The Myopic Man

The Myopic Man

The sores in his eyes were burning him like pieces of flying ash. He tried his spectacles on. At first he was more than satisfied. The metallic pair of 1960s NHS spectacles gave him a feeling of superiority and an unparalleled expectation of future unimpaired vision.

Donald Jardine was anything but extraordinary. He worked as a fishmonger in an East-End market town. He lived in Ilford, Essex. He passed his days anonymously in his first floor flat with only his dog, Laurie for company. Donald had worn glasses every since he was a five year old child with ginger hair and considered geeky by his peers. His parents thought mistakenly with Donald’s serious disposition that he must be intellectually superior to other children. But this simply was not the case. Consequently this left Donald with an inferiority complex and smattering of lost hopes and dreams that displaced him in a world of dreary limbo.

At five years of age he was fitted with his first pair of NHS glasses. Diagnosed with long-sightedness – astigmatism, he had no choice but to wear glasses on a permanent basis.

But despite Donald’s dull and ordinary personality he was blessed with the rare gift of second sight.

Donald could see into the future with his spectacles and was uncannily able to predict future events before they happened. He could actually witness these events as they unravelled from his spectacles.

Donald remembered that crucial afternoon in the optician’s room where he would wait as a petrified child for his eye-drops to be administered to him by the vilest optical nurse he ever had the dubious pleasure of meeting.

Ann Kaye she was called. He never forgot her. Short dark stringy perm, thick horn rimmed spectacles. Spartan brown skirt, matronly, grey blouse. Red spots, angry black heads. She must have been fifty or a little more with her acne allowed to proliferate, evidently never having disappeared since she was a teenager.


The eye-drops were administered by this vile specimen of humanity in ten sharply stinging pincer movements with the woman’s spongy hands. The optical nurse, Miss Kaye – it was no surprise to Donald she was not married and had no children given her aversion to kids, so he presumed anyway.

“Stop whinging child,” she barked like a school head-mistress.

The drops were like huge lumps of icy hot acid being plunged into him. Perversely it appeared that Miss Kaye deliberately indulged in taking as long as possible with each child forever prolonging their misery.

Miss Kaye might have been every child’s monstrous nightmare but now at thirty-three years of age Donald was coming to terms with the possibility that he could lose his sight altogether.

His prognosis had been good. Up until his nineteenth year Donald had continued to wear his glasses at all times resulting in a gradual improvement in his vision. This was despite the taunting of school bullies who often thought it appropriate to take them off at which point they would grab, bend and break them.

The bullying was all but a small microcosm of what was to come. Then paranoia, whispered words in the school canteen. “Swot! Swot!”

But the visions were not simply products of a mind deranged and obliterated by years of mental torment. The visions only appeared when he wore his spectacles transferring his world beyond all imaginings.

A surreal mind-map which when translated into reality was beyond the pall of psychotic delusion.

Then one day he stood next to his arch nemesis with her aristocratic mannerisms.

Eleanor. Exquisite, lethal, poignant. A poisoned chalice of corrupted innocence. Her artificial regal bearing glared with a demonic luminescence.

“Beauty is only skin deep,” as his mother would say.

Her dark bluebottle eyes reflected both the tragedy and the despair beyond all earth shattering proportions.

Eleanor, that piece of Britain. That timeless gem that could have come from antiquity, an archetype of British nobility. Donald walked in her shadow everywhere from the shores of exotic Haiti where he had met her with her family on a huge cruise-ship where he worked as a trainee sous chef on the former warship, Victoria.

Through her eyes he saw the world. Beacons of perplexed lunacy. Apocalyptic, and when he took off her spectacles Eleanor was no longer there.

A missing relic from a bygone era, gone disappeared forever from his mutilated mind.

Donald felt like the hand of God had been upon him only to be dragged away at the last moment like a marked man awaiting his execution.

“Myopia”. Mr Phillips, the brusque optician said he had but Donald knew he had something more than that. The spectacles reflected more than his myopic vision but a second sight unparalleled and hidden away in his confused mind.

“This means you can see things clearly from close distances but further off is much more difficult”

The long winded scientific description went by the wayside in Donald’s mind.

Donald wanted no-one to know his secret. Reticent as always he approached Eleanor. In her mercurial way she challenged everything he knew about life, from the black and white notions of his childhood to the sweetest sensations of the flesh. Holding him in her bosom like a mother tending to her baby son, she let him suckle her breasts. Then if felt as if the tree of life transcended all in its glory.

Those were the days. The 1960s passed and her autumn years loomed ahead of her. Eleanor reciprocated Donald’s love providing his second sight and vision, like seven pillars of wisdom.

Harshly gloating as she said to him, “I know all. I have experienced everything life had to offer me. The remnants of my life will be flesh wounds on you, Donald. I have been crucified, damned and burned. I am the first and the last of everything. The Alpha and the Omega reside within me, I am the beginning. I am the end.”

Then like a banshee she was gone, overcome by the heavens while the world turned and gravity exploded.

Within him there was a gradual shift in his attitude which was apocalyptic in magnitude. The extremities of the two forces, good and evil fought within him to maintain control with catastrophic consequences.


The atmosphere melted into nothing and it was as if the end of the world was nigh.

But then she counselled him, told him about the stars and the planets and the many fallen lost universes before Earth’s time began. Eleanor said to Donald, “Human beings will be aliens in their favoured lands. Nature will be no longer. Mankind will conspire to destroy itself.”

She came to Donald with something she called the Fake Book. When opened, a flock of birds appeared. Donald heard them twittering away. They sounded like harpies, the devil’s children, acolytes bound in reverence to an evil queen, enshrining and glorifying her. With every swift success she took a bow. Her arrogance was terrible. Then the book was shut and the secrets once again hidden.

Donald awoke to the sound of T-Rex’s “Ride a White Swan” ripping his ears out in its unashamed intensity. The colours of the world with their light and dark shades merged with the music to explode in Donald’s eyes to one huge beam of blinding ultra violet rays.

Love, beauty overwhelmed him. These were more than abstractions but the lightening reflexes of the pinpointed cushions of atomic energy. The clouds were not simply fluffy lily pads fighting for space in the sunlight. They were controlled by a creator who held the world together by one giant fingertip.

Then Eleanor appeared in all her splendour.

She might have been carved in ivory partly honed from that kind of aristocratic porcelain fragility but also from a supreme sense of Celtic or elfin charm.

In her palms was a wilting bouquet of roses and her face when pierced against the rose thorns showed pure tears innocently crafted on her cheeks, as if put there, fated.

Then her jaw, chiselled too perfectly hardened and it was as if a shadow had clutched hold of her and then like a naked white flame she was gone again, as if with the smallest dust mites in the air. Had she ever been there in the first place?

But Donald knew. She was the past, present and the future. The beginning and the end. Immortality dovetailed through the clouds and every spark of sunlight spoke her name lost in the leaves but always throughout time remembered.

Then the sparks faded. Donald had taken his glasses off and he was back to a sort of normality that was both bleak and surreal.

His mum was there polishing his shoes, curlers rolled in her hair, shouting him up from the parlour.

“Donald! Donald! Come down this instant.”

“Yes mum. I’m coming,” he groaned. The year is 1966, Donald quickly gets rid of his Viz comic and wanders lazily downstairs,”

“You’re missing the World Cup final, son, are you off your head?”

“Ok I’m coming,” he replied moodily.

“Some people are on the pitch, they think it‘s all over. It is now”.

Donald simply walked passed the telly un-interested as shouts from his father and beams from his mother told of England’s greatest ever moment in its history – winning the World Cup.

But even then he doubted this event’s reality, as if he was in an imagined past and reality a deluded concept.

Then Eleanor appeared again in all her omniscience. All powerful like a deity itself she smiled at Donald that long teasing smile he loved so much. But then was she real at all? Had her existence been like some passing transient moment, a subtle kiss in the dark, or a false memory? Past, present or future, he had no idea where he was or if he existed at all.

They were the cream of the crop, the aristocrats of high society, revealed Eleanor as she opened the book again. Its presence was the oddest thing Donald had ever seen. In fact it appeared alien, abnormal, even to someone like himself who doubted his even being of belonging in the planet such were the extent of his vision.

He kept saying to himself at moments like these. I am Donald Jardine, bon 1954. I am fifty-six year old and work as a fishmonger in Ilford, Essex. I am married to Donna for just under a year and everything I am seeing is lies, lies, delusions, or time-slips.

Donald remained unconvinced by this argument, but then she appeared. No, not Eleanor this time but Donna in a vague mist, that looked somewhere between a bubble and a thought shower, teaching Three E at school, admonishing him like one of her pupils, for what. Trivial little things like picking his nails or wearing his tie slightly askew. The little first floor grimy flat that they lived in above the fishmongers felt like a strange glimmer of a reality in his mad existence.

Then Eleanor appeared with her words or terror and truth. There was a world somewhere between now and eternity that existed only in the mind of egotistical dreamers. Where birds twittered away and the fake book revealed a slow passage to damnation.

She stirred like an animal nursing an injured limb, bellowing now at him. “Well Donald. You’ve done it now haven’t you? You fool. You imposter! I revealed to you my secrets and what do you do? Indulge in your inglorious past of sin and iniquity.”

“It’s not true” shouted Donald, as the dream ended and reality, whatever that was hit home in all its gross degenerateness.

The man was standing at the top of a mountain. He was going for the drop. Begging for someone to pull him out of his lunacy. But that man wasn’t Donald, it was someone else; no it could not be him. The man’s face was haggard; he was a broken haunted man. But this was simply a vision Donald reasoned, a possibility of things to come. No it wasn’t fact or fiction or even a mixture of both.

But Donald’s rationalism was flawed; Eleanor had shown him that from the moment they had first met. Donna was obliterated, Donna was no longer important. Donna was unnecessary to him. Donna was nothing but a mousy whinger, who clung to him for affection like the bitterest threads of an appalled normality.

Donald felt wretched. He stood outside the fishmongers with his hand to his chest; the stabbing pains were coming back again. As he moved slightly left he felt a horribly intense sense of longing. For what though? This feeling was mysterious to Donald. How could you for one minute think that you are dying and the next longing for a world beyond existence or imagination?

“Darling?”

Donald was feeling for his spectacles in his pocket, they were grimy and in definite need of a clean. Sparks of bizarre certainty overcame his heightened mental state of confusion.

Eleanor. He could see her drowning in a well of unhappiness, her features fractured, impaired, wounded by her sorrow. She was going down now, down, down into this manifestly evil supernatural hell that enclosed her, reigned her mortal self in. He witnessed her crucified upside down like St Peter, attempting to continue the endurance of Christ’s suffering on the Cross. But her face, pallid and deeply wounded had an immortal split that was suddenly cleansed and healed. She was immortal now, saintly, beatified.

Then he awoke like a child who had succumbed to a wicked witch’s evil spell. He felt for his spectacles and saw that they were broken into many shards of glass on the floor.

Donald felt like he had been hit by a mortal wound. He was that man holding onto the cliff face and Donna was there in tears, wrecked by a misery that Donald could not event contemplate. The continuous train of visionary though that Donald had accustomed himself for so long had finally caught up with him. He was completely out of touch with reality now.

Then the van came with the men in white coats. Donald clung to the cliff’s edge like a child holding a teddy bear for comfort like the lost remnants of an unclear past.

He awoke to the sound of sirens and a burning memory etched on his mind forever. Donna clinging on him for dear life holding him in her arms like a first-born. But then as Donald looked at the flowery curtains of an acute psychiatric ward his mind mocked him. The flowers became thorns and his head became crowned with them like a Christ figure bearing the sorrow of the world’s sins and his anguish. Donald had never been especially religious although he had a brief flirtation with a woman named Eleanor, his Theology teacher as a fresher at his local college of further education. Her eyes burned into them tingling. Donna’s eyes became Eleanor’s. Eleanor the mythical, Eleanor the real.

Then there was nothing but a desolate hill in the middle of nowhere but scrubland and rows of stone pillars pointing to the sun.

Then she was there mocking him again. Like every woman ever had. The conspiracy had forced him into deep sorry but still he fought for rationality. But then there was none. The Earth hit the Sun and it was gone but for the Evil Queen with her harpies and her husband the Beast. The fake book opened then closed and all was revealed in on unholy mess.

Donald was looking down on himself; the light was becoming closer now. He could almost reach it but for a woman clothed in white light. She was mercurially beautiful and he wanted her unlike any other. Then Eleanor came with her Saxon hoards and many minions. Eleanor in Haiti flirting with the Krays and the high dignitaries and ambassadors. Eleanor who was involved in the murder of John F Kennedy.

The twilight came, the evil queen revealed was not Eleanor, nor Donna, nor the evil fabrications that tore his mind apart. But a man, no more than a man, a beast, a thunderous man on a horse, wearing a Napoleonic hat guiding his forces through the quagmires of the Earth, seeking his New World Order.

Then the end came like Donald prophesied, the light grew stronger, the riots on the street had become blood baths, innocent people were murdered, tortured and imprisoned, and the Christ appeared again holding his hand out to Donald. Donald reached for the light as it grew stronger and then he saw not Eleanor, not Donna, but his whole life running past him in reverse like a weirdly mawkish sideshow, with laughing puppeteers and revered comedians fanning their skills across the nation like flames of electrical fire and thunder.

Then Donald saw his glasses, neatly repaired, in good order. He was sitting opposite the optician who was continuing his long speech about the need to wear the spectacles at all times. So Donald put them on. Then something happened that blurred the bridge between the unreal and reality.

The Napoleonic man came through a window at a hurtling pace but was barely hurt by the savage shock of the glass to his flesh wounds. Donald opened his eyes. They were burning him like pieces of flying ash. The optical nurse came towards him with her pincer like fingers. Her fingernails were longer, manicured, and there was subtle essence that came from her perfume.

“So? Have you finished playing now, child?”

“I’m sorry, I thought…”

“You though what,” there was a kind silky lightness to her voice that did not quite ring true.

“The mind is a strange thing,” said Ann Kaye

“But, but,”

“Take my advice, Donald. Start over again. Treat everything in a different light”.

Then he remembered what his mum always told him of looking outward and not inward. Donald felt this sharp intake of terror.

He realised that he had not lived his life in the real world. He had hidden himself in his mind’s darkest shadows struggling to find any sort of light or cohesion. He had invented Eleanor; a character based on a simple school boy fantasy crush for his teacher, and turned her into something more than fantasy. The delusions had won control over him and somewhere he had lost his mind and Donna in consequence. His life now felt like a strange lie of subterfuge, depression, lost hopes and dark dreams.

But now he was back here, a boy again, given another chance by the light that had inched close to him that had turned his delusions into something fantastical and supernatural, and gave him that chance to start again and to change.

He walked how from the opticians, his NHS spectacles firmly in place and realised the extent his imagination and desire to be something special, and something he wasn’t melted away into nothing.

He looked in his mirror, and fiddled with his spectacles slightly. He opened a book to start reading, then it was all revealed, Eleanor came back strangling his every hope and dream, but he still loved her, she was real.

He saw himself, a sailor in Hawaii with Eleanor in tow his bride. Wicked, surreal, exciting and loving, she was his future, past, his everything. As she destroyed him, the evil Queen in her last strangling embrace, Donald was reborn, a beast wearing his Napoleonic crown fighting for his new order on the empty dying streets of an imminent apocalypse.

Copyright © Carol Fenwick