by R. M. Green
Dad just squeezed my hand and kissed the top of my head and I heard him stand up and he must have silently guided the boys out of the room.
“Yes, Darling, I’m fine. You gave us all a scare but you are going to be ok, my angel.”
“Why can’t I see, Mum? I’m scared!”
“It’s OK, Nancy, sweetheart, you got a little bit of glass in one of your eyes.” I could hear the tremor in her voice as she struggled to fight back the tears.
“Don’t cry, Mum. I am sure I will be better soon.”
Mum just dissolved into sobs at that point, which made me cry too but with the bandages over my eyes, it was impossible and I just sniffled. Dad must have heard her and come in because I felt the weight of the mattress shift as he sat down beside her. And they stayed there with me, not speaking just stroking my hand, or my hair for what seemed like an eternity. I drifted off to sleep and didn’t dream.
I mentioned somewhere that I am a bit of a wiseacre. Well, a week or so later they finally removed the bandages and were fussing around me telling me to keep my eyes closed until they were ready. I could hear my parents and my brothers hovering by my side and they all seemed in much better spirits than the first time that I had been aware that they were all in the room. My little room now had another occupant too. A little girl about my age, who I later learned was called Agatha and who had fallen down some stairs. But she didn’t have any visitors and was asleep all the time. I often wonder what happened to her.
I was half ready. The doctor had been talking to me every day and preparing me for what I was about to see. He explained that the tiny shard of glass had gone quite deeply into my right eye and that although they tried, there was nothing they could do and that I would never see out of it again. “But look on the bright side, Nancy,” he said, “Your left eye is perfect and now you will be able to wear a patch and look like a real pirate!” I am sure that is exactly what every eight-year-old girl dreamed of in 1966!
So when they finally removed my bandages and fiddled around for a few more moments and held the mirror up to my face, my parents, my brothers and the hospital staff all leaned forward with encouraging smiles. I blinked a few times and winced as the bright light stung my one good eye but after a few seconds, I looked up into the little round mirror that the doctor was holding in front of my face. Looking back at me was a pale, brown-haired girl with a few bruises on her face and a plaster over her left brow and one rather pretty, so I have often been told, hazel eye. Over the right eye was a black patch straight out of Treasure Island (the Disney film that was a favourite of my both my brothers). No one spoke while they nervously awaited my reaction.
After a good twenty seconds gazing into the little mirror I looked around the room at each of them in turn and with a gap-toothed smile, I gave my verdict.
In my best Robert Newton voice, I said, “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!”
To this day, when my brothers call me, they start the conversation with, “Arghhh, Jim Lad!”
My collection of patches in different materials and some with diamante studs is quite impressive these days.
So later, back in Miss Abernathy’s class again, after the best part of a school year away and being the oldest in my class by at least six months, the other girls called me Cyclops. And have you noticed, little girls can be so cruel? The boys thought I was way cool (which is an expression that was first coined in Canada, I am told. Like so many other great “American” words, it really came from above the 49th parallel; other great words such as ‘William’ and ‘Shatner’, ‘Keanu’ and ‘Reeves’, and ‘Mike’ and ‘Myers’. OK, we won’t mention the words ‘Pamela’ and ‘Anderson’; nobody’s perfect!). But I didn’t care what anyone said though because I had a sharp wit and two older brothers!
Since then, of course, I have become fascinated with famous one-eyed people and it always gave me an extensive choice for fancy-dress parties growing up. At various times, I have been Colombo (borrowing Jeff’s filthy old Mac with an unlit stogie clamped in my teeth), Rex Harrison dressed in tweeds like he was in My Fair Lady and Leo McKern as Rumpole of the Bailey dressed in a white wig and a black robe. Not too many famous one-eyed women, you will notice, well none that are good characters for a fancy-dress do! My favourite one was for my fortieth birthday. Jeff wanted to organise a fancy dress at our house. I decided not to black up as Sammy Davis Jr (poor taste) or Moshe Dayan (too political) so I opted for Cassandra, the prophetess from Greek mythology. It gave me a fabulous excuse to wear layers of multi-coloured scarves and outrageous makeup. Now I know, technically, Cassandra wasn’t blind in either eye but a lot of people believe she was. Cassandra’s curse was that all her prophesies came true but no one believed her. For Cassandra you can substitute ‘Mum’ and for no one I mean ‘my kids’!
By way of a couple of illustrations:
“Pauly! Don’t pull Caroline’s pigtails or she will wallop you!”
Two seconds later: “Owwww! Mum! Caro hit me!”
“Caroline! You better take your Parka if you are going out to play, it’s freezing out. You’ll catch cold!”
“I’ll be alright, Mum!”
Later that evening: “Achoo! Mum, can I sday ad home tomorrow, I feel icky!”
Anyway, as I said, most people wrongly think that Cassandra’s trade-off for seeing the future was the fact she was blind. Most people. But some folk are better educated in the classics than others and I forgot that Habib was from the Levant! So, everyone starts arriving and we are having a great time when Habib comes up to me and looking me up and down asks, “Nance, who are you supposed to be?”
“Why, Cassandra of course!”
“Well, I thought Cassandra wasn’t blind.”
“See,” I said, “I knew you were going to say that!”
Smart mouth, see what I mean?
Anyway, so there I am, at precisely two o’clock on a really icy February afternoon, two years ago next week, sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. (I don’t know why, but I always feel guilty watching TV in the living room on the sofa during the day. At least this way, if someone comes to the door, I can instantly look like I am busy rather than have to struggle out of the couch! My, what a strange old bird I have become!) I have the remote in my hand and I click onto channel 147 for today’s fix of the Young and the Restless just as the piano music, ‘Nadia’s Theme’ starts and the opening credits, the new ones, begin the damn TV fizzes and dies! I curse but I don’t panic, there are two other sets in the house, one in the lounge and one in the basement. Jeff and I won’t have one in the bedroom. We read and hey, we may be pushing 60 but we can still occasionally find something more fun to do than fall asleep in front of the TV of a night. Oh my! I hope Caroline doesn’t read this! She will be so embarrassed. I can just picture her now; fingers stuck in her ears, eyes tight shut singing, “La-la-la,” at the top of her voice! She still does it at 30 years old, just like when she was a little girl.
So, I ran into the lounge with the kitchen remote still in my hand and tried to turn on the TV. Silly cow! I berated myself using my mum’s favourite expression for her late sister, Glenda, back in Sussex. I threw down the kitchen remote and rummaged around for the lounge remote. After a mad scramble diving deep into the cushions, I surfaced, red-faced and still cursing with the remote, and pointed and zapped. Nothing happened. “This cannot be happening,” I shouted out loud at the black screen. The bloody batteries had gone. How many times have I told Jeff they were about to die?
“Sure, Hon, I’ll take care of it.” At this point, I was ready to take care of him had he been around!
OK, so the remote doesn’t work, surely there must be some buttons or knobs on the set. Well, so you would think. But frisking the entire surface back, front, top and bottom of the flat screen, all I could find was one lousy button. So I hit it and the little red light at the base of the set disappear
ed. So, I hit it again, and the little red light came back on… but nothing else. Now furious and frantic and yet, slightly ashamed of myself for getting so worked up over a soap opera, I ran downstairs to the basement only to find the television covered in a dustsheet because Jeff was painting the walls. Ripping the dustsheet off the set, I got lucky because the remote was there on top of the TV. I swept it up and steadying my hand, deliberately took aim and ‘click’, ‘click’. OK, third time’s a charm ‘click’. I think I started to cry. I went to the back of the TV and the lead did not have a plug on it. Jeff must have either been about to replace a fuse or had used the plug for some other device like his power drill or some such. He was always doing that! The amount of times he takes a good light bulb out of my bedside lamp to put in the basement or the garage beggars belief! Three televisions and not a damn one was I able to watch!
I was miffed beyond words and swore up and down I would deal with Jeffrey when he got in from work. That part was all bluster. We seldom argued and certainly not about trivia. Although at that precise moment it was not at all trivial to me, and Jeff was still in the stocks in my mind’s eye getting pelted with rotten tomatoes.
I picked up the phone and dialled Sonya. No answer! Then I remembered that she and Habib had taken a couple of days off to go and see Barry Manilow on Broadway.
The outrage over, I was left with a pubescent pout and a huffy shrug and wandered listlessly back to the kitchen and sat down deliberately hard on the stool, somehow punishing it for my woes with my slightly-wider-than-I-would-have-liked bum.
I picked up the TV Guide from the breakfast bar and read the one-line synopsis for The Young and the Restless. All it said was, ‘Carmine is surprised to see Abby back in town’. No help at all.
I poured myself a cup of coffee from the filter machine and added a Sweet’n Low, then went to the cupboard and got a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, which defeated the object of the sugar substitute in my coffee but sometimes a girl just has to cope with an emergency as best she can!
I sipped my coffee and nibbled at my sickly treat, staring at the black oblong screen at the end of the breakfast bar, imagining the dialogue and how today’s episode would unfold. Then I got to wondering if the actors knew that they were making chewing gum for the brain, and whether the chiselled features and perfect teeth of the men, and the amazing hair and perfect teeth of the women masked anyone of depth or learning, anyone who wasn’t as plastic in real life as they seemed on the screen. And that is when, at a few months short of my fifty-fifth birthday, I got it. Inspiration. I hadn’t been seeking it, expecting it, nor had any interest in it. But there it was just the same. What if I wrote a book or a story about a soap opera? Not a soap opera itself but a story set behind the scenes about the actors and writers and crew and their real lives (as I imagined them). I knew a lot about the process because seven years ago when Jeff and Habib and Larry went off to catch shad in the Annapolis River in Nova Scotia, Sonya and I flew out to Los Angeles for a week (poor Rachel couldn’t make it because she couldn’t get the time off work). We spent it doing the Universal Studios tour, the tour of celebrity homes and all the cheesy Hollywood stuff that we loved and that our menfolk just could not understand. It was our secret world, and one into which they frankly didn’t want to step! The highlight had been, what is often called, a ‘fan event’. It was at the Sheraton at Universal City, and there were cast and crew from several of the soaps that we watched, and they signed autographs, posed for pictures and there were even some question and answer sessions. There were hundreds of middle-aged women there, and surprisingly some younger ones too, and more than a handful of really good-looking guys who I assumed were actors on the few soaps I couldn’t fit into my afternoon window. Ian and William laughed when I was excitedly telling them about our trip a couple of weeks later.
“Oh you poor sweet, misguided girl,” sighed Ian, cupping my face and shaking his head mournfully.
“What all of them?” I asked.
“Every last queen!” said William.
“Well,” I said, “thanks for setting the record straight as it were!”
So, yes I had been watching soaps for thirty-five years, and I had had a taste of Hollywood and had seen some of these creatures up close. I read the gossip magazines not for facts but because it’s standard fodder for soap addicts, and although we don’t believe 90% of what we read, it is quite entertaining and there is that delicious possibility that ten per cent of it is true!
A couple of days later, the lounge TV now having a fully functioning remote with long-life batteries and the kitchen TV to be replaced shortly, I watched my daily quota through completely different eyes. I was no longer a soap fan but a keen observer of clues to the real lives of the characters. I started to write a story. I called it Behind the Scenes; a hackneyed cliché, yes, true, but so are the soaps and that is why we love them. The villains are just as identifiable in the Bold and the Beautiful as the baddie in The Lone Ranger was because of his black hat.
So, I wrote my story about the real-life tragedy and drama of a couple of my favourite stars. Obviously I changed the names of the shows and the characters but anyone like me, anyone who has been watching closely for so many years, would know who they were. It took me three months to write then another three months to write it all over again. I wrote for just an hour or so a day, Monday to Thursday, and a couple of hours on a Sunday, and when it was finished I showed it to Rachel and Sonya and they loved it; mostly because they love me, but the encouragement was nice. They insisted I try to get it published. The thing was, I had no idea what to do with it. Who was I going to send it to? Even Jeff, bless him, pretended to read it and made nice noises and asked around at the PR department at Rogers because he had heard that Katey, one of the senior secretaries there, had a sister down in Austin who was an accountant at Circe Books. I met Katey for coffee one morning and gave her the manuscript. I didn’t want to email it because it seemed less real to me. The deal was she would read it and, if she liked it, she would send a copy to her sister and we would all keep our fingers crossed. Katey didn’t just like the story, she loved it! I was so elated; I think I twirled in the middle of the Elgin Street!
Well, as it turned out lots of women in publishing, and not just secretaries, watch soaps and like them. It is the secret vice of many of these successful women who have to spend all day in business suits fighting wolves; they can’t wait to get home, put on their sweatpants and watch their shows on TiVo with a large glass of Chardonnay and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s. Yes, the sisterhood of soap is a broad church!
After another couple of months working with a very sweet and very patient editor, Claire, who gave up so much of her time to help me, my story appeared in a women’s new writing magazine called, rather seductively, Vixen in the November in Eastern Texas, and I got paid $800 for it. I was truly delighted and then just before Christmas I got a call from a woman called Rebecca who is head of commissioning at Pandora Studios in Chicago. They make TV shows and documentaries mostly aimed at a female market and are very successful. Rebecca wanted to fly me down to the Windy City to discuss a possible project after the holidays. January came around and I flew down with Sonya and Rachel this time, not as glamorous as Sex in the City but we were treated like VIPs, and I spent two days locked in a very plush boardroom with Rebecca discussing the possible project.
So here we are; it’s a year on from that meeting in Chicago and they are making a three part mini-series from my story! The funny thing is that, they don’t want me to write any of the script as they have teams of writers who do that for a living. They are paying me quite a silly amount of money to be a script consultant, whatever that is. I said that as long as Sonya, Rachel and I get to be there when they are making the programmes, they could call me whatever they liked! And frankly, between you and me, I think that I was good for just the one story and I may leave it there, but I know one thing: I had a blast!
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Hello again. I know it has been almost two years since we last spoke but I thought I would bring you up to date. It has been a topsy-turvy couple of years, I must say. We have had some successes, some failures, sadly, three deaths and, happily, two births, so I suppose the balance sheet evens out in a way.