Cecelia Ahern 2-book Bundle

by Cecelia Ahern

  ‘Not more of this crap, Doris. It’s all she talks about now. She sees somethin’ about it on TV and that’s all I get, all the way from Chicago on the plane.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s past-life stuff, Doris, but thanks.’

  Doris tuts. ‘You two need to have open minds about this kind of thing because you never know.’

  ‘Exactly, you never know,’ Al fires back.

  ‘Oh, come on, guys. The woman was familiar, that’s all. Maybe she just looked like someone I knew at home. No big deal.’ Forget about it and move on.

  ‘Well, you started it with your déjà stuff,’ Doris huffs. ‘How do you explain it?’

  Justin shrugs. ‘The optical pathway delay theory.’

  They both stare at him, dumb-faced.

  ‘One theory is that one eye may record what is seen fractionally faster than the other, creating that strong recollection sensation upon the same scene being viewed milliseconds later by the other eye. Basically it’s the product of a delayed optical input from one eye, closely followed by the input from the other eye, which should be simultaneous. This misleads conscious awareness and suggests a sensation of familiarity when there shouldn’t be one.’

  Silence.

  Justin clears his throat.

  ‘Believe it or not, honey, I prefer your past-life thing,’ Al snorts, and finishes his beer.

  ‘Thanks, sweetie.’ Doris places her hands on her heart, overwhelmed. ‘Anyway as I was saying when I was talking to myself in the kitchen, there’s no food, cutlery or crockery here so we’ll have to eat out tonight. Look at how you’re living, Justin. I’m worried about you,’ Doris looks around the room with disgust and her back-combed hair-sprayed dyed red hair follows the movement. ‘You’ve moved all the way over to this country on your own, you’ve got nothing but garden furniture and unpacked boxes in a basement that looks like it was built for students. Clearly Jennifer also got all the taste in the settlement too.’

  ‘This is a Victorian masterpiece, Doris. It was a real find, and it’s the only place I could find with a bit of history as well as having affordable rent. This is an expensive town.’

  ‘I’m sure it was a gem hundreds of years ago but now it gives me the creeps and whoever built it is probably still hanging around these rooms. I can feel him watching me.’ She shudders.

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’ Al rolls his eyes.

  ‘All the place needs is a bit of TLC and it’ll be fine,’ Justin says, trying to forget the apartment he loved and has recently sold in the affluent and historic neighbourhood of Old Town Chicago.

  ‘Which is why I’m here.’ Doris claps her hands with glee.

  ‘Great.’ Justin’s smile is tight. ‘Let’s go get some dinner now. I’m in the mood for a steak.’

  ‘But you’re vegetarian, Joyce.’ Conor looks at me as though I’ve lost my mind. I probably have. I can’t remember the last time I’ve eaten red meat but I have a sudden craving for it now that we’ve sat down at the restaurant.

  ‘I’m not vegetarian, Conor. I just don’t like red meat.’

  ‘But you’ve just ordered a medium-rare steak!’

  ‘I know,’ I shrug. ‘I’m just one crazy cat.’

  He smiles as if remembering there once was a wild streak in me. We are like two friends meeting up after years apart. So much to talk about but not having the slightest clue where to start.

  ‘Have you chosen the wine yet?’ the waiter asks Conor.

  I quickly grab the menu. ‘Actually I would like to order this one, please.’ I point to the menu.

  ‘Sancerre 1998. That’s a very good choice, madam.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I have no idea whatsoever why I’ve chosen it.

  Conor laughs. ‘Did you just do eeny-meeny-miny-mo?’

  I smile but get hot under the collar. I don’t know why I’ve ordered that wine. It’s too expensive and I usually drink white, but I act naturally because I don’t want Conor to think I’ve lost my mind. He already thought I was crazy when he saw I’d chopped all my hair off. He needs to think I’m back to my normal self in order for me to say what I’m going to say tonight.

  The waiter returns with the bottle of wine.

  ‘You can do the tasting,’ Al says to Justin, ‘seeing as it was your choice.’

  Justin picks up the glass of wine, dips his nose into the glass and inhales deeply.

  I inhale deeply and then swivel the wine in the glass, watching for the alcohol to rise and sweep the sides. I take a sip and hold it on my tongue, suck it in and allow the alcohol to burn the inside of my mouth. Perfect.

  ‘Lovely, thank you.’ I place the glass on the table again.

  Conor’s glass is filled and mine is topped up.

  ‘It’s beautiful wine.’ I begin to tell him the story.

  ‘I found it when Jennifer and I went to France years ago,’ Justin explains. ‘She was there performing in the Festival des Cathédrales de Picardie with the orchestra, which was a mem orable experience. In Versailles, we stayed in Hôtel du Berry, an elegant 1634 mansion full of period furniture. It’s practi c ally a museum of regional history – you probably remember my telling you about it. Anyway, on one of her nights off in Paris we found this beautiful little fish restaurant tucked away down one of the cobbled alleys of Montmartre. We ordered the special, seabass, but you know how much of a red wine fanatic I am – even with fish I prefer to drink red – so the waiter suggested we go for the Sancerre.

  ‘You know I always thought of Sancerre as a white wine, as it’s famous for using the Sauvignon grape, but as it turns out it also uses some Pinot Noir. And the great thing is that you can drink the red Sancerre cooled exactly like white, at twelve degrees. But when not chilled, it’s also good with meat. Enjoy.’ He toasts his brother and sister-in-law.

  Conor is looking at me with a frozen face. ‘Montmartre? Joyce, you’ve never been to Paris before. How do you know so much about wine? And who the hell is Jennifer?’

  I pause, snap out of my trance and suddenly hear the words of the story I had just explained. I do the only thing I can do under the circumstances. I start laughing. ‘Gotcha.’

  ‘Gotcha?’ he frowns.

  ‘They’re the lines to a movie I watched the other night.’

  ‘Oh.’ Relief floods his face and he relaxes. ‘Joyce, you scared me there for a minute. I thought somebody had possessed your body.’ He smiles. ‘What film is it from?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t remember,’ I wave my hand dismissively, wondering what on earth is going on with me and try to recall if I even watched a film any night during the past week.

  ‘You don’t like anchovies now?’ he interrupts my thoughts, and looks down at the little collection of anchovies I’ve gathered in a pile at the side of my plate.

  ‘Give them to me, bro,’ Al says, lifting his plate closer to Justin’s. ‘I love ’em. How you can have a Caesar salad without anchovies is beyond me. Is it OK that I have anchovies, Doris?’ he asks sarcastically. ‘The doc didn’t say anchovies are going to kill me, did he?’

  ‘Not unless somebody stuffs them down your throat, which is quite possible,’ Doris says through gritted teeth.

  ‘Thirty-nine years old and I’m being treated like a kid.’ Al looks wistfully at the pile of anchovies.

  ‘Thirty-five years old and the only kid I have is my husband,’ Doris snaps, picking an anchovy from the pile and tasting it. She ruffles her nose and looks around the restaur ant. ‘They call this an Italian restaurant? My mother and her family would roll in their graves if they knew this.’ She blesses herself quickly. ‘So, Justin, tell me about this lady you’re seeing.’

  Justin frowns. ‘Doris, it’s really no big deal, I told you I just thought I knew her.’ And she looked like she thought she knew you too.

  ‘No, not her,’ Al says loudly with a mouthful of anchovies. ‘She’s talking about the woman you were banging the other night.’

  ‘Al!’ Food wedges in Justin’s throat.

&nb
sp; ‘Joyce,’ Conor says with concern, ‘are you OK?’

  My eyes fill as I try to catch my breath from coughing.

  ‘Here, have some water.’ He pushes a glass in my face.

  People around us are staring, concerned.

  I’m coughing so much I can’t even take a breath to drink. Conor gets up from his chair and comes around to me. He pats my back and I shrug him off, still coughing with tears running down my face. I stand up in panic, overturning my chair behind me in the process.

  ‘Al, Al, do something. Oh, Madonn-ina Santa!’ Doris panics. ‘He’s going purple.’

  Al untucks his napkin from his collar and coolly places it on the table. He stands up and positions himself behind his brother. He wraps his arms around his waist, and pumps hard on his stomach.

  On the second push, the food is dislodged from Justin’s throat.

  As a third person races to my aid, or rather to join the growing panicked discussion of how to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre, I suddenly stop coughing. Three faces stare at me in surprise while I rub my throat with confusion.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Conor asks, patting my back again.

  ‘Yes,’ I whisper, embarrassed by the attention we are receiving. ‘I’m fine, thank you. Everyone, thank you so much for your help.’

  They are slow to back away.

  ‘Please go back to your seats and enjoy your dinner. Honestly, I’m fine. Thank you.’ I sit down quickly and rub my streaming mascara from my eyes, trying to ignore the stares. ‘God, that was embarrassing.’

  ‘That was odd; you hadn’t even eaten anything. You were just talking and then, bam! You started coughing.’

  I shrug and rub my throat. ‘I don’t know, something caught when I inhaled.’

  The waiter comes over to take our plates away. ‘Are you all right, madam?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, I’m fine.’

  I feel a nudge from behind me as our neighbour leans over to our table. ‘Hey, for a minute there I thought you were going into labour, ha-ha! Didn’t we, Margaret?’ He looks at his wife and laughs.

  ‘No,’ Margaret says, her smile quickly fading and her face turning puce. ‘No, Pat.’

  ‘Huh?’ He’s confused. ‘Well, I did anyway. Congrats, Conor.’ He gives a suddenly pale Conor a wink. ‘There goes sleep for the next twenty years, believe you me. Enjoy your dinner.’ He turns back to face his table, and we hear murmured squabbling.

  Conor’s face falls and he reaches for my hand across the table. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘That’s happened a few times now,’ I explain, and instinct ively place my hand over my flat stomach. ‘I’ve barely looked in the mirror since I’ve come home. I can’t stand to look.’

  Conor makes appropriate sounds of concern and I hear the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘pretty’ but I silence him. I need for him to listen and not to try to solve anything. I want him to know that I’m not trying to be pretty or beautiful but for once just to appear as I am. I want to tell him how I feel when I force myself to look in the mirror and study my body that now feels like a shell.

  ‘Oh, Joyce.’ His grip on my hand tightens as I speak, he squeezes my wedding ring into my skin and it hurts.

  A wedding ring but no marriage.

  I wriggle my hand a little to let him know to loosen his grip. Instead he lets go. A sign.

  ‘Conor,’ is all I say. I give him a look and I know he knows what I’m about to say. He’s seen this look before.

  ‘No, no, no, no, Joyce, not this conversation now.’ He withdraws his hand from the table completely and holds his hands up in defence. ‘You – we – have been through enough this week.’

  ‘Conor, no more distractions.’ I lean forward with urgency in my voice. ‘We have to deal with us now or before we know it, ten years on we’ll be wondering every single day of our miserable lives what might have been.’

  We’ve had this conversation in some form or another on an annual basis over the last five years and I wait for the usual retort from Conor. That no one says marriage is easy, we can’t expect it to be so, we promised one another, marriage is for life and he’s determined to work at it. Salvage from the skip what’s worth saving, my itinerant husband preaches. I focus on the centre flame’s reflection in my dessert spoon while I wait for his usual comments. I realise minutes later they still haven’t come. I look up and see he is battling tears and is nodding in what looks like agreement.

  I take a breath. This is it.

  Justin eyes the dessert menu.

  ‘You can’t have any, Al.’ Doris plucks the menu out of her husband’s hands and snaps it shut.

  ‘Why not? Am I not allowed to even read it?’

  ‘Your cholesterol goes up just reading it.’

  Justin zones out as they squabble. He shouldn’t be having any either. Since his divorce he’s started to let himself go, eating as a comfort instead of his usual daily workout. He really shouldn’t, but his eyes hover above one item on the menu like a vulture watching its prey.

  ‘Any dessert for you, sir?’ the waiter asks.

  Go on.

  ‘Yes. I’ll have the …’

  ‘Banoffee pie, please,’ I blurt out to the waiter, to my own surprise.

  Conor’s mouth drops.

  Oh dear. My marriage has just ended and I’m ordering dessert. I bite my lip and stop a nervous smile from breaking out.

  To new beginnings. To the pursuit of … somethingness.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A grand chime welcomes me to my father’s humble home. It’s a sound far more than deserving of the two up-two down, but then, so is my father.

  The sound teleports me back to my life within these walls and how I’d identified visitors by the sound of their call at the door. As a child, short piercing sounds told me that friends, too short to reach, were hopping up to punch the button. Fast and weak snippets of sound alerted me to boyfriends cowering outside, terrified of announcing their very existence, never mind their arrival, to my father. Late night unsteady, uncountable rings sang Dad’s homecoming from the pub without his keys. Joyful, playful rhythms were family calls on occasions, and short, loud, continuous bursts like machine-gun fire warned us of door-to-door salespeople. I press the bell again, but not just because at ten a.m. the house is quiet and nothing stirs; I want to know what my call sounds like.

  Apologetic, short and clipped. Almost doesn’t want to be heard but needs to be. It says, sorry, Dad, sorry to disturb you. Sorry the thirty-three-year-old daughter you thought you were long ago rid of is back home after her marriage has fallen apart.

  Finally I hear sounds inside and I see Dad’s seesaw movement coming closer, shadowlike and eerie, in the distorted glass.

  ‘Sorry, love,’ he opens the door, ‘I didn’t hear you the first time.’

  ‘If you didn’t hear me then how did you know I rang?’

  He looks at me blankly and then down at the suitcases around my feet. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘You … you told me I could stay for a while.’

  ‘I thought you meant till the end of Countdown.’

  ‘Oh … well, I was hoping to stay for a bit longer than that.’

  ‘Long after I’m gone, by the looks of it.’ He surveys his doorstep. ‘Come in, come in. Where’s Conor? Something happen to the house? You haven’t mice again, have you? It’s the time of the year for them all right, so you should have kept the windows and doors closed. Block up all the openings, that’s what I do. I’ll show you when we’re inside and settled. Conor should know.’

  ‘Dad, I’ve never called around to stay here because of mice.’

  ‘There’s a first time for everything. Your mother used to do that. Hated the things. Used to stay at your grandmother’s for the few days while I ran around here like that cartoon cat trying to catch them. Tom or Jerry, was it?’ He squeezes his eyes closed tight to think, then opens them again, none the wiser. ‘I never knew the difference but by God they knew it when I was after them.’ He raises a f
ist, looks feisty for a moment while captured in the thought and then he stops suddenly and carries my suitcases into the hall.

  ‘Dad?’ I say, frustrated. ‘I thought you understood me on the phone. Conor and I have separated.’

  ‘Separated what?’

  ‘Ourselves.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘From each other!’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about, Gracie?’

  ‘Joyce. We’re not together any more. We’ve split up.’

  He puts the bags down by the hall’s wall of photographs, there to provide any visitor who crosses the threshold with a crash course of the Conway family history. Dad as a boy, Mum as a girl, Dad and Mum courting, married, my christening, communion, débutant ball and wedding. Capture it, frame it, display it; Mum and Dad’s school of thought. It’s funny how people mark their lives, the benchmarks they choose to decide when a moment is more of a moment than any other. For life is made of them. I like to think the best ones of all are in my mind, that they run through my blood in their own memory bank for no one else but me to see.

  Dad doesn’t pause for a moment at the revelations of my failed marriage and instead works his way into the kitchen. ‘Cuppa?’

  I stay in the hall looking around at the photos and breathe in that smell. The smell that’s carried around everyday on every stitch of Dad’s back, like a snail carries its home. I always thought it was the smell of Mum’s cooking that drifted around the rooms and seeped into every fibre, including the wallpaper, but it’s ten years since Mum has passed away. Perhaps the scent was her; perhaps it’s still her.

  ‘What are you doin’ sniffin’ the walls?’

  I jump, startled and embarrassed at being caught, and make my way into the kitchen. It hasn’t changed since I lived here and it’s as spotless as the day Mum left it, nothing moved, not even for convenience’s sake. I watch Dad move slowly about, resting on his left foot to access the cupboards below, and then using the extra inches of his right leg as his own personal footstool to reach above. The kettle boils too loudly for us to have a conversation and I’m glad of that because Dad grips the handle so tightly his knuckles are white. A teaspoon is cupped in his left hand, which rests on his hip, and it reminds me of how he used to stand with his cigarette, shielded in his cupped hand that’d be stained yellow from nicotine. He looks out to his immaculate garden and grinds his teeth. He’s angry and I feel like a teenager once again, awaiting my talking-down.