My name is Charity, but I'm not particularly little. I'd like to apologise now for the humorous title, especially if you were thinking this story is about the general goodness of people, or their propensity for giving money to good causes, or even to go and help in person.
This story is about that, though perhaps not in the way you were thinking. This story is about me and how I came to be where I am and who I am. And about one person that helped me get here, and what they gave to me, in time, friendship, physical help and even a bit of fun too.
I am legally blind. Visually impaired, if you want to be politically correct and unnecessarily vague. I can see a tiny amount if I look carefully which is why I use the word 'legally'. I started to lose my sight in my early teens. One morning I woke up with bleary eyes. I'm sure we've all had this, where you open your eyes first thing and there's some gunk or 'sleep' in your eyes which make your vision slightly foggy, so you wipe them with a tissue or the duvet cover and, lo and behold, you can see again, and your day begins normally.
Well, I woke up that morning, opened my eyes and saw things in my bedroom looking foggy. I wiped my left eye with a tissue and tried looking around me. I think I wiped my eye about a hundred times that morning but the fog stayed. Just my left eye. I thought little of it, except that it didn't clear up. As the days grew into weeks I told my mother about it who clucked sympathetically but did nothing.
A month later, the same happened in my right eye. I woke up, opened both eyes and saw more fog than usual. After a few seconds, I realised it wasn't my left eye, it was my right eye. This time it was serious. I'd been getting by on just the sight from my right eye, subconsciously learning to favour it over my left eye. Suddenly I couldn't see anything clearly.
I didn't know what to do, nor did my mother, my school teachers or my friends that one day I made it to school, the first day my right eye went. I don't know how I made it to school, although I knew the way very well. A few idiot boys at my school found out I couldn't see very well and pushed me around a bit, then held up their fingers and shouted 'how many fingers am I holding up', but the teachers sorted them out and sent me home again.
I wasn't totally blind. I could tell if it was dark or light. I could see shapes in front of me, but nothing in any kind of detail. I couldn't read or watch the telly. I couldn't do school work or even safely walk around the house or school, or go into the street without smacking into things, especially if they were down at feet level. My mother took me to doctors, opticians, ophthalmologists and all the other -ologists anyone could think of. They found a whole series of things wrong with my eyes that had been brewing for years and which was now far too late to fix or cure. The fog was caused by rapidly-growing cataracts which obscure the lens part of the eye. Almost the worst thing about it was that up to now my eyes looked perfectly normal, so people had a hard job actually believing me. But from this time onwards, my eyes started developing visible cataracts instead of invisible ones.
They told me that my sight would get worse until I could see nothing except the fog. In addition, they warned me that parts of my retinas were about to detach, and when that happened, there would be chunks of my vision that simply disappeared, fogginess or no fogginess. Retinal detachment is when the light receptors at the back of the eye peel away from the nerves connecting them to the brain. Until the detachment started, I could at least see the fog, if that makes any sense to you. When a piece of my retina detaches, I 'see' flashes of light then those particular light receptors won't even be able to see the fog, and the areas of blankness increase.
Double whammy.
And now, about twelve years later, I'm twenty-five and what they said would happen has happened, pretty much. I have one small area of clear vision left in one eye, but sadly it's in the bottom left-hand corner, not the straight-ahead area. If I want to see something, I have to get close to it and look too high and too much to the right, in other words in the wrong direction then try to favour my unfavoured eye. I then have to use my peripheral vision to see it. It's like you pretending not to look at something you've been told not to look at. You look away but really you are trying to focus on what you are not looking at.
And you can understand that I can't read or write or watch any telly or films or look at something or find anything that's not where it should be or ride a bike or drive or safely walk up or down stairs or over rough ground or easily get in and out of cars or on and off buses... because I simply can't see. Everywhere I look I see mostly the translucent film over most of each cornea, my sight not reaching any further than that, like you trying to look out of the window when there's a net curtain covering the whole thing except a small area in one corner. Also, the blank areas of retinal detachment randomly get bigger every year. Soon I will have no vision left at all, not even the little bit in the bottom left-hand corner of my left eye, and it will all be blank. And it's blank, not black or white or grey. Those are colours you can see. The blank areas are empty of vision, like a void, the black hole of sight.
Anyway, that's the fun stuff over with. Now you know who I am.
What does this all mean for me? Well, I dipped out of school for a while, missed my GCSEs and A levels when my friends were doing them. Some friends kept in touch for a while, but when I started going to another school in Bristol, so about a thousand miles away (actually only seventy miles, but it might as well have been a thousand), we lost touch. Not because I was blind and they weren't; it was just too far, and I was never at home. I caught up with exams after a while and later went on to do quite well on my uni course, so thanks for asking.
I even had a boyfriend for a while, in Bristol. I lived in a hall of residence at the little school for the blind. Well, it wasn't a school for the blind, it was a school where some people were blind and the staff were OK with it. For some reason unknown to either of us, he was given the flat next door and of course we got talking, and he had a sweet-sounding voice. Probably as ugly as sin, but how would I know? He wasn't even at the school, he had a job with the City Council, never found out what.
It didn't last, however. Two or three times I was invited into his little flat and we'd sit on the same sofa, holding hands while he watched football on the telly and tried it on with me. He was always wanting to feel me up, asking what size bra I was wearing, wanting me to wear short skirts and slide my knickers down, that sort of thing. Pretty normal, I guess. I let him feel my breasts a couple of times, but we never, you know, did it.
Because I'm a good girl.
Then one time he wanted a can of beer from his fridge. I offered to get it for him since I'd found my way around his flat, and knew where the fridge was. I groped my way to the fridge and opened the door. In front of me was the general hazy glare of the fridge interior with one or two blank patches, and nothing else.
I felt around for the top shelf, then I felt around to see what was on this shelf. I tried looking sideways to see if I could see any beer, but the glare from the fridge light was too much, and all I saw was brightly lit fog. My fingers told me there were quite a few things that might or might not be a can of beer. By mistake, I touched some food item in a pot. The pot went bang, then something else went splosh. The boyfriend sprang up and saw that I'd inadvertently knocked over a small bottle of something, and it had emptied itself into tomorrow's macaroni cheese. He shouted at me for being a clumsy fool and why couldn't I look what I was doing? I left immediately, my hot tears streaming down my face as I blundered back to my room, and I never had another boyfriend.
However, that left the other half of humanity. During my uni course in Psychology, my cousin Ginny invited herself to my parent's house for the summer holidays. She wanted to do something practical as part of her Nursing course, and she chose to find out how to look after a blind person - that is, me.
She soon learned what was good and what wasn't. We shared my bedroom because we were much the same age, and there was nowhere else for her to sleep. My mum pretty much left us by ourselves except for the evening meals and the occasional day out. I had help with the visual parts of my course from my Aunt Connie who lived nearby. Ginny's bed took up most of the room that wasn't already my bed, my desk and hers.
The subject of Personal Hygiene and Care soon came to the top of Ginny's Nursing course to-do list. She wanted to learn how to manage a blind person in the bathroom. I had to put my essay-writing on hold so she could have me in the middle of the bathroom while she made notes about various things and ticked off items on her course checklist. Several times, she physically moved me around, in and out of the bath, shower and loo seat, pretending I needed it for the sake of her course. Of course, we were both fully dressed whilst doing these tests.
Once, she accidentally brushed my boobs with her arm.
Or maybe I moved forward at the wrong moment and inserted my boobs where her arm was going to go. One or the other, I expect. Blind people have a habit of moving part of themselves into the wrong place at the wrong time, mostly because they don't realise there is a wrong place.
The thing is, I didn't react or say anything. I thought she would just ignore it and move on to the next item on her course checklist.
One thing led to another, and she touched my moderately sized breasts again. Once more I didn't say anything. I couldn't see exactly what she was doing, anyway. I let her do it and she went on doing it for longer than I expected, so I summoned up all my courage and groped around for one of hers. I hoped she wasn't going to explode in a frenzy of moral superiority and never speak to me again. She didn't, she just carried on with what she was doing and let me grope.
I suddenly found I was breathing hard and trying not to collapse on the floor in a pile of sexual turmoil. She made a small murmuring sound but didn't react more than that. Still, breathless with excitement, I put my other hand on her other breast. She was a little shorter than me, but I found that her boobs stuck out quite a bit further in front of her than mine did on me. I could feel her bra doing a sterling job with its small band size but big cup size. Up to this point, I'd had no idea what her curves were like since I could only make guesses based on the different blobs of cloudy soup which I could see. I hadn't checked her out with my hands. Why not?
Because I'm a good girl.
I worked out that her breasts were bigger than mine. She put her clipboard and pen down on the worktop and put her free hand on my other boob. So far she was doing no more to me than my short-lived boyfriend had done (I never let him actually touch me 'down there', but I imagine he looked 'down there' as often as he liked since I was never going to see where he was looking). However, this time I was doing the same to her, and it was sending flashes of lightning around my body.
“Can we lie on the bed together?” she whispered, fearful of being heard even though the nearest other person besides ourselves was Aunt Connie who lived across the street and four houses along, our house being otherwise empty.
Ginny led me very correctly through the doorway (there's a knack to doing that with a visually impaired person, you know) and towards the bed. She guided me onto it and I lay down with her next to me, still clothed.
