Cecelia Ahern - The Book of Tomorrow

Dad decided he’d had enough in May, right before my Junior Certificate exams, which was a little unfair as, up until then, I thought I was the one who was supposed to want to top myself. I did my exams anyway. I probably failed them, but I don’t really care and I don’t think anybody else does either. I’ll find those results out in September. My entire class came to Dad’s funeral, which I’m sure they loved because they got a day off school. With all that going on, can you believe I was actually embarrassed about crying in front of them. I did it anyway, which started off Zoey and then Laura. A girl in my class called Fiona, who nobody ever talked to, hugged me really tight and gave me a card from her family saying that they were all thinking of me. Fiona gave me her mobile number and her favourite book, and said she’d be there for me if I ever needed somebody to talk to. At the time I thought it was a bit lame, her trying to get in with me at my dad’s funeral, but thinking about it after-which is something I do now-it was the kindest thing anybody did or said to me that day.

I started reading the book in the first week I moved to Meath. It was a kind of a ghost story about a girl who was invisible to everybody in the world, including her family and friends, even though they knew she existed. She was just born invisible. I won’t give away the rest but she eventually becomes friends with someone who does see her. I liked the idea and thought Fiona was trying to say something, but when I stayed overnight in Zoey’s house and told her and Laura, they thought it was the weirdest thing they’d ever heard and that Fiona was even more of a freak. You know what, I’m finding it increasingly hard to understand them.

During the first week that we moved here Arthur drove me to Dublin so that I could stay overnight in Zoey’s house. The car journey was over an hour and we never spoke once. The only thing he said was, ‘Radio?’ and then when I nodded he turned it on to one of those channels that just talk about the problems in the country and don’t play music and he snot-snorted his way through it. But at least it was better than silence. After spending the night with Zoey and Laura-and bitching about him all night-I was feeling confident. Back to my old self. We all agreed that he and Rosaleen definitely lived up to being called the Deliverance Duo and that I shouldn’t allow them to pull me into their weirdo existence. That meant that I should be able to listen to whatever the hell I wanted in the car. But the next day, when he picked me up in his filthy dirty Land Rover, which Zoey and Laura so obviously couldn’t stop laughing at, I felt bad for Arthur. I felt really bad.

Having to go back to a house that wasn’t mine, in a car that wasn’t mine, to sleep in a room that wasn’t mine, to try to talk to a mother that didn’t feel like mine, made me want to hold on to at least one thing that was familiar. Who I used to be. It wasn’t necessarily the right thing to hold on to, but it was something. I kicked up a fuss in the car and told Arthur that I wanted to listen to something else. He put my favourite radio station on for one song and then he got so frustrated listening to the Pussycat Dolls singing about wanting boobies, he grumbled and changed it back to the talk channel. I stared out the window in a huff, hating him and hating myself both at the same time. For half an hour we listened to a woman crying down the phone to the presenter about how her husband had lost his job in a computer factory, couldn’t find another and they had four children to look after. My hair was down across my face and all I could do was hope that Arthur didn’t see me crying. Sad stuff really gets to me now. I heard about it before but I was kind of numb to it. It just didn’t happen to me.

I don’t know how long we’re going to live here. Nobody will answer that question for me. Arthur simply doesn’t talk, my mum isn’t communicating and Rosaleen isn’t able to cope with a question of that magnitude.

My life is not going as I planned. I’m sixteen and by now I should have had sex with Fiachrá. I should be in our villa in Marbella swimming every day, eating barbecued dinners, clubbing every night at Angels & Demons and finding guy number two to fancy and sleep with. If the first person I sleep with ends up being the man I marry, I think I’ll die. Instead, I’m living in hicksville, in a gatehouse with three crazy people, the nearest things to us being a bungalow housing people that I’ve never seen, a post office that’s practically in somebody’s living room, an empty school, and a ruined castle. I have absolutely nothing to do with my life.

Or so I thought.

I’m choosing to start the story from when I arrived here.

My mum’s best friend, Barbara, drove us to our new life in Meath. Mum didn’t say a word the whole way. Not one word. Even when asked a question. Now that’s a hard thing to do. I got so frustrated that I shouted at her in the car; this was back when I was trying to get her to respond.

It all happened because Barbara got lost. Her satellite navigation kit in her BMW X5 failed to recognise the address and so we just headed to the nearest town it could locate. When we got to the town, a place called Ratoath, Barbara had to rely on her own brain and not the equipment in her SUV. As it turns out, Barbara’s not a thinker. After ten minutes spent driving down country roads with few houses and no signposts, I could tell Barbara was starting to get nervous. We were driving down roads which, according to the sat nav, didn’t exist. I should have taken this as a sign. Used to going somewhere, and not down invisible roads, Barbara began to make mistakes, driving blindly through crossroads, veering dangerously on to the other side of the road. I’d only been there a handful of times over the years and so I was no help, but the plan was this: for me to look on the left-hand side for gatehouses and for Barbara to look on the right-hand side. She snapped at me at one stage for not concentrating, but really, I could see that there were no gates for at least a mile, so there was absolutely no point in looking. This, I shared with her. At breaking point she snapped that meant ‘feck all,’ seeing as we were already driving down ‘fecking roads that don’t exist’, so she couldn’t see why there couldn’t be ‘a fecking house without a fecking gate’. Hearing the word ‘fecking’ come out of Barbara’s mouth was a big deal considering her usual expression of annoyance was ‘fiddlesticks!’

Mum could have helped us but she just sat in the front seat smiling as she looked out the window. So, trying to help matters, I leaned forward and-okay, it wasn’t right and it wasn’t clever, but it was what I did, regardless-I shouted in her ear, the loudest possible scream that I could summon up. Mum jumped with fright, blocked her ears and then when her shock had died down, with two hands she swatted me across the head over and over again as though I were a swarm of bees. It really hurt me too. She pulled at my hair, scratched me, slapped me and I couldn’t escape her grip. Barbara got so upset she pulled the car over and had to pry Mum’s hands off me. Then she got out of the car and paced up and down the side of the road crying. I was crying too and my head was pounding from where Mum had pulled and scratched at it. It’s fashionable where I’m from to have a hairstyle like a haystack but Mum just ruined it; she’d made me look like somebody from an insane asylum. We both left her in the car, sitting upright, looking straight ahead and angry.

‘Come here to me, sweetheart,’ Barbara said, between tears, and she reached her arms out to me.

I didn’t need to be asked twice for a hug. I longed for a hug. Even when Mum was on form, she wasn’t a hugger. She was bony, always dieting, had the same relationship with food as she had with Dad; loved it but didn’t want it most of the time because she felt it was bad for her. I know this because I overheard a conversation she had with a friend at two a.m. on returning from a ladies’ lunch. But regarding the hugging, I think she just felt awkward having somebody physically so close. She wasn’t a comfortable person and so had no comfort to give anybody else. It’s like words of advice; you can’t give them unless you have them. I don’t think it meant she didn’t care. I never felt she didn’t care. Well, okay, maybe I did, a few times.