Cecelia Ahern - The Year I Met You

I cringe again.

‘Is he … keen to get you back?’

‘Yes,’ I say, gravely serious.

‘Oh.’

‘He called me at one a.m. a few nights ago singing All Saints’ “Bootie Call”. He sings like an altar boy.’

‘Oh,’ he says in a lighter tone, less concerned.

‘So obviously you have a lot to contend with,’ I add.

‘Maybe a sing-off,’ he suggests. ‘You know, as soon as I saw your red head covered in muck and garden leaves I knew I wanted you. I just couldn’t figure out what to do about it. The job bought me time. So none of it was a waste of my time, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

We kiss again and I could quite literally move into this little caravan and stay with him for ever, despite neither of us being able to stand up straight without bowing our heads, but we hear voices right outside the window as another group survey the garden.

‘Hey, I bought you something.’ He rubs his nose, scratches his temple, all of a sudden in a fluster and he is mumbling incoherently, and I find it so endearing I just sit at the table and watch with a great big smile on my face, doing nothing to help him out at all. ‘It’s for your garden,’ he says, embarrassed, ‘But if you think it’s stupid, I’ll take it back, no problem. It’s not expensive, I saw it and thought of you, or thought you might like it, I mean, I don’t really know anyone else who lives in their garden as much as you, apart from my mam of course who literally lives in her … anyway, I’ll take it back if you don’t like it.’

‘Monday, that’s a beautiful way to present something,’ I say sarcastically, putting my hand on my heart.

‘Get used to it,’ he says gently, then reaches under the table and presents me with a gift for the garden. He covers his face with his hands so he can’t see my reaction. ‘Do you like it?’ he asks in a muffled voice.

I kiss his hands. He lets them fall to his lap and his uncertain face breaks into a relieved smile.

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘I wouldn’t say it’s beautiful .’

‘It’s perfect. Thank you.’

We kiss in the middle of a caravan in Connemara in the Phoenix Park with a battered garden signpost that says, Miracles only grow where you plant them.

26

Monday and I are lying in my bed. It is August. It is ten p.m. and my curtains are open. The sky is still bright. I can hear children from surrounding streets still out playing. My garden is still plump with life. There are still sounds of life and activity around us, the smell of barbecue in the air. I am in a wonderful bubble of bliss, lying naked with Monday, bathing in after-sex glory and contentment. I’m looking out at the sky, marvelling at the red sky.

‘Red sky at night,’ I start to say, and then your face suddenly appears in the window. ‘Ahhhhhhhhh! Arrrrrrgggghhh!’

I almost give Monday a heart attack, jumping up and pulling the sheets around me, getting tangled in the process.

‘Jesus bloody Christ,’ Monday screams when he sees you.

You start laughing, a depraved lunatic sound, and I can see from your wired eyes that you’re drunk.

‘Nice trellising,’ you shout, knocking on the window and I’m beginning to regret constructing the climbing frame on the wall of my house that leads to my bedroom window, from which parkdirektor riggers, a hardy perennial deciduous red rose, is growing up the front of the house.

Monday groans.

‘I think he’s drunk,’ I say.

‘You think?’

I look at him.

‘Go,’ he says tiredly. ‘Go do whatever it is that you two do at ten p.m. on a Thursday night.’

I open the front door in my robe, and find you sitting at the table in your garden. You’re wearing a tuxedo.

I whistle.

You swear at me.

Seeing your front door wide open, I drop your house keys into my pocket and I sit down.

‘I see he finally gave you a job,’ you say, and then snort and laugh that disgusting filthy chesty laugh again. You’re back on the cigarettes tonight too.

‘You forgot to cut your grass today,’ I say.

‘Keep your opinions to yourself, Delia Smith.’

‘She’s a chef.’

‘Fuck off.’

You’re angry tonight, Matt, back where we started. You finish the bottle of beer then throw it across the road. It breaks on my side of the path. Monday peers out the window, sees that I’m okay and disappears again.

‘What happened tonight?’

‘I went to the radio awards. I wasn’t nominated. I was disgusted. I told them so. Said a few other things about a few other people who haven’t been there for me like they should have been. Said it on stage into the microphone so everyone could hear what I had to say nice and loud. The organisers didn’t like my behaviour. So they fucked me out of there.’

Two steps forward, one step back. It’s the same with both of us. It’s natural, I suppose. Nobody and nothing is perfect. I don’t judge, not aloud anyway. You rant about work, about not working, about all the people in the world who work. It is difficult to keep up with, you start and stop, abandon ideas before they’re fully developed. Your thought process is indicative of where you find yourself now. In a way, I agree with you. Some of what you say is how I felt at times during the past year, how I still sometimes feel as I struggle to find my place every day. Society is built around industry, you say, only children and retired people relax into not working and the percentage of retired people who die of heart attacks soon after retirement is a worry to you. You think you will die of boredom and make a note to visit Dr J about that.

You are struggling to find a job, in fact it’s proving impossible. Your gardening leave is up, you are officially unemployed. Once hot property, you are now far from a desired commodity. You have been blacklisted. Nobody seems to want to hire a loose cannon like you with the potential for such notoriety, and those who do show interest want you for the wrong reasons, want you to amp up your dark side, turn you into a cartoon version of yourself. But this will not get Amy back, and that is a side of you even you are not comfortable with. You have had endless meetings with your agent, who doesn’t return your calls as much as he once did, who is spending more time with a new TV personality rising star who has whiter teeth, and thicker hair, better skin and politically correct banter. Housewives love him, truck drivers can tolerate him. You threw a glass of water over him tonight and when no one was looking he took you outside, pretending he wanted to have a mature discussion, and instead boxed you across the chin, adjusted his Tom Ford tuxedo and went back inside with his plastic smile to present an award. Your words. You hope he’ll die of a venereal disease. You attempt to list them all.

Then you move on to the DJ who won your award, the award you’ve won every year for six years straight, a man who talks about birds and gardening on air. I also know that you’re trying to hurt me because of my new interests, but I don’t bite. I know your tricks now. When you are hurting you try to hurt other people. It won’t work with me.

Then you start on Corporate Man, who recently asked you and Amy to keep your voices down when the two of you were having a heavy-duty argument on the street one night and as a result has now become your main target of hate. You speculate that he loves to have meetings about meetings, loves the sound of his own voice and makes long-winded speeches about his love for butt-plugs and other such things that you make up on the spot.

I go into your house and come back with a roll of toilet paper.

‘I have an idea,’ I say, interrupting your Corporate Man rant.

‘I’m not crying,’ you say angrily, seeing the toilet roll. ‘And I already took a shit. On your roses.’