Guilt.
It was the guilt.
The guilt was, quite literally, eating her alive.
Her skin had become a patchwork quilt of guilt.
This terrified her, but realizing the root of the mysterious skin disease was enough to bring a flicker of hope. She only ever needed to know what was wrong, and then she could fix it. It was what she told her children when there was some concern eating at them. It was the great unknown that fed the fear.
Excited, she pushed the sleeves of her nightgown up her arms and studied her skin. These marks too were fading; the more violent ones were now less red and raging. And as she studied each one she remembered the moment, the defining moment each one had arrived. The business trip to London. The second night in a row to get a babysitter. The school trip to the museum she hadn’t been able to take. Their ten-year wedding anniversary night she’d gotten so drunk she’d vomited on the daffodils in the front garden and ended up sleeping on the bathroom floor. The third no in a row to a friend’s dinner invitation.
All of these bite marks were moments, moments she had felt she wasn’t enough for the people who needed her.
But she knew that wasn’t true. The people who loved her told her so. They told her every day and it was their voices she needed to listen to.
She climbed out of bed, she disconnected the IV from her vein, removed the pulse oximeter from her forefinger. The manic beeping from the machine began. Ignoring it, she calmly took out her bag and started packing.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Annie, the wonderful nurse who had cared for her during her stay.
‘Thank you for all that you’ve done, Annie. I’m sorry to have wasted your time—’ She stopped herself. The guilt again. ‘Actually, I’m not sorry. Thank you. I appreciate your kindness and care, but I have to go now. I’m better.’
‘You can’t leave,’ Annie said gently, at her side.
‘Look.’ The woman held out her arms.
Annie looked at them in surprise. Ran her fingers over the fading bites. She lowered herself to her knees, lifted the hem of the woman’s gown and inspected her legs.
‘How on earth?’
‘I let the guilt get to me,’ the woman said. ‘I let it eat me up. But I won’t any more.’
Or at least, she’d try not to let it. She could do this. She could do it all, because she wanted to and because she had to. Because it was her life, the only one she had, and she was going to live it as best she could, embracing every moment, going to work, being with her family and refusing to apologize to anyone for it, least of all herself.
Annie took in her determination and smiled. ‘So why are you rushing home now?’
The woman stopped and thought about it. She was doing it again.
‘The marks are fading but they’re not gone. If you push it, they may return. I suggest you get back into bed, let yourself get better and then you can go home. Rested.’
Yes, the woman decided. One more night, guilt-free, sleep-filled. And then she would return. Return home. Return to herself. Celebrating everything, guilt-free.
‘X, R, S, C, B, Y, L, R, T …’ she says, calling out the letters on the sign before her.
‘Okay, you can remove your hand now,’ the optician says and so she lowers her hand from her right eye, and looks at him expectantly.
‘Your visual acuity is very good,’ he says.
‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘It refers to clarity of vision dependent on optical and neural factors; the sharpness of the retinal focus within the eye, the health and functioning of the retina and the sensitivity of the interpretive faculty of the brain.’
‘Harry, I used to babysit you. I caught you dancing in the mirror to Rick Astley, singing into your deodorant bottle, with your shirt off.’
He blinks, a flush appearing on his cheeks. He rephrases: ‘What it means is that you have 20/20 vision. Perfect eyesight.’
She sighs. ‘No, I don’t. I told you that. They’re my eyes. I should know.’
‘Yes,’ he shifts in his chair, the professional side of him disappearing and the nervous young boy in his place. ‘This is what I don’t quite understand. You seem so sure of your ailing eyesight but you’re not experiencing any headaches, sore eyes, no blurred vision, you can read perfectly well. There’s no issue with your distance sight, in fact you read the bottom line of the eye chart, which many people can’t read. I don’t understand where your difficulty lies.’
She throws him the same look she had thrown him when she’d found him with his head hanging outside the bathroom window, sneaking a cigarette. He’d shouted to her that his stomach was upset, but she’d used a coin to unlock the door from the outside. If he didn’t have an upset stomach before, he had one after. She had been a terrifying babysitter. Despite the fact they were both twenty years older now, her intimidating stare held the same power over him.
He tries to remember he is a grown man now, married, two children. Holiday home in Portugal. Mortgage half-paid. She can’t hurt him any more. He straightens his spine.
She breathes in and out. Counts to three silently. He’s qualified, an academic, but clearly he’s still the stupid teenager whom she caught jerking off into a sock.
‘It started happening a few weeks ago,’ she explains.
‘What did?’
‘The problem with my feet.’
He stares at her blankly. ‘You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?’
‘Of course I am. What am I here for?’
‘Your eyes.’
‘My eyes,’ she snaps.
The grown-up Harry, the husband and father is gone. He’s back to the humiliated teen. The sock memory.
‘I can’t quite pinpoint it, but I would say it happened about three weeks ago. I woke up the morning after my birthday party and I felt wretched. I could barely recognize myself but I put that down to the tequila slammers, you see, so I let another few days go by before I realized it wasn’t just a hangover, there really was something wrong.’
‘And what exactly is wrong?’
‘They are seeing me wrong.’
He swallows. ‘Your eyes are seeing you wrong?’
‘They aren’t seeing me as they should. They’re showing me a different version of me. It’s the wrong version. It’s not me. There’s something wrong with them. Perhaps it’s not the vision, perhaps I need an X-ray or an MRI. Perhaps it’s not the lens – what if it’s the pupil or the iris or … another part.’
‘Let me get this straight …’ He leans forward, elbows on his knees, long thighs, long arms and fingers, quite attractive really for someone who was such a little pain in the ass. There’s the trace of a smile on his lips and this maddens her. She can see he’s trying not to laugh. She shouldn’t have come here.
‘You’re here because you look at yourself in the mirror and see yourself differently?’
‘Yes,’ she says calmly. ‘My eyes are not