The Sleeping Sword. Michael Morpurgo

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      CHAPTER 3

      INSIDE MY BLACK HOLE

      THE NEXT DAY THE BANDAGES CAME OFF SO that the doctor could examine the wound on the side of my head. ‘Good, Bun, very good,’ said the doctor. ‘The swelling’s gone right down. You can open your eyes now.’

      It took some doing – they felt a bit gummed up. But I did it. I opened them. The trouble was that I couldn’t see anything. I blinked and tried again. Blackness. Only blackness. I squeezed them tight shut, and opened them again. I felt I was deep inside a black hole, that there was no way out. I was drowning in blackness, unable to breathe, my heart pounding with sudden terror.

      ‘That looks a lot better, Bun,’ the doctor went on, turning my head with his cold hands, ‘a lot better.’

      ‘I can’t see,’ I told him. ‘I can’t see.’ There was a long silence. Then I could feel his breath on me, his face close to mine. He was lifting my eyelids.

      ‘What about now?’ he asked me. ‘Can you see a light? Can you see anything?’

      ‘No,’ I said.

      ‘What’s the matter with him, Doctor?’ My mother was asking just the question I wanted to ask, and she was frightened, really frightened. I could hear it in her voice.

      ‘Well, it’s a little difficult to say at this stage,’ the doctor said. ‘I expect it’s just a side effect of the trauma. He’s had a nasty crack on his head. It’ll correct itself in time, I’m sure. But we’ll do some tests. It’s nothing to worry about, Bun.’ His hand squeezed my shoulder. ‘You’ll be fine.’

      If I had a pound for every time doctors told me that in the next few months, I’d be rich, extremely rich. But you can’t blame them. What else could they say? They had to try to reassure me. Everyone was trying to reassure me. When they discharged me and I got back home, it was the same old refrain: ‘Don’t worry, Bun. It’ll be fine.’

      To begin with I believed them, because I wanted to believe them, needed to believe them. All the tests – and there were dozens and dozens of them, in Truro, in Bristol, in London – showed that I should be able to see. But the fact was that I couldn’t.

      Every morning I opened my eyes hoping and praying, but no longer believing, that this time I’d be able to see something. I never could. Everything else had healed up long ago by now. The plaster was off my broken arm, and the stitches out of my head.

      Dan said cheerily, that he preferred me when I’d looked like a mummy. Liam, I could feel, didn’t know what to say, so he said very little. He didn’t know how to include me, so he didn’t.

      Only Anna didn’t pretend with me, didn’t feel awkward. She was just herself. She’d sit and talk, talk about anything and everything. She seemed to understand, without my having to tell her, what no one else did: that I felt lost, bewildered and frightened in a strange black world where I was entirely alone. She knew that I just wanted everyone to be normal, as they had been, so that I could still be part of the real world I remembered, their world.

      My father was endlessly encouraging, taking me out on the fishing boat as he used to, trying to pretend my blindness didn’t exist. From time to time I’d hear my mother crying quietly downstairs, and I knew only too well why. But when she was with me she was always positive, always concerned and comforting and cuddly, more so than she ever had been, too much so.

      No one ever spoke the word ‘blind’, not in my hearing anyway, either at home or in the various hospitals. So in the end I mentioned it myself, to Anna, because I knew she’d be honest with me. ‘I’m blind, aren’t I?’ I said to her, interrupting a story she was reading to me.

      ‘Yes,’ she replied quietly. ‘But because you’re blind now, it doesn’t mean you will be for ever, does it? I mean, your arm got better, so did your head. Why not your eyes?’

      ‘What if I stay blind?’ I asked her. ‘What if I don’t get better?’

      ‘It won’t change anything, not really. You’ll still be the same person. I’ll still be your friend. I always will be.’ I cried then as I’d never cried before, and Anna put her arm round me. It wasn’t exactly worth going blind to have her do that, but it comforted me as nothing else had; calmed my fears, made me feel less alone inside my black hole of despair.