door opened, she walked out, hoping and expecting that this was the ground floor, but with no easy means to be sure. She walked out into the amply lit upper floor of the shopping mall. Bright it may have been, but quite unfamiliar to her, and with her vision, simply a mass of blurred shapes and colours. Not only did she not know which way to go, she had no way to find out other than trial and error. She picked left, so headed that way. Over on her right hand side she identified a set of railings, so assumed there was a staircase. A few strides over to look changed that assumption: she realised the smear below her was the lower ground floor. She thought optimistically “never mind, I’ll find a staircase or something.” Perhaps she would, but it might take any amount of time.
She set off again, seeing no sign of people around to approach and attempt to ask for directions, so just kept going. After walking past several shops that seemed to be closed, because by now it was late in the day, she found a set of doors. As she got closer, she realised that these was facing out into the outside world. Once through them, she was on a distinctly quiet street. It was time to consult her map: she pulled it out of her bag, and by means of peering at it closely, guessed correctly where she was, despite being completely unable to see street names. To her, it was simply a case of this way then that way, names of streets being irrelevant.
She patiently walked her way back to the design studio where she’d been interviewed some twenty minutes ago. She tried the door, then peered hopefully into the window. The door was locked and the lights off. Nobody there, she concluded. She hammered a couple of times, waited, and then, realising there really was nobody there, started considering her next move, with the aid of her map they’d sent her. Luckily they’d put the train station on it, just in case she’d elected to come by train. Unfortunately the map was ever so slightly wrong: it counted one less turning than reality. If she could have seen clearly, that wouldn’t have been a huge issue, since she could have read the street names. She set off in innocent unawareness of this problem, walking along, sometimes gently feeling with her fingertips the walls of shops and offices as she went past, or railings in front of them, vaguely seeing and correctly counting the side streets as she found them. But, despite her care, she headed left down the wrong street unknowingly.
For a long time she didn’t realise anything was wrong, because on her map it was obvious to her that the train station lay quite a distance down this route, so expecting to find it, kept walking. By the time she’d begun to suspect, then realise something might be wrong, it was far too late. She blundered into a low wall, stumbled and the precious map flew out of her hand, fluttering away she knew not where. Desperately she sought it for minute after desperate minute: but she was forced to abandon her search. There was no sign of it: it had wafted way over to her left, and fallen down a drain cover, unreachable and invisible to her. Disconsolately, she leaned against the wall of a building and wondered what to do next. She considered that she could have tried finding the train station again, but at this point it seemed too difficult, and she risked getting so lost she’d never find her way anywhere. She knew her way back to the shopping mall, so it occurred to her that perhaps she could find someone there, a security guard or someone of that ilk. She got up and headed back, again counting turnings religiously, and relying on landmarks she’d taken note of whilst getting as far as she had.
Sara found her way back to the doors of the shopping centre, but this time didn’t go in: instead, she’d decided to try to find her glasses in the back yard of the car park. This was, admittedly, an unlikely proposition for someone so short sighted as she was in her present bare-eyed state, and if she found them, she thought that it unlikely they would be anything else than too broken to use. But even that slim hope was better than nothing. She carried on around the bulk of the shopping centre complex, to her just a featureless brown blur, except where she came near enough to make out the brickwork, her fingers constantly touching and retouching the bricks as she walked past them, more for reassurance than anything else.
Quite soon she walked past the entrance for the car park where she’d blithely driven her car in about an hour and a half ago. Eventually she found her way around the back of the car park: there was more graffiti, as she soon discovered on peering closely at the discoloured wall. The view in front of her that she could see was all but mysterious, with some large blue objects before her. She walked up to them and discovered that they were bins parked against another wall. Behind that wall she thought she’d find the back of the car park she’d looked down on recently.
She walked up to the wall and resolved to climb over it, using the bins to assist her. The problem of getting back over was one she’d have to solve later: if she was lucky, then she might have something of her glasses to assist her. So Sara climbed up onto the top of the nearest bin, and thence onto the top of the wall. Looking down from such a height, the ground was even more of a blur than usual. She jumped down, scratching her legs on some bush she failed to see, and then got to her feet.
Sara briefly explored the space, about thirty yards wide by about twice as much in length, as best she could, and then started in the middle looking for some trace of her glasses. She was obliged to crouch and grope around with her fingers, her vision being next to useless. For ten minutes the search was fruitless, but then she chanced on a piece of concrete about a foot square. Her fingers found a piece of plastic that seemed curiously smooth and curved. She picked it up and brought it to within a few inches of her face: it was an ear piece, which had been sitting on her left ear not so long ago. Her searching became more frantic as she thought her vague hope would be realised. After another quarter of an hour she’d found nothing else. Lying not many feet away from her was another part of her glasses, a round plastic frame still with one of the lenses in, albeit badly cracked. But she didn’t see it. Her shoulders gradually slumped, and she was forced to give up. She subsequently climbed over the wall, using a bush to assist her, gaining scraped knees for her trouble.
A few minutes later Sara was in the shopping centre again, searching for someone to help her. The whole place was on the point of closing, she thought, and it was true. She chanced upon an information point containing a map of the centre, and with boxes full of leaflets featuring local attractions. The map of the place was certainly useful to her. But when she pulled out a leaflet and peered closely, she found something much more useful to her: another map of the surrounding area, including where the station was in relation to the shopping mall, and also including the missing turning she’d gone down.
In better spirits, she headed off for the station again, this time guided by the map, her fingers and what vision she could muster. And some time later, after avoiding going down the wrong road for a second time, she found the station. She went into the foyer section and saw all the timetables on the walls, but, alas, there was nobody around to help her in the ticket office, only a machine. The timetables were a particularly difficult thing for her to decipher, so she ignored them, but she bought a ticket easily enough.
Her next problem was to find out which platform the train would arrive at. She wasn’t sure how many platforms there were: the only way to find out would be to visit each of them until she found the right one. Signs high up, and way out of her visual reach were of no use to her. She went down onto the first platform she’d found and searched around for some visible sign of where she was. Eventually she found a timetable specifically for this platform. Trains for her home town did not stop there. So, she went back up the stairs to the footbridge and down to the next one. As she inspected the next platform, a train stopped briefly and then started off on another platform. She’d have to wait a bit longer now, being as that was her train, but alas she was completely unaware of it. Two more platforms she wandered around, and eventually found the correct one, with dusk slowly coming in the sky. Sara was by now worried: she saw so poorly now, but without glasses, well she had no hope of seeing anything unless what she was looking for was brightly lit. And there was another problem: she could not hope to identify the right train. What if she got on the wrong one? She simply had to hope for the best.
Some fifteen minutes later a train stopped and she got on. She found a seat and sat down, hoping that the stops would be obvious to her. She could count stops easily enough, but identifying them, well that was pretty much guesswork at that moment. The train rattled off, and as it stopped three times, dusk started to turn into night. By the time she arrived at the station in her home town, night had very much fallen around her. The station was mercifully well-lit and even more mercifully much more well-known to her. She used her memory to assist where her limited vision failed her, in order to guide her out of the station and into the streets beyond.
Her knowledge of her home town was far better than that of the town where she’d had the interview, but in this muddy grey-darkness that she saw everything in, she grew nervous and uncertain. Her home was now a bus ride away. If she could just find her way to a bus stop, she’d be fine. But then she checked the time, and realised with dismay that the buses stopped running nearly half in hour previously. And, again, her vision would have made the right one hard to catch. So, she had no option but to walk home.
It was her intention to stick to the main roads and brighter lights, not only to assist her limited vision, but also to ward off the unknown possibility of something happening to her, perhaps caused by persons of ill intent. After some minutes she headed down a street that she’d maybe should never have attempted, but she was trying to save time. The lights seemed to be a little less bright and helpful, and before she knew it she’d tripped on something and fallen flat on her face. Her head hit a wall, and with her fading consciousness, she felt something slightly warm and slippery against her legs.
Sara woke near to midnight; the lights that had helped her seemed to be very few and distant, and certainly well blurred by her uncorrected myopia. As she stirred, she felt the same sliminess on her leg, now cold. She felt it with her fingers, then brought it to her nose in order to smell it: it was some kind of spicy sauce, perhaps a curry or Mexican. Not that great, but a much more unpleasant odour filled her nose: she smelt something that seemed like vomit. And sure enough, she found out why: her blouse was spattered in it. Some tramp or drunk had evidently puked on her during her little sleep. She was revolted by that thought. She needed to get home, urgently. It was cold out here dressed in just a filthy blouse and skirt, and of course, she desperately needed her glasses. She groped around and found plastic bin bags, including the one she’d tripped over and ripped open.
Half an hour later she walked up the street to her home. It seemed very different to her now as she walked up to the door to her flat. Then she found she had no keys. Had they fallen out or been stolen? She had no idea. But the explanation for that wasn’t the most important problem at that juncture: getting in was. She went around the back and tried to climb up to her toilet window. As she got a few feet up, her feet slipped as she groped blindly for support; she fell down, falling very heavily on her left arm as she stuck both out to break her fall. Her fall was broken, but at the cost of a bruised shoulder. She winced and rubbed away tears with the back of her right hand.
She found and grasped a brick in her right hand, went around to her front door, and with a swish smashed the window in, dropped the brick and stuck her hand in to open the latch. Alas, her wrist caught on the jagged splinters of glass, and although she managed to open the door, blood was oozing from a long shallow cut onto her blouse and skirt. She went indoors, slammed the door, paused just a moment and then exhaustedly ran upstairs. Once upstairs she headed straight for her bedroom. In the top drawer of her bedside cabinet sat a spare pair of glasses, similar to those she had lost, but with clear plastic frames. She found them and immediately donned them. With a sigh of relief everything became clear. Then she went to the bathroom. The sight of her in the mirror was a shock to her: she’d not imagined she could get so dirty and dishevelled just getting home.