Cecelia Ahern - The Gift & Thanks for the Memories

Ruth returned, much to his relief, and noted him just idly standing by watching his five-year-old daughter being ill, and then barged by him to tend to her.

‘It’s okay, sweetheart.’ Ruth fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around her daughter. ‘Lou, I need you to get me two damp facecloths.’

‘Damp?’

‘Run them under some cold water and rinse them out so they’re not dripping wet,’ she explained calmly.

‘Of course, yes.’ He shook his head at himself. He wandered slowly out of the bedroom, then froze once again on the landing. Looked left, looked right. He returned to the bedroom. ‘Facecloths are in the …’

‘Hotpress,’ Ruth said.

‘Of course.’ He made his way to the hotpress and, still with his briefcase in hand and his coat on, with one hand he fingered the various colours of facecloths. Brown, beige or white. He couldn’t decide. Choosing brown, he returned to Lucy and Ruth, ran them under the tap and handed them to her, hoping what he’d done was correct.

‘Not just yet,’ Ruth explained, rubbing Lucy’s back as her daughter took a break.

‘Okay, erm, where will I put them?’

‘Beside her bed. And can you change her sheets? She had an accident.’

Lucy started to weep again, tiredly nuzzling into her mother’s chest. Ruth’s face was pale, her hair tied back harshly, her eyes tired, red and swollen. It seemed it had already been a hectic night.

‘The sheets are in the hotpress too. And the Deoralite is in the medicine cabinet in the utility room.’

‘The what?’

‘Deoralite. Lucy likes blackcurrant. Oh God,’ she said, jumping up, hand over her mouth again, and running down the hall to their own en suite.

Lou was left in the bathroom alone with Lucy, whose eyes were closed as she leaned up against the bath. Then she looked at him sleepily. He backed out of the bathroom and started to remove the soiled sheets from her bed. As he was doing so, he heard Pud’s cries from the next room. He sighed, finally put down his briefcase, took off his coat and suit jacket, and threw them out of the way, into Dora’s tent. He opened the top button of his shirt, loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves.

Lou stared deep into his Jack Daniel’s and ice and ignored the barman, who was leaning over the counter and speaking aggressively into his ear.

‘Do you hear me?’ the barman growled.

‘Yeah, yeah, whatever.’ Lou’s tongue stumbled over his words, like a five-year-old walking with untied shoelaces, already unable to remember what he’d done wrong. He waved a limp hand dismissively through the air as though wafting away a fly.

‘No, not whatever , buddy. Leave her alone, okay? She doesn’t want you to talk to her, she doesn’t want to hear your story, she is not interested in you. Okay?’

‘Okay, okay,’ Lou grumbled then, remembering the rude blonde who’d kept ignoring him. He’d happily not talk to her, he wasn’t getting much conversation out of her anyway and the journalist he’d spoken to earlier didn’t seem much interested in the amazing story that was his life. He kept his eyes down into his whisky. A phenomenon had occurred tonight, and nobody was interested in hearing his story. Had the world gone mad? Had they all become so used to new inventions and scientific discoveries that the very thought of a man being cloned no longer had shock value? No, the young occupants of this trendy bar would rather sip away at their cocktails, the young women swanning about in the middle of December with their tanned legs, short skirts and highlighted hair, designer handbags hooked over extended brown arms like candelabras, each one looking as exotic and as at home as a coconut in the north pole. This they cared more about than the greater events of the country. A man had been cloned. There were two Lou Sufferns in the city tonight. Bilocation was a reality. He laughed to himself and shook his head at the hilarity of it all. He alone knew the great depths of the universe’s abilities, and nobody was interested in learning.

He felt the barman’s stare searing into him and so he stopped his solo chortling and instead concentrated again on his ice. He watched it shifting in the glass as it squirmed around trying to get comfortable, falling deeper and deeper into the liquid. It made his eyes droop just watching it. The barman finally left him to his own devices and tended to the others crowded around the bar. Around the lonesome Lou, the noise continued, the sound of people being with other people: after-work flirting, after-work fighting, tables of girls huddled together with eyes locked in as they caught up, circles of young men standing with eyes locked outwards and shifty movements. Tables were dominated by drinks covered with beer mats, the empty seats around them a sign that the people belonging to the glasses were outside striking up matches and new relationships in the smokers’ quarters.

Lou looked around to catch somebody’s eye. He was fussy at first about his chosen confidant, preferring somebody good looking to share his story with for the second time, but then he decided to settle on anybody. Surely somebody would care about the miracle that had occurred.

The only eye he succeeded in meeting was that of the barman again.

‘Gimme me nuther one,’ Lou slurred when the barman neared him. ‘A neat Jack on th’rocks.’

‘I just gave you another one,’ the barman responded, a little amused this time, ‘and you haven’t even touched that.’

‘So?’ Lou closed one eye to focus on him.

‘So, what good is there in having two at the same time?’

At that, Lou started laughing, a chesty wheezy laugh with the presence of the bitter December breeze that had darted into his chest for warmth as soon as it had seen his coat open and his chest revealed, moving quick like a frazzled cat through a doorflap at the sound of a firework.

‘I think I missed the joke,’ the barman smiled. Now that the bar counter was quiet, he may have had no drink to give to pass the time, but he’d time to give the drunk.

‘Ah, nobody here cares.’ Lou got angry again, waving his hand dismissively at the crowd around him. ‘All they care about is Sex on the Beach, thirty-year mortgages and St Tropez. I’ve been listenin’ and that’s all they’re sayin’.’

The barman laughed. ‘Just keep your voice down. What don’t they care about?’

Lou turned serious now and fixed the barman with his best serious stare. ‘Cloning.’

The barman’s face changed, interest lighting up his eyes, finally something different for him to hear about rather than the usual woes. ‘Cloning? Right, you have an interest in that, do you?’

‘An interest? I have more than an interest .’ Lou laughed patronisingly and then winked at the barman. He took another sip of his whisky and prepared to tell the story. ‘This may be hard for you to believe, but I’, he took a deep breath, ‘have been cloned,’ he began. ‘This guy gave me pills and I took them,’ he said, then hiccuped. ‘You probably don’t believe me but it happened. Saw it with my own two eyes.’ He pointed at his eye, misjudged his proximity and poked himself. Moments later, after the sting was gone and he had rubbed away the tears, he continued chatting. ‘There’s two of me,’ he continued, holding up four fingers, then three, then one, then finally two.

‘Is that so?’ the barman asked, picking up a pint glass and beginning to pour a Guinness. ‘Where’s the other one of you? I bet he’s as sober as a judge.’

Lou laughed, wheezy again. ‘He’s at home with my wife,’ he chuckled. ‘And with my kids. And I’m here, with her.’ He directed his thumb to the left of him.

‘Who?’

Lou looked to the side and almost toppled off his bar stool in the process. ‘Oh, she’s – where is she?’ He turned around to the barman again. ‘Maybe she’s in the toilet – she’s gorgeous, we were having a good chat. She’s a journalist, she’s going to write about this. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m here having all the fun , and he’s,’ he laughed again, ‘he’s at home with my wife and kids. And tomorrow, when I wake up, I’m going to take a pill – not drugs, they’re herbal, for my headache.’ He pointed to his head seriously. ‘And I’m going to stay in bed and he can go to work. Ha! All the things that I am going to do, like,’ he thought hard but failed to come up with anything, ‘like, oh, so, so many things. All the places I’m going to go. It’s a fucking mir’cle. D’ya know when I last had a day off?’