The First Time I Saw You: the most heartwarming and emotional love story of the year

by Emma Cooper

  I tap my fingers gently along the table to find the knife and fork and smile at Mam as she puts the plate down in front of me. I’ve been in this brace for eight weeks. I’ve got a check-up next week and I’m hoping that Dr Medium was right and that I’ve only got another four weeks in it. At least then I’ll be able to see where my dinner is.

  ‘Be careful now,’ she warns, ‘Mr McLaughlin has just made the gravy.’ I look down to see my dinner – pie and chips – but I can’t see the plate at all; it’s too close. I can see the edge of the plate of bread and butter, piled high like the leaning tower of Pisa, and I can see the tomato sauce. This has happened a lot since I’ve been home. Some meals I can negotiate with – chippy is good, my fingers can find the chips easily; sandwiches too are inoffensive – but sit-down meals are another matter. Dinner continues around me: pass the sauce, no more salt Gertie, did you see that weather forecast? It’s going to get hotter next week. All of this continues as I navigate my hands holding the cutlery and guess where they are landing on my plate. Nobody seems to have noticed.

  A chip goes down the wrong way and I try to reach for a drink (a glass jar with a straw inserted into the lid, as is the current trend – ‘Why would you want to drink out of a jam jar?’, Mam asked when she came back from the supermarket), knocking it over in the process. She starts fussing, getting up and ripping huge wads of kitchen towel to wipe up the mess as I continue to splutter.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, taking a piece of kitchen towel and wiping my mouth.

  ‘Worse things have happened at sea,’ she replies. The same phrase she has always used.

  ‘Tell me a bit about this girl you’re trying to find, Sammy,’ Da interjects, and I’m grateful to him for his attempt at ignoring what has just happened. I stall, trying not to think of the small gasps she made, the way her legs wrapped around my naked skin, the taste of her, the—

  ‘Sammy? You look like you’re in cloud cuckoo land.’ Da’s voice brings me back; I clear my throat and shift, hoping that the beginnings of my erection aren’t on show.

  ‘Paddle boats,’ I blurt out.

  ‘Paddle boats?’ Gertie and Will say in unison.

  ‘Paddle boats . . . I took her out on paddle boats.’ I picture the way she had laughed so hard she had started snorting when I said I had to get off them because I felt so seasick; I can’t help but smile.

  ‘But you get seasick, Sammy. Remember when we took him on that boat trip, Mr McLaughlin?’ They both start laughing. ‘You’ve never seen a child throw up so much! It was everywhere.’

  ‘The wind took it and it hit the reverend right in the chops!’ Da punches the air like I’ve just scored a try.

  ‘I wanted to, you know . . . show her my romantic side.’

  ‘I never had you down as the romantic type, Sammy,’ Da says thoughtfully, ‘although there was that time you started writing poetry, but I thought we’d sorted that out.’

  Ma sits in front of me, right in the centre of my view. She inclines her head and smiles.

  ‘Ah, Mr McLaughlin . . . our boy is in love.’ Gertie and Will make puking noises.

  ‘Well, it’s about time, Sammy,’ he answers as Mrs McLaughlin claps her hands excitedly.

  ‘So, when can we meet her?’

  ‘I’m working on it,’ I answer.

  Week Fifteen

  Sophie

  My fifteen-week check-up has gone well, no problems at all except for when I stepped on the scales; I’ve put on half a stone already. It’s only the third week in May and yet my time with Samuel seems so long ago. As the time passes, I worry more about whether the decision to do this on my own is the right one, but then I think of the hurt I felt. I let down my defences before and look at what happened to me. I have Bean to think of now; I need to protect us. I’m setting up my new life. The website ‘S B (for Bean) Williams Accountants’ is almost ready; I’ve had a couple more interested potential clients.

  The air conditioning in the car is on full as I drive home and I still feel hot even when all I’m wearing is a blue jumpsuit – one of my purchasing mistakes. What is the point of a maternity jumpsuit when you have to unbutton a million buttons before you can take it down so you can go to the toilet? Fashion over practicality. I laugh at myself as I notice a chocolate Mini Milk stain on my chest . . . how many times have I worn crippling heels and a white suit, even though I know my feet will hurt and I will inevitably have to avoid anything vaguely colourful on the menu, just so I can look the part?

  I stare at my back garden, a jungle that I have been trying to tame for the last hour. Sweat dribbles down my back and expands into crude circles under my arms. This time next year I will have Bean here, and my child will need a place to play. The difference between the grass and weeds is indecipherable and there is no hope of being able to get a lawnmower anywhere near it. The hedge at the back scratches and fights in all directions as the fence panels sway and groan, their backs broken, their discs slipped. I’m trying to clear a way for Handy Huw to be able to get his rotovator into the garden. There’s an old gate that we never used to the right-hand side, which is barely hanging on by its rusted hinges, and in front of it there’s an old fence panel that has fallen over where our old garden table used to sit. Brambles have woven their way through the slats and attached to the furniture I know is behind it. The veins and innards of this overgrown monster have taken over my mother’s garden.

  The bruises of Ian’s abuse could almost be forgotten when we were out here. The garden would be filled with the scents and colours of the plants she would grow from seedlings in the small greenhouse; a skeleton is all that remains now, the glass skin broken and exposing its brittle bones.

  My palms are itching inside the rough gardening gloves and my lower back is starting to ache as I snip away with the shears. I cut away, and little by little the panel becomes freed of the monster’s grip. The sweat slithers down my back as I begin to pull at the wood. A small piece splinters away but the rest, I worry, is too heavy for me to move.

  ‘What now, Bean?’ I ask as I take thirsty gulps of lemon squash. Bean loves all things citrus at the moment. The Book says my baby might be sucking its thumb this week; this thought brought me to tears. Mum still sucked her thumb all the way through her adult years. Never in public or in front of Ian, but she did in front of Helen and me, her middle finger running left and right as though she was rubbing a moustache as she sat with her feet tucked beneath her while reading cheesy romance novels. I can hear Charlie moving around in his garden: the sounds of a radio and some kind of gardening machine – not a lawn mower but something like it. I pull at my earlobe. The garden needs doing. Handy Huw cannot get into my garden. The fence needs moving but I can’t move it. I need help. I lift my arms and grimace at the patches beneath. Oh well . . . it’s not like he hasn’t seen me looking worse. I wade through the monster’s tendrils and peer through a crack in the fencing between our two gardens. The machine sound has stopped, and I squint my eye and look through the knothole in the wood but can’t see anything other than something propped up next to it. I sidestep along the fence and peer through another gap, registering that his garden is in a much better state than mine.

  ‘Looking for something?’ I snap my head back and look up to where Charlie is leaning, bare-chested, over my fence in the exact spot that I was just peering through. Once again, this man has caused my embarrassment to roll its eyes, begrudgingly adding wood to the fire as my cheeks flame. It must have been his torso blocking my view, which means he’s just watched my progress from where he is standing peering over at me with an expression that is either amused or irritated. I can never tell with him.

  ‘Hah, um, yes. Glad you’re in, actually,’ I say, shading my eyes from the sun with my hand and trying to salvage some dignity. ‘I was wondering if you could help me move this fence?’ I point to the wood in question.

  ‘Now?’ he asks, as though I’ve just interrupted an important meeting to ask if he wouldn’t mind massaging my fee
t.

  ‘Yes, please,’ I say, smiling, I hope, gratefully. ‘Handy Huw is coming tomorrow, and he needs to get a rotovator or something in through that gate.’ I signal towards the gate in question with my thumb.

  ‘Well, we can’t have Handy Huw stuck outside with his tools, can we?’ I’m not sure if he’s being kind or sarcastic. He disappears from view and my feet are confused as to what to do next: do they walk towards the front door and open it, or do they wander back to the broken fence panel because the conversation has ended? They needn’t have worried, because he then strides through my doors into the garden.

  Seeing him inside my house shocks me and I chastise my baby-brain. I must have forgotten to lock my door.

  ‘You should lock your door,’ he says, but I’m not really listening because, I’ll be honest, I can’t take my eyes off his chest which is bare, tanned and very, very nice. My libido has just woken up from a very long nap, and it is hungry.

  Week Fifteen

  Samuel

  I’ve been at the hospital for almost the whole day. And the news is good: the ligaments in my back and neck are healing well, and I’ll be out of this carcass in three weeks’ time. But. The bad news is bad. My sight is diminishing ‘much faster than we’d hoped’. This phrase bothered me.

  Than they’d hoped? They’d hoped? They have only just met me. They are not going to spend the rest of their lives in darkness; they won’t have to learn to walk again, learn to eat again, learn to fecking wipe their own arses again.

  I check my email. I don’t have time for Gemma to take all day to reply to her emails; I imagine she probably doesn’t even work in Sophie’s office now anyway. I press refresh again, but the screen tells me cheerfully: ‘Yay! Your inbox is empty.’

  ‘Mam! Did you post those letters?’ I shout from the lounge. I’m holding my arm up in front of my face while I swipe the screen. I’m searching for repair garages in Shropshire and there are hundreds of the bastards. I’ve called every Helen Yates I could find, private-messaged the ones on Facebook and come up with nothing. My last resort was to write to the few Helens that I found in the phone book who I called but couldn’t get an answer from.

  ‘Mr McLaughlin!’ she shouts. ‘Did you post Sammy’s letters?’

  ‘I’m having a shite, for the love of God, woman!’ The toilet flushes and Da shuffles into the lounge; I can hear him wiping his hands on his jeans. ‘I sent them yesterday. What is it you’re doing there, Sammy?’

  ‘Looking for garages in Shropshire. Sophie had her car fixed there when she first left London . . . it’s the only place I know she’s gone to.’

  ‘Isn’t that like looking for a needle in a haystack? Shropshire is a pretty big place, I think.’ I ignore his reply and continue alternating reading my phone, putting it down and lifting a notepad up so I can write notes. ‘Ah, Sammy, give me the whatsit.’ He snatches the phone out of my hand and sits down on the sofa, hidden in the tunnel’s walls. ‘She worked for a big hotshot bank-thing, right?’

  ‘Yeah. Sandwell.’

  ‘So, let’s ring Sandwell and offer them some business.’ I can feel that he is winking as he says it. ‘How do you—? What the—? Mrs McLaughlin! Fetch me that laptop, would you? I can’t see a thing on this phone of Sammy’s!’

  ‘Da, I can do it, just—’

  ‘You need to rest your eyes, Sammy – it’s probably staring at this thing that has buggered yours up in the first place.’ I sigh.

  ‘Would you like biscuits with your tea, Samuel?’ Mum fusses as Da starts pounding the keys on the laptop.

  ‘Right. Here we go . . . oh, two, oh . . .’ he starts punching numbers into the landline phone next to him. ‘It’s ringing.’

  ‘Ah, hello. My name is Paul O’Grady.’ I close my eyes and would shake my head if I could. ‘I’m running a promotion for our garage and was wondering if your company would be interested in a free trial? We’re a new business and . . . right, right, right you are. And just so I know who our main competitor would be, who is the firm that you use?’ He pauses, covers the handpiece and whispers that they are transferring him. ‘Hello!’ he begins again. They won’t tell him, but then again, Da usually gets his way. ‘Fast Fix, you say?’ Ma stands in front of me and claps her hands together. ‘Grand, grand. Thanks for your time.’ He replaces the phone.

  ‘Mr McLaughlin, I always said you should be a spy.’ She winks at him and leans into the darkness where I hear a peck on the cheek.

  ‘Now then . . .’ It’s a wonder the buttons still work on that laptop, I think as he punches the keys again. ‘F-A-S-T, space, F-I-X, space, S-H-R-O-P-S-H-I-R-E . . . here we go. There are seven, Sammy. Now then, that’s narrowed our search a bit, hasn’t it?’ The springs in the sofa creak and clap him on the back for a job well done.

  Ma returns with the tea, which I have to drink in the lidded jam jar.

  ‘Sophie’s eyes look like the colour of tea,’ I say, smiling.

  ‘Really, has she got cataracts? You’d make a blinding pair, you two!’ Da laughs, the bass rumble filling the room.

  ‘Ah, would you shush, Mr McLaughlin? What colour do you mean, Sammy?’

  ‘Like amber,’ I reply.

  ‘You’ve turned into a right soft touch, Sammy. What else did you get up to after the paddle boats? Paddle boats! I ask you!’

  ‘We read Tolstoy together.’

  ‘Tolstoy? Best get you up and sorted and back on to the rugby pitch, I reckon . . . Blind rugby! Now that would be an extreme sport I’d enjoy watching!’

  ‘Sweet Jesus, wash out your mouth, Mr M! Now pass me that laptop while you drink your tea . . . let’s find where this Sophie who has stolen our boy’s heart is hiding.’

  Some time later, Mam tries the last number on the list. ‘Thanks anyway,’ she says into the phone. We have called every one of the Fast Fix garages in Shropshire, but each call is a dead end.

  ‘What’s yours will always come back to you,’ Mam says, kissing the top of my head after the final call. ‘You’ll find her.’

  Week Sixteen

  Sophie

  Sleep hides from me, crouching behind vivid memories and unknown questions. This time last week I barely knew Charlie at all. I think it is safe to say that our relationship has changed quite a bit.

  Charlie had flipped the fence panel with relative ease. I had been distracted as he pulled on his T-shirt while walking through my garden, so didn’t see it at first. He carried the panel away to the side of the house while I stood, my skin prickling with goosebumps: it felt like the heat of the day had been inhaled by the past and ice filled my lungs as it exhaled.

  The memory had been so buried that I felt dizzy with its resurrection. The day I had left for that night at my friend’s, Mum had looked disappointed. She had forgotten all about the sleepover, she had said with a bright smile; never mind, we’ll do it at the weekend; do what? I had asked; nothing important, she had said with a dismissive wave of her hand. But it wasn’t nothing. The night she had died, there had been dreadful storms – I remember me and my friends shrieking at the lightning. When I was thrown into hell the next day, I remember thinking that the world must have been angry that night and that it had tried to let me know. Maybe pulling that fence panel down that night was the world trying to protect the last piece of her.

  What the broken fence revealed was the round garden table which we had spent countless sunny afternoons sitting around with the Scrabble board. But I couldn’t see the cast-iron swirls of the table top because it was obscured by a tablecloth; the rose pattern and lace around the edge just visible beneath its dark green covering of moss. Each of the three high-backed wooden chairs was covered in dense green foliage which tucked and folded itself like seat covers over the frames. In front of the three chairs I saw cutlery: knives, forks, spoons, their silver tarnished to bronze, sitting slightly out of place but preserved. In the middle of the table were the remains of a china teapot, green-tea innards pouring over and spilling on to the table, and at each
place setting, a china cup and saucer, each cup filled with the same vibrant green moss as the chairs. I felt myself keel over, a loud keening noise escaping my lips: it was a tea party, the tea party she had always said we should have, the tea party from Alice in Wonderland, preserved and sheltered by the moss and wood of the fence panel.

  I was aware of his warm hands guiding me inside, of him holding me as I sobbed into his chest, his unfamiliar smell feeling alien and yet comforting. Time passed as I began to talk. And once I started, I just couldn’t stop. I told him about Mum and Ian, I told him about moving to London and meeting Samuel, I told him how I had left him and how hurt I was that he betrayed me but that I knew I deserved it. I told him about Bean and the way I felt having this baby entirely dependent on me. The sun arced slowly across the sky: just as it would in Paris, dipping past the Eifel Tower; sinking behind the Sphinx in Egypt; hiding behind the Colosseum in Rome.

  As dusk began to blink heavy eyelids, and the darkness of night closed around us, he listened to me. He poured bitter lemonade into iced glasses. He closed the windows as the insects began to creep in with the end of the day. He made sandwiches. He washed up: he listened.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said as he passed me another tissue.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he answered with a small smile.

  ‘Thank you for listening. I don’t know how I would have coped with finding that today if you hadn’t been here.’