At First Sight

by Hannah Sunderland

  He leaned forward, crossing his arms loosely and leaning them on the edge of the table. He rearranged them several more times until he gave up and lowered his fidgeting hands to his lap.

  ‘I’m … erm, I’m sorry, about storming off the other night.’

  He looked to me for a reply, but I gave none.

  ‘The beer just got into my brain and made it all screwy. It was nothin’ you did. I’m sorry I was rude. I didn’t wanna upset yer.’

  ‘Are you married?’ I blurted.

  He looked taken aback by my question, his eyes glazing for a moment before he answered. ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘I think I’d be aware of it if I was.’

  ‘And you’re not lying to me? You have no pre-existing romantic connection that would mean that we couldn’t be … friends?’

  ‘None at all. In fact, you’re the first woman I’ve talked to in … well, I don’t truly remember the last time.’

  I watched him warily and when I didn’t reply, he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘I blew it, didn’t I?’ He looked at me again and it was like fricking kryptonite to my stone-cold resolve. I could feel the mortar between the bricks of my wall beginning to crumble and fall.

  ‘Maybe,’ I allowed, making him stew a little longer. ‘But they do say it’s all in the recovery.’

  ‘I was a complete eejit – there’s no denyin’ that. Any chance of starting over?’ When I didn’t answer straight away, he lowered his head like a guilty puppy and looked up at me through his lashes. ‘I did so very like havin’ a friend.’

  I tried to force the corners of my mouth to stay down, but a small, treacherous smile found its way onto my lips. God damn it! That accent was to me what soft pipe music was to snakes in baskets.

  I rolled my eyes and that was it: the bricks came tumbling down and crashed into nothingness. ‘You’re a pain in the arse, do you know that?’

  ‘Of course. It’s the only thing I’ve been sure of my whole life. My mother told me so very often when I was young.’ He cocked his head to the side. ‘And when I was older, in fact.’

  ‘She’s a smart woman, your mother.’

  ‘Aye. At least I got a smile outta yer though.’

  I pulled my smile wider. ‘Which smile is it? My show one or my sunshine smile?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s what you said before. That my real smile was like sunshine,’ I said, enjoying how much he squirmed.

  ‘Ah, God. Did I say that? Smile like sunshine?’ He grimaced. ‘Never let me drink again. There’s no call for me to start getting all poetic.’

  Despite everything I chuckled and looked down at the table, annoyed with myself for not being harder to crack. I’d thought that I would be like granite but I’d ended up being Play-Doh.

  He clenched his teeth together and sent me a toothy grin, complete with hopefully raised eyebrows, and nudged me with his elbow.

  I shook my head and exhaled loudly, sitting back and dragging my keys from the table to my lap. The staff began to close in around us, placing chairs on tables and dragging crumb-filled brooms across the floor, the subtle go-home signals not so subtle anymore.

  ‘What are you doing now?’

  He shrugged and smiled a crooked, cheeky smile. ‘Talkin’ to a pretty girl. How about you?’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘I’m going shopping.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’ He looked down at his hands in his lap.

  ‘I could use your help though, if you wanted to come.’

  He looked up again, hope back in his eyes. ‘Ah.’ He sighed. ‘I was so hopin’ yer’d say that.’

  Chapter Seven

  The distant sound of ‘Islands in the Stream’ played from speakers, suspended high up in the corrugated metal ceiling of the homeware superstore. Charlie and I stood before a wall of scatter cushions that was so extensive it stretched from one end of the shop to the other and had every shape, size and colour that any human could ever need.

  ‘Well, you’ve certainly come to the right place for scatter cushions,’ Charlie said as he grabbed a royal blue one and began feeling the velvet with subconscious strokes of his fingers.

  ‘Okay, so we’re going for anything cheerful.’ I took down a yellow cushion and tossed it into the trolley behind us.

  ‘How many do you want?’ he asked, holding up the blue velvet one. I nodded and he threw it in too.

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s just choose the ones we like and we can whittle it down later,’ I replied.

  He walked a little way down the aisle, pulling out a bright orange one and holding it out in the air in front of him at arm’s length, like he was inspecting a work of art.

  I took an oblong violet cushion from the bottom shelf and playfully swung it to meet with the back of his knees. He lost his balance for a moment and took my arm in his hand for support.

  ‘Don’t think for a second that I’m goin’ to have a pillow fight with you in the middle of this shop and certainly not in my underwear,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but women don’t really do that.’

  ‘You mean … it was all a lie?’ His arms fell to his sides in mock disappointment. ‘Ah well, another day, another crushed dream.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but someone had to tell you eventually.’

  He turned back to the shelf and slid the orange cushion into the space it’d come from.

  I winced a little as the figure popped up on the screen of the horridly out-of-date till and the cashier motioned towards the card reader. We’d run away with ourselves a little and had failed to whittle down the amount by more than a few. We’d spent a good hour in the shop, walking the aisles with our trolley of cushions and sharing small talk. The whole time, I found myself trying to supress the glimmer of excitement that refused to leave me alone whenever he was in view, or out of view for that matter.

  I’d lost Charlie to the pick ’n’ mix stand at one point and he’d rejoined me in the queue after several minutes of shovelling sweets into a clear plastic bag. I’d looked down at it and seen that it was filled with nothing other than hundreds of gummy bears, their stubby little limbs pressing against the bag as if they were begging to be set free. The cashier looked at me from beneath her under-pruned brows as she tried to decide what two people could want with seventeen scatter cushions and a kilogram of pure uncut gummy bears. By the look of confusion that lingered on her face as we left, I doubted that she’d come to a conclusion.

  We made our way to the car, where we proceeded to stuff every available space with our purchases. We raced each other to the trolley park and back and were out of breath by the time we slumped into the seats.

  I leaned back against the headrest and angled my head towards the windscreen, although I was watching him from the corner of my eye. He breathed heavily as he sat there in the passenger seat, little puffs of steam whisping from his lips, and he drew a hand through his shaggy dark hair. His lips sat in an almost smile, although the set of his jaw looked tense, as though he was worried about something.

  ‘I came back, you know,’ I said out of nowhere.

  He looked up at me with a question in his eyes.

  ‘When we met at the café, after I left. I got all the way back to work before I turned around and came back, but you were gone.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Why d’ya do that, then?’ he asked, his cheeky expression showing me that he knew exactly why.

  ‘Because I wanted to see you again and I thought that that would never happen if I didn’t get your number.’

  ‘That’s right, is it?’ He was smiling and, of course, that meant I was too.

  ‘I just knew, the moment that I saw you, that …’ I paused for dramatic effect ‘… that you’d be the only one that I ever wanted to go scatter cushion shopping with.’

  He chuckled and pulled on his seatbelt, sat forward and clapped his hands together. ‘So, where to next?’

  ‘Home.’ I
sat up and pushed the key into the ignition. ‘Do you want me to drop you at yours?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind helping you take all of this into the house.’ He gestured over his shoulder at the mountain of pillows behind him. ‘You know, somethin’ people don’t get about pillows, is that they’re just so … heavy. I wouldn’t want you strainin’ yourself.’

  ‘Oh, and you’re just the big strong man to help me, are you?’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, I’ve seen the guns on yer and all. But I’m just sayin’ that yer might, y’know, want the help.’

  ‘Okay.’ I grinned and clipped in my seatbelt. Charlie reached over and pushed the button for the radio.

  ‘Oh, the radio doesn’t work. Hasn’t for years since Ned took his ex-wife to the safari park and the aerial got torn off by a particularly spiteful macaque.’

  He stared at me for a moment, waiting for me to indicate that I was joking, but I wasn’t.

  ‘There might be some CDs in there,’ I said, pointing to the glove box.

  He leaned forward and pulled it open. ‘You can tell a lot about a person by what’s in their glove box,’ he said, bending double in the seat to rifle through it.

  ‘Well, it’s Ned’s glove box, so you won’t learn anything about me from in there.’ He pulled out a decrepit old A to Z, a pair of woolly gloves that looked as if the moths had been at them, a packet of tissues and three CDs, held together with the sticky, decade-old glue of a melted boiled sweet.

  ‘Delightful,’ he said, pulling on the cases until he prised them apart with a sound like a wax strip being torn from a thigh. ‘Is this guy for real?’ He turned to me with lowered brows.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The man’s radio doesn’t work, the only alternative he has is the CD player and these are all he can bring to the table?’ He held out the options. A sun-faded audiobook of The Hobbit, the soundtrack to Phantom of the Opera and The Best of Michael Bolton.

  ‘Hey, don’t knock Bolton,’ I said, taking the CD from him and turning it over to see the track list.

  ‘Oh, please don’t tell me you’re a fan or I might have to rethink this whole “friendship” thing.’

  I turned in my seat to face him, holding up the image of peak Nineties Michael Bolton, his face slightly concealed by gooey red sugar. ‘This man’s voice has both the raw masculine power of an Eighties wrestler, whilst also being as silky smooth as caramel. There’s no one else like him.’

  ‘You mean to say that his voice is like Hulk Hogan covered in butterscotch?’

  ‘No, caramel,’ I repeated. ‘Have you even listened to him or is this like when people say they don’t like a food they’ve never tried?’

  ‘He’s the “Lean on Me” guy isn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, Charlie.’ I chortled through my words. ‘Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. He’s so much more than that.’ I took the slightly sticky disk from the case and slid it into the player. The first soulful bars of ‘Time, Love and Tenderness’ played out into the car and I balled a fist and drew it slowly down through the air in front of my face as I sang. I got so into the song that I almost forgot that Charlie was in the car and when I opened my eyes, I found him leaning back against the inside of the door, his eyebrows raised.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, regaining my composure. I turned the volume down a touch and placed my hands on the wheel. ‘I can’t be held responsible for anything I do while that golden-haired, gravel-voiced man is singing.’

  ‘Clearly.’ The smile was still tugging at his mouth. ‘I apologise. I was wrong about him.’

  ‘You bet your ass you were,’ I responded as I checked behind me and pulled out of the space.

  The headlights dazzled against the wall of the house as I pulled up onto the inclined drive and shut off the engine just as the first tinkling notes of ‘How Am I Supposed to Live Without You’ came on. I turned to Charlie, who was still eyeing me with wariness, and expelled a sigh full of a contentment that only musical nostalgia can bring. I was raised on Bolton, moulded by him. Like Bane only more likely to seduce you than kill you.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘have I changed your perspective on the great man himself?

  ‘How could you not with passion like that?’ He breathed a laugh and reached for the door handle.

  We piled all of the cushions onto the living room floor, between the sofa and the rarely used fireplace, the floor becoming an uneven rainbow patchwork. As I stood at the edge of the ocean of pillows, Charlie munching gracelessly on his bag of gummy bears beside me, I thought to myself that I may have gone slightly overboard. Did we even have enough places to put all of these?

  ‘Well, there’s only one thing for it now,’ Charlie said, scrunching the top of his gummy bear bag, turning around and lowering himself back onto the cushions. He wriggled around for a moment, the pillows shifting into place beneath him. After a few seconds he let out a long, contented sigh and closed his eyes, his arms splayed out at either side of him. ‘You comin’ in? The water’s great.’

  I knelt down and crawled to a spot that was an acceptable distance from him, turned over and lay down. I settled into position the cushions rising between us and popping out from under my body like when you stand on a pool float that slips from under your feet. The cushions formed a small barricade between us and I was glad of it, because at least this physical divide would absorb some of the sexual tension I felt towards him. I often found it a struggle to look away from him. The feelings zipping and chiming in my chest when he caught me with that intense blue stare.

  The room held the damp chill that old houses always do, the subtle blast of evening heating that I could still feel lingering in the air, unable to chase away all of the cold. The ceiling, high above us, held hairline cracks, again just a product of age, that ran across the whole span of it, disappearing behind the ornate plaster ceiling rose.

  ‘Do you miss it?’ I asked, my voice sounding quiet in the large room.

  ‘Do I miss what?’ His voice was dreamy, content.

  ‘Home. Ireland. Your family.’

  ‘Yes and no. I miss the place, obviously. It’s beautiful. Have yer ever been?’

  ‘I haven’t, but well done on that particular attempt at conversational misdirection. Almost seamless. What about your family?’ I probed further.

  ‘Touché. Erm, some of them. I highly doubt they miss me though.’

  ‘Why is that?’ I pressed a little more, hoping that I wasn’t pushing my luck.

  He sighed. ‘I did something real shitty a couple of years back.’

  I shifted a little, the zip of one of the cushion coverings digging into my side. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Technically it’s more of what I didn’t do.’ He paused, his voice thick with something I couldn’t quite decipher.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘At some point, but not now.’

  We lay in the silence for a while, the air thick with our own individual trains of thought. It was a while before either of us made a sound and when that sound came, it came in the form of a rustling plastic bag. A moment or two after the rustling, a hand appeared over the barricade of soft furnishings, clutching a fist full of gummy bears.

  I reached up and touched my hand gently to his. His fist unfurled and a rainbow of bears fell into my open palm. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No worries,’ I heard him utter in a dreamlike way as he retracted his arm. I tossed one into my mouth, without taking notice of the colour as all gummy bears tasted the same to me, and the sound of my chewing was so loud in my ears that I stuffed them all into my mouth and got rid of them in one go.

  I felt something uncomfortable behind my back and reached around, pulling out a blue cushion, covered with brown patches of atlas print. I ran my fingers over the soft surface of the cushion, mentally counting the places Mum had been to and lived in over the years. So many different places, filled with new people and cultures. And where had I been? Cowering in a corner, making excuses not to visi
t her because I was afraid of flying.

  I saw movement over the wine-red pillow of the barricade and I watched as his fingers began to set up a line of gummy bears, all looking over into my section. I narrowed my eyes and looked at the bears a little more closely, lined up as if they were about to begin a goose step, and all of them had had their heads removed, the vacant space filled with a head of a different colour.

  I leaned up on my elbows and looked at the line of bears in horror. ‘Erm … are you doing some weird gummy bear head transplant surgery over there?’

  He placed another bear in the line, red with a green head. ‘Yeah, with this one I was goin’ for a festive Christmas sort of vibe.’ I still couldn’t see his face, only his right shoulder leaning against the blue velvet cushion he’d picked out himself.

  ‘Isn’t the first sign of a serial killer when they start butchering poor defenceless animals?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think gelatine bears count.’

  I blew a laugh through my nose and sent one of them over into his section with a flick of my finger.

  ‘Hey!’ he called with somewhat genuine annoyance. ‘What’ya doin’ to young Frankenstein there?’ A moment later, delicate fingers picked him up and placed him back in line.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t know you’d grown so attached to them.’ I saw the dark hair of his head, bobbing over the partition as he constructed more poor unfortunate monstrosities. ‘You do know that the monster wasn’t actually called Frankenstein though, right?’ I said, throwing a piece of utterly useless knowledge out there.

  ‘Yes, he was,’ he argued as he placed his eighth creation, a clear head on a yellow body, in line.

  ‘No, the doctor was called Victor Frankenstein; the creature didn’t have a name. He’s referred to as Adam at one point, because he’s the first of his kind, but it’s not his official name.’

  ‘Are’ya serious?’ he asked, sitting up and finally coming back into view. ‘Yer tellin’ me I’ve been gettin’ that wrong me whole life?’ He stared at me with pinched brows and a mouth hanging crookedly open in question.

  ‘The whole theme of the book is abandonment and the fact that he refuses to give the creature a name reflects the theme,’ I said, reiterating something that my mother had once told me.