The shock had come at the afternoon rehearsal, where she had found herself sharing a sofa with Daniel Sullivan, when she had been led to believe by the agent – and had really been looking forward to it as a result – that Mr. Daghash was going to be there. Daniel had treated her as his own personal accessory and allowed himself the luxury of putting his arm round her and touching her in all manner of unobtrusive but apparently intimate ways.
“You know, you couldn’t’ve got a better pair of eyes if you’d ordered them off the internet,” Adam was saying. “Beautiful, beautiful, coffee with a splash of milk. And those little flecks! Like copper stars in a chocolate sky.”
“If you say so,” Miranda said.
“You’re not thrilled about being on telly then?” Adam went on, applying a brown mascara to her eye-lashes.
“No,” Miranda said. “I’m just so ordinary.”
“Hardly,” Adam said. “God I’d love to be on a reality show. Anything to get noticed. I’ve applied five times to go on Big Brother. I’d win it, no probs, but I’ve never even had an interview.”
“I don’t want to be famous,” Miranda said. “I just want to see.”
“Celebrity’s wasted on celebs,” he said. “Most of them don’t realise what they’ve got.”
“I’m just sitting here hoping I don’t muck up a live interview,” Miranda said.
“Nothing you could do could possibly muck it up,” Adam said encouragingly. “Everyone will love you because you look absolutely gorgeous, and because of what you’ve been through, and if you get stuck just get emotional. It gets me going every time.”
“Thanks,” Miranda said.
The producer had wanted all ‘Miranda’s party’ to sit together in the audience, but a compromise had eventually been arrived at which saw Faith and Niall on one side of a stepped aisle and Roderick, Karin and Amelia Leman – with Matthew in tow – on the other. Hugo had also come – “He deserves his crack at celebrity,” Niall had said to Faith, “and I don’t want to be hanging on your arm all night like some pathetic species of parasite” – and was stationed on the aisle by Niall’s feet in a position of considerable prominence, should a cameraman happen to pick him out. He looked pleased with the arrangement.
Niall had been battling demons since the night of The Nutcracker. His anger that Miranda had accepted Sullivan’s invitation was exacerbated by the fact that she wouldn’t talk to him about the evening, and compounded by anger at himself for being angry. He had also observed the growing closeness between Miranda and Faith, which had made him jealous on the one hand and anxious on the other. He believed now that Faith and Sullivan were working together: to what end he could not as yet figure out, but he couldn’t think of a way to broach the subject with Miranda without sounding petty, jealous or a complete fantasist.
Hugo had been his only real comfort, but Niall could sense that even he was getting tired of listless inactivity, which had been their predominant state in the weeks following Christmas. What they both needed was something to kick-start the transplant story, and here he was sitting across the aisle from Roderick Leman, waiting for the warm-up act to get them into a responsive mood. It was, surely, too good an opportunity to miss.
“Mr. Leman?” Niall said, his head turned in what he thought must be Roderick’s direction. He heard Leman pretend not to hear him, and his wife urging him from the other side to respond.
“Yes?” he said, impatience and disdain clear in his voice.
“Can we start again? I feel like we got off on the wrong foot.” Niall kept his voice deliberately loud. He knew that there were a lot of other people in earshot, and their presence – and their awareness of his own blindness – would force Roderick Leman into a civility that he had no desire to show.
“I’m sorry if you thought so,” Leman said. “I’m sure you can understand my surprise when we met. Susannah had never mentioned you. It came as a shock. Under the circumstances any parent would want to protect his daughter from gold-diggers.”
“Of course,” Niall said. “But I hope you know now that all I want to be is her friend.”
“We’ll see,” Roderick Leman said. Niall was aware of more whispering from Leman’s other side. “Yes,” Roderick added.
“Shake?” Niall suggested, reaching his hand across the aisle. There was a delay, and Niall smiled to himself as he imagined the squirming distaste that Roderick Leman was experiencing, but in the end a hand grasped his in a crushing grip that managed to serve as a private warning under the charade of quaint, schoolboy manners.
“Your daughter tells me,” Niall went on, thinking it best to avoid the emotive Susannah/Miranda issue, “that you’re an architect.”
“That’s right.”
“And you work for a big city firm.”
“Manston Redfearn,” Leman helpfully supplied.
“What do you design mostly?”
He could feel Roderick Leman seething inside as the presence of his wife, the audience and the studio staff forced him to supply polite answers to Niall’s questions.
“I work a lot with renewable energy centres. Several Gulf countries are looking to build green cities, green shopping malls, green tower blocks utilising solar energy.”
“Sounds fascinating,” Niall said. “And incredibly important.”
“Yes,” Roderick said minimally.
“I’d’ve loved to do something like that,” Niall lied. “But I don’t think blindness and architecture really go together,” he added.
“I certainly can’t think of a successful blind architect,” Leman commented.
“Although,” Niall continued his own train of thought, “I suppose most of it is done on computers now, and there are plenty of blind people who are geniuses on computers.”
“I’m sure,” Roderick said.
“Perhaps your daughter will be able to follow in your footsteps now she can see,” Niall said, pushing the envelope a little. “Keep up the family tradition.”
“Perhaps,” Roderick said drily. “Who knows?”
A steward called them to order and asked them to give a warm welcome to a young and up-coming comedian. Niall sat back contentedly. He had what he wanted. He could Google Manston Redfearn, locate their office, and pay Mr. Leman a visit to reinforce their new cordial relationship.
The warm-up ended. The show began. Jon Allen and Melissa McEvoy introduced each other in line with modern convention and then ran through ‘What’s on the programme tonight.’
“And on the sofa we’ve got Susannah Leman,” Melissa said, “the amazing girl from Surrey who couldn’t see six months ago, but now, courtesy of a brand new pair of beautiful transplanted brown eyes, can see as well as you and me.”
“Probably better than you actually,” Jon Allen put in, making reference to Melissa’s glasses, which were a trademark part of her look.
Miranda tried to breathe deeply and tried to see herself as ‘the amazing girl from Surrey.’ If only she felt that way. She had allowed them to call her Susannah all through the rehearsal, and, thinking about it, she seemed to be reverting, in her slightly scared, apologetic, self-effacing attitude to everything, to the girl she had been. Quiet, invisible Susannah. Hadn’t she declared to herself and everyone else that Susannah Leman was no more?
The first item ended and she was on.
“So, Susannah, welcome to This Is Now!” Jon said.
“Actually I’m not Susannah,” Miranda said. Jon and Melissa were both too startled to think of a quick response, but – luckily, from the director’s point of view – Miranda herself filled the void.
“I mean, yes, this is me, you haven’t got the wrong girl,” she said as Melissa and Jon looked fascinated for the cameras. “But I am just a totally different person now I can see. I realised it almost at once. I couldn’t be Susannah any more. She was too tied up in the blind girl I had been. My middle name’s Miranda. So, I’m calling myself Miranda now.”
“Right, well, Miranda,” (with great emp
hasis on the name), “welcome to This Is Now!” Jon tried again.
“Thank you.”
“You look amazing,” Melissa said.
“Thank you.”
“I don’t think any of us can imagine what it must feel like to be you right now,” Jon went on. “Can you begin to explain it to us?”
“It is difficult,” Miranda agreed. “When I was blind I had no idea what seeing would be like. I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to see when people first talked to me about it. I was really lucky because just before the operation I met a journalist called Niall Burnet. He’s blind but he could see up until the age of eight and he really persuaded me that sight was worth having. Nothing I can ever say or do can repay the debt I owe him. He arrived just when I really needed him. Like a guardian angel. Now I can see that he was right. The world we live in is a sighted world. I can’t bear the thought of not being able to see any more.”
“Why the fuck didn’t we get any of this in the rehearsal?” Lucy Sturmey hissed in the control room. “And why the fuck haven’t we got Burnet? I thought the journalist’s name was Long.”
“We have got Burnet,” one of the crew remarked. “He’s in the audience with his guide dog.”
Sturmey groaned.
“We’ve been sent up completely the wrong alley on this,” she said.
“The weird thing is,” Miranda was saying, giving Jon and Melissa little opportunity to get a word in edge-ways, “that I feel I’ve learnt more about being blind and the blind world since I’ve been able to see than I ever did when I was blind.”
“Right,” Melissa said, looking to the autocue for instructions.
“That’s where Miranda is so much more inquisitive than Susannah. Susannah was just this poor little blind girl wrapped in cotton wool and pity. She never tried to do anything. She never tried to be anything. Because really that was how she was encouraged to be. Passive. No trouble. Now I – Miranda – see what a pathetic specimen Susannah was. Nice enough. Harmless. But pathetic. When I see a guy like Niall who’s got a decent job, got his own flat, got his own life and yet he’s blind, you know I’m just – I think it’s amazing.”
“We need to wrap up and cue swimming pools VT,” somebody said in the control room.
“Fuck swimming pools of Britain,” Sturmey said. “I want to stay on this girl until she starts rambling. I want Melissa to go into the audience and get a word out of Burnet, and his dog if possible.”
“What about the pompous guy?”
“Cut him,” Sturmey said. “We don’t need him.”
“Jon mentioned him at the beginning.”
“We’ll get him on set to wave goodbye,” Sturmey said.
Rebecca Blackford’s mobile phone rang. She was sitting on her bed in her parents’ house reading Grazia magazine. The caller was Kate Newcombe, a childhood friend.
“Hi Kate.”
“Have you got This Is Now on?” without preamble.
“No.”
“Turn it on. Turn it on.”
Rebecca had a small television in her room. She turned it on.
“Why?” she asked.
“It’s the girl who had the eye transplant last year.”
“What girl?”
“It was all over the news when she came out of hospital.”
“I must’ve missed it.”
“First eye transplant in the world,” Kate explained.
“Right,” Rebecca said.
“Look at her eyes. Look at her eyes when they go into close up.”
Maddeningly, they didn’t go into close up for a full minute, until Melissa McEvoy said ‘Let’s have one last close up of Miranda’s beautiful eyes,’ whereupon the camera obediently zoomed in.
“What do you think?” Kate asked.
Rebecca had to fight back a sob.
“No,” she said.
“Got to be,” Kate said.
Rebecca stared at the screen where some idiot who wasn’t sporting her brother’s eyes was getting excited about an open air swimming pool in Wallingford.
Pockets of pandemonium broke out like small wildfires all over the studio as This Is Now came to its cheery up-beat end. Lucy Sturmey sighed as she emerged from the control room to deal with them. There were members of her research team who were in for an almighty bollocking with liberal exploitation of the f-word, but there were other choice words to be had first.
“Excuse me.” And there was the pompous ass from the blind charity. Shit. How could she have been so careless as to have walked straight into him?
“I know what you’re going to say, Mr. – ” she began, deciding to cut him off before he could start, “but this is a live show. Things happen. Unexpected things. We have to react. We have to make decisions. I have to make decisions. I made them.”
“Never mind that I’m a very busy man who gave up a day on the understanding that I was to be a significant part of the interview,” Daniel slavered, “you allowed a girl in a very vulnerable state and potentially with mental health issues to embarrass herself and her family in front of a huge audience and didn’t lift a finger to stop it.”
“She didn’t sound vulnerable to me or to the viewing public, I think you’ll find, Mr …” She wished she could remember his name. “She came across as self-possessed and eloquent. I grant that some of her family members and people responsible for her former life might have been embarrassed. I think that was her intention and I applaud it.”
“It’s well known that yours is a scurrilous organisation –” Daniel said, changing tack.
“To readers of the Daily Mail,” Lucy Sturmey put in.
“And you have just confirmed it.”
“Because I didn’t let you plug your charity on air and give you a New Year’s windfall in your collection boxes.”
“How dare you!”
“I know how the world works,” Sturmey said. At which point it suddenly became clear that the pockets of pandemonium had resolved themselves into one large conflagration around the sofa. Lucy Sturmey pushed past Daniel Sullivan to get to it.
“Excuse me,” she said.
When she got to the sofa she found everyone gathered around Miranda, who was sitting exactly as she had sat when the cameras were on her. She was also crying. If somebody had allowed one of her family to upset her – . Lucy sat beside her.
“What is it? What is it, my love?” she asked.
“I can’t see,” Miranda said, tears running through Adam’s carefully applied make-up. “I can’t see.”
Lucy Sturmey panicked. She looked up in the hope of seeing someone who would know what to do and she encountered the gaze of a silver-grey-haired woman who had been sitting next to the blind journalist.
“We’ve called an ambulance,” the woman said. “She needs to get to Moorfields as soon as possible.”
“Was it something to do with the interview?” Lucy asked.
“Maybe the stress, maybe the studio lights,” the woman said.
“We were told she was fine,” Sturmey protested, envisaging lawsuits.
“It may be completely unconnected,” the woman said. “It may be chronic rejection of the new eyes.”
“Sorry,” Lucy said. “You are - ?”
“Faith Hodgkiss. I’m a counsellor. I work out of Moorfields Eye Hospital. Miranda’s been staying with me since she came out of there.”
“Right,” Lucy said, relieved that the woman wasn’t some amateur do-gooder from the audience.
“You can leave her to us,” Faith said. “I’m sure you’ve got lots to do.”
“Thanks,” Lucy said. “But please keep me posted. She was fantastic in the interview.”
“She was,” Faith said.
In her darkness Miranda tried to use her old blind skills to pick out who was close to her, who was touching her. But already those skills seemed to have deserted her. Voices swirled around her head as if she were standing at the bottom of a waterfall of sound, unable to separate them into their different sources,
their signature tastes. She thought this was almost certainly the end of her seeing adventure, that this blackout was the last. It had come at the end of the programme, just as the presenters were making their closing remarks. First a fog, then darkness. She had hoped it would pass. It didn’t. Then people were turning to her, talking to her, congratulating her, asking questions, expecting her to get up. And she had to tell them, had to say aloud the words she had been dreading, “I can’t see.” Having once said them, she seemed incapable of saying anything else. She longed to hear Faith’s voice, Niall’s, maybe even her mother’s blackberry and apple, anything to bring some kind of comfort, but the truth was there was no comfort, not if she was going back down the tunnel into the dark. Then she felt something soft pressing against her leg, and a dog’s nose in her lap, and she grasped Hugo tightly, one piece of flotsam in the wreck of her blind future, as the tears ran down her face.
Niall thought it was amusing that they all prowled round Moorfields pretending they didn’t know each other, all waiting for some kind of news, some kind of hope. What did he want for Miranda? Of course he wanted her to get her sight back. Of course he did. Didn’t he? Or did he want to take her hand and lead her into the blind world with him? Talk about selfish. And this was the girl he had taken an instant dislike to. No it wasn’t. That was Susannah. This was Miranda. And that was what he really wanted to tell her: that no matter what happened now, no matter if she never saw again, she could still be Miranda. He would help her to be Miranda. He had felt ashamed by what she had said about him in the interview, knowing how unkind he had been to her since Christmas; ashamed but also astonished. Never mind that he was actually unemployed and not the person she said he was, she had made him glow with undeserved pride and that could never be forgotten. She had given him his thirty seconds of fame as the luscious Melissa McEvoy had climbed the steps to his position in the audience, thrust microphone and cleavage into his face, and asked him how it felt to be described as a guardian angel. “Hugo’s the only angel round here,” he had said. “And he does most of the guarding. So I don’t think I can take much of the credit.” That had gone down well and a staff researcher had just been hooking up with him when it became clear that all was not well on the set. From his own professional standpoint, Miranda’s blackout had been badly timed.
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