Cecelia Ahern - The Year I Met You

We’re outside. The day has turned, the wind has picked up again; in the space of an hour the trees have started to whip from one side to the other, violently, as if we’re on some tropical island – only we’re not, it’s Ireland and it’s February. Everything is skeletal and grey, people walk by with screwed-up faces, purple-lipped, tight blue hands glowing in the dull light or thrust into their pockets.

I watch him walk to his car.

It didn’t bother me when he pretended he knew me and flattered me, but it bothers me when he pretends he knows me and speaks the truth. Because although we’ve only known each other one hour, he’s probably right. As things stand, a job – any job – would be good for me. It might be the only thing that can stop me slipping into whatever it is I’ve been slipping into.

12

The storm that swept in that evening reached hurricane level, with winds in some parts of the country touching 170 kilometres per hour. According to the news there are two hundred and sixty thousand people without electricity. There are reports of accidents on the motorway, trucks blowing over, falling trees crushing cars, images of destruction on people’s houses, roofs being lifted off buildings, windows shattered from flying debris. The east coast was relatively unaffected. I see branches littering the road, leaves, wheelie bins lying down and surrendering, and children’s toys where they shouldn’t be, but compared to those whose homes are flooded we are incredibly lucky. However it has been a wild night for our street, and for so many reasons.

While trying to read my folder and discover how human rights and climate change are related, I am interrupted by you. It is different to the usual interruptions. You don’t drive home with your music blaring: you are already at home, in fact you are completely sober. This isn’t entirely unheard of, you are not all guns blazing every night, and it is not always on the same level. Since your wife left you, you have been quieter; there has been no one to scream at, and even though some nights you have forgotten this and shouted as if she was there, you have quickly remembered that there is no one to hear you and settled down to sleep in your car or at the garden table. While all the other garden furniture in the neighbourhood has been flying around in the terrible storms – the Malones lost a favourite gnome when it fell over and smashed its face in – yours has remained entrenched in your bog marsh of a front garden. It lists to one side, the right-hand legs having sunk deeper into the grass than those on the left, and I have watched you at night doing the thing that seems to help you focus on whatever it is your mind is pondering: again and again you place your lighter on the higher end of the sloped table and then watch it roll down into your open palm at the lower end. I don’t know if you even realise you are doing it; the expression on your face suggests your mind is somewhere else entirely.

Most nights you’ve either remembered your own key or driven off elsewhere when you couldn’t find it, but I have had to let you into your house with the spare key three times in total. Each time you stumbled into the house and closed the door in my face, and I knew that you would not remember it the following day. It is ironic, to me at least, that the very thing that I hate you for is something that you probably have no recollection of, and the very things that feed that hatred you forget every single time you wake up.

At three a.m. this morning it is not your car that disturbs me from my reading, it is your son, Fionn. The wind is so loud that I can’t make out the words, but the shouting is being whipped around in the air and occasionally tossed in my direction: random words that don’t add up to enough to reveal the subject of the argument. I look out of my bedroom window and see you and Fionn in the garden, the pair of you screaming, arms waving. I can see your face, but I can’t see Fionn’s. Neither of you is wearing a coat, which tells me you weren’t planning on this discussion under the stars. Fionn is a whippet of a thing, a tall, skinny fifteen-year-old who keeps being blown over every time there’s a gust of wind; or so it seems, until I realise it has nothing to do with the wind: he is falling-down drunk. You are solid, you are tall, you are broad, you have your trainers firmly planted on the ground; your body is wide and you look as though not long ago you were fit although you’ve become softer around the edges. I can see the hint of love handles, and your gut has swelled a bit since your wife moved out, or maybe it’s just that the wind is blowing your shirt tight against your waist and revealing a body I wouldn’t ordinarily see. You try to grab Fionn’s arms when they flail close to you, but each time you reach out to him, he swings his arms wildly, fists clenched, trying to hit you.

You manage to grab him by the waist and pull him towards the house, but he bends over and squirms out of your grasp. He punches out, fist connecting with some part of your body and you fall back as if hurt. But it isn’t that which makes me move, it is the two younger children standing at the open door, looking so petrified in their pyjamas, one squeezing a teddy bear to his chest, which has me out of bed and pulling on my tracksuit before I can give it a second thought. When I undo the lock on the front door I’m almost knocked over by the force with which it flies open, so strong is the wind. Everything in the hallway – the notepad on the phone table, hats, coats – seems to take off, scurrying to the far corners of the house like mice when the light is switched on. I have to battle to pull the door closed behind me; using two hands, I tug with all my might. The wind is icy, wild, angry. It rages, and across the road the two of you flail wildly at one another as if tapping into Mother Nature’s anger.

I see it happen, the thing you will never forgive yourself for, and though I am not your biggest fan, I know that it wasn’t intentional. You don’t mean to hit your son, but that is what you do. While trying to reach for him and protect yourself from his fists, you somehow make contact with his face. I happen to be looking at your face in that moment, and before I know what it is you’ve done, your expression tells me. Someone who had not seen your face might not have understood that it was accidental, but I did. Your eyes are suddenly haunted, scared – appalled. The revulsion is so strong, you look as if you’re going to be sick. You’re desperate to reach out to him and protect him, but he is screaming and pushing you away, holding his bloodied nose, shouting at you, accusing you, calling you names a father would never want to be called by his son. The children at the door are crying now and you are trying to keep them calm, and all the while the storm rages; the clumpy garden chairs, which had previously seemed embedded into the ground, suddenly blow over as if to join in the family drama. One chair topples backward, another is lifted and skids across the ground as if it is weightless, landing dangerously near the window. My intention is to protect the little ones, to bring them inside and distract them. I have no plan to intervene in father–son fisticuffs, I know that would not end well for me, but as I make my way towards you both, your son announces that he never wants to set foot in your house again and sets off down the road, alone, with no coat, drunk, against a one-hundred-and-something-kilometre wind, with a bloodied face – and that changes things.

And that is how your son ends up sleeping in the spare bedroom of my home on the stormiest night the country has seen. He doesn’t want to talk, and that is okay, I’m not in the mood either. I clean his face, thankful that your thump hasn’t broken his nose. I give him fresh towels, a pint of water and a headache tablet, an extra large NYPD T-shirt that somebody gave me as a gift years ago, and I leave him alone. Then I sit up all night, drinking green tea and listening to him making trips from the bedroom to the bathroom, where he throws up relentlessly.