Cecelia Ahern - The Year I Met You

Heather and I are firm in keeping to this, no matter how uncomfortable it makes people feel. While Dad knows the circles code exists, it was Mum who taught it to us. Dad never involved himself in these kinds of things.

I watch Heather looking at his outstretched hand in confusion. I know that she knows what to do, but she looks at me for support.

‘Orange, Heather.’ Though personally I’d rather keep him in the red zone.

Heather nods then turns to him and waves.

‘Only a wave for me?’ he asks, like he’s speaking to a child and not a thirty-four-year-old woman.

He moves closer and I am about to step in front of him and tell him to stop when Heather holds out her hand. ‘Stop. You are not in my Blue Hug Circle.’

But Ted doesn’t take her seriously. He chuckles at what she has said, not giving it any consideration, and wraps his arms around her in a bear hug. Heather immediately starts screaming and I pull at his arms to get him away from her.

‘Jasmine!’ Dad says, as he watches me trying to wrench Ted’s arms off her. Leilah gives out to Dad. Zara starts crying and Heather is screaming, manically.

Ted backs off, hands in the air as if he’s the victim of a hold-up, saying, ‘All right, all right, I’m only being friendly,’ over all the noise.

Dad is apologising to Ted, trying to get him to sit down at the table, barking at Leilah to get him a drink and make him comfortable, but Leilah isn’t listening.

‘Are you okay, Heather?’ Leilah is by my side.

Heather is still screaming, huddled in my arms, and I know that the best thing is for us to leave. She will not want to settle at the table for dinner with him here, after he broke a rather serious rule of hers.

‘There’s no need to overreact,’ Dad says, following us out into the hall. Heather is hiding her head in my chest, cuddling into me, and I wish Dad would shut up. He is talking to me, but she might think it’s her he’s saying it to.

‘Dad, she told him no.’

‘It was only a hug, for feck’s sake.’

I bite my tongue. I don’t even know where to start with telling him off, but before I can get a word out, he erupts.

‘That is the last time this happens. We’re not doing this any more. I’ve had enough,’ he says, anger rising in him in a way I haven’t seen in years. ‘No more of this!’ He points at me and Heather and then the dinner table, as if this entire episode has happened before and it is our fault.

‘Any excuse,’ I snap back at him, and I leave the apartment.

I offer to bring Heather home with me, to stay overnight at my place, but she declines, giving my face a maternal pat before she gets out of the car, as if she’s sorry that this has all been too much for me. She is happier when she is in her own home, surrounded by her things.

I, on the other hand, return home alone.

10

I am disappointed Heather doesn’t stay overnight with me for a number of reasons: one, because I like her company; two, because I want to make sure she is okay after the incident at Dad’s; and three, because it would have been a great way for me to cancel the dreaded meeting with my cousin Kevin, which is to take place tomorrow. Or maybe even bring her to see Kevin with me, but Heather is too busy with her Friday job in the solicitor’s office.

Our meeting is planned for noon in Starbucks on Dame Street beside the Wax Museum. Lots of tourists, nothing intimate. I will be able to leave when I want to.

Deep down I know that it will be fine. He will apologise for his twenty-two-year-old self, tell me how he always felt lost and alone, an outcast who used force and fear as a way of maintaining control over a life that he felt was out of control. He will tell me that he has done some soul-searching on his travels – kept a journal, started a novel, or maybe he’ll have gone all ‘hairy feet and sandals’ and become a poet. Then again, maybe he ended up working in a bank. He probably met a woman – or maybe a man, who knows – and now that he is content with who he is, he is able to face who he was and apologise for the incident all those years ago. I know that the ice will quickly melt and we can forge on, laughing about how we tied his brother Michael to a tree, danced around him dressed as Indians and accidentally fired an arrow into his leg; or how we stole Fiona’s clothes while she was skinny-dipping and put them on the rocks so that she was forced to climb up to get them, barefoot and butt-naked. I might mention the whole ‘You are going to die, Jasmine’ talk that changed the course of my thinking for ever, and maybe I will go as far as mentioning Santa Claus.

When I see him, I am surprised by his appearance. I don’t know what I’m expecting, but it’s not what I see. He is thirty-eight and so I should have prepared myself for that. Seeing him makes me feel old; we’re grown up now. Suddenly everything disappears and I just feel a fondness towards him. My cousin. So many memories come flooding at me, so many with my mother in them, and I am dumbfounded by how overcome I feel. It has been a long time since I’ve felt that longing for my mum; it leaves me feeling winded and lost and childlike again, as if I’m reaching for something that is beyond my grasp. For a while her smell lingered at home and I would wrap myself up in her bed in an effort to be close to her; other times I would get a whiff of her perfume from somebody else and I would stop midstride, almost hypnotised as I was transported and locked in the vivid memory of her. But it happened less and less as the years passed by. Everything that used to remind me of her, everything that I saw and heard – restaurants, shops, roads we’d driven down, buses we’d sat on, parks, songs on the radio, phrases overheard in passing conversations – absolutely everything linked back to her in some way. But of course it did, she died when I was young, when she was still the centre of my world, before I’d had a chance to start making a life for myself. As I’d stayed in the same city that all of those memories were made in, I thought that I would never lose them. Whenever I needed her – my mum fix – I’d go back to those places, hoping to bring her back, summon her energy. Instead, the act of going back made new memories, and every time I went I would add another layer on top of her memory, until eventually I’d buried them completely and all of those places stopped being about my past with her and became my present. It is rare, twelve years on, that I am struck like this, and I know it is because of him, because I haven’t seen him since she passed away, so everything I can tie him to is connected with her. He looks up and sees me, and he beams. I feel okay. This is going to be nice, nostalgic. I immediately feel guilty for the Starbucks venue and wonder if I should move our meeting to a restaurant nearby.

He has found a small table, with two chairs where we will have to sit diagonally to avoid our knees meeting. I was hoping to get there first to grab two sinking armchairs well away from each other. He gives me a big hug, a long warm embrace. His hair is thinning, he has wrinkles around his eyes, I think he is the only person I have gone so long without seeing. It’s a big leap for the brain and it’s oddly disconcerting.

‘Wow,’ I say when I sit down and stare at a familiar face peeking out at me from behind an unusual mask of time. I don’t know where to start.

‘You haven’t changed,’ he beams. ‘Still have the red hair.’

‘I do,’ I laugh.

‘And those eyes.’ He looks at me intently, then shakes his head and laughs.

‘Eh. Yes. Decided to keep the eyes.’ I laugh. Nervously. ‘So …’ Long silence while we stare at one another. He is beaming and keeps shaking his head as if he can’t believe it. I get it, but enough now, let’s move on. I’m once again happy we didn’t choose an actual lunch date.