‘Stepping out? Which era is that term from, exactly?’ I asked as I turned up the pizza aisle and, as expected, found Ned looking at two pizzas as if his life depended on the choice he had to make. I walked over and stood beside him. ‘Maybe you’re right. I could get back on Tinder and see what prime specimens are out there?’
‘Don’t do that,’ Ned said without looking up. ‘You’ll end up with another gropey X-ray technician.’ Shit, I guess not everyone had forgotten. ‘You’d be much better off going on Bumble.’
‘That’s right, listen to Ned,’ Mum said through the phone and he looked up at the mention of his name.
‘Oh, hi, Cassie.’ Ned stepped into the frame of the camera, waving at her enthusiastically.
She lifted a hand and returned the greeting. ‘Oh, nice dress.’
I sent him a warning glare. ‘Look.’ I turned my attention back to her. ‘I’ll try and be successfully ensconced with someone by the time you arrive, but don’t hold your breath.’ I was getting exasperated with the conversation.
‘Ooo, she’s coming to stay?’ he asked me, then turned to the phone screen again. ‘You’re coming to stay?’
‘Yes, I’ll see you soon,’ she answered. ‘If that’s all right.’
‘More than all right,’ he said enthusiastically.
I held the phone to my chest and covered the microphone. ‘Okay, down boy,’ I chided. ‘Remember that she’s my mother.’
He grinned cheekily, looking back to his pizza conundrum, while I turned my attention back to the call. ‘Right, Mum, I need to go before Ned blows a gasket over trying to pick a pizza. Enjoy your evening and tell Piero I said hi.’ I threw that last bit in to annoy Ned.
‘Will do. Bye, sweetie.’ She blew a kiss and hung up.
‘Erg, Piero,’ Ned said, tossing the four-cheese pizza back on the shelf and placing the ham and mushroom one into the basket.
That evening, as we watched the film that we’d known would be bad, but surpassed even our low expectations, I thought about the strangeness that had occurred over the last two days. Yes, I was disappointed about my rom-com moment not playing out like I’d hoped it would, but I was more annoyed about the fact that he’d just left, without explanation. Was Ned right about him being married? Or was the moment I moved closer to him the same moment that he realised that I wasn’t worth his time?
I picked up my phone and began typing out a message to him:
Hey, how are you?
But after a few moments, I deleted it.
I shook my head, and slouched a little further into the sofa as I tried to get back into the film. I felt a weight drop onto my shoulder and I turned to see Ned’s steady hand there. He patted me, reassuringly, before his hand returned to his beer.
‘Cheer up, kid.’ He pointed to the half-naked, surgically enhanced woman on the screen who was being chased through a dark corridor, her ginormous breasts jiggling in the seedy lighting. ‘I’m pretty sure this idiot’s gonna get skewered any second.’
Chapter Six
‘So, she walks into the fire and you’re thinking that there’s no way she’s coming out of this alive. I was bummed out; I’ll tell you that. But then the fire dies down and there she is, sat in the ashes with these three baby dragons clutching on to her,’ Jackson said, his tone enthusiastic as it travelled through my headset.
‘It sounds really exciting,’ I responded, pretending that I hadn’t already watched what he was talking about several years ago.
‘It’s really worth a watch,’ he said again.
‘So, apart from watching an entire two seasons of Game of Thrones since we last spoke, how has everything else been?’ I asked, directing the question back to him. He sniffed loudly and the enthusiasm in his voice waned.
‘I’m all right when I have something to take my mind away from … all of that stuff. It’s when I’m left with my own thoughts that things get bad.’
‘A lot of people say that taking up a hobby is very helpful for quieting the mind. Something like knitting or reading or writing, even. I’m sure you’d benefit greatly from writing your thoughts down.’
‘I don’t know if the knitting life is for me, although I’ve enough balls of wool left over from Mum.’ I heard his tone shift when he started talking about his mother.
‘No, I’m not a knitter either. My mother tried to teach me once but she’s left-handed and I’m not, so my scarf came out looking like a four-year-old had done it,’ I said. Jackson chuckled.
‘I like the idea of writing though. Maybe I’ll pen the next great memoir?’
‘You never know.’
‘Okay, well, thanks for the chat, Nell. I’ll speak to you again soon.’
‘See you Jackson.’ I took off my headset for the day. I sighed heavily, exhaling the tension that had built up over the last eight hours and feeling it linger in the form of a tension headache, like a rubber band across my brow.
‘Everything okay, Nell?’ Barry droned as he sauntered over to me from his glass-doored office.
‘I’m okay, just signing off for the day. You?’
‘Had a hard call this morning.’ He looked down.
I sighed an empathetic, yet unhelpful sigh. There was nothing I could do to help; there was nothing anyone could do. ‘I’m sure you did a brilliant job, as usual.’ I gnawed at my lip and then smiled his way before standing and placing a supportive hand on his shoulder. ‘Do you wanna talk about it?’
He looked, for a moment, as if he might accept my offer, but ended up shaking his head.
‘Okay,’ I said, knowing that sometimes talking about it only made you feel more like you did something wrong, or realise that you could have done more. ‘I’m sure Ned will be free for a drink later, if you change your mind.’ It had been Ned’s day off today, but he could never say no to a person in need of delving into the depths of their emotions.
‘Okay. Thanks, Nell.’ His mouth gave the impression of a smile as I turned and walked towards the cloakroom.
I arrived home as the sky was on the verge of night and the street lamps burst into life as I passed along the road. A warm welcoming light glowed from the hallway as I slipped my key into the lock and pushed the door with my shoulder. It stuck a little, as it often did in winter when the wood of the door swelled in its frame, but a few short, sharp thrusts of using my body like a battering ram and it fell open with a quiet squeal.
I took off my coat and hung it over the balustrade, slinging my bag onto the Victorian tiles that I was pretty sure were original to the house. This building was always so quiet, even with both of us milling around inside it. The walls were thick, the ceilings high, the rooms large and impossible to heat to a comfortable temperature during the depths of winter. It had a large unmaintained garden in the rear and a huge kitchen that I often felt sorry for because it was never used to the grand standards it was so clearly equipped for.
Ned had lived in this house with Connie, his ex-wife, whom he had been trying to win back for over six years, but who, as far as I was concerned, was an example of the worst of humankind and should be ashamed of how she’d treated him. She’d run off with a colleague named Richard, after having an eighteen-month affair with him, but had played Ned like a cello, making sure she got as much of his money as she possibly could. Ned had been wealthy once, family money, but not so much anymore.
The house was too big for two people really. Ned and I had spent a drunken evening in the back garden last summer, musing on our lives, and he’d told me then that he really would have loved to have children, but that his time for that had probably passed him by now. When he’d told me this, I’d decided that Ned needed something to care for. He was a carer, a lover, and he needed something to focus that care and love upon. I didn’t count because I could take care of myself and a pet seemed like a big commitment to just spring on someone. And so, one day, I brought home Lola and introduced him to the world of succulent ownership. She’d been with us for six months now, sitting in her little yel
low pot on her own shelf (which Ned had put up especially for her) in the kitchen above the kettle. Sometimes, in the morning I could hear Ned talking to her.
It seemed wholly unfair to me that a good man like Ned should end up losing his money, living in an empty home with all of his paternal instincts focused on a houseplant, whereas Connie – mistress of Beelzebub – got everything she wanted. I’d tried to brighten the place up and make it more homely for him by bringing in colourful blankets, lavender bubble bath and Lola, of course. The place had been pretty stark when I got here, after Connie had stripped the place of what she wanted and left Ned to live like a poverty-sworn monk. I was still in the process of trying to make the house more homely but I was bringing in the changes slowly so it didn’t look like I was dictating the decor. We faced a lot of darkness in our line of work, it only made sense that our home life should be filled with colour.
I became aware of the soft sounds of Eighties soft rock coming from the kitchen and followed it to where I found Ned sitting at the kitchen table, chocolate Hobnob hovering over a cup of steaming tea, nose buried in this month’s issue of his beloved History Today magazine, the silky tones of ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’ drifting from the speaker by the kettle.
‘Feeling emotionally vulnerable?’ I asked as I pulled out a chair and sat down beside him. He looked up from his article about the Aztecs just as his soggy Hobnob disintegrated, falling away from the main biscuit and disappearing into the milky tea.
‘I wasn’t until I lost my biscuit,’ he replied, fishing out the crumbly mess with a teaspoon, his brow furrowed with disappointment. He deposited the soggy crumbs onto the plate of Hobnobs beside him and I reached over and grabbed one before the liquid could reach them.
‘I’m out tonight,’ he said, looking less than thrilled by the prospect.
‘Oh yeah? Got a date?’ I ate the Hobnob in two bites and instantly wanted another, although I resisted.
‘Oh yeah. With a sexy little minx called Barry,’ he countered.
‘Hot,’ I jested. ‘He had a rough day today.’
I wouldn’t go as far to say that Ned and Barry were friends, more like co-workers bonded over a mutual love of the job. Barry was about as exciting as a bowl of unsweetened almond milk porridge and he rarely had a word to say about anything. Yet they still went out together about once a month. What they did during these outings, I had no idea. I had visions of them sat, stoic, in one of those old-man pubs, not sharing a single word until they said goodbye. But maybe they both saved their wild sides for each other and what they were actually doing was going to street races and karaoke bars.
‘Oh, those came for you. They were on the porch when I got back from shopping today.’ Ned roused me from my mental images of Barry and Ned duetting to ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ and pointed over his shoulder with his thumb to a bunch of flowers standing in a cardboard container on the countertop.
‘For me?’ I asked. ‘From who?’
‘I didn’t open the card,’ he answered. ‘But they’re pungent. They’ll be setting my hay fever off before too long.’
My chest buzzed with excitement as I got up and walked over to them. The scent found my nose when I was still several paces away and as I got nearer, I saw the eucalyptus leaves, nestled between yellow tulips and purple hyacinths. They looked expensive, like the kind you get from an actual florist and not from those big black buckets in Aldi. At the edge was a plastic holder and in it a little envelope. I took the envelope and pulled out a tiny card, which had so much writing on it I had to squint to read the words.
Nell,
I’m sorry about how we left things the other night. I know that I was rude before I left.
I wanted to send you something, as a way of apologising and also for the chance to tell you that I’m not the person I made myself out to be.
I hope you like the flowers. It’s the first time I’ve ever been into a florist and so I didn’t really know what I was doing. I must have looked like a right eejit.
She said that the purple ones are meant to mean ‘sorry’ and the yellow ones are just there to make it look cheerful, I think.
Anyway, I totally understand if you don’t want to, but I’ll be at our café tonight – you know, the one where we met. I’ll wait for you until it closes, but in case you don’t show, thank you for everything.
Hope to see you soon,
Charlie xxx
My heart thumped in my chest, making the card shake in my hands as I reread it and then placed it against my chest, pressing it hard into my sternum as if I could absorb it into myself. No one had ever bought me flowers before.
‘They’re from Charlie. He says he wants to meet me again,’ I said, walking back over to the chair, taking the flowers with me and setting them down on the table. Ned stopped reading his magazine again and looked up at them.
‘The married one?’ He leaned back in his chair, looking almost fearfully at the bouquet and the inevitable congestion they would bring.
‘We don’t know that he’s married,’ I snapped, clinging on to my one last shred of hope.
‘You gonna meet him?’ he asked, rubbing his nose with his palm, his voice turning nasal.
‘I don’t know. What do you think I should do?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me.’
‘Ned!’ I chastised. ‘What good is it, me living with a counsellor, if I don’t get to reap any of the benefits?’
He sat forward in his chair and clasped his hands together on the tabletop, striking his therapist’s pose. ‘Yes, you have a lot to lose here in terms of how emotionally invested I can see you getting in this guy, but what else are you going to do with your evening? Come to the pub with me and Barry?’
‘Oh, God no.’ I grimaced at the thought. ‘I was thinking about going to buy some scatter cushions to brighten up the living room.’
‘Sod the scatter cushions, Nell. Do you like this man?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think that he’s married?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Is that a problem for you?’
‘I think so, yes,’ I replied.
‘But we don’t know whether that’s the case yet.’
‘We don’t.’
‘Then, what would you say to taking chances?’
I narrowed my eyes and thought for a moment. ‘Ned, did you just use Celine Dion lyrics to advise me in my love life?’
‘I believe I did, Nell, yes. Whatever problems you’re facing in life, I guarantee that Celine has a piece of advice for it and on the rare occasion that Celine can’t help, there’s always Michael Bolton.’
I sighed and slumped back into the chair. ‘Is that how you handle your calls, just feed them lyrics by ballad-singing icons?’ I whined.
‘It hasn’t failed me yet.’ Ned looked at me with raised brows and waited for me to give him my decision.
I thought about my options for a moment before sitting up. ‘Can I borrow the car?’
I stood, a few paces away from the café door, still undecided as to whether I would be walking through it or not. I hadn’t checked to see if he was inside and the large blackboard by the door showed that they’d be closing in half an hour. The bitterness from Charlie’s strange sort of rejection made me want to flee the scene before he had any chance of seeing me, but those bastarding little butterflies, those deceitful little skips in my heartbeat made me take a few steps forward, before my mother’s voice came back into my head and I stopped walking.
‘Never let anyone make you work for something that makes you feel like less than you are.’ She’d said that one night, her voice travelling the seven hundred or so miles from Denmark to my tear-stained phone after I’d had a particularly mentally destroying evening with Joel a few years ago.
Something about Charlie made me nervous. Why had he decided to send those flowers and rekindle something that could quite easily have fallen into obscurity? I took a tentative step closer and peered through the fo
gged glass. Sure enough, my eyes found the hunched shoulders of Charlie Stone, sat in the same place he’d been sitting when I’d thrown my sandwich at him and set this whole thing in motion.
I wondered if Ned would have been so eager for me to go out and take a risk on Charlie, if he knew the whole story about me meeting him after he’d called in? Probably not, but that wasn’t worth worrying about now. This could be the chance that I lived to regret in a few days, or maybe it could be the one that paid off.
Celine Dion crept into my brain again and I hated that Ned was right; she did give good advice.
I pushed the door, the palm of my hand chilling in seconds against the condensation-obscured glass.
I nodded a nervous hello to the supervisor as I stepped through the door. He held up a tattoo-adorned arm and waved.
‘You’re welcome to a drink, but we’re closing soon,’ he called out over the sound of the newbie employee – who had miraculously lived to work another day – clanking metal jugs together.
‘It’s okay. I’m just coming to meet someone.’ I sent him a kind smile and turned my attention back to Charlie and found that he’d twisted in his chair, his eyes staring my way, his eyebrows raised and his lips curled in happy surprise. I cleared my throat and walked over to the table, keeping my eyes downcast until the last second. I looked up and made a deal with myself that I would not be won over by blue eyes and Irish charm. I was a grown-ass woman and my protective walls would not be brought down that easily.
‘You came,’ he said with quiet shock.
‘To thank you for the flowers, that’s all,’ I shot back, although that wasn’t completely true.
‘I’m glad yer liked them.’ His eyes shifted awkwardly and he pointed towards the chair beside him. ‘D’yer wanna sit?’
‘No,’ I said matter-of-factly.
‘Okay,’ he said, disappointed.
I stood for a few seconds longer, the tension thickening, before shrugging my eyebrows and trying to keep my impartial expression intact as I sat. I slung my keys onto the table where they landed with a jingling clatter.
At First Sight Page 6
