One of the few things that unites me with my two flatmates,
Saffy and Amanda is our collective myopia. We’re all blind as bats. Without our
assorted visual aids, we’d be forever bumping into a wall. Which is why when an
ocular catastrophe happens to one of us, it’s of immediate deep concern,
galvanizing the entire flat into a flurry of frantic and often pointless
activity. United we stand, divided we fall with blurred vision.
So, you can imagine the chaos a few days ago when Amanda
came out of the bathroom and announced that she was going blind.
“I’m going blind!” were her exact words before she burst
into tears and fell to the floor, sobbing dramatically.
“What? What? What?” Saffy immediately started shouting,
racing to Amanda’s side.
“I can’t see!” Amanda wailed, hands covering her eyes.
“Everything has gone blurry!”
“Well, wear your contacts then!” Saffy said, clutching
Amanda maternally to her heaving bosom.
“I am wearing them!” Amanda moaned. “I can’t see a
thing!”
“Blink hard!” Saffy advised. “Sometimes, you just need to
clear the air from the contacts.”
“I’ve tried everything,” Amanda sniffed. “I’ve put
eye-drops. Rotated the lenses. Taken them out. Put them back in. Nothing.
Nothing is in focus. I’m going blind!”
An emergency phone call was made to the optometrist. “I’m
going to sue if he’s damaged my eyes!” Amanda said stoutly, her killer legal
instincts briefly reasserting themselves.
“Uh huh. Uh huh. We’ve tried that,” Saffy said into the
phone. “Uh huh. Mmmm. Nope, tried that as well. She’s blind. Uh huh? Really?
Huh!”
When she hanged up, she reported that Mark, the cute
optometrist had instructed us to come down at once to his office. By the time
we arrived, we were all slightly breathless and a little ill tempered on
account of a little mascara accident. On the way there in the cab, Amanda
insisted Saffy help her put on some make-up.
“I can’t show up looking like a dog!” Amanda said, ever
conscious of potential dating opportunities in any situation. Just then, the
cab suddenly swerved to avoid a bus and Saffy’s hand slipped while fluffing
Amanda’s eye-lashes, drawing a thick black slash across Amanda’s forehead.
“I don’t see why it’s my fault that the cab swerved!” Saffy
grumbled to me as Amanda groped her way into Mark’s office. “And hello, but
don’t you think there are more urgent things to worry about at the moment
besides her stupid make-up? Ooh, maybe I should see Mark since I’m here. I’m
also having trouble with my vision.”
Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I’d turned off
the stove before rushing out of the flat. It’s funny how people react
differently to a crisis.
Amanda wasn’t in there very long before she emerged.
Somehow, she’d managed to fix her hair and tidy up her make-up and was
presently beaming up at Mark.
“Oh, thank you!” she lisped attractively, laying a hand
gently on his arm. “You were just wonderful! Simply wonderful!”
As it turned out, Amanda wasn’t going blind after all. In
the misty gloom of our bathroom, she’d mistakenly switched her contact lenses,
inserting them into the wrong eyes.
“I can’t believe how silly I was!” she exclaimed cheerfully,
the world suddenly bright again as we waited for Saffy’s examination to be
over. “And Mark’s asked me out on a date.”
“How do you do that?” I demanded jealously. “You just
breathe and you get dates!”
Meanwhile, the world was not as bright for Saffy.
“It’s outrageous!” she reported later. “He says my vision is
a bit wonky because the eyes are dried out because I don’t shut my eyes fully
how is that at all humanly possible that I don’t shut my eyes fully and how
come you got asked for a date?”
“You mean you sleep with your eyes half open?” Amanda
gasped. “Like a snake?”
“Apparently!” Saffy huffed. “He wants me to check if my eyes
are closed when I sleep and how am I supposed to do that if I’m supposed to be
asleep men can be so stupid!”
Then a thought occurred to her and she turned to me. “You
have to sleep with me tonight and watch how my eyelids close! I can’t ask
Amanda – she’s such an auntie, she can’t stay up past 10 o’clock!”
So here I am in bed with Saffy and she’s only just fallen
asleep. I can feel my allergies acting up. It’s very dusty in here and there
are far too many pink frills about. It’s incredible what I have to put up with.
Meanwhile, I’m too scared to move in case I wake Saffy but I’m a bit concerned
that I may have left the stove on after dinner.
2 comments:
So does she?!
YES, it's very creepy.
Post a Comment