At First Sight

by Hannah Sunderland

  I gulped. ‘Thanks, Ned. You’re being really helpful.’

  He ignored me and carried on. ‘As for Charlie, you know the signs, Nell. If he begins to feel like he’s losing control again then you’ll be able to see it. You’re on the same wavelength now. You know everything, so don’t worry that he’s going to try and do it again. And you’re completely allowed to feel like you don’t know what you’re doing. These are high-risk, uncharted waters for you, for most people, but your job isn’t to fix him, it’s to let him know that it is possible to be happy again. As far as jealousy is concerned, you don’t need to be jealous because you’re not in competition with Abi. He’s not got a notebook with your names in columns, ticking off things that each of you are better at.’ He unfurled his hands and reached one over, resting it on my mine. ‘This was never going to be easy, Nell. But if anyone can handle it, it’s you.’

  I stared at him for a moment, a nervous energy making me feel as if I might cry. I swallowed down the tears and squeezed his fingers.

  ‘Damn, you’re good. You know that?’ I said. He chuckled and retracted his hand.

  ‘You’re a badass, Nell. Don’t for a second think that you can’t do this.’

  I picked my spoon back up and stirred my congealing chilli, the next sentence forming in my brain, but my mouth was reluctant to spill it.

  ‘What?’ Ned asked. ‘I know there’s more.’

  I looked back up and met his eyes. ‘It’s nothing. I just had a call the other day and I wanted to ask you about it. It wasn’t something I’d heard of before.’

  ‘I don’t know how much help I’ll be but, sure, fire away.’ He sat back in his chair, crossing his arms and listening with interest.

  ‘So, it was this person who was feeling guilty about something and they started seeing … things.’

  ‘What kind of things?’ he asked.

  The chair next to him was suddenly filled with the glaring form of Abigale Murphy, her hair coiffed to ludicrously glamorous standards, her lips glossed and pouting as she rested a nonchalant chin upon a crooked hand. Yeah, Nell. What kinda things? she sassed.

  I took a deep breath and turned my attention back to Ned, who was eyeing the chair beside him with a worried frown.

  ‘People that weren’t, you know, there.’ I looked back down at my chilli and pushed around a particularly huge kidney bean with my spoon.

  Ned sighed, racking his brain for a moment before answering, ‘Hmm, not sure. Could be that these delusions, for lack of another word, could be a manifestation of their guilt, a way of dealing with it all because they don’t otherwise know how to combat it? Things like this usually come down to delusional disorder or psychosis.’

  Fantastic, I thought, glancing over at Abi, who was grinning at me manically. ‘Yeah, yeah. That’s what I thought.’ I said.

  ‘The human mind is a complicated place. It’ll never stop surprising you.’ He stood and went over to the sink where he doused his bowl with water.

  I took a deep breath, squeezing my eyes shut and then looking back to the chair that I hoped would be empty, but there she still was, staring at me with malevolent glee. She cackled. Yer can’t get rid of me that easily.

  At seven fifteen, the doorbell rang and I found myself uncommonly nervous. I pulled open the door and found Charlie’s deadpan stare, his eyelids half closed in a look of pure exasperation. In his hands he held Carrick’s hot pink suitcase, a black backpack of his own and a large carrier bag containing what looked like a plastic box.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, checking around us for unwanted apparitions of dead wives and thankfully finding none. ‘Where’s Carrick?’

  ‘He’ll be along. Eejit’s just getting the cat out from under the driver’s seat,’ he replied, stepping into the hallway and dropping his bags down onto the floor.

  ‘I’m sorry, did you just say, the cat?’

  I looked down the drive at the taxi that idled against the kerb. The driver gesticulated angrily as Carrick flailed about in the back seat. A few seconds passed as I watched in awe, before Carrick emerged with a disgruntled Magnus in his outstretched hands. Carrick shouted one last insult at the driver who brushed the back of his hand under his chin in a physical insult before driving away.

  ‘Success!’ Carrick bellowed as he jogged up the drive, holding the cat at arm’s length like an unstable grenade. Ned sauntered into the hall just as Carrick made it to the door.

  ‘Ah!’ Carrick exclaimed as he stepped inside. ‘You must be Ned.’

  ‘I am,’ Ned said, warily. ‘And you must be Carrick.’ He looked down at the cat with worried brows.

  ‘Right yer are.’ Carrick thrust Magnus in his direction. ‘Take the beast, will yer? Before I lose a pinkie.’

  Ned, ever obedient, did as he was told and held Magnus to his chest. The cat instantly looked more at ease and quickly found his way up to Ned’s shoulder, where he curled around the back of his neck and settled down with a quiet purr.

  ‘Would yer look at that, Boyo,’ Carrick said over his shoulder to an incensed-looking Charlie. ‘We’ve managed t’find the one man on the planet that the little fecker likes.’ Carrick took the plastic bag from Charlie and handed it to Ned. ‘Here’s some food and a litter tray, complete with brand-new, shite-free litter. Don’t say we don’t treat yer well.’ He winked at Ned and then walked over to his nephew, slapping him affectionately on the shoulder. ‘So, that’s the cat sorted. Where do you want us?’

  Chapter Sixteen

  The fear of embarrassing myself in front of Charlie was about the only thing keeping me from hyperventilating as I glanced out the window of the plane. A jolt of panic struck me square in the chest as I saw the cloud-speckled world so very far below me, but I just took a deep breath and reminded myself that it wasn’t long until we’d be back on the ground. Although, I tried not to think about the landing part. I hated the landing part. Once I was in the air, I was fine. It was just the going up and coming down that made me want to cry like Ned when presented with a Bridget Jones box set.

  My knuckles were still a little achy from when I’d clutched Charlie’s hand to a state of blueness against the armrest. Everything this morning had gone surprisingly smoothly. Charlie hadn’t suddenly decided not to come, like I thought he might and Carrick had been less hungover than I thought he would be, after finding him and Ned in the kitchen just after midnight, three bottles of wine down and playing a particularly competitive game of Jenga, where Carrick had somehow ended up shirtless, his chest stained with long-since-dried droplets of red wine, and could be heard periodically shouting, ‘How about that, Sassenach?’

  I leaned forward and looked past a slumbering Charlie to see how Carrick was doing. He’d taken the aisle seat as the altitude ‘fecked with his bladder’ as he’d so poetically put it. He was sleeping it off now, his head leaning back against the headrest and his sunglasses pulled down over his light-sensitive eyes. I hadn’t wanted to sit by the window, but Charlie had said it would be good for me and if I was making him face his fears, then I’d have to face some of my own too.

  ‘Don’t worry about him. The man wears a hangover as often as he wears trousers,’ Charlie said, his voice making me jump.

  ‘For the sake of everyone in Westport, I hope that means that it’s often.’

  He chuckled and opened his eyes. ‘How’re you doin’?’ he asked, squeezing my hand.

  ‘Okay. You just might have to keep your hands away from me when we land, unless you want your bones crushing again.’

  ‘Duly noted.’ He shifted in his seat and took hold of the tea on his little fold-out tray that, surprise surprise, he’d let go cold.

  I thought back to the mug beside the bed in which Abi had died, and something clicked.

  Tea. It was the last thing he ever did for her. He’d made her a cup of tea, a cup which she never drank. That’s why he never drank his own, because why should he be allowed to when Abi hadn’t? Did he buy himself cup after cup of wasted tea because it was his
own small way of punishing himself, of making sure he never made the mistake of getting distracted again?

  ‘I wonder how Ned’s doin’ with the cat?’ Charlie asked, breaking my train of thought.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think you need to worry there. They’re soulmates if ever I saw them,’ I replied.

  There couldn’t be that much longer to go now before we started descending and the closer we got, the more haywire my nerves seemed to be getting. What were people going to think when Charlie showed up with a strange new Englishwoman on his arm? Would people think that he’d brought a date to his wife’s funeral? Because I was only there for moral support; it wasn’t like we were going to be making out on the buffet table after the service, or making out at all for that matter.

  ‘Hey, Nell?’ Charlie asked, shuffling in his seat so that he was facing me as much as he could. ‘When I disappeared …’

  ‘Which time was this? The first time or the second when you ignored me for two weeks?’ I grinned to lessen the sharpness.

  ‘Ha-ha.’ He mock laughed. ‘The second. There was a reason for it, yer know. I was erm … well, I was afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’

  ‘Of you.’

  ‘Me?’ I asked, my brows knitting at the mere notion of it. ‘I know I’ve got a little bit of a temper sometimes but I wouldn’t say that I was particularly menacing.’

  ‘Not of you as a person, of what I felt … for yer.’

  My chest felt as if it was filling with pressure, like a balloon pressed beneath the sole of a shoe.

  ‘I felt a lot more than I thought I would ever be able to feel again,’ he continued. ‘I felt guilty. I want yer to understand that Abi and I never broke up. We never fell out of love or ended up hating each other. She was just there one minute, gone the next and I had, still have, no idea what to do with everything I feel for her. So, when I began feelin’ that churnin’ in my stomach and wanting to lean in and kiss yer. When I touched that tattoo on yer shoulder and wanted to take yer upstairs, that all felt like cheatin’ to me, like I was gonna get home and Abi was gonna be there with a private investigator and a look of murder on her face.

  ‘It wasn’t because I didn’t like yer, it was because I liked yer too much. And I was always gonna come back and talk to you again, explain myself. Yer just beat me to it.’ His hand landed gently on mine, his fingers falling into the spaces between.

  Since I’d met Charlie, I had felt something for him that I had never felt for another human being before. It was an unspoken intimacy that felt more real, more connected than any bond I’d ever shared with anyone else. It made everything about us, even these new, timid touches, feel natural, inevitable.

  ‘I understand,’ I said, my voice almost a whisper. ‘I can’t imagine how hard this has all been for you and I don’t want you to think that I’m trying to replace her or make you move on faster. This can be done at your own speed.’

  He leaned his head forward until his forehead rested against mine and he exhaled a relieved breath.

  ‘I’m so glad I met yer, Nell,’ he said quietly, his face so close to mine that his eyes morphed into one in the centre of his forehead. But what a handsome cyclops he made.

  I thought of what would have happened if we hadn’t met.

  An extra space at the café table. One call less on the waiting list. The sound of sirens in the distance that I didn’t know the purpose of. A cordoned-off road that added a couple of minutes to my journey. A few more miserable mornings of waking up beside Joel. Loneliness.

  I leaned up a little and pressed my lips to his gently, where they rested for a moment before I moved away. ‘Me too.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  There had been many things that I’d seen in my life where I had asked myself the question: ‘Who the hell thought that this was a good idea?’ But never more so than right now, standing in what looked like a car park full of UPVC huts and staring at what can only be described as a Virgin Mary in a jar full of water, being sold under the guise of a snow globe. Mary stood in the middle, surrounded by trees and a village scene that she dwarfed in size and which was periodically rained down on by glitter and little chips of fake snow.

  ‘Fifteen euro,’ said the tiny, withered woman behind the counter, who looked as though she might be as old as Mary herself.

  ‘How much?’ I asked in horror but I’d already committed to buying it.

  Ned had specifically asked me to bring him back a beautiful souvenir and I was prepared to use that adjective as sarcastically as possible. She raised her eyebrows, or at least I think she did. The hair above her eyes was so sparse that they barely constituted eyebrows at all.

  ‘Fifteen euro. That’s holy water in there, so it is,’ she said as if that was any consolation for paying thirteen pounds for a jam jar full of water with a plastic figurine and some glitter thrown in for good measure. She held my gaze with her wide, sweet eyes and before I knew what was happening, I’d already tapped my card against the reader and she was thanking me with a polite smile. ‘Would yer like a wee bag with that?’

  I nodded, wanting to get as much from this transaction as possible.

  She wrapped Mary up in a sheet of newspaper and put her in a bag, which was less ‘wee’ and more regular-sized, and I walked away feeling unsure as to how she’d managed to bamboozle me with her Irish charm and lack of brows.

  I walked back out into the … I guess market is what you’d call it, and found Charlie exactly where I’d left him. He was standing sullenly, our luggage around his feet, beside a stand advertising large empty plastic bottles to fill with holy water and take home. Carrick had gone to find the car that he’d parked on a friend’s drive, leaving Charlie and I to peruse the souvenirs on offer.

  Charlie leant against an electricity box, his brows lowered over his eyes, his teeth gnawing on his bottom lip. He pulled off the brooding look so well that I often had trouble deciding if he was angry or not. Was he simmering on a medium heat of fury or had his face simply forgotten how to pull any other expression?

  ‘What d’yer have there?’ he asked.

  ‘Something for Ned. I said I’d bring him something back.’

  ‘I never took yer or Ned as religious.’ He nodded towards the bag in my hand.

  ‘How do you know that I bought something religious?’ I asked, reaching in and taking out the paper-wrapped jam jar.

  ‘This is Knock, Nell; everythin’s religious.’

  I unwrapped it and gave him a peek.

  His eyes widened with what I can only assume was intense jealousy, that I should be the owner of such an exquisite object and he not. ‘I’m glad to see you went for the tasteful one rather than the tacky stuff.’ He took it from me, shook it a few times and grimaced at the pathetic scattering of glitter snow. ‘How much did they rob off yer for this?’

  ‘Fifteen euros.’

  ‘Fifteen euro?!’ he exclaimed and then immediately started laughing, violently shaking it around.

  ‘Hey, give it back!’ I pushed myself up onto my tiptoes and snatched it back. ‘I’ll have you know that this is holy water.’

  ‘Oh, well I do beg yer pardon.’

  ‘Yeah, jealous now, aren’t you?’ I said with a grin.

  ‘I am. I mean, just look at the craftsmanship, the … oh, good grief.’ He took my wrist in his hand and brought the globe closer to his face. I squinted through the glass and saw the Virgin Mary’s eyes staring at me judgementally. When I say eyes, however, I mean the twinkly sky-blue diamantes that had been affixed over her eyes.

  ‘Oh, that’s a nice touch.’ Charlie chuckled.

  The sound of one of those jet-propelled boy-racer cars roared to life in the distance, disturbing the quiet town and causing milling tourists to look up from their purchases.

  I’d always found the loud-engined, spoiler-clad, narcissism in car form thing baffling. All it spoke of to me was a larger than average ego and a smaller than average penis. I winced and watched as Charlie raised
a hand to his forehead and rubbed calming circles into his skin. I turned in the direction of the roaring as a bright orange BMW skidded around the corner and, within a matter of seconds, screamed to a halt, the tyres bouncing away from the kerb as the car rebounded a few inches. I scoffed and rolled my eyes at Charlie, who looked nothing but overwhelmingly embarrassed. The driver’s side window opened and out popped Carrick’s beaming face.

  ‘Hop in, kids,’ he called.

  ‘They let you have your car back then?’ Charlie said as he gathered the bags and smiled apologetically at the tourists looking on judgementally.

  ‘On the condition that I get a silencer fitted,’ he called back, his head hanging out the window like a Labrador’s.

  ‘Uh-huh and when are you going to get that done?’

  ‘We’re on the way to the garage now … if anyone asks,’ he replied.

  ‘You get travel sick?’ Charlie asked me over the low top of the car as I popped the door behind the driver’s seat. I shook my head. ‘Good. But there’s a bag in the back of Carrick’s seat if you need one. His driving has been known to bring out the vomit in people.’

  ‘Excellent,’ I murmured, sliding into the back seat. Charlie got in beside me and Carrick shifted the passenger seat forward so that Charlie’s legs could fit in.

  ‘You not going up front?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah, it’s safer back here … I think.’

  ‘Everyone strapped in?’ Carrick asked. I quickly buckled my seatbelt and gave him the thumbs up in the mirror. ‘Right then, off we go.’

  The car left the kerb at such a speed that I felt like I was back on the plane, being thrust back into my seat by the sheer G-force of Carrick’s acceleration. We were off and away, leaving nothing but noise pollution and the smell of burning rubber behind us. Before I even had time to feel embarrassed at the distressed looks of the people milling around the streets, Carrick took a corner like a rally driver and we were quickly out of sight. As my body slid across the leather seat and my shoulder collided with the inside of the door, I was struck by the thought that I hadn’t said goodbye to my mother or to Ned. I hadn’t even rung him when I got off the plane like I’d promised I would. Hopefully, I wouldn’t die here, but I decided to send them both a text, just in case.