the princess could not see, she still knew how to lean, reach and spin.
And so she danced by herself, serving until the bag lay empty, all birthed out. Then she picked up the empty sack, walked to the other side of the court, and crawled around, scavenging for the scattered balls and thus she played solo, tracing that space alone for two long months, a dead, knee-scraped time until…One day, the princess felt a tap on the shoulder and, sensing that someone was standing above her, she asked, ‘Who’s there?’ The silent stranger took her arm; she tensed, smiling with the complacent grimace of a trained circus performer, she groped for her racket, and she served. As soon as she heard the ball skimming the net, she curtsied; he applauded; she felt a hand on hers, then a furry little globe – someone had handed her what she was seeking, and that is how the blind princess met the silent stranger.
* * *
Little circles of blankness had appeared one by one, first in the left eye, then in the right. Agnes could only tell that her eyes were failing at different rates when she closed one or the other. For each drop of sight that disappeared from her view, a small bump of the same size formed under her skin – on her forearm, her back, her cheek – like an insect bite but without the itch. She didn’t notice this strange and gradual pox; she didn’t connect the dots. Indeed, it took three losses in the autumn season before she casually mentioned to her mother that sometimes, when the tennis ball came speeding towards her, it simply vanished as if into a pocket of air.
Agnes was still in denial when her mother insisted they go to see their old family doctor that winter. Agnes sat on the edge of the examination table, her mother’s hand trembling on her shoulder. Her father was seated in the corner of the room. His figure was blurry but she imagined he was in his usual posture – legs and arms crossed, keeping himself contained behind Xs. She could hear his incessant murmur of hmms, the static of his agreement burring her conversation with Dr Lemming, which was beginning to sound like something that Agnes’s thespian cousin Jane might rave about: a modern existential drama, all questions and answers on a dark stage.
‘Can you see this?’ A faint beacon spun across Agnes’s visual frame.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘And this?’ A peripheral flicker, like a light bulb dying behind her.
‘Yes!’
Her mother patted her shoulder to reassure or reproach her for her promptness.
‘Has a ball ever hit you in the head or face?’
‘No,’ she scoffed. ‘I’m ranked eighth in Surrey. Eighth.’
‘Mm, of course.’ A waft of onion. Did Dr Lemming keep a tiny onion under his tongue? Agnes had wondered this as a child, too, with more conviction in its likelihood.
‘And can you see this?’
She heard a click but saw nothing. After a pause, she replied: ‘Yes, of course I can.’
Her mother’s hand lost its quicksilver tremble on her shoulder, became leaden. Agnes felt a sudden fury, hot and wet, behind her eyes. If nothing else, this would blind her, her mother’s hand sinking its weight into her shoulder, her father no longer murmuring in the corner, everyone waiting with bated breath but not the way they’d once waited for her flat serve.
‘Are you sure, Agnes?’
Nothing, nothing, a Venn diagram of nothing.
‘Yes! I can see it, I’m sure, I’m fine. I’m fine, yes I can see it…’
‘Alrighty now.’ Her mother gripped her shoulder. ‘He turned it…the torch isn’t…nothing to…’
Dr Lemming grunted and cracked his knuckles. Agnes shivered. She had always been wary of her doctor’s hands. As a teenager, she had noticed with horror why they seemed so misshapen – Dr Lemming had bitten his nails down nearly a half. Did he still bite them? Was he musingly gnawing away at them at this very moment? But no, Dr Lemming was uttering dry words – scotoma, macular, retina, optic – that her mother was wringing for a drop of hope: ‘Money not a…Anything we can…Is there…’ The slightest creep of a cool shadow, another waft of onion, Dr Lemming’s rough palm on her arm.
‘Agnes, can you describe what you see? What does it look like, exactly?’
Agnes had never witnessed the burning of a photograph but she must have seen it in a film or read it in a book because this was what she thought to say. It