Unfortunately, my reference to “restructuring” merely encouraged her to ask what I had in mind and why I was deviating from our agreed approach. My answers became increasingly vague and defensive; I could see that I was just making things worse. Then I remembered that I had an appointment for an eye test. Although it was actually in a couple of hours’ time, I told her it was sooner and I would have to ring off. But I had to agree to send her a summary of the new structure, which was annoying – because it didn’t exist yet. I tried to draft something before I left for the eye test, but all I had to show for it was a list of unresolved questions.
It was as I was leaving the flat for the optician's that I was cornered by that journalist. I cursed myself for going onto the website using those aliases. It had been stupid and unnecessary. And now it looked as if I would be exposed before I was ready to tear off the mask I have been wearing for so long. I was still preoccupied with these gloomy reflections when I reached the optician's. I knew that I had to find a way of stopping her going into print until after I've finished this account - but what?
Discouraged by my monosyllabic responses, the optician soon gave up trying to engage me in conversation. On the wall was a poster headed “The Wonders of the Human Eye”, featuring a huge diagram of an eyeball with a cut-away section showing all the different kinds of tissue inside. When I took my glasses off, I realised that without them, I could easily have mistaken the blurred image for a diagram of a planet, showing the different geological formations from the outer crust down to the molten core at the centre. The optician, however, gave the distinct impression that eyes had long since ceased to arouse any sense of wonder in her. I estimated that she must have between eight and ten half hour appointments with patients each day. That’s up to twenty eyes per day; eighty to a hundred per week. If you put all the eyes she had ever examined together in a room, you would have thousands upon thousands of them, like frog-spawn.
I envied her sense of professional distance. It was exactly the kind of objectivity – indifference even – towards one’s subject that would be required if I was to make any progress with my biography of Pete. There was certainly no denying that the project needed some urgent attention. As my publisher had pointed out, adopting the tone of a parent talking to a recalcitrant teenager, the deadline was less than six months away.
But they can stuff their biography. I can’t face devoting yet more precious time to a subject that I despise. What I really want is to finish this account and just have done with it all.
And if I am to do that, I need to stop Susan Crossfield publishing what she has discovered. By the end of the eye examination, a plan had begun to form in my mind.
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