Cecelia Ahern - The Gift

“But you can’t; you have the conference call. It took us weeks to set that up. If you don’t talk to them tonight, they’ll go with Raven and Byrne, and you don’t want that.”

“I know, Alison,” he snapped. “But I need to be at this.” He stabbed a finger on the page. “Make it happen.” Then he rushed into his office and slammed the door. He froze before he got to his desk. On it his mail was laid out neatly.

He backtracked and opened his office door again.

Alison snapped to it quickly and looked up at him. “Yes?” she said eagerly.

“The mail.”

“Yes?”

“When did it get here?”

“First thing this morning. Gabe delivered it the same time as always.”

“He couldn’t have,” Lou objected. “Did you see him?”

“Yes,” she said, looking concerned. “He brought me a coffee, too. Just before nine, I think. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he snapped.

“Em, Lou, just one thing before you go…Is this a bad time to go over some details for your dad’s party?”

She’d barely finished her sentence before he’d gone back into his office and slammed the door behind him once again.

THERE ARE MANY TYPES OF wake-up calls in the world. For Lou Suffern, a wake-up call was a duty for his devoted alarm clock to perform on a daily basis. At six a.m. every day, when he was in bed sleeping and dreaming, thinking of yesterday and planning tomorrow, his alarm would ring dutifully and loudly. It would reach out from the bedside table and prod him right in the subconscious, taking him away from his slumber and dragging him into the world of the awakened. Lou would wake up; eyes closed, then open. Body in bed, then out of bed; naked, then clothed. This, for Lou, was what waking up was about. It was the transition period from sleep to work.

For other people wake-up calls took a different form. For Alison, it was the pregnancy scare at sixteen that had forced her to make some choices; for Mr. Patterson, it was the birth of his first child that had made him see the world in a different light. For Alfred, it was his father’s loss of their millions when Alfred was a child, forcing him to attend public school for a year before his father made it all back. It changed him forever. For Ruth, her wake-up call happened on their last summer holiday, when she walked in on her husband with their twenty-six-year-old Polish nanny. For little five-year-old Lucy, it was when she looked out into the audience during her school play to see an empty seat beside her mother.

Today, though, Lou was experiencing a very different kind of wake-up call. Lou Suffern, you see, wasn’t aware that a person could be awakened when his eyes were already open. He didn’t realize that a person could be awakened when he was already out of his bed, dressed in a smart suit, doing deals and overseeing meetings. He didn’t realize a person could be awakened when he considered himself to be calm, composed, and collected, able to deal with life and all it had to throw at him. The alarm bells were ringing now, louder and louder in his ear, and only his subconscious could hear them. He was trying to turn the bells off, to hit the snooze button so that he could nestle back down in the lifestyle he felt cozy with, but it wasn’t working. He didn’t know that he couldn’t tell life when he was ready to learn, that life would instead teach him when it felt he was good and ready. He didn’t know that he couldn’t press buttons and suddenly know it all; that it was the buttons in him that would be pressed.

Lou Suffern thought he already knew it all.

But he had only scratched the surface.

AT SEVEN THAT EVENING, WHEN the rest of his colleagues had been spat out of the office building and then sucked in by the spreading Christmas mania outside, Lou Suffern remained inside at his desk, staring at some files, feeling less like the dapper businessman and more like Aloysius, the schoolboy in detention whom he’d fought so hard over the years to leave behind.

Outside was black and cold. Lines of traffic filled every bridge and quay as people made their way home, counting down the days of this mad rush to Christmas. Harry in the mailroom was right: it was all moving too quickly, the buildup feeling more of an occasion than the moment itself. Lou’s head pulsated more than it had that morning, and his left eye throbbed as the migraine worsened. He lowered the intensity of the lamp on his desk, feeling sensitive to the light. He could barely think, let alone string a sentence together, and so he wrapped himself up in his cashmere coat and scarf and left his office to go to the nearest pharmacy for some headache pills. He knew he was hung over, but he was also sure he was coming down with something; the last few days he’d felt extraordinarily unlike himself. Disorganized, unsure — traits that were surely due to illness.

Lights were out in all the offices; the hallways were dark, apart from a few emergency lights that remained on for the security guards doing their rounds. Lou pressed the elevator call button and waited for the sound of the thick wires pulling the elevator up the shaft to start up. Instead, the doors opened instantly, and he caught sight of himself in the elevator mirror: disheveled, tired. He pulled his coat around him tighter, stepped into the car, and before he had the opportunity to press a button, the doors automatically closed and the elevator immediately descended.

He pressed the ground-floor button, but it failed to light up. He pressed it again harder. Still nothing. He thumped it a few times and, with growing concern, watched as the light moved from each number on the panel to the next. Twelve, eleven, ten…The elevator picked up speed as it descended. Nine, eight, seven…It showed no signs of slowing. The elevator was rattling now as it sped along the wires, and, with growing fear and anxiety, Lou began to press all of the buttons in front of him, alarm included, but it was to no avail. The elevator didn’t respond, and it continued to fall through the shaft on a course of its own choosing.

Only floors away from the ground level, Lou moved away from the doors quickly and hunched down, huddling in the corner of the car. He tucked his head between his knees, crossed his fingers, and braced himself in the crash position.

But seconds later, the elevator slowed and suddenly stopped, shuddering a little from its abrupt halt. When Lou opened his eyes, which until that moment had been scrunched shut, he saw that he’d stopped on the basement floor. Then the elevator omitted a cheery ping, and its doors slid open. He shuddered at the sight in front of him as he looked out. The basement was cold and dark, and the concrete ground dusty. Not wanting to get off in the basement, he pressed the ground-floor button again to return quickly to marble surfaces and carpets, to creamy toffee swirls and chromes, but the button still failed to light up; the elevator stayed open. He had no choice but to try to find the stairs so that he could climb up to the ground floor. As soon as he stepped out of the elevator and placed both feet on the basement floor, the doors behind him slid closed and the elevator ascended.

The basement was dimly lit. At the end of the corridor a fluorescent strip of light flashed on and off, which didn’t help his headache and made him lose his footing a few times. There was the loud hum of machines all around, and the ceilings revealed a complicated mess of electrics and wiring. The floor was cold and hard beneath his leather shoes and dust motes bounced up to cover his polished tips. As he moved along, searching for the exit, he heard the sound of music drifting out from under the door at the end of a hallway that veered off to the right. “Driving Home for Christmas” by Chris Rea. Along the hallway on the opposite side, he saw a green sign depicting a man running illuminated above a metal door. He looked from the exit, back to the room from which music and light emanated. He glanced at his watch. He still had time to make his way to the pharmacy and — providing the elevators worked — back to his office for the conference call. Curiosity got the better of him, and so he made his way down the hall and drummed his knuckles against the closed door. The music was so loud he could barely hear his own knock, so he slowly opened the door and stuck his head in the room.