‘How could I possibly pass up that opportunity. Where shall I meet yer?’
‘Really?’ I asked, astonished. ‘That was easy.’
‘Hey now,’ he said suavely. ‘I won’t have yer running all over town tellin’ everyone I’m easy, okay? I’ve an untarnished reputation to uphold. So, shall I meet yer at work?’
‘Sure,’ I said and gave him the address, my face so close to the desk to avoid being overheard that the heat of my breath bounced back onto my face.
‘I’ll see yer soon then, Nell.’ The sound of my name on his voice made me grin from ear to ear.
‘See you soon.’ The line went dead and I breathed an excited laugh into the desk.
‘What’s got you going all giggly?’ Ned’s accusatory voice made me jump and I flung myself around in my chair so fast that I rolled all the way to the window, my knee bouncing against the floor-to-ceiling glass pane as I came to a stop.
‘Nothing,’ I said rather unconvincingly. ‘Change of plan. I’m going out after work, so I’m gonna have to take a rain check on spag bol and true crime.’
‘Please tell me that you’re not going with Joel.’ He pouted and tilted his head.
‘It will be a Joel-free evening.’ From the corner of my eye, I saw the flustered mess of who I assumed was now a very late Caleb come crashing through the door, his lanyard twisted around his neck and looped under his arm as if he’d put it on while flying around in one of those skydiving simulators. ‘And I think that’s my cue.’ I signed off the computer, grabbed my notes and made my way to Barry’s office, with excitement zinging in my stomach like popping candy.
Chapter Four
I sighed into the smudged mirror of the poorly maintained bathroom and wondered what tricks I could pull out of my sleeve to make myself look a little less like I’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. My hair had begun to break free of the elastic that held it in a topknot. The messy bun slowly sliding down the right side of my head like an ice cream, slipping from its cone on a hot day. I tucked my finger under the bobble and pulled it free, my hair knotting around it and sending a sharp pain down into my scalp as it tugged against the roots. I hissed and untangled the strands before letting my hair fall down in a curtain of chestnut mess. I combed it with my fingers and scrunched the ends to try and make it presentable before wiping the eyeliner from beneath my eyes and pinching my cheeks to give them a tiny bit of colour.
The sound of loud, tuneless music drummed through the door and into my skull and I wondered how people possibly enjoyed this type of noise. I could cope with there being no words, it was the lack of anything other than a bassline that made me question its validity as music.
I turned away from the mirror and opened the door, the music assaulting me with its loudness as I stepped back into the bar.
The Street Food Market was somewhat crowded, for a Thursday night, and the air hung with the mingling smells that drifted in from the various food trucks outside. The trucks collected in a courtyard three days a week, decorated with fairy lights and neon signs, selling everything from pimped-up brownies to Indian fish and chips, a miasma of all the combined foods making one delicious odour. Aside from the street food, there were also three bars, each boasting a different theme. I’d been here a few times before and tried them all at least once, but this time we’d opted to try the bar at the far end, a 1920s-themed one with pied floor tiles and plush red seating.
I weaved my way through the crowd back to where I’d left Charlie at the bar, perched on a tall stool and picking unenthusiastically at some jerk chicken with a wooden fork. He smiled goofily as I pulled myself up onto the stool beside him. The man who’d sold it to us had, I think, been borderline insane and, when Charlie had asked how spicy the food was, he had replied, ‘It’ll slap you in the face and take you shopping.’ Neither of us had known exactly what that meant and if it was even a good thing to say about what you were going to put in your mouth. He’d been such a born salesman that we hadn’t been able to turn away without parting with what seemed like a great deal of money for such a small portion.
‘How’s the food?’ I asked, catching the eye of the barmaid and signalling for a refill of our empty beer glasses. ‘Did it slap you in the face and take you shopping?’
‘Not exactly how I’d describe it. It’s more like eating napalm,’ he said, touching the fork to his tongue and wincing a few moments later when the heat hit him.
‘That’s the mild one.’ I chuckled, reaching over, taking a piece with my fingers and popping it into my mouth. The heat was most certainly there, though it didn’t make me turn puce like Charlie. He let the fork slump back into the cardboard tray and pushed it towards me.
‘Be my guest. My poor Irish tongue can’t handle it.’ The bartender brought over two frothing pints, one of which Charlie grabbed and glugged until it quelled the burning in his mouth. I tapped my card to the card reader and the bartender sent me a wink.
I picked up the wooden fork and ate the rest of our ‘shared’ meal in what I expect was a matter of seconds. When I looked up, he was watching me with fondness. I blushed and quickly wiped at my mouth with my sleeve.
‘Sorry. I tend to forget that the rest of the world exists when I eat. I’m sure it’s horrifying to witness.’
‘Not at all,’ he countered.
I pushed away the empty tray and reached for my beer.
I had a surprisingly high tolerance for alcohol for someone of my size and so two beers were nothing to worry about. I sipped at the cold beer and felt it mingle with the spice on my tongue, the bubbles aggravating it before the coolness calmed it again.
‘So, tell me about Carrick,’ I said and his body language changed instantly. He looked at me through dark, fanning lashes but didn’t reply. I shrugged my eyebrows and tilted my head. I could tell that he didn’t really want to talk about it, that pushing away whatever it was that was playing on his mind was his way of dealing with his worry, but it was my job to extract the unextractable.
‘We don’t have to.’ He exhaled loudly through his nose and looked back to his beer. ‘You’ve finished work for the day. You don’t want to be talking to me about this kinda stuff now.’
‘I met you before you called today. This isn’t work, this is me helping a friend.’ I tentatively threw the idea out there. Sure, we hadn’t known each other for very long and I felt my heart go a little haywire whenever he met my eyes, but why couldn’t we be friends?
‘A friend?’ he asked, his crooked smile bringing a cheeky look to his face. ‘Do you even know my last name?’
‘No. But you only really need to know last names if you’re going to be sleeping together, don’t you?’ My cheeks burned as I realised what I’d just said. ‘I … I mean, isn’t that the rule?’
He laughed under his breath but his face was blushing a little too. ‘Don’t get ahead of yourself; you’ll have to buy me a drink first.’ He looked from me to the beer in his hand with mock surprise. ‘Well, would yer look at that.’ His eyes were playful as he sipped from his glass and looked at me over the rim. ‘It’s Stone, by the way,’ he uttered after swallowing. ‘My last name.’
‘That’s a good last name,’ I babbled. ‘Strong. Both in the sense of how it sounds and, you know, stone.’ Oh God, shut up! I looked down at my hands lying limply in my lap and prayed that no more words would fall out of my mouth. After a few moments of awkward silence, I thought of something to say and opened my mouth to ask him a question, but before the sound could find its way out of my mouth, he was already speaking.
‘So, Carrick is this upbeat, annoying, in yer face kinda guy. I think that maybe he was meant to be a twin and, in the womb, he absorbed enough personality for two people.’
‘And he’s changed?’
He nodded solemnly.
‘Any reason?’ I asked. I noticed how my demeanour had changed, my voice got lower, more authoritative but not too much to be off-putting. My brow took on a pensive furrow and my hands clasped
in my lap.
‘Heartbreak, feelin’ lost in life, the whole shebang really.’
‘Do you think he’d talk to me?’
He shook his head with certainty. ‘No, I highly doubt it. But I can ask.’
‘Please do. Sometimes the most unlikely of people are just waiting for someone to ask them how they are. Think of it like a bottle of champagne. The cork is always jammed right in there, keeping it all inside, but all it takes is a little shake and it all comes spewing out.’
He chuckled. ‘I’ve never heard anyone speak like you before.’
I looked at him from under furrowed brows. ‘Is that a good thing?’
‘I think so.’ His mouth curled into a one-sided smile and it did things to me that I never thought a smile could do. ‘So, tell me about yerself. Seeing as we’re now wholly committed to this friend business. What’s your family lookin’ like?’
‘My family is a little bit unconventional.’
‘Right, that sounds like a gold mine of conversation. Start from the beginning.’ He leaned forward a touch, holding his beer with one hand, while the other messed, idly, with a loose thread on the hem of his shirt.
‘Erm, okay, well, my mum is this really intelligent, beautiful woman. She went to uni in London and became a geologist. She’s one of the people who find the best places to build off-shore wind farms. But when she was twenty-one, she had the first, and only, irresponsible night of her entire existence with a man that she didn’t recall the next day. Nine months later, I arrived, hence no brothers and sisters.’
‘Firstly—’ he held up a finger and leaned forward a little more ‘—that sounds like an awesome job. Secondly, you don’t know who your dad is?’
‘No idea. Neither does she.’
‘Does that bother you?’
‘Not really. It did when I was younger and I saw my friends with their dads, but I had my uncle to fill that role. I lived with him when my mum was off working, but he died when I was sixteen and so it was just me and her after that.’
‘Sorry to hear that.’ He looked a little saddened.
‘It’s fine … now,’ I said as he took a swig of his beer. ‘Then there’s Ned, the guy I live with.’ I don’t know if it was just wishful thinking on my part, but I think I saw his shoulders sag. ‘We work together, that’s how we met, and when I broke up with Joel, I moved in as a lodger.’
A sudden loud cough came as Charlie seemed to choke on some of his drink, cleared his throat several times and lifted a balled fist to his mouth to cover it. ‘You live and work with this guy? This Ned?’ he asked with furrows forming on his brow.
‘Uh-huh,’ I replied.
‘So, yer live with this man, but you’ve never … yer know?’
I scrunched up my face, horrified by the mere thought of it. ‘Absolutely not! He’s old enough to be my dad. He could be my dad for all I know. Oh God, what a distressing thought.’
‘Okay, so no nookie with the co-worker. And you’re not married or betrothed?’ he checked. I shook my head. ‘No boyfriends that are gonna come up and start a fight with me for having a drink with their girl?’ he carried on.
‘Nope, not anymore.’
‘Sounds like there’s a story there.’
‘Not really. There’s only ever been the aforementioned Joel.’
‘And who is Joel?’
Wow, we were really getting the exes conversation out of the way straight out of the gate, weren’t we?
‘Met at uni. I was with him for seven and a half years. Now I’m not, but he’s eager to get back together,’ I said simply, leaving out the occasional booty call part that made me ashamed of myself.
‘Who broke up with who?’
‘Me with him.’
‘Why was that?’
‘He quit his job and ploughed all of his money, and a great deal of mine, into his online web-building company. He also gambled a lot online, which I knew nothing about until I finally read one of my bank statements instead of throwing it in the kitchen drawer and saw that he’d spent over two hundred pounds that month on Betfred. By the end of the second year of living together, we were so broke that we almost got evicted.’ I sighed and felt the ache of remembered anxiety. ‘We started shouting instead of talking and the only time we ever touched was when we passed in the hallway and when I handed him his dinner. In the end I was so miserable that I decided I’d rather be on my own than with him. Funny, isn’t it, how eighteen months of misery can obliterate years of happiness?’
‘It’s a shame.’
I waved a passive hand. ‘That was almost two years ago now though. I’m over it,’ I said, although that wasn’t one hundred per cent true. ‘What about you? Someone like you must have left a trail of broken hearts trailing across the Irish Sea.’ I sipped my beer, realising that my glass was already half empty, although I didn’t remember drinking it.
‘Not really.’ He glugged down the rest of his beer and turned to the bar. ‘Do you want another drink?’ I took the hint that this was a touchy subject for him and decided to move on.
‘I’m okay, thanks.’ I held up my glass to show how much I had left. He signalled the bartender and ordered another pint. ‘So, seeing as we’ve tackled my family, what’s the story with yours? Tell me more about Carrick.’
‘Erm, nothin’ too interestin’. My parents still live in Westport, County Mayo, with Carrick, who’s my dad’s brother. He’s quite a bit younger than my dad and only twelve years older than me and so he was sort of like a brother.’
‘What’s he like?’
Charlie laughed at a memory that I could almost see as it played out inside his head. ‘He’s unpredictable and loud, forgetful, obnoxious and tactless. But he’s kind and good. He only acts out because he’s lonely, I guess.
‘He drives my mam up the wall sometimes. Him and my da run the family business and my parents live in this little house with panoramic views of Clew Bay. There’s this mountain called Croagh Patrick on the opposite side of the water. Pilgrims travel to it every last Sunday in July and climb it. Some of them do it barefoot, some on their knees and you have a great view of the mountain from my parents’ place.’
‘They climb a mountain on their knees?’ I asked, astounded. ‘How tall is this mountain?’
‘About two and a half thousand feet.’
‘Holy crap,’ I said, then worried that I might have offended him. He was Irish after all, and I was only now realising how much I blasphemed in everyday life. ‘Sorry.’
‘For what?’ he asked, frowning.
‘Taking the Lord’s name in vain, or whatever.’
‘Ah, cuss away. It matters nothin’ to me.’ He smiled, his fingers stroking the beads of condensation on the outside of his glass, as his eyes stayed locked on to mine. ‘I like a person who says what they’re thinking.’
I’d never had a moment like this, where everything else bleeds away and you know exactly what the other is thinking, simply by the look in their eyes. I came over all hot and flustered, running a hand through my hair and forcing myself to look away from him before I gave too much away.
‘So …’ I cleared my throat, my voice strangely breathy. ‘You were saying about Carrick?’
‘Yeah, erm …’ He looked down too, drawing a hand through his stubble and pressing his knuckles to his lips for a moment before carrying on. ‘Carrick has this big house high up on the hill in Knockranny, not far from my parents’ house. It’s big and it’s filled with all that fancy shite he likes, but he barely spends any time there. He’s always at my parents’ place, livin’ in the summerhouse out back.’
‘Why’s that?’ I asked as his next drink was delivered.
‘He can’t stand his own company. He’s funny that way.’
I smiled. ‘He definitely sounds like he’s got a lot on his mind. Is there someone over there he can talk to?’
He shook his head. ‘Na, Mammy would lose her mind with the shame of it.’
‘There’s nothing to be as
hamed of.’
‘I know that.’ He took his new pint in hand and started on that one. ‘But family … it’s complicated, yer know.’
‘Sure is.’
He held my gaze for a moment or two before speaking again. ‘There doesn’t seem to be many people in your life. Yer seem a little lonely. Is that right?’
‘Maybe, I haven’t given it much thought,’ I lied.
‘I don’t think it’s somethin’ yer give much thought to. I think it’s one of those things that you wake up one day and it’s just there.’
‘Are you speaking from experience?’ I asked.
‘Maybe.’ He smirked. ‘I haven’t given it much thought either.’
By the time the taxi pulled up on the kerb outside home, Charlie was needing a little more propping up than he had before. He’d gradually slid over from his side of the car to mine, his weight pressing against my shoulder as he stared, blankly, out the window. ‘This is me,’ I said, feeling a tug-of-war inside my stomach. On one end of the rope was my bed, warm and soft and awaiting me with open sheets; on the other was Charlie and how much I didn’t want to just go inside the house and possibly never see him again.
‘I’ll get out here too.’ He slurred a little as he spoke and unbuckled his seatbelt. I thanked the driver, Ahmed (his children were called Pritika and Arnab and they’d both gone to uni to study law).
‘You don’t have to,’ I replied. ‘I’m sure I can make it to the door without being attacked.’
But he was already out of the car.
I got out and the car swiftly disappeared. I joined Charlie on the pavement, looking up at the large Victorian house, dark except for a warm yellow light behind the curtain of Ned’s room.
‘Nice place,’ he muttered.
‘Yeah, it’s not too shabby, maybe a little run-down.’
He slowly turned to face me, his eyelids hanging at half-mast over his eyes.
‘This evening didn’t turn out like I thought it would,’ he said as fine rain began to dust us both.
At First Sight Page 4