At First Sight by Hannah Sunderland (latest novels to read TXT) 📕

I sat on the end of Kenna’s bed, squeezing my hair between layers of thick maroon towel, as Kenna riffled through a drawer of clothes.

‘Most of my good clothes are in London, but I’m sure there’s somethin’ that’s not hideous in here.’ She flung shirts and leggings and dresses across the room like a dog flicking earth with its back paws, the clothes landing in a pile of disarray on the carpet beside the bed. ‘Here,’ she said, emerging from the wardrobe with a black V-neck jumper and some stretchy jeggings. I appreciated the fact that Kenna wasn’t even pretending for a moment that we were the same size. Where she had curves, I had flat edges. Where she was womanly, I was more like a fence post, but the things she picked out fitted me pretty well, if slightly saggy in areas. The deep V of the neckline, which I’m sure made Kenna look like something out of Playboy, made me look like a 1950s schoolboy, just missing the white collar poking out from beneath.

‘So, how’s yer singing voice?’ she asked, her eyebrows raising with anticipation.

‘Terrible, awful, abominable,’ I said, overstressing the words. ‘Why?’

‘Well, it’s gettin’ to the drunk portion of the memorial and so there’ll be a speech where Mammy will excuse herself and go and cry in the downstairs toilet and then, when everyone is thoroughly depressed, in we come with a few songs. That is the Irish way.’

‘I think I’d be best left out of it. I don’t think anyone needs to be depressed even further and that’s just what will happen if any musical sounds try to escape my throat.’

‘Hmm.’ She held a curled finger to her lips and looked away for a moment in thought. ‘Then, how are yer with tambourines?’

When I re-emerged downstairs, I found the house in a state of disarray that it hadn’t been in when I’d left. The majority of the buffet table had been consumed and now all that was left were empty platters, scattered crumbs and discarded glasses with millimetres of liquid sitting in the bottom. I found Charlie loitering on the periphery of an animated conversation with a group of people around his age. They must have been friends from school who’d only ever known Charlie as Abi’s and Abi as his. Charlie’s smile was crooked and not wholly believable. A crystal cut glass containing one large ice cube and a healthy measure of whisky fell into my view, suspended in front of my face by skinny fingers.

‘Here we go,’ Carrick said from beside me, nodding in the direction of Kenna who was walking through the room with authority. ‘Yer gonna need this.’ I took the drink and sipped on the cool, astringent liquid. Carrick copied my action with his own, slightly fuller glass and sighed at the numbing liquid. He’d done a good job of hiding how shaken he’d been, but I could see in his strained eyes that he was kicking himself for losing Charlie in the first place. He was looking rather more dishevelled than he had earlier. His soaked chartreuse jacket had been discarded over the banister and his magenta shirt was now undone to the third button and darkened with rain across the shoulders. His greying hair hung down over his eyes in damp, limp curls as he nervously sipped from his glass again.

Kenna walked up to just in front of the French doors that opened out into the garden, the inside of the doors speckled with droplets from when they had been hastily closed once the rain had set in. In her hand she held a bodhrán, one of those large drums that you always see in folk bands. She raised the double-ended drumstick as she reached the doors and brought it down hard on the taut skin of the drum.

The room needed little encouragement to look Kenna’s way. She was like the sun: even when you weren’t looking at her, you were always aware of her presence. The conversation quietened before muting completely and everyone turned themselves around to face her as she set the drum down.

‘Hello, everyone,’ she said, her voice sounding professional and crisp in the crowded room. ‘I thought that I might get a speech in before yer all get too drunk to remember why we’re even here.’ She chuckled and a quiet laugh spread amongst the crowd. She cleared her throat and her smile ebbed a little. ‘Abi wasn’t like me, she didn’t enjoy the spotlight, and so she’d be thoroughly mortified to see all of the fuss we’ve made over her in the last two years. But it warms our family’s heart to see so many people who still hold so much love for my big sister.’ Her voice broke a little. She cleared her throat, sniffed and composed herself.

I glanced over at Charlie on the other side of the room. His eyes were glassy, his bottom lip pulled into his mouth. I could see him, monitoring his breathing, taking one breath at a time like Carrick had asked him to. I wanted so much to comfort him but he was too far away, separated from me by bodies and bodhráns.

‘On this day two years ago, the world lost a kind, funny, accident-prone, short-tempered, good-hearted woman, who had enough love in her heart for every single person in this room and then some. We lost a daughter, a sister, a friend, a wife.’ I looked around the room for Siobhan but couldn’t see her and I guessed that she was exactly where Kenna had said she’d be, sobbing into triple ply in the downstairs WC. Kenna wiped a tear from her eye with the flash of a gel-tipped finger, not leaving it there long enough for it to smudge her thick, cat liner. ‘So, that’s enough of the chatter.’ She looked towards the door as two suited men walked in with trays of small whisky-filled glasses. I was offered one, but I turned it