Cecelia Ahern - The Book of Tomorrow

She left the house carrying a parcel of freshly baked brown bread that smelled so good it sent my taste buds and my already full stomach into spasms. I watched her from the front living-room window power-walking across the road, not an inch of femininity about her, to the bungalow. I waited by the window, intrigued to see who would answer the door, but she went round the back and spoiled my fun.

I took the opportunity to wander around the house without Rosaleen breathing down my neck and explaining the history behind everything I laid my eyes on as she’d done all morning.

‘Oh, that’s the cabinet. Oak, it is. A tree came down hard one winter, thunder and lightning, we’d no electricity for days. Arthur couldn’t rescue it-the tree that is, not the electricity; we got that back.’ Nervous giggle. ‘He made that cabinet out of it. Great for storing things in.’

‘That could be a good little business for Arthur.’

‘Oh no,’ Rosaleen looked at me as though I’d just blasphemed. ‘It’s a hobby, not a money-making scheme.’

‘It’s not a scheme, it’s a business. There’s nothing wrong with that,’ I explained.

Rosaleen tut-tutted at this.

Hearing myself, I sounded like my dad, and even though I had always hated this about him-his desire to turn everything into a business-it gave me a nice warm feeling. As a child if I brought home paintings from school he’d think I could suddenly be an artist, but only an artist who could demand millions for my works. If I argued a point strongly, I was suddenly a lawyer, but only a lawyer who demanded hundreds per hour. I had a good singing voice and suddenly I was going to record in his friend’s studio and be the next big thing. It wasn’t just me he did that with, it was everything around him. For him life was full of opportunities, and I don’t think that was necessarily a bad thing, but I think he wanted to grab them for all the wrong reasons. He wasn’t passionate about art, he didn’t care about lawyers helping people, he didn’t even care about my singing voice. It was all for more money. And so I suppose it was fitting that it was the loss of all his money that killed him in the end. The pills and the whisky were just the nails in the coffin.

‘Is it that photo you’ve got your eye on?’ Rosaleen would continue as my eyes roamed the room. ‘He took that when we visited the Giant’s Causeway. It rained the entire day and we got a puncture on the way up.’

And on she went.

‘I see you’re looking at the curtains. They need a bit of a clean. I’ll take them down tomorrow and do them. I bought the fabric from a woman doing door-to-door. I never usually but she was a foreign woman, hadn’t much English, or money, and had all this fabric. I like the flower in it. I think it matches the cushion there, what do you think? I’ve lots left in the garage down the back.’

Then I looked to the garage down the back and she’d say, ‘Arthur built that himself. Wasn’t here when I moved in.’

It struck me as odd phrasing. When I moved in. ‘Who lived here before?’

Rosaleen looked at me then, with those wide curious eyes she’d previously reserved for when I was eating. She didn’t say anything. She does that a lot, at the most random times. Dropping in and out of our conversations with looks and pauses as though she loses signal on her brain connection.

She freaked me out so much that I looked away, apparently down at the rug that was given to her by somebody for something, I don’t know…But that morning when I was alone and didn’t have her nervous jabbering interfering in my thoughts, I was able to look around properly.

The living room was cosy, I suppose, if not a little old. Well, a lot old, not like my house, which is-was-modern and clean, crisp lines and everything symmetrical. This room had things all over the place. Art that didn’t match the couches, funny-looking ornaments, tables and chairs with spindly legs and animal claws, two couches with totally different fabrics-one blue and ivory floral, the other as if a cat had thrown up on it-and a coffee table that doubled as a chessboard. The floor felt like it was uneven, sloping from the fireplace to the bookshelves, making me feel a little seasick. The busiest area seemed to be around the fireplace; an open fire that made me shudder with its contraptions that looked like something out of a medieval torture chamber; wrought-iron pokers with animal heads, coal shovels of different sizes, an ancient bellows, a black cast-iron fireguard with an animal of some sort emblazoned on the front. I turned my back on the fire and concentrated on the floor-to-ceiling bookcase, with a ladder, running the length of the wall. It was filled with books, photos, tins, keepsake boxes, useless trinkets, that kind of thing. Most of the books were on gardening and cooking, very specific, not at all to my taste. They were old and well-read, some ripped apart, some missing their covers, yellowing pages, and some that looked water damaged, but not a speck of dust was to be seen. There was a huge red-bound book, which looked so ancient the pages were black with the red dye running into them. It was Lloyd’s Register of Shipping 1919-1920 Volume 2 . Inside were hundreds of pages of the alphabetically arranged names of vessels, showing the dead weight and capacities of holds and permanent bunkers. I slid it back into place and wiped my hands on my clothes, not wanting the bacteria of 1919 to infest me. Another book was about faiths of the world, which had on the cover a gold emblem of a cross dug into the ground with a snake twisted around it. Then beside it was a book on greek cooking, though I doubted very much that there’d be a place for a souvlaki next to Rosaleen’s Aga. The next book was The Complete Book of the Horse, though it mustn’t have been, for there were twelve more on the subject.

I’d read only the first chapter of the book Fiona gave me at my dad’s funeral and already that was the most I’d read in a year, so the books stuffed onto the shelves didn’t particularly interest me. What did interest me was a photo album filed alongside them all. It was in the large book section, beside the dictionaries, encyclopaedia, world atlas and that kind of thing. An old-fashioned album, it had the look of a printed book, or at least its spine had. It had a red velvet cover and was embossed by a frame of gold, and I took it out and ran my finger across the front, leaving a darkened trail on the velvet. I curled up in the leather-studded armchair, looking forward to getting lost in somebody else’s memories. As soon as I opened the first page, the doorbell rang, long and shrill. It broke the silence and made me jump.

I waited, almost expected Rosaleen to come sprinting across the road with her teadress hitched up to her thighs, revealing hamstrings so tight Jimi Hendrix could play on them. But she didn’t. Instead there was silence. There wasn’t a peep upstairs from Mum. The doorbell rang again and so I placed the photo album down on the table, and made my way to the front door, the house feeling a little more like home as I did so.

Through the obscure stained glass, I could tell it was a man. When I opened the door, I saw it was a gorgeous man. Early twenties, I guessed, dark brown hair gelled straight up in the front, just like his polo-shirt collar. He could well be a rugby boy. He looked me up and down, and smiled.

‘Hi,’ he said, and his smile revealed perfectly straight white teeth. He had stubble all around his jaw, his eyes were bright blue. In his hand was a clipboard with a chart attached.

‘Hi,’ I said, arching my back as I leaned in against the door.

‘Sir Ignatius?’ he asked.

I smiled. ‘Not I.’

‘Is there a Sir Ignatius Power in this house?’