Cecelia Ahern - The Book of Tomorrow

‘I can’t,’ I laughed. ‘It’s locked.’

‘Oh, come on,’ he smiled, ‘you’re taking the piss, Goodwin.’

‘I’m not,’ I laughed, moving towards him. ‘Honestly, look.’

I passed it to him and our fingers brushed, causing a tingle of seismic proportions to rush through every single erogenous zone that existed in my body.

The pages of the book were closed with a gold clasp and attached to that was a small gold padlock.

‘What the hell…’ he said, trying to pull at the lock, making a series of grimaces that had me smiling. ‘Trust you to choose the only book in here that doesn’t have an author or title and is padlocked.’

We both started laughing. He gave up on the padlock and our eyes locked.

This was the bit where I was supposed to say, ‘I’m only sixteen.’ But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I told you, I felt older. Everybody always thought I looked older. I wanted to be older. It wasn’t like we were going to have sex on the floor, he wasn’t going to be in prison for staring at me. But still. I should have said it then. If we were in some old Gone with the Wind-style southern early nineteenth-century book, back in the good old days where women were men’s property and weren’t protected at all, then it wouldn’t have mattered, we could have rolled around in the hay in a barn somewhere and done whatever we wanted and nobody would have been accused of anything. I felt like hunting down that book from the shelves, opening it and jumping into the pages with him. But we weren’t. It was the twenty-first century. I was sixteen, very nearly seventeen, and he was twenty-two. I’d seen it on his ID card. I had experience in knowing that a guy’s horn didn’t last until my seventeen birthday. It was rare they felt like coming back in July.

‘Don’t look so sad,’ he said, and reached out and lifted my chin with his finger. I hadn’t realised he’d come so close to me and there he was, right before me. Toe to toe.

‘It’s only…a book.’

I realised I was hugging it close to me, both my arms wrapped around it tightly.

‘But I like the book,’ I smiled.

‘I like the book too, very much. It’s a cheeky very pretty book, but it’s obvious we can’t read it right now.’

My eyes narrowed, wondering if we were talking about the same thing.

‘So, that means we’ll both just have to sit and look at it, until we find the key.’

I smiled, and I felt my cheeks pink.

‘Tamara!’ I heard my name being called. A screeching, desperate call. We stopped gazing at one another and I rushed to the door of the bus. It was Rosaleen. She was running across the road toward me her face scrunched up, her eyes wild and dangerous. Arthur was standing on the pavement beside his car, looking calm. I relaxed a little then. What had Rosaleen all riled up?

‘Tamara,’ she said, breathless. She looked from Marcus to me, appearing like a meerkat again, on high alert. ‘Come back to us, child. Come back,’ she said, her voice shaky.

‘I am coming back,’ I frowned. ‘I’ve only been gone an hour.’

She looked a little confused then, looked at Marcus as if he was going to explain everything.

‘What’s wrong Rosaleen? Is Mum okay?’

She was silent. Her mouth opened and closed as if she was trying to find words.

‘Is she okay?’ I asked again, panic building.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course she’s fine.’ She still looked confused, but beginning to calm.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘I thought you’d…’ she trailed off, looking around the village now and, as though realising where she was, she stood up straight, ran a hand across her hair to smooth it down, fixed her dress which was crumpled from the drive. She took small breaths and she visibly calmed before us. ‘You’re coming back to the house?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I frowned. ‘I told Mum where I was going.’

‘Yes, but your mother…’

‘My mother what?’ My voice hardened. If everything was so okay with my mother, then my telling her should have been fine.

Marcus’s hand was on my back, his thumb comfortingly circling the small of my back, reminding me of Mexico, of all the other places I could be.

‘You should go with her,’ Marcus said quietly. ‘I have to move on now, anyway.You can hold on to that.’ He nodded at the book I was hugging in my arms.

‘Thanks. See you again?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Of course, Goodwin. Now go.’

As I walked across the road and sat in the back of the Land Rover, I noticed the three male smokers standing outside the pub, staring. It’s not unusual to be stared at but it was the way they were staring. Arthur nodded at them. Rosaleen kept her head down, her eyes to the floor. The three men’s eyes followed us, and I stared back, hoping to figure out what exactly was their problem. Was it because I was new? But I knew it wasn’t, because they weren’t looking at me. All eyes were on Arthur and Rosaleen. In the car, nobody said a word the entire way home.

Inside the house, I went to check on Mum despite Rosaleen telling me not to. She was still sitting in the rocking chair, not rocking, and looking out at the garden. I sat with her a while and then left. I went downstairs to the living room, back to the armchair I’d been sitting in before Marcus called. I reached for the photo album but it was gone. Tidied away by Rosaleen again. I sighed and searched for it again on the bookshelf. It was gone. I went through every single book on that shelf, but it was nowhere to be found.

I heard a creak at the door and I spun round. Rosaleen was standing there.

‘Rosaleen!’ I said, hand flying to my heart. ‘You scared me.’

‘What were you doing?’ she asked, her fingers creasing and then smoothing the apron over her dress.

‘I was just looking for a photo album I saw earlier.’

‘Photo album?’ She cocked her head sideways, her forehead wrinkled, her face pinched in confusion.

‘Yes, I saw it earlier, before the library came by. I hope you don’t mind, I took it out to look at it but now it’s…’ I held my hands up in the air and laughed. ‘It has mysteriously vanished.’

She shook her head. ‘No, child.’ She looked behind her and then lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Now hush about it.’

Arthur entered then, with a newspaper in his hand and she went quiet. He glanced from me to her.

She looked at Arthur nervously. ‘I better see to the dinner. Rack of lamb tonight,’ she said quietly.

He nodded and watched her leave the room.

The way he watched her made me not want to ask Arthur about the album. The way he watched her made me think a lot of things about Arthur.

Later that evening, I heard them in their bedroom, muffled sounds that rose and fell. I wasn’t sure if it was an argument or not but it felt different from the way they usually talked. It was a conversation, instead of a series of comments thrown to one another. Whatever they were talking about, they were trying hard for me not to hear them. I had my ear up against the wall, wondering about their sudden silence, when my bedroom door opened and Arthur was there staring at me.

‘Arthur,’ I said, moving away from the wall, ‘you should knock. I need my privacy.’

Considering he’d just caught me with my ear to the wall he did well not to say anything.

‘Do you want me to bring you to Dublin in the morning?’ he grumbled.

‘What?’

‘To stay with a friend.’

I was so delighted, I punched the air and got straight on the phone to Zoey, either forgetting to pursue or not caring as to the sudden reason for my expulsion. And so that was the time I went to stay with Zoey. It had been only two nights in the gatehouse and already I felt different returning to Dublin. We went back to our usual patch on the beach beside my house. It looked different and I hated it. It felt different and I hated that too. By the entrance gate to my house a For Sale sign had been erected. I couldn’t look at it without my blood boiling, my heart rate rising and feeling an overwhelming desire to scream like a banshee, so I didn’t look. Zoey and Laura were already studying me as though I had landed from another planet, gutted their best friend and zipped on her outer layer of skin like a sleeping suit, and everything I said was being picked at, analysed, misconstrued.