Rosie 6

I first met Rosie when we worked together in the Council housing department. She was kind and gentle, and popular with other employees. She was about four feet six inches tall, with straight, dark, shoulder-length hair. She was severely hunch-backed, with a hump on her right shoulder. She had large but rather droopy breasts, the right one much larger than the left one, and also higher, because of her spinal curvature. She had been a complete left-hemiplegic since birth, and wore an old-fashioned, full-length, steel-and-leather leg-brace on her left leg. Her withered arm hung straight down, the small hand loosely clenched.

She walked slowly, laboriously dragging her braced leg forward each time, her left arm limp and dangling. It would be nice to say that, in spite of her cruelly deformed body, she was good-looking, but sadly she was ugly: she had a very large, bulbous, misshapen nose, buck teeth, a severely receding chin, small, deep-set eyes, and a blotchy complexion. She spoke with a marked lisp. I rapidly fell in love with her, and also, being a lifelong disability devotee, was strongly sexually attracted to her although I didn't admit it to anyone, to my shame. I did at least challenge another employee who made a cruel joke about her; to be precise, I told him that if he ever spoke about her like that again, I'd knock his teeth so far down his throat, he'd be able to bite the label on his underpants.

When we first met, I was 24, and she was 22.

One day, I asked her if she'd like to go for a drink after work.

"What? Thpeak up!" she replied. (Did I mention that she was rather deaf? Well, she was.) I repeated myself. She looked at me in mild surprise, and said "Yeah - ok!"

I suggested the 'Cheshire Cheese', an excellent pub about a mile away.

At five o'clock, I went towards her work area, and saw her limping slowly towards me. Her spinal curvature means that she usually looks downwards, at the floor, but when she saw my legs, she raised her head to the horizontal, gave me a lovely smile, said "Hi!", and dropped her head again. I was suddenly overwhelmed with desire and love, which even I thought was weird, given poor Rosie's grotesque appearance.

"OK, let's go"

I said, in a slightly wobbly voice, as I gave her my arm, and we headed towards my car in the car park.

"I thee you like fatht carth!"

she said when we got there. She was being sarcastic - my car then was a beaten-up old Mini. I opened the passenger door, and she sat down sideways on the seat, unlocked the knee-joint of her legbrace with her right hand, so that her left foot suddenly fell to the floor, then swivelled round, lifting her left leg in to the car with her right hand.

The pub was almost empty when we arrived, so we went to the most isolated table so that I could talk to her reasonably loudly without everyone hearing. She asked for a pint of 'Old Rosie' cider, appropriately enough, and I had the same. On bringing them back to the table, I said "Here you are, young Rosie, a pint of 'Old Rosie'" and then tried hard to think of something else to say: I've always been hopeless at conversation.

"Tell me", she said, "why did you thuggetht thith pub, when the 'Tharathen'th Head' ith clother?"

"Oh, I don't know"

I prevaricated,

"It's a nice pub."

"Tho ith the 'Tharathen'th Head'" she pointed out, "but that'll be full of people from work. Anyone would think you wanted to get me to yourthelf!"

I blushed, and said

"Well, this place is quieter."

"What?"

she said. I repeated myself, louder.

"Have you got a thing about ugly, deaf, deformed, crippled dwarfth, or thomethng?" "I'm only teathing!" she added quickly.

Later, she told me that she was due for a hearing test in a week, so she could be fitted with new, more powerful hearing aids, her current ones not really being up to the job any more. Her hearing had started to deteriorate in her early teens, and had got slowly worse ever since. She knew that in two or three years she would be completely deaf.

Afterwards, we went back to her flat, where she made us coffee, refusing any help from me. She came back into the main room, pushing a small trolley with two mugs of coffee on it, gave me one, and sat down on the settee next to me. I hesitantly confessed my feelings for her, and she said that she'd noticed the way I looked at her. "It'th a new eckthperienthe for me, ath you can imagine!" she said, "It'th nithe, though!"

We soon became established as an item, and I met her many friends, including Sue, who was tall, blonde, breathtakingly beautiful, and had a fantastic figure. She was also totally bllnd from birth, and had a terrible stammer. She and her boyfriend, Alan, became good friends, as well, and we often went out as a foursome. The first time all four of us went out together, to the 'Cheshire Cheese', Sue, whose stammer had been getting steadily worse since she was 11, and who was now practically unable to speak, and left the talking to others, contributing an occasional "um" and "erm", and communicating with gestures, suddenly used a pause in the conversation to say

"I - erm - I erm - I nnnuh- I nnnuh - I nnnnuh nnneed..."

"Thay no more" said Rosie, got up, took Sue's arm, and led her to the Ladies. As I watched the tall, blonde woman with the super-model looks on the arm of the deformed, stunted, ugly, disabled woman, I was consumed with love and desire for Rosie. Sue was gorgeous, but Rosie was the woman I ached with love for.

Rosie's remaining hearing went more quickly than she'd bargained for, and less than a year after we became an item, she was completely deaf. I learned sign-language, although how long that would be any use was open to question, as Rosie's sight had started to deteriorate: she'd noticed that her field of vision was narrowing. The Doctor referred her to a specialist, and she was eventually told that she had Usher's syndrome type 3, which caused progressive blindness and deafness, leading inexorably to total loss of hearing and sight. She was given five years before she lost her sight completely. She took the terrible news calmly, and told me that if I wanted to break up, she'd understand. I told her, via sign language, that I wouldn't dream of it, and asked her to marry me. She said

"Yeth, of courth!" and burst into tears.

We were married six months later, with Sue as her bridesmaid and Alan as my best man. (Rosie and I returned the compliment a year later.)

Rosie was completely blind in little over three years from diagnosis, but I had learned deaf-blind sign language, modified for use with someone with feeling and movement in only one hand, in preparation. She had to give up work, of course, but remains in touch - literally - with many of our colleagues, most of whom "speak" to her by writing in capital letters on the palm of her hand, which is slow but effective.

Our relationship is - shall we say - a little odd, but we are very happy; at any rate, I am, and Rosie seems to be most of the time, though she has bouts of understandable depression.

My name, by the way, is Patrick, and, like the Pat in the song, I think I'm a really lucky man.