Page 42 of The First Time I Saw You
‘So how are we going to get Handy Huw in with his rotovator?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I reply. He nods and passes me his coffee, then walks over to the next panel along to the dilapidated gate, looks it up and down and disappears back into the house. I stand sipping my coffee and looking at the table in all its fairy-tale glory. His return startles me and it takes me a moment to register that he is holding a sledgehammer as he stomps back to the panel and, in six heavy swings, sends it crashing to the ground in a pile of splintered mess.
He stamps back towards me.
‘Huw can get in now.’ Charlie smiles, drains his cup and leaves.
Week Sixteen
Samuel
I can’t breathe, I can’t see, I can’t live like this. I grip my phone tightly in my hand but what I want to do is throw it against the lounge wall and watch it smash into my twenty-year-old rugby-playing self. Instead, as I lower my hand, I let the black hole swallow it. I have found and rung every number for the staff at Sandwell and the answers are always the same. Nobody knows where Sophie is; three of them – new employees – hadn’t even heard of her.
Insanity is nudging me, whispering to be let in; I can feel myself slipping into the darkness, the tunnel closing around my insides in the same way that it is closing around my vision. My small circle of sight is collapsing, and my ability to see is caught in the embrace of the snake which contracts and squeezes, taking my will to live with every movement.
I can still see my phone screen, but I have noticed that the fog around it is rolling in. Where it used to be surrounded by life and colour, it is now smudged in soot. I’m powerless to stop it.
Just over two weeks and I’ll be out of this brace, my leg will be out of the cast and for that I’m grateful. My sight will be a little easier to cope with once I can move around, but for now . . . I’m still stuck here.
The house is quiet for once; the family have taken Will and Gertie to the beach. For the first couple of hours it was a relief. The silence smiled and relaxed into the sofas; the ticking of the clock grew cocky and commanding, taking over the house like an old general. But now I have nothing to do but watch Da’s old James Bond films on their small TV. My heart quickens when I realise that I won’t be able to see the whole screen of my fifty-inch flat screen by the time I return to DC – the edges will soon be eaten away by the encroaching darkness – but then I realise that my TV isn’t there anyway; it’s buried beneath the pile of rubble that used to be my home. I will never be able to watch a film at the cinema again . . . too much would be hidden in the tunnel walls.
My eyes close and I replay the way she’d laughed at my jokes as we drove to the cinema.
‘What do you call a man with a piece of wood on his head?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Edward.’
‘What do you call a man with three pieces of wood on his head?’
‘Still no idea.’
‘Edward Woodward.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘What is there to get? Edward Woodward, the actor?The Equalizer? We didn’t have Sky until I was seventeen, so we were always stuck watching stuff from the eighties. The classics, my Da always called them . . .The A-team?Knight Rider?’
She’d shaken her head.
‘You’ve got to have heard that joke when you were at school?’
‘Sorry, no, I guess we were too busy watching the Eisteddfod.’
I think back to the way she talked, how when she’d had a few glasses of wine her speech pattern would change, her London accent slipping into something much softer.
Feck’s sake . . . she’s Welsh!
Week Seventeen
Sophie
The tape measure unravels as I count out the twelve centimetres. My thumb holds its marker and I bend and twist the reel over the curve of my stomach.
‘You’re getting big, Bean,’ I say, discarding the measure and rubbing my hand over my expanding stomach, which now sticks out further than my boobs. Although I can’t be sure if that is all Bean and not down to Charlie’s food parcels.
Ungainly fat raindrops plod down against the window panes and I reach over the sink to pull the window closed, my tummy leaning against the counter, restricting my movements.
