Cecelia Ahern - Short Stories - The Every Year Collection

‘Bingo, Aggie.’ She rolled her eyes. Here she goes again.

‘Ha?’

‘For the fiftieth time, I said I got Bingo! she yelled, the veins in her forehead throbbing from the volume of her voice.

The room stopped what they were doing and stared at her. ‘I’m so, so sorry, Ms Divine,’ the bingo caller said, startled. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t hear you the first time. Would you like to come up and collect your prize? You’ve won ten euro. Everybody give Mags a round of applause.’

Mags’s cheeks blushed as she slowly stood up from her chair and made her way shakily up to the stage. Her hip was at her again. Wait till Connie heard all her good news today, she thought happily, accepting the crisp ten-euro note.

Mags said her goodbyes to Aggie, eventually settling on just a wave after Aggie had questioned Mags’s ‘goodbye’ over and over again. Glowing from her win, she stopped at her local newsagent and bought a small bouquet of flowers, €1.99 for a bunch. She opened the gate and walked up the path to her husband. Seeing him in the distance, she started to explain. ‘Oh, Connie, you’ll never believe the day I’ve had. I won ten euro in the bingo and poor old Aggie accused me of farting in front of everyone.’ Mags laughed at the memory. ‘Well these are for you,’ she said, thrusting the pretty flowers towards him. She placed them on the grass of her husband’s grave. ‘I miss you, love,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I miss you so much. This life’s not designed for old single women at all.’

Let me tell you what this story is about before I get into the finer details. That way you can decide whether you want to read it or not. Let this first page be like my synopsis. First of all, let me tell you what this story is not: this is not an ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ story; it’s not about lifelong friendships, the importance of female relationships; there are no scenes of ladies whispering and sharing stories over cups of coffee and plates of cream cakes they swore to themselves and their weekly Weight Watchers class they wouldn’t eat. Drunken giggles over cocktails do nothing to dry the tears or save the day in this story.

What if I told you that this story won’t warm the cockles of your heart, it won’t give you hope or cause you to blame escaping tears on the sun cream as you lie by the pool reading this? What if I told you that the girl doesn’t get the guy in the end?

Knowing exactly how it ends, do you still want to read on? Well it’s not as if we don’t venture into things without knowing the end, is it? We watch Columbo knowing his misguided representation of himself as a foolish old man will help him solve the case; we know Renée Zellweger decides that she will be the one to go with Tom Cruise and the fish in Jerry Maguire every single time we watch it; Tom Hanks always sees Meg Ryan at the end of Sleepless in Seattle; James Bond always gets the girl; in EastEnders every once-happy marriage will end in death, destruction or despair; we read books knowing that the character will blatantly and predictably fall in love with the guy as soon as his name is first mentioned—but we still watch them and read them. There’s no twist in my story. I genuinely mean it when I say it, I do not live happily ever after with the love of my life, or anyone else for that matter.

It was my counsellor’s idea for me to write this story. ‘Try to keep an air of positiveness,’ she kept telling me. ‘The idea for this is to enable you to see the hopefulness of your situation.’ Well, this is my fifth draft and I’ve yet to have been enlightened. ‘End it on a happy note,’ she kept saying as her forehead wrinkled in concern while she read and reread my attempts. Well this is my last attempt. If she doesn’t like it she knows what she can do with it. I hate writing; it bores me, but these days it passes the time. I’m taking her advice, though: I’m ending this story on a happy note. I’m ending it at the beginning.

I’ll tell you, just as I told her, that my reason for doing so is that it’s always the beginnings that are the best. Like when you’re starving and it feels like you’ve been cooking dinner for hours, the smell is tickling your taste buds, making your mouth water, and it teases you until you take that first bite, that first beautiful bite that makes you feel like giggling ridiculously over the joy of having food in your mouth. You can’t beat the first relaxing slide into a warm bath filled with bubbles before the bubbles fade and the water gets cold, your first steps outside in a new pair of shoes before they decide to cut the feet off you, your first night out in a new outfit that makes you feel half the size, shiny and new before you wash it, the newness fades and it becomes just another item in your wardrobe that you’ve worn fifty times, the first half-hour of a movie when you’re trying to figure out what’s going on and not yet let down by the end, the first few minutes of work after a lunch break when you feel maybe you have just enough energy to make it through the day, the first few minutes of conversation after bumping into someone you haven’t seen for years before you run out of things to say and mutual acquaintances to talk about, the first time you see the man of your dreams, the first time your stomach flips, the first time your eyes meet, the first time he acknowledges your existence in the world.

The first kiss on a first date with a first love.

At the beginning, things are special, new, exciting, innocent, untouched and unspoiled by experience or boredom. And so it’s there that my story will end, for that is when my heart sat high in my chest like a helium-filled balloon. That is when my eyes were big, bright, and as innocently wide and as green as a traffic light all ready to go, go, go. Life was fresh and full of hope. And so I begin this story with the end.

The End

… Feeling desolate, I looked around the empty wardrobes, doors wide open, displaying stray hangers and deserted shelves as though taunting me. It wasn’t supposed to end this way. What had only moments ago been a room overflowing with sound and tension of pleas, of desperate begs for him not to leave, of sobs and squeals, wails and shouts coming from both sides was now a chamber of silence. Bags had been thrown around, violently unzipped, drawers were pulled open, clothes dumped into sacks, drawers banged shut, and zips making ripping sounds as they closed. More desperate begs.

Hands holding out and pleading to be held, hearts refusing, tears falling. An hour of mass confusion, never-ending shouts, boots heavily banging down the stairs, keys clanging on the hall table as they were left behind, front door banging. Then silence. Stunned silence.

The room held its breath, waited for the front door to open, for the softer surrendered sound of boots on the stairs to gradually become louder, for the bag to be flung on the ground, unzipped, drawers opened, to be filled and closed again.

But there was no sound. The door couldn’t open: the keys had been left behind. I slowly sat on the edge of the unmade bed, breath still held, hands in my lap, looking around at a room that had lost all familiarity with a heart that felt like the dark mahogany wardrobe, open wide, exposed and empty.

And then the sobs began. Quiet whimpering sounds that reminded me of when I was five years old, had fallen off my bicycle all alone and away from the safe boundaries of my home. The sobs I heard in the bedroom were the frightened sobs that escaped me as a child running home sore and scared and desperate for the familiar arms of my mother to catch me, save me and soften my tears. The only arms now were my own wrapped protectively around my body. My heart was alone, my pain and problems my own. And then panic set in.