by Rosie Chard
“You ready?” said a female voice close to my bed.
For someone without sight this was a terrifying question. Were they going to put a spider into my hand? Throw me a cricket ball? “Ready for what?” I said.
“The great unveiling.”
Oh, yes. I was more than ready for the great unveiling.
It was a strange sensation: the gentle peeling, the slow emergence of light. My whole body felt lighter as each layer of bandage was removed. I felt self-conscious too, yet at the same time curious. Would my face be gloriously restored, or would it be puckered and yellow like a wound released from beneath a damp plaster?
“Looking good, Mr. Harcourt.”
“Oh . . . there’s two of you.”
“Yes. Welcome back.”
“Could you close the curtains?” I said in the direction of the speaker, who was blurred as a hurried photograph.
“They are closed.”
I put my hand up to my eyes.
“Don’t touch!” snapped the apparition. “Put these on.”
I felt something placed on my face; it was intimate, a warm hand glancing my cheek, the plastic arms of glasses sliding across my ears.
“Better?”
“Much.”
“Can you see me?”
I blinked. The brightness of the windows was already receding and I could just make out a tall man with a surprisingly large head. “Yes. I can see you.”
“Good. Do you remember me? I’m Dr. Treadmill.”
“Ah. The man with the needle and thread?”
He laughed. “Yes. That’s me. Everything went well; you’ll be glad to hear. It feels strange to have the bandage off, doesn’t it.”
“Yes. That was a long two days. Although . . . ” I resisted the urge to scratch my eye, “you see things differently when you can’t see, don’t you?”
He laughed again. “Everyone says that.”
Funny how much that cut me. Bill Harcourt, never original.
The doctor sat on the chair next to the bed. Doctors never sit on the chair next to the bed. “So, Mr. Harcourt, do you have any idea what happened?”
I blinked in the direction of his face. “I was walking home from work–”
“Alone?”
“Yes, alone. And something . . . some thing hit me – in the face.”
The doctor glanced at the clock on the wall. “What hit you?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see it coming.”
“So, there was nothing left behind . . . on the street?”
I shook my head. It hurt.
“Was there anyone else about?”
“No. The street was empty.”
“And you definitely didn’t see anything coming?”
“No, I didn’t see anything coming.”
He leant towards me and gazed into my eyes. “Alright, I suppose we’ll have to put it down to one of life’s unexplained incidents. The nurse will go over the post-op procedures. She’ll be here in a minute. Then you can go home. Have you got someone picking you up?”
“No.”
“Someone’ll call you a taxi.” He shook my hand. Or rather picked it up from my chest and held it. “See you in a month, Mr. Harcourt.”
“Yes. And thanks for patching me up.”
“You’re welcome, and remember the golden rule. Don’t touch your eyes.”
“I’ll remember.”
Blinking fast and desperate to scratch, I watched his back as he passed through the doorway.
The room was smaller than I’d imagined and there was only one other bed, not two or three, as I’d thought. The other bed was empty. I heaved my feet onto the floor and sat up. Then I shuffled over to it – funny how you lose control over your legs after just two days in bed. At first I just stood there like an idiot. Then I gingerly sat down. I’d heard the sound of the sheets being peeled back earlier that day, had almost felt the smack of the mattress, but only then did it sink in. The silent patient had gone. I blinked. Then I lay down on the pristine sheets and gazed up at the ceiling.
“Mr. Harcourt!” A female voice hurtled from the doorway. “Get back to your own bed.”
JACK was on his way home. It had been raining all day, that warm, steady spit so typical of August in London, and the inside of the Tube had the atmosphere of a neglected greenhouse: wilted raincoats, limp newspapers and commuters sapped of their last ounces of energy. The woman directly opposite him endlessly rearranged her fringe across her forehead and Jack felt disturbed by the way she was never happy with the result.
He gazed out of the window, and then, tired of the blackness of the tunnel, he glanced at the newspaper held by the man sitting next to him. It had been folded into a rectangle and the man gripped the bulging folds in a way that suggested he repeated this action every day of his life. The train’s seating allowed only tabloids to be opened wide enough to be read thoroughly so owners of the increasingly rare broadsheets had to be content with a truncated story, read in snatches as the paper was folded and refolded over cramped knees or, as with standing travellers, bent into even smaller squares and held aloft like trophies. Jack was particularly keen on truncated stories. He liked it when his news was edited by a stranger. It meant he read what the stranger did not: the car theft on a skew, the upside-down bombing, the story cut in two as the owner of the paper abruptly turned the page. But that’s what he was about: finding the little pieces and putting them together to make a story.
Sometimes his news would be reduced to a single line, ‘Sex-change vicar in shock horror mercy dash,’ or occasionally summarised by a lone word –‘Gotcha!’ lunging across the carriage towards him. During the rush hour, when every seat was taken and readers’ elbows were jammed tight against their ribs, the newspapers would disappear completely from view and all he’d get were the expressions on the readers’ faces, the dart of excited eyes across the football results, or the sad mouth of someone reading of a death in a faraway place.
That day the train was sparsely peopled and he had a chance to have a long look at what his neighbour was reading. This particular traveller was a very slow reader, his finger suspended beneath the lines as if holding the words in place. Jack watched the ink-smudged digit travel across the news pages, and then feel its way through the film reviews until it reached the classified ads. Here everything changed. The paper was opened out fully – a corner cantilevered over Jack’s knees – and the man pulled a pen from his pocket and settled himself back into his seat with an air of great purpose. Then the work really started. The pen bled a dot beside each job advert as it was checked off and then the man began to underline phrases as they caught his attention – no training required, minimum wage, start immediately.
He seemed to be at rock bottom, the man, circling the occupations of the desperate: the early school leavers, the unqualified, the ones with skills known only to themselves. Jack had been there. Even now he wasn’t so far removed from the cheap orange chairs of the Job Centre that he’d forgotten what it was like to have to apply for anything and everything. He glanced at the man’s shoes; they were sturdy, but of another era – nylon laces, square toes. Jack then noticed the pen circling a job in the top left corner. He couldn’t see what it was, but he felt a prick of curiosity as it was heavily ringed in ink. As if suddenly exhausted the man let out a sigh, folded up the newspaper and placed it casually down on the seat opposite. Jack fretted. It seemed a long way away to stow ones’ possessions, especially on the Tube where distance suggested abandonment. Jack glanced sideways at the man who had now pulled out a Tube map and was studying it, his horizontal finger holding up the whole of the Northern Line. Jack stared at the newspaper on the seat and wondered whether he could pick it up. Discarded newspapers were public property, after all. But before he could do anything the train pulled into a station and people got on, hopping inside the carriage as if scared of the doors. His view was now just waists in every direction: belted waists, bulging waists, waists of naked skin. He stood up to le
t a woman holding a baby take his seat and noticed the newspaper had been chucked onto the window ledge just as the train pulled into the next station. His stop, he realised, also scared of the doors. With a glance back at the square-toed man, Jack bent forward, picked up the newspaper and stepped off the train.
CHAPTER
3
I’d seen it so many times. Someone is out of the office for a few days and when they get back their desk is covered with someone else’s junk. I’d done it myself. When James, the bloke who sits opposite me, went to Majorca last year all my paperwork crept sideways and by the time he came back his desk had become my overflow filing cabinet and I’d lent out his chair. Nature abhors a vacuum was my favourite expression in such circumstances, but it was still a shock to see the amount of rubbish that had piled up on my desk in just two weeks. There were at least twenty dog-eared ‘circulating’ envelopes awaiting a signature – nobody ever looked inside those things – and a small, pink envelope, no doubt a staff leaving-card filled with smiley faces and comments, will miss you, or won’t miss your rubbish tea. And there were coffee rings everywhere, on everything, as if some strange, workplace creature had run amok. And there on the corner of my desk waited the pile. Jean liked to place James’ pile on the right side of his computer and place my pile on the left, so it always glanced my hand as I clicked on my mouse, a tactile reminder of what I did from nine to five – reading questionnaires from the pile, researching the social issues of the day, hunting down patterns and quirks in human opinions, drawing desires on graphs that our clients would then reconfigure, swapping X axes with Ys, and massaging the data, up and down, in and out, until it resembled the truth.
“So, what have I missed?” I said, reacquainting myself with the arms of my chair.
James looked glum. He was often more of a thinker than a talker and I knew I’d have to wait for the answer. Maybe even enough time to dash up the corridor and put on the kettle.
“Wilson’s got a bee in his bonnet,” he said at last.
I disliked clichés, especially those involving animals, but this one conjured up such a vivid picture in my head I let it go. Tom Wilson was the company’s boss, the ‘head honcho,’ as he liked to refer to himself in team-building sessions and occasionally mentioned in the emails sent out to all staff by his fragrant secretary Jean. He was a classic misery-guts, his social skills so minimal he was hard pressed to meet your eye if you passed him in the corridor, let alone smile. He frequently came up with barmy ideas guaranteed to lower office morale, but he was conservative when it came to accepting suggestions offered up by his workforce. He particularly enjoyed taking things apart, gadgets he found at the back of his drawer, but unfortunately could never put them together again.
“What’s the bee about?” I said, signing a circulating envelope and tossing it onto James’ desk.
“He wants fresh thoughts.”
“So long as it’s not fresh blood he’s after.”
James grinned then stared at my face. “How are your eyes by the way? I thought you’d be wearing dark glasses.”
“I’m past that stage. They’re almost back to normal. The eye is one of the quickest parts of the body to heal. Itched like hell at the beginning, though.”
“Any more news on what happened?”
“No. I . . . no.”
“Right. So, we’ve got to come up with some new proposals. By Wednesday.”
“About what exactly?”
“That’s for you to decide.”
“You mean he’s letting us think?”
James’ Adam’s apple was suddenly prominent. “. . . yeah. He is . . . yeah.”
The office hummed on. James and I were both quiet workers but our keyboards tapped pleasantly and voices drifted down the corridor in sporadic waves so we avoided the distraction of silence. I checked my long list of emails, had a bite of a sandwich from my desk drawer (someone had nicked my last bar of chocolate) and then wandered off to see what was going on by the vending machine. I was ready. Ready for condolences, ready for interest in the gory details of the last two weeks of my life.
“Got change of a quid?” It was Sammy Gringold: data analyst: big hands, face of a teddy bear.
“You what?”
“Have you got change of a quid?”
I fished some coins out of my pocket and looked at my colleague – poor Sammy, so hard at thrift. “Here you go.” I said.
“Thanks.” He flipped two coins into the vending machine with a practiced finger and pressed a button; something thumped down by our knees.
“So, how are you doing?” I said.
“Not bad. You?” He reached down and pulled out a Toblerone.
“Almost healed.” I held my head at an angle, ready for inspection.
He glanced up from unpeeling the chocolate in his hand. “What do you mean?”
“My eyes. Almost healed.”
He stared at my face. “I don’t get it, what do you mean, ‘almost healed?’”
“I had an accident.”
“Did you?” He popped a piece of chocolate into his mouth. “When?”
“Three weeks ago.”
He sniffed. “Didn’t hear about that. Did we send you a card?”
“Yes.”
“Healing up, then?”
“Yeah, healing up.”
“Want a bit of chocolate?”
“No, thanks.”
“That’s good.” He smiled with genuine happiness. “See you later.”
“See you.”
I watched his back as he walked down the corridor, his collapsing trouser hems dragging along the floor. Sammy wasn’t high on my list of people. I had a list. Deep in my head I categorised my colleagues into those whose opinion I cared about and those whose opinion I didn’t. This made life easier – it allowed reactions to be classified, smile sizes put in order, intonation graded and time spent at home nursing only the worthiest of slights.
The fortnight spent alone in my flat had seemed longer than fourteen days. I’d felt more fragile than I really was on that first day home from hospital and had let myself slip into a vapid patient condition, sipping grey soup off a tarnished spoon and getting into my pyjamas at nine thirty at night. But even then I couldn’t rest, worrying that the doorbell would ring and I’d have to explain, or somehow make the case, that wearing pyjamas soothed injured eyes. I forgot that the sight of a pale person decked out in safety glasses might be more disturbing than a grown man dressed for bed before it was dark. And in this troubled state of hospital discharge I developed a skewed sense of perspective; my cooker seemed larger than I remembered and the risers on the stairs were definitely higher than before. I could see perfectly well by then but I quickly developed a peculiar sensitivity to anything that swung even briefly close to my eyes: my T-shirt pulled over my head, the greengrocer’s finger as he pointed out his latest delivery of fresh tomatoes. My mother phoned daily, but, as she became increasingly distracted by noises in her house – the squeak of the window cleaner’s cloth, the whistle of the kettle – her calls became less frequent until they stopped altogether. I didn’t mind. And so the two weeks passed without incident but worried by thoughts of my boss’s forefinger tapping impatiently on his desk I had returned to work a week earlier than my sick note specified.
I glanced at the hem of my trousers and began walking back to my office. As I turned a corner I saw Tom Wilson coming towards me. Everything as usual – jagged smile and shifty sideward glance as if we were strangers in the street, not colleagues tied together by all the stuff of mutual employment: contracts, sick leave, Christmas lunch.
“Have you been back long, William?” he said, pausing at an unnaturally long distance from which to start a conversation.
I paused too. “Clocked back in today.”
“You alright?”
“Just fine.”
“James told you about the ‘Fresh Thoughts’ initiative, did he?”
“Yes, the thoughts are fermenting as w
e speak.”
His lips twitched. “Good. I want something that’s going to shake this company up. Put it on the map. Then shake it up again.”
“Right.”
I watched the back of his head as he made his way down the corridor wary of the next corner. I sighed – a long, dramatic expellation of breath that emptied both my nose and lungs. I felt too tired for upheaval. Perhaps I’d suggest that we keep the status quo. That was radical. That would put the company on the map.
VIOLET was desperate for a coffee. She’d walked up the High Street too quickly and the heel of her stiletto had got stuck in a gap in the pavement, an inelegant pause in her day that left her with puddle water on her ankle and a groove in her heel that would be impossible to repair. The insides of the cafe windows were gently dripping when she arrived and she hesitated at the door, imagining the effect on her hair, on her laptop. She pushed open the heavy door and voices poured out through the gap to meet her.
“Get yerself in here, darlin’!” A woman with an apron tied too tightly round her waist pointed to a table in the corner. “Last one’s over there. Better be quick.”
A whiff of coffee entered her nose and that was it, Violet was inside, every bit of her ready for her morning fix. She squeezed between the tables – taking care to lift her handbag above the surrounding heads, and forcing a man to tuck in his stomach and shuffle his chair sideways – and sat down. An abandoned plate, reeking of tomato ketchup and the remnants of a fried egg, remained in front of her so she pushed it to the edge of the table, glanced at the waitress to indicate her readiness to order and then pulled out her laptop.