Cecelia Ahern - The Year I Met You

I’m on what is called ‘gardening leave’. It has nothing to do with gardening, thankfully, or I’d have a very long year power-hosing and weeding between the cracks of my cobble-locked garden. Gardening leave is the practice whereby an employee who has left their job or who has been terminated is instructed to stay away from work during the notice period, while still remaining on the payroll. It’s often used to prevent employees from taking with them up-to-date and perhaps sensitive information when they leave their current employer, especially when they are leaving to join a competitor. I wasn’t leaving to join a competitor, as I’ve already explained, however Larry felt certain that I would work with a company we were in relative competition with, a company I had tried to schmooze to buy ours. He was right. I would have worked with them. They called me the day after I was fired to offer me a job. When I told them about the gardening leave they said they couldn’t possibly wait that long – twelve months gardening leave!! – and so they went off to find somebody else. Not only has the length of my gardening leave chased away other employers, I have absolutely nothing to do while I wait. It feels like a prison sentence. Twelve months gardening leave. It is a sentence. I feel as if I’m gathering dust on some shelf while the world is moving on around me and I can’t do anything to stop it or join in. I don’t want my mind to start growing moss; I’ll need to continuously power-hose it, to keep it fresh.

Blades of wet grass stick to my feet, working their way up my ankles as I walk back and forth on the patch of grass. So what happens when I’m put on hold for an entire year and there’s nothing I can do about it? What do I do?

I pad up and down on the wet grass, my feet starting to feel cold but my mind buzzing with a new idea. A new project. A goal. An objective. Something to do. I must right a wrong. I will uproot the very ground I walk on, which will be easy because I feel as if I have been uprooted already.

I will give the neighbourhood a gift. I will bring back the garden.

5

‘He’s beautiful,’ I whisper, looking at the tiny baby in my friend Bianca’s arms.

‘I know,’ she smiles, gazing at him adoringly.

‘Is it amazing?’ I ask.

‘Yeah, it’s … amazing.’ She looks away, her smile a bit wobbly, her eyes sunken into the back of her head from two nights’ lack of sleep. ‘Hey, have you started a new job yet?’

‘No, I can’t – you know, the gardening leave thing.’

‘Oh yeah,’ she says, then winces and goes quiet for a moment. I don’t dare interrupt her thoughts. ‘You’ll find something,’ she says, giving me a sympathetic smile.

I have grown to hate that smile on people. I am in the Rotunda Hospital, once again finding myself visiting somebody as they do something else. It has occurred to me lately that most of my visits have been this way. Calling into a friend at work, dropping by one of my sister’s classes to watch, seeing my dad while he is busy with Zara, chatting to friends while they are watching their children swimming or dancing, or at a playground. Every time I see people lately it is me interrupting their life, them busy with something – distracted heads that have one eye on me and another on their job – while beside them or across from them I am still, patiently waiting for them to finish what they’re doing to answer me. I am the still person in every scene of my life and I have started to see myself from afar each time it happens, like I’m outside of myself, watching myself be still and silent while the others move around, tend to their work, their children. Since realising this, I have tried not to meet anyone during the day when they are in the middle of something and I am not. I have tried to make appointments for nights out, dinners, drinks – times when I know we can be on even ground, face to face, one on one. But it is difficult, everybody is so busy, some can’t get a babysitter, we can’t seem to synchronise a night out that suits everybody, and so we struggle to arrange anything. It took me weeks to organise a dinner party in my house this weekend. Then I will be busy, and they can be still. In the meantime, here I am in the hospital, sitting at the bedside of one of my dearest friends who has just had her first baby, and while I am happy for her, of course I am, and was secretly delighted about the nine months maternity leave so that I could have company for the remainder of the year, I know the reality is that I will not see her very much, or if I do, she will be busy and I will be still, I will sit opposite her or beside her and wait for her to be ready, holding half her attention.

‘We were thinking, me and Tristan …’ Bianca breaks into my thoughts.

My body turns rigid as I sense what’s coming.

‘He’s not here, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me asking you …’

I feel dread but I fix my face into what I hope is the perfect look of interest.

‘Would you be his godmother?’

Ta-da. Third one in two months, it has to be a world record. ‘Oh, Bianca. I’d love to,’ I smile. ‘Thank you, that’s such an honour …’

She smiles back at me, delighted by her request, one of the most special moments in her life, while inside I feel like a charity case. It’s as if they’ve all made a pact to ask me to be godmother in order to give me something to do. And what will I do? Go to the church and stand by their side while they hold the baby, while the priest pours water, while everybody does something and I stand idly by.

‘Did you hear about your friend’s son?’

‘What friend?’

‘Matt Marshall,’ Bianca says.

‘He is not my friend,’ I say, annoyed. Then, deciding it’s best not to argue with a woman who has just given birth, I ask, ‘What did his son do?’

‘He put a video up on YouTube telling the world how much he hates his dad. Mortifying, isn’t it? Imagine talking about a family member like that.’

The baby in Bianca’s arms lets out a scream.

‘This little fucker keeps biting my nipple,’ she hisses, and I’m immediately silenced as her mood swings again and darkness descends in the hospital room.

She moves her three-day-old son into a different position, holding him like a rugby ball, her enormous breast bigger than his head and looking like it’s smothering him. The baby sucks and is silenced again.

It is almost a beautiful moment, apart from the fact that when I look at her she has tears streaming down her face.

The door opens and her pale husband Tristan ducks his head in. He sees his firstborn and his face softens, then he looks up and sees his wife and his face tightens. He swallows.

‘Hi, Jasmine,’ he steps inside and greets me.

‘Congratulations, Daddy,’ I say gently. ‘He’s beautiful.’

‘He’s got a mouthful of fangs, is what he has,’ Bianca says, wincing again.

The baby screams as he’s pulled away from her chapped red raw nipple.

‘Seriously, Tristan, this is … I can’t …’ Her face crumples.

I leave them to it.

I tell myself while driving that I am not interested in watching your son on YouTube. I tell myself I won’t stoop to your level, that I have far more important things to do than think about you and absorb myself in your world, but all I actually have to do that day is shop for dinner. Shopping for one person doesn’t depress me as it does some of my other single friends; I am happy to be alone and everybody needs to eat, but it has come to this. Eating. Eating was something I had to squeeze into my busy day because I had to, to stay alive. Now it is something to string out, make an afternoon of. The last few days I have made elaborate meals for myself. Yesterday I spent fifty-five minutes in Eason’s browsing the shelves for recipe books, spent sixty minutes buying the ingredients, which took me two and a half hours to prepare and cook, and then I ate it in twenty minutes. That was my entire day yesterday. It was enjoyable but the novelty has worn off many of the things I was looking forward to doing in my ‘time off’.