At First Sight

by Hannah Sunderland

  I wondered if Charlie and I would ever get to those sickening levels of cliché where you don’t even care that you’re a cliché anymore, because the endorphins are making you feel all ridiculous and fuzzy inside?

  I looked back at Charlie who was frowning at the menu like it’d just insulted him. He was wearing a red lumberjack shirt, open over that same Night of the Living Dead T-shirt he’d been wearing when I’d first met him and I found myself smiling at his charming boyishness and the memory of us two lone zombies, sat side by side in a cinema of regular-looking people. He had an air of nervous energy tonight, his aura pulsing with anxiety.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked.

  He glanced up from his menu, not maintaining eye contact for long and then looking back down. ‘Grand. Yerself?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I replied, unconvinced. ‘So, what is this in aid of?’

  He looked up and sat back in his chair. ‘Well, I thought, seeing as, so far, I’ve caused yer to violate rules at work, been a bastard, ghosted yer and dropped the bombshell that is my mental health, I’d give yer somethin’ nice for a change.’ He sipped his water and crunched through an ice cube with careless, clearly unsensitive teeth. ‘Yer deserve things like this after what you do for everyone else all day.’

  I grinned as the waiter arrived and took our order.

  I ordered a glass of red wine, which Charlie upgraded to a bottle. We got olives to start and eventually, he decided on a pepperoni pizza. I decided to go for ravioli, because it seemed the most graceful to eat of the foods on offer. I did glance down at my pale blue shirt when I read the words ‘rich tomato sauce’ and uttered a silent apology to my later self, the one with a nail brush and a tub of Oxi Action. I added on the garlic bread that I’d been craving and the waiter congratulated us hyperbolically.

  He sashayed away, humming as he went, and returned almost immediately with a pot of olives on a saucer, toothpicks in little paper sleeves sitting around it in a circle.

  ‘I’ll pay for my half,’ I said, unprompted. I was always uncomfortable when other people paid for stuff for me. This was probably due to Joel never paying for anything. In seven and a half years I could count on one hand the number of times he’d taken me out for a meal and paid. I could, however, count on several thousand hands the number of times he’d ‘forgotten’ his wallet or his card had been ‘surprisingly’ declined and I’d ended up having to foot the bill.

  ‘If yer want to pay then that’s fine, don’t want to offend, but I did ask yer here and so I’m more than happy to pay. Think of it as a thank you for puttin’ in the overtime with me.’

  He reached over to the olive bowl and unsheathed a toothpick from the surrounding saucer, twiddling it between his fingers.

  ‘I enjoy it,’ I said. ‘My job, I mean. It’s not like I feel that I’m owed anything for helping people.’

  ‘And that is why you’re a significantly better person than the rest of us.’ He smiled and ran a hand through his hair. ‘You’ve enough patience for ten people. You’re a good egg.’

  A good egg? Sexy, I thought.

  ‘I have this one caller. I’ve been talking to him for years and whenever he calls, he only ever wants to talk to me.’

  ‘Well, I can certainly understand that.’ He gave me a subtle smile and an intensely blue stare that made my chest flutter. The neck of his T-shirt was stretched from overwear, the deep curve of it hanging lower than normal and showing the smattering of dark hair that sat on his sternum. I paused for a moment while I regained control of my thoughts, dragging them out of the gutter and back to the moment in hand.

  ‘He’s my favourite caller,’ I said when I finally found my voice.

  ‘I’ll try not to get offended by that.’

  ‘Present company excluded, obviously.’

  ‘Do yer think you’ll do it your whole life, or is this just a steppin’ stone?’

  ‘I never planned on staying this long,’ I admitted. ‘I feel like there’s so much more I want to do, but I worry about what would happen if I left.’

  ‘What do yer mean?’ He leaned forward and crossed his arms, resting them on the edge of the table.

  I stopped twiddling the toothpick and stabbed a green olive, as the black ones always tasted as if they were going off to me. ‘I wanted to work with people, not phone lines. Like with Jac—’ I stopped talking, realising just in time that I was about to violate Jackson’s confidentiality. ‘Like with my favourite caller. I know him so intimately and I’d go as far to class him as a buddy, yet I’ve never met him. I’ve helped him so much over the years, all from the other end of a phone. Imagine what I could have done had we been in the same room.’

  He nodded understandingly.

  ‘And lately I’ve kinda been thinking …’ I stopped and looked down at my hands, not knowing if what I was about to say was going to sound stupid or not. ‘I’ve been thinking about going back to uni and finishing the course I started.’

  ‘I think that’s a great idea. Why did you quit in the first place?’ he asked.

  I flinched at the word ‘quit’. It sounded so aggressively final. ‘I don’t think I was ready. I had no idea what I was doing and I saw my friends from school having the quintessential university experience and that’s just not what was happening for me. But I feel like the pressure to go out and get drunk and act like an idiot wouldn’t apply to me now that I’m older. I actually think I might enjoy learning again. But I don’t know if I can leave.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because what happens to my callers if I go? What happens to Ned?’

  ‘Ned’s a big boy. He’ll cope. Granted, the caller situation is a tough one, but couldn’t you keep in touch?’

  ‘It’s not really allowed – not that I haven’t broken the rules before.’ I smirked his way, placed the olive into my mouth and rolled the bitter little ovoid around on my tongue. ‘Anyway, that’s enough talk about work. Switch off, Nell,’ I said, the olive still clutched between my molars.

  The waiter returned with our bottle of wine and two glasses. He poured a small amount into my glass, stopped and looked at me expectantly. I looked worriedly at Charlie, lifted the glass, took a sip and then looked at the expectant waiter’s face with slight panic. I nodded. ‘Yep, that’s wine.’

  ‘Eccellente.’ He chuckled. I did wonder if this man was actually Italian or if he was required as part of the job description to pretend. Was he really Luca from Sicily, as his name tag and accent suggested, or was he something far less impressive, like Kyle from Small Heath?

  ‘Luca’ grinned from ear to ear and topped up my glass before pouring Charlie’s and trotting off to the kitchen.

  ‘What shall we toast to?’ I asked, holding my glass ceremoniously up in the air.

  He looked a frown my way as he thought, before he too raised his glass up to join mine. ‘To whoever slapped that sticker on the clock tower,’ he said.

  I winced a little at the thought of what would have happened if that sticker hadn’t been there and he hadn’t had easy access to our number. It was a miracle really that it was there. The person who’d put it there was the one who’d really saved Charlie’s life. ‘To the phantom sticker slapper,’ I said, chinking my glass to his.

  Charlie raised the glass to his lips and took a large swig, his pupils upturned to the ceiling as if he was nervous. ‘You okay?’ I asked, taking a sip myself and washing the bitter olive flavour from my tongue.

  ‘Mmm-hmm.’ He swallowed and placed the glass down on the table, but held on to it with delicate, nervous fingers.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, sitting forward.

  ‘See.’ He sighed. ‘Part of the reason I wanted to bring yer here tonight was to tell yer what yer want to know, about why I was at the tower that night and the time before, but now I feel like a jackass because we’re havin’ a nice time and this is a nice place and I don’t want yer to forever think of this place as the place that I told yer that my wife died.’ I felt a weight drop into
my stomach. ‘Ah feck!’

  ‘You had a wife and she …?’ I managed to say before my voice failed me.

  ‘Died, yes.’

  ‘W-what? When?’ was all I managed to say.

  ‘Two years ago, next Saturday.’ He raised a black olive, slick with oil and herbs to his mouth and took it from the cocktail stick with his teeth.

  ‘Oh my God, Charlie. I’m so sorry.’

  He winced and held his hand up. ‘Please, don’t.’ He swallowed and looked up, meeting my eye again, but his gaze was harder this time. ‘When … it happened, that’s all people ever said to me. After a week or two, the pity got unbearable.’

  I was still so shocked that I didn’t know what to say. Everything I’d learned over the years about how to talk to someone who was grieving left my head and I felt completely unequipped for the conversation. ‘I’d had a lot of friends, before, but they filtered away pretty damn sharp when I turned out to not be as fun as I used to be. It seems that people givin’ a shit about what you’re goin’ through has an expiry date.’ He stabbed another olive with a little more anger than the last and ate that one too. ‘They all said things like “time heals all wounds” and “she’s in a better place now”. Fecking bullshit, all of it. Time’s done sod all and, I’ll never tell my mother this, but I don’t believe in all that heaven stuff.’

  ‘I’m sure they just wanted to reassure you, make you feel better,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it didn’t help.’

  He picked up his glass and took a large swig.

  ‘How did it happen?’ I asked. I realised that I was leaning across the table now, waiting with bated breath for what he would say next.

  He winced again. ‘Can’t yet.’

  ‘Okay, no rush.’

  ‘But can I ask her name?’

  He cleared his throat loudly. ‘Abi.’

  ‘Abi,’ I repeated.

  He sat forward, his elbows leaning against the surface of the table. ‘I don’t want you to think that I’m lookin’ for sympathy or anythin’ like that. I just wanted yer to know what it was that had me feelin’ like shite the day I called yer.’

  ‘I know that must have been hard. Thank you for telling me,’ I said. ‘How long were you together?’

  He frowned as he tried to calculate it, those deep furrows etching themselves into his brow. ‘Married twelve years, together twenty-one, on and off.’

  My eyes widened even more. ‘Wow, that’s a long time. You must have been so young when you got together.’

  ‘Fourteen,’ he told me. ‘She used to joke and say that we only got together because we lived in such a small town and there weren’t any other options. That wasn’t the truth of it though.’ He smiled a sad smile and sipped at his wine again.

  I couldn’t imagine loving someone for that long. Seven and a half years had felt like a struggle, but I guess that was because Joel and I weren’t meant to be together. Maybe we’d had that kind of love, once, but it hadn’t been long-lived.

  ‘When … if you want to talk about it, then I’m happy to listen,’ I said.

  His nervous fingers stopped fidgeting around the slender stem of the wine glass. ‘That wouldn’t be weird for yer?’ he asked, with narrowed eyes.

  ‘Why … why would it be weird for me?’ I asked, but, in truth, there was no way it wouldn’t be weird for me to sit there while he recounted tales of how much he had and still loved another woman.

  ‘No reason,’ he said, staring meaningfully at me.

  ‘This is what I do for a living and besides that, I … care about you. If I can help, then of course I’ll listen.’

  We ate our food to the tune of a different topic of conversation, but my mind was nothing but a swirling mess of new information. The food went fast and the wine even faster and Charlie got us a second bottle.

  ‘How do you do that?’ I asked as Luca brought the bill over, the tray beneath it bearing little jelly babies.

  ‘Do what?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Tell me something like you just told me and then just have a normal conversation and eat a meal.’

  He thought for a moment and tossed his card onto the receipt. ‘Most of the time I’m okay. The pain is there and it aches, but it’s so constant that I can almost forget about it. But then something happens, and it can be something tiny and insignificant, like an orange scatter cushion that reminds me of Abi’s hair or the smell of bacon that reminds me of Sunday mornings, and the pain flares again.

  ‘And I hate how the pain feels, but it’s the only thing she left me with and I’ve felt it for so long that I feel almost empty when I don’t feel it. So, sometimes I’ll find myself actively triggering it, like prodding a bad tooth, so that I can feel it again. It’s not always there, but when it is, it’s like the oxygen has been pumped from the room and replaced with burning gas.’

  ‘Oh.’ I wasn’t really sure what to say after that, because I knew the feeling he was talking about – not to the extent that he did, but I knew it.

  Charlie paid, although I offered several times, and we were sent on our way by Luca shouting ‘Ciao’ from the doorway. We walked aimlessly along the road with the half bottle of wine that was left, pushed into my bag.

  ‘Yer see, the thing with modern zombie films is that they completely miss the point of what the zombie was meant to represent in the first place.’ He’d been talking about zombie films for a while, as if sitting through a marathon of movies on the subject wasn’t torture enough. As it turned out, he was even more passionate on the subject than I’d thought he was.

  ‘And what was that?’ I asked, my head feeling so very heavy after the barrage of Montepulciano D’abruzzo that I’d just provided it with.

  ‘Zombies are slow. They walk, they don’t run, because they symbolise death followin’ yer. The idea is that no matter how slowly it’s comin’ for yer, it’s always gonna catch up in the end.’

  Was that how he really felt? Like those two nights on the clock tower were always there, in the fog of the horizon, on their way to get him?

  I hummed a sleepy sigh and lay my head down on his shoulder, as he went on about something else zombie-related. I tried to keep up but my brain had turned to mush and my eyelids were slipping down over my tired eyes. I don’t know how long I zoned out on his shoulder for, my legs moving on autopilot as I snoozed, but I was roused by the jarring sound of an ambulance siren in the near distance and opened my eyes to find that we were somewhere I didn’t recognise.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked, blinking the sleepiness from my eyes.

  We stopped walking and he looked up, as if he had no idea either. ‘Ah, sorry. I was too busy dronin’ on that I walked us to my house instead to yours.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I stepped back and put my hands on my hips. ‘If you wanted me to come over then all you had to do was ask,’ I jibed.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ he said, stepping closer, his own eyes semi closed with drunkenness. ‘What woman, or man for that matter, could resist an adorable emotionally crippled, unemployed widower like this?’ He gestured to himself and nodded in a feigned cocky sort of way.

  I chuckled quietly and stepped a little closer. The collar of his shirt was bent the wrong way and poking out over the collar of his jacket.

  I reached up a hand and tucked it back inside, my fingers lingering there, where the fabric sung with the retained warmth of his skin.

  ‘Don’t put yourself down. You’ve a lot of very appealing qualities that a girl, such as myself, but not specifically me, would find … you know … attractive.’

  ‘Oh yeah? And what are these qualities you speak of?’ His hand landed on my arm and I wasn’t sure if it was through affection or the need to stop himself from falling down.

  ‘Well, you’re not hideous and your accent is pretty appealing, some would even say sexy – not me though, I much prefer the dulcet tones of a thoroughbred Brummie.’

  ‘Is that so?’ he asked through a flirtatious smirk. ‘Do go on.’

&nbs
p; ‘Erm, let’s see. Well you have a skill, which is more than can be said for the majority of the population and you have your own place. All positives.’

  ‘Yeah, well I don’t think that my place is anythin’ to get excited about.’

  I looked up at the apartment block that I hadn’t been able to see when I dropped him off the other night. I tried to remember how I’d got home from here, but my addled brain was struggling with keeping me upright, without throwing orienteering into the mix. I squinted until my eyes started co-operating with my brain. The apartment block wasn’t fancy but wasn’t one of those horrid concrete structures either. It wasn’t tall, only three storeys of warm red brick and each apartment seemed to have French doors that opened to an immediate metal fence that ran along the length of the windows. I bet that in the brochures they label them as balconies, but they were about as little like a balcony as you could get, while still using the word to describe it.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Er, because it’s an absolute tip and I’m ashamed to call it mine. You’ll probably die on entrance from inhaling spores, which haven’t killed me, simply because I’ve grown immune to them over time.’

  ‘It can’t be that bad and, anyway, I don’t mind messy houses or messy people for that matter.’

  ‘Explains why you like me then.’ He looked up at a window that I assumed was his and then back at me with apprehension tugging at the muscles in his face.

  ‘It really is just truly an appalling mess.’

  ‘Charlie, I don’t care.’

  He sighed melodramatically and slowly began walking towards the building. ‘All right, but don’t you dare judge me.’

  Charlie’s flat was on the second floor, so we climbed the stairs with the sluggish speed of two people with too much wine running through their veins. Passing the door of number two brought with it the lingering smell of curry and spices that had made me feel equally as likely to knock on the door and ask for a doggy bag or throw up into the tall plastic ficus that sat beside their door. Whoever lived at number three had clearly had a good evening because the smell of rose-scented candles crept under the door along with the sultry, sexy sounds of D’Angelo playing, muffled through the walls. Charlie was a little way ahead of me, ignoring all of the things I was finding interest in. He climbed the last set of stairs and came to a stop on the top floor, next to a pale blue door that bore the number six in dulled silver. He glanced at me as I came to a stop at his side, muted panic in his eyes.