Cecelia Ahern 2-book Bundle

by Cecelia Ahern

‘Yeah?’ I give up looking for my shoe and concentrate on inserting my earrings. My fingers are trembling with the adrenalin of the Justin situation and my fingers become too big for the task at hand. The back of one earring falls to the floor. I get down on my hands and knees to find it.

  ‘So then I walked up and down the road, checking all of the shops that I know you like, asking all the people in them if they’d seen you.’

  ‘You did?’ I say, distracted, feeling carpet burns through my jeans as I shuffle around the floor on my knees.

  ‘Yes,’ he says quietly again.

  ‘Aha! Got it!’ I find it beside the bin below the dresser. ‘Where the hell is my shoe?’

  ‘And along the way,’ Dad continues, and I hold back my aggravation, ‘I met a policeman and I told him I was very worried, and he walked me back to the hotel and told me to wait here for you but to call this number if you didn’t come back after twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Oh, that was nice of him.’ I open the wardrobe, still searching for my shoe, and find it still full of Dad’s clothes. ‘Dad!’ I exclaim. ‘You forgot your other suit. And your good jumper!’

  I look at him, I realise for the first time since I entered the room, and only now notice how pale he looks. How old he looks in this new soulless hotel room. Perched at the edge of his single bed, he’s dressed in his three-piece suit, cap beside him on the bed, his case packed or half-packed and sitting upright right beside him. In one hand is the photograph of Mum, in the other is the card the policeman gave him. The fingers that hold them tremble; his eyes are red and sore-looking.

  ‘Dad,’ I say as panic builds inside me, ‘are you OK?’

  ‘I was worried,’ he repeats again in the tiny voice I’d as good as ignored since I’d entered the room. He swallows hard. ‘I didn’t know where you were.’

  ‘I was visiting a friend,’ I say softly, joining him on the bed.

  ‘Oh. Well, this friend here was worried.’ He gives a small smile. A weak smile and I’m jolted by how fragile he appears. He looks like an old man. His usual attitude, his jovial nature is gone. His smile disappears quickly and his trembling hands, usually steady as a rock, force the photoframe of Mum and the card from the policeman back into his coat pocket.

  I look at his bag. ‘Did you pack that yourself?’

  ‘Tried to. Thought I got everything.’ He looks away from the open wardrobe, embarrassed.

  ‘OK, well, let’s take a look in it and see what we have.’ I hear my voice and it startles me to hear myself speaking to him as though addressing a child.

  ‘Aren’t we running out of time?’ he asks. His voice is so quiet, I feel I should lower mine so as not to break him.

  ‘No,’ my eyes fill with tears and I speak more forcefully than I intend, ‘we have all the time in the world, Dad.’

  I look away and distract those tears from falling by lifting his case onto the bed and trying to compose myself. Day-to-day things, the ordinary, the mundane is what keeps the motor running. How extraordinary the ordinary really is, a tool we all use to keep going, a template for sanity.

  When I open the case I feel my composure slip again but I keep talking, sounding like a delusional 1960s suburban TV mother, repeating the hypnotic mantra that everything’s just dandy and swell. I ‘oh, gosh’ and ‘shucks’ my way through his suitcase, which is a mess, though I shouldn’t be surprised as Dad has never had to pack a suitcase in his life. I think what upsets me is the possibility that at seventy-five years old, after ten years without his wife, he simply doesn’t know how to, or else my being missing for a few hours has prevented him from accomplishing it. A simple thing like that, my big-as-an-oak-tree, steady-as-a-rock father cannot do. Instead he sits on the edge of the bed twisting his cap around in his gnarled fingers, liver spots like the skin of a giraffe, his fingers trembling in air as though wobbling on an invisible fingerboard and controlling the vibrato in my head.

  Things have attempted to be folded but have failed, are crumpled in small balls with no order at all as though they have been packed by a child. I find my shoe inside some bathroom towels. I take my shoe out and put it on my foot without saying anything, as though it’s the most normal thing in the world. The towels go back to where they belong. I start folding and packing all over again. His dirty underwear, socks, pyjamas, vests, his washbag. I turn my back to take his clothes from the wardrobe and I take a deep breath.

  ‘We have all the time in the world, Dad,’ I repeat. Though this time, it’s for my own benefit.

  On the tube, on the way to the airport, Dad keeps checking his watch and fidgeting in his seat. Every time the tube stops at a station, he pushes the seat in front of him impatiently as if to move it along himself.

  ‘Have you to be somewhere?’ I smile.

  ‘The Monday Club. He looks at me with worried eyes. He’s never missed a week, not even when I was in hospital.

  ‘But today is Monday.’

  He fidgets. ‘I just don’t want to miss this flight. We might get stuck over here.’

  ‘Oh, I think we’ll make it.’ I do my best to hide my smile. ‘And there’s more than one flight a day, you know.’

  ‘Good.’ He looks relieved and even impressed. ‘I might even make evening Mass. Oh, they won’t believe everything I tell them tonight,’ he says with excitement. ‘Donal will drop dead when everybody listens to me and not to him for a change.’ He settles back into his seat and watches out the window as the blackness of the underground speeds by. He stares into the black, not seeing his own reflection but seeing somewhere else and someone else a long way off, a long time ago. While he’s in another world, or the same world but a different time, I take out my mobile and start planning my next move.

  ‘Frankie, it’s me. Justin Hitchcock is getting the first plane to Dublin tomorrow morning and I need to know what he’s doing stat.’

  ‘How am I supposed to do that, Dr Conway?’

  ‘I thought you had ways.’

  ‘You’re right, I do. But I thought you were the psychic one.’

  ‘I’m certainly not pyschic and I’m not getting anything about where he could be going.’

  ‘Are your powers fading?’

  ‘I don’t have powers.’

  ‘Whatever. Give me an hour, I’ll get back to you.’

  Two hours later, just as Dad and I are about to board, I receive a phone call from Frankie.

  ‘He’s going to be in the National Gallery tomorrow morning at ten thirty. He’s giving a talk on a painting called Woman Writing a Letter. It sounds fascinating.’

  ‘Oh, it is, it’s one of Terborch’s finest. In my opinion.’

  Silence.

  ‘You were being sarcastic, weren’t you?’ I realise. ‘OK, well, does your Uncle Tom still run that company?’ I smile mischievously and Dad looks at me curiously.

  ‘What are you planning?’ Dad asks suspiciously once I’ve hung up the phone.

  ‘I’m having a little bit of fun.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you get back to work? It’s been weeks now. Conor called your hand phone while you were gone this morning, it slipped my mind to tell you. He’s in Japan but I could hear him very clearly,’ he says, impressed with either Conor or the phone company, I’m not sure which. ‘He wanted to know why the house hadn’t got a For Sale sign in the garden yet. He said that you were supposed to do that.’ He looks worried, as though I’ve broken a world-old rule and now the house will explode if it doesn’t have a For Sale sign dug into the ground.

  ‘Oh, I haven’t forgotten.’ I’m agitated by Conor’s call. ‘I’m selling it myself. I have my first viewing tomorrow.’

  He looks unsure and he’s right to because I’m lying through my teeth, but all I have to do is go through my books and call around my list of clients who I know to be looking for a similar property. I can think of a few straight away.

  ‘Your company knows this?’ His eyes narrow.

  ‘Yes,’ I smile tightly. ‘They can take the photos and put th
e sign up in a matter of hours. I know a few people in the estate agent world.’

  He rolls his eyes.

  We both look away, in a huff, and just so I don’t feel that I’m lying, while we shuffle along the queue to board the plane, I text a few clients I showed properties to before I took my leave to see if they’re interested in a viewing. Then I ask my trusty photographer to take the shots of the house. Just as we take our seats on the plane, I have already arranged the photographs and For Sale sign for later today and a viewing appointment for tomorrow. Both teachers at the local school, she and her husband will view the house during their lunch break. At the bottom of the text is the mandatory ‘Was so sorry to hear about what happened. Have been thinking of you. See you tomorrow, Linda xx.’

  I delete it straight away.

  Dad looks at my thumb working over the buttons on my phone with speed. ‘You writing a book?’

  I ignore him.

  ‘You’ll get arthritis in your thumb and it’s not much fun, I can tell you that.’

  I press send and switch the phone off.

  ‘You really weren’t lying about the house?’ he asks.

  ‘No,’ I say, confidently now.

  ‘Well, I didn’t know that, did I? I didn’t know what to tell him.’

  Score one to me.

  ‘That’s OK, Dad, you don’t have to feel in the middle of all this.’

  ‘Well, I am.’

  Score one to him.

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t answered my phone.’

  Two one.

  ‘You were missing all morning – what was I supposed to do, ignore it?’

  Two all.

  ‘He was concerned about you, you know. He thought you should see someone. A professional person.’

  Off the charts.

  ‘Did he now?’ I fold my arms, wanting to call him straight away and rant about all the things I hate about him and that have always annoyed me. The cutting of his toenails in bed, his nose-blowing every morning that almost rattled the house, his inability to let people finish their sentences, his stupid party coin trick that I fake laughed to every time he did it, including the first, his inability to sit down and have an adult conversation about our problems, his constant walking away during our fights … Dad interrupts from my silent torture of Conor.

  ‘He said you called him in the middle of the night, spurting Latin.’

  ‘Really?’ I feel anger surge. ‘What did you say?’

  He looks out the window as we pick up speed down the runway.

  ‘I told him you made a fine fluent Italian-speaking Viking too.’ I see his cheeks lift and I throw my head back and laugh.

  All even.

  He suddenly grabs my hand. ‘Thanks for all this, love. I had a great time.’ He gives my hand a squeeze and goes back to looking out the window as the green of the fields surrounding the runway goes racing by.

  He doesn’t let go of my hand, so I rest my head on his shoulder and close my eyes.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Justin walks through arrivals at Dublin airport on Tuesday morning, with his cellphone glued to his ear, listening once again to the sound of Bea’s voice mail. He sighs and rolls his eyes before the beep, beyond bored now with her childish behaviour.

  ‘Hi, honey, it’s me. Dad. Again. Listen, I know you’re angry with me, and at your age everything is oh-so-very-dramatic, but if you’d just listen to what I have to say, the odds are you’ll agree with me and thank me for it when you’re old and grey. I only want the best for you and I will not hang up this phone until I have convinced you …’ He immediately hangs up.

  Behind the barricade at arrivals is a man in a dark suit holding a large white placard with Justin’s surname written in large capitals. Underneath are those two magical words, ‘THANK YOU’.

  Those words had captured his attention on billboards, newspapers, radio adverts and television adverts all day and every day, since the first note arrived. Whenever the words drifted from the lips of a passer-by, he did a double take, following them as though hypnotised, as though in them was contained a special encrypted code just for him. Those words floated in the air like the scent of freshly cut grass on a summer’s day; more than a smell, they carried with them a feeling, a place, a time of year, a happiness, a celebration of change, of moving on. They transport him just as the hearing of a special song familiar from youth does, when nostalgia, like the tide, sweeps in and catches you on the sand, pulling you in and under when you least expect it, often when you least want it.

  Those words were constantly in his head, thank you, thank you, thank you. The more he heard them and reread the short notes, the more alien they became, as though he was seeing the sequence of those particular letters for the first time in his life – like music notes, so familiar, so simple, but arranged in a different way, become pure masterpieces.

  This transformation of everyday common things to something magical, this growing understanding that what he perceived to be was not at all, reminded him of when he was a child and spent long silent moments staring at his face in the mirror. Standing on a footstool so that he could reach, the more intensely he stared, the more his face began to morph into one he was wholly unfamiliar with. It wasn’t the face his mind had so stubbornly convinced him he had, but instead he saw the real him: eyes further apart than he’d thought, one eyelid lower than the other, one nostril also ever so slightly lower, the corner of one side of his mouth turning downward, as though there was a line going through the centre of his face and with the drawing of that line everything was dragged south, like a knife through sticky chocolate cake. The surface, once smooth, drooped and hung. A quick glimpse and it was unnoticeable. Careful analysis, before brushing his teeth at night, revealed he wore the face of a stranger.

  Now he takes a step back from those two words, circles them a few times and views them from all angles. Just as with paintings in a gallery, the words themselves dictate the height at which they should be displayed, the angle from which they should be approached and the position from which they should best be contemplated. He has found the correct angle now. He can now see the weight they hold, like pigeons, and the messages they carry, oysters with their pearls, bees on dutious guard of their queen and honey, with their barbed stings attached. They have a sense of purpose, the strength of beauty and ammunition. Rather than a polite utterance heard a thousand times a day, ‘Thank you’ now has meaning.

  Without another thought about Bea, he flips his phone closed and approaches the man holding the sign. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Mr Hitchcock?’ The six-foot man’s eyebrows are so dark and thick Justin can barely see his eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ he says suspiciously. ‘Is this car for a Justin Hitchcock?’

  The man consults a piece of paper in his pocket. ‘Yes, it is, sir. Is that still you or does it change things?’

  ‘Ye-es,’ he says slowly, contemplatively. ‘That’s me.’

  ‘You don’t seem so sure,’ the driver says, lowering the sign. ‘Where are you going this morning?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you know that?’

  ‘I do. But the last time I let somebody in my car as unsure as you, I delivered an animal rights activist directly into an IMFHA meeting.’

  Unfamiliar with the initials, Justin asks, ‘Is that bad?’

  ‘The President of the Irish Masters of Fox Hounds Association thought so. He was stuck at the airport with no car, while the lunatic I collected was splashing red paint around the conference room. Let’s just say, in terms of a tip for me, it was what the hounds would call a “blank day”.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think the hounds would call it anything, necessarily,’ Justin jokes, ‘unless they go “Ooo-ooo”.’ He lifts his chin and howls into the air, playfully.

  The driver stares at him blankly.

  Justin’s face flushes. ‘Well, I’m going to the National Gallery.’ Pause. ‘I’m pro the National Gallery. I’m going to talk about painting, not tu
rn people into canvases as a method of venting my frustration. Though if my ex-wife was in the audience I’d run at her with a paint brush,’ he laughs, and the driver responds with another glare.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting anybody to greet me,’ Justin yaps at the chauffeur’s heels, out of the airport into the grey October day. ‘Nobody at the Gallery informed me you’d be here,’ he tests him as they hurry across the pedestrian walkway through the parachuting raindrops, which pull on their emergency cords as they plummet towards Justin’s head and shoulders.

  ‘I didn’t know about the job until late last night when I got a call. I was supposed to be going to my wife’s aunt’s funeral today.’ He roots around his pockets for the car parking ticket and slides it into the machine to validate it.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’ Justin stops wiping away the raindrop parachuting casualties that have landed with a shplat on the shoulders of his brown corduroy jacket, and looks at the driver grimly, out of respect.

  ‘So was I. I hate funerals.’

  Curious response. ‘Well, you wouldn’t be alone in thinking that.’

  He stops walking and turns to face Justin with a look of intense seriousness on his face. ‘They always give me the giggles,’ he says. ‘Does that ever happen to you?’

  Justin is unsure whether to take him seriously or not but the driver doesn’t crack even the slightest smile. Justin pictures his father’s funeral, goes back to when he was nine years old. The two families huddled together at the graveyard, all dressed head to toe in black like dung beetles around the dirty open hole in the ground where the casket was placed. His dad’s family had flown over from Ireland, bringing with them the rain, which was unconventional for Chicago’s hot summer. They stood beneath umbrellas, he close to his Aunt Emelda, who held the umbrella in one hand and another tightly on his shoulder, Al and his mother beside him under another umbrella. Al had brought along a fire engine, which he played with while the priest talked about their father’s life. This annoyed Justin. In fact, everything and everybody annoyed Justin that day.

  He hated Aunt Emelda’s hand being there on his shoulder, though he knew she was trying to be helpful. It felt heavy and tight, as though she was holding him back, afraid he’d escape from her, afraid he’d scuttle into the big hole in the ground where his father was going.