At First Sight

by Hannah Sunderland

  ‘Where d’ya keep it all?’ he asked, looking impressed.

  ‘What, the useless information? I store it in the spaces reserved for actual useful knowledge, like where the Isle of Man is or how to change a fuse.’

  The overhead light emitted a warm glow that made shadows of the strands of his dark hair, which hung down over his eyes, and the straight bridge of his nose.

  He picked up the ‘festive’ gummy bear and raised it to his lips.

  ‘No,’ I gasped comically, ‘you can’t.’

  ‘Oh, I can and, shortly, you’ll see that I will.’ He opened his mouth and held it just inside.

  ‘But you brought them into this world!’

  He dropped it onto his tongue, closed his mouth and chewed.

  ‘You monster!’ I exclaimed.

  A forced, evil cackle rolled from his lips. ‘Mwahaha!’ He snatched the rest of them up and piled them onto his tongue and, just like that, he put an end to his creations.

  We both laughed and I was filled with the same kind of foolish, simple joy that fills you in your teenage years when you’re doing something stupid with someone you have a crush on.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked abruptly.

  I checked my phone and was shocked to see how late it had got. ‘It’s eight forty-five.’

  ‘Damn it, I’d better get goin’,’ he said and something inside me deflated. He pushed himself up and I followed, my feet slipping as I padded over the cushions in sock-covered feet. I met him on solid flooring and readjusted my loose jumper from where it had ridden up in all the wrong places.

  ‘Hey, what’s that?’ He gestured to the top of my shoulder blade where the small greyish black blades of a wind turbine tattoo poked out from under my clothes.

  ‘Oh, that,’ I said, pulling my hair over my opposite shoulder and tugging the back of my jumper down a little. I turned to the side so it could be seen more clearly, about the size of a fifty-pence piece, the bottom of it disappearing into waves. ‘I’d always wanted a tattoo but couldn’t think of anything to get and then one day when my mum came back from one of her work trips, we both went and got the same tattoo, so that we will always be linked, no matter how far apart we are.’

  I looked over my shoulder as he raised a hand and ran his fingers over the skin of my tattoo. I closed my eyes and exhaled a shaky breath as his thumb moved in gentle circles and I felt goose bumps over every inch of my skin. ‘Do you … erm … d-do you have any?’

  ‘Huh?’ he said quietly, not really listening.

  ‘T-tattoos? Do you have any?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ His voice seemed far away. ‘I’m glad that we’re, you know, friends again.’

  ‘Me too.’

  But we were not friends. I didn’t lie in bed at night thinking about friends like I did about Charlie. I didn’t go over every word I’d said to them, slapping my pillow with frustrated hands when I remembered a moment where I’d embarrassed myself. My breathing became heavy as I turned around to face him and I looked at his lips, surrounded by stubble that was on the verge of becoming a beard. He moved a little closer. He was so close that I could smell the sweet scent of gummy bears on his breath and I wondered if he’d taste like them too, when his lips finally reached mine. He moved closer still, the heat of his body radiating out to mine through the unforgivably cold air of this big old house. His hand moved up to my face and a tender fingertip ran along the line of my jaw. I closed my eyes and almost shivered at the touch and when I opened my eyes again, I found him even closer than he had been before.

  I prepared myself for what I imagined would be an end-credits kiss, the big one that happens to swelling orchestral music and where doves take off and circle above us as the camera pans out and fades to black, a cheerful pop song taking over from the orchestra as the names roll by. I could practically hear the conductor readying the ensemble as Charlie looked down at my lips.

  This was going to be it. A second chance at the moment he’d screwed up before.

  He moved closer, his lips barely an inch from mine and then, just as my eyes fell closed, he stopped.

  ‘I’ll … erm …’ He cleared his throat and stepped away, so very far away. The conductor in my brain threw his baton in frustration, the orchestra disassembling in disappointment. He stepped away, grabbed his shoes from by the door and left, disappearing once again.

  Chapter Eight

  My mum had always been a fan of those who-done-it murder mystery adaptations that always come on around Christmas, where you spend the whole time trying to work out who it is that killed old Viscount Mulberry with the cyanide in the parlour. I wasn’t ever much of a fan of those; I didn’t have the patience for them. So, the real-life, walking (but not so much talking) mystery, otherwise known as Charlie Stone, was proving to be one of the most frustrating people I had ever attempted to wrap my head around. It had been thirteen days now, almost an entire two weeks, since Charlie and I had shared a moment of pure, erotica-level sexual tension, quickly followed by a hurried, wordless goodbye. Almost two weeks since he took his second chance and used it to sexually frustrate me once more with almost kisses and I hadn’t heard a peep from him since.

  Meanwhile, I’d been going through the full spectrum of emotions. Denial, waiting up for an hour or two after he left to see if he might come back and explain himself. Anger, where I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, seething with a concentrated fury that I hadn’t felt in years. Bargaining, sitting between calls at work and thinking that maybe there was a reason for his running away. That was where I was stuck right now, coming up with endless excuses and reasons why. Maybe he’d suddenly found himself feeling ill or remembered he’d left the stove on. Maybe something had happened with Carrick and he’d had to go home to Ireland? I’d worried that he hadn’t taken my number down right, that he’d missed a digit or that the phone masts were down, but we usually got bulletins about problems with the phone lines at work and I hadn’t heard of any recently.

  I then went back to the much more believable theory of him being married. I could think of no reason more fitting for the guilty look that’d arrived on his face after the first of the two almost kisses. Just because he’d told me that he wasn’t married, didn’t mean that that was the case. I’d had several moments over the last two weeks when all I’d been seeing in my mind’s eye were stills of him with his beautiful, Victoria’s Secret model wife who’d have a name like Cara, their two perfect children playing on the carpet with the Labrador beside the log fire. Charlie smiling as he withdrew a roast from the Aga and placed it on the perfectly laid, polished oak table.

  Another option was that he was dead. What if he’d never made it home after that night of butchered gummy bears and tentative touches? What if he was lying, unidentified, in a morgue somewhere, heading for nothing but years as a John Doe in a freezer, ice crystals forming on those thick dark lashes? All of these theories were plausible, if not likely, but all of them had one single purpose: to not allow myself to think about the most probable reason for it all. What if he just didn’t want to talk to me? I’d gone onto Facebook and searched for him after four days of radio silence, but his profile was private and I didn’t want to dignify his ghosting, if that was what this was, with any sign that it was bothering me.

  His profile picture was one of him standing on a hill, bathed in sunshine. He looked so different, slightly heavier than he was now, his stubble and long hair stripped away in favour of a clean shave and slickly styled quiff. He beamed into the camera with a cocky look of excitement in his eyes, one that I hadn’t seen there in my time of knowing him, which, granted, had not been that long. The only other picture I could see was one of him and a group of friends. They looked like your typical yuppy bankers with ostentatiously sized watches and slip-on loafers over sockless feet. Charlie, although looking a little out of place, seemed to be enjoying himself. His smile wide, his eyes bright. He looked like a stranger.

  ‘Well, which do you think it is?’ I asked,
pushing my head through the hole of a turtleneck jumper, like I was being born all over again, and pulling my hair out from inside the collar. It was instantly hit by that static frizz that is impossible to get rid of once it happens and I quickly checked the damage in the camera of my phone. ‘Dead, married or ghosting me?’

  ‘Honestly, Nelly, I don’t know,’ Mum said through the screen. ‘I don’t know which one you want me to say.’ She was in her office, typing something into her computer with rapid fingers, not even glancing down at the keyboard.

  ‘The one that you think is the truth,’ I replied a little tetchily.

  She sighed, but didn’t stop typing. ‘Honestly, love, I think it might be that he’s just a prick. One of those … what do you young people call them these days? Fuckboys. That’s it.’

  ‘Mum!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘What? You asked what I think and that’s what it is. I think he tried his luck with you and then when you didn’t hand it out on the first night or the second, he gave up on it and I’m proud of you for that. The Coleman women are anything but easy.’ She stopped typing and scrunched up her nose. ‘Well, apart from that one, single, solitary time, when you were conceived. Apart from that, we are chaste women.’

  ‘That’s honestly not what it was like, Mum.’

  ‘Well, maybe he’s just a little bit unhinged then? You did meet him via a mental health phone line.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he’s crazy, Mum. People who feel overwhelmed at times aren’t all sitting in the corners of rooms, rocking back and forth in straitjackets, you know? And anyway, he was calling to talk about his uncle, not himself.’

  She sighed. ‘Look, you gave him a chance, two even. I’d call it quits now.’

  ‘But I really liked him.’ I groaned. ‘He’s just so flaky. He said he’d text me soon, he promised. It’s been two weeks.’

  ‘Well, have you tried to contact him? It’s the twenty-first century, you know. Women aren’t expected to wait for the men anymore.’

  ‘I’ve texted him three times and sent him a couple of memes and he’s ignored every single one of my messages. He’s read them – I can see that – he just doesn’t bother to respond.’

  She sucked her teeth and looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Well, I suppose that two weeks isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things.’

  ‘It is when you don’t have a job and you’ve already disappeared once already. Being ghosted has genuine detrimental psychological effects, you know. There’s been articles on it.’

  ‘He doesn’t have a job?’

  ‘He’s between jobs,’ I said, looking away from the camera to hide from her withering stare. Why was I defending him? What was wrong with me?

  ‘And what is his profession?’ she asked. She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair.

  ‘He’s a make-up artist.’

  ‘A make-up artist? Like the ones in MAC? Because you know that they tend to, more often than not, be …’

  ‘He’s not gay, Mum, but way to stereotype. No, he’s not one of those make-up artists anyway. He’s one of the ones that make fake noses out of silicone or make you look like your arm’s just been sawn off.’ I grabbed a brush from my makeshift vanity table – a spare plank of laminate flooring propped up with books at either end – and gently combed it through my hair to try and undo the damage the statically charged jumper had done.

  ‘What a charming job.’ Her nostrils flared a little before she spoke again. ‘Is he any good?’

  ‘I have no idea. That would involve him actually divulging some personal information, wouldn’t it, and that’s not something he seems capable of doing.’ I carried on dragging the brush through my hair, harder and harder, until my scalp began to ache. ‘I just don’t understand him. One minute he’s saying that he’s in desperate need of a friend and that I am that friend and that he wants to know more about me and then he’s looking at me with those big, I want to kiss you eyes and then poof, he’s gone again.’ I could feel the brush snapping through hair when the bristles encountered tiny knots but I couldn’t stop; the brushing, and subsequent pain, was cathartic.

  ‘Darling, darling. You’ll have no hair left.’ She held her hand up to the camera, begging me to stop. ‘You know your grandmother had trouble holding on to her hair. Let’s not help the genes on their way.’

  I dropped the brush down onto the ‘table’ like it’d turned white hot and surveyed the number of hairs lying in the bristles. Not too many – I wouldn’t be going bald just yet.

  ‘Seems to me like he’s messing you around and you’re better off following Ned’s advice and getting yourself on Bumble.’ She resumed her typing, although each hammer of the key was a little louder this time.

  ‘I don’t want to go on Bumble, but I agree with you about the messing me around thing. I’m giving him one last day. He has until the stroke of midnight to text me and if he doesn’t, then I guess he goes back to being a pumpkin.’

  ‘Good plan, Nelly. Let me know how it goes. No word on when I’ll be back just yet, but it’ll be soon, I promise.’ She picked up the phone and drew it towards her face.

  ‘Uh-huh. A lot of people keep making me promises at the moment.’ I sighed.

  ‘Nelly, I am your mother. If you can’t trust me to keep a promise then who can you trust?’ She blew a kiss into the camera. I caught it and returned one of my own before hanging up and turning to the mirror.

  I was wearing my hair straight today, parted in the middle like a Seventies hippy. I applied some hair oil to my hand and dragged it through my unruly locks in a last-ditch attempt to calm the frizz. I had done very little with my day so far. My only real objective had been to go into town to buy a film and some pizza for me and Ned tonight. I’d thought about calling around to my ever-evaporating pool of friends but in the end, I decided that I’d much rather wander around town on my own. It had been an empty, boring kind of day where you can’t wait for night to come so you have an excuse to sit around and be lazy.

  I caught the bus into town, due to the sudden shower of rain that disappeared as quickly as it came, but gave its all while it was here. I vowed to walk my way home and attempt to get to at least four digits on the pedometer.

  I tried to clear my mind and enjoy my day, but there was a quiet anger that bubbled away in the background, turning my smallest of actions into expressions of frustration. I’d slapped my card down so forcefully onto the reader when I entered the bus that the driver recoiled a little. I knew that the annoyed, proud part of me, the part that’d been raised on tales of Boudica and Pocahontas, wanted to be strong and cut my losses with Charlie Stone now, before that treacherous warmth in my chest grew to be something that I’d carry with me in various forms of damaging behaviour for the rest of my life. I was a strong, capable woman and I didn’t need a man to complete me. I would, however, like to have someone to sleep beside or kiss me when I left for work. I had Ned for all my platonic needs but it would be nice to have the romantic needs covered too.

  I went into HMV and bought a bargain-bin romantic drama with an embracing couple on the cover. Ned was a sucker for this type of film and he’d be overjoyed to curl up in our mountain of scatter cushions and use one of them to hide his moistening eyes when the credits rolled. God forbid we had a tear-stained repeat of the A Walk to Remember debacle of 2019.

  I grabbed two pizzas and a couple of four-packs of Peroni and began heading back home. It took about twenty minutes to walk and that would give me enough time to think a little more about the Charlie situation, before putting it all to rest. It must have been somewhere near five o’clock, so that gave him seven hours to text and if he didn’t, then I would do what I should have done a week ago and step away.

  The walk home seemed long and arduous and I thought about turning around and heading to the bus station, but I had promised myself that I would get at least some exercise. Caffeine was what I needed, a little boost to see me through.

  I turned in the direction of caffein
e and approached Cool Beans Café. I shamelessly walked in through the glass door, turned opaque with condensation, and scoured the room for him, like I’d done every lunchtime these past two weeks, and came up with nothing. I walked up to the counter and ordered a coffee from the rookie employee as I continued to scour the place with increasingly frustrated eyes.

  ‘Americano,’ the boy said and handed me my drink. I thanked him and was about to walk away when I turned back to him and glanced down at his name tag.

  ‘Sorry, erm, Russel?’ I asked. Russel turned back to me, worried that he’d cocked up my order. ‘Can I just ask if that Irishman with the dark hair has been coming in recently?’ A magenta-lipped woman in the queue sucked her teeth in my direction. I had become the very thing I hated the most, someone who holds up the line.

  ‘Oh, you mean cold tea guy?’ he asked, his eyes momentarily widening, and then he quickly checked over his shoulder to make sure no one had heard him. ‘Sorry, we’re not supposed to refer to regulars by the nicknames we give them.’

  ‘Nicknames? Do I have one?’ I asked, getting a little distracted.

  He grinned. ‘Yeah. You’re smiley girl.’ He leaned in and whispered, ‘But if anyone asks, I didn’t tell you that.’ He resumed his position and cleared his throat. ‘So, it’s him you’re looking for? The one who always leaves his tea?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ I replied.

  ‘Yeah, he was in here not too long ago.’

  ‘As in … today?’ I asked.

  ‘As in, like, five minutes ago. He took a tea and some banana bread.’ He grinned, terribly pleased with himself that he could remember the order.

  ‘Did you see which way he went?’ I asked, even though I could feel the impatient eyes of every person in the queue boring into me.

  He scrunched up his face as if his usefulness was coming to an end and began to shake his head. ‘Erm, well,’ his face unscrunched and his eyebrows rose a little higher. ‘Isn’t that him there?’ He pointed out the window to one of the few tables put out front for smokers and in one of those cold, rain-spattered chairs, was the melancholy outline of Charlie Stone.