For plok

[cosmolinguist]

(an LJ Idol entry)

She loved the smell of diesel particularly.

Well, that and the power, but she didn't want to tell the police that.

"....massive traffic jams on the M6 due to an overturned lorry between junctions--" she heard before someone reached through the open door of the cab and switched the radio off. She was disappointed; she'd been looking foreard to hearing about herself on the radio.

She kind of hoped the radio would be hearing more from her soon.

The police officers on the scene were already asking her Why did you do this? She imagined Eddie Mair asking her.

It wasn't that bad a crash, really. She hadn't hit any other cars. And her cargo wasn't inflammable, or toxic, or anything dangerous like that. You got lucky, the police officers told her. She nodded. They resented her for not being in hysterics. She was still imagining the Radio 4 interview.

Why did you do this job? How could you do it?"

"Well you see, on all my work capability assessments, the private company that the UK's Department for Work and Pensions farmed out these assessments to, which judges its success by how many people it can get off disability benefits, which disregards the professional opinions of doctors and specialists working with the people in the system, which was found impersonal, mechanical and lacking in clarity....they kept telling me i had no difficulty seeing."

"No difficulty?"

"Those were the exact words in the letter I got after the second 'assessment'. Which by the way happen at irregular intervals, including just after I won an appeal and was, again, told that there was nothing wrong with me."

"Sounds like you made a pretty sudden recovery then!"

"Yeah, quite; seems my poorly-formed optic nerves and abnormal visual cortex and weak eye muscles just sorted themselves right out in the month between when I was awarded benefits and when they were taken away again. I mean, that must be what happened..."

"So, rather than appealing the decision... you got a job as a lorry driver?"

"Well, why not? I mean, until this point I'd obviously not tried to drive. It would've been illegal for me to drive."

"Well yes, it says here you were bilnd at birth and your vision isn't all that correctable even with glasses."

"Exactly. My visual impairment was always such a hindrance for me! Not being able to drive myself out of the farmland I grew up in was the worst. If only I'd known then that I had no difficulty seeing! Here I had teachers getting my textbooks on tape, and my parents refusing to let me play sports because they thought I'd get hurt! But I never guessed that I have no difficulty seeing! Doctors and specialists and expensive consultants at the Mayo Clinic and everything, they thought I had tons of difficulty seeing! They don't know why I can see at all."

"So how were you able to get this job driving these big lorries?"

"I interview well."

"But...this is really serious. If blind people are driv--"

"Partially sighted, Eddie. Says so right here on my Certificate of Visual Impairment. I'm only legally blind!"

"Er, right, sorry... but if people who are driving lorries can't see where they're going..."

"Oh I can see where I'm going! I can see the road and everything. And the other cars, more or less. They tend to get out of the way though if they see me coming. I mean, you wouldn't catch me driving a Mini! That'd be so dangerous! Nobody would care about running into me then!"

"What?!"

"As it is, all I have to worry about is staying on the road. Like in those old arcade games I used to play; I was really bad, I'd drive over whole rows of pixelated palm trees along the side of the road. Remember the cars would just suddenly appear, nearby, because they didn't have the computing power to make them realisitically approach in the distance? Though it pretty much looks like that for me in real life, too. You know! [she laughs] All of a sudden, wham!, there's a car right there up ahead next to you!"

"So--"

"It's better than the appeal process! Even though it has a really high sucess rate, you know -- seventy, eighty percent -- which just shows you how terrible these assessments are in the first place."

"If it's such a terrible system, why hasn't anyone brought this up before?"

"Well, people have. The Liberal Democrats, at their last Federal Conference, actually passed a motion precisely about these assesments and another on provision of adult social care. Since they're a party of government, I can hope this will make a difference, but I have been made very cynical by my experience with this system. The huge numbers of people who are failed by the disability benefits system more generally have been highlighted recently by the 'Spartacus Report,' an uprising of sick and disabled people organizing themselves through social media, when the government wouldn't listen to them and mainstream media wanted nothing to do with the movement. Why hasn't anyone brought this up before? Because I guess you think that a blind woman driving a big truck down a motorway is the first thing worth paying attention to."

"That's a bit harsh, don't you th--"

"Well, you think this kind of thing happens in isolation? You think I wouldn't love to be told 'there's nothing wrong with me'? I want nothing more than for that to be true. But it isn't, and if I have to live in a system that tells me lies are truth, my very existence point out that absurdity. I can't help it."

And with that, her reverie was broken; the interview vanished as if in a puff of smoke

And then, the girl on the side of the motorway, with police radios crackling and the smell of diesel filling her nostrils, disappeared too. Because she is just a figment of my imagination, a length to which I have not gone...but otherwise I am her and everything she says is as true, as real as you are.

Comments

[sfred]

This is a brilliant piece of writing. I'm sorry so much of it is true.

[cosmolinguist]

Thank you. I'm sorry it is too; for other people evne more than me. Many have it a lot worse than I do.

[eiffel_71]

Awesome, and so true.

[cosmolinguist]

Thanks. It was a lot of fun to write.