The Writer's E-Zine Home

Writers' Village University - F2K: Free Fiction Writing Course - ePress-online
Writers' Village University Membership Information

Fiction Short Story

by Clare Kirwan

Eye Contact

'I want a full description,' he insists.

'You mean what I look like? How will you know?'

'I wasn't always blind.'

It taxes my powers of description. I'm losing my words lately, my vocabulary falling away like the withered October leaves outside. My life is on a downward spiral now - falling apart slowly. Forty years of thinking you are indestructible, forty more of lingering destruction. That's how it seems from here on the cusp.

But who am I to complain? Adam makes me feel ashamed of my grumbling, the way he just gets on with it even though he has to squint at something from a distance of about a millimetre to see it at all. I sit across the desk and so he's never seen me—we're not that close. Except that I've just come round to his side for more paper, and somehow we got onto the subject.

'I'm not a pretty sight,' I say.

He laughs and looks in my vague direction, and even though I know we're not making eye contact really, it feels as though we are and I probably blush a little but he's not to know that. I'm glad the others are out to lunch.

We were all scared when Adam got the job, not knowing if he would cope, or if we would. But he had arrived with unexpected energy and confidence, turning the office around on itself, challenging and chatting, a big man with the open face of a child. He's the kind of person that lifts a room when he walks into it, and you with it.

He drums his fingers impatiently against each other the way he always does; big firm hands, nails bitten to the quick. He hasn't been with us very long, but already his habits are familiar. He's waiting for a real answer.

'Well, my face is longer than it's round, not a classical shape.'

I'm supposed to be better than this. I can come up with a good line in thirty seconds on a good day—queen of the witty riposte. That's what he likes about me. What else is to like?

'Come on, Ms Taylor.' He always calls me that. He used to have a girlfriend called Anne. He never calls me Anne.

'Why does it matter so much, Mr Shaw?' I respond in kind, but he's always Adam in my head. It feels very intimate suddenly, to be alone in the office with him.

'I just want to get an idea, that's all.'

'Well I'm not sure I'm ready to divulge this information.'

'You're discriminating against me!' Damn. I knew he'd do that. He's fiercely independent and likes to joke about other people's political correctness, but he isn't averse to resorting to it himself sometimes. He told me once that people always offer him seats on buses, as though there was something wrong with his legs.

'And I always accept!' he'd said. 'It'd be churlish not to!'

It had conjured up a picture of little old ladies with varicose veins clinging to the hand rail while he sits there, the picture of health and manliness, folding his white stick away and beaming up in the general direction of his embarrassed co-passengers.

But I refuse to be embarrassed. I know it's just a game for him.

'I could tell you anything,' I say to him slyly.

'Why would you do that?'

He's got me here. Why would I?

'Okay, just teasing,' I come back at him, a bit too quickly—because it's on the tip of my tongue to tell him exactly why, but I'm holding that back the same way I'm holding back the invitation to just have a feel for himself. 'And I'm spotty, even though that's supposed to stop after your teens.'

'Too many cakes!' he interrupts with great authority.

'If you're going to keep butting in …'

He holds up his hands, smiling that smile again, the one that gets me somewhere at the base of my stomach. I tell myself I don't want it to feel like that, but if that were true, why am I always trying to make him smile? It doesn't mean anything. It isn't important. That's the good thing about getting older—nothing is quite so desperate any more. You can like someone from a distance without it taking over your life, without having to do anything about it. You can flirt and know exactly how far to go and when to stop. You know that no-one can ever really get under your skin any more and no-one is going to hurt you. You're more in control.

'I'm hairier than I ought to be, but I can't be bothered to do anything about it.' I'm rabbitting on now, uncomfortably aware there's something a bit dangerous about the word 'hairy'. I bite my lip. 'and there are monkey lines.'

'Monkey lines?'

'You know, around the mouth, sort of circling it. But the teeth aren't monkey—they're more horse. And the nose is just a blob, really. And that's it. Happy?'

I walk away, half-wanting him to reach out and touch my hand and tell me none of it matters. But he doesn't. I go back round the desk and get on with the next invoice and he puts his headphones back on so he can hear what he's writing. And sometimes I think he's looking across at me but really it's just the way he's holding his head and the direction he's facing that give that impression.

We're both old enough to know not to start anything here. Not at work. Not when anyone you've ever been with has become part of the accruing damage and part of what makes you so fragile. It's better not to get involved, to go home to your own flat, stuff your spotty, monkey face and curl up with some romantic movie—too far removed from real life to make you cry for long.

'Are you on the phone?' he asks, suddenly. He always asks that. We forget sometimes, and it's only questions like that that make us remember.

'No.'

'I forgot to ask. What about your eyes?'

'What about them?'

My eyes are my best feature. Everyone says that. The windows to the soul. I feel the adjectives returning. My eyes are the part of me that I feel best about. They can be warm and laughing and sexy, they can be sorrowful, compassionate. Open those windows and everything else comes rushing out—intelligence, comprehension, passion even. And all the time lately, they're fixed in one direction and he probably doesn't even know it.

'Tell me about your eyes.'

'They're brown.' I say.


About the Author
Clare Kirwan is a writer and performance poet based in Merseyside in the UK. She is active in Liverpool's Dead Good Poets Society and has won various prizes including Liverpool's Slam Contest in 2005. She has worked in many places, amongst which are a bank, a glue factory, an eco centre, and a newspaper, but insists this was all just 'research.' Her website is: www.clarekirwan.com.