Cecelia Ahern - The Book of Tomorrow

As I lay in bed caught in the irony of forcing myself to drift away, my mind went over and over the diary entry I had read in the castle before it had cleared and made way for the next one. Thankfully, I had read it so many times before the words disappeared and were replaced by a new entry that I knew almost every line off by heart. Everything that I’d read had come true that day. I wondered if tomorrow would yield the same supernatural results, if it would all somehow be revealed as somebody’s cruel idea of a joke, or if Sister Ignatius was right and the late-night scribbles of a sleepwalker would reveal themselves to be mere inconsequential babble.

I had heard about things people did when they were asleep. Sleep epilepsy, carrying out weird sexual acts, cleaning or even homicidal somnambulism, which is sleepwalking murder. There were a few famous cases where people committed murders and claimed to be sleepwalking. Two of the murderers were acquitted and ordered to sleep alone with their doors locked. I don’t know if that was one of the documentaries Mae watched or if it was an episode of Perry Mason called ‘The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece’ that educated me on that. Anyway, if all of those things were possible, then I supposed it was also possible that I could have written my diary in my sleep and, while I was writing it, predicted the future.

I believed more in the homicidal somnambulism defence.

Knowing the dream that I was going to have-well, according to the Tamara of Tomorrow-my mind tried to think of ways to change the dream, of ways to stop Dad from becoming my English teacher and keep him around so that we could actually talk. I tried to think of a special code that only he would understand, which I could say to him and somehow summon him from the dead to communicate with me. I obsessed about it all so much, I inevitably dreamed about exactly what I’d written: about my dad, whose face morphed into that of my English teacher, and then my school moved to America but I couldn’t speak the language, then we lived on a boat. The only difference was that I was being repeatedly asked to sing by the students, some of whom were the cast of High School Musical, and when I tried to open my mouth no sound would come out because of the laryngitis. Nobody would believe me because I’d lied about it before.

The other difference, which felt far more disturbing, was that the boat that I lived on, the wooden Noah’s Ark style boat, was crammed full of people like millions of bees in a hive. Smoke kept drifting through the halls but nobody noticed except for me, and they kept on eating, stuffing their mouths over and over with food while seated at long banquet tables, which then felt like a Harry Potter film, and all the while the smoke filled the rooms. I was the only one who could see it, but nobody could hear me because the laryngitis had taken away my voice. Boy and Wolf come to mind.

You could say that the diary was right, or a more cynical mind would suggest that because I’d allowed my mind to obsess over the details of the already documented dream, I inevitably forced myself to dream the dream. But I did, as forecast, wake to the sound of Rosaleen dropping a pot on the floor with a yelp.

I threw the covers off and fell to the floor on my knees. Last night I had taken my own forecasting voice’s advice by hiding the diary under the floorboard. If Tamara of Tomorrow felt it was important then I was going to follow her advice. Who knew why she-or I-was going to such great lengths to hide silly hormonal thoughts? Maybe Rosaleen had gone snooping and she, or I, hadn’t written about it. The last few nights I’d taken to blocking the bedroom door with the wooden chair. It wouldn’t keep Rosaleen out but it would at least alert me to her presence. She hadn’t watched me sleep since the first night. As far as I knew.

I was sitting on the floor beside the bedroom door rereading last night’s entry again when I heard steps on the stairs. I looked through the keyhole and saw Rosaleen leading Mum back up the stairs. I almost jumped up and did a song and a dance when, after Mum’s door closed, Rosaleen knocked at mine.

‘Morning, Tamara. Is everything all right?’ she called from outside.

‘Eh, yes, thank you, Rosaleen. Did something happen downstairs?’

‘No, nothing. I just dropped a pot.’

The doorknob began to turn.

‘Em, don’t come in! I’m naked!’ I dived and pushed it closed.

‘Oh, okay…’ Talk of bodies, particularly naked ones, embarrassed her. ‘Breakfast will be ready in ten minutes.’

‘Fine,’ I said quietly, wondering why on earth she had lied. Mum going downstairs was huge. Not to any normal family but to mine at present it was right up there.

That’s when it struck me how important each line in the diary was. Each was that trail of breadcrumbs I longed to drop from my old home to here. Each word was a clue, a revelation, of something that was happening right under my nose. When I’d written that I’d woken to Rosaleen dropping a pot and yelping I should have read into it more. I should have realised that she would never normally do such a thing, that something must have happened to make her drop the pot. Why would she have lied about Mum going downstairs? To protect me? To protect herself?

I settled back down on the floor, my back to the door, and read the entry I’d discovered last night.

Sunday, 5 July

I shouldn’t have told Weseley about Dad. I hate the way he looked at me, with such pity. If he didn’t like me, he didn’t like me. A dad who’d committed suicide wasn’t going to make me any nicer-though seemingly that was the case-but how was he to know that? It’s probably really hypocritical for all this to come from me but I don’t want people’s opinions of me to change just because of what Dad did. I always thought I’d want the opposite, to really milk the sympathy, you know. I’d have everybody’s attention, I could be all I wanted to be.

I thought I’d love it. Aside from the first month, immediately after Dad’s death-I found him, so there were a lot of questions, cups of tea and nice pats on the back, all while I blubbered over my statements to the gardaÍ; and, of course, at Barbara’s mews where Lulu was assigned to tend to our every whim, which for me was mostly hot chocolate with extra marshmallows on an hourly basis-I haven’t been getting any special attention. Unless this is special attention from Arthur and Rosaleen, and next month I become the cinder girl.

I really couldn’t stand this new girl, Susie, in my class but then I found out her brother played rugby for Leinster and all of a sudden I was next to her in every maths class and I stayed in her house every weekend for a month, until her brother was suspended from the team after being arrested for jumping on and crushing someone’s car, after one too many vodka and Red Bulls. The tabloids tore him to shreds and he lost his sponsorship for the contact lense company. Nobody wanted anything to do with him for about a week. And then I was gone.

I can’t believe I wrote that. Cringe.

Anyway, Weseley totally changed when I told him Dad killed himself. I should have said something else, like he died in war or-I don’t know-just something else like a more common kind of death. Would it be too weird if I said, ‘By the way, about the suicide thing? I was just joking. He really died of a heart attack. Ha ha ha.’

No. Maybe not.

Who the hell was Weseley? I looked at the date. Tomorrow, again. So between now and tomorrow evening I’d meet a Weseley. Absolutely impossible. Was he going to climb up the wall of Fort Rosaleen to say hello to me?

After having the weirdest dreams last night, I woke up feeling more tired than before I went to bed. After zilch sleep all I wanted to do was lie in bed all morning-actually, all day. This wasn’t going to happen. The talking clock rapped on my door once before entering.