Cecelia Ahern - The Gift & Thanks for the Memories

‘You don’t like anchovies now?’ he interrupts my thoughts, and looks down at the little collection of anchovies I’ve gathered in a pile at the side of my plate.

‘Give them to me, bro,’ Al says, lifting his plate closer to Justin’s. ‘I love ’em. How you can have a Caesar salad without anchovies is beyond me. Is it OK that I have anchovies, Doris?’ he asks sarcastically. ‘The doc didn’t say anchovies are going to kill me, did he?’

‘Not unless somebody stuffs them down your throat, which is quite possible,’ Doris says through gritted teeth.

‘Thirty-nine years old and I’m being treated like a kid.’ Al looks wistfully at the pile of anchovies.

‘Thirty-five years old and the only kid I have is my husband,’ Doris snaps, picking an anchovy from the pile and tasting it. She ruffles her nose and looks around the restaur ant. ‘They call this an Italian restaurant? My mother and her family would roll in their graves if they knew this.’ She blesses herself quickly. ‘So, Justin, tell me about this lady you’re seeing.’

Justin frowns. ‘Doris, it’s really no big deal, I told you I just thought I knew her.’ And she looked like she thought she knew you too .

‘No, not her,’ Al says loudly with a mouthful of anchovies. ‘She’s talking about the woman you were banging the other night.’

‘Al!’ Food wedges in Justin’s throat.

‘Joyce,’ Conor says with concern, ‘are you OK?’

My eyes fill as I try to catch my breath from coughing.

‘Here, have some water.’ He pushes a glass in my face.

People around us are staring, concerned.

I’m coughing so much I can’t even take a breath to drink. Conor gets up from his chair and comes around to me. He pats my back and I shrug him off, still coughing with tears running down my face. I stand up in panic, overturning my chair behind me in the process.

‘Al, Al, do something. Oh, Madonn-ina Santa!’ Doris panics. ‘He’s going purple.’

Al untucks his napkin from his collar and coolly places it on the table. He stands up and positions himself behind his brother. He wraps his arms around his waist, and pumps hard on his stomach.

On the second push, the food is dislodged from Justin’s throat.

As a third person races to my aid, or rather to join the growing panicked discussion of how to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre, I suddenly stop coughing. Three faces stare at me in surprise while I rub my throat with confusion.

‘Are you OK?’ Conor asks, patting my back again.

‘Yes,’ I whisper, embarrassed by the attention we are receiving. ‘I’m fine, thank you. Everyone, thank you so much for your help.’

They are slow to back away.

‘Please go back to your seats and enjoy your dinner. Honestly, I’m fine. Thank you.’ I sit down quickly and rub my streaming mascara from my eyes, trying to ignore the stares. ‘God, that was embarrassing.’

‘That was odd; you hadn’t even eaten anything. You were just talking and then, bam! You started coughing.’

I shrug and rub my throat. ‘I don’t know, something caught when I inhaled.’

The waiter comes over to take our plates away. ‘Are you all right, madam?’

‘Yes, thank you, I’m fine.’

I feel a nudge from behind me as our neighbour leans over to our table. ‘Hey, for a minute there I thought you were going into labour, ha-ha! Didn’t we, Margaret?’ He looks at his wife and laughs.

‘No,’ Margaret says, her smile quickly fading and her face turning puce. ‘No, Pat.’

‘Huh?’ He’s confused. ‘Well, I did anyway. Congrats, Conor.’ He gives a suddenly pale Conor a wink. ‘There goes sleep for the next twenty years, believe you me. Enjoy your dinner.’ He turns back to face his table, and we hear murmured squabbling.

Conor’s face falls and he reaches for my hand across the table. ‘Are you OK?’

‘That’s happened a few times now,’ I explain, and instinct ively place my hand over my flat stomach. ‘I’ve barely looked in the mirror since I’ve come home. I can’t stand to look.’

Conor makes appropriate sounds of concern and I hear the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘pretty’ but I silence him. I need for him to listen and not to try to solve anything. I want him to know that I’m not trying to be pretty or beautiful but for once just to appear as I am. I want to tell him how I feel when I force myself to look in the mirror and study my body that now feels like a shell.

‘Oh, Joyce.’ His grip on my hand tightens as I speak, he squeezes my wedding ring into my skin and it hurts.

A wedding ring but no marriage.

I wriggle my hand a little to let him know to loosen his grip. Instead he lets go. A sign.

‘Conor,’ is all I say. I give him a look and I know he knows what I’m about to say. He’s seen this look before.

‘No, no, no, no, Joyce, not this conversation now.’ He withdraws his hand from the table completely and holds his hands up in defence. ‘You – we – have been through enough this week.’

‘Conor, no more distractions.’ I lean forward with urgency in my voice. ‘We have to deal with us now or before we know it, ten years on we’ll be wondering every single day of our miserable lives what might have been.’

We’ve had this conversation in some form or another on an annual basis over the last five years and I wait for the usual retort from Conor. That no one says marriage is easy, we can’t expect it to be so, we promised one another, marriage is for life and he’s determined to work at it. Salvage from the skip what’s worth saving, my itinerant husband preaches. I focus on the centre flame’s reflection in my dessert spoon while I wait for his usual comments. I realise minutes later they still haven’t come. I look up and see he is battling tears and is nodding in what looks like agreement.

I take a breath. This is it.

Justin eyes the dessert menu.

‘You can’t have any, Al.’ Doris plucks the menu out of her husband’s hands and snaps it shut.

‘Why not? Am I not allowed to even read it?’

‘Your cholesterol goes up just reading it.’

Justin zones out as they squabble. He shouldn’t be having any either. Since his divorce he’s started to let himself go, eating as a comfort instead of his usual daily workout. He really shouldn’t, but his eyes hover above one item on the menu like a vulture watching its prey.

‘Any dessert for you, sir?’ the waiter asks.

Go on .

‘Yes. I’ll have the …’

‘Banoffee pie, please,’ I blurt out to the waiter, to my own surprise.

Conor’s mouth drops.

Oh dear. My marriage has just ended and I’m ordering dessert. I bite my lip and stop a nervous smile from breaking out.

To new beginnings. To the pursuit of … somethingness.

CHAPTER TEN

A grand chime welcomes me to my father’s humble home. It’s a sound far more than deserving of the two up-two down, but then, so is my father.

The sound teleports me back to my life within these walls and how I’d identified visitors by the sound of their call at the door. As a child, short piercing sounds told me that friends, too short to reach, were hopping up to punch the button. Fast and weak snippets of sound alerted me to boyfriends cowering outside, terrified of announcing their very existence, never mind their arrival, to my father. Late night unsteady, uncountable rings sang Dad’s homecoming from the pub without his keys. Joyful, playful rhythms were family calls on occasions, and short, loud, continuous bursts like machine-gun fire warned us of door-to-door salespeople. I press the bell again, but not just because at ten a.m. the house is quiet and nothing stirs; I want to know what my call sounds like.