Even before I leave the author’s house I can tell something is wrong. As he poses for pictures my eye starts itching. I rub it and rub it. Rubbing, it turns out, doesn’t help.
Stewart, the photographer, looks at me. “Are you OK?” he asks. “It’s my eye.” I say. “Yeah it looks a bit swollen,” he says.
Master of bloody understatement, I realise when I finally see a reflection of myself some time later. Jeez, I think, I look like Tommy Lee Jones’s older brother. [1]
It’s all the fault of the author’s cat. It must have been. I do have a cat allergy. It normally doesn’t hit me like this though.
But what else could it be? I’m pretty certain I didn’t get anything in my eye to make it water and swell like this. I’m sure I would have noticed a 6ft rusty metal pole being inserted into my right ocular cavity. And it would have had to be a 6ft rusty metal pole to hurt like this.
Stewart drops me off in Inverness to catch the train. I walk around for an hour with half my face pulsing.
On the train back to the central belt I do that thing of taking selfies just to see how terrible I look. Really terrible, it turns out. It’s like I’ve aged 20 years overnight. And it’s not as if I’m young to start with. Plus, it hurts. I’m not good with things that hurt.
I get home. Everyone makes cooing noises. “It is a bit swollen,” J says. Clearly she uses the same book of bedside calming phrases as Stewart.
I neck some allergy pills and lie on the couch feeling sorry for myself. I have become a one-eyed man. A Cyclops. I have visions of myself wearing a patch for the rest of my life, which might look elegant if you’re Errol Flynn or someone but not so much on a short, dumpy guy with a Northern Irish accent.
“You’ll have to go and get Daughter Number Two,” J tells me. “If you can drive, that is?”
“Yes, I can drive. I’m not blind. I’m just feeling sorry for myself.”
J doesn’t say that’s pretty normal for me. I go out to the car. To be fair my eye might be sore and itchy and the skin around it as puffy as the giant marshmallow man in Ghostbusters but I can see out of it. [2]
I pick up Daughter Number Two. She gets in on the opposite side to my bad eye. She doesn’t notice anything. Eventually I have to point my affliction out to her.
“Oh yeah,” she says. “They do both look a bit swollen.” It takes me one, two, three beats to take that in.
“What do you mean both of them?”
[1] That said, trawling through some TV backwater I saw Tommy Lee in The Eyes of Laura Mars the other night. Quite the young Adonis once.
[2] I reckon it's a symptom of my past-itness that my go-to references are so old. hen again, they're remaking it, aren't hey?
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