Cecelia Ahern - How to Fall in Love

‘I told you: your friend Julie is a slut. By the way, I think I should meet her; she sounds interesting,’ he joked, trying to lighten the atmosphere.

‘Tell me the second message,’ I demanded.

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Adam, they’re my bloody messages, now tell me!’ I shouted, standing in front of him.

My shouting did nothing to change him. I thought it might provoke him but it had the opposite effect, he softened, was sympathetic, which made me all the more angry.

‘You don’t want to know. Okay?’ he said.

From the way he was studying me, it scared me to think what personal information Barry had revealed. It was obvious I wasn’t going to get any information out of him, not then anyway, so I left the room. I wanted to storm off, away from him, out of the apartment, just be alone to scream and shout or cry or rant with frustration at how my life had become so out of control, but I couldn’t. I felt tied to him, as a mother did to her child, unable to leave him even if I wanted to in that moment. He was my responsibility, all the time, constantly, night and day. I needed to watch over him even if right at this moment, thanks to whatever Barry had said, he seemed to feel it was his job to protect me.

It didn’t take me long to realise that Adam’s moods were unpredictable. One moment he would be engaged in a conversation, sometimes leading it, other times merely tolerating it, and then all of a sudden he would be gone. Completely gone. He would retreat into his mind, with a look so lost, sometimes so angry, that I dreaded to think what he was thinking. This could happen mid-conversation, mid-sentence, even in the middle of his own sentence, and it could last for hours. He would close himself off completely. This was what happened after I shouted at him for deleting my voicemails. I watched him settling into another hour of being comatose on the couch, hating life, hating himself, hating everybody and everything around him, so I stepped in to remedy that.

‘Right, let’s go.’ I threw his coat at him.

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Yes, you are. You want to disappear?’

He looked at me, confused.

‘You want to disappear,’ I told him instead. ‘You want to be lost. Fine. Let’s get lost.’

Three-year-old Alicia was sitting on the front steps of her porch with a car seat beside her. Alicia was Brenda’s youngest child and as part of my aunt duties, which I thoroughly enjoyed – with Alicia, mostly, as I couldn’t quite connect with the boys who always wanted to tie me up and chant about spit-roasting me whenever I walked in the door – I took her out for a few hours every week. Our day-trips in this current form had started four months ago, probably about the same time that I started to think about leaving my marriage. I had been driving Alicia to a play centre where I could let her off her leash in a room built entirely of sponge and watch her bouncing from wall to wall and toppling down stairs into tubs of plastic balls, and then try to hide my horrified expression when she checked to see if I was watching. On the way to the play centre, Alicia announced at the traffic lights where we would usually take a right that instead she wanted me to take a left. In no hurry to see her being squished as she crawled between two padded, turning cylinders in the name of fun, and contemplative after my previous night’s fantasy of me with another man, I had taken a left and then asked Alicia which way to go next. For an hour we drove around, taking turns at Alicia’s command. We did this every week, always ending up in different places. It allowed me to think, it passed the time, and it allowed Alicia the novelty of exercising authority over a grown-up.

One of the pieces of advice in the Simple Ways to Enjoy Life manual was to Spend time with kids. It explained that surveys had shown the happiness caused by children was immense. Although I had read other studies that ranked it no higher than going food shopping. I suppose it depended on whether you liked kids or not. I was hoping this would be another way to get Adam to open his eyes to the beauty of life. And he wouldn’t get arrested for watching this child.

‘Hi, Alicia.’ I gave her a hug.

‘Hi, poo poo.’

‘Why are you out here on your own?’

‘Lee is doing a poo poo.’

Lee, her childminder, waved from the window with six-month-old Jayden in her arms. I took it as a sign I could take Alicia away.

I opened the passenger door, disturbing Adam, who was practically comatose.

‘You can sit in the back seat beside Alicia. This is Adam, he’s going to get lost with us.’

I wanted him to be able to engage in a conversation with her; in the front of the car she would be easy to ignore.

‘Is he your one true love, poo poo?’

‘No, poo poo, he’s not.’

Alicia giggled.

I lifted the car seat and inserted it into the car, then helped Alicia in. Adam got in beside her, still disengaged and looking out the window. He took a break from his daydream to glance at the cute three-year-old being strapped in beside him. They both stared at each other; neither of them said anything.

‘How was Montessori today?’ I asked.

‘Good, poo poo.’

‘Are you going to say poo poo in every sentence?’

‘Yes, wee wee.’

Adam looked confused but amused.

‘Do you have any kids in your family?’ I asked him.

‘Yeah, Lavinia’s. But they’re pretentious little fuckers. Losing their house is probably the best thing that could have happened to them.’

‘Nice,’ I complimented him, sarcastically.

‘Sorry,’ Adam winced.

I watched them both in the rear-view mirror.

‘So how old are you?’Adam asked Alicia.

Alicia held up four fingers.

‘You’re four.’

‘She’s three,’ I said.

‘And evidently a liar,’ Adam accused her.

‘Look my nose, woooo!’ Alicia pretended her nose was growing.

‘Where are we going?’ Adam asked.

‘Left,’ Alicia said.

‘She’s three and she knows the directions?’

I smiled and indicated left. When I got to the end of the road, I looked at Alicia in the mirror.

‘Right,’ Alicia said.

I turned right.

‘Seriously, you know the directions?’ Adam turned to Alicia.

‘Yep,’ Alicia said.

‘How? You’re three.’

‘I know all the directions. To everywhere. In the whole world. Want to go to poo poo street?’ She threw her head back and cackled.

We took various turns, left, right, straight on, all on Alicia’s instruction. Ten minutes passed.

‘Okay, can I ask where exactly we’re going?’ Adam asked.

‘Left,’ Alicia said again.

‘I know we’re going left, but left to where?’ he asked me.

‘This is the way to get lost,’ I said.

‘So we just drive round and round, taking directions from a child?’ he asked.

‘Exactly. Then we try to find our way home.’

‘For how long?’

‘A few hours.’

‘And you do this how often?’

‘Usually on a Sunday. This is a special extra outing. It’s better when the roads aren’t busy. It’s an interesting thing to do. The only rule is that the motorways are off limits. Once we ended up in the Dublin mountains, another time Malahide beach. When we arrive somewhere we like, we get out and take a look around. We discover new things every week. Sometimes we don’t leave Clontarf and end up going in circles, but she never notices really.’

‘Right,’ Adam called out.

‘That’s the sea, poo poo,’ Alicia laughed.

‘Exactly,’ Adam said, wanting out.

He was quiet for fifteen minutes as he disappeared into a mood.

‘I want to have a go,’ he said suddenly. ‘Can I say the directions?’