THE BLIND OPTICIAN

A bit of a nightmare after a night out with his colleagues...

Things couldn’t have been worse for Albert Potts.

Things started going wrong after a night disappointing night. He’d been out with the boys from where he worked at the biggest optician’s in town - well, boys was a bit of a misnomer because not one of them was under fifty and half of them were of the female persuasion anyway - and when he’d got back home he’d suffered from a bout of optical interference that meant he couldn’t see the stairs properly when he wanted to go to bed, and being an optician he’d been a tad puzzled. At first he’d put it down to the whiskey and had crawled up stairs on his hands and knees, unable to see a single step. His optical interference meant he couldn’t even guarantee that what he thought was a step on his staircase was actually there or whether it was in fact a fading memory of a step that may have been there some time or never..

It had all been most peculiar, and living on his own as he did there was nobody he could call on for help.

Who would have thought that emptying his bladder could have been such a nightmare? But it was.

He thought he knew where the bathroom door was, but when he crawled through a door that must have shifted half a dozen steps to the right, his head buzzing and his eyes useless, it was to find he was confronted by a wardrobe that he didn’t have, at least not in the bathroom, and his bladder was reaching bursting point.

He did eventually find the toilet. It had been imperative that he did, and he used every last resource in his memory and located it.

Why in the name of everything that’s Holy did I have to wear this pair of trousers with its button flies?

That pair of trousers was widely regarded as being smart and even rather fetching by the ladies who were due to share his boy’s night out with him and he had chosen to wear them in order to impress. Who could tell where impressing with a pair of trousers might lead him? There was Janine, a widow with a more than adequate chest, a colleague from work though not exactly in his league because he was a fully fledged optician with all the right letters after his name and she was a mere secretary. But that didn’t matter, not when you considered that chest of hers, and he did that possibly too often for his own good.

She’d been in the group and had barely cast an eye in his direction.

He had known why. Despite that pair of trousers with its button fly he knew the absolute truth, that he was boring. There never had been much doubt about it because, truth to tell, he even bored himself.

And now he was kneeling in the bathroom in front of the toilet bowl trying to find the buttons on his fly so that he could satisfy the increasingly severe demands of his bladder.

This is not the kind of time for my eyes to go on strike, he thought as he levered himself up using both hands on the lavatory bowl and pushing until he was roughly in an upright position.

I won’t go into details as to what happened next because something did and it was the sort of something that happens to most men occasionally when a flow of warm urine precedes the proper opening of the fly.

He ended up with soggy trousers, and he had to take them off and find somewhere to put them that wouldn’t fill the house with the stench of drying urine by dawn. He liked his home to smell sweet and fragrant - not in a girly way with flowery bouquets but in a manly way, with chemicals.

Somehow he managed to find his way back down the stairs, dragging the offending trousers and underwear with him. And somehow he managed to find a receptacle in his utility room where he knew he always put clothes prior to putting them into the washing machine, and somehow he managed to put those trousers and dripping boxers into that receptacle.

It had taken half the night.

And he had work tomorrow. Work at the optician’s where Janine would be at her secretarial desk with a keyboard in front of her and a radiant smile on her face.

And what a face! She wasn’t in the first flush of youth, none of them at work were, but she still clung to a peaches-and-cream perfection topped by a serenely blonde cascade of fragrant hair.

And it was half way up the stairs, struggling for the second time to get to bed and some sleep, that his thoughts toppled over into a waking dream and he thought, no, he was certain, that he could see her at the top of the stairs, waiting for him.

He opened his eyes and stared.

And a charcoal fog that filled all of everything stirred and cleared and Janine was standing there in that naughty little skirt of hers, beckoning him.

“I’m coming!” he shouted, forgetting for a moment that he lived entirely on his own, that his next birthday would be his sixtieth and that Janine hadn’t ever worn a skirt as short as the one he was staring at. Not at work, anyway. He’d never seen her out of work so didn’t know how she dressed during her hours of leisure. But for a moment he was convinced it must be in that particular skirt, a tiny kilt affair with a shiny pin, and when a gust of wind from nowhere blew and ruffled it there was such a promise in its fluttering tartan that he just had to swallow.

A gust of wind on his staircase? Whatever next!

He groped for the next step, but it wasn’t where he expected it to be. He felt all around, fumbled against what might have been one of the banister rails, wondered why night had fallen so heavily and blackly, and called to Janine,

“You couldn’t … it wouldn’t be too much to ask … you couldn’t help me?” he begged.

“Where were you when I needed you?” she replied, a glint in her eyes. He could see those eyes all right, and the way that they glinted, after all it was all he could see, those eyes and that skirt…

“When?” he asked, “when did you need me, precious Janine?”

“Can’t you remember? But surely you can! I needed you back then, in the maternity ward of Saint Rolph's, when the wretched urchin started crawling out of me, and all I wanted was relief from the pain, your arms around me comforting me, your lips on mine and a night to remember for ever… but where were you then?”

“I don’t know,” he groaned, “but what became of the child?”

“Child? What child? I have no child...”

“But you said ...”

“You should never pay any attention to what a person says, not when you’re dying, you are dying, aren’t you? It can be fun, they say, counting the seconds down until you reach zero, and all the while the dizzy world spins and you dream...”

“But I’m not dying!” he protested, “I’ve been out for a night with the lads, that’s all! I’ll be okay tomorrow.”

“Wait and see,” she crooned, “you’ll want me then, you’ll want to canoodle with me then, you’ll want a joy you never knew and you know what I’ll say?”

“No...” he groaned, searching for another step, needing to crawl towards her, take her in his arms, make glorious love to her…

“I’ll tell you, then,” she glowered, “I’ll ask you … and I promise you’ll try to answer … but I’ll ask you who wants a blind optician?”

And at that instant Albert Potts knew that nothing in the universe could be worse than that moment in time.

Which is why he wanted to die but didn’t actually know whether he was alive or, maybe, hopefully, already dead…

Heal thy sight, optician, was his very last thought.

© Peter Rogerson 22.05.18