Cecelia Ahern - The Gift & Thanks for the Memories

Now he takes a step back from those two words, circles them a few times and views them from all angles. Just as with paintings in a gallery, the words themselves dictate the height at which they should be displayed, the angle from which they should be approached and the position from which they should best be contemplated. He has found the correct angle now. He can now see the weight they hold, like pigeons, and the messages they carry, oysters with their pearls, bees on dutious guard of their queen and honey, with their barbed stings attached. They have a sense of purpose, the strength of beauty and ammunition. Rather than a polite utterance heard a thousand times a day, ‘Thank you’ now has meaning.

Without another thought about Bea, he flips his phone closed and approaches the man holding the sign. ‘Hello.’

‘Mr Hitchcock?’ The six-foot man’s eyebrows are so dark and thick Justin can barely see his eyes.

‘Yes,’ he says suspiciously. ‘Is this car for a Justin Hitchcock?’

The man consults a piece of paper in his pocket. ‘Yes, it is, sir. Is that still you or does it change things?’

‘Ye-es,’ he says slowly, contemplatively. ‘That’s me.’

‘You don’t seem so sure,’ the driver says, lowering the sign. ‘Where are you going this morning?’

‘Shouldn’t you know that?’

‘I do. But the last time I let somebody in my car as unsure as you, I delivered an animal rights activist directly into an IMFHA meeting.’

Unfamiliar with the initials, Justin asks, ‘Is that bad?’

‘The President of the Irish Masters of Fox Hounds Association thought so. He was stuck at the airport with no car, while the lunatic I collected was splashing red paint around the conference room. Let’s just say, in terms of a tip for me, it was what the hounds would call a “blank day”.’

‘Well, I don’t think the hounds would call it anything, necessarily,’ Justin jokes, ‘unless they go “Ooo-ooo”.’ He lifts his chin and howls into the air, playfully.

The driver stares at him blankly.

Justin’s face flushes. ‘Well, I’m going to the National Gallery.’ Pause. ‘I’m pro the National Gallery. I’m going to talk about painting, not turn people into canvases as a method of venting my frustration. Though if my ex-wife was in the audience I’d run at her with a paint brush,’ he laughs, and the driver responds with another glare.

‘I wasn’t expecting anybody to greet me,’ Justin yaps at the chauffeur’s heels, out of the airport into the grey October day. ‘Nobody at the Gallery informed me you’d be here,’ he tests him as they hurry across the pedestrian walkway through the parachuting raindrops, which pull on their emergency cords as they plummet towards Justin’s head and shoulders.

‘I didn’t know about the job until late last night when I got a call. I was supposed to be going to my wife’s aunt’s funeral today.’ He roots around his pockets for the car parking ticket and slides it into the machine to validate it.

‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’ Justin stops wiping away the raindrop parachuting casualties that have landed with a shplat on the shoulders of his brown corduroy jacket, and looks at the driver grimly, out of respect.

‘So was I. I hate funerals.’

Curious response. ‘Well, you wouldn’t be alone in thinking that.’

He stops walking and turns to face Justin with a look of intense seriousness on his face. ‘They always give me the giggles,’ he says. ‘Does that ever happen to you?’

Justin is unsure whether to take him seriously or not but the driver doesn’t crack even the slightest smile. Justin pictures his father’s funeral, goes back to when he was nine years old. The two families huddled together at the graveyard, all dressed head to toe in black like dung beetles around the dirty open hole in the ground where the casket was placed. His dad’s family had flown over from Ireland, bringing with them the rain, which was unconventional for Chicago’s hot summer. They stood beneath umbrellas, he close to his Aunt Emelda, who held the umbrella in one hand and another tightly on his shoulder, Al and his mother beside him under another umbrella. Al had brought along a fire engine, which he played with while the priest talked about their father’s life. This annoyed Justin. In fact, everything and everybody annoyed Justin that day.

He hated Aunt Emelda’s hand being there on his shoulder, though he knew she was trying to be helpful. It felt heavy and tight, as though she was holding him back, afraid he’d escape from her, afraid he’d scuttle into the big hole in the ground where his father was going.

He’d greeted her that morning, dressed in his best suit, as his mother had requested in her new quiet voice, which Justin had to put his ear to her lips to hear. Aunt Emelda had pretended to be psychic just as she always did when they met one another after their long stints apart.

‘I know just what you want, little soldier,’ she’d said in her strong Cork accent, which Justin could barely understand and was never sure whether she’d just broken into a song or was speaking to him. She’d rummaged in her oversized handbag and dug out a soldier with a plastic smile and a plastic salute, quickly peeling off the price, and with it ripping off the soldier’s name before handing it to him. Justin stared down at Colonel Blank, who saluted him with one hand and held a plastic gun in the other, and immediately mistrusted him. The blank-shooting plastic gun got lost in the heavy pile of black coats by the front door as soon as he’d pulled open the packet. As usual, Aunt Emelda’s psychic powers had been tuned into the desires of the wrong nine-year-old boy, for Justin had not wanted this plastic soldier on this day of all days, and he couldn’t help but imagine a young boy across town waiting for a plastic soldier for his birthday and instead being handed Justin’s father by the tuft of his jet-black hair. However, he accepted her thoughtful gift with a smile as big and sincere as Colonel Blank’s. Later that day, as he stood beside the hole in the ground, maybe for once Aunt Emelda could read his mind as her hand gripped him tighter and her nails dug into his bony shoulders as though holding him back. For Justin had thought about jumping into that damp dark hole.

He thought about what it would be like in the world down there. If he could escape the strong hand of his Corkonian aunt and leap into the hole before anybody could catch him, maybe when the ground was closed over on top of them, like a grass carpet being rolled over, they would both be together. He wondered if they would have their own cosy world under the ground. He could have him all to himself, without having to share him with Mom or Al, and there they could play and laugh together, where it was darker. Maybe Dad just didn’t like the light; maybe all he wanted was for the light to go away so that it wouldn’t make his eyes squint and his fair skin burn and freckle and itch, as it always did when the sun came out. When that hot sun was in the sky it annoyed his dad, and he would have to sit in the shade while he and his mom and Al would play outside, Mom getting browner and browner by the day, his dad getting paler and more irritated by the heat. Maybe a break from the summer was all he wanted; for the itch and the frustration of light to go away.

As his casket was lowered into the hole, his mother let out howls that made Al cry too. Justin knew that Al wasn’t crying because he missed his dad, he was crying because he was scared of Mom’s reaction. She started crying when his grandma, his father’s mother’s sniffles became loud wails, and when Al started crying it broke the hearts of the entire congregation to see the young child left behind in tears. Even Dad’s brother, Seamus, who always looked like he wanted to laugh, had a trembling lip and a vein that jutted out of his neck like a body-builder, which made Justin think there was another person inside Uncle Seamus, just bursting to get out if Uncle Seamus would let him.