The Book of Tomorrow

by Cecelia Ahern

  Rosaleen’s door opened. Footsteps down the corridor. My bedroom door opened. The long white nightie was illuminated in the moonlight. She interrogated me for a few minutes about hearing a door close but I denied it. She stared at me in a long silence, as if trying to decide whether I was telling the truth or not, nodded, then closed the door. I heard her bedsprings and after that, silence.

  I couldn’t sleep after that. I just kept thinking about whether my lie to mum was right or wrong. By the time morning light had flooded my room, I realised I had made a mistake. I should have just told her the truth.

  I’ll write again tomorrow.

  After reading that entry, I had the day to plan what I was going to say to Mum. I felt anxious throughout the day, watching Mum’s silent living and knowing that soon enough that spell would be broken. I tried to remember the diary entry word for word. I didn’t want to get it all wrong. I wanted to do and say exactly the same things as I’d written so as to summon the same response. I wanted her to come to my room in the middle of the night. Then I wanted to tell her the truth about the glass tear drop. I waited all day.

  Finally after dinner I went upstairs to her bedroom. She was lying in bed, examining the ceiling, humming softly.

  ‘I have something for you,’ I said, my voice so croaky that the words were barely audible. I started again. ‘I have something for you.’

  She kept humming as I reached into my pocket and felt around for the glass, which was warm from my body. I placed it down on the bedside table. The gentle tapping sound made her eyes turn, but not the rest of her head. When her eyes landed on the glass tear drop, she instantly stopped humming and her finger stopped twirling her hair.

  ‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’ I asked.

  She looked at me then, and I recognised the moment that spark entered her eyes. She returned her stare to the tear drop. Not wanting to but knowing I should follow protocol, I reached for it and just as I’d written, out came her hand and it landed on mine to prevent me from taking it.

  ‘No,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, smiling. ‘Okay.’

  I sat up in bed, unable to sleep, knowing she would awaken me. I read the diary entry for the next day, unsure whether it would be accurate as events that were about to unfold would probably alter the day that Tamara of Tomorrow had.

  Friday 24 Friday

  Happy Birthday to me. Seventeen. I decided to get out of bed this morning and Rosaleen was surprised to see me. I think I almost gave her a heart attack in the pantry when I entered the kitchen. I thought she was up to something, because she looked as guilty as sin and shoved something in the pocket of her apron. It could have been something for the cake but I don’t know…

  She gave me an awkward hug and kiss, and then danced off with Mum’s tray to give her her breakfast and then to get my gift from her bedroom. She returned with a perfectly wrapped gift, pink paper with white and pink ribbon. It was a basket of Strawberry bubble bath, soaps and shampoo. She was practically hyperventilating while I opened it, leering over me with a nervous smile to see if I liked it or not. I told her I did. I told her it was perfect and I genuinely did like it. It was different for me. Last year for my sixteenth birthday, I’d received a Louis Vuitton handbag and a pair of Gina shoes, this year, a bubble bath and shampoo set, but weirdly I was more grateful for this because I actually needed it. I was running out of shampoo and the red squirrels weren’t easily impressed by the Louis Vuitton bags.

  Then she said an extraordinary thing-‘I saw it last month, would you believe, and I thought to myself and I even said it to Arthur, “That’s got Tamara’s name written all over it.” I’ve been hiding it in the garage since then and I was so terrified you’d find it,’ she giggled nervously.

  That comment chilled me. Rosaleen was cleverer than I gave her credit for. There was no way that she would have avoided my going to the garage, or tried to stop us storing our belongings in there because she was hiding a little soap basket. She was either cleverer or she thought I was stupid. My hunger to get inside that garage has been stirred even more.

  Mum slept all day again. Zoey and Laura both phoned the house. I told Rosaleen to tell them I was out.

  Sister Ignatius called by with a present for me. Rosaleen offered to pass it on but Sister wouldn’t give it to her. The longer I ignore her, the worse I’m making it. Now I’ve so much more to apologise for. I think she’s been the best friend I’ve ever had but I just feel like hiding from the world. I can’t bear being seen.

  After dinner, Rosaleen emerged from the pantry with a chocolate cake with candles singing ‘Happy Birthday’. That must have been what I almost caught her doing in the pantry this morning. It’s probably too late to check that apron pocket now.

  I’ll write again tomorrow.

  I must admit I hadn’t thought much about my birthday during the past couple of weeks and the times I had thought about it, it was with a heavy feeling for poor Marcus. If only we’d just waited. If only I’d just told him. I hadn’t thought about what kind of celebrations I could have or would have had in my previous life or what kind of presents I would have been adorned with from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep. But after reading today and yesterday’s entry, I was fired up. I was excited.

  It was as though I’d spent the past days wandering through a misty glen and I couldn’t see past my own nose. But now the fog had lifted. My mind had just been so busy mulling over something in all that time that it couldn’t concentrate on anything else. It seemed to have come to the end of its wander because I was sitting up in bed, fully alert, my heart racing, feeling breathless as though I’d run for miles. I was intent on figuring out what on earth Rosaleen had been doing, or was about to do in the pantry tomorrow morning.

  As I was working out a plan, I heard Mum’s door open. I quickly lay down and closed my eyes. She closed the door behind her ever so quietly, aware that she needed to be silent. She sat on the edge of my bed and I waited for her hand on my shoulder. There it was. The urgent squeeze.

  I opened my eyes, not feeling the panic I’d written about, but instead feeling totally prepared.

  ‘Where did you get it?’ she whispered, her face close to mine.

  I sat up.

  ‘Across the road. In the bungalow,’ I whispered back.

  ‘Rosaleen’s house,’ she whispered, and immediately looked out the window. ‘The light,’ she said, and I noticed a kind of a light flashing on my bedroom wall opposite the window. It had the same effect of trees swishing from side to side across the moonlight causing the light to appear and disappear in the room. Only it wasn’t the trees because it seemed to sparkle more, like glass, releasing prisms of colour. It reflected against Mum’s pale face and she seemed caught in its field, entranced. I immediately looked out my window and across to the bungalow. Hanging in the front window a glass mobile caught the light, sending beams flashing outward, almost like a lighthouse.

  ‘There are hundreds more of them over there,’ I whispered. ‘I wasn’t supposed to be there, it’s just that, she…’ we both looked to the wall as we heard the springs in Rosaleen and Arthur’s bed, ‘she was being so secretive. I just wanted to say hello to her mother, that’s all. I brought her over some breakfast a couple of weeks ago and I saw someone in the shed in the back garden. It wasn’t her mother.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. A woman. An old woman, with long hair. She was working in there. Making them. She must blow the glass herself. Do you think she’s allowed to do that? Legally?’ I looked at the tear drop in her hand. ‘There were hundreds of them. All hanging on lines. I’ll show you them. When I went back to collect the tray, it was sitting on the wall outside. This was in it.’

  We both looked at the tear drop.

  ‘What does it mean?’ I broke the silence.

  ‘Does she know?’ Mum asked, not answering my question.

  I took the ‘she’ to mean Rosaleen. ‘No. What’s going on?’
>
  She squeezed her eyes shut and covered them with her hands. She rubbed her eyes fiercely, then ran her hands through her hair as though trying to wake herself up.

  ‘I’m sorry. I feel so fuzzy. I just can’t seem to…wake up,’ she said, rubbing her eyes again. Then she looked at me directly, her eyes shining. She leaned in and kissed me on the forehead. ‘I love you, sweetie. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  But I was asking her back view as she rose and quietly left my bedroom. I looked outside again at the light, the jagged glass twirling around as though being blown from inside. Then, as I was concentrating on that, the curtain moved and I realised someone had been watching me. Or had been watching us.

  Then I heard Rosaleen’s door open, footsteps down the hall and my door opened. There she stood in her vision of white.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, following the diary.

  ‘I heard a door close.’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

  After a long stare, she left me alone to ponder what I had achieved by telling Mum the truth. Something good had to come of it surely, and I was sure I was about to find out. I opened the diary again to see if the entry had changed. I held my breath.

  As I opened the front page, the pages started to slowly curl inward at the edges, becoming browned and charcoaled, as though they were burning before my very eyes. Eventually they stopped retreating and the burned stained pages stared back, hiding tomorrow’s world from me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Housewife in the Pantry with the Cocoa Powder

  I hardly slept after the incident in the early hours of the morning. I lay with my covers up to my chin, rigid with a cold fear that had me hopping in my bed every time I heard the slightest noise. I was pretty sure that the woman in the bungalow was the person who’d followed me to the graveyard the week before last, and as the morning moved on and the sun shed light on the shadows, I became less frightened of her. Perhaps she wasn’t dangerous, perhaps just a little odd. By the look of her hair and clothing at the studio, she wasn’t somebody that saw people regularly. Besides, she’d given me a gift of the small tear-shaped glass. She was obviously reaching out.

  But the burned diary gave me a sense of impending doom.

  When I did sleep I dreamed of fire: of castles on fire, and books on fire. I dreamed of glass being made, blobs of molten hot glass being shaped and dripping. After waking up to a dark room, with my heart beating wildly in my chest, I tried hard to stay awake. I watched the pages of the diary for the rest of the morning, waiting for the burned pages to uncurl themselves, for the writing to magically appear in its neat loops and crosses. But they remained the same.

  I was up early the next morning determined to catch Rosaleen do whatever she was doing. Catching the Housewife in the Pantry with the Cocoa Powder wasn’t exactly the most exciting thing in the world, but I had realised that the diary was leading me somewhere, was trying to show me something, pointing to the way out just as I had been trying to show the bluebottle. I would be a fool to ignore the miracle of what was occurring. Every word was a clue, every sentence an arrow, a signpost for me to get out of here.

  The radio was blaring in the kitchen, Arthur was having a shower and Rosaleen thought she had the morning entirely to herself. She turned and headed to the pantry, and I ducked out of sight behind the hall door just in time. I could see her in the pantry through the crack in the door.

  She had Mum’s breakfast tray on the counter and she reached into a box, hidden behind another box and took out a container of pills. My heart hammered. I had to block my mouth to make sure I didn’t scream. I watched her tip two capsules into the palm of her hand, open them and sprinkle the powder into the porridge and mix it around. I fought with whether to jump out then and confront her. I had her. I’d known she was up to something but now I had to stop myself. They could merely be headache pills and my pouncing on her would backfire, again, or else they were something more serious, which were making Mum sicker. I leaned in closer to the crack in the door but as I did so, the floorboard under my foot creaked. Rosaleen immediately dropped the container into her apron, picked up the tray and swivelled around as though nothing had happened. I quickly stepped out from behind the door.

  ‘Oh, good morning,’ she said, a bright smile. ‘How is the birthday girl today?’ I might have been paranoid but I was convinced her eyes were searching my face to see if I’d witnessed her actions.

  ‘Old.’ I returned the smile, doing my best to regain my composure.

  ‘Oh you’re not old, child,’ she laughed. ‘I remember when I was your age.’ She threw her eyes to heaven. ‘It’s all ahead of you yet. Now I’ll bring this up to your mother and I’ll be back down to give you a special birthday breakfast.’

  ‘Thanks, Rosaleen,’ I said sweetly, and watched her race up the stairs.

  As she disappeared into Mum’s bedroom and the door closed behind her, the mail landed on the mat by the front door. I stalled, waiting for Rosaleen to come flying down on her broomstick to snatch it, but she didn’t. She didn’t hear it. I reached for the post-only two white envelopes, probably bills-and rushed into the kitchen with them. I didn’t know what to do. I looked around quickly for somewhere to hide them. I wouldn’t have time to read them now. I heard Rosaleen’s feet on the stairs again and my heart slammed in my chest. Last minute, I decided to tuck the envelopes into the back of my tracksuit bottoms and covered them over with my baggy boyfriend cardigan. I stood in the centre of the kitchen with my hands behind my back looking as guilty as sin.

  She slowed when she saw me. The muscles in her neck protruded.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’re not doing nothing. What’s in your hands, Tamara?’ she said forcefully.

  ‘Fucking thongs,’ I said, pulling at the back of my trousers.

  ‘Show me your hands.’ She raised her voice.

  I took my hands out from behind my back; waved them at her cockily.

  ‘Turn around.’ Her voice quivered.

  ‘No,’ I said defiantly.

  The doorbell rang. Rosaleen didn’t move. Neither did I.

  ‘Turn around,’ she repeated.

  ‘No,’ I repeated, stronger, firmer.

  The doorbell rang again.

  ‘Rose!’ Arthur shouted down the stairs. Rosaleen didn’t answer and we heard boots on the stairs as he made his way down. ‘I’ll get it so,’ he said, glancing at us with frustration. He opened the door.

  ‘Weseley.’

  ‘I couldn’t back the van up any more, is that okay? Is it in far enough? Oh, hi, Tamara,’ he said, looking in past Arthur.

  Rosaleen’s eyes narrowed even more.

  I smiled. Yes I had a friend that she didn’t know about.

  I looked at Weseley with wide eyes, willing him to pick up that something was wrong. I didn’t want him and Arthur to leave.

  ‘We’ll see you later so,’ Arthur said.

  The door closed behind them and we were left facing one another in the kitchen.

  ‘Tamara,’ Rosaleen said gently. ‘Whatever you are hiding, and I think I know what it is, just give it back.’

  ‘I’m not hiding anything, Rosaleen. Are you?’

  She twitched.

  On that note we heard a bang from upstairs, a crash of plates and then feet on the floorboards. We both snapped out of our staring match and immediately looked up.

  ‘Where is he?’ I heard my mother screech.

  I looked at Rosaleen and ran past her.

  ‘No, child.’ She pulled me back.

  ‘Rosaleen, let go, she’s my mother.’

  ‘She’s not well,’ she said nervously.

  ‘Yes, and I wonder why that is!’ I yelled in her face, and ran upstairs.

  I didn’t make it that far. Mum had flung the door open and with wide eyes, terrified eyes, was searching the corridor.

>   ‘Where is she?’ she said, unable to focus on me.

  ‘Who? Rosaleen?’ I started, but she pushed by me when she saw her at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Where is he?’ she demanded, standing at the top of the stairs in her dressing gown.

  Rosaleen, wide-eyed, was wringing her hands in her apron. I could still see the outline of the container of pills in the pocket. I looked from one to the other, not understanding what was going on.

  ‘Mum, he’s not here,’ I said, trying to hold her hand. She shook it away.

  ‘He is. I know it. I can feel him.’

  ‘Mum, he’s not here.’ I felt tears welling. ‘He’s gone.’

  Her head twisted round to me immediately then and her voice lowered to a whisper. ‘He’s not gone, Tamara. They only said he was but he’s not. I can feel him.’

  I was crying now. ‘Mum, stop, please. That’s just…that’s just…his spirit that you feel around you. He’s always going to be with you. But he’s gone…he’s really gone. Please…’

  ‘I want to see him,’ she demanded of Rosaleen.

  ‘Jennifer,’ she said, her hands reaching out even though she was too far away to touch her, ‘Jennifer, just relax, go back and lie down.’

  ‘No!’ Mum shouted, her voice trembling now. ‘I want to see him! I know he’s here. You’re hiding him!’

  ‘Mum,’ I cried, ‘she’s not. Dad’s dead, he’s really dead.’

  Mum looked at me then, and for a moment she seemed so sad. Then she was angry and ran down the stairs. Rosaleen ran for the door.

  ‘Arthur!’ she yelled outside.

  Arthur, who was only in the driveway with Weseley, loading equipment into the Land Rover, jumped to attention.

  Mum ran out to the garden, shouting, ‘Where is he?’ over and over.

  ‘Jen, stop it now. Relax, it’s okay,’ Arthur called to her calmly over and over.