Cecelia Ahern - The Time of My Life

That evening, when the buggy was safely back with Claire, I took my shoes off, brought a high stool to the centre of the floor and sat down to watch Blake’s travel show. Just as it began I heard a key in the door. It opened and Life entered, wearing a new blazer.

‘How did you get a key?’

‘I made a copy of yours when you were asleep,’ he said, taking off his blazer and tossing the keys onto the counter like he lived here.

‘Thanks for asking for my permission.’

‘Didn’t need to, your family already signed the paperwork.’

‘Ah-ah-ah,’ I said as he took a step onto the carpet. ‘Shoes off, it’s just been cleaned.’

‘What are you watching?’ he asked, doing as he was told and looking at the paused image of a snake rising from a basket.

‘Blake’s travel show.’

He raised his eyebrows and studied me. ‘Really? I thought you never watched the show.’

‘I do sometimes.’

‘How often?’

‘Only on Sundays.’

‘I believe his show is only on on Sundays.’ He brought a stool beside me. ‘The carpet doesn’t look any different.’

‘That’s because it’s wet. It’ll brighten up when it dries.’

‘What were they like?’

‘Who?’

‘The carpet people.’

‘It was just one man.’

‘And?’

‘And he was very nice and he cleaned the carpet. Can you stop talking? I want to watch this.’

‘Touchy.’

Mr Pan leaped into his lap and we sat uncomfortably on our stools and watched Blake. He was climbing across some rocky mountains, wearing a navy vest that was covered in sweat stains and revealed rippling back muscles. It made me think of the carpet-cleaning guy. It struck me as unusual that Blake, the most perfect man in the universe, would cause me to think positively of another man, and once I was comfortable with that thought, I compared their muscle sizes.

‘Does he wear fake tan?’

‘Shut up.’

‘Does he do his own stunts?’

‘Shut up.’

I paused the TV, searched for her. She wasn’t there.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Shut up.’

‘So what is the obsession with Blake anyway?’

‘I’m not obsessed.’

‘I mean last night. I know you said you didn’t want to talk about it but I think we should. I mean, you broke up three years ago. What’s the deal with your friends? Why are they so involved in what happened with you and him?’

‘Blake is their centre of gravity,’ I said, watching him climb across the cliff barehanded. ‘We both used to be, believe it or not. We were the ones who arranged everything, who brought everyone together. We held dinner parties every week, had parties, organised holidays, nights out, trips away, that kind of thing.’ I pressed pause, studied the scene, unpaused it again. ‘Blake is a lively guy, he’s addictive, everyone likes him.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Really?’ I looked at him surprised, then turned back to the TV quickly so I wouldn’t miss anything. ‘Well, you’re biased, it doesn’t count.’

I paused the TV again, then unpaused.

‘What exactly are you doing?’

‘Shut up.’

‘Please stop telling me to shut up.’

‘Please stop giving me cause to.’

He watched the rest of it mostly in silence with the occasional snide remark. Then finally as Blake was finished bargaining in the souks and trying to charm snakes – to which Life maturely commented that he was a charming snake – he sat down in a café in Djemaa el Fna, the large central square in the old city and gave his final thought to camera.

‘Someone once said, the world is a book and those who do not travel, read only a page.’

Life groaned and pretended to vomit. ‘What a crock of shit.’

I was surprised; I rather liked that one.

Then Blake winked. I savoured the moment, my eyes glued to the final seconds of my time with him for this season; after this, all that I would learn about him would be propaganda from the Blake Party – if I ever heard from them again.

‘Do you think that maybe he left you because he’s gay?’ Life asked.

I ground my teeth together, fighting the urge to push my life off the stool. It would be pointless, it would be like cutting my nose off to spite my face and I was thinking about that when my life changed forever. The next shot was quick, so quick that any untrained eye could have missed it, but not my eye, not even my bad eye could miss it which had worse vision after Riley had blown a pen bomb – a ball of paper blown from the outer plastic shell of a pen – in my eye when I was eight years old. I hoped and prayed and wished on every lucky thing that due to my as yet undiagnosed but ever present psychotic tendencies, that I’d merely imagined what came next. The camera zoomed out and I paused and searched. It was her. There she was. Jenna. The bitch. From Australia. Or at least I thought it was her. They were in a busy noisy café, at a table piled high with mounds of food with at least a dozen other people. It looked like the Last Supper. I hopped off the stool and moved closer, stood right up at the screen. If it was her, it would be her last supper.

‘Hey, the carpet,’ Life said.

‘Fuck the carpet,’ I said, venom in my voice.

‘Whoa.’

‘The little …’ I paced up and down before the screen, watching their frozen toast, their glasses pushed up against each other suggestively, both looking into each other’s eyes, or at least her at him and him at something over her shoulder, but still in the general direction. ‘Bitch,’ I finally said. I played it again, watching their toast, rewound it and watched it once more. I examined their shared look: yes, they definitely looked at one another as their glasses clinked, did that mean something? Was it code? Were they secretly silently saying to one another, Let’s you and me clink tonight just like we did on the top of Everest? The thought made my stomach heave. Then I analysed their body language, and then even looked at the food on their plates; they had shared a few dishes and they disgusted me. My heart was pounding, thudding in my chest, I felt like the blood wanted to jump out of my veins. I needed to climb through the television and into their world so I could break them up and ram the Moroccan meatballs down her throat.

‘What on earth is wrong with you?’ Life asked. ‘You look possessed, and you’re ruining the carpet.’

I turned around and fixed him with the most determined look I could muster. It wasn’t difficult, I felt it inside. ‘I know why you’re here.’

‘Why?’ He looked worried.

‘Because I’m still in love with Blake. And I know what my dream is, the thing that I really, really want, the thing that I’d do if I had the guts and didn’t care what anybody thought. It’s him, I want him. And I have to get him back.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

‘I have to go to him,’ I said, pacing.

‘No, you don’t.’

‘ We have to go to him.’

‘No, we certainly do not.’

‘This is why you’re here.’

‘No …’ He spoke slowly. ‘I’m here because you’re delusional.’

‘I’m in love with him,’ I said, still pacing, my mind working overtime while I tried to plan winning him back.

‘You’re ruining the carpet is what you are.’

‘I knew she was out to get him. I’d known it ever since I met her and she asked him if he’d like ice and lemon in his drink. The way she said it, I just knew. ‘“ Ice ”,’ I imitated her. ‘“Do you want ice with that?”’