Cecelia Ahern - The Year I Met You

Zara presses the plastic hook against my skin, and pushes her face near mine. ‘If you see that Peter Pan, you tell him I’m lookin’ for him – him and that little fairy he’s with.’ She glares at me meanly then jumps up and runs down the hall.

I’m left lying on the ground alone, laughing.

On this occasion I’ve brought a bracelet-making set for Heather and she settles down at the table to focus on sliding the beads on to the string. Zara is keen to play with it too and though we tell her calmly that it is not a toy, that it is Heather’s, that Zara must play with her own toys – and the new vet set that I brought her – she has a meltdown, which makes Heather extremely tense. I can see her shoulders bunch up as she focuses threading the beads, her cheeks getting hotter as Zara’s wails get louder. Leilah’s voice is calm and firm and she removes Zara from the room. I stay beside Heather, my elbow on the table to keep my head propped up, and I watch her intently.

‘What are you doing, Jasmine?’ she asks.

‘Watching you.’

She smiles. ‘Why are you watching me, Jasmine?’

‘Because you’re beautiful,’ I say, and she smiles shyly and shakes her head.

‘Jasmine!’

I laugh and continue watching her. She giggles, but then eventually disappears into bracelet-making concentration zone. Zara returns into the room quietly, her eyepatch discarded to reveal two sad red eyes. Lollipop in hand, she settles in her corner of the room and plays with the new vet game I bought for her, talking to herself in badly constructed sentences with random words thrown in that she has overheard from us. Heather gives her a quick look and concentrates on her beading. It is easy company for twenty minutes while the two girls concentrate, while Leilah prepares the lunch. I’m not being lazy, we both know it’s best that I stay in the room with Zara and Heather in case any further conflict arises.

The smell of garlic drifts from the kitchen as Leilah massages butter and garlic into the lamb. She snips rosemary from the herb garden on the balcony and, after rinsing it off, makes quick little nips into the flesh and inserts the rosemary. My dad isn’t home; he’s playing golf and will be back in time for lunch, so I put on Tangled , the only movie that Zara will concede to watching, and I settle down on the couch for a lazy hour. I wake to feel little butterfly kisses on my face. Heather is smiling down at me, and just seeing her is the most beautiful way to wake up.

‘Dad is here, Jasmine,’ she says.

I’m groggy, with my shoes off, and my dress up around my waist, and who follows Dad into the living room but Ted Clifford. Ted is over six feet tall and very broad. He fills the doorframe and I feel Heather freeze beside me, her body tensing. In fact everybody tenses, including Leilah, whose look of composure drops for a moment to show that she had no idea Ted was coming to visit.

‘Ted,’ she says, not hiding her surprise. ‘Welcome.’

‘Hello, Leilah,’ he says, giving her a wet kiss and an overly familiar hug. ‘I hope you don’t mind me invading your lunch, but Peter lost the golf which meant he had to invite me!’ He guffaws loudly.

Leilah smiles, but I can see the true meaning beneath, the tightness around the mouth, the warning signals in her eyes. It ruffles Dad’s feathers a bit.

‘This must be little Zara,’ Ted says, looking down at Zara. From her position on the floor she is looking up at him as if he is the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk . She looks at Leilah uncertainly, a wobbly smile-cry expression on her face, but Ted ignores the signs and scoops her up in his arms to plant a big smacker on her face. Leilah diplomatically lifts Zara from his arms and Zara wraps her legs tightly around Leilah’s waist and buries her head into her neck to hide from the giant. All the while Dad is beaming, all the while I am seething because this is no coincidence: me and Ted in the same room barely two weeks after Dad raised the issue of asking him to find a job for me. Leilah works two half-days a week so that she can spend afternoons with Zara, Dad is retired, I am unemployed, Heather has a day off: it makes sense for all of us to be eating lunch on a Thursday, but it makes no sense that Ted would be here. He should be working. Instead he is here to talk to me. I feel the anger rising within me and can barely look Dad in the eye.

‘You know my daughter, Jasmine,’ he says, holding out his hand to display me.

Ted gives me the once-over and comments on how I’ve grown since we met last. Ted is sixty-five years old, no excuse to treat a woman half his age as though she has just reached puberty and it was all for his benefit. It is clear that he is not surprised that I am here. I’m either paranoid or right about this. We shake hands, and I intend to keep it at that, but he pulls me in for a wet kiss that I find myself wiping off my cheek immediately. Leilah looks at me, empathetic.

‘And this is Heather,’ Dad says.

As an aside. Not, this is my daughter Heather, no display of the arm, no grand gesture. I am sensitive when it comes to Heather – very; I think that is clear from my treatment of you – so I don’t always know if what I feel about other people’s treatment of her is real or heightened or simply a case of me projecting my fears. Everyone will probably always make mistakes when it comes to her, in my eyes. I do, however, feel that in thirty-four years Dad has done very little to overcome the awkwardness he feels when introducing Heather to strangers, particularly those that he looks up to, people like Ted that he has always had an embarrassing schoolboy crush on, constantly trying to please him, sell his company to and then ultimately undersell it because it’s Ted and he wouldn’t want Ted to think that he’s uncool. It is not necessarily that he is ashamed of Heather, because he is not so cold-hearted, but he is conscious of the fact that some feel uncomfortable around Heather. He deals with this by paying as little attention to her as possible, making as little a deal of her as possible, playing everything down, as if that will make everyone feel more comfortable. Of course his apparent lack of affection for his daughter has the opposite effect. I have on many occasions raised this with him, but he thinks I’m overly emotional and irrational about the whole thing.

‘Ah,’ Ted says, looking at Heather in a way that I don’t like. ‘Hallo!’ he says in an unusual voice. ‘Well, I can’t leave you out, can I?’ he says and reaches out to shake her hand.

This is a risky move.

As a student of Heather I have learned that all individuals, regardless of disability, are sexual beings. Ensuring that Heather, whose physical development outstrips her emotional development, understands the physical and more particularly the psychological aspects of sexuality has always been of concern to me. It is a continuing lesson, more than ever now, when she yearns for a boyfriend. The last thing I want is for her to be rejected or ridiculed, never mind abused.

To deal with this, from a young age we learned the Circles concept, a system that helps categorise the various levels of personal relationship and physical intimacy. The reason why someone like Ted concerns me is because he has a misguided take on intimacy, seeing as he has kissed and picked up a three-year-old, squeezed a wife, checked me out, and now doesn’t want Heather to feel left out. I think this is one time that Heather would be more than happy to be left out.

The Purple Private Circle represents the individual; in this case Heather. The Blue Hug Circle comes next. This represents people who are closest to the person in the purple circle, both physically and emotionally, and it’s where close-body hugs are the norm; this circle includes me, Dad, Zara and Leilah. Next comes the Green Faraway Hug Circle. Close friends and extended family members are assigned to this circle. Sometimes friends may want to be closer than this, but Heather must tell them exactly where they stand. Then comes the Yellow Handshake Circle, for friends and acquaintances whose names are known, followed by the Orange Wave Circle for other, more distant acquaintances, such as children who may want to hug and kiss Heather but she knows she must not, that she must wave at them instead. No physical or emotional contact is involved at this level of intimacy. Finally there is the Red Stranger Circle. No physical contact or conversation is exchanged with people in this category, unless the person is identified by a recognisable badge or uniform. If somebody tries to touch Heather when she doesn’t want to be touched, Heather should say ‘Stop.’ Some people remain strangers forever.