Cecelia Ahern - The Time of My Life

Life uttered a tirade of unrepeatable expletives.

‘Ladies first,’ Blake shouted, moving aside for Life and me.

‘No, no, you go ahead,’ I said firmly. ‘We’re going to go last.’ I tried to give Blake warning eyes to hint that Life was afraid but Life had turned around again to stare at me.

‘No, I insist,’ Blake said. ‘Just like old times.’

‘I’d love to but … he’s a bit nervous, I think it’s better if we watch first. Okay?’

Life was fuming. ‘Nervous? I’m not nervous. Come on, let’s go.’ He started shuffling on his bottom to the edge of the plane and I was pulled along with him. I was flabbergasted but wouldn’t argue with him, so I checked that the tandem harness and parachute were safely secured and we moved to the edge of the plane. I couldn’t believe Life was doing this, I had been expecting us to go back down with the pilot. I had been disappointed all the way up and now I was ready, adrenaline was pumping.

‘Are you ready?’ I shouted.

‘I hate you,’ he shouted back, in a shrill voice.

I counted him down. On three, we were out the door, free falling through the sky and up to the speed of 200 km per hour in just ten seconds. Life was shouting so loudly, one long scream of terror all the way down, while I felt alive. I whooped happily alongside him so that he knew it was okay, that this was not a mistake, that we were supposed to be twirling around like snowflakes, not knowing what direction we were going in. Then finally we adopted the free-fall position, and we floated and fell for a total of twenty-five seconds, experiencing the ultimate rush; the wind in our ears, in our hair, everywhere, loud and cold and wonderfully terrifying. When we reached 5,000 feet I deployed the main parachute and once it was open, suddenly the mania and the rush of the wind in our ears was gone. Everything was quiet, everything was blissful and wonderful.

‘Oh, my God,’ Life said, breathless and husky after his fit of screaming.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Okay? I almost had a heart attack. But this,’ he looked around, ‘this is amazing.’

‘Told you,’ I said, so pleased to be sharing this moment with my life. I was so happy I was fit to burst; the two of us hung there in the air, suspended like the two freest souls in the universe.

‘I didn’t mean it when I said I hated you.’

‘Good. Because I love you,’ I said, out of nowhere.

He turned around. ‘I love you too, Lucy,’ he beamed. ‘Now shut up talking, you’re spoiling my experience.’

I laughed. ‘Do you want to steer?’

Life took control and steered the parachute and we moved around the sky, flying like a bird, taking the world in, feeling happy, feeling alive, feeling united and complete. Our perfect happy moment. The flight lasted four minutes and finally I took control again for landing. We adopted the landing position, legs and feet up, knees together. I slowed the parachute and we touched down for a soft landing.

Life collapsed on the ground in a fit of exhilarated laughter.

Released from the parachute and from me, Life jumped up and ran around in circles as though he were drunk, whooping and laughing.

‘That was absolutely incredible. I want to it again, let’s do it again, can we do it again?’

I laughed. ‘I can’t believe you did it!’

‘And let him see that I was weak? Are you joking?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘ Blake. Who else? I don’t want that idiot seeing me back out of anything. I want him to know I don’t care what he thinks of me, I’m tougher than he thinks.’

‘What? I don’t understand. Why are you trying to create a battle with him?’

‘I’m not creating anything, Lucy. It’s his issue. Always has been.’

‘What are you talking—’

‘Anyway, never mind,’ he said, smiling again and doing a celebration dance. ‘Woohooooo!’

Feeling happy about Life’s exhilaration but confused as to its source, I watched him with mixed emotions. Surely, in order for my newly rediscovered love for Blake to be fair and right, both Life and I should be on the same page when it came to our feelings. I wanted us all to get along, not for Life to be preoccupied with one-upmanship, but perhaps this was the natural course of things. Blake had hurt me, had wounded my life, and though I was on my way to forgiving him and was able to accept responsibility for my side of the relationship’s failure, Life needed more time. But what did that mean? What did that mean for Blake and me? Usually after parachute jumps I felt exhilarated, just as Life did, and everything became clear, but suddenly my headache was back, the one I got when I had deep emotional thoughts about issues I’d rather sweep under the shagpile of my mind. A jeep was headed towards us across the field. A lone woman sat behind the wheel and as she got closer Jenna’s face came into view. My heart twisted in the same way it used to when I thought of her, even though I knew for sure, without doubt, they weren’t in a relationship.

‘You look like you want to kill someone,’ Life said breathlessly, finally stopping his whooping and standing beside me.

‘Funny that,’ I said, watching Jenna come closer, with two hands gripping the sides of the wheel, staring at me intently. I wondered if she was going to stop.

‘Be careful, Lucy, she’s a nice girl. Anyway, I thought you said they weren’t together,’ he said.

‘They’re not.’

‘Then why do you still hate her?’

‘Habit, I suppose.’

‘Just like loving him,’ Life said, looking up to the sky. Then he left me alone to view Blake floating down like the perfect pumped-up angel and ponder that bombshell.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Blake and I were face to face in the people carrier. He had his back to my life who had declared he was ‘riding shotgun’, then persisted to gabble excitedly to Jenna who was behind the wheel. Occasionally Jenna would break from my life’s full attention to the rear-view mirror to check I wasn’t misbehaving, and each time she played taxi mom, our eyes met and she quickly looked away. She knew, and I knew, and we both knew that we both knew; an ex-girlfriend and a girlfriend in waiting, we were like two hawks circling our prey, wary of one another, wondering who was going to go in first for the kill. The no-longer-green-in-the-face Harry and the girl who wanted to have Blake’s babies were engrossed in their own little adrenaline love fest, talking a mile a minute about the experience they’d just had, going over each second of the dive, each following up the other’s description with an overenthusiastic ‘Me too!’ I sensed Blake had just lost his chance of a surrogate, if indeed he ever needed one. Jeremy, the second instructor, was staring out of the window, cool and uninterested by anything inside, outside or around the general vicinity of the jeep, but apart from him everybody was on a high. My heart? It soared. My adrenaline pumped for different reasons from the others; mine was because I was in love, but instead of enjoying it, I was having a full-on debate in my mind about whether it was a habit or not. These moments with Blake were precious and crucial, I had waited a long time to be this close both physically and emotionally, and I was destroying it by developing new thoughts which I had more than enough time to create while I wasn’t with him. Plenty of hours alone on the couch with Mr Pan, in a club, pub, restaurant or family occasion, to ponder the foundations and authenticity of my love and yet I chose now, now goddamnit , to have a crisis of the mind. It was frustrating, I was the most frustrating human being on the planet.