Cecelia Ahern - The Time of My Life

I looked to my other side. But I had my life.

Life leaned forward as soon as we reached the inner city. ‘Can you let us out here?’

‘Why here?’

We’d gotten out on Bond Street, the heart of the Liberties in Dublin, one of the most historical and central areas in the city where most of the original streets, including the one we found ourselves on, were still cobble-locked. Behind the black gates of the nearby Guinness Brewery, smoke pumped into the air as the scientists in white lab coats inside concocted our greatest export.

‘Follow me,’ he smiled proudly. I followed him down the cobble-stoned road, the old walls beside us towering above us as they hid working factories side by side with derelict buildings and walls of bricked-up arched windows. Then, just when I thought we were in the middle of a lesson of the heart that would go a little something like talking about all the problems that had come to people before, perhaps to the very people who lived on this street, yet they had recovered from it – perhaps sealing up their windows in a mass form of self-healing – and that hearing this would somehow make me feel better about myself, he took out a set of keys and made his way to a random door in a wall full of bricked-up windows.

‘What are you doing? What’s in here?’ I looked around, waiting for somebody to stop us.

‘I want to show you something. What do you think I’ve been doing all the time I was sneaking away from you?’

I frowned, then had an image of Life cheating on me with a younger prettier version of me, parading as her Life in order to get close to her, sitting with her family at Sunday lunches, trying to keep up with the stories of her growing up and under the beady eyes of her possessive father having to act like he knew them all already, while all the time feeling guilty for pretending to the well-adjusted woman who was now questioning herself that she needed a life intervention, yet also feeling torn inside about what he was doing to me; exhausted from the double lie.

Life was staring at me. ‘You look angry. What are you thinking about?’

I shrugged. ‘Nothing. So what is this place?’

Inside, it was a converted warehouse, a large open space with high ceilings and exposed brickwork, dusty from new renovations. We stepped into an elevator and I waited for us to catapult through the ceiling and soar into the sky over rooftops while my Willy Wonka Life showed me all that was mine to keep. But that didn’t happen. We got out on the seventh floor and Life led me down the hall to a light-filled square room, boxes everywhere on the floor and a window which looked over the city: flats and terraced houses dominated the view immediately below, St Patrick’s Cathedral and the Four Courts were visible in the distance with their bright green copper roof and dome respectively, and out towards Dublin Bay, building cranes filled the sky alongside the Poolbeg red-and-white striped 680-foot-high chimneys. Then I waited for the lesson. But it didn’t come.

‘Welcome to my new office,’ he beamed. He looked so happy, so far removed from the man that I had met a fortnight ago that it was difficult to believe he was the same person.

I looked at the boxes cluttering the floor, most of which were still taped closed but some of which had been half-emptied revealing the files inside. Black marker on the outside of the boxes declared ‘Lies 1981–2011’, ‘Truths 1981–2011’, ‘Boyfriends 1989–2011’, ‘Silchester Family Ties’, ‘Stewart Family Ties’. There was a box for ‘Lucy’s Friends’, with files divided into individual headings of ‘School’, ‘College Degree’, ‘MBA’, ‘Miscellaneous’ and a file for each of my previous jobs, not that I had made or taken many friends with me from them. There was a box marked ‘Holidays’ with separate compartments for each trip I’d taken, with the date. I surveyed the floor, the dates and random moments jumping out at me and sparking off memories I’d long lost. These boxes contained my entire life – on paper – all my dealings with every single person I had ever met; Life kept a report of them all, analysing them and studying them to see if the victim of bullying in the school yard had anything to do with a failed relationship twenty years later, or whether it was the contrary; a successful day at work; and if an unpaid bill in Corfu had anything to do with a drink in my face in a Dublin club – which I mention because it turned out it had absolutely everything to do with it. I imagined him then as a kind of a scientist and his office his laboratory, where he’d spent the days before I met him, and would continue to spend the rest of my days, analysing me, experimenting with philosophies and theories as to how I’d turned out the way I did, why I made mistakes, why I made good decisions, why I succeeded and why I faltered. My life; his life’s work.

‘Mrs Morgan thinks I should get rid of all this and just have everything in these little USBs but I don’t know, I’m old-fashioned, I like my written reports. It gives them character.’

‘Mrs Morgan?’ I asked, in a daze.

‘You remember the American woman you gave the chocolate bar to? She offered to help me put everything on computer but the agency won’t fork out for it so I’ll get round to doing it at some stage. It’s not like I’ve anything else to do.’ He smiled. ‘As you probably remember from our first meeting, I’ve a lot of the important stuff on the computer already. Oh, and you’ll be glad to know I got a new one,’ he said, patting a brand-new PC on his desk.

‘But … but … but …’

‘That’s a very good point, Lucy, and one I argued countless times.’ He smiled softly. ‘Has this become weird to you now?’

‘No, but I suppose I’m just realising, I really am your job ? Just me?’

‘You mean, do I do nixers with other people’s lives?’ he laughed. ‘No, Lucy. I’m your soulmate, your other half, if you will. You know that old-fashioned theory that there’s another part of you elsewhere … that’s me.’ He waved awkwardly. ‘Hi.’

I don’t know why I was finding it all so weird now, I’d read about all of this in the magazine; as well as giving us a schedule of her new diet and toning exercises which was displayed in a separate box complete with photos of the food – porridge, blueberries, salmon, a piece of broccoli for those who weren’t yet acquainted with the food types – the star interviewee had also gone into extreme detail about how the entire ‘Life’ system worked. So I knew, I had no cause to be surprised, but seeing it all at play here in an office, so ordinary, seemed to take the magic out of it, not that I believed in magic – thanks to my Uncle Harold’s overemphatic declarations of stealing my five-year-old nose but my only ever being able to see his fat yellow thumb between his fingers. It looked nothing like my nose; my nose did not have a dirty fingernail and carry the stench of cigarettes.

‘How do you know I’m the right person for you?’ I continued. ‘What if there’s some depressed man named Bob sitting on his couch now eating chocolate sandwiches and wondering where on earth his life is, and it’s you, and instead you’re here, with me, and it’s all just a big mistake and—’

‘I know,’ he said simply. ‘Don’t you have the same feeling?’

I looked at him then, dead in the eye, and I immediately softened. I knew. Like I’d known when I looked at Blake every day for five years. There was a connection. Every time I looked at Life in a crowded room where nobody and nothing made sense to me, I knew that he was thinking exactly the same thing as me. I knew. I just knew.

‘What about your own life?’ I asked him.

‘It’s getting better since we met.’