At First Sight

by Hannah Sunderland

  I walked over to the kitchen and started looking around for any form of coffee. Finding a jar of Nescafé in the cupboard and then moving on to the next obstacle that lay between me and caffeine. Mugs.

  I moved over to the sink and washed up two mugs, running away with myself a little and ending up doing the whole lot and scouring the apartment for elusive cups on tables and behind curtains.

  The cat jumped up on the counter and watched every move I made as if it was learning for future use.

  I took my phone from my pocket and saw a couple of text messages on my screen, both from Ned, both from last night. One asked me if I planned on coming home and the second one extended his hopes that I was safe and wasn’t lying in a shallow grave in open farmland. He’d be up for work by now and so I texted him back, apologising for ignoring him and assuring him that I was, in fact, still living, even if it didn’t feel like it. I made myself a coffee in the giant Sports Direct mug, and drank it down, feeling the caffeine chipping away at my hangover, and when I felt a little less like I was about to keel over, I turned my attention to the rest of the flat. Seeing as I was here with nothing to do, I might as well make myself useful.

  I straightened the piles of books, watered the Swiss cheese plant – which I imagined sighed in relief at finally getting some liquid – and cleaned down the coffee table, clicking on the kettle for further caffeine fuel, before I turned my attention to the pile of letters behind the door. I sat down on the mat, sorting them into levels of scariness with the brown ones from the tax office at the top and the flyers from takeaways on the bottom. I made a separate pile of the handwritten envelopes, of which there were many. Some in plain envelopes with blue airmail stickers on them and others in those envelopes with red and blue stripes around the edge. The handwriting looked the same on all of them and so I stacked them all together and put them on the counter by the empty bread bin. The handwriting was sloppy and untidy, but legible, and up in the top left-hand corner of every envelope sat a return address and a name, Carrick Stone.

  Charlie’s uncle – the one he’d concocted a story about when he first me. Why would Carrick be writing actual letters to his nephew and not texts or emails, let alone in such volume? There had to be around ten, all from Carrick, all unopened, and I’d seen more of them when I was tidying, thrust into a drawer in the kitchen. I opened the drawer again and pulled out a further four letters from amongst the detritus of the drawer.

  At the bottom, peeping out from under what looked like a less than pleasant letter from the landlord, was a photograph, glossy-surfaced and dog-eared at the corners. I reached in and pulled it from between the papers, holding it gently by the edges as I’d always been told to and looking at the image of Charlie and a woman who must have been Abi. In the photo they sat together in a booth at what looked like a bar. They were both wearing everyday clothes, except for the cheap-looking veil affixed to a plastic headband that sat atop Abi’s hair and the sash that she wore across her chest that read Just Married. Charlie was looking at her like he couldn’t believe he’d got her, his arms around her tiny waist. Abi stared at the camera, her tongue sticking out and her right eye scrunched up in a wink like young girls do in pictures. She was slender and tall, with pale skin to match Charlie’s and auburn-coloured freckles that dusted the bridge of her nose and the undersides of her eyes. Her hair was long and straight, parted in the middle and the colour of fallen autumn leaves. She was dainty and ethereal-looking, like she wouldn’t look out of place dancing around a pixie’s fire with clothes made from petals.

  Okay, Nancy Drew, snoop time’s over. The suddenness of the thought that I almost heard, made me jump.

  There she was again, like she had been last night, only now I had a face to put to the voice of my conscience disguised as Abi. I could just imagine her, full of sass leaning against the counter with her long arms crossed over her chest. I pushed the picture back under the letters and closed the drawer. I went back to my trusty Sports Direct mug, spooned in three teaspoons of granules before pouring boiling water up to the halfway point.

  Someone’s making herself at home, isn’t she? Even got yerself a favourite mug.

  ‘Shut up,’ I murmured to myself, fully aware of how mental I would look, if there was anyone around to see me, other than a passive-aggressive cat of course. I made my way to the sofa and sat down, setting the coffee aside to cool as the cat came over and plonked himself back down on my knee.

  I grabbed a remote and turned the TV on and the volume down. I stroked the soft head of the cat and quiet purrs arose as I closed my eyes. I wasn’t going to sleep, just resting for a moment.

  Next thing I knew I was woken by the feeling of someone’s weight falling onto the sofa beside me. ‘Well, that’s a miracle if ever I saw one.’ Charlie’s voice made me jump and I turned, bleary-eyed, to find him next to me as an extremely unattractive, mildly terrified groan escaped my lips. I glanced towards the TV and saw that the ten o’clock news was on.

  ‘What is?’ I asked, quickly checking for dribble and smoothing down my hair.

  ‘Magnus, sitting on you, being pleasant. That’s not how he rolls, not with me anyway.’

  ‘Magnus?’ I asked.

  ‘The cat.’ He pointed at what looked like a melted pile of ginger hair in my lap and frowned. ‘He was Abi’s. Little fecker hates the air I breathe. I think he’s sexist, personally.’

  He swigged at his coffee and motioned towards a full cup of steaming coffee sitting on the table. ‘I made you another one. The last one went cold. Thank you for cleanin’ up by the way; you didn’t have to. I feel kinda bad about it to be honest.’

  ‘Don’t be. I was only planning to wash up, but it was helping my hangover to focus on something other than my building urge to throw up and then I ran away with it a little.’

  ‘I’ve needed to do something about it for ages, but the task was so overwhelming that I didn’t know where to start.’

  I reached forward and took my mug, sipping at the liquid and feeling the caffeine hit me almost instantly. I sighed and settled back into the doughy sofa cushion. I sent him a sideways glance as he reached over and attempted to stroke the cat’s head. Magnus looked up before he even made contact, hissed violently, swiped with razor-sharp claws and then stared Charlie down until he withdrew his hand.

  ‘See? I wasn’t lyin’.’

  ‘Oh, before I forget,’ I said. ‘There’s some broken glass in the bedroom. I was going to sweep it up but I couldn’t find a dustpan and brush.’

  ‘Oh, I know about that. It’s fine, leave it,’ he replied, looking down at the coffee cup in his hands. He ran his thumb along the edge of the rim, his lashes downcast over his eyes.

  ‘What are they, the jars?’ I probed.

  ‘Sea glass,’ he said, reaching into the pocket of his jeans, which were rumpled and creased from sleeping all cramped up in the tub, and pulled out the small rounded lump of orange glass. It was a strange shape, like the shape of a bubble that’s still clinging on to the wand.

  ‘She collected it.’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘The number of hours I’ve lost trawling beaches for these little bastards.’ He handed it to me, the almost weightless glass rolling on the skin of my palm. I took it between my thumb and finger and held it up to the light where it was set aflame like a burning ember.

  ‘I’ve never seen orange sea glass before,’ I said, recalling all of the times I’d gone beachcombing with my mum over the years. I’d seen green and clear, the odd brown but never orange.

  ‘It’s really rare. She’d got red ones and turquoise too. She filled those jars with the stuff so that they’d catch the light when it came through the window.’

  I handed the glass back to him and he pushed it back into his pocket. On the TV, the local newsreader handed over to the weatherman, Nathaniel Croome, a tall, perfect-teethed man in the world’s tightest suit trousers. He was somewhat of a local celebrity and a heart-throb amongst mums of the West Midlands.

  �
�Who do yer think’s fathered more children: this weatherman or Michael Bolton?’ Charlie asked, completely changing the topic of conversation.

  ‘Oh, this guy definitely,’ I said, gesturing to Croome, who made love to the camera with every glance. ‘I saw him, from a distance, at the opening of the German Market last year and I’m pretty sure that every woman within a two-metre radius of him got pregnant that day, just by looking at him. Now if you asked the question of how many children have been conceived whilst listening to Michael Bolton, then I don’t think there’s a man alive who could beat that record.’

  I looked over to where he watched me with a quirked eyebrow. ‘Sometimes I worry about yer.’

  ‘Me too, Charlie, me too.’ I chuckled.

  He observed me for a good long moment, before reaching a hand over and placing it on my knee, the one that wasn’t guarded by Magnus, and squeezing.

  ‘Are you feeling okay?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, a little hungover.’

  ‘Did you throw up? Is that why you slept in the bath?’

  ‘No.’ He retracted his hand from my knee and went back to his cup. He took a deep, steady breath and bit his top lip, hard, before speaking again. ‘I think I’m ready,’ he said, gripping his knees with fingers that quickly turned white-knuckled.

  ‘Ready for what?’

  ‘To tell you what happened. If you want to hear it that is.’ He shrugged, looking suddenly nervous.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, shifting around in my seat to face him. ‘You sure you’re ready?’

  He nodded firmly and then pushed himself up from the sofa. ‘Come.’ He held out his hand, his eyes staring into mine with an intensity that made me forget how to breathe. I lay mine in his and he pulled me up, Magnus dropping to the floor with a harrumph.

  He looked at me, swallowed hard and, still looking in my eyes, led me to the bedroom door.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I stood beside the unmade bed, my arms fidgeting nervously at my sides.

  Charlie stood frozen on the other side of the door, as if he was afraid to step over the threshold.

  ‘I’ve never told anyone this, so bear with me.’ He exhaled a heavy breath, his top lip clenched between his front teeth.

  ‘My mammy came home from her knittin’ circle one day when I was fourteen and told me that the ladies had been sayin’ that Siobhan Murphy needed some help,’ he began, his eyes downcast as he talked. ‘Her husband had died about six months back and she was havin’ trouble keepin’ up with the garden and so Mammy had volunteered my services. I wasn’t too happy about it. I was a teenager. The idea of work eatin’ into my band practice time disgusted me, but she told me that I needed to be a good Catholic boy, and go help that poor widowed lady. Patrick, her husband, had had a stroke. He’d come in from the garden after mowing the lawn, sat down in his chair with a glass of beer gettin’ warm on the end table beside him. Next anyone knew he was dead.

  ‘The kids had been sayin’ things ever since Siobhan had holed herself up in her house. Callin’ her a witch and a madwoman. I didn’t join in with the name-callin’ but I must admit, I felt a little nervous goin’ to that house. When she answered the door, I thought I’d got the wrong place. She’d always been a looker, Mrs Murphy. My Uncle Carrick always said so and stared at her arse when he spotted her around town. But in the six months since Mr Murphy had passed, she’d aged about ten years. Her hair used to be this bright red, the colour of flames on a bonfire, but it’d started to turn white and she’d wrapped herself up in these shawls and scarves like bandages, as if she was tryin’ to hold herself together with them.

  ‘She did her best to act normally with me, although I could tell that her brain wasn’t really there with me in that kitchen. She told me where I could find the mower and the rest of Patrick’s gardenin’ tools and at the mention of his name, she began to well up. I can’t handle it when people cry in front of me – I get all teary m’self and I need to go do somethin’ else before I start bawlin’ along with them. I went out to the shed, wadin’ through the grass and weeds that were knee-high. The grass was so heavy it was falling down on top of itself under its own weight and mattin’ into clumps with all the dead grass underneath. I had no idea where to start. I’d never done any gardenin’ in my whole life and this seemed like a baptism of fire into the pastime.

  ‘I found a strimmer in the shed – it was one of the few things that I recognised – and I took it, along with an extension lead, and began hacking away at the grass. It came down easily enough at first, but the thickness of it all was makin’ the blade slow and I was less than a quarter of the way through before I stopped making any progress. I remember sitting down on the pile of cut grass I’d made and sighin’. I was wet through with sweat and stinkin’ to high heaven. I heard this voice call out to me but I couldn’t see where it was coming from. “You don’t know what you’re doin’, do yer?”

  ‘“What gave it away?” I called back into the open air. There was a rustlin’ up in the tall sycamore tree on the opposite side of the garden and after a few moments, I saw a figure sittin’ in its branches.

  ‘“Because, Charlie Stone, you’re making a pig’s ear of my father’s lawn.” I squinted against the sun, the figure nothing but a block of human-shaped shadow. I watched as she fiddled with somethin’ in her waistband, grabbed hold of the branch, swung herself around and dropped onto the ground. The sun was so bright that I didn’t see her until she slumped down into the grass beside me.

  ‘“So, what do you suggest I do then, Abigale Murphy?” I asked, annoyed and embarrassed that she’d borne witness to my attempt. Abigale Murphy, Siobhan’s eldest daughter, was a year below me in school, but she was just as much a looker as her mother had once been. Same red hair, same freckles dashed across her nose.

  ‘“I suggest that you pick the right tool, for a start. You need a scythe.”

  ‘“A scythe? Like the grim reaper?” I asked. She grinned and flexed her bushy eyebrows at me, before flingin’ herself into a backwards roll and runnin’ off to the shed. She emerged a few moments later with a scythe, comically large next to the willowy frame of her, and a rake.

  ‘“If I cut, you can get rid of it.” She tossed me a roll of bin bags and pulled a book from her waistband and placed it carefully on the sill of the shed window. It was a beaten-up book that I’d never heard of, the cover all creased and curled, as if it had been read a hundred times over.

  ‘“Well come on then,” she said and set to scything the grass like that shirtless guy in that period drama. It was hilarious to see. Tiny, scrawny Abi Murphy cuttin’ through that grass as if it were butter. I raked everything that she cut and put it into bag after bag until it was clear, the dead grass underneath opened up to the sun so it could try to thrive again. She handed me a cardboard box of grass seed and we spread it around without talkin’. I watered it with the hose and we ended up having a water fight there on the grass and I’m pretty sure that’s the moment I fell in love with her, all red hair, dirty face and freckles.

  ‘It wasn’t long after we’d both become soaked through with the hose water that her mammy started callin’ her from inside, sayin’ her sister needed her. Mrs Murphy had had another baby about three years earlier, you see. They called her Kenna. She was unplanned and now she found herself with a baby she could barely remember to look after, so Abi did most of the carin’. She told me that I could leave and that I should come back the next Saturday to get rid of the thorns by the back fence. And so, I walked home and from that moment on, I thought of little other than her.’

  He cleared his throat and glanced over at me as if he’d forgotten that I was here. ‘Do you want me to carry on?’ he asked. ‘I know I’m ramblin’.’

  ‘Go on,’ I said, my stomach tingling.

  ‘Okay. I spent every Saturday of the summer there, some Sundays too and sometimes she read to me from her books while we ate lunch on the lawn that grew through good as new.

  ‘She was always co
vered in scrapes and bruises, cuts and dents that she never moaned about and I ended up buying a box of plasters every Saturday morning in preparation for the inevitable wound she’d give herself that day. She always insisted that they didn’t hurt, although I could tell when they did.

  ‘On that last Saturday, when summer was over and the garden looked as good as if Mr Murphy had done it himself, she kissed me at the side gate and told me that she was almost certain that she was in love with me.

  ‘We started seeing each other from then on and everything was going fine. I stuck around for a year after I finished school so that whatever we were going to do, we could do together. She applied for a course in illustration at Dublin University and I thought everythin’ was gonna be fine and I was headin’ there too for an apprenticeship. Everything was planned out, until she didn’t get into Dublin and got accepted to the National University of Ireland over in Galway instead. I’d already found myself somewhere to live and there just wasn’t the same theatre culture in Galway that there is in Dublin. I’d have had nothin’ to do there.

  ‘We told ourselves that it would work out but there was almost one hundred and thirty miles between us and it wasn’t long until she called it quits on us. I was heartbroken and I dealt with it pretty badly. Turned myself into a bit of a tosser, made some awful decisions with some awful people. We didn’t talk for about two years after that, until one day in Dublin, I was leaving the theatre where I was working when I literally walked straight into her. We were both as shocked as each other. We didn’t say a word, just stared at each other with these beamin’ smiles on our faces. We spent the evenin’ in a bar, talkin’ about old times and before the night was over, we were deep enough in love again that we got married as soon as we could. We didn’t tell anyone because we just wanted to do somethin’ low-key.

  ‘When our families found out, they weren’t happy. They dragged us back home and made us do the whole thing all over again in the “appropriate Catholic way” as Mammy said. After uni was done, Abi moved to live with me in Dublin until she got a job in London and we moved over there. We lived there for a good long while before we realised that commutin’ from Birmingham would cost less than living in London and that’s how we ended up here.’