Cecelia Ahern - The Gift & Thanks for the Memories

‘Look, we don’t even have to talk. You can ignore me in the car too. And in the hotel. Don’t talk to me all night, if it’ll make you feel better.’

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ he huffs.

‘Honestly?’

He looks at me.

‘Yes.’

He tries not to smile. Scratches the corner of his mouth with his yellow-stained cigarette fingers to hide how he softens. The smoke rises into his eyes and I think of his yellow eyes, think of how piercingly blue they used to be when, as a little girl, legs swinging, chin on my hands, I’d watch him sitting at the kitchen table, while he dismantled a radio or a clock or a plug. Piercing blue eyes, alert, busy, like a CAT scan sourcing a tumour. His cigarette squashed between his lips, to the side of his mouth like Popeye, the smoke drifting into his squinted eyes, perhaps staining them the yellow that he sees through now. The colour of age, like old newspapers dipped in time.

I’d watch him, transfixed, afraid to speak, afraid to breathe, afraid to break the spell he’d cast on the contraption he was fixing. Like the surgeon who’d operated on his heart during his bypass surgery ten years ago, there he was, youth on his side, connecting wires, clearing blockages, his shirtsleeves rolled to just below his elbows, the muscles in his arms tanned from the gardening, flexing and unflexing as his fingers tackled the problem. His fingernails, always with a trace of dirt under the surface. His right forefinger and middle finger, yellow from the nicotine. Yellow, but steady. Uneven, but steady.

Finally he stops walking. He throws his cigarette on the ground and stomps it out with his chunky shoe. The cab stops. I throw the life-saving ring around his body and we pull him out of his stream of defiance and into the boat. Always a chancer, always lucky, he’d fall into a river and come out dry, with fish in his pockets. He sits in the car without a word to me, his clothes, breath and fingers smelling of smoke. I bite my lip to stop from saying anything and prepare to have my thumb burned.

He is silent for a record amount of time. Ten, maybe fifteen, minutes. Finally words start spilling out of his mouth, as though they’d been queuing up impatiently behind his closed lips during the rare silence. As though they’d been fired from his heart and, as usual, not from his head, catapulted to his mouth, only this time to find themselves bounce against the walls of closed lips. Instead of being allowed out into the world, they build up like paranoid fat cells, afraid of the food never coming. But now the lips open and the words fly out in all directions like projectile vomit.

‘You may have got a sherbet but I hope you know that I haven’t a sausage.’ He raises his chin, which pulls on the invisible string attached to his pride. He appears pleased with the collection of words that have strung themselves together for him on this particular occasion.

‘What?’

‘You heard me.’

‘Yes, but …’

‘Sherbet dab, cab . Sausage and mash, cash ,’ he explains. ‘It’s the ol’ Chitty Chitty.’

I try to work that out in my head.

‘Bang Bang, rhyming slang ,’ he finishes. ‘He knows exactly what I’m talking about,’ he nods at the driver.

‘He can’t hear you.’

‘Why? Is he Mutt and Jeff?’

‘What?’

‘Deaf.’

‘No,’ I nod my head, feeling dazed and tired. ‘When the red light is off, they can’t hear you.’

‘Like Joe’s hearing aid,’ Dad responds. He leans forward and flicks the switch in the back of the cab. ‘Can you hear me?’ he shouts.

‘Yeah, mate.’ The driver looks at him in the mirror. ‘Loud and clear.’

Dad smiles and flicks the switch again. ‘Can you hear me now?’

There is no response, the driver quickly glances at him in the rearview mirror, concern wrinkling his forehead, while trying also to keep an eye on the road.

Dad chuckles.

I bury my face in my hands.

‘This is what we do to Joe,’ he says mischievously. ‘Sometimes he can go a whole day without realising we turned his hearing aid off. He just thinks that no one’s saying anything. Every half-hour he shouts, “JAYSUS, IT’S VERY QUIET IN HERE!”’ Dad laughs and flicks the switch again, ‘’Allo, guv,’ Dad says pleasantly.

‘All right, Paddy,’ the driver responds.

I wait for Dad’s gnarled fist to go through the slit in the window. It doesn’t. Instead his laughter filters through.

‘I feel like being on my tod tonight. I say, could you tell me where there’s a good jack near my hotel, so I can go for a pig without my teapot.’

The young driver studies Dad’s innocent face in the mirror, always meaning well, never intending insults. But he doesn’t respond and continues driving.

I look away so Dad isn’t embarrassed, but I feel rather superior and hate myself for it. Moments later, at a set of traffic lights, the hatch opens and the driver passes a piece of paper through.

‘There’s a list of a few there, mate. I’d suggest the first one, that’s my favourite. Does good loop and tucker right about now, if you know what I mean,’ he smiles and winks.

‘Thank you.’ Dad’s face lights up. He studies the paper closely as though it’s the most precious thing he’s ever been given, then folds it carefully and slides it into his top pocket, proudly. ‘It’s just that this one here, is being a merry ol’ soul, if you know what I mean. Make sure she gives you a good bit of rifle.’

The driver laughs and pulls over at our hotel. I examine it from the cab and am pleasantly surprised. The three-star hotel is right in the heart of the city, only ten minutes’ walk from main theatres, Oxford Street, Piccadilly and Soho. Enough to keep us either out of trouble. Or right in it.

Dad gets out of the car and pulls his case along to the revolving doors at the hotel entrance. I watch him while waiting for my change. The doors are going around so fast, I can see him trying to time his entrance. Like a dog afraid to jump into the cold sea, he inches forward, then stops, jerks forward again and stops. Finally he makes a run for it and his suitcase gets stuck outside, jamming the revolving doors and trapping him inside.

I take my time getting out of the cab. I lean in the passenger’s side window to the sound of Dad rapping on the glass behind me.

‘Help! Someone!’ I hear Dad call.

‘By the way, what did he call me?’ I ask the driver, calmly ignoring the calls behind me.

‘A merry old soul?’ he asks with a grin. ‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Tell me,’ I smile.

‘It means arsehole,’ he laughs, and then he pulls away, leaving me at the side of the street with my mouth gaping.

I notice the knocking has quietened and turn to see that Dad has been freed at last. I hurry inside.

‘I can’t give you a credit card, but I can give you my word,’ Dad is saying slowly and loudly to the woman behind the reception desk. ‘And my word is as good as my honour.’

‘It’s OK, here you go.’ I slide my credit card across the counter to the young lady.

‘Why can’t people just pay with paper money these days?’ Dad says, leaning further over the counter. ‘It’s more trouble that the youth of today are getting themselves into, debt after debt because they want this, they want that, but they don’t want to work for it so they use those plastic thingies. Well, that’s not free money, I can tell you that.’ He nods his head with finality. ‘You’ll only ever lose with one of those.’

No one responds.

The receptionist smiles at him politely and taps away on the computer. ‘You’re sharing a room?’ she asks.

‘Yes,’ I respond with dread.

‘Two Uncle Teds, I hope?’