Cecelia Ahern - The Book of Tomorrow

‘My mother,’ she said finally.

I waited for the rest of the sentence. My mother told me to mind my own business. My mother told me to always wear tea dresses. My mother told me never to reveal her apple pie recipe. My mother told me to never enjoy sex. But nothing else came. Her mother. Her mother lived across the road.

‘Why have you never mentioned it?’

She looked a little embarrassed. ‘Oh, you know…’

‘No. Is she embarrassing? Sometimes my parents were embarrassing.’

‘No, she’s…she’s old.’

‘Old people are cute. Can I meet her?’

‘No, Tamara. Not yet, anyway,’ she softened. ‘Her health isn’t the best. She can’t move around. She’s not good with new people. It makes her anxious.’

‘So that’s why you’re always back and forth. Poor you always having to look after everybody else.’

She seemed touched by that.

‘I’m all she has. I have to take care of her.’

‘Are you sure I can’t help you? I won’t talk to her or anything.’

‘No, thank you, Tamara. Thank you for asking.’

‘So did she move closer to you so you could take care of her?’

‘No.’ She spooned chicken and tomato sauce into a casserole dish.

‘Did you move closer to her so that you could take care of her?’

‘No.’ She put two boil-in-the-bag rice sachets into another Tupperware box. ‘She’s always lived there.’

I thought about that for a minute while watching her.

‘Hold on, so that’s where you grew up?’

‘Yes,’ she said simply, placing everything on a tray. ‘That’s the house I grew up in.’

‘Well, you didn’t move far away, did you? So did you and Arthur move in here after you were married?’

‘Yes, Tamara. Now that’s enough questions. You know curiosity killed the cat.’ She smiled briefly before leaving the kitchen.

‘Boredom killed the fucking cat,’ I shouted at the closed door.

I sloped into the living room as I had done every morning and watched her scurry across the road, like a little paranoid hamster anxious for a hawk to swoop down and grab her.

She dropped a dishtowel and I waited for her to stop and pick it up. But she didn’t. She didn’t appear to notice. I quickly went outside and down the garden path, stalling at the gate like an obedient child as I waited for her to come running back out.

I bravely stepped beyond the gate. And then once I’d done that, I walked to the entrance of the grounds, expecting by now for her to have noticed her missing dishtowel. Red alert; there was an apple pie somewhere omitting heat. The bungalow was a red-brick boring-looking thing, two windows covered in white netting, like two eyes with glaucoma, and separated by a snot-green door. The windows seemed dark and even though they weren’t, the glass seemed tinted and only reflected the light from outside, showing no signs of life inside. I picked up the blue chequered dishtowel from the middle of the road, which was mostly always-mostly always, very dead-empty of traffic. The gate to the front garden was so low I could lift my leg over it. I thought it would be the safest way, or fifty years of rusted gate would give me away. I slowly walked up the path and looked through the window on the right of the building. I pressed my face up against the glass and tried to see through the horrific netting. After all the mystery I don’t quite know what I was expecting to see. Some great secret, a crazy sect, dead bodies, a hippy commune, some weird sex thing with a lot of keys in an ashtray…I don’t know. Anything, anything, but an electric heater in place of a real fire, surrounded by dodgy brown tiles and tiled mantel, green carpet and jaded chairs with wooden handles and green crushed-velvet cushions. It was all a bit sad, really. It was all a bit like a dentist’s waiting room, and I felt a little bad. Rosaleen hadn’t been hiding anything at all. Well, not quite: she’d been hiding the biggest home design disaster of the century.

Instead of ringing the doorbell I walked round the side of the house. Immediately as I turned the corner I could see that there was a small garden with a large garage, just like the one at the back of the gatehouse, at the bottom of the land. From the window of the workshed something sparkled. At first I thought it was a camera flash, but then I realised that whatever had dazzled my eyes and momentarily blinded me only did so each time it caught the sunlight. As I neared the end of the side passage I yearned to see what was around the corner.

Rosaleen stepped in front of me and I jumped, my scream echoing down the narrow alleyway. Then I laughed.

Rosaleen instantly shushed me, seeming jittery.

‘Sorry,’ I smiled. ‘I hope I didn’t scare your mum. You dropped this on the road. Just came to give it to you. What is that light?’

‘What light?’ She stepped a little to her right and my eyes were protected but my view blocked.

‘Thanks.’ I rubbed my eyes.

‘You best go back to the house,’ she whispered.

‘Oh, come on, can I not at least say hello? It’s all a bit too Scooby-Doo for me. You know, mysterious.’

‘There’s no mystery. My mother isn’t good in the company of strangers. Perhaps we’ll have her over for dinner some day if she’s up to it.’

‘Cool.’ Another over-fifty to add to my list of acquaintances.

I was going to try again one last time, seeing as she’d softened so much but I heard a vehicle coming down the road and hoping it was Marcus, I saluted Rosaleen, turned around and ran.

If it hadn’t been Marcus, then that five seconds of hope would have been the most exciting thing that had happened that day. But it turned out it was him. He was standing at the porch of the gatehouse by the time I ran across the road, running his hand through his hair and glancing at his reflection in the glass.

‘There’s a hair out of place just over your ear,’ I called from the gate.

He spun round with a smile. ‘Goodwin. Good to see you.’

‘Have you come for the book?’

He smiled. ‘Eh, yeah, the book, of course. Couldn’t stop thinking about…that damn book.’

‘Actually, there’s a problem with the book.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘No, I mean the actual book, the real book.’

‘You lost it.’

‘No I didn’t lose it…’

‘Don’t believe you. Do you know what the punishment for losing library books is?’

‘Spend a day with you?’

‘No, Goodwin. If you do the crime you have to do the time. I am, revoking your travelling library card.’

‘Nooo, anything but my travelling library card.’

‘Yes. Come on, give it to me.’ He came close and started poking and prodding my body. ‘Where is it? Is it in here?’ His hands were everywhere, in my jeans pockets, padding down my stomach.

‘I refuse to give it up,’ I laughed. ‘Seriously, Marcus, I haven’t lost it but you can’t have it back.’

‘I don’t think you understand the rules of the travelling library. You see, you borrow a book, you read it, or dance around with it if that makes you happy, and then you return it to the handsome librarian.’

‘No, you see, what happened, was that somebody broke the lock and discovered that it wasn’t a book, but in fact a diary. All the pages were totally blank.’

Totally blank. Very dead.

‘So then, somebody wrote in it.’

‘Ah…somebody. That wouldn’t happen to be you?’

‘Actually, no. I don’t know who wrote in it.’ I smiled but of course I was being serious. ‘It’s just the first few pages. I could rip them out and give you back the book but…’

‘You could just say you lost it. It would be easier.’

‘Stay there a minute.’

I ran into the house and upstairs, lifted the floorboard and took the diary out. I brought it outside, hugged it close to my chest.