Cecelia Ahern - The Gift & Thanks for the Memories

A crumpled ball of paper has landed nearby and as I reach for it, my shoulder knocks over a two-legged stool, which toppled onto me in my rush to leap into the skip. I locate the paper and open it up, smoothing out the edges. My heart starts its rumba beat again as I see my first name, Dad’s address and his phone number scrawled upon it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

‘Where on earth have you been? What happened to you, Gracie?’

‘Joyce,’ is my response as I burst into the hotel room, breathless and covered in paint and dust. ‘Don’t have time to explain.’ I rush around the room, throwing my clothes into my bag, taking a change of clothes and hurrying by Dad, who’s sitting on the bed, in order to get to the bathroom.

‘I tried calling you on your hand phone,’ Dad calls to me.

‘Yeah? I didn’t hear it ring.’ I struggle to squeeze into my jeans, hopping around on one foot while I pull them up and brush my teeth at the same time.

I hear his voice saying something. Mumbles but no words.

‘Can’t hear you, brushing my teeth!’

Silence while I finish and then back to the room and he continues as though we didn’t have five minutes of silence.

‘That’s because when I called it, I heard it ringing here in the bedroom. It was on top of your pillow. Just like one of those chocolates the nice ladies here leave behind.’

‘Oh. OK.’ I jump over his legs to get to the dressing table and reapply my make-up.

‘I was worried about you,’ he says quietly.

‘You needn’t have been.’ I hop around with one shoe on, while searching everywhere for the other.

‘So I called downstairs to reception to see if they knew where you were.’

‘Yeah?’ I give up looking for my shoe and concentrate on inserting my earrings. My fingers are trembling with the adrenalin of the Justin situation and my fingers become too big for the task at hand. The back of one earring falls to the floor. I get down on my hands and knees to find it.

‘So then I walked up and down the road, checking all of the shops that I know you like, asking all the people in them if they’d seen you.’

‘You did?’ I say, distracted, feeling carpet burns through my jeans as I shuffle around the floor on my knees.

‘Yes,’ he says quietly again.

‘Aha! Got it!’ I find it beside the bin below the dresser. ‘Where the hell is my shoe?’

‘And along the way,’ Dad continues, and I hold back my aggravation, ‘I met a policeman and I told him I was very worried, and he walked me back to the hotel and told me to wait here for you but to call this number if you didn’t come back after twenty-four hours.’

‘Oh, that was nice of him.’ I open the wardrobe, still searching for my shoe, and find it still full of Dad’s clothes. ‘Dad!’ I exclaim. ‘You forgot your other suit. And your good jumper!’

I look at him, I realise for the first time since I entered the room, and only now notice how pale he looks. How old he looks in this new soulless hotel room. Perched at the edge of his single bed, he’s dressed in his three-piece suit, cap beside him on the bed, his case packed or half-packed and sitting upright right beside him. In one hand is the photograph of Mum, in the other is the card the policeman gave him. The fingers that hold them tremble; his eyes are red and sore-looking.

‘Dad,’ I say as panic builds inside me, ‘are you OK?’

‘I was worried,’ he repeats again in the tiny voice I’d as good as ignored since I’d entered the room. He swallows hard. ‘I didn’t know where you were.’

‘I was visiting a friend,’ I say softly, joining him on the bed.

‘Oh. Well, this friend here was worried.’ He gives a small smile. A weak smile and I’m jolted by how fragile he appears. He looks like an old man. His usual attitude, his jovial nature is gone. His smile disappears quickly and his trembling hands, usually steady as a rock, force the photoframe of Mum and the card from the policeman back into his coat pocket.

I look at his bag. ‘Did you pack that yourself?’

‘Tried to. Thought I got everything.’ He looks away from the open wardrobe, embarrassed.

‘OK, well, let’s take a look in it and see what we have.’ I hear my voice and it startles me to hear myself speaking to him as though addressing a child.

‘Aren’t we running out of time?’ he asks. His voice is so quiet, I feel I should lower mine so as not to break him.

‘No,’ my eyes fill with tears and I speak more forcefully than I intend, ‘we have all the time in the world, Dad.’

I look away and distract those tears from falling by lifting his case onto the bed and trying to compose myself. Day-to-day things, the ordinary, the mundane is what keeps the motor running. How extraordinary the ordinary really is, a tool we all use to keep going, a template for sanity.

When I open the case I feel my composure slip again but I keep talking, sounding like a delusional 1960s suburban TV mother, repeating the hypnotic mantra that everything’s just dandy and swell. I ‘oh, gosh’ and ‘shucks’ my way through his suitcase, which is a mess, though I shouldn’t be surprised as Dad has never had to pack a suitcase in his life. I think what upsets me is the possibility that at seventy-five years old, after ten years without his wife, he simply doesn’t know how to, or else my being missing for a few hours has prevented him from accomplishing it. A simple thing like that, my big-as-an-oak-tree, steady-as-a-rock father cannot do. Instead he sits on the edge of the bed twisting his cap around in his gnarled fingers, liver spots like the skin of a giraffe, his fingers trembling in air as though wobbling on an invisible fingerboard and controlling the vibrato in my head.

Things have attempted to be folded but have failed, are crumpled in small balls with no order at all as though they have been packed by a child. I find my shoe inside some bathroom towels. I take my shoe out and put it on my foot without saying anything, as though it’s the most normal thing in the world. The towels go back to where they belong. I start folding and packing all over again. His dirty underwear, socks, pyjamas, vests, his washbag. I turn my back to take his clothes from the wardrobe and I take a deep breath.

‘We have all the time in the world, Dad,’ I repeat. Though this time, it’s for my own benefit.

On the tube, on the way to the airport, Dad keeps checking his watch and fidgeting in his seat. Every time the tube stops at a station, he pushes the seat in front of him impatiently as if to move it along himself.

‘Have you to be somewhere?’ I smile.

‘The Monday Club. He looks at me with worried eyes. He’s never missed a week, not even when I was in hospital.

‘But today is Monday.’

He fidgets. ‘I just don’t want to miss this flight. We might get stuck over here.’

‘Oh, I think we’ll make it.’ I do my best to hide my smile. ‘And there’s more than one flight a day, you know.’

‘Good.’ He looks relieved and even impressed. ‘I might even make evening Mass. Oh, they won’t believe everything I tell them tonight,’ he says with excitement. ‘Donal will drop dead when everybody listens to me and not to him for a change.’ He settles back into his seat and watches out the window as the blackness of the underground speeds by. He stares into the black, not seeing his own reflection but seeing somewhere else and someone else a long way off, a long time ago. While he’s in another world, or the same world but a different time, I take out my mobile and start planning my next move.

‘Frankie, it’s me. Justin Hitchcock is getting the first plane to Dublin tomorrow morning and I need to know what he’s doing stat.’

‘How am I supposed to do that, Dr Conway?’