Cecelia Ahern - The Gift & Thanks for the Memories

The following words that Gabe spoke sent shivers running up and down Lou’s spine, and had him wanting to run immediately to his family.

‘Come on, Lou, you know this one.’

They were Ruth’s words. They belonged to Ruth.

Lou’s body was trembling now and Gabe continued.

‘An opportunity to spend some time with your family, to really get to know them, before … well, just to spend time with them.’

‘To get to know them before what?’ Lou asked, quiet now.

Gabe didn’t respond, looking away, knowing he’d said too much.

‘BEFORE WHAT?’ Lou yelled again, coming close to Gabe’s face.

Gabe was silent but his crystal-blue eyes bored into Lou’s.

‘Is something going to happen to them?’ His voice shook as he began to panic. ‘I knew it. I was afraid of this. What’s going to happen to them?’ He ground his teeth together. ‘If you did something to them, then I will –’

‘Nothing has happened to your family, Lou,’ Gabe responded.

‘I don’t believe you,’ he panicked, reaching into his pocket and retrieving his BlackBerry. He looked at the screen: no missed calls. Dialling the number of his home quickly, he backed out of the basement stock room, giving Gabe one last vicious look, and ran, ran, ran.

‘Remember to buckle up, Lou!’ Gabe shouted after him, his voice ringing in Lou’s ears as Lou ran to the underground car park.

With the BlackBerry on autodial to Lou’s home, and still ringing out, Lou drove out of the underground car park at a fierce speed. Thick, heavy rain plummeted against his windscreen. Putting the wipers on the fastest speed, he drove out of the empty car park and put his foot down on the by-then-empty quays. The beeping of the seat-belt warning got louder and louder but he couldn’t hear it for all the worrying he was doing. The wheels of the Porsche slipped a little on the wet roads as he raced down the backroads of the quays, then up the Clontarf coast road to Howth. Across the sea, the two red and white striped chimneys of the electricity generating station stood 680 feet tall, like two fingers raised at him. Rain bucketed down, leaving visibility low, but he knew these streets well, had driven up and down them all his life, and all he cared about was driving over the small thread of land that separated him from his family and getting to them as quickly as possible. It was six thirty and pitch black as the day had closed in. Most people were at Mass or in the pubs, getting ready to put presents together and leave a glass of milk and Christmas cake out for Santa, a few carrots for his chauffeur. Lou’s family were at home, having an evening meal – that he’d promised them he’d join – but Lou’s family weren’t answering the phone. He looked down at his BlackBerry to make sure it was still dialling, taking his eye off the road. He swerved a little as he moved over the middle line. A car coming at him beeped loudly and he quickly moved back into his lane again. He flew up past the Marine Hotel at Sutton Cross, which was busy with Christmas parties. Seeing a clear road ahead of him, he put his foot down. He raced by Sutton Church, raced by the school along the coast, passed through safe, friendly neighbourhoods where candles sat in the front windows, Christmas trees sparkled and Santas dangled from roofs. Across the bay, the dozens of cranes of Dublin’s skyline were laced in Christmas lights. He said goodbye to the bay and entered the steep road which began to ascend to his home on the summit. Rain bucketed down, falling in sheets, blurring his vision. Condensation was appearing on the windscreen, and he leaned forward to wipe it with his cashmere coat sleeve. He pressed the buttons on the dashboard to hopefully clear the screen. The ping, ping, ping of the seat-belt warning rang in his ears, and the condensation rapidly filled the windscreen as the car got hotter. Still he sped on, his phone ringing out, his desire to be with his family overtaking any other emotion he should have felt then. It had taken him twelve minutes to get to his street on the empty roads.

Finally, his phone beeped to signal a call coming through. He looked down and saw Ruth’s face – her caller ID picture. Her big smile; her eyes brown, soft and welcoming. Glad she was at least safe enough to call him, he looked down with relief and reached for the BlackBerry.

The Porsche 911 Carrera 4S has a unique four-wheel-drive system which grips the road far better than any rear-wheel-drive sports car. It allots five to forty per cent of the power to the front wheels, depending on how much resistance the rear wheels have. So if you accelerate out of a corner hard enough to spin the rear wheels, power is channelled to the front, pulling the car in the right direction. All-wheel-drive basically means that the Carrera 4S could negotiate the icy road with far more control than most other sports cars.

Unfortunately, Lou did not have that Porsche model. He had it on order. It would be arriving in January, only a week away.

And so when Lou looked down at his BlackBerry, so overwhelmed with relief and emotion to see his wife’s face, he had taken his eye off the road and had dived into the next corner much too fast. He reflexively lifted his foot from the accelerator, which threw the car’s weight forward and lightened the rear wheels; then he got back on the accelerator and turned hard to make the corner. The rear end broke traction and he spun across to the other side of the road, which was the deep decline down the cliff’s edge.

The moments that followed for him were ones of sheer horror and confusion. The shock numbed the pain. The car turned over, once, twice and then a third time. Each time, Lou let out a yell as his head, his body, his legs and arms thrashed about wildly like a doll inside a washing machine. The emergency airbag thumped him in the face, bloodying his nose, knocking him out momentarily so that the next few moments passed in a still but bloody mess.

Some amount of time later, Lou opened his eyes and tried to survey the situation. He couldn’t. He was surrounded by blackness and found himself unable to move. A thick, oily substance covered one of his eyes, preventing him from seeing, and with the one hand he could move, he found that every part of his body he touched was covered in the same substance. He moved his tongue around his mouth, tasted rusty iron and realised it was blood. He tried to move his legs, but couldn’t. He tried to move his arms, and could just about move one. He was silent while he tried to keep calm, to figure out what to do. Then, when for the first time in his life he couldn’t formulate one single thought, when the shock wore off and the realisation set in, the pain hit him at full force. He couldn’t get the images of Ruth out of his mind. Of Lucy, of Pud, of his parents. They weren’t far above him, somewhere on the summit; he had almost made it. In the darkness, in a crushed car, in the middle of the gorse and the hebe, somewhere on a mountainside in Howth, Lou Suffern began to whimper.

Raphie and Jessica were doing their usual rounds and bickering over Raphie’s country-music tape, which he liked to torment Jessica with, as they passed the scene where Lou’s car had gone off the road.

‘Hold on, Raphie,’ she interrupted his howling about his achy breaky heart.

He sang even louder.

‘RAPHIE!’ she shouted, punching the music off.

He looked at her in surprise.

‘Okay, okay, put your Freezing Monkeys on, or whatever you call them.’

‘Raphie, stop the car,’ Jessica said, in a tone that made him immediately pull over. She leapt out of the car and jogged the few paces back to the scene that had caught her eye, where the trees were broken and twisted. She took her torch out and shone it down the mountainside.