The opening extract from my work-in-progress, tentatively named Forgotten. I struggle with openings, almost as much as I struggle with naming stories, but since I am currently 60,000 words into the work I thought it was time I gave it a go. Let me know what you think!
It was raining the day that Cayleen Jones disappeared from Connor’s life, and it is raining the day she returns. He sees her out of the corner of his eye, a flash of brilliant ginger and bright green eyes smiling at him. At first he ignores it. He has seen her a million times and more over the last seven years, always out of the corner of his eye, always just out of reach. But then it happens again. He is in the middle of folding a pile of shirts – arms back, cuffs in, fold up – when there is another fleeting glimpse of those eyes.
She’s here.
The thought pounds through his head even though he knows it’s insane, even as he turns and looks and sees not Cayleen but a window shopper, gazing in with the universal glazed interested-but-not-too-interested expression of window shoppers.
The window shopper moves on to scout other store fronts. Behind her is a stranger. For a second Connor meets his eyes and he sees Cayleen’s looking back at him, bright green and sparkling with curiosity. The vision fades. The stranger’s eyes are an electric blue, but there is a similarity. That curiosity. That spark of interest.
Connor forces himself to look away. This man is not a window shopper. He’s looking straight at Connor, like he’s never seen a sales assistant before and is dissecting him in his mind. Connor shivers. He doesn’t like where his mind’s going. It’s going to the forbidden places, the places he’s spent years training himself to avoid.
She always looked like the world was a curiosity to her. It’s part of what made her so beautiful to him.
“Con?”
He jolts; his manager is standing on the other side of the till, mouth pulled down into a frown that lies, with difficulty, somewhere between stern and gentle.
“You okay mate?”
Ben’s a good enough manager, and a decent enough man as far as Connor can tell. He has a habit of picking at his teeth when he thinks no one’s looking and he’s going through a divorce he hasn’t told any of his staff about. Connor’s noticed the lack of wedding ring, the increase in time spent in his back office, the fraught, whispered conversations to people he’s not supposed to be calling during work hours.
“Con?” Ben’s voice is amused now. “You’re drifting again.”
Connor forces himself back to the situation. Work. Folding the shirts. This is a solid reality, a reality he can work with. “Sorry.” He starts folding again, movements quick and practiced.
Ben doesn’t leave. He’s watching Connor’s hands. Connor watches them too, and realises they’re trembling.
“You okay?”
Connor forces a smile. “I’m good, just a headache.”
Ben nods. He looks relieved. He can work with a headache. “Let me know if you wanna go out back and grab some paracetamol.”
Connor risks a look at the window. The stranger has gone. He feels the relief like a physical weight slipping off his shoulders. “Actually, if you don’t mind…”
Ben raises his hands in dismissal. “Go, grab a drink and a five minute break. I’ll man the till. If there’s a sudden rush I’ll call you back.”
Connor laughs out of habit. It’s an ongoing joke. The shop gets by, in the kind of way that most chain clothes shops get by. Much of their business is online. Especially the men’s, and they are a men’s branch. He’s been offered a job as manager at another shop, a busy shop with high footfall in the centre of Birmingham. He turned it down. He has his little corner of the world, and he is content with that.
The back of the store is a mix of narrow corridors, a large stock room with very little stock to fill it, and a sorry-looking staff room that Ben’s been talking about patching up for as long as Connor’s worked here. He grabs a glass of water but doesn’t bother with the paracetamol: it’s not going to help what’s wrong with him. Instead, he goes to the cramped toilet and braces himself by the sink, splashing cool water on his face.
When he looks up, he sees her eyes in the mirror.
He swerves. There’s no one there. Of course there’s no one there. But his heart is pounding like crazy and he staggers back to the break room to sit down before he falls down.
This is bad. It hasn’t been this bad in a long time. Usually, he sees her once a day. He shakes the sight away. He knows it’s impossible for her to be here.
Three times in one day is unusual. It’s what his sister Bethan would refer to as a ‘bad day’. He hasn’t had many bad days in the last few years. They were very common immediately after she disappeared, but he has worked hard to make them less so.
He rests his head back against the wall, closing his eyes. His thoughts are a broken record, scratching the same name out over and over.
Cayleen. Cayleen. Cayleen.
“She isn’t here,” he whispers. “I didn’t see her.”
Her green eyes. That ginger hair. Ginger, never auburn, never red. She was proud of it. He saw it so clearly. He saw her so clearly.
Cayleen. Cayleen.
“She’s not here.” He presses his hands over his eyes, encasing himself in a darkness where he can be the voice of reason to his own thoughts. The voice of reason always sounds a bit like Bethan to him. He likes that. It grounds him to reality, to the here and now.
Cayleen.
“She can’t be here.”
Why not?
“Because she doesn’t exist. She never existed.” Acceptance was one of the final stages of his therapy. It’s a stage he returns to time and time again on the bad days. “Cayleen Jones wasn’t real.”
But the name keeps repeating in his head, and in the darkness behind his hands he sees the stranger with the blue eyes watching him.