Cecelia Ahern - Roar

The Woman Who Was Kept on the Shelf 3. The Woman Who Grew Wings 4. The Woman Who Was Fed by a Duck 5. The Woman Who Found Bite Marks on Her Skin 6. The Woman Who Thought Her Mirror Was Broken 7. The Woman Who Was Swallowed Up by the Floor and Who Met Lots of Other Women Down There Too 8. The Woman Who Ordered the Seabass Special 9. The Woman Who Ate Photographs 10. The Woman Who Forgot Her Name 11. The Woman Who Had a Ticking Clock 12. The Woman Who Sowed Seeds of Doubt 13. The Woman Who Returned and Exchanged Her Husband 14. The Woman Who Lost Her Common Sense 15. The Woman Who Walked in Her Husband’s Shoes 16. The Woman Who Was a Featherbrain 17. The Woman Who Wore Her Heart on Her Sleeve 18. The Woman Who Wore Pink 19. The Woman Who Blew Away 20. The Woman Who Had a Strong Suit 21. The Woman Who Spoke Woman 22. The Woman Who Found the World in Her Oyster 23. The Woman Who Guarded Gonads 24. The Woman Who Was Pigeonholed 25. The Woman Who Jumped on the Bandwagon 26. The Woman Who Smiled 27. The Woman Who Thought the Grass Was Greener on the Other Side 28. The Woman Who Unravelled 29. The Woman Who Cherry-Picked 30. The Woman Who Roared Keep Reading … About the Author Also by Cecelia Ahern About the Publisher

1

There’s a gentle knock on the door before it opens. Nurse Rada steps inside and closes the door behind her.

‘I’m here,’ the woman says, quietly.

Rada scans the room, following the sound of her voice.

‘I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,’ the woman repeats softly, until Rada stops searching.

Her eye level is too high and it’s focused too much to the left, more in line with the bird poo on the window that has eroded over the past three days with the rain.

The woman sighs gently from her seat on the window ledge that overlooks the college campus. She entered this university hospital feeling so hopeful that she could be healed, but instead, after six months, she feels like a lab rat, poked and prodded at by scientists and doctors in increasingly desperate efforts to understand her condition.

She has been diagnosed with a rare complex genetic disorder that causes the chromosomes in her body to fade away. They are not self-destructing or breaking down, they are not even mutating – her organ functions all appear perfectly normal; all tests indicate that everything is fine and healthy. To put it simply, she’s disappearing, but she’s still here.

Her disappearing was gradual at first. Barely noticeable. There was a lot of, ‘Oh, I didn’t see you there,’ a lot of misjudging her edges, bumping against her shoulders, stepping on her toes, but it didn’t ring any alarm bells. Not at first.

She faded in equal measure. It wasn’t a missing hand or a missing toe or suddenly a missing ear, it was a gradual equal fade; she diminished. She became a shimmer, like a heat haze on a highway. She was a faint outline with a wobbly centre. If you strained your eye, you could just about make out she was there, depending on the background and the surroundings. She quickly figured out that the more cluttered and busily decorated the room was, the easier it was for her to be seen. She was practically invisible in front of a plain wall. She sought out patterned wallpaper as her canvas, decorative chair fabrics to sit on; that way, her figure blurred the patterns, gave people cause to squint and take a second look. Even when practically invisible, she was still fighting to be seen.

Scientists and doctors have examined her for months, journalists have interviewed her, photographers have done their best to light and capture her, but none of them were necessarily trying to help her recover. In fact, as caring and sweet as some of them have been, the worse her predicament has grown, the more excited they’ve become. She’s fading away and nobody, not even the world’s best experts, knows why.

‘A letter arrived for you,’ Rada says, stealing her from her thoughts. ‘I think you’ll want to read this one straight away.’

Curiosity piqued, the woman abandons her thoughts. ‘I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,’ she says quietly, as she has been instructed to do. Rada follows the sound of her voice, crisp envelope in her extended hand. She holds it out to the air.

‘Thank you,’ the woman says, taking the envelope from her and studying it. Though it’s a sophisticated shade of dusty pink, it reminds her of a child’s birthday party invitation and she feels the same lift of excitement. Rada is eager, which makes the woman curious. Receiving mail is not unusual – she receives dozens of letters every week from all around the world; experts selling themselves, sycophants wanting to befriend her, religious fundamentalists wishing to banish her, sleazy men pleading to indulge every kind of corrupt desire on a woman they can feel but can’t see. Though she’ll admit this envelope does feel different to the rest, with her name written grandly in calligraphy.

‘I recognize the envelope,’ Rada replies, excited, sitting beside her.

She is careful in opening the expensive envelope. It has a luxurious feel, and there’s something deeply promising and comforting about it. She slides the handwritten notecard from the envelope.

‘Professor Elizabeth Montgomery,’ they read in unison.

‘I knew it. This is it!’ Rada says, reaching for the woman’s hand that holds the note, and squeezing.

‘I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,’ the woman repeats, as the medical team assist her with her move to the new facility that will be her home for who knows how long. Rada and the few nurses she has grown close to accompany her from her bedroom to the awaiting limousine that Professor Elizabeth Montgomery has sent for her. Not all the consultants have gathered to say goodbye; the absences are a protest against her leaving after all of their work and dedication to her cause.

‘I’m in,’ she says quietly, and the door closes.

There is no physical pain in disappearing. Emotionally, it’s another matter.

The emotional feeling of vanishing began in her early fifties, but she only became aware of the physical dissipation three years ago. The process was slow but steady. She would hear, ‘I didn’t see you there,’ or ‘I didn’t hear you sneak in,’ or a colleague would stop a conversation to fill her in on the beginning of a story that she’d already heard because she’d been there the entire time. She became tired of reminding them she was there from the start, and the frequency of those comments worried her. She started wearing brighter clothes, she highlighted her hair, she spoke more loudly, airing her opinions, she stomped as she walked; anything to stand out from the crowd. She wanted to physically take hold of people’s cheeks and turn them in her direction, to force eye contact. She wanted to yell, Look at me!

On the worst days she would go home feeling completely overwhelmed and desperate. She would look in the mirror just to make sure she was still there, to keep reminding herself of that fact; she even took to carrying a pocket mirror for those moments on the subway when she was sure she had vanished.

She grew up in Boston then moved to New York City. She’d thought that a city of eight million people would be an ideal place to find friendship, love, relationships, start a life. And for a long time she was right, but in recent years she’d learned that the more people there were, the lonelier she felt. Because her loneliness was amplified. She’s on leave now, but before that she worked for a global financial services company with 150,000 employees spread over 156 countries. Her office building on Park Avenue had almost three thousand employees and yet as the years went by she increasingly felt overlooked and unseen.

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