Cecelia Ahern - The Gift & Thanks for the Memories

He thinks again about the muffins and dials again. He clears his throat.

‘Hello.’

‘Jennifer, it’s Justin.’

‘Hello, Justin.’ Her voice is cold.

Used to be warm. Like honey. No, like hot caramel. It used to bounce from octave to octave when she heard his name, just like the piano music he’d wake on Sunday mornings to hear her play from the conservatory. But now?

He listens to the silence on the other end.

Ice.

‘I’m just calling to see whether you’d sent me a hamper of muffins.’ As soon as he’s said it, he realises how ridiculous this call is. Of course she didn’t send him anything. Why would she?

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I received a basket of muffins to my office today along with a thank you note, but the note failed to reveal the sender’s identity. I was wondering if it was you.’

Her voice is amused now. No, not amused, mocking. ‘What would I have to thank you for, Justin?’

It’s a simple question, but knowing her as he knows her, it has implications far beyond the words, and so Justin jumps up and snaps at the bait. The hook cuts through his lip and bitter Justin is back, the voice he grew so accustomed to during the demise of their … well, during their demise. She has reeled him right in.

‘Oh, I don’t know, twenty years of marriage, perhaps. A daughter. A good living. A roof over your head.’ He knows it’s a stupid statement. That before him, after him and even without him, she had and always would have a roof, of all things, over her head, but it’s spurting out of him now and he can’t stop and won’t stop, for he is right and she is wrong and anger is spurring on every word, like a jockey whipping his horse as they near the finish line. ‘Travel all over the world.’ Whip-crack-away! ‘Clothes, clothes and more clothes.’ Whip-crack-away! ‘A new kitchen when we didn’t need one, a conservatory , for Christsake …’ And he goes on, like a man from the nineteenth century who’d been keeping his wife accustomed to a good life she would otherwise have been without, ignoring the fact that she had made a good living herself, playing in an orchestra that travelled the world, making several trips that he had accompanied her on.

At the beginning of their married life they had no choice but to live with Justin’s mother. They were young and had a baby to rear, the reason for their hasty marriage, and as Justin was still attending college by day, bar tending at night and working at an art museum at the weekend, Jennifer had made money playing the piano at an upmarket restaurant in Chicago. At the weekends, she would return home in the early hours of the morning, her back sore and tendonitis in her middle finger, but that all went out of his mind when she’d dangled the line with that seemingly innocent question. She had known that this tirade would come and he gobbles, gobbles, gobbles, munches on the bait that fills his mouth. Finally running out of things they have spent the last twenty years doing together, and out of steam, he stops.

Jennifer is silent.

‘Jennifer?’

‘Yes, Justin.’ Icy.

Justin sighs with exhaustion. ‘So, was it you?’

‘It must have been one of your other women, because it most certainly wasn’t me.’

Click and she’s gone.

Rage bubbles inside him. Other women. Other women! One affair when he was twenty years old, a fumble in the dark with Mary-Beth Dursoa at college, before he and Jennifer were even married, and she carries on as though he was Don Juan. In their bedroom, he’d even put a print of A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph by Piero di Cosimo, which Jennifer had always loathed but he had always hoped would send her subliminal messages. In the painting there is a young girl semi-clothed who on first glance seems asleep but on further viewing has blood seeping from her throat. A satyr is mourning her. Justin’s interpretation of the painting is that the woman, mistrusting her husband’s fidelity, followed him into the woods. He was hunting, not going astray as she thought, and shot her by accident, thinking her rustling in the trees was an animal. Sometimes during his and Jennifer’s darkest moments, when their hate raged during their toughest arguments, when their throats were red raw, their eyes stinging with tears, their hearts breaking from the pain, their heads pounding from the analysis, Justin would study the painting and envy the satyr.

Fuming, he charges down the North Terrace steps, sits down by one of the fountains, places the basket by his feet and bites into a muffin, scoffing it down so quickly he barely has time to taste it. Crumbs fall at his feet, attracting a flock of pigeons with intent in their beady black eyes. He goes to reach for another muffin but he is swarmed by overenthusiastic pigeons pecking at the contents of his basket, greedily. Peck, peck, peck – he watches dozens more flock towards him, coming in to land like fighter jets. Afraid of falling missiles from those that circle his head, he picks up his basket and shoos them away with all the butchness of an eleven-year-old.

He breezes in the front door of his home, leaving it open behind him, and is immediately greeted by Doris, with a paint palette in her hand.

‘OK, so I’ve narrowed it down,’ she begins, thrusting dozens of colours in his face.

Her long leopard-print nails are each decorated with a diamanté jewel. She wears an all-in-one snakeskin jumpsuit, and her feet wobble dangerously in patent lace-up ankle stilettos. Her hair is still its usual shock of red, her eyes catlike with inky eyeliner sweeping up from her corners of her eyes, her painted lips to match her hair remind him of Ronald McDonald. He watches them with severe irritation as they open and close.

The random words he hears are, ‘Gooseberry Fool, Celtic Forest, English Mist and Woodland Pearl, all calm tones, would look so good in this room or Wild Mushroom, Nomadic Glow and Sultana Spice. The Cappuccino Candy is one of my faves but I don’t think it’ll work next to that curtain, what do you think?’

She waves a fabric in front of his face and it tickles his nose, which tingles with such intensity it senses the fight that is about to brew. He doesn’t respond but takes deep breaths and counts to ten in his mind. And when that doesn’t work and she keeps listing paint colours, he keeps on going to twenty.

‘Hello? Justin?’ She snaps her fingers in his face. ‘Hel-lo?’

‘Maybe you should give Justin a break, Doris. He looks tired.’ Al looks nervously at his brother.

‘But—’

‘Get your sultana spice behind over here,’ he teases and she whoops.

‘OK, but just one more thing. Bea will love her room done in Ivory Lace. And Petey too. Imagine how romantic this will be for—’

‘ENOUGH!’ Justin screams at the top of his lungs, not wanting his daughter’s name and the word romantic to share the same sentence.

Doris jumps and stops talking immediately. Her hand flies to her chest. Al stops drinking, his bottle freezes just below his lips, his heavy breathing above the rim making ivory pipe music. Other than that, there’s absolute silence.

‘Doris,’ Justin takes a deep breath and tries to speak as calmly as possible, ‘enough of this please. Enough of this Cappuccino Nights—’

‘Candy,’ she interrupts, and quickly silences again.

‘Whatever. This is a Victorian house, from the nineteenth century, not some painted lady from an episode of Changing Rooms .’ He tries to restrain his emotions, his feelings insulted on behalf of the building. ‘If you had mentioned Cappuccino Chocolate—’

‘Candy,’ she whispers.

‘Whatever! To anyone during that time, you would have been instantly burned at the stake!’