The Book of Tomorrow

by Cecelia Ahern

  I think I was telling Marcus this as we walked along, but I wasn’t sure.

  ‘I don’t have the zapper for the gate on my keys,’ I heard myself say. ‘I’ll have to climb over and open the gates from the house.’

  I’d a system. I’d done this so many times. Mum and Dad had taken my keys most evenings after school so that I wouldn’t escape, but despite its height I’d navigated the gate safely on many an occasion. I could hear Marcus warning me, pointing out which way to go, but I didn’t follow him. On autopilot I just scaled the gate and landed safely on the other side. I heard him applauding as I walked the long driveway to our house. He may have thought he was there with me, but I was nowhere near him.

  Our house-glass, stone, wood, bright, light, modern, airy. It was like something from a catalogue. Stone to camouflage parts of the house to match the rock it was built into, wood to blend into the woodlands surrounding it, glass to give us views of the sea that stretched on for ever. Dad had tried to create the most perfect place that neither of us would ever want to leave. He did that right. I knew the front door would be locked, and still on autopilot I made my way round the back of the house.

  I saw the tennis ball in the back garden that was always there, lying soggy and wet. It had flown over from our nearby tennis court into the garden and I’d been too lazy to collect it. I’d been playing with Dad that day. Spring had arrived, we’d started using the outdoor court again, but I was playing horrendously. After a winter of having not picked up a racket, I was rusty. I kept missing the ball, kept hitting it over the fence and had grown tired of the times I’d had to search for the ball in the garden. Dad had been patient, he hadn’t yelled, he hadn’t said anything. He’d even gone searching for the ball when it wasn’t his fault. He even purposely fluffed a few shots, and that had angered me even more. I remember him in his little white tennis shorts, his white collared T-shirt, his sport socks that he pulled up too high, which embarrassed me even though I was the only one who could see. My lovely Dad…

  In the back there were the same garden statues-an old chubby couple with gardening tools in their hands, the man revealing the crack of his behind-that my granddad, my dad’s dad, always used to talk to before he died. He called the woman Mildred and the man Tristan, for no particular reason, but it had made me laugh since I was a child and Mildred and Tristan had become part of the family. But Mum obviously hadn’t arranged for them to be moved and so Mildred and Tristan remained the only inhabitants of the house. Near the washing line there was a red plastic peg in the grass, dropped there from the last wash.

  I climbed up onto the swimming pool roof, where the old weather-beaten wooden ladder was still lying. I’d stored it there for my midnight escapes. In the newest addition to the house, the pool was covered over by a blue canvas, our six pool loungers lay diagonally by the window, still with their pink cushions waiting for me and my morning swim. A deflated swimming ring sat on one of the sun loungers. I’d brought it back from Marbella. It was a pink flamingo. Manuel, a boy I’d kissed last year, had given it to me and I was intent on bringing it home. It lay there now with nobody to use it. A discarded kiss.

  Once on the roof, I climbed the ladder to my bedroom balcony. Nobody ever locked my bedroom balcony door. It was supposedly too high up, too inaccessible for any burglar to reach. My head was spinning as I finally pulled myself up onto the balcony. The weather had cooled now as we had driven towards the coast. The sea air was cold, the wind took away the July heat and brought the scent of seaweed and salt. I looked out to the beach and took in the view, remembered sixteen years of summers with Mum and Dad, and nights out with friends. I don’t know how long I’d been standing there watching the imaginary family writing their names in the sand and the little girl burying her daddy in the sand, when I remembered Marcus at the gates.

  As soon as I opened the balcony door, the alarm went off. I ran inside, immediately, hoping they hadn’t changed the code. They hadn’t, of course. What owners in their right minds would ever want to break back in to their repossessed house?

  After failing on the first attempt, due to shaky fingers, I remembered what to do and the alarm finally stopped. I took a few breaths, waited till the ringing died down in my ears. I pressed the button for the gate, then went downstairs and opened the front door. While I waited for Marcus to make his way up the road, I wandered around the house. I ran my fingers over all the surfaces. Some were slightly dusty. I heard Marcus behind me, his voice echoing in the entrance hall. I heard him whistle, impressed.

  I went into the kitchen, saw family dinners at the table, rushed breakfasts at the breakfast counter, Christmas dinners in the nearby dining area, noisy parties, birthday parties, New Year’s Eve. I remembered fights, Mum and Dad, Me and Dad. I remembered dancing. Dancing with my dad for everyone at one party. I remember Dad’s party trick, a long story that I never really understood but loved to hear him tell. He would come alive, he would love the limelight in the company of those he trusted. His cheeks would be flushed with alcohol, his blue eyes glazed but he would recant the tale perfectly and confidently, just dying to get to that final line to see everybody erupting in laughter. I could see Mum’s area where she’d prop herself with her lady friends for the night, all huddled together, elegant women with expensive shoes, thin ankles, tanned skin and highlighted hair.

  As I turned away, I saw Dad wander through the halls, wink at me, cigar in hand as he went to the only room Mum would let him smoke in. I followed him in there. I watched him enter and greet his friends. They all cheered as he opened the best brandy, as they settled down for a chat or to play snooker. I looked around the walls and remembered the photographs. His achievements, his degrees, his sports trophies, his family photographs. Me teary-eyed on my first day of school, me on his shoulders in Disney World, wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt with my hair in pigtails, a silly smile with missing front teeth. I moved into the next room. Dad and his friends on the top of a ski slope in Aspen. A photo of Dad playing golf with Padraig Harrington at a celebrity charity event.

  I moved into the television room and saw him sitting in his favourite armchair watching television. Mum in the other corner, legs curled up underneath her, her arms wrapped around her legs protectively, the two of them laughing at some comedy show. Then he looked at me and he winked again. He stood up and I followed him. We walked through the entrance hall, past Marcus, who was watching me, then he walked through the closed office door. He disappeared. I couldn’t go in there.

  The fight. The horrible fight we’d had. I’d slammed that door in his face and run upstairs. I should have told him I loved him. I should have said sorry and hugged him.

  ‘I never want to see you again. I hate you!’

  ‘Tamara, come back!’ His voice. His lovely voice that I want to hear again. Oh, Daddy, I’m here, I’m back. Please come out of the office.

  Then the next morning, seeing him, my beautiful dad. My handsome dad on the floor. Not the way he was supposed to be. He was supposed to live forever. He was supposed to mind me forever. He was supposed to interrogate my boyfriends and walk me down the aisle. He was supposed to gently persuade Mum when I couldn’t get my way, he was supposed to wink at me when he caught my eye. He was supposed to look at me proudly for the rest of my life. And then when he got old I was supposed to protect him, I was supposed to be there for him, paying it all back.

  It had been my fault. It had all been my fault. I’d tried to save him but I didn’t even know how to do that properly. If I’d learned how, if I’d paid attention at school, if I’d tried to be an interested, better person than the selfish one I’d been, then maybe I could have helped. They’d said I got to him too late, that there was nothing I could possibly have done, but still you never know. I’m his daughter-maybe that would have helped.

  That room, his room, that smelled of him. His aftershave, of cigars, of wine or brandy, of books and wood. The room he’d taken his life in, with the vomit-stained rug from where I’d thrown up
the red wine on the night after his funeral. I couldn’t go in there.

  I heard the clink of cans and the rustle of a plastic bag, and I turned around. Marcus was watching me.

  ‘Nice house.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You okay?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Must be weird being back here.’

  I nodded again.

  ‘You’re not very chatty today.’

  ‘I didn’t really bring you here to talk.’

  He looked at me then. I could see it in his face, he wanted it too.

  Tell him. Tell him.

  ‘So come on, let me show you the best room in the house,’ I smiled. I took him by the hand and I led him upstairs.

  Back in my bedroom, I lay down on my bedroom floor, on the soft plush cream carpet where my king-sized bed used to be with the white leather headboard. My head spun from the alcohol and from all that had been going on. I wanted to forget everything that had happened that day-Sister Ignatius, Weseley, Rosaleen, Dr Gedad, the mystery woman in Rosaleen’s mother’s house. I wanted to forget my mother as I’d tried to drag her limp frail body out of bed. I wanted to forget Kilsaney and all the people in it. I wanted to forget we’d ever left this house and that Dad had ever done what he’d done. I wanted to go back to the night I’d crept out and then had the fight with him. I wanted everything to change.

  And then everything changed.

  Everything.

  And if I’d managed at any stage to upstand the dominoes, they all started to fall again.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  RIP

  Though two years ago our house in Killiney could have fetched a whopping eight million euro, it stood for sale for half of that now. I know how much it had been worth because Dad regularly had it valued. Each time the new valuations would come through, he’d surface from the cellar of his eight-million-euro home with a €600 bottle of Chateau Latour to share with his perfect model wife and his perfectly hormonally imbalanced teenage daughter.

  I don’t begrudge Dad his success. I’m not one of those people and not just because his success was inevitably our success-ironically, his failures became ours too-but because he worked hard, early mornings, late nights, weekends. He cared about what he did, he donated regularly to charities. Whether he did it in a tuxedo, in front of a flashing camera, or with his hand raised high at a charity ball auction was entirely irrelevant. He gave and that’s what mattered. There was nothing wrong with having an expensive home, nothing wrong at all. There’s a pride in building something up, working hard to achieve something. But it shouldn’t have been his manhood that increased with each new success, it should have been his heart. His success was like the witch in the ‘Hansel and Gretel’ fairy tale: it fed him for all the wrong reasons, fattening him in all the wrong places. Dad deserved his success, he just needed a masterclass in humility. I could have done with one too. How special I thought I was in the silver Aston Martin in which he drove me to school some mornings. How special am I now, now that somebody bought it from a depot of repossessed cars, for a fraction of the price. How special indeed.

  The reason I mentioned the price of the house is because though the sale price had been halved, and judging by the dust that had settled inside it would be reduced even further, the house was still asking a high price and so was still a priority sale for the estate agents. Little did I know that when I opened the balcony door to my bedroom and set off the alarm, it sent an automated response phone call to the estate agent, who in her worryingly quiet offices, immediately jumped into her car and came to check the premises. While I was three flights upstairs, facing the wrong direction, of course I didn’t hear the electric gates open half a mile down the driveway. While I was in the throes of it all, I also didn’t hear her open the front door and step into the entrance hall.

  But she heard us.

  And so the next people that paid us a visit were the garda? Three flights of heavy pounding on the stairs allowed us at least not to be doing what we’d been previously doing on the floor of my bedroom, but it didn’t give us enough time to clothe ourselves and so huddled behind Marcus, with my clothes scattered around me, I met Garda Fitzgibbon, an overweight man from Connemara, with a redder face than mine, who I’d regularly been acquainted with on the beach with my friends. This was not the time for reunions.

  ‘I’ll give you a minute to get dressed, Miss Goodwin,’ he said, immediately looking away.

  Twenty-two-year-old Marcus, who’d been invited to an eighteen-year-old girl’s house which hadn’t yet been sold, found the entire thing mildly embarrassing, but mostly amusing. He didn’t know that the girl he’d just slept with was a few weeks away from her seventeenth birthday, and so not only were the bottles of beer highly illegal, so was half of what they’d done on the carpet. He kept looking at me and snorting while we quickly got dressed. I was panicked, my heart thudding so loudly I could barely think, feeling so queasy I was afraid I’d vomit right there in front of them all.

  ‘Tamara, relax,’ he said cockily. ‘They can’t do anything. It’s your house.’

  I looked at him then, and I hated myself more than he was ever going to.

  ‘It’s not my house, Marcus,’ I whispered, my voice refusing to work.

  ‘Well your parents’, whatever…’ he smiled, and pulled his jeans up one leg.

  ‘The bank took it,’ I said, sitting there, dressed, feeling completely out of it. ‘It’s not ours any more.’

  ‘What?’ A giant domino fell. I felt the floor vibrate as it thudded to the floor, like a great big skyscraper crashing down.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, then started crying. Then the words I wanted to say to him for so long, finally came out, but all in the wrong way and totally at the wrong time. ‘I’m sixteen,’ I panicked.

  Thankfully Garda Fitzgibbon, who’d been standing at the door, was on alert after the first raised voice and heard the rest of the conversation. He at least would believe Marcus didn’t know, but it was up to Marcus to prove that in court. He also had to step in as Marcus came flying at me in anger, not to hit me, but shouting at me with such ferocity I wanted him to throw more at me, call me everything under the sun, but he just yelled and I knew that I’d ruined everything for him. Whatever arrangement he’d made with his dad in that travelling library, it’d probably been his last chance. We’d never spoken about it but I recognise somebody on their last chance. I used to see it in the mirror every day.

  We were brought to the station. Went through the humiliation of giving statements of the entire account. I was hoping the first time I finally had sex I could write all the juicy and embarrassing details in a diary, not at a police station. Tamara Goodwin. Tamara Fuckup, ripping things apart as usual.

  Rosaleen and Arthur had to drive to Dublin to collect me from the station. As soon as Marcus’s dad found out, he sent a car for him. I tried to apologise over and over again, desperately between tears and trying to cling to him so he’d stop and listen, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He wouldn’t even look at me.

  Arthur stayed in the car while Rosaleen met with the garda, the next most embarrassing thing that happened to me that day. Rosaleen seemed more concerned about Marcus, what would happen to him. They told her the maximum sentence for sleeping with a “child” under seventeen was two years. I broke down crying at that. Rosaleen seemed as distraught as I was. I don’t know if it was because I’d soiled their name, even more so than my father’s suicide had, or if she was genuinely fond of Marcus. She asked question after question about Marcus until Garda Fitzgibbon seemed to calm her with the news that he seemed to genuinely not know what age I was and that if he could argue this in court then he’d be okay. It seemed to be enough for Rosaleen but it wasn’t enough for me. How long would this take him? How many sessions in court? How much humiliation? I’d ruined his life.

  Rosaleen didn’t even try to talk to me, she barely even looked at me. She curtly told me Arthur was waiting and then she left the stati
on. I eventually followed her. There was the most horrific tension in the car when I sat inside, as though they’d had a fight. I suppose what had happened to me was enough cause for there to be tension. I was mortified, absolutely mortified. I couldn’t look at Arthur. He said nothing when I sat in the car and then we pulled away and headed back to Kilsaney. I was actually relieved to be going so far away, to be so disconnected from what had happened. It had finally ripped through the umbilical cord that tied me to this place. Maybe that had been my intention.

  I cried the entire way home, so embarrassed, so disappointed, so angry. All of those emotions were directed at myself. My head thumped as the male voice on the radio entered my ears and got closer and closer to my brain, and as the alcohol left its calling card. About thirty minutes in, Arthur pulled the car over outside a shop.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Rosaleen asked.

  ‘Could you get some bottles of water and some headache tablets?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘What? Me?’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked him.

  ‘Rose,’ he merely said.

  I’d never heard him call her that. It struck with me as familiar-I’d seen it somewhere, heard it somewhere-but I couldn’t think. Rosaleen looked back at me and then at Arthur, her worst fear having to leave us two alone. I thought fast. Eventually she got out of the car and practically ran into the shop.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Arthur asked, looking at me in the mirror.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ My tears welled again. ‘I’m so sorry, Arthur. I’m so embarrassed.’

  ‘Don’t be embarrassed, child,’ he said softly. ‘We all do things when we’re young. It will pass.’ He gave me a small smile. ‘Just as long as you’re okay?’ He gave me a look then, a worried look of a paternal concern over what I’d done.