Cecelia Ahern - The Book of Tomorrow

Rosaleen stands beside me and pours me tea. I’d love nothing more than a gingersnap lattÉ but I tip the milk into the strong tea and sip it all the same. Her eyes watch me and don’t look away till I swallow.

I don’t know how old Rosaleen is exactly but I’m guessing somewhere in her early-to-mid-forties, and if this makes sense, I’m sure whatever age she really is, she looks ten years older. She looks like she’s from the 1940s in her floral tea dresses buttoned down the middle, with a slip underneath. My mum never wore slips; she barely wore underwear. Rosaleen has mouse-brown hair, always worn down, parted sharply in the centre of her head, revealing grey roots, and it’s short, to her chin. She always tucks her hair behind both ears, pink little mouse ears peeping out. She never wears earrings. Or makeup. She always wears a gold crucifix on a thin gold chain around her neck. She’s the kind of woman that my friend Zoey would say looks like she’s never had an orgasm in her life and I wonder, while cutting the fat off the bacon and as Rosaleen’s eyes widen at me doing this, if Zoey had an orgasm when she did it with Fiachrá. Then I visualised the damage the hockey stick did to her and I instantly doubted it.

Across the road from the gatehouse is a bungalow. I have no idea who lives in it but Rosaleen pops back and forth every day with little parcels of food. Two miles down the road is a post office, which is operated from somebody’s house, and across the road from that is the smallest school I’ve ever seen, which unlike my school at home, which has activities every hour throughout the year, is completely empty during the summer. I asked if there were any yoga classes or anything in it and Rosaleen told me she’d show me how to make yoghurt herself. She seemed so happy that I couldn’t correct her. In the first week I watched her make strawberry yoghurt. In the second week, I was still eating it.

The gatehouse that is Arthur and Rosaleen’s house once protected the side entrance to Kilsaney Castle in the 1700s. The castle’s main entrance has a disused scary-looking gothic entrance that I imagine I see severed heads hanging out of every time we pass. The castle was built as a towered fortification of the Norman Pale-that was the area with Norman and English control in the East of Ireland, established after Strongbow invaded-sometime between 1100 and 1200, which, when you think about it, is a bit vague. It’s the difference between me or my half-human, half-robot great-great-great-great-grandchildren building something. Anyway, it was built for a Norman warlord, so that’s why I think of the severed heads, because they did that, didn’t they?

The area it’s in is called County Meath. It used to be East Meath and, along with Westmeath-surprise surprise-it made up a separate and fifth province in Ireland, which was the territory of the High King. The former seat of the High Kings, the Hill of Tara, is only a few kilometres away. It’s in the news all the time now because they’re building a motorway nearby. We had to debate it in school a few months ago. I was ‘for’ the motorway being built because I thought the King would have liked to have one in his day, as it would have made it easier for him to get to his office instead of having to go through shitty fields. Imagine the filth on his sandals. I also said it would be more accessible for tourists. They could drive right up to it or take photographs from open-top buses going one hundred and twenty kilometres on the motorway. I was only taking the piss, but our substitute teacher went crazy, thinking I actually meant it, because she was on a committee to try and prevent the motorway being built. It’s so easy to give substitute teachers nervous breakdowns. Especially the ones who believe they can do some good for the students. I told you, I was nasty.

After the Norman psycho, various lords and ladies lived in the castle. They built on stables and outhouses around the place. Controversially one lord even converted to Catholicism after marrying a Catholic, and built a chapel as a treat for the family. Me and Mum got a swimming pool as our treat, but each to their own. The demesne is surrounded by a famine wall, which was a project to provide work for the starving during the potato famine. It runs right along Arthur and Rosaleen’s garden and house, and creeps me out every time I see it. If Rosaleen had ever visited our house for dinner she’d probably have started building a wall around us, because none of us eats carbs. At least, we never used to eat carbs, now I’m eating so much I could fuel all the factories they’re closing down.

Kilsaney descendants continued to live in the castle until the 1920s, when some arsonists didn’t get the memo that the inhabitants were Catholic and they burned them out. After that they could only live in a small section of the castle because they couldn’t afford to fix it up and heat it, and then they eventually moved out in the nineties. I don’t know who owns it now but it’s fallen into disrepair: no roof, fallen-down walls, no stairs, you get the idea. There’s loads of stuff growing inside it and whatever else that scutters around. I learned all that while I was doing a project on it for school. Mum suggested I stay with Rosaleen and Arthur for the weekend and do some research. She and Dad had the biggest fight I’d ever seen or heard that day, and Dad became even more crazy when she suggested I go away. The atmosphere was so bad that I was happy to leave them. Plus, Mum trying to get me to leave the house really pissed Dad off, and so feeling it was my duty as a daughter to make his life hell, I merely obliged. But as soon as I got there, I wasn’t really interested in snooping around and finding out the history of the place. I just about managed to stay with Rosaleen and Arthur for lunch, and then went to the toilet to call my Filipino nanny, Mae-who we’ve since had to send back home-and made her collect me and bring me home. I told Rosaleen I had stomach cramps and tried not to laugh when she asked me if I thought it was the apple pie.

I ended up taking an essay about the castle from the internet. I was called to the principal’s office and she failed me for plagarism, which was ridiculous because Zoey did her project on Malahide Castle, stole everything from the internet, changed a few words and dates around, got the words and dates wrong to make it look like she didn’t copy it, and she still got a higher score than me. Where’s the justice in that?

Surrounding the castle is one hundred acres of land. Arthur is the groundskeeper here and, with one hundred acres to look after, he’s out first thing in the morning and back at five thirty on the button, as dirty as a coal miner. He never complains, he never groans about the weather, he just gets up, eats his breakfast while deafening himself with the radio, and then goes out to work. Rosaleen gives him a flask of tea and a few sandwiches to keep him going and he rarely comes back, except to get something from the garage that he forgot, or to go to the toilet. He’s a simple man only I don’t really believe that. Nobody who says as little as he does, is as simple as you’d think. It takes a lot to not say a lot, because when you’re not talking, you’re thinking, and he thinks a lot. My mum and dad talked all the time. Talkers don’t think much; their words drown out any possibility of hearing their subconscious asking, Why did you say that? What do you really think?

I used to stay in bed for as long as possible on school mornings and on weekends until Mae dragged me out kicking and screaming. But here, I wake up early. Surrounded by so many gigantic trees, the place is swarming with birds. They’re so loud and I just wake up without feeling tired. I’m always up by seven, which is nothing short of miraculous for me. Mae would be so proud. The evenings here are long too, and so there’s pressure having to keep myself busy during the daylight. That’s an awful lot of hours for an awful lot of nothing to do.