Cecelia Ahern - The Book of Tomorrow

She was still as a rock.

‘Mum, please. Come out to the fresh air. We can walk around the trees and the lakes, we can see the swans. I bet you’ve never even walked around these grounds before. Come on. There’s a beautiful castle and lots of lovely walks. There’s even a walled garden.’

She looked right at me then. I could see her pupils dilate as she focused on me. She said, ‘Secret garden,’ and she smiled.

‘Yes, Mum. Have you been there?’

‘Roses.’

‘Yes, there’s lots of roses.’

‘Mmm. Pretty,’ she said softly, then as though she’d suddenly become from the North of England and dropped a few words, she said, ‘Prettier than rose.’ She said this looking out the window and then she looked at me and used her forefinger to trace the outline of my face. ‘Prettier than rose.’

I smiled. ‘Thanks, Mum.’

‘She’s walked around here before, hasn’t she?’ I exploded into the kitchen, full of energy, which startled Rosaleen.

She raised her finger to her lips. Arthur was on the phone, an old-fashioned thing that was stuck to the wall.

‘Rosaleen,’ I whispered, ‘she talked.’

She stopped rolling out dough and turned to me. ‘What did she say?’

‘She said that the walled garden was a secret garden and that I was as pretty as a rose,’ I beamed. ‘Or prettier, actually.’

Rosaleen’s face hardened. ‘That’s nice, dear.’

‘That’s nice? That’s fucking nice?’ I exploded.

Rosaleen and Arthur both shushed me.

‘Yes. That’s Tamara,’ Arthur said.

‘Who’s on the phone?’

‘Barbara,’ Rosaleen said, strands coming loose around the front of her pinned-back hair and really starting to sweat as she now put some elbow grease into rolling the dough.

‘Can I talk to her?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘All right. All right. We’ll come to some sort of arrangement. Yes. All right. Indeed. All right. Bye.’

He hung up.

‘I said I wanted to talk to her.’

‘Oh, well, she said she had to go.’

‘She’s probably sleeping with the pool boy. Busy, busy,’ I said cattily. I’ve no idea where that came from. ‘So what did she call about?’

Arthur looked at Rosaleen. ‘Well, unfortunately they’re having to sell the place where all your things were being stored and so they can’t keep them any more.’

‘Well, there’s no space here,’ Rosaleen said immediately, turning back to the counter and tossing flour on the worktop.

This was familiar to me.

‘What about the garage?’ I asked, the diary now making sense.

‘There’s no space.’

‘We’ll find space,’ Arthur said to me, pleasantly.

‘We won’t because there is none.’ Rosaleen picked up the next dough ball and threw it down on the counter, and started pushing her hands into it, squeezing it, punching it, making some sort of shape.

‘There’s room in the garage,’ Arthur said.

Rosaleen stalled but didn’t turn around. ‘There’s not.’

I looked from one to the other, initially intrigued by this, for once, public disagreement.

‘Why, what’s in there?’ I asked.

Rosaleen kept rolling.

‘We’ll have to make room, Rosaleen,’ Arthur was saying, really firmly now, and just as she was about to interject he raised his voice: ‘There’s nowhere else.’

That was final.

I had a horrible feeling then that the conversation about me and Mum moving in with them wouldn’t have gone too differently.

They didn’t object when I brought the blanket outside to the garden with a plate of fruit and sat under the tree. The sun shower had left the grass wet but I wasn’t planning on moving. The air was fresh and the sun was fighting its way back out again. From my place on the grass I could see Mum sitting at the window gazing outside. I willed her to come out, for the sake of my own sanity as well as hers. Not surprisingly, she didn’t join me.

Rosaleen busied herself about the kitchen. Arthur was sitting at the table listening to the radio at full blast and flicking through the paper. I watched Rosaleen leave the kitchen with the tray and a minute later she appeared in Mum’s bedroom. I watched her do her usual fussing about. Window, table, linen, cutlery.

After Rosaleen had placed the tray down on the table she stood straight and looked at Mum. I sat up. It was unusual, whatever she was doing. Then her mouth opened and closed, as she said something.

Mum looked up at her, said something, then looked away.

I stood up automatically, watching them both.

I ran inside, almost knocking Arthur over, and charged up the stairs. I pushed open Mum’s door and I heard a yelp and a smash as it smacked against Rosaleen and her tray. Everything dropped to the floor.

‘Oh, my!’ Rosaleen hunkered down and grabbed everything in a panic. Her dress lifted up her thigh and she had surprisingly youthful legs. Mum had twisted around in her chair to see, looked at me, smiled and then faced the window again. I tried to help Rosaleen but she wouldn’t let me, swatting me away and racing to pick up every item I reached for time and time again. I followed her down the stairs, like a puppy, almost nipping at her heels.

‘What did she say?’ I tried to keep my voice down so Mum wouldn’t hear us talking about her.

Rosaleen, still in shock from my attack was trembling and a little pale. She wobbled her way into the kitchen with the big tray.

‘Well?’ I asked, following her.

‘Well, what?’

‘What was that noise?’ Arthur asked.

‘What did she say?’ I asked.

Rosaleen looked from Arthur to me, her eyes wide and bright green, her pupils so tiny her green eyes glowed.

‘The tray dropped,’ she said to Arthur and then to me, ‘Nothing.’

‘Why are you lying?’

Her face transformed. Morphed into something so angry, I wanted to take it all back straightaway: it was my imagination, I had made it up, I was looking for attention…I don’t know. I was confused.

‘I’m sorry,’ I stuttered. ‘I didn’t mean to accuse you of lying. It just looked like she said something. That’s all.’

‘She said, thank you. I said she was welcome.’

I forced myself to remember Mum’s lips. ‘She said sorry,’ I blurted out.

Rosaleen froze. Arthur lifted his head from the newspaper.

‘She said sorry, didn’t she?’ I asked, looking from one to

the other. ‘Why did she say that?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly.

‘You must know, Arthur.’ I looked at him. ‘Does that mean anything to you? Why would she say sorry?’

‘I suppose she just feels she’s being a nuisance,’ Rosaleen jumped in and spoke for him. ‘But she’s not. I don’t mind cooking for her. It’s no bother.’

‘Oh.’

Arthur clearly couldn’t wait to leave and as soon as he’d gone, the day returned to what it always was.

I wanted to have a look around the garage when Rosaleen was gone and I learned the best thing to do was to pretend you didn’t want her to go. That way, she was never suspicious.

‘Can I bring something over with you to the bungalow?’

‘No,’ she said, agitated, still annoyed with me.

‘Oh, okay, but thank you very much for offering, Tamara.’ I rolled my eyes.

She took out the freshly baked brown bread, the fresh apple pie. A casserole dish of something else and a few Tupperware boxes. Enough for a week’s dinner.

‘Well, who lives there?’

No answer.

‘Come on, Rosaleen. I don’t know what happened to you in your last life but I’m not the Gestapo. I’m sixteen years old and I only want to know because there’s absolutely nothing for me to do. Perhaps there’s somebody over there who I could talk to that’s not nearing death.’