Cecelia Ahern - How to Fall in Love

‘What kinds of things?’

‘Like, did my dad touch me – stuff like that. I mean, they didn’t say it in so many words, but I could tell they were wondering. Then they gave me all these leaflets. I’ve seen the shows.’

‘I’m not going to ask you anything like that, believe me. I’m not a doctor, I’m not a therapist. I want to talk, that’s all. It sounds like you’ve had a really hard time and I want to listen to you, without judgement.’

‘Are you a garda?’

‘No.’

The girl gave me a sidelong look, then played with the sheets on the bed with her good hand. The other remained limp and unmoving. ‘So why did my dad ask you to come?’

‘Because he knows that when I was young my mother killed herself.’

She looked at me then, gave me her full attention.

‘She killed herself when I was four years old. So I understand what it’s like, to live with someone who felt the way you do.’

‘Oh.’ She looked down at her bandage. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I understand why you don’t want to talk to your parents. It’s embarrassing, isn’t it? My dad is still embarrassing and I’m thirty-three years old.’

Caroline smiled weakly.

‘But that’s why it’s okay if you want to talk to me. I won’t judge you, I won’t tell you that you shouldn’t have done this or done that, I’ll just listen. Sometimes it helps to talk, to say things out loud. And if you don’t know where to turn or who to talk to, you can ask me and I’ll do whatever I can to help. There’s always someone to turn to, Caroline. And we can keep it between the two of us – you won’t have to worry about me telling anybody you don’t want to know.’

Caroline’s face crumpled and she started to cry. She tried to hide behind her good wrist, leaving the other one lying flat on the bed as if it had been forgotten, as if it had died in the attempt. Her shoulders shook as she was wracked with sobs.

‘I didn’t think there was anyone,’ she admitted.

‘Now you know,’ I said gently, giving her a tissue. ‘There is always someone to hear you and help you. Always.’

She wiped her eyes, composed herself, seemed to think about things.

‘I slit my wrists,’ she said. She lifted her hand up and showed me her bandage as if I hadn’t noticed it already. ‘I suppose you think I’m a crazy person.’ She studied me.

I shook my head.

‘I went online and found out how to do it. I used my razor, but it was too difficult. It took me too long to break the skin. And it hurt. Nothing was happening to me, even though it was bleeding. I was lying there on the bed, waiting to die, but nothing happened. It just hurt. I had to go back online and see what I’d done wrong. Eventually I went downstairs to Mum to show her because I was scared.’ She kept crying. ‘Mum was screaming at me: What did you do? What did you do? And I swear I wanted to go upstairs and do it again so I could die and not have to see the way she looked at me. I felt like a freak. Dad won’t stop asking me why. I’ve never seen him so angry. It’s like he wants to kill me.’

‘He doesn’t want to kill you, Caroline. He’s shocked and scared and all he wants to do is to protect you. Your parents want to make things better. They want to understand so that they can help.’

‘They’ll kill me.’ She started sobbing again. ‘Is that how you felt? Did you hate your mum?’

‘No,’ I said soothingly, tears coming to my eyes at the hazy memories of Dad coming home from the hospital, a fake jolly look in his eye as if they’d been on holiday, and Mum lying out on a deck chair in the back garden, fully clothed in the pouring rain because she wanted to ‘feel something’. Even when she was in the room with me it felt like she wasn’t there at all. I loved her, all I wanted was to sit with her, be with her. I would hold her hand and wonder if she even noticed I was there. ‘I never hated her, not for one minute.’ I left a silence. ‘Why was it so unbearable for you? What happened?’

‘I can’t tell them. Anyway, they’ll find out soon enough. I’m surprised they don’t know already. Every day I’d come home from school and I’d be waiting for them to realise. I was terrified. At school everyone knows, everyone’s looking at me, laughing at me, saying stuff to me. Even my own friends. I had no one – no one who would help me, no one who’d talk to me. Not even Aisling …’ she trailed off, confusion and betrayal all over her face.

‘Aisling’s your friend?’

‘Was. She was my best friend. Since we were five. She wouldn’t even look at me. For a whole month. First it was everyone else and she was still my friend, but then it got worse: they started leaving things in my locker, gross things, they kept saying stuff on Facebook, spreading lies. Then they started dragging Aisling too, saying stuff about her too. She blamed me for what was happening and then she stopped being my friend. I mean, how could she?’

‘Something happened that everyone found out about?’ I guessed.

She nodded, tears streaming down her face.

‘Online?’

She nodded again. Then she was surprised. ‘Do you know?’

‘No. You’re not the first person it’s happened to, Caroline. Were you … in a compromised position?’

‘He told me it would just be for us,’ she said, her face crimson. ‘And I believed him. And then a friend of mine texted me and said it was up on Facebook, and then everyone started ringing me. Some were laughing about it, some were really angry, calling me a whore and all sorts – people I thought were my friends. I went online to see it and I swear I was sick. I don’t even want to see me doing that, never mind strangers. It was meant to be for a laugh, for us. I didn’t think he would show anyone. I thought maybe a friend had taken his phone and done it, or it had been hacked, but …’

‘What did he say?’

‘He wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t even look at me. Then one day I got hold of him, told him how I felt about it, how I couldn’t go on any more, and he just looked at me and laughed. He laughed . He couldn’t understand why I was so upset. He said I should be happy. That loads of celebs have become famous because of it and now they’re millionaires. I mean, we live in fucking Crumlin! How famous are we going to become? Where’s our millions after that?’ She started crying again.

‘Were you and him having sex, Caroline?’

She was mortified by the question and it took her a while to tell me: she’d been giving him a blow-job, while they were at a house party one night, and they’d both had too much to drink. It was his idea to film it. He’d already started filming her before she had a chance to object, and when she saw the camera was on her she didn’t want to stop, she didn’t want to look like a ‘wuss’.

‘When did this happen?’ I asked, anger rising in me. If I felt like this, I could imagine Detective Maguire’s reaction. He’d make life hell for the boy with the camera phone, but after what he’d done that boy should consider himself lucky if Maguire at least let him live. I didn’t envy Caroline, being a teenager nowadays; the landscape of issues such as trust and intimacy and sex had completely changed since I was her age, leaving boys and girls navigating a minefield.

‘About two months ago, but he put the video up three weeks ago. I tried to ignore it. I tried to keep going to school, keep my head down, ignore them all, but I’m still getting text messages from people. Look.’ She handed me her phone and I scrolled through the texts from her so-called friends, most of them so abhorrently evil I could barely believe what I was reading.

I understood why Caroline had felt she had nowhere to turn. Her friends had turned their backs on her; the guy she fancied had laughed at her, made a mockery of her; she was being taunted daily in the small world that was social networking – a world no one could escape, where lies flourished like bacteria before anyone had the chance to prove them wrong. And the poor girl was too embarrassed and too afraid to turn to her parents, afraid they’d ‘kill’ her. So she decided to do it to herself instead, end the embarrassment, the pain, the loneliness. A permanent solution to a temporary problem. This pain would not last for ever; she would bear the scars of the experience and she would remember it for the rest of her life, no doubt it would influence every decision she made from this moment on. But where pain was, healing could come; where loneliness was, new relationships could be formed; where rejection was, new love could be found. It was a moment. And moments changed. She would have to live through the moment to get to the next.