Cecelia Ahern - How to Fall in Love

While mulling that over, I tried to keep the atmosphere light for Amelia.

‘Maybe your mother was a secret agent and inside the storage unit is a collection of secret identities, wigs and passports, briefcases with concealed compartments,’ I mused, continuing the game we’d been playing on the car journey over.

I looked at Adam, to hand it over to him.

‘Your father had a large porn collection that he didn’t want you to know about.’

Amelia winced.

‘Your parents were into S&M and this is their secret lair,’ I said.

‘Nice,’ Adam complimented me.

‘Thanks.’

‘Your parents embezzled millions and stored it here,’ Adam said.

‘I wish,’ Amelia muttered.

‘Your mother stole Shergar,’ I said, and Adam cracked up.

Amelia stopped abruptly in front of a luminous pink door, and we walked into the back of her. She composed herself, glanced at me and then placed the key in the door, slowly turned it and pushed the door open, leaning as far away from the room as possible in case something leapt out at her. We were greeted with musty darkness.

Adam fumbled with the wall and switched the light on.

‘Whoa.’

We stepped inside and looked around.

‘Your mother was Imelda Marcos,’ I said.

Each wall of the ten-by-ten-foot room was lined with shelving units crammed with shoeboxes. Each shoebox was labelled with a year, starting from the bottom left-hand corner with 1954 and ending on the opposite wall with a box dated ten years ago.

‘That’s the year they married,’ Amelia said, going to the box and opening it. Inside was a photograph of her parents on their wedding day, along with a dried flower from the bride’s bouquet. There was a wedding invitation, the prayer manual from the ceremony, photos from their honeymoon, a train ticket, boat ticket, cinema stub from their first date, a receipt from the restaurant, a shoelace, a fully completed Irish Times crossword – all neatly filed away. Forget a memory box, it was a memory room.

‘My God, they kept everything!’ Amelia ran her fingers delicately along the row of shoeboxes, stopping at the final year. ‘The year Dad died. He must have done all of this.’ She swallowed hard, smiling at the thought of him curating this collection, then frowning, hurt by the fact they’d kept it from her.

She reached for another box at random and searched inside, then pulled out another and another. One by one she searched each box, exclaiming with delight as she found item after item representing a memory in their lives, and a memory in hers. Old school reports of hers, the ribbon she wore on the first day of school, her first tooth, a lock of hair from her first visit to the hairdresser, a letter she’d written to her father when she was eight years old apologising after they’d quarrelled. I began to wonder whether we should leave her alone in the room, sure she would want to spend endless hours poring through each box, reliving each year of her parents’ married life and her life. But she needed someone to share her memories with and Adam was patient enough to stay alongside me so we could do that for her. Even he seemed touched by what he saw and I hoped it would be a good form of therapy for him to witness this love captured in a room.

She held up a photo of her parents in the Austrian mountains. ‘That was at my uncle’s holiday chalet,’ she said, smiling as she studied the photo, running her fingers over their faces. ‘They used to go there every year before I was born. I saw the photos and begged them to bring me, but Mum couldn’t go.’

‘She’s been sick since you were a child?’ Adam asked.

‘Not at the beginning. She had her first stroke when I was twelve, but before that she was too afraid. She became very nervous about travel after she had me. I suppose it’s a mother thing …’

She looked at us for confirmation, but neither of us could answer, having grown up without a mother.

‘I had no idea they’d hung on to all this stuff.’

‘I wonder why they kept it from you,’ Adam said, more to himself than Amelia, too engrossed in browsing the shelves to register what he was saying.

It was the elephant in the room and he’d pointed at it and shouted. He realised that as soon as he’d said it and he quickly tried to cover his tracks. ‘How amazing that they kept all of this.’

It was too late. Amelia had an odd expression on her face. He had reminded her that this room was a secret that they hadn’t wanted to share with her. Why?

‘Amelia?’ I asked, concerned. ‘Are you okay? What is it?’

As if snapping out of a trance, Amelia leapt into action and began scouring the shelves as though she knew what she was looking for and hadn’t a second to lose. She ran her finger along the dates on the boxes.

‘What are you looking for?’ I asked. ‘Can we help?’

‘The year I was born,’ she said, standing on tiptoes to read the dates on the upper shelves.

‘Seventy-eight,’ I told Adam. At six feet tall, he could reach more easily than we could.

‘Got it,’ he said, retrieving a dusty box.

He was just bringing it down to Amelia’s level when she reached up and accidentally punched the box, and sending it flying across the unit. The lid popped open and the contents cascaded through the air and scattered all over the floor. We got down on our hands and knees to retrieve as many bits as possible. Adam and I bumped heads.

‘Ow,’ I laughed and Adam reached out to rub my head.

‘Sorry,’ he winced, feeling my pain. He looked at me with those big blue icy eyes and I melted. I would gladly have stayed in that little room of love with him for ever. The thought excited me, gave me a glow; it was nice to have a crush again. It had been so long, and after Barry I’d begun to worry that I’d never feel that way about anybody ever again, but there it was, alive inside of me, this ball of nerves and anxiety and excitement every time he looked at me. But then as soon as it happened, the reality of my situation hit me and it slithered away to the corner again.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked gently.

I nodded.

‘Good,’ he said with a small smile and I felt like I was buzzing from head to toe, just zinging.

I became paranoid then and realised Amelia, who was standing beside me, had gone very quiet. Assuming she was witnessing our moment, I looked up and saw tears rolling down her cheeks as she read a piece of paper in her hand. I sprang to my feet.

‘Amelia, what’s wrong?’

‘My mother –’ she handed me the handwritten note – ‘was not my mother.’

My dear baby Amelia,

I’m sorry I am not able to care for you as I should. When you are older I hope you understand that this decision was made purely with love and nothing else. I trust you are in safe and loving arms with Magda and Len. I will think of you always.

Love and forever,

Your mummy

Back in Amelia’s kitchen I was reading the note aloud to Amelia and Elaine. Amelia was pacing the floor, having moved from shock to grief, and now to an uncomfortable snappy anger, which made Elaine and I wary of what to say. Elaine was fingering the items in the shoebox: baby booties, a cardigan, a hat, a dress, a rattle, among other things.

‘These were all handmade,’ she said, interrupting Amelia’s rant.

‘So?’ Amelia snapped. ‘That’s hardly the issue here.’

‘Well, this is Kenmare lace.’

‘Who cares what lace it is?’ Amelia snapped again.

‘It’s just that it’s not made by many people, not even now, so in the seventies there’s only one place that would have made it.’

Amelia stopped pacing and looked at Elaine, realisation growing on her face.