Cecelia Ahern - The Time of My Life

I took a photo from the hall table and passed it to him.

‘Who’s the man?’

‘I think he’s her husband but I haven’t seen him for at least a year. I don’t think he could cope with her like this.’

‘Well, that’s depressing.’ He handed the photo back to me and we sat in silence for a moment, both sobered by the situation. Life broke the minute’s silence. ‘So you have to stay in there even though there’s no baby?’

‘If I leave and she comes back, I can’t tell her that it’s because she has no baby, that would be cruel.’

‘So you can’t come out and I can’t go in,’ he said. ‘Oh, the irony.’ He smiled and for the briefest moment he was attractive. ‘We can talk here,’ he said.

‘We already are.’

He slithered down the door and sat on the ground in the hallway. I followed him and sat across from him in the hallway of the apartment. A neighbour got out of the elevator, took a look at us and walked through the middle. We stared at one another in silence.

‘People can see you, can’t they?’ I asked.

‘What do you think I am, a ghost?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘I may be completely invisible to you but other people in this world pay plenty of attention to me. Other people actually want to know about me.’

‘Okay, okay, touchy,’ I said.

‘Are you ready to talk?’

‘I’m angry at you,’ I said almost immediately, suddenly remembering all that I’d rehearsed in my head.

‘Why?’

‘Because of what you did to all those people yesterday.’

‘What I did?’

‘Yes, they didn’t deserve to get involved in your … your curveball or whatever you called it.’

‘Hold on, you think I manipulated those people into doing what happened yesterday?’

‘Well … didn’t you?’

‘No!’ he said emphatically. ‘What do you think I am? Actually, don’t answer that. All I did was synchronise the Augusto Fernández thing, I had nothing to do with whatever his name is.’

‘Steve,’ I said firmly. ‘Steve Roberts.’

He looked amused. ‘Ah, now there’s a loyalty I didn’t see last week. What was it you called him? Sausage?’

I looked away.

‘I didn’t organise that. You are responsible for your own life and what happens in it, so are the other people. Your life had nothing to do with what happened there. You were feeling guilty,’ he said, and because it wasn’t a question I didn’t answer.

I put my head in my hands. ‘I have a headache.’

‘Thinking about things will do that, you haven’t done it for a while.’

‘But you said you planned the Fernández thing. You meddled with his life.’

‘I didn’t meddle. I synchronised your lives. Made your paths cross in order to help both of you.’

‘How did that help him? The poor man had a gun to his head and it didn’t need to happen.’

‘The poor man had a water pistol to his head and I think you’ll find he’ll be better off after all this.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. We’ll have to watch this space.’

‘Didn’t matter at the time that it was a water pistol,’ I grumbled.

‘I’m sure it didn’t. Are you okay?’

I was silent.

‘Hey.’ He stretched out his leg and tapped my foot with his, playfully.

‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’

‘Ah, Lucy,’ he sighed. He came across the hall and hugged me. I pushed away at first but he held on tighter and eventually I gave in and hugged him back, my cheek against the fabric of his cheap suit, breathing in his musty smell. We pulled away and he tenderly wiped imaginary tears away with this fingers. His kindness made him look moderately more attractive. He handed me a tissue and I gave my nose a loud, wet blow.

‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘You’ll wake the baby.’

We both laughed, guiltily.

‘I’m pathetic, aren’t I?’

‘I’m leaning towards saying yes but I should ask you first, in what way?’

‘Here I am after being held at gunpoint with a water pistol, babysitting a baby that doesn’t exist.’

‘Sitting with your life,’ he added.

‘Good point. Sitting with my life, that is a person. It doesn’t get any weirder than this.’

‘It might. We haven’t even started yet.’

‘Why doesn’t she have her life following her around? How sad is this?’ I referred to the toy-littered floor behind me.

He shrugged, ‘I don’t get involved in other people’s lives. You are my sole concern.’

‘Her life must be in denial,’ I said. ‘You should take a leaf out of her life’s book.’

‘Or out of yours.’

I sighed. ‘You really are that unhappy?’

He nodded, and he looked away from me. He worked his jaw as he took a moment to compose himself.

‘But I don’t understand how things are so bad for you. I feel fine.’

‘You don’t feel fine.’ He shook his head.

‘I don’t wake up every day singing “Good Morning”, but I’m not,’ I lowered my voice, ‘pretending that things are there when they’re not.’

‘Aren’t you?’ He looked amused. ‘It’s like this. If you fall and break a leg you feel pain and you go to the doctor, they take an X-ray and you hold it up to the light and everybody can see the broken bone. Yeah?’

I nodded.

‘You have a sore tooth, you can feel the pain, so you go to the dentist and he sticks a camera in your mouth, sees the problem, you need a root canal or something, yeah?’

I nodded again.

‘These are all very acceptable things in modern society. You’re sick; you go to the doctor, you get antibiotics. You’re depressed; you talk to a therapist, they might give you anti-depressants. Your greys show; you get your colour done. But with your life you make a few bad decisions, get unlucky a few times, whatever, but you have to keep going, right? Nobody can see the underneath part of who you are, and if you can’t see it – if an X-ray and a camera can’t take a picture of it for you – in this day and age the belief is, it’s not there. But I am here. I’m the other part of you. The X-ray to your life. A mirror is held up to your face and I’m the reflection, I show how you’re hurting, how you’re unhappy. It’s all reflected on me. Make sense?’

Which made sense about the bad breath, the clammy skin and the bad haircut. I mulled it over. ‘Yes, but that’s rather unfair to you.’

‘That’s the card I was dealt. Now it’s up to me to make myself happy. So you see, this is as much about me as it is about you. The more you live your life, the happier I feel, the more satisfied you are, the healthier I am.’

‘So your happiness depends on me.’

‘I prefer to see us as a team. You’re the Lois Lane to my Superman. The Pinky to my Brain.’

‘The X-ray to my broken leg,’ I said and we smiled and I felt a kind of a truce being called.

‘Did you talk to your family about what happened? I bet they were worried about you.’

‘You know I did.’

‘I think it’s better that we both treat our conversations as if I don’t know anything.’

‘Don’t worry, I do. I saw my mum and Riley yesterday. I went to Riley’s. We had Pakistani takeaway and Mum insisted on making me hot chocolate like she did after I’d fallen when I was little,’ I laughed.

‘That sounds nice.’

‘It was.’

‘Did you talk about yesterday?’

‘I told them I was in another office, running an errand, and that I missed the entire thing.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘I don’t know. So I wouldn’t worry them.’

‘Well, aren’t you the thoughtful one,’ he said sarcastically. ‘It wasn’t to protect them; it was to protect you. So you wouldn’t have to talk about it, so you wouldn’t have to admit feeling anything. That weird word you don’t like.’