The First Time I Saw You by Emma Cooper

Author:Emma Cooper [Cooper, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2019-06-30T18:30:00+00:00

Week Twenty

Samuel

I have visited a new eye specialist. She is officially called a consultant ophthalmologist, but I have named her Mrs Cheerful. Mrs Cheerful gave me a series of tests, some testing how much of my sight (the picture at the end of the tunnel) I could see clearly, and another where she checked my field of vision (the tunnel walls). I came out with a score that put me firmly in the severely sight impaired bracket. I have a certificate saying this. This irritates me. Shouldn’t certificates be to celebrate something? This thing should be a . . . a sentence.

She has confirmed what I already know: I’m losing my peripheral vision and I’m losing it quickly. Mrs Cheerful tells me (like it’s a good thing) that I will get concessions for public transport use, as though the fact that I can never drive my car again is actually a good thing because I’ll get money off bus fares. I even get money off my TV licence, she tells me in her cheery voice; I mean really? That should be free – I won’t be able to see the TV!

I can still see a fair amount, really; if you make your fist binoculars again but leave a small gap about the width of a tiddlywink to see through, you can get the gist of what I can see.

Once I had my ‘certificate’, suddenly I was visited by people from various disability departments. I’ve had white cane training. I’m not joking; someone came around to the house to show me how to use it, even though I keep telling everyone that I can still see. It has an end that looks a bit like a marshmallow and it rolls against the floor.

‘Thanks, but I don’t need it yet,’ I told the woman as she showed me how it concertinas in on itself, so I can carry it inside my pocket.

‘You may not, Samuel,’ she said, ‘but it helps people around you. If you bump into someone and they see you’re holding a cane, they know that you are sight impaired . . . If they don’t know the reason you have bumped into them, they might just think you’re being an arsehole.’ I wasn’t entirely sure if she was implying that I was, in fact, being an arsehole – she had a point – but I still hate it. It prods about inside a world that is shrinking: darkness surrounds my every move, my every action; it’s swallowing me whole. But. As I walk through the busy airport, I know it hasn’t eaten me yet. I’m still alive.

‘Sorry,’ I say for what feels like the hundredth time as I bump into a teenager; the girl is wearing denim and the strong smell of cheap perfume clouds my senses. As I track my vision upwards, gigantic headphones fill my circle of light.

‘’S’OK,’ she answers as I bump into another person, then another, until reluctantly, I pull out the cane from inside my pocket.

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