At First Sight Hannah Sunderland (free e books to read online txt) 📖

ended up having a water fight there on the grass and I’m pretty sure that’s the moment I fell in love with her, all red hair, dirty face and freckles.

‘It wasn’t long after we’d both become soaked through with the hose water that her mammy started callin’ her from inside, sayin’ her sister needed her. Mrs Murphy had had another baby about three years earlier, you see. They called her Kenna. She was unplanned and now she found herself with a baby she could barely remember to look after, so Abi did most of the carin’. She told me that I could leave and that I should come back the next Saturday to get rid of the thorns by the back fence. And so, I walked home and from that moment on, I thought of little other than her.’

He cleared his throat and glanced over at me as if he’d forgotten that I was here. ‘Do you want me to carry on?’ he asked. ‘I know I’m ramblin’.’

‘Go on,’ I said, my stomach tingling.

‘Okay. I spent every Saturday of the summer there, some Sundays too and sometimes she read to me from her books while we ate lunch on the lawn that grew through good as new.

‘She was always covered in scrapes and bruises, cuts and dents that she never moaned about and I ended up buying a box of plasters every Saturday morning in preparation for the inevitable wound she’d give herself that day. She always insisted that they didn’t hurt, although I could tell when they did.

‘On that last Saturday, when summer was over and the garden looked as good as if Mr Murphy had done it himself, she kissed me at the side gate and told me that she was almost certain that she was in love with me.

‘We started seeing each other from then on and everything was going fine. I stuck around for a year after I finished school so that whatever we were going to do, we could do together. She applied for a course in illustration at Dublin University and I thought everythin’ was gonna be fine and I was headin’ there too for an apprenticeship. Everything was planned out, until she didn’t get into Dublin and got accepted to the National University of Ireland over in Galway instead. I’d already found myself somewhere to live and there just wasn’t the same theatre culture in Galway that there is in Dublin. I’d have had nothin’ to do there.

‘We told ourselves that it would work out but there was almost one hundred and thirty miles between us and it wasn’t long until she called it quits on us. I was heartbroken and I dealt with it pretty badly. Turned myself into a bit of a tosser, made some awful decisions with some awful people. We didn’t talk for about two years after that, until one day in Dublin, I was leaving the theatre where I was working when I literally walked straight into her. We were both as shocked as each other. We didn’t say a word, just stared at each other with these beamin’ smiles on our faces. We spent the evenin’ in a bar, talkin’ about old times and before the night was over, we were deep enough in love again that we got married as soon as we could. We didn’t tell anyone because we just wanted to do somethin’ low-key.

‘When our families found out, they weren’t happy. They dragged us back home and made us do the whole thing all over again in the “appropriate Catholic way” as Mammy said. After uni was done, Abi moved to live with me in Dublin until she got a job in London and we moved over there. We lived there for a good long while before we realised that commutin’ from Birmingham would cost less than living in London and that’s how we ended up here.’

‘Did you carry on working in London?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘For a time. But it’s a hard industry.’

‘It’s a beautiful story.’ I had almost forgotten that I already knew the end to this story and I wanted him to stop there. If he stopped talking now then I could pretend that gangly Abigale Murphy and young stupid Charlie Stone got their happy ending. ‘We can stop there if you want to, leave the rest for later.’

He shook his head. I could already see his eyes glistening. ‘It’s okay. I want to finish it.’ He swallowed hard, audibly, and took a deep breath through his nose. ‘She had these lumps in her boobs. They’d scared the shite outta us both when they showed up, but she got them checked out and the doctor said that they were just these calcified lumps of tissue that would do her no harm. She didn’t have the largest, you know, and so you could see one of them through her skin. I couldn’t have cared less about them but she wanted them gone, so she went in for the op and had them taken out.

‘The operation went fine and that evening I brought her back here and put her in bed. They’d given her these long, tight stockings to put on, but she said they looked stupid and dug into her knees and so she refused to wear them. There was little you could do when Abi had made her mind up about somethin’. Anyway, when she got into bed, she was in a foul mood. The anaesthetic made her all sassy and we’d had an argument on the way home.’ I watched as his face changed, then his voice, as the story got closer to the final conclusion. ‘She kissed my cheek as I sat her up in bed on all those pillows.’ He motioned to the bed, looking almost fearfully at it. ‘She apologised and asked me to give her one of the strong painkillers they’d sent her home with and a cup of tea. I remember saying to her, “Abigale