At First Sight

by Hannah Sunderland

  ‘No, Joel.’ I pulled off his T-shirt, now that everything was hidden behind the appropriate underwear, and held it out to him as I stared firmly into his eyes.

  ‘Just because we have sex every so often doesn’t mean that things have changed. It doesn’t mean that we’ve fixed anything that was broken. All this does is plaster over the cracks for a while. If we got back together things would turn out the same as they did the first time.’ He took the shirt from me, his eyes wide like a child on the verge of a crying fit. ‘I think that this should be the last time this happens.’ I know that I’d said this before, that I’d meant it all the other times too. Not that I was the only one to blame for this toxic thing we had going, but I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t see the disappointment in his eyes when his plan to reunite us failed for the umpteenth time. It wasn’t fair on him and his manipulation, making me feel bad about myself for days afterwards, wasn’t fair on me either.

  He pulled the Bob Dylan shirt over his head and sniffed. I turned away and went over to the mirror to tackle the task of making myself look presentable for the day.

  ‘I’ll be seeing you then,’ he said, coming up to the mirror and sliding his hands around my waist. He pulled me backward, pressing his body to mine and kissed me gently on the cheek. Damn him.

  I didn’t turn around and watch him leave. This was it. This was the final time.

  It had to be.

  Chapter Three

  The big fat pigeon sitting outside the window taunted me with its freedom and cooed at me through the glass, its beady little eyes goading me into distress. I’d been watching it and it had been watching me, in some sort of wild-west-style stare-off, ever since I returned from the bathroom a few minutes ago. It strutted about on the windowsill, more compact than your regular crumb scavenger that hangs around outside Greggs awaiting a morsel of pastry from a sausage and bean melt. No one in the office probably knew that this taunting little bird was a tumbler pigeon, if they’d even noticed it at all. I only knew what it was because my uncle had been a pigeon fancier and had kept several different types over the years.

  I’d always found the term pigeon fancier a little disconcerting, giving me mental images of fully-grown men looking at pigeons the way Bob Hoskins looks at Jessica Rabbit.

  The pigeon turned away from me, as if its daily quota of interest in my life had run dry and I didn’t blame it. How that mistake at the café yesterday and the subsequent Joel-based mistake had haunted me like a bad odour ever since, turning everything sour. The pigeon stepped from the sill, unfurling its wings and taking off into the dusk sky, disappearing before I had chance to see it show off its moves.

  I’d seen them before, flying completely normally until, all of a sudden, they stop, as if shot from the sky. They tumble over themselves, spinning their way through the air towards the ground until you think that their time here is up, their ticket punched, their bucket kicked. But then, they right themselves, returning to the flock and carrying on as if nothing has happened. My uncle had told me once that it’s a survival tactic that domestic pigeons have developed over centuries but it seems strange to me, that a method of survival should look so much like the opposite.

  I heaved a sigh, dug my heels into the pale blue carpet tile below my desk, threadbare from years of wear, and pulled myself closer to the desk. I replaced my headset, the plastic band returning to the notch it always created in the skin behind my ear.

  I looked at my screen and saw that there were three calls waiting to be answered. I clicked a call, accepted it and sat back in my chair, taking a breath before speaking. ‘Hello, you’re through to Healthy Minds. Can I ask who’s calling please?’

  ‘Hey, is that Nell?’ The familiar voice came on the line.

  ‘Hey, Jackson,’ I replied. ‘How’s it going today?’

  Jackson had been a regular caller, almost once a week, for the past five years. In fact, his first call to the helpline had been during my first shift and so I felt a sort of affinity with him. He was bipolar and had severe social anxiety that he tried to fight at every opportunity. Some of those fights were more successful than others. During my time helping him on calls, we’d managed to find him an appropriate doctor, the right meds and he was doing better now than he ever had before. Things had been going well until his mother had died last year, making matters worse.

  ‘I’m okay,’ he said as if trying to reassure himself. ‘Better than last week, but worse than I’ll be after I hear your voice for a few more minutes.’

  I smiled and relaxed a little. Jackson always set me at ease because it was like talking to an old friend. I often found it strange that if I passed him in the street I would have no idea who he was. But I knew more about the inner workings of his mind than anyone else on the planet, other than his doctor. Whenever he got through to another operator, he would ask to be patched through to me, no matter how long he had to wait.

  I hadn’t thought about this as a career choice when I was younger. I’d wanted to be a counsellor or support worker because I liked to help people, enjoyed seeing a smile at the end of the tears. But uni had been daunting for me and I’d found myself sinking in a sea of people who seemed to be far surer about everything than I was. I hadn’t known what I’d missed, if there was a book I’d failed to read or a class I’d somehow not attended, but everyone else seemed to know far more than I did and, in the end, I’d decided to leave that confusing world behind.

  I kept in touch with my friends who were still at uni, doing the drinking and partying part of student life in lieu of the actual student part. That’s how I met Joel. I worked in cafés for a while, a carpet shop for a little bit, but after working for years in jobs that made nothing but money and did nothing of greater value for the world, I decided to volunteer at the Healthy Minds helpline. I had only planned on staying for a couple of months, but six months later I was still there and the office manager had offered me one of the very few paid positions. I’d snapped up the offer in a millisecond.

  I loved helping people. I loved putting the phone down and knowing that the person who’d called was freer and happier than they had been when I’d picked up. But the job wasn’t always so rosy. I could usually tell within thirty seconds if a call was going to be a suicidal one or not and whenever those dreaded calls came in, my stomach would bunch up in knots and my heart would hammer in my chest. Not that they happened as often as people might think. But when they did all moisture would leave my mouth and I would find myself calm and reassuring on the outside, but inside a maelstrom of anxiety was raging. Because all it takes to tip someone over from thinking about it to actually doing it, is one badly constructed sentence, one thoughtlessly uttered phrase – and that’s a lot of pressure.

  You could always tell when Ned’d had a suicidal call. We referred to them as hard calls, because that’s exactly what they were. Hard for them, hard for us.

  He’d had a particularly bad one a couple of years ago and it just so happened that that call happened on his birthday. He’d been happy for the majority of the day, which was odd for him because he usually detested his birthday. Barry, the office manager, had presented him with a cake and we’d all sung to him. Then he’d got back to work and answered the call that would put a stop to his birthday joviality. He never knew what happened to the person on the other end of the line and, in some ways, that’s even worse than knowing the truth, because ambiguity allows for hope and there is no crueller thing in this world than hope.

  Jackson had been a hard call on a few occasions, but not today. Today all he wanted to do was chat and talk about his day at work and how he’d been feeling. The doctor was trying him on a new course of anti-anxiety medication and he said that, so far, it was working a treat. We talked about how he was ordering himself a curry, and how he’d be setting up the first season of Game of Thrones, ready to watch once the delivery man arrived.

  It was fifteen minutes before he signed off with his usual ‘Ta-ra, Bab’ and then he was go
ne.

  I sat back in my chair, seeing that all of the other calls were being handled at the moment, and I looked out of the window again. The light outside was turning from dusk to darkness and I caught sight of my reflection in the glass. My hair was no longer holding the delicate beachy wave, which I’d attempted with great success this morning when Joel had left, after watching a YouTube tutorial on ten different uses for flat irons. It had now fallen both flat and frizzy, which I didn’t even think was possible. I grabbed one of the decade-old bobbles from beside my monitor and twisted my unruly locks into a topknot.

  I saw Ned in the reflection of the window as he made his way over, coming back in from a meeting with Barry.

  ‘If you’re quite done admiring yourself, Barry’s got a favour to ask,’ he said when he reached his cubicle and leaned one elbow nonchalantly on the partition between our desks. Barry was the single least inspiring person I’d ever encountered. Even the resigned timbre of his voice was enough to sap the enthusiasm from any conversation. And yet, he was such a good counsellor that he’d started as a volunteer and worked his way up to manager over the eight years he’d been here.

  ‘Admiring wouldn’t be the right word,’ I replied. ‘Loathing would be a good alternative, berating maybe.’

  ‘What do I keep telling you? You need to leave Joel behind. He’s no good for you,’ he said with an air of I told you so about him.

  ‘I know.’ I sighed. ‘Now what is it that Barry wants me to do?’

  ‘That new volunteer, Caleb, he’s stuck in traffic and will be a tad late. Do you mind covering until he arrives?’

  ‘Fine. Anything to take my mind off how much of a tit I am.’ I sent a smile his way.

  He glanced around to check that no one was paying us any attention and whispered, ‘I got some mince on my lunch break. You up for spag bol and a marathon of Cold Case Files?’

  ‘Sounds like perfection,’ I whispered back before turning to the screen and readjusting my headset. Ned eyeballed Beryl, the volunteer opposite me, and slid back into his cubicle as if he’d just successfully pulled off a covert op.

  Ned and I had got along well ever since I started here five years ago. He’d been here a little longer than me and was one of the others who were paid for their time here. We sat in the far back corner, a coveted spot that we’d earned from years of consistently moving along a desk when someone left until we finally got our chosen seats. He was in his forties, although I didn’t know where exactly as he was always very vague on the subject. He was shorter than average with a longer than average neck, which I am sure is trying to make up for the deficit in leg length. He has large brown eyes and his hair is short, dark and unremarkable. He is, in almost every way, very plain. But he possesses that thing that some people have, that glimmer of something that shines out and puts a glow over everything else. I know that a lot of the women in the office fancy him but he’s always just been good old platonic Ned to me.

  Ned and his wife had separated several years ago and I think that she’d messed him around for much longer than any decent woman should have. He lived alone in a huge Victorian detached house on one of the most sought-after suburban roads in town and I think that he was just as lonely as I was. When I’d started at the helpline, I’d been living in a shitty little flat above a kebab shop on a road that, let’s just say was in a less desirable postcode. Joel and I had moved in there together a year after leaving university and three weeks after moving in, there was a drive-by shooting at the end of the road, but luckily the only victim had been the driver’s side door of a Peugeot 206.

  Joel and I lived crammed together in the tiny little hovel for years, before our relationship fell apart and he left to go back home and live with his parents. I’d struggled to keep up the payments alone, not that Joel had contributed much towards rent when he lived there anyway, and the air inside the flat always smelled like three-day-old doner meat and mint yogurt, which after surprisingly little time of living there, had put me off kebabs for life.

  Ned and I had quickly become good friends after I’d had an emotional breakdown in the toilets at work, during a particularly bitchy phone call from my landlady, and Ned had heard me crying from the hallway. He’d taken me out for a cheer-up Chinese and asked me if I wanted to move in with him as a lodger. It made sense – he had that huge empty house and I hated my horrid little flat. He only wanted half the amount of rent that I was already paying and he said it would be nice to have someone around to watch true crime documentaries with in the evenings and that having someone else there would make him feel less guilty about putting the heating on.

  I waited out the month in my flat and moved in with Ned within the fortnight, leaving the kebab-scented sofa behind.

  Twenty minutes into my overtime and Caleb still hadn’t shown. Ned wasn’t done for another hour, so I was in no rush to get home, mind. I didn’t want any spare time to ponder on missed opportunities with handsome Irishmen and opportunities that I wished had been missed with ex-boyfriends.

  The beep of a new call sounded through the headset and I straightened myself in my chair. I took a breath, donned my calm and reassuring tone and accepted the call.

  ‘Hello, you’re through to Healthy Minds. Can I ask your name?’

  The only response that came was a slight whoosh of wind as it brushed against the mouthpiece. I waited a second or two before trying again.

  ‘Hello? Are you there?’ I heard someone inhale. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi.’ The voice came from the other end of the line.

  ‘Hi there. How are you doing?’ It was a regular question, one that was asked every day out in the world and very rarely was it answered truthfully. But here, in this office and all the other offices like it, the prescribed answer wasn’t necessary. Here we always strived to get the truth.

  The line crackled, the connection fizzing in and out of clarity.

  ‘I-I don’t —ow —ed.’

  ‘I’m having trouble hearing you. Is it possible to move around a little to see if we can get a better connection?’ I scrunched up my face, as if this would somehow help, and pressed my earphones against my ears.

  I heard movement and a moment later the voice came through clear.

  ‘Hi, can you hear me now?’ he asked and something landed in my stomach like a lead weight.

  ‘Yeah, I can hear you,’ I replied. ‘How are you feeling this evening?’

  ‘I’ve had better days I’m not gonna lie to yer,’ the man answered, his Irish accent sending a shiver through me. Could it really be him? No, surely not. There had to be more than one Irishman living in Birmingham, hadn’t there? But he sounded so very like him.

  What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t let him unload his woes onto me without letting him know who I was, could I?

  ‘Your name wouldn’t happen to be Charlie, would it?’ my mouth asked before my brain had signed off on it.

  ‘Erm … yeah,’ he responded, nonplussed. ‘Do I, err, do I know yer?’

  ‘I think I may have thrown my lunch at you yesterday.’ I chuckled through my words nervously.

  ‘Nell?’ he asked. ‘From the café?’

  I laughed through a nervous breath, a little chuffed that he’d remembered my name, and nodded even though he couldn’t see it. ‘What a small world, hey? Although, we both do live in the same city and only ran into each other yesterday, so maybe not so small and, for the love of God, I should stop talking and let you say what you rang to say. That’s if you even want to talk to me. I could put you on to someone who doesn’t have an aggressive sandwich-based history with you, if you’d like.’

  ‘Jesus, you really weren’t lyin’ about that verbal diarrhoea, were yer?’

  ‘Not even slightly, no.’ I chuckled nervously again. ‘So, what made you call today?’

  ‘Erm …’ He took a deep breath and the sound of his feet pacing found my ears. ‘I feel like an eejit doing this, but I just called because I’m worried about my uncle. He’s been a b
it weird lately.’

  ‘Weird how?’ I questioned, my brain quickly switching from giggly flirtation to serious counsellor.

  ‘Oh, you know, gettin’ distant, closed off, that kind of thing. He used to talk so much that you’d be offering him money to stop, but lately it’s been nothin’ but one-word answers.’

  ‘What’s your uncle’s name?’ I asked.

  ‘Carrick.’

  ‘Has he spoken to you about this or are you just picking up on his behaviour?’

  ‘They’re just observations,’ he replied. ‘Thing is, I’m terrible at this kind of thing. I’d probably just end up makin’ it worse, so that’s why I called yer.’

  I opened my mouth to ask if Carrick might consider talking to me and agree to a call with both of us, but before I could get the words out, Charlie was speaking again. He scoffed in disbelief. ‘I-I just don’t believe this,’ he said, sounding slightly embarrassed. ‘What are the odds that it’s you who picks up my call?’

  ‘I know.’ I’d spent all day cursing myself for not being brave enough to ask for his number and I felt like I couldn’t let a second chance slip away from me without at least trying. I looked around, checking that Ned was on a call before pulling myself right up against the edge of my desk, lowering my head to the surface and hushing my voice to an almost whisper.

  ‘This is gonna sound a little … odd. But, what would you say if I suggested that we carry on this conversation … not over the phone?’

  ‘I’m listening.’ I thought I heard the inclination of a smile in his voice.

  ‘Well, I should be finishing work within the next half hour and I wondered if you wanted to, you know, carry on this chat in person? Feel free to say no and to forget that I ever spoke, because I’m pretty sure I could get fired for asking you this, but I really enjoyed speaking with you yesterday and I’m getting kinda hungry and I know you wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity to see me eat again.’