Cecelia Ahern - The Book of Tomorrow

Though two years ago our house in Killiney could have fetched a whopping eight million euro, it stood for sale for half of that now. I know how much it had been worth because Dad regularly had it valued. Each time the new valuations would come through, he’d surface from the cellar of his eight-million-euro home with a €600 bottle of Chateau Latour to share with his perfect model wife and his perfectly hormonally imbalanced teenage daughter.

I don’t begrudge Dad his success. I’m not one of those people and not just because his success was inevitably our success-ironically, his failures became ours too-but because he worked hard, early mornings, late nights, weekends. He cared about what he did, he donated regularly to charities. Whether he did it in a tuxedo, in front of a flashing camera, or with his hand raised high at a charity ball auction was entirely irrelevant. He gave and that’s what mattered. There was nothing wrong with having an expensive home, nothing wrong at all. There’s a pride in building something up, working hard to achieve something. But it shouldn’t have been his manhood that increased with each new success, it should have been his heart. His success was like the witch in the ‘Hansel and Gretel’ fairy tale: it fed him for all the wrong reasons, fattening him in all the wrong places. Dad deserved his success, he just needed a masterclass in humility. I could have done with one too. How special I thought I was in the silver Aston Martin in which he drove me to school some mornings. How special am I now, now that somebody bought it from a depot of repossessed cars, for a fraction of the price. How special indeed.

The reason I mentioned the price of the house is because though the sale price had been halved, and judging by the dust that had settled inside it would be reduced even further, the house was still asking a high price and so was still a priority sale for the estate agents. Little did I know that when I opened the balcony door to my bedroom and set off the alarm, it sent an automated response phone call to the estate agent, who in her worryingly quiet offices, immediately jumped into her car and came to check the premises. While I was three flights upstairs, facing the wrong direction, of course I didn’t hear the electric gates open half a mile down the driveway. While I was in the throes of it all, I also didn’t hear her open the front door and step into the entrance hall.

But she heard us.

And so the next people that paid us a visit were the garda? Three flights of heavy pounding on the stairs allowed us at least not to be doing what we’d been previously doing on the floor of my bedroom, but it didn’t give us enough time to clothe ourselves and so huddled behind Marcus, with my clothes scattered around me, I met Garda Fitzgibbon, an overweight man from Connemara, with a redder face than mine, who I’d regularly been acquainted with on the beach with my friends. This was not the time for reunions.

‘I’ll give you a minute to get dressed, Miss Goodwin,’ he said, immediately looking away.

Twenty-two-year-old Marcus, who’d been invited to an eighteen-year-old girl’s house which hadn’t yet been sold, found the entire thing mildly embarrassing, but mostly amusing. He didn’t know that the girl he’d just slept with was a few weeks away from her seventeenth birthday, and so not only were the bottles of beer highly illegal, so was half of what they’d done on the carpet. He kept looking at me and snorting while we quickly got dressed. I was panicked, my heart thudding so loudly I could barely think, feeling so queasy I was afraid I’d vomit right there in front of them all.

‘Tamara, relax,’ he said cockily. ‘They can’t do anything. It’s your house.’

I looked at him then, and I hated myself more than he was ever going to.

‘It’s not my house, Marcus,’ I whispered, my voice refusing to work.

‘Well your parents’, whatever…’ he smiled, and pulled his jeans up one leg.

‘The bank took it,’ I said, sitting there, dressed, feeling completely out of it. ‘It’s not ours any more.’

‘What?’ A giant domino fell. I felt the floor vibrate as it thudded to the floor, like a great big skyscraper crashing down.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, then started crying. Then the words I wanted to say to him for so long, finally came out, but all in the wrong way and totally at the wrong time. ‘I’m sixteen,’ I panicked.

Thankfully Garda Fitzgibbon, who’d been standing at the door, was on alert after the first raised voice and heard the rest of the conversation. He at least would believe Marcus didn’t know, but it was up to Marcus to prove that in court. He also had to step in as Marcus came flying at me in anger, not to hit me, but shouting at me with such ferocity I wanted him to throw more at me, call me everything under the sun, but he just yelled and I knew that I’d ruined everything for him. Whatever arrangement he’d made with his dad in that travelling library, it’d probably been his last chance. We’d never spoken about it but I recognise somebody on their last chance. I used to see it in the mirror every day.

We were brought to the station. Went through the humiliation of giving statements of the entire account. I was hoping the first time I finally had sex I could write all the juicy and embarrassing details in a diary, not at a police station. Tamara Goodwin. Tamara Fuckup, ripping things apart as usual.

Rosaleen and Arthur had to drive to Dublin to collect me from the station. As soon as Marcus’s dad found out, he sent a car for him. I tried to apologise over and over again, desperately between tears and trying to cling to him so he’d stop and listen, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He wouldn’t even look at me.

Arthur stayed in the car while Rosaleen met with the garda, the next most embarrassing thing that happened to me that day. Rosaleen seemed more concerned about Marcus, what would happen to him. They told her the maximum sentence for sleeping with a “child” under seventeen was two years. I broke down crying at that. Rosaleen seemed as distraught as I was. I don’t know if it was because I’d soiled their name, even more so than my father’s suicide had, or if she was genuinely fond of Marcus. She asked question after question about Marcus until Garda Fitzgibbon seemed to calm her with the news that he seemed to genuinely not know what age I was and that if he could argue this in court then he’d be okay. It seemed to be enough for Rosaleen but it wasn’t enough for me. How long would this take him? How many sessions in court? How much humiliation? I’d ruined his life.

Rosaleen didn’t even try to talk to me, she barely even looked at me. She curtly told me Arthur was waiting and then she left the station. I eventually followed her. There was the most horrific tension in the car when I sat inside, as though they’d had a fight. I suppose what had happened to me was enough cause for there to be tension. I was mortified, absolutely mortified. I couldn’t look at Arthur. He said nothing when I sat in the car and then we pulled away and headed back to Kilsaney. I was actually relieved to be going so far away, to be so disconnected from what had happened. It had finally ripped through the umbilical cord that tied me to this place. Maybe that had been my intention.

I cried the entire way home, so embarrassed, so disappointed, so angry. All of those emotions were directed at myself. My head thumped as the male voice on the radio entered my ears and got closer and closer to my brain, and as the alcohol left its calling card. About thirty minutes in, Arthur pulled the car over outside a shop.

‘What are you doing?’ Rosaleen asked.

‘Could you get some bottles of water and some headache tablets?’ he asked quietly.