Free The Visitors by Rebecca Mascull Page B

and best far away, beyond the room and the undulating treetops to the stately rainclouds. The closer something is, the less clearly I can see it. Except the Visitors. They are in perfect focus, wherever they stand in the room. I do not know what to do about them, so I tell them to leave. One by one, they fade and depart. I will deal with them tomorrow. For now, I have a world to know. I have opened my eyes and created light and colour. I have invented the world anew. I can see.

7
    On this, my first day of sight, I begin by exploring the house. I am allowed to leave my parents and the doctor behind and walk across the hall and down the stairs. Lottie is with me all the time, to stop me tripping, to explain this and that. One of the strangest things is trying to reconcile my brand-new visual images with the knowledge I gained previously from touch or description. Some objects I know presently and others I cannot make sense of at all until I touch them. I see a painting on the landing of something green and frilly, with layers of shapes and a long thin line at its centre. I stare at it and cannot decipher what it might be. Is it something you wear?
    I ask Lottie, ‘What is it?’
    ‘Hops. A painting of hop flowers, the leaves, the stalk.’
    I am dismayed. I know this object intimately by touch but its visual image means nothing to me. The next painting I know immediately. I have never visited this place, yet I know that this grey mass bordered by a flat expanse of yellow under a louring sky is the sea. Somehow the linguistic description I had read so often in books or discussed with Lottie had painted an image in my mind more powerful than that of Father’s beloved hops, which I have handled countless times.
    I go on through the house, astounded at how much there is to see. The wallpaper and painted walls are all different colours, and the upholstery is patterned with leaves and flowers and birds in every shade imaginable. Clothes, too, are covered with checks and dots and swirls and lines, on Mother and Lottie, and even Father’s waistcoats and his shiny shoes and buttons. I am bewitched by the myriad tints of colour within one object, such as Lottie’s eyes: the pupil is black, the aura deep blue while the iris is light fringed with green. It is how I picture the Mediterranean. Even my own eyes – not as bewitching as Lottie’s – have two tones, dark brown at the centre with a paler edge.
    We move from room to room, our speed as always hampered by clutter. But once outside, my first instinct is to run, and I launch myself from the bottom step and hurtle across the gravel driveway to the grass. I stop short, panting, and move forward again, the vertical trees and the horizontal ground hurling themselves at me at a terrifying rate and bewildering my eyes. Lottie catches up with me and I drop to the grass. I look at her face and see her eyebrows lowered, her eyes intense, her mouth slightly pursed. I know these shapes with my fingers. Her expression is concern for me, she is worried. I will have to learn a whole new language of reading other people’s faces and bodies, applying my knowledge of touch and vibration to what I see and correlating the two.
    ‘Go slowly,’ she advises.
    I have crossed the threshold to a new country, the land of the sighted, and it has its own laws of which I am ignorant. I stand again and move forward, with care this time. My surroundings move quite quickly, but I am becoming accustomed to it. It may be better to walk with my eyes closed, but I cannot bear to. I look to the sky and the clouds race across it. I see them reveal the sun, and stare into this white heat. I gasp and cover my eyes. It hurts to look straight at the sun – is this just me or everyone? Lottie tells me it is a flaming ball of fire, of course it will hurt to look at it, everyone is the same in this.
    I see my first animals, little birds flitting from tree to tree or flapping across the white of the sky. The way birds