Cecelia Ahern - The Year I Met You

‘You don’t have to do this.’

‘I know. But it might give you a few more minutes’ thinking time about the job. You’ve seemed to have needed a lot of that.’

I bite my lip. ‘Sorry. You said I had a month to decide.’

‘Tops. We can talk about it after I do this, if that’s okay.’

I look at the wires in his hand. ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’

‘I bought an old cottage in Skerries and did it up myself. New roof, new plumbing, new electrics. Took me a few years, but it’s habitable now. Don’t worry, I haven’t blown anything up. Yet.’

I try to picture him in his little cottage in the sleepy town of Skerries, wearing an Aran sweater and buying his fresh fish daily from a fisherman, but I can’t. All I can see is him, naked from the waist up, ripping up floorboards and stripping wallpaper with enormous power tools in his hands.

‘Do you have time to talk after?’ Registering my blank stare, he adds, ‘We had arranged to talk today …’

The penny drops. ‘Ah. I thought you meant over the phone, which is why I’m … we never actually agreed a time, but today is fine.’

He seems embarrassed that he has shown up unexpected on a Sunday, or is there something more to his awkwardness? If so, it is quickly covered up. Or perhaps I’m imagining it, kidding myself that I can see that vulnerable side of him, that he’s dropped by unannounced because he genuinely wants to see me. In the flash that passes between us I believe that is a possibility, but now it’s business as usual – or not quite, as he is destroying a perfectly good suit as he bends over a hole in my garden.

Thirty minutes later, as I have prepared tea for me and coffee for him, Monday and Heather are sitting at the kitchen table. Heather is telling him about her jobs. She is always proud of her work and finds it the easiest thing to talk about around strangers. I like that she does this, she is good at conversation, though I worry about her security. I don’t want her to tell random men about her weekly schedule in case they turn up where she is. I’m not worried about her telling Monday, obviously. Nor is she, because when she is finished, she asks him about his job.

‘I’m a headhunter,’ he says. ‘My job is to identify suitable candidates who are employed elsewhere to fill business positions.’

‘Isn’t that like cheating?’

‘Not really.’ He smiles. ‘I don’t like cheating. I see myself more as a problem-solver. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. I put the right people in the right places. Because sometimes people aren’t in the place that they should be.’

We catch each other’s eyes when he says that. He doesn’t speak slowly, as if she’s incapable of understanding, or loudly as though she is deaf, though she does wear a hearing aid. His sentences are short and simple, to the point.

Heather then starts to tell him about me, about my jobs – a simplified version, the version I’ve told her over the years. I’m confused as to what she’s doing, thinking she surely has misunderstood his job, but then I realise that she’s trying to sell me to him, which touches me so much I stop moving and can’t quite figure out what I’m doing. I’m completely transfixed, overwhelmed that Heather would do this for me, that she would know to do this for me. He is a person who gets people jobs and she is trying to get me a job. She lists my attributes and comes up with anecdotes to illustrate those attributes. It is something she has learned to do herself when attending a job interview and she has applied it to me.

She begins each sentence with ‘Jasmine is …’ The first sentence she completes with ‘kind’ and then gives an example of my kindness. She tells him I paid for her apartment.

‘Jasmine is smart,’ she says. ‘One day we were in the supermarket car park and Jasmine found twenty euro by the ticket machine. Beside it was an appointment card for somebody’s doctor appointment. So Jasmine posted the money and the appointment card to the doctor and told him that the person you have on this date at this time dropped their money in the car park on this date.’ She beams. ‘Isn’t that smart?’

‘That’s definitely very smart.’ He smiles.

I hope she’s finished now; it’s lovely but difficult to listen to praise. Instead she continues, ‘Jasmine is generous,’ and I shake my head and go back to what I was doing.

One peek at Monday shows me he’s touched. He is looking at her intently, fixated on her. He must sense that I’m watching because he looks over at me, smiles gently, then I have to start moving again. He doesn’t always understand her, he asks her to repeat some things; despite years of therapy, her speech isn’t so clear, but though I have understood everything, I stop myself from interrupting. She is not a child. She doesn’t need a translator.

‘Jasmine sounds like a great person,’ he says, eyes on me again. ‘And I agree. I think lots of people would be lucky to have her.’ I’m not looking at him but I can see him from the corner of my eye, the angle of his face on mine, and every single move I make is sloppy, while my heart bangs and my stomach flutters. I fumble with the milk carton, spill milk on the counter when trying to pour it into the jug.

‘She is,’ Heather agrees.

‘And you’re a great sister to say that about her.’

The next thing she says sends me into an emotional spin and catapults me out of the room so fast that even Monday has the brains to leave, and text me later – from his personal mobile – that he would like me to call him when I have the time.

‘I’m her big sister. When our mum died, she told me I’m the big sister and I have to look after Jasmine. I do all of these other things, but protecting Jasmine is my main job.’

18

First thing on Monday morning I’m woken by the sound of a lawnmower right outside my window. This hurts me on many levels. Firstly because it is just after eight a.m. and is generally an intrusive sound, and secondly because I had a bottle of red wine before going to bed. Perhaps I’m lying about the amount, it could have been more and it also could have been an entirely different spirit, but I’m feeling it today, the thud, thud, thud that penetrates my skull right to my brain cells, killing them as it does, and then drills back through to the back of my head where I feel it pulsating on the pillow. The thoughtless lawnmower user could be any of the four retired couples around us who work to their own schedule, avoiding any thought of others’, particularly as they know that I no longer have a job. It could be anyone, but already I know it is you. I know that it is before even lifting my head up from the pillow, because it goes on far too long. Nobody in the world has that much grass; only an inexperienced gardener would take that long. When I look outside it is as though you have been waiting for me to appear. You glance up immediately and give me a big fine wave. I see the sarcasm dripping from every pore. Then you turn the lawnmower off, as if you have succeeded in doing what you set out to do, and make your way across the road to my house.

I can’t move. I am too dizzy, I really need to lie down again, but you are at the door, pressing the bell, too loud, for too long, as though you have a finger on a bruise on my skin and are pushing it in short bursts of Morse code torture. I collapse on the bed, hoping that if I ignore you, you will go away, but apparently like every other problem, you do not, you only get worse. In the end it is not you that moves me, it is the sight of the bottle of vodka beside my bed that catapults me – at the pace of a snail – out the door.

I pull the front door open and daylight burns holes in my eyes. I grimace, and cower, retreat back into the safety of the darkened, curtain-closed room. You follow me in.