Cecelia Ahern - Short Stories - The Every Year Collection

He wouldn’t give up on me like everyone else had. It was as if we were having some kind of contest. How much could I push it before he sacked me, how much could he take before he would have no choice? I wouldn’t quit; if I was gonna lose everything it had to be taken from me, not given by me. I had a feeling he was just leaving me for the next selfish guy who took his job; I was the mess he didn’t want to have to clean up. He was retiring soon, getting away from all this damn snow and heading to the sun. So in the meantime I got to work later every day and missed a few Happy Holly dolls now and then.

Yesterday they had hundreds of them all packaged nice and pretty, ready to go out, until some guy realized that half of them had only one arm. I told them it would be more realistic to let the kids know that not everyone is born looking like some blonde princess with pretty dresses who did whatever you wanted her to do whenever you wanted. It was sending out the wrong message, I told them. But they didn’t go with my idea, instead they just took them all out of the boxes again and some fool whistled while he fixed the few hundred he wasn’t supposed to fix and wasn’t paid to fix. He didn’t care, just kept on with that happy tune while his dinner grew cold on the table, while his kids went to sleep without a goodnight kiss from their daddy and while his wife, who was getting angrier and angrier by the minute, was getting bored waiting for him and starting to look elsewhere.

And why’s he doin’ it? Because one fat man with a grey beard has given some screwed-up motivational speech about helping people all around the world and he fell for it. Got tied up thinking about kids he didn’t know and forgot about his own. I knew the story all too well.

I watched him hammering away and thought, That’s what I must have looked like before they sent me out on the conveyer belt. All enthusiastic and happy, packaged in bright colours designed to please the eye and heart. Ready and willing to do anything asked of me at the press of a button. Plastic.

I missed a few Happy Holly dolls while watching him, decided I couldn’t care less, sat back, lit up a cigarette and watched while those beady eyes rolled on by, seein’ nothin’ and hearin’ nothin’. Existing only in the world to please little beings who’d throw them around, drool on them, kick them, dirty them, leave them out in the rain and make them sit down and drink imaginary tea. Eventually they’d be forgotten about or lost.

The cigarette smoke sent a few whistles out of tune, that’s for sure, caused a few coughs. I looked up at the window at Big Brother and wondered when he was gonna give up. He slowly unfolded his arms, beckoned to me, calling me up. Ah, victory at last. I’d finally won. I’d lost absolutely everything.

I knocked on his door and entered. He was sitting in an expensive leather chair behind an expensive desk looking fat and rich and unhealthy. He looked at me with his twinkling blue eyes, rosy cheeks and a red nose—all the signs of someone who’d drunk far too much all his life.

‘Want me to sit on your knee, Nicholas?’ I asked sarcastically, taking a drag of my cigarette.

He laughed heartily. He wasn’t supposed to and that annoyed me. So I stood before him while he told me a story. A story about a man who worked so hard, cared so much about people he didn’t know, that he lost his family and friends, drank himself to oblivion, ate all the junk in the world and got a belly so big he could rest a cup of cocoa on it, and I stood there fuming because I thought he was talking about me. But it turned out to be his own story and he told me that he looked out that window every day at me and thought he was looking at himself in the mirror. A mirror with a time delay. I didn’t realize it at the time but it seemed that, watching him, I’d been looking in a mirror reflecting the future.

Later, after his retirement, from the windows of that very same office, I kept an eye on the enthusiastic hammerer and watched as he let it all slip away. He would be next. I changed my name, settled into my new job where obesity and unhealthiness was a virtue and where parents smiled and took photos when you put their kids on your knee. Suddenly, I was more welcome in every home around the world than I’d ever been in my own. I had a wonderful assistant, Mary, who made a list of my clients and I checked them twice.

I filled the boots of a great man and in turn became a great man. I may have lost everything I ever owned and loved, but in return I was given the world.

A spoon tapping against a champagne glass silences the bubbles of conversations. Voices simmer and then calm.

My eldest son George takes his place at the head of the room, the ringmaster, as always, ready to direct proceedings. My husband, Fred, and I are surrounded by our entire world, cocooned by the generations we had a hand in creating. Fred and I sit beside one another, everybody else stands with a drink in their hand. I eye the quickly disappearing whiskey in the glass in Fred’s hand and vow, again, as I did as a young woman at the top of the altar over fifty years ago, to keep an eye on him tonight. I prepare to be spoken about as though I’m not here, the centre of attention for tonight. Oh, how I hate that, but they all mean well, I know.

‘I was trying to think when was the last time so many of us gathered together and I think it was again for Mum, when we celebrated her seventieth birthday three years ago,’ George begins.

Nods of agreement, memories flashing back, quiet murmuring.

‘She’s always been such an attention seeker, isn’t that right, Mum?’ Edward shouts out and everybody laughs.

‘Do you remember that birthday party, Greg?’ George calls to the baby of the family.

Forty years old this year, my baby Greg. I watch him fondly, at how his face reddens as they taunt him. Ever since the day they’d formed words on their tiny lips, they’d never stopped teasing. How cruel siblings can be. I’d always hated their carry-on as children and teens, each of them so precious to me that one insult flung at them would hit me ten times harder than it ever would them. But siblings are impenetrable, each mock only adds another layer of thickened skin. When should a mother step in? I questioned myself each time, for I’d end up doing more harm than good for the little one I was protecting. Mummy’s pet, they would chant then. No, I tried to stay well out of it and watched them instead with the eyes in the back of my head, hurting for them more than they could ever hurt, feeling tested more than they were testing one another. I still do now. Over forty years old, the lot of them, their tongues sometimes dripping with more venom than ever before. Old enough to know better, the more years they have, the more childish those words from their mouths sound.

They’re teasing Greg now about his behaviour at my seventieth-birthday party. He was up dancing on that floor all night, mostly on his own, inhaling helium from the heart-shaped balloons they’d arranged for me, and singing the Bee Gees. More was that performance a ‘Tragedy’ than the song, for his enjoyment will be a source of embarrassment for the rest of his life.

A surprise seventieth. Now there’s an oxymoron: never was there a day I knew was on the horizon more than that one. It’s not a number that creeps up and shouts boo! Life does slip by, it’s true, but I’m not so unobservant as not to notice or so numb as not to feel seventy years in this life. But a surprise seventieth-birthday party— now that was a shock. Have you ever heard anything like it? That was a great big boo! in my ear. Had my hearing aid been switched off I’d still have heard it. Lucky my seventy-year-old heart didn’t fail me when I was besieged as I entered the room. A few drinks with Betty and Frank, my you-know-what. Betty had barely been out of her bed for a month. Oh, but it was the best excuse Fred could think of to get me down to that pub. If it wasn’t for the state of his prostate, I’d have thought he had a little someone on the side. On the phone for an entire month before that party, he’d leave the room every time I walked in. Late at night I’d hear him whispering down the phone, and there’s me thinking he was organizing the new patio furniture from the magazine I’d left open on the table. But no, when they all jumped out at me from the dark, throwing streamers in my face and shouting, the surprise was on me. A moment I’ll never forget, and nor will they, for they’re still talking about it as my mind wanders.