The Time of My Life

by Cecelia Ahern

  ‘Oh, man, that kitchen,’ he shook his head. ‘That was some kitchen, but you should see the one I have now. I’m using this amazing oven; it’s a built-in multi-function stainless-steel PyroKlean oven. It offers you forty different programmes for fresh and frozen foods and you just enter the weight of the food and the oven automatically selects the best setting, then it controls—’

  ‘—the cooking time and switches off when the meal is done, using the residual heat to save energy,’ I interrupted.

  His mouth dropped. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘I wrote it,’ I said, proudly.

  ‘I don’t understand, you wrote what?’

  ‘The instruction manual. I work at Mantic. Or at least I did until yesterday. I translated the manuals.’

  He continued to look at me in such an unusual way that I had to turn around to make sure it was me he was looking at, at all.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘What happened to Quinn and Downing?’

  ‘I haven’t worked there for years,’ I laughed. Then, though I tried to keep it casual, I added more seriously, ‘Didn’t Adam tell you anything about me over the past few years?’ I meant it. I thought that everything I was doing was going back to Blake, I thought he knew everything about me and I knew nothing about him. For the past few years I’d made decisions and created lies thinking they’d be working their way back to him, and he didn’t even know what had happened on Day One, the day that he left me and I lost my job.

  ‘Adam? No,’ he said, confused, then smiled and his face lit up again. ‘So let me tell you about this Moroccan pie—’

  ‘He thinks I cheated on you,’ I interrupted his recipe. I didn’t plan to say that, never ever in all of my conniving thoughts and pre-planning plans; it just came flying out of my mouth.

  ‘Huh?’ He had been about to talk about saffron and this had put a spanner in the works.

  ‘They all do.’ I tried to keep the tremor out of my voice, the tremor not of nerves but of anger; it was building again and I was fighting hard to keep it under wraps.

  ‘Blake,’ called a guy who stuck his head in the door. ‘We have to get a move on.’

  ‘Coming now,’ Blake said and he picked up the equipment. ‘Let’s go,’ he grinned. My anger once again dissipated and I found myself with a mushy smile on my face.

  The plane held six people, which was three groups. Harry was strapped to Blake, and the young fertile lady who wanted to have Blake’s babies was strapped to another instructor named Jeremy – the one whose timely arrival had stopped me from exploding at Blake in the equipment room – and she was staring at Harry with jealousy over having pulled the short straw. Life was wearing an orange jumpsuit with goggles over his eyes; he was sitting on the floor between my legs with his back against my front, and every now and then he looked at me with absolute disgust and terror.

  He turned around again as we took off. ‘“The view will be nice,”’ he hissed at me.

  ‘It is a beautiful view,’ I smiled calmly.

  ‘“And you can land with the pilot,”’ he said angrily. ‘You tricked me. You lied to me. That’s one big lie,’ he said with venom in his voice.

  ‘You don’t have to jump,’ I said, trying to be relaxed, but really I was worried. I couldn’t afford for Life to tell a humongous truth. Not here, not now, not with Blake so close that our feet were touching.

  ‘Then why am I attached to you by an umbilical cord?’

  ‘You can pretend to have a panic attack. We can go back down if you want, I just wanted to, you know, do this one more time with him.’

  ‘Pretend? I won’t need to bloody pretend,’ he said, then faced front again and ignored me for the rest of the journey. Harry was absolutely terrified looking and was green in the face; I could see his body trembling. Our eyes met.

  ‘You’re going to love it. Just picture Declan with no eyebrows.’ He smiled, closed his eyes and took deep breaths. Blake and I watched one another as the plane left the ground and we went up to the sky. We couldn’t stop ourselves from smiling; he shook his head again out of disbelief that I was there. We climbed up to two hundred feet. We flew for twenty minutes and finally we were ready for action. Blake opened the door and wind blasted inside as the countryside below was revealed to us like a patchwork quilt.

  Life uttered a tirade of unrepeatable expletives.

  ‘Ladies first,’ Blake shouted, moving aside for Life and me.

  ‘No, no, you go ahead,’ I said firmly. ‘We’re going to go last.’ I tried to give Blake warning eyes to hint that Life was afraid but Life had turned around again to stare at me.

  ‘No, I insist,’ Blake said. ‘Just like old times.’

  ‘I’d love to but … he’s a bit nervous, I think it’s better if we watch first. Okay?’

  Life was fuming. ‘Nervous? I’m not nervous. Come on, let’s go.’ He started shuffling on his bottom to the edge of the plane and I was pulled along with him. I was flabbergasted but wouldn’t argue with him, so I checked that the tandem harness and parachute were safely secured and we moved to the edge of the plane. I couldn’t believe Life was doing this, I had been expecting us to go back down with the pilot. I had been disappointed all the way up and now I was ready, adrenaline was pumping.

  ‘Are you ready?’ I shouted.

  ‘I hate you,’ he shouted back, in a shrill voice.

  I counted him down. On three, we were out the door, free falling through the sky and up to the speed of 200 km per hour in just ten seconds. Life was shouting so loudly, one long scream of terror all the way down, while I felt alive. I whooped happily alongside him so that he knew it was okay, that this was not a mistake, that we were supposed to be twirling around like snowflakes, not knowing what direction we were going in. Then finally we adopted the free-fall position, and we floated and fell for a total of twenty-five seconds, experiencing the ultimate rush; the wind in our ears, in our hair, everywhere, loud and cold and wonderfully terrifying. When we reached 5,000 feet I deployed the main parachute and once it was open, suddenly the mania and the rush of the wind in our ears was gone. Everything was quiet, everything was blissful and wonderful.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Life said, breathless and husky after his fit of screaming.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Okay? I almost had a heart attack. But this,’ he looked around, ‘this is amazing.’

  ‘Told you,’ I said, so pleased to be sharing this moment with my life. I was so happy I was fit to burst; the two of us hung there in the air, suspended like the two freest souls in the universe.

  ‘I didn’t mean it when I said I hated you.’

  ‘Good. Because I love you,’ I said, out of nowhere.

  He turned around. ‘I love you too, Lucy,’ he beamed. ‘Now shut up talking, you’re spoiling my experience.’

  I laughed. ‘Do you want to steer?’

  Life took control and steered the parachute and we moved around the sky, flying like a bird, taking the world in, feeling happy, feeling alive, feeling united and complete. Our perfect happy moment. The flight lasted four minutes and finally I took control again for landing. We adopted the landing position, legs and feet up, knees together. I slowed the parachute and we touched down for a soft landing.

  Life collapsed on the ground in a fit of exhilarated laughter.

  Released from the parachute and from me, Life jumped up and ran around in circles as though he were drunk, whooping and laughing.

  ‘That was absolutely incredible. I want to it again, let’s do it again, can we do it again?’

  I laughed. ‘I can’t believe you did it!’

  ‘And let him see that I was weak? Are you joking?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Blake. Who else? I don’t want that idiot seeing me back out of anything. I want him to know I don’t care what he thinks of me, I’m tougher than he thinks.’

  ‘What? I don’t understand. Why are you trying to create a battle with him?’r />
  ‘I’m not creating anything, Lucy. It’s his issue. Always has been.’

  ‘What are you talking—’

  ‘Anyway, never mind,’ he said, smiling again and doing a celebration dance. ‘Woohooooo!’

  Feeling happy about Life’s exhilaration but confused as to its source, I watched him with mixed emotions. Surely, in order for my newly rediscovered love for Blake to be fair and right, both Life and I should be on the same page when it came to our feelings. I wanted us all to get along, not for Life to be preoccupied with one-upmanship, but perhaps this was the natural course of things. Blake had hurt me, had wounded my life, and though I was on my way to forgiving him and was able to accept responsibility for my side of the relationship’s failure, Life needed more time. But what did that mean? What did that mean for Blake and me? Usually after parachute jumps I felt exhilarated, just as Life did, and everything became clear, but suddenly my headache was back, the one I got when I had deep emotional thoughts about issues I’d rather sweep under the shagpile of my mind. A jeep was headed towards us across the field. A lone woman sat behind the wheel and as she got closer Jenna’s face came into view. My heart twisted in the same way it used to when I thought of her, even though I knew for sure, without doubt, they weren’t in a relationship.

  ‘You look like you want to kill someone,’ Life said breathlessly, finally stopping his whooping and standing beside me.

  ‘Funny that,’ I said, watching Jenna come closer, with two hands gripping the sides of the wheel, staring at me intently. I wondered if she was going to stop.

  ‘Be careful, Lucy, she’s a nice girl. Anyway, I thought you said they weren’t together,’ he said.

  ‘They’re not.’

  ‘Then why do you still hate her?’

  ‘Habit, I suppose.’

  ‘Just like loving him,’ Life said, looking up to the sky. Then he left me alone to view Blake floating down like the perfect pumped-up angel and ponder that bombshell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Blake and I were face to face in the people carrier. He had his back to my life who had declared he was ‘riding shotgun’, then persisted to gabble excitedly to Jenna who was behind the wheel. Occasionally Jenna would break from my life’s full attention to the rear-view mirror to check I wasn’t misbehaving, and each time she played taxi mom, our eyes met and she quickly looked away. She knew, and I knew, and we both knew that we both knew; an ex-girlfriend and a girlfriend in waiting, we were like two hawks circling our prey, wary of one another, wondering who was going to go in first for the kill. The no-longer-green-in-the-face Harry and the girl who wanted to have Blake’s babies were engrossed in their own little adrenaline love fest, talking a mile a minute about the experience they’d just had, going over each second of the dive, each following up the other’s description with an overenthusiastic ‘Me too!’ I sensed Blake had just lost his chance of a surrogate, if indeed he ever needed one. Jeremy, the second instructor, was staring out of the window, cool and uninterested by anything inside, outside or around the general vicinity of the jeep, but apart from him everybody was on a high. My heart? It soared. My adrenaline pumped for different reasons from the others; mine was because I was in love, but instead of enjoying it, I was having a full-on debate in my mind about whether it was a habit or not. These moments with Blake were precious and crucial, I had waited a long time to be this close both physically and emotionally, and I was destroying it by developing new thoughts which I had more than enough time to create while I wasn’t with him. Plenty of hours alone on the couch with Mr Pan, in a club, pub, restaurant or family occasion, to ponder the foundations and authenticity of my love and yet I chose now, now goddamnit, to have a crisis of the mind. It was frustrating, I was the most frustrating human being on the planet.

  Blake and I watched one another; there was a smile on his face as bright as my new bathroom light bulb which, given, on first read is a lame and unromantic simile, but when plunged in darkness for a year whilst on the toilet, a new light bulb is a very welcoming and enlightening thing to have, not to mention useful. Jenna said something in the front seat, Life howled with laughter and while Blake was before me smiling at me, promising a million tomorrows – or at least a tonight which I would gladly take, I wasn’t fussy – their growing bond over the past five minutes bothered me to distraction. Life’s disgusting rash was gone, he was delirious with happiness and as much as I tried to convince myself it was Blake’s doing, the reality felt very far away. He’d hit it off far more with Jenna than with the love of my life, and it wasn’t for his lack of trying either. I had seen it first-hand on the first day we met how Life could have greeted Blake – he could quite simply have been a bastard – and I was so thankful for Blake not to have seen that side of him. Whatever possibility of a future would we have together if Blake hated my life? And who would I choose? A new thought, which scared me. I wanted to slap my own face. Stop thinking, Lucy, it’s never done anybody any good.

  ‘Just like old times,’ Blake said suddenly.

  Something about that irked me. I analysed it as Life had programmed me to do to everything, it seemed, and it wasn’t him that bothered me. It was neither his expression, nor his tone, it was the mere sentiment itself. Yes it did feel like old times but there was a large pile separating us, it was the unsaid all swept under the mat between us, getting so high that I could barely see his face. But I didn’t want to pull back the rug, I didn’t want to go backwards by delving into the compost heap of our past problems. I wanted to stay right here in the car in the airfield with the unsaid all still hidden away, suspended in time where everything was still and quiet and blissful, like we were floating down to earth with a great big parachute tying us together.

  ‘Are you staying around?’

  I wasn’t sure if he was asking me to, or asking if I planned to; there was a difference. I played it safe.

  ‘I have to go back today. He has to meet somebody later.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A guy called Don,’ I replied, confused as to why he’d ask and then I realised what he’d meant, he’d forgotten about the presence of my life again. ‘My life,’ I said firmly which took him back. ‘My life is meeting someone called Don.’

  ‘But you can stay, can’t you?’ He gave me a mischievous smile, one of his best, and I couldn’t help but break my momentarily hardened exterior. ‘Come on,’ he laughed, leaning forward and squeezing just above my knees where he knew I was ticklish.

  Jenna looked in the rear-view mirror. Our eyes met. I couldn’t help but laugh, not at her, which she might have assumed, but because Blake’s fingers were wrapped around the ticklish part of my thigh and I couldn’t keep a straight face.

  ‘Jer’s having celebration drinks tonight.’ He continued tickling while I battled him off, laughing. ‘He’s thirty.’

  ‘I wish,’ Jeremy said, smiling, still looking out the window.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ I said but he still didn’t look at me. He was one of those people who made you feel like they either didn’t know or didn’t care that you were in the room and if they ever did acknowledge your existence it was bizarrely score one to you, and twenty years later they’d tell you they’d always had a crush on you but never had the courage to say anything and you’d tell them, What? I didn’t even think you liked me? And they’d say, Are you crazy? I just never knew what to say! At least that’s what happened with Christian Byrne who confessed to me in a bar four months ago, the coolest guy in our tennis camp when I was fifteen, who spoke to and kissed practically every girl in the dorm apart from me. And after all that time and after the confession, I still couldn’t kiss him because he’d gotten a girl pregnant and they were getting married because he felt it was the right thing even though it had caused him to end up in a dodgy strip club on Leeson Street at four in the morning and confess his love to a girl he hadn’t seen for fifteen years. I was in the club with Melanie, in case inquiring minds wanted to know.

  ‘We’d lo
ve to go if you don’t mind,’ I said to Jeremy.

  Jeremy didn’t react. Jeremy didn’t know or didn’t care that I was talking to him. Jeremy secretly loved me, he would discover this soon enough but by then it would be too late because I would be back with Blake. Their friendship would suffer because he wouldn’t be able to stand seeing his best friend with the woman he loves so he would have to quit his job and move away, try to find another love but he never would, he’d eventually find someone but it wouldn’t be his one true love; he’d get married and have children but each time he and his wife would finish making love and she’d fall asleep, he’d lie awake until late in the night always thinking of the woman he left behind in Bastardstown, Co. Wexford. Me.

  ‘Course he doesn’t mind,’ Blake answered on his behalf. ‘It’s in the Bodhrán at six o’clock. We’ll go as soon as we get out of here. Come,’ he said, playfully prodding at my legs again, one poke with each word. ‘Come, come, come.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ I laughed, using all my strength to catch his fingers to stop him from tickling me, but he was stronger and he grabbed my hands and we clasped fingers and sat like that, leaning in towards each other, staring at each other. ‘I’ll come,’ I said.

  ‘You bet you will,’ he joked quietly, and my heart actually had a conniption fit.

  ‘We can’t go,’ Life said as we lay on the floor in the back of the camper van, looking up through the skylight to the perfect blue sky we had merely moments ago fallen through. The camper van was still parked in the car park and we were waiting for the others to join us after Declan, Annie and Josh had finished their dive. Harry was somewhere using clever wordplay to figure his way into the underwear of the girl who wanted Blake’s babies.

  ‘Why can’t we go?’

  ‘Don!’

  ‘Screw Don!’ I said, immediately feeling guilty, but I was more than frustrated that my life was missing the point.