Page 81 of The First Time I Saw You
‘Shush!’ she snaps, and I scan the room to find where the slight nostril snort of amusement is coming from and see parts of my sister’s red hair from beside the door. ‘You two great idiots, with your bucket list, are swanning around as if you’ve got a month to live. Sammy, whether you want to accept it or not, you need to prepare for when your sight goes, and that means applying for a guide dog and—’
‘Guide dog my—’ Da begins.
‘Mr McLaughlin, you shut your piehole! You’ve done enough damage!’ The table wobbles as her hands slap the surface. ‘There are lots of things you need to learn to do as a blind person, Sammy. Like how to post a selfie.’
‘What? I know how—’
A fuzzy image of Da laughing his head off as we staggered through the lounge replays in my aching head. He was showing Mam the selfie I’d taken of us but hadn’t managed to hit the selfie mode. Instead – as Mam is demonstrating by pushing Da’s phone screen into my face – is a pair of tits. Good ones, but tits nonetheless and I’m not talking about me and Da.
‘Christ, woman, it was only a strip club, not the red-light district,’ he grumbles.
‘I couldn’t give a flying fish about the strip club,’ Mam answers. I’ve given up trying to track her movements as she bangs about the kitchen. I focus on Sarah’s hair instead as she twirls it around her finger like she used to when we were kids.
‘Sammy, you need to get your life together. I’m not having you living here for ever; I brought you up well enough for you to stand on your own two feet. Just because you’re going to be blind . . .’ her voice catches as she says this, ‘doesn’t mean you stop being independent. It’s time to get on with your life.’ Something is slid across the table and my palms skim across the plastic tablecloth and pick up a note, but I can’t read it without slowly moving my head across the words: it’s a number for a social worker.
‘I’ve spoken to her this morning. She can help you so much, Samuel, she can help you learn to look after yourself; teach you to iron, to cook . . . to get your life back.’
Sophie holding her family in her arms punches me in the stomach, shaking the bacon and the coffee.
‘I haven’t got a life to get back,’ I say. Michael straightens his back and we walk out of the room, closing the door quietly behind us and returning to our bed.
Week Thirty-One
Sophie
I’m trying to give Charlie some space. It’s hard not to keep knocking on his door. Every morning that I notice the curtains are open and hear the sound of his radio fills me with relief. Will I ever stop worrying about him?
Darkness fills the room as I balance my laptop on Bean. We huddle beneath the duvet, my fingers tapping away as I try to find anything I can about Samuel.
Stepping back into the world of social media fills me with apprehension. I set up new accounts, putting a picture of a leaf as my profile picture.
The sheer magnitude of social media settles around my shoulders like a cloak. The weight of it presses down on me, becoming heavier, and with every page I open, with every photo I scan, another patch of material is added: the smiles, the dogs, the babies, the food, the pouts, the memes, the proposals, the weddings, the lost and the lonely. How do so many of us do this, walk around with this cloak pulling us down, dragging behind us as we walk, the material itching us until we scratch ourselves raw? We try to make the cloak pretty, make it look brighter with a filter, happier with interesting scenery, look perfect as we gaze into our partner’s eyes. But with every new piece of material we add, no matter how special and perfect it is, we can’t stop the cloak from becoming heavier.
But Samuel never wanted to wear it. ‘I don’t do social media,’ he said.‘It’s all fake.’
I yawn and glance at the clock – it’s half-two in the morning.
He’s not there.
My search continues as I scroll through Sarah McLaughlins, but there are so many, some without profile pictures, some with, but none of them look like the Disney character he had described. I jot down a few possible matches, but as I click on them, they don’t live in Derry.
The cloak is too heavy for me now and so I slip my arm out of the sleeve as I close down Facebook, unfasten the buttons as I log off Twitter and finally shrug it off and on to the floor as Instagram disappears from view.
Bean fidgets beneath my skin and I change position as a heel catches my ribcage. My baby is as uncomfortable as I am and I shift the laptop next to me, pull down the duvet, and lift my nightie. I laugh as a foot stretches out and then jolts against my tight skin, moving my whole stomach, but my baby is still not comfortable. My stomach arches up on one side; the clear outline of bone protrudes from my stomach then snaps back inside. I gasp as the bone pushes outwards again, the whole bump stretching further away from my own body than I ever imagined it could, and then the baby beneath it rolls over to the right side, the entire tummy moving from the left of my body to the right. My hand flies to my open mouth as I let out a giggle that is more shock than amusement as Bean stills, comfortable in its new position.
‘Oh Samuel, you’re missing it,’ I mumble and then I have an idea. When, and I do mean when, I find Samuel I don’t want him to miss these moments; I want to be able to show them to him. I smile, grab my mobile and choose the video camera option. I give Bean a good poke and film my tummy as our child pushes and turns beneath my skin. I replay it and sigh as I put the phone down and look at the clock again. I compose another email to Bret, but just as I have so many times, I delete it before I hit send. I’ve said all that I can to Bret; I’m not leaving my fate – and Bean’s – in his hands any more.
I stroke my bump. My body is uncomfortable now, the weight of Bean making my hips ache and pushing against my bladder. It takes a long time before I finally begin to drift off to sleep but just as I do, I hear Samuel.‘I was never late for dinner because we could hear the bells from our den.’
My eyes flash open and my heart speeds up; I have a clue about where Samuel grew up in Ireland, that he lived by a church.
My hand fumbles for the light switch. I know how ridiculous this is – it’s one tiny straw to clutch at – but I reach for my laptop and carry on regardless, tapping in ‘churches in Londonderry’ into the search bar. There are a lot of churches in Derry.
But it’s a start.
Week Thirty-One
Samuel
