I cried behind my bandages when they left, but out of joy, not sadness. Anna had come to see me, and she’d be back. I’d be out of hospital and home in just a week, a couple at the most, that’s what they’d told me. Everything would be back to normal.
CHAPTER 3
INSIDE MY BLACK HOLE
THE NEXT DAY THE BANDAGES CAME OFF SO that the doctor could examine the wound on the side of my head. ‘Good, Bun, very good,’ said the doctor. ‘The swelling’s gone right down. You can open your eyes now.’
It took some doing – they felt a bit gummed up. But I did it. I opened them. The trouble was that I couldn’t see anything. I blinked and tried again. Blackness. Only blackness. I squeezed them tight shut, and opened them again. I felt I was deep inside a black hole, that there was no way out. I was drowning in blackness, unable to breathe, my heart pounding with sudden terror.
‘That looks a lot better, Bun,’ the doctor went on, turning my head with his cold hands, ‘a lot better.’
‘I can’t see,’ I told him. ‘I can’t see.’ There was a long silence. Then I could feel his breath on me, his face close to mine. He was lifting my eyelids.
‘What about now?’ he asked me. ‘Can you see a light? Can you see anything?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘What’s the matter with him, Doctor?’ My mother was asking just the question I wanted to ask, and she was frightened, really frightened. I could hear it in her voice.
‘Well, it’s a little difficult to say at this stage,’ the doctor said. ‘I expect it’s just a side effect of the trauma. He’s had a nasty crack on his head. It’ll correct itself in time, I’m sure. But we’ll do some tests. It’s nothing to worry about, Bun.’ His hand squeezed my shoulder. ‘You’ll be fine.’
If I had a pound for every time doctors told me that in the next few months, I’d be rich, extremely rich. But you can’t blame them. What else could they say? They had to try to reassure me. Everyone was trying to reassure me. When they discharged me and I got back home, it was the same old refrain: ‘Don’t worry, Bun. It’ll be fine.’
To begin with I believed them, because I wanted to believe them, needed to believe them. All the tests – and there were dozens and dozens of them, in Truro, in Bristol, in London – showed that I should be able to see. But the fact was that I couldn’t.
Every morning I opened my eyes hoping and praying, but no longer believing, that this time I’d be able to see something. I never could. Everything else had healed up long ago by now. The plaster was off my broken arm, and the stitches out of my head.
Dan said cheerily, that he preferred me when I’d looked like a mummy. Liam, I could feel, didn’t know what to say, so he said very little. He didn’t know how to include me, so he didn’t.
Only Anna didn’t pretend with me, didn’t feel awkward. She was just herself. She’d sit and talk, talk about anything and everything. She seemed to understand, without my having to tell her, what no one else did: that I felt lost, bewildered and frightened in a strange black world where I was entirely alone. She knew that I just wanted everyone to be normal, as they had been, so that I could still be part of the real world I remembered, their world.
My father was endlessly encouraging, taking me out on the fishing boat as he used to, trying to pretend my blindness didn’t exist. From time to time I’d hear my mother crying quietly downstairs, and I knew only too well why. But when she was with me she was always positive, always concerned and comforting and cuddly, more so than she ever had been, too much so.
No one ever spoke the word ‘blind’, not in my hearing anyway, either at home or in the various hospitals. So in the end I mentioned it myself, to Anna, because I knew she’d be honest with me. ‘I’m blind, aren’t I?’ I said to her, interrupting a story she was reading to me.
‘Yes,’ she replied quietly. ‘But because you’re blind now, it doesn’t mean you will be for ever, does it? I mean, your arm got better, so did your head. Why not your eyes?’
‘What if I stay blind?’ I asked her. ‘What if I don’t get better?’
‘It won’t change anything, not really. You’ll still be the same person. I’ll still be your friend. I always will be.’ I cried then as I’d never cried before, and Anna put her arm round me. It wasn’t exactly worth going blind to have her do that, but it comforted me as nothing else had; calmed my fears, made me feel less alone inside my black hole of despair.
CHAPTER 4
ONLY ONE WAY OUT
AFTER THAT, RESIGNATION GREW IN ME SLOWLY, imperceptibly. I would never see again. Never. There was to be no going back. I was going to have to live with myself as I was, sightless and alone, in permanent unending darkness. For a while I could think of nothing else and sank into a deep sadness, a bottomless pit of bitterness and self-pity. Anna tried to get me out of it, not by pitying me but by arguing with me.
‘It’s like a living death,’ I told her once.
‘You can’t say that,’ she said. ‘You know nothing about death. You haven’t been there and neither have I. We’re alive. All right, so you can’t see. But you can live. We’ve got to think about living.’
Anna came over to see me whenever she could, whenever she was home from school. More than anyone else she lightened my darkness. We’d talk of all the good times we’d had together and laugh about them. She brought me some of her CDs – Robbie Williams, Britney Spears, the Corrs – and some audio tapes as well –The Sword in the Stone, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Arthur, High King of Britain. With their help I managed to banish the hateful silence of my room and to fill my life with sound. This seemed to help, to distract me, to take myself out of myself – at least, for a while. But as time went on I found I also had something else to worry about. I had tried to ignore it, to pretend it wasn’t so. But I couldn’t, not any longer.
At first I hoped it might be temporary, just a phase that would pass. But it didn’t pass. If anything it became worse. It was something I had to hide, something I’d told no one about, not even Anna. Ever since the accident I had been unable to remember things, little things that might not have mattered so much on their own. But there were also, I discovered, important parts of my life that had just gone missing. For instance, apparently we’d all been on holiday to Canada when I was five, to see my uncle Bill, my father’s brother, who lived in Toronto. People still talked about it. I remember I’d seen the photographs. It was the only time I’d been up in a jumbo jet. But I couldn’t remember any of it.
Nor could I recall anything of a trip up to London only a year or so ago, when we’d been to the zoo, and to the Science Museum, to the Tower of London, and to Stamford Bridge to see my favourite team Chelsea playing Tottenham Hotspur. All these events were a complete mystery to me. In fact, I had no memories of even being a Chelsea fan.
My mind, I was discovering, was full of blank spaces, gaps in my memory that were completely unpredictable, so that I was never prepared for them.
The vicar came to see me one day – ‘just to cheer you up,’ as he put it – and started going on about a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat he’d put on the year before in the church, apparently.
‘You’ve a fine singing voice, Bun,’ he said. ‘Everyone said so. You were a wonderful Pharaoh, just wonderful.’
I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. I had no memory of it whatsoever. I covered up as best I could, but how well I had covered up I could never really be sure, because of course I couldn’t see people’s faces to see how they reacted.