At First Sight

by Hannah Sunderland

  ‘Yeah but that’s just the point,’ Joel said, his voice devoid of emotion. ‘The thing that made your life better has ruined mine. Your happiness is my pain, because I still love her.’ He pointed to me even though he couldn’t bring his eyes to look my way. ‘But I don’t get to do that anymore – that’s your job now.’

  ‘Joel,’ I said stepping forward. ‘I just got off the phone with your mum. She’s in hell thinking that she’s gonna lose you.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ he said, brushing it off with a passive swipe of his hand.

  ‘I know that you’re hurting and that I said some things last night that I shouldn’t have and I’m sorry for anything I did to hurt you.’ I felt myself on the verge of crying and in the distance, I heard the sound of not too far-off sirens. My spirits lifted a little and I took a step closer.

  Joel looked from me to Charlie and then back again. ‘I can see why you love him, I really can. He’s, like, physically perfect and exotic and seems to have his shit together. He’s everything I’m not.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call Westport, County Mayo, exotic.’ Charlie chuckled nervously. ‘And believe me, I’m not as together as you seem to think I am. I’m unemployed, widowed, completely lost. The world doesn’t give a feck what I’m doin’,’ he said, holding his arms aloft. ‘I have no person in this world who needs me and yet, I decided to stay because I found a glimmer of hope.’ The sirens were close now and Joel was beginning to notice them too.

  I watched Charlie as he spoke the words. It was as if he was looking at a mirror image, telling himself exactly what he had needed to hear on that night he’d called me. ‘You seen Castaway?’ he asked. ‘Tom Hanks. Plane Crash. WILSON!’ The sound of sirens was right below us now. From the sound of it, there was more than one car down there.

  ‘Yeah I’ve seen it,’ Joel replied, glancing over his shoulder at the drop and flinching as if filled with a sudden fear.

  ‘Well, there’s this bit at the end, where he’s been rescued and he’s talkin’ to his mate about a time when he planned to throw himself from the cliffs instead of be lonely for one more day and he says that he’s got to keep breathing because tomorrow the sun will come up, and who knows what the tide will bring along.’

  ‘But what if the tide brings nothing?’ Joel asked.

  ‘Then it brings nothing and you ask yourself the same question another day. But for now, you give the tide a chance to come up with somethin’.’

  I couldn’t help it now. The tears were dripping from my chin onto the bird-mess-spattered floor.

  ‘Please, Joel,’ I sobbed and, finally, he turned his eyes to me. ‘Please, don’t do this. In time you’ll see that this was the best thing for both of us. We couldn’t have carried on the way we were. I was miserable and so were you.’ I swallowed hard and stepped forward. ‘Just because it didn’t work for us doesn’t mean it won’t with someone else.’

  Joel looked me dead in the eyes, his face draining of emotion, and Charlie inched forward. ‘I don’t want anyone else.’

  His foot moved so slightly that I didn’t even see it, as he stepped from the ledge and the bottom fell out of my stomach.

  ‘Joel!’ I screamed as he fell. Charlie had moved before Joel had even inched his foot backwards, his hands reaching out and grabbing at his shirt. He flung himself down at the edge, his body flat against the brickwork and the momentum of Joel’s weight carrying him towards the edge. I ran forward, flinging myself down onto the floor as well and grabbing Charlie’s legs as a counterweight.

  ‘I got him!’ Charlie shouted back to me. ‘I got him!’

  There was a sound behind me as a police officer appeared.

  ‘Hello, miss,’ the police officer said. I looked up and saw a young woman’s face, round and familiar in some way, although my brain wasn’t capable of figuring out from where right now. ‘I need you to hold on while the officers get him, okay?’ she asked as two police officers moved either side of Charlie and began taking Joel’s weight. I listened as she used a calm voice to reassure me, my fingernails still digging into the denim of Charlie’s jeans as I felt the physical weight of everything I was holding in my two hands. I held the only two men I had ever loved. I held my future and my past and I didn’t want to let go of either of them.

  It was midnight before Charlie and I arrived home. Ned and Mum had come to pick us up and, unbeknownst to us, had been waiting at hospital for us for hours. Rachel had gone off with Joel, I assume to check him in to somewhere he couldn’t hurt himself. I’d tried to talk to him afterwards, but he didn’t want to see me and so Rachel had just told me to go home.

  Mum made us tea and tried to force-feed us burned lasagne but we both felt sick and ended up going to bed soon after arriving home. We lay on the bed, on top of the sheets and stared at the ceiling. We didn’t say a word to each other and I didn’t remember falling asleep, but when I did, I dreamt of falling.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Joel refused to see me when I turned up at the psychiatric ward after work a couple of days later with a box of his favourite Lindt chocolates. Rachel came instead and took me by the hands, thanking me for finding him in time. She said that Joel didn’t want to see me and that I should wait for him to get in contact. I doubted the day would ever come when Joel felt like dropping me a cheery hello, but I think it would be nice, further down the line, to speak to him again.

  I’d returned home after the hospital with an exhausted brain and a weary body and Charlie, still unwilling to return home to a flat full of memories, had greeted me with a glass of Pinot Grigio. Ned had left to take Mum to the airport, but I’d decided to give this particular goodbye a miss. I didn’t think I was ready yet to see them making out in the drop-off bays.

  I sat at the kitchen table with Magnus dozing on my lap and I sipped on the cool, crisp wine as Charlie chopped vegetables and tossed them into a sizzling pan. I wondered if this was what our future looked like? Me arriving home from work and him, the dutiful husband, cooking me dinner and talking non-stop about inane things that filled the silence. I watched his shoulders tense and relax as he worked away at the counter and I thought how strange it was that I hadn’t touched him properly yet, had barely kissed him more than a handful of times and yet, I loved him so deeply that it felt like we’d been together for years.

  But I knew that it was only me who felt this way. It was like starting a new book before you’ve finished the last one. Your brain is still engaged with the first story, the new one exciting and distracting, but you have a sense of unease because you never knew how the first story ended. Abi was that story and he still hadn’t found the end of it.

  ‘Everyone I’ve ever made this for has asked me how I always get it to taste so good. Really, I think that the secret’s all in the bay leaves,’ he said, turning to me and waving his knife in the air to stress the point. ‘Wildly underestimated herb.’

  ‘Charlie, I think we need to have a talk.’ The words tumbled out of my mouth, making him freeze when they hit him.

  ‘Okay. Should I brace myself? Because nothin’ good ever comes after those words,’ he said, placing the knife down and coming to sit opposite me, his hands clasped on the table in front of him. I couldn’t help but smile at how cute he looked in Ned’s old pinny, stained and burned from years of use. ‘What about?’

  ‘I think you need to leave.’

  He flinched. ‘What? Right now? But the bourguignon’s not done yet.’

  ‘Not right this second,’ I said, reaching out and holding his hand. ‘But I just don’t think that this is healthy … for me to have you staying here and it’s not particularly good for you either. Isn’t you living in the spare room just another way for you to run away from everything you need to be tackling?’

  He looked at me and I had to look down at our hands, clasped together on the table, because I was weak for those eyes. ‘I know that we decided that maybe the timing wasn’t right for us to make a go of this just yet. But, I’m not going to lie, it
’s kind of painful to have to see you every day and not be able to be with you in the ways I want to be. To love you and know that you can’t love me back, it hurts, Charlie. And there’s stuff that both of us need to sort out and I don’t think we can do that if we’re together, holding each other back.’

  He smiled at me sadly, but I could see from his face that he knew I was right.

  ‘You said, when we were up on the clock tower with Joel, that no one needed you, but that wasn’t true.’

  ‘You don’t need me, Nell. You’d be just fine on your own.’

  ‘I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about Carrick,’ I replied. ‘I don’t think Carrick is as together as you think he is. He misses you and he loves you so much. I think he needs a friend. He needs you.’

  ‘What about you?’ he asked, his brows a little downturned at the ends. ‘What will you do?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but that’s the beauty of it I guess.’

  He sighed, his thumb stroking my knuckles.

  ‘I wish I could … yer know, say it.’

  ‘I know.’ I smiled and squeezed his hand, all the while, trying not to acknowledge the feeling of my heart cracking in two.

  Carrick arrived on the last day of April to help Charlie box up all of his stuff. It was strange having him out of the house and, even though we hadn’t been sleeping in the same room since that first night, knowing that he wasn’t a wall’s width away from me made me feel hollow and achy inside. This was for the best – we both knew it. I hoped that we could have a future, one that wasn’t filled with sadness and loose ends of previous loves. But he was going away and taking everything with him, except for Magnus who was now Ned’s, body and soul. He was erasing himself from my life, from Birmingham, from the United Kingdom, and knowing that he was going to be so far away gave me the awful feeling that these might be my final days with Charlie.

  The night before Charlie was set to leave, we had dinner with Ned and Carrick.

  I remained pretty quiet during dinner, which went mostly unnoticed because Carrick filled the quiet with his insatiable need to say whatever came into his head. Magnus dozed on top of the fridge, his long tail trailing down over the front of the door and having to be held up like a bead curtain every time someone needed to get something from inside it.

  Ned was about as in love with Magnus as I’d ever seen him with anything, with the exception of my mother. I still shuddered with vomit-inducing recollection every time he casually mentioned her name in conversation. I knew that she’d mentioned finding a non-travelling position within the company so that she could stay home, but I doubted that anything would come of it and Ned would soon learn that Cassandra Coleman was not a woman to pin your hopes and heart on. I assumed that the Ben and Jerry’s would be in full flow when that moment came around.

  When everyone had finished their meals, Charlie disappeared into the hall, returning with a bottle of whisky and taking four glasses from the cupboard.

  ‘So,’ he said, retaking his seat beside me and pulling the cork from the bottle, ‘before I go, I just wanted to say a few things.’

  ‘Ah feck, yer not gonna give us a speech are yer?’ Carrick teased.

  ‘Will yer shut yer mouth for one bloody minute and let someone else have a chance? Jesus, man.’ Charlie chided through a smile. He poured some of the amber liquid into each of the glasses and passed one to each of us. ‘I am sittin’ here right now, digestin’ another one of Ned’s culinary triumphs and about to sample this fine whisky because of each and every one of yer.’ He looked around at the three of us. ‘I don’t think many people who sit at the dinner table can say that every one of the people around it has saved their life. But I can and what that proves to me is that I’ve got some pretty feckin’ awesome people in my life. I just wanted to let yer all know that I’m gonna miss yer and that this isn’t goodbye.’

  He turned to me and smiled.

  ‘Sláinte.’ Carrick led the cheers and we all followed.

  As I swigged down the burning liquid, I felt a warm tear roll down the side of my face and I wiped it away before anyone could see.

  I stood in front of the mirror and washed the make-up from my face. I wasn’t tired, quite the opposite. My body was charged with anxiety about tomorrow morning, but sitting downstairs with them all, waiting for the time to come when Charlie would walk out of my life, possibly forever, made me want to do nothing but curl up in bed. I left the bathroom and found Carrick on the landing, leaning against the wall with his thumbs in his pockets, like James Dean.

  ‘Hey, I didn’t know you were waiting. Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘I was waitin’ to talk to yer.’ He pushed off from the wall and placed his hands on my shoulders. ‘I just wanted to tell yer that there’s no need to worry about him when he’s over there. He’ll be stayin’ with me and I’ll be lookin’ out for him every step of the way. I let him down once already, at the memorial, but I’ll do better.’

  ‘I know you will,’ I said, drawing him into a hug.

  ‘I know it was your idea for him to come home.’ He sighed into the hug and pulled me a little closer. ‘You’re a selfless lass, I’ll give yer that.’

  ‘Not really,’ I replied into his greying hair. ‘This is for both of us. Just don’t let him forget about me,’ I whispered, my voice breaking.

  ‘As if he ever could.’

  I don’t know how long I’d been asleep when I felt something on my cheek. At first, I thought it was one of those fabled spiders that sneak into your mouth while you sleep, but as the panic of that thought brought me round to consciousness, I realised that it wasn’t long spindly legs, but soft fingers.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, opening my eyes to see Charlie’s handsome face illuminated by the warm light of the bedside lamp.

  ‘I’m gonna miss yer, so much,’ he whispered, his face so close to mine I could feel his breath on my skin.

  I reached up to where his fingers lay on my face and took them in my hand. ‘I’m going to miss you too,’ I replied dreamily, the weight of sleep pressing down on me, my eyes straining to keep open.

  ‘Whatever happens I want yer to know that you’ve changed my life, Nell Coleman. Hell, there wouldn’t even have been a life to change if it wasn’t for you and Ned. Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I said, with a sad smile.

  His hand pulled free of mine and moved up over my cheekbone, his fingers feeling their way through my hair until his hand came to rest, holding the nape of my neck. His face fell out of focus as he moved closer, his top lip grazing mine and sending a shockwave through me. I raised my hand and rested it on the crown of his head, his hair soft and tousled beneath my fingers, and I gave him the one last push he needed. His lips fell to mine and lingered there for a moment before he pulled away.

  ‘I’d better be going,’ he whispered.

  ‘Okay. I’ll see you in the morning then,’ I said, tears burgeoning in my eyes.

  ‘Ten sharp.’ He nodded with a smile and moved to the door. ‘Bye, Nell.’

  ‘Bye, Charlie.’

  I rolled over in bed and looked at the screen of my phone. It took me a second or two for the time to register in my brain: 9.45 a.m.

  My heart thumped, my eyes widened and I flung myself out of bed with a sense of panic. I dressed quickly and tried to make myself look presentable before stumbling my way down the stairs, my brain buzzing with anxiety whilst still being clouded with sleep.

  I walked into the kitchen to find Ned sitting in his dressing gown, sipping coffee without a sense of urgency. ‘Ned, why didn’t you wake me up? And what are you doing? Get dressed. We need to go in, like, five minutes.’

  He looked up at me with pity in his eyes and jerked his head towards the counter. I turned to see one of Abi’s jars of sea glass sitting by the kettle with an envelope propped up against it.

  My heart plummeted down into my stomach and my arms fell limply at my sides. ‘He’s already gone, hasn’t he?’


  I placed the jar of sea glass on the bathroom windowsill and ran myself an almost scalding bath, tipping in half a bottle of the bubble bath I’d got for Christmas last year and making sure I was safely ensconced amongst the bubbles before I opened the envelope and pulled out the letter inside. It was short and to-the-point.

  Nell,

  I thought it would be easier if I just left and I didn’t subject you to a long drawn-out goodbye, but I couldn’t leave without saying this.

  Thank you for giving me something to hope for, something to smile about. For a long time, it seemed like no one cared if I lived or died, until you. I don’t know what it is you’re planning on using this space and time for, but whatever it is, Nell, I know that, much like you, it’s going to be incredible.

  I hope the time comes when everything falls into place for us, but for now I think I’m going to leave this one to the fates, seeing as they seem to know so much.

  I’m not going to ask you to wait for me, or live your life around the possibility of whether we have a future together. Live your life for you.

  Charlie.

  P.S. I hope you don’t mind, but I took George with me. Don’t worry, it won’t be the last you see of him. But I couldn’t leave without taking something of you with me.

  I folded up the note and let it float to the tiles, as I curled myself up inside the bubbles, wrapping my arms around myself in an attempt to keep myself whole. It was clear to me now that the pain I’d been waiting for had finally come. It was nice to dream of a pretty future together where Charlie was whole again and we could be what I’d always wanted us to be, but that’s all it was: a dream. Charlie was gone and he’d taken my final scrap of hope with him.