Cecelia Ahern - One Hundred Names

‘Okay, everybody, I promise this will be quick. Follow me, please.’

‘Good luck.’ Steve winked at her.

Ready for another adventure, the party all climbed off the bus and followed her.

Rebecca, the art director, was standing at the open door looking out anxiously.

‘Kitty, thank God,’ she said, when Kitty ran up the stairs. ‘He’s going insane in there. I don’t envy you right now.’ She pulled Kitty’s coat from her shoulders, and then looked at the team of people who followed after her, in shock. ‘Who are all these people, Kitty? Kitty …?’ she followed them all, wide-eyed.

‘Can you all just wait here a moment, please?’ Kitty said to them, took a deep breath and entered the meeting room. It smelled of coffee, sweat and anger. There was also a lot of frustration and irritation emanating from the pore of every person at the table and it was all directed at her.

‘Hi, everyone,’ she said, breathless. ‘I’m so sorry I’m late. You wouldn’t believe what I had to go through to get here.’

They groaned and mumbled something about what they’d been through to get there too but Kitty hurried on, glad to see Bob was in attendance, which meant that Cheryl was no longer in her acting deputy editor role. Kitty looked from Pete to Cheryl and smiled sweetly. ‘Hi, guys, nice to see you again.’

Cheryl reddened and looked away.

‘Two weeks ago I was given the task of writing Constance’s final piece. Something I was hugely honoured to do, and something I thought hard about because as we all know Constance was a true professional, a perfectionist, never accepted anything but the best, and I didn’t have a huge amount of faith in myself in delivering. I know many of you in this room felt the same and I understand why.’ She swallowed as there were a lot of shared looks to prove she was right. Nobody believed she could pull this off. ‘But a lot has changed in two weeks, believe me.

‘All I had to go on with Constance’s story was one hundred names. That was it. No synopsis, no explanation, no outline, absolutely nothing but a random list of people that nobody had ever heard of. I had no way of contacting them, no way of knowing what the story was about, nothing at all. That’s why it has taken me so long to come to this meeting,’ she explained. She could see that few people had been let in on this fact. ‘It was left up to me to find a common link between these one hundred people and it was believed, I believed, that this is where the story lay. So far, I have met with six of those people.’

Pete let out an exasperated sigh.

Kitty turned to him. ‘Pete, there was no way in the world I was going to meet and speak with one hundred people within two weeks, people who had no idea that there was an intention for them to even be written about.’

‘Constance hadn’t contacted them?’ Rebecca asked.

‘No!’ Kitty laughed. ‘Constance didn’t even know who they were!’

The others looked at each other in confusion.

‘It’s all so perfectly clear to me now,’ Kitty explained. ‘The last time I met with Constance she lectured me, as she always did, on the art of writing a good story. She told me that to seek the truth is not necessarily to go on a mission all guns blazing in order to reveal a lie, neither is it to be particularly ground-breaking – it is simply to get to the heart of what is real.

‘My job was not to uncover a secret or a lie or find something earth-shattering that one hundred people were hiding from me, it was simply to listen to their truths.

‘Constance’s idea was this,’ she paused. ‘It’s very simple. If you were to randomly select one hundred people from a phone directory, you would not only find a story, you would find one hundred stories, because everybody, every single person , has a story to tell. Every single ordinary person has an extraordinary story . We might all think that we are unremarkable, that our lives are boring, just because we aren’t doing ground-breaking things or making headlines or winning awards. But the truth is we all do something that is fascinating, that is brave, that is something we should be proud of. Every day people do things that are not celebrated. That is what we should be writing about. The unsung heroes, the people that don’t believe they are heroes at all because they are just doing what they believe they have to do in their lives.’

It was completely quiet in the room.

‘Everybody has a story to tell,’ she said. ‘ That is what links us all, that is what links all the names on the list. Constance was simply getting back to basics.’

Kitty looked around the room and saw Bob’s eyes shining with tears, his chin trembling as he struggled to compose himself as Constance’s story finally came to life, as the silenced Constance finally found her voice.

‘Constance’s story is titled One Hundred Names and I’m sorry, Pete, but I don’t have one story for you. Right now I have six stories.’

Kitty made her way over to the projector and placed Constance’s original list on the surface and flicked the switch. The names were revealed on the wall behind her.

‘These are the one hundred names, now, please, meet the people.’

She opened the door and all eyes turned in surprise to see Ambrose Nolan, Eva Wu, Archie Hamilton, Jedrek Vysotski, Bridget Murphy and Mary-Rose Godfrey all enter the room, looking around shyly, proudly, and with confusion all at the same time.

‘Everybody please meet name number two, also known as Ambrose Nolan. A fascinating woman who dedicates her life to capturing the essence of beauty.’

Ambrose looked down and her wild red hair covered more of her face than ever before.

‘Ambrose dedicates her life to celebrating butterflies; on her conservation site she helps to create new life but in her museum she also celebrates the life of those that have been and gone. I have heard her describe herself as a Small Tortoiseshell species of butterfly, but I liken her more to the Brown Hairstreak.’ Ambrose looked up at Kitty in surprise. Kitty smiled. ‘Few people have seen this elegant butterfly, but when they do, the female is so striking with its orange band that they never forget its beauty.’

Ambrose’s look of surprise slowly transformed to a faint smile of thanks and then she disappeared behind her hair again.

‘Please meet name number three, Eva Wu, a woman who was given a Pandora’s Box filled with hope at a time in her life when she felt like there was none, and because of that was blessed with the gift of bringing hope into other people’s lives.’ Eva’s eyes filled and she looked down. ‘Through her company, “Dedicated”, Eva Wu is more than a personal shopper. I liken her to an angel who spends a period of time in people’s lives, observing them with the keenest of eyes to make a journalist like me jealous, and gives them the greatest gift of all – not what people think that they want, but gifts that people never even know they need at all until they receive them and realise they were incomplete without.’

Birdie, knowing more than anyone in the room that there was truth to this, reached out and held Eva’s hand. She rubbed it warmly with her other.

‘Meet name number four, Jedrek Vysotski, a husband, father and courageous man, who wanted to prove to the world that he was able to achieve something, that he was worth something, that he could stand out from the crowd even when he felt the world was telling him he couldn’t.’

Jedrek proudly lifted his chin higher in the air and focused on the audience before him.

‘Jedrek and his friend Achar successfully completed a task that will ensure they are in Guinness World Records , where it will be forever in print that they are men of extraordinary dedication and talent. And for Jedrek, proof that he is a man of worth .