Cecelia Ahern - The Book of Tomorrow

‘Ruin’ had been crossed out and beside it was:

castle on a stairway to heaven that looked very tempting to climb and leap for a cloud that would carry me away from here. Now it’s night-time and I’m back in my bedroom writing this dorky diary that Sister Ignatius talked me into doing. Yes, she’s a nun and not a transvestite, as I’d previously thought.

I sighed and looked up from the page. How could this be? I searched around me for answers. I thought about running back to the house to tell Mum, to tell Rosaleen, to phone Zoey and Laura. Who on earth would believe me? And even if they did, what could they do that could help me?

The castle was so still, it seemed like the clouds, so perfectly round and white like cherubs, were moving at a hundred miles an hour. There was the occasional rustle under a weed, dandelion seeds drifted through the air, taunting me to catch them, drifting close and then darting away suddenly as the breeze took them. I took a deep breath, lifted my face to the hot sun-hot sun. Very dead-closed my eyes and exhaled slowly. I really loved spending time in the castle. I opened my eyes and continued reading, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.

I love spending time in the castle. It should be ugly but it’s not. Like Jessie Stevens with his broken nose and cauliflower ears from rugby, he should be ugly, but he’s not. I should have done this sooner, this writing lark. I was denied my rant in Zoey’s, when she and Laura just wouldn’t shut up about the no-knickers story. Anyway.

Mum still hasn’t come out of her room. Despite feeling like I wanted to curl up and die-I’m smothered with a cold after yesterday’s soaking-I decided to eat breakfast in the back garden beside the tree this morning because I knew that she’d see me. I rolled out the blue cashmere blanket from my room and laid out some sliced fruit. It felt and tasted like cardboard. I wasn’t hungry, all of my energy was going into trying to will Mum to come outside. I tried to look so carefree, I lay back on my elbows and crossed my ankles and looked around as though I hadn’t a care in the world. It was my attempt to entice her outside but she didn’t join me. I just thought that if she got some air, if she took a look around this place, came to this castle, maybe she’d see what I see, that she’d snap out of the trance she’s caught in. Of course she doesn’t want life to go on while she’s sitting up there in that bedroom. It’s only when you come outside and realise life is moving on, that you just have to go with the flow.

I don’t know why Rosaleen and Arthur aren’t doing more to help her. Breakfast, lunch and dinner big enough to feed an elephant aren’t going to cure her. Nor is silence. I should bring it up again with Rosaleen. Maybe mention it to Arthur. He’s her brother, he should be helping. As far as I can see, apart from the bizarre forehead-touching greeting they had when we arrived, he hasn’t said one word to her. How weird is that?

After the rain of yesterday…

Okay so that’s when I knew it was all ridiculous because it was the most beautiful hot day today. No rain whatsoever. I continued reading with a cocked eyebrow, armed with the knowledge that I was being punked or something, and I waited for Zoey and Ashton Kutcher to jump out from behind the crumbling pillars.

…I feel smothered with a cold. Rosaleen practically wrapped me up in cotton wool, stuck me in front of the fire and force-fed me chicken soup. I lost half the day sweating profusely next to that ghastly fire and trying to convince her I wasn’t dying. She made me cover my head with a towel and stick my face over a bowl of boiling hot water filled with Vicks to clear my nose, and while under there snotting myself, I was almost sure I heard the doorbell ring. She assured me it didn’t. I should have taken Sister Ignatius up on her offer of drying off in her house. How scary can a house of nuns be?

Tomorrow I plan to avoid another heart attack on a plate and find a quiet place to write this. I’ll probably sunbathe in my bikini. Give the pheasants something to look at. It might not be so bad. When you close your eyes you can be just about anywhere you want to be. I can lie by the lake and imagine I’m by the pool in Marbella, that the splashing of the swans as they shake out their feathers is Mum. She always used to lie, not on a sunbed like everybody else, but along the edge of the pool, near the filters. She’d allow her hand to hover over the water, slapping the water lightly. It sounded like toddler’s barefeet walking about the place. It was either to keep cool or because she liked the sound. I used to like listening to it. Though for some reason I always told her to shut up. Something to say in the silence, something that would make her open her eyes and look at me.

Who could have known all of that? Only Mum.

Maybe I’ll sunbathe right in the path of Arthur’s lawnmower on the grass and hope he’ll run me over. If it doesn’t kill me, the least it could do is save me from a full body wax.

Arthur’s not so bad, actually. He doesn’t say much. He doesn’t even make many reactions, but I get a good feeling from him. Most of the time. Rosaleen’s not so bad either. I just have to try to figure her out. She reacted so unusually at dinner today-shepherd’s pie, yum-when I told her I’d spent time with Sister Ignatius. She said Sister had called round to her during the morning and mentioned nothing about meeting me. That must have been when I was in the shower. Would love to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation. Then she kept interrogating me on what kinds of things Sister and I talked about. Honestly, it was constant, and even Arthur seemed uncomfortable. I mean, did she think I was lying about it? Really, it was weird. I wish I hadn’t told her what I’d learned about the castle. Now I know that whatever information I need to learn, it most certainly can’t be from her. I suppose Rosaleen and Arthur are just different. Or maybe it’s just me that’s different. I never really thought of it that way before. Perhaps it was always just me.

In case I die of dehydration and somebody finds this diary, I should mention that I cry every night. I go through the entire day, save for bluebottle and ruined-castle breakdowns, as strong as can be and then as soon as I crawl into bed and lie in the darkness and stillness, the world only then seems to me to be spinning. Then I cry. Sometimes for such long periods of time my pillow becomes soaked. Rolling down the edges of my eyes, along my ears and tickling down my neck, sometimes down to my vest, I just let the tears go wherever. I’m so used to crying, I don’t notice it sometimes. Does that make sense? Before, if I cried it was because I’d fallen and hurt myself, or because I’d had a fight with Dad, or I was totally drunk and the slightest thing made me upset. But now, it’s like, whatever…I’m sad so I’ll cry. Sometimes I start and then stop as I convince myself that everything will be fine. Sometimes I don’t believe myself and I start again.

I have lots of dreams about Dad. Rarely is he really Dad, but instead a mixture of different people’s faces. He starts off as him, then becomes a school teacher, then becomes Zac Efron and then some random person that I saw once before in my life, like the local priest or something. I’ve heard people say that when they dream about a loved one that has died, they feel that it’s real, that the person is really there, sending them a message, giving them a hug. That somehow dreams are a blurred line between here and there, like a meeting room in a prison. You’re both in the same room, yet on different sides and really, in different worlds. I used to think that people who talked like that were quacks, or fundamentalist religious freaks. But now I know that that is just one of the many things I was wrong about. It’s got nothing to do with religion, it’s got nothing to do with mental stability, but it has everything to do with the human mind’s natural instinct, which is to hope beyond all hope, unless you’re a cynical bastard. It’s got to do with love, with losing somebody you love, a part of you being torn away that you’d do almost anything or believe anything to have returned to you. It’s hope that someday you’ll see them again, that you can still feel them near you. Hope like that, as I thought before, doesn’t make you a weak person. It’s hopelessness that makes you weak. Hope makes you stronger, because it brings with it a sense of reason. Not a reason for how or why they were taken from you, but a reason for you to live. Because it’s a maybe. A ‘maybe someday things won’t always be this shit.’ And that ‘maybe’ immediately makes the shittiness better.