I was fully clothed, intensely dry-mouthed, and I was aching all over. I was also boiling … The sun was streaming in through the windows, and I was halfhidden beneath a spare duvet. I started to wonder why on Earth I was on the sofa. Perhaps I’d had a fight with myself in the night and banished myself to the living room. That seemed unfair to me. In relationships I’d always been the one who’d ended up sleeping on the sofa. You’d think living on my own would mean I got the bed. But a vague memory reached me, clouded and slow. I began to remember that in my drunken state I’d decided it wouldn’t be all that wise to try and start negotiating the stairs up to the bedroom. But worrying that I would get cold in the night, I knew I’d need to fetch a duvet. So I ran upstairs to get one and bring it down. At no point had the all-too-logical idea of just staying up there hit me. I’d even gone for the spare duvet—the one hidden away at the back of a cupboard, the one I’d have to stand on a chair to get. Worse, I could remember feeling rather proud of myself for being so sensible as I stumbled back down the stairs, duvet in arms, ready to pass out.
The world was still blurry, and so I reached out to grab my glasses. I grabbed a pen instead. I reached again. A remote control. I gradually worked out that in order to find my glasses, I would have to find my glasses. Say what you like about me, but I’m bloody good at problem-solving.
But it was proving a difficult problem to solve. I knew my specs had to be somewhere, and they had to be somewhere in here. I tried the coffee table, making huge sweeping gestures with my arms, but couldn’t find them. I tried the sofa, the side table, and then the floor, scuttling over to any object I could make out and sticking my face a mere inch away from it in order to see what it was. Objects that to someone with half-decent vision could never in a million years be mistaken for a pair of glasses were scrutinised, prodded, and picked up. At one point I imagined a shoe could have been my glasses. It wasn’t. It was a shoe. Moments later I was up close to a tiny, carved wooden elephant, studying it just in case it had a couple of flip-out arms I could use to rest on my face. Had a window cleaner decided that today was the day he’d buff my windows up, I hate to think what he’d have told his mates after watching a grown man crawling around his flat on all fours, his face an inch from the floor, picking up random objects and holding them far too close to his eyes. Mind you, I suppose that could actually have happened. I wouldn’t have bloody seen him.
I was starting to panic now. My glasses were the one thing I needed to function in this world; the one thing I couldn’t do without. They were the only thing that stopped me from having to stand a little too closely to strangers, the one thing that helped me retain my Britishness. How drunk had I been last night? Had I said yes to someone who wanted my glasses? Could I have eaten them? Or had I lost them earlier on in the evening but not noticed? Perhaps I’d put my blurry vision down to drunkenness, when in fact it was because I’d lost my specs? Had someone stolen them in the night? Perhaps a cat burglar was ordered to steal them, like Nicholas Cage was ordered to steal posh cars in Gone in Sixty Seconds? It seemed unlikely. It would have made the papers by now. Not that most of the victims would’ve been able to read it.
With growing desperation and a thudding head, I checked the bathroom and the stairs and the living room again. I tried retracing my steps from the night before, but what with them being drunken steps, they would have made me quite dizzy. And in my current state I could do without being dizzy. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever spun a blind man.
Again I checked the bathroom and the bedroom and the living room. It was a painstaking process, taking up much of the morning. Finally, with great sorrow and confusion, I was forced to admit it: I had lost my glasses. I had lost my glasses!
This, as the bespectacled among you will know, is a horrifying prospect for anyone low on sight. The world’s a big place. It’s full of … you know … things. Big, blurry things. It’s easy for a spectacles-wearer devoid of spectacles to get lost in a world like that. To mistake buses for dragons. Short people for goblins. Men with beards for wizards. This was going to be terrifying! How would I know what I was wearing anymore? How would I know what I was cooking? How could I pretend to be considering an important problem without some glasses to pop into the corner of my mouth while staring into the distance? I had to find them!
The phone rang. I was thrown into panic again. The phone! My God, the phone! How would I ever find the phone!
And then I remembered the phone was where it always was, so I ambled over and picked it up.
“Hello?”
“Dan, it’s Ian.”
“Oh, Ian, thank God!”
“What’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter? Can’t you tell? I’ve lost my glasses!”
“Oh,” said Ian. “Never mind.”
“Never mind?” I said, outraged. This was typical of the full-sighted. And of the way people with disabilities like mine are treated by society at large. “What do you mean, never mind? I’m going to Edinburgh in a couple of days! I can’t set off without my glasses! I’ll never get out of London!”
“Get some new ones.”
“’Get some new ones’?” My God, this man had a cheek. How did he … well, yes, I suppose I could get some new ones, actually.
“Hey! What a great opportunity to change your look!” said Ian. “Go to an optician and say yes to the first pair of glasses they make you try on!”
“I don’t want a new look!” I said. “I just want my glasses back! They’re like a part of me, Ian!”
“Where did you last have them?”
“On my face.”
“Have you checked there?”
“Have I checked my face?”
“All of it, I mean.”
“Oh, not all of it, no. Just the lips. Hang on, I’ll check the rest of my face.”
“All right, all right … When did you last have them?”
“Well, last night, I suppose. If I took them out with me, that is. I’m very confused. Did I have them on the last time you saw me?”
“I can’t remember.”
“What do you mean, you can’t remember? Surely you’d remember if I wasn’t wearing my glasses?”
“So how come you don’t remember?”
“That’s different. I can’t see me.”
“Well, do you remember seeing met?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you were wearing your glasses, then.”
I considered Ian’s point. It was fairly airtight.
“So where are they then?” I said. “Are you wearing them?”
“No.”
“Check.”
“Dan, I’m fairly sure I’m not wearing your glasses. Have you checked the whole flat?”
What did he think I’d been doing?
“Yes! Ian, this is bad. I don’t want to start seeing dragons and goblins and wizards. I need my glasses. I can’t see without them. I can’t even be sure this is a phone I’m using. I could have picked anything up and started speaking into it.”
“Don’t you have a spare pair?”
“No. Oh, hang on, though …”
Now, a spare pair I didn’t have. But I did have a pair. A pair I used to wear as a kid. Surely my eyes couldn’t have changed that much in the last twenty years? They’d still work, wouldn’t they? My mum had dropped them off at the flat a few years ago along with a box full of other stuff I’d left at the house …
“Ian, you’re a genius,” I said.
I was sitting on a chair in front of the mirror, considering the problem.
I appeared to be a grown man, wearing the spectacles of a small boy.
If there is indeed an afterlife, and our ancestors do, as is claimed, pop back every now and then to check up on us, then I hope they choose their moments carefully. The last thing I needed was word of this getting back to the afterlife. “How was Danny?” one of them would say.
“Oh, fine,” the other would say. “Although it appears he is now a simpleton.” And what wo
uld Maitreya make of it all, if he’d popped in to have a look-see? Surely this couldn’t be part of his grand plan?
The phone rang. It was Ian again.
“So, I just talked to Wag,” he said. “What the hell did you do to him last night?”
“Nothing! I just showed him the way of Yes.”
“He says you took him into a strip club, where you were both robbed.”
“We were invited in. And it wasn’t a strip club. It was a gentleman’s parlour.’ It was very classy.”
“Where was it?”
“In an alleyway.”
Ian made some kind of overly dramatic “tsk” sound.
“And you were robbed?”
“We were not robbed. We simply walked in, and after seeking firm assurance that there was nothing illegal or immoral going on, sat down in a small room where a woman in a negligee poured us two warm beers, before a fat Moroccan in a suit walked in and told us the beers were fifty quid each, and we would have to leave, because the show was over.”
“It was a clip joint! They’re made for tourists! Not you!”
“I don’t understand it. Why invite us in at all, if all you’re going to do is take our money and kick us out again?”
“Wag thinks you’re on the verge of a breakdown.”
“I’m not!”
“I know you’re not, but he doesn’t. He says you were ordering curries and then going into the restaurant next door and ordering even more.”
“Exaggeration! I had poppadoms.”
“He also says he thinks you might have a … thing for him.”
“A thing?”
“He says the obsession with Hanne is a front. He says he first started to suspect something was up when you sent him the flowers. But he says you always agree with everything he says now, and you’re always so eager to hang out with him.”
“That’s hardly enough evidence to question my sexuality.”
“He also says you’ve got a newfound interest in musicals and have talked more than once about how men can have babies.”
“Oh.”
“Essentially,” he said, “Wag thinks you may want to have a baby with him.”
“Ah.”
“I don’t think Wag is the Challenger, after all.”
“No. I don’t think he is, either.”
So Wag was off the list. Which was fair enough. He had proved himself to be no more than a confused friend in my ongoing battle with a shadowy and secretive enemy. No matter.
Two hours later I had braved my hangover and was in the optician’s office, trying to get new glasses and hoping to God the woman behind the counter wouldn’t try and suggest any fancy new children’s frames.
“Okay,” she said. “A few questions. First, your name please …”
“Wallace,” I said.
She very slowly typed “Wallace” into her computer.
“Okay … Wallace … and your surname?”
“Oh. Sorry, that was my surname. Still is, in fact. My first name’s Danny.”
She sighed and made quite a show of having to press the delete key seven times.
“Okay. We’ll start again. Name?”
“Danny.”
She typed “Danny.”
“And your surname?”
“Er … Wallace.”
I felt like I was being tested and was relieved when she nodded her head silently as she tapped my answers in. Phew. My name really was Danny Wallace.
“Now …,” she said, obviously coming to the next prompted question on the screen. “Is it ‘Mister’?”
Eh? Of course it was “mister.” Look at me, woman. I’m not exactly the most feminine-looking man in the world. Not unless you like your women unshaven. And … you know … male.
“Sorry?” I said.
“Is it Mister Wallace?”
She wasn’t looking up. But she’d seen me come in. She could hear my voice. How could she not know? Was she afraid to guess? Despite myself, I considered her question carefully, before answering: “Yes, it’s Mister Wallace.”
Perhaps it was the fact that I was wearing a small boy’s pair of glasses that confused her. Perhaps she assumed I was going to say, “No, it’s Master Wallace, but I’m a big boy now, because mummy’s sent me down to the shops on my own.”
“Right … Mister Wallace. And is it spectacles you’re after?”
Jesus. Did I look like someone who was happy with their current spectacles? No, I didn’t. But then she wouldn’t know that, because she was too busy staring at her screen.
“Yes.”
I watched her click yes, before the screen changed, and she asked her best question of the day….
“And are you a spectacles-wearer already?”
Am I a spectacles-wearer already? Look at my face. I am clearly a spectacles-wearer! That is an entirely unmissable fact. I am a spectacles-wearer, and I am a mister. You might as well call me “Mister Four-Eyes Spectacles-Wearer, the Male Boy-Man Who Wears Glasses on His Face.”
Had this woman never seen either a human male or an established spectacles-Monocoledwearer before? What was she used to? Monocoled dogs?
“Am I a spectacles-wearer already?” I tried, just in case I’d misheard and the image of a monocoled dog had been wasted.
“It’s for the system,” she said, looking up for the first time since sitting down, but still not registering that all the information she needed for “the system” was literally staring her in the face.
“Yes, I am. I am already a spectacles-wearer.”
“Well, great!” she said, standing up. “Let’s get you sorted out, then.”
My new glasses would be ready in one or two hours, and thanks to the power of Yes, I’d also agreed to undertake a free thirty-day contact-lens trial. With some free time suddenly in hand, I took the opportunity to run some errands to fully prepare myself for my trip up to Edinburgh.
I bought vitamins and six pairs of black socks and a pair of white ones too, in the unlikely event of some surprise exercise being sprung on me up there. I wandered around TopMan for a while, but I kept catching glimpses of myself in the mirror, and it was a little disconcerting. So I decided to head off and undertake another much-needed errand—one that would not require me to wear a pair of children’s glasses. A haircut.
I found my way to a hairdresser’s on Great Portland Street, but as I was about to enter, I received a most annoying text message.
YOU OWE ME FIFTY QUID.
It was from Wag. I hadn’t really wanted to call him before now—the whole “him thinking I have a thing for him” thing made that a little uncomfortable as a prospect. And anyway, you’re supposed to wait two days before calling someone after a first date.
But, oh well. I suppose I had to give him his fifty quid—the fifty quid I’d made him spend on one warm beer in a Soho clip joint. You’d think he’d have let me off, what with the ticket to “We Will Rock You” and the bhuna, but I guess that’s the risk you take when you’re a Yeser. I texted him back, and we arranged to meet briefly, later on in the afternoon.
* * *
“So …,” said Scott, the kiwi hairdresser. “The question I’m asking myself is, what are we going to do for you today?”
“Same basic shape,” I said, “except I would like you to cut it so that it is a little shorter.”
“Understood,” said Scott, who I’m suddenly worried you will think is not simply a hairdresser from New Zealand (a kiwi hairdresser), but instead a hairdresser who cuts the hair off kiwis (a kiwi hairdresser). “I can do that for you very easily indeed.”
But then Scott did something rather odd. He put both hands on my shoulders and leant down to my level. We made eye contact in the mirror.
“Or …,” he said, “do you want to try something new?”
Scott certainly seemed to be putting his back into this haircut. I’d had to remove my glasses—something I was only too pleased to do—while he did something fancy with a razor down the sides of my head,
but it gave me a few precious and welcome moments of contemplation. That’s the good thing about being near-sighted. When someone takes your glasses off, all you can do is think—not much good in a fight, admittedly, but perfect for the hairdressers. And so that’s what I did. I thought about the new cast of characters who’d come into my life of late, some of whom I knew, and some of whom I … well … didn’t.
The thing was, if Wag wasn’t the Challenger, then who was? Who was sending me odd things and taunting me? What was their objective? To tease me? To scare me? Had they really expected me to go to Stonehenge? Did they know I’d been? Was I too hasty in ruling Ian out of the equation? And where did the man on the bus fit into all of this? I suppose if the man on the bus was, in fact, Maitreya, as Brian and Pete and the Starburst Group had suggested, maybe he was the Challenger? Maybe I was merely a pawn in a very odd game of chess. Hey, “yes” rhymes with “chess.” Maybe that was a clue. But who knew about my very important quest? Who had I …
“Okay, we’re all done!”
Scott stood back from me, and I reached for my glasses.
“Great,” I said, putting them on. And then I didn’t really say much at all.
I just looked.
I now had very, very short hair at the sides. The top had a kind of mohawk effect, but it was much more spiky than it had ever been before, and there seemed to be something still tickling my neck…. But after a moment or two I liked it. Kind of. I kind of liked it.
“I’ll just show you the back,” he said, holding up a mirror, but then whipping it away again before I could really see what was going on round there.
“Er … could I just see the back again?”
“Sure,” said Scott, and he held the mirror up longer this time.
And I nearly swallowed my tongue.
Scott had given me … No, he couldn’t have …
Could he?
I thought that …
Christ.
Scott had given me … a mullet.
I was now a man with a mullet, wearing the glasses of a boy.
I waited in the Yorkshire Grey for Wag. I’d picked up my new specs, thank heavens, and I’d tried to make my new haircut a little less manic by going to the toilets and smearing water all over my head. It just made the wax Scott had put in there go all runny, and my hair had now set in a much more unfortunate style than before. I winced. Somehow I had found the one hairdresser in all of Great Britain who shared Wag’s conviction that the mullet was a somehow acceptable haircut.
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