Cecelia Ahern Short Stories (6 page)

Her thoughts diminished as she stared down at her card.

‘Oh,’ she said quietly with surprise.

‘Wha’?’ Aggie yelled.

Mags smiled at her lifelong friend. ‘I got bingo, Aggie.’ She clapped her hands together with glee.

‘You got wha’?’

‘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.

… 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.

Feelings of regret, gasps for breath in a heaving chest and hours of panic were spent dialling furiously, redialling, leaving tearful messages on an answering machine that felt as much as its owner. There were moments of hope, moments of despair, lights at the ends of tunnels shone, flickered and extinguished themselves as I fell back on the bed, the fight running out of me. I’d lost track of time, the bright room had turned to darkness. The sun had been replaced by the moon that had turned his back on me and guided people in the other direction. The sheets were wet from crying and the phone sat waiting to be called to duty in my hand, and the pillow still clung to his smell just as my heart clung to his love. He was gone. I untensed the muscles in my body and I breathed.

It was not supposed to end like this.

And so I won’t let it.

… Oh, sweet joy, the joy of falling in love, of being in love. Those first few years of being in love, they were only the beginning. Twenty phone calls a day just to hear his voice, sex every night until the early
hours of the morning, ignoring friends, favouring nights in curled up on the couch instead of going out, eating so much you both put weight on, supporting one another at family dos, catching roving eyes as they studied one another in secret, existing only in the world to be with them, seeing your future, your babies in their eyes, becoming a part of someone else spiritually, mentally, sexually, emotionally.

Nothing lasts for ever, they say. I didn’t fall in love with anyone else, nor did he. I’ve no dramatic story of walking in on him, in our bedroom with the skinny girl next door; I’ve no story to tell you of how I was romanced by someone else, chased and showered with gifts until I gave in and began an affair. You see, I couldn’t see anyone but him, and I know he couldn’t see anyone else but me. Maybe the dramatic stories would have been better, better than the very fact that living in a state of heartbreak, seemed more appealing to him than being with me.

We had one too many Indian takeaways on the couch together, had one too many arguments about emptying the dishwasher, I piled on one too many pounds, he refused one too many nights out with his friends, we went one too many nights falling asleep without making love and went one too many mornings waking up late, grabbing a quick coffee and running out of the door without saying I love you.

You see, it’s all that stuff at the beginning that’s important. The things that you do naturally. The surprise presents, the random kisses, the words of caring advice. Then you get lazy, take your eye off the ball, and before you know it you’ve moved to the middle stage of your relationship and are one step closer to the end. But you don’t think about all that at the time. When it’s happening, you’re happy enough living in the rut you’ve carelessly walked yourself straight into.

You have fights, you say things you definitely mean but afterwards pretend you don’t, you forgive each other and move on, but you never really forget the words that are spoken. The last fight we had was the one about who burned the new expensive frying pan; that’s the one that ended it. It stopped being about the frying pan after the first two minutes: it was about how I never listened, how his family intruded, about the fact he always left his dirty laundry on the floor and not in the basket, about how our sex life was nonexistent, how we never did anything of substance together, how crap his sense of humour was, how horrible a person I was, how he didn’t love me any more. Little things like that …

This fight lasted for days, I knew I hadn’t burned the frying pan, but he could bet his life on the fact he hadn’t even used it over that week, and of course he didn’t, seeing that
I
was the one who did the cooking around here, which according to him was ‘an admission to burning the pan’. Years of a wonderful relationship had turned to that? He went out both nights that weekend and so did I. It was like a competition to see who could come home later, who could ring less, who could be gone for the longer amount of time without contact, who could go longer without calling all their friends, family and police sick with worry. When you train yourself not to care, the heart listens.

One night I stayed out all night without telling him where I’d gone. I even turned my phone off. I was being childish; I was only staying in a friend’s house, awake all night turning my phone on and off checking for messages. Waiting for the really frantic one that would send me flying home and into his arms. I was waiting for the desperate calls, to hear ‘I love you’, to hear the sound of a man in love wanting to hang onto the best thing that had ever happened to him. As proof, as a sign that there was something worth holding onto. No such phone call came. That night taught us something. That I had stooped that low and that he hadn’t cared or worried as he should have.

We had an argument and he left. He left and I chased.

You know those moments at the end of movies when people announce their undying love in front of a
gasping crowd? When there’s music, a perfect speech and then he smiles at you with tears in his eyes, throws his arms around your neck and everyone applauds, feeling as happy about the end result as you are? Well imagine if that didn’t happen. Imagine he says no, there’s an awkward silence, a few nervous laughs, and people slowly break away. He turns away from you and you’re left there with a red face cringing and wishing you’d never made that speech, taken part in the car chase, spent the money on flowers and declared your love in the middle of a busy shopping street in the lunch hour.

Well, where do you go from there? That’s something the movies never tell you. And not only is the moment embarrassing, it’s heartbreaking. It’s the moment when your best friend, the person who said he would love you for ever, stops seeing you as the person he wants and needs to protect. So much so that he can say no to you in front of the gathering crowd. It’s the moment that you realize absolutely everything you shared is lost because those eyes didn’t look at you as they should have and once did. They were the eyes of an embarrassed stranger shrugging off the begging words of an old lover.

A face looks different when the love is gone. It begins to look just how everyone else sees it, without the light, the sparkle—just another face. And the moment they walk away it’s as though the fact you know they sneeze seven times exactly at a quarter past ten every morning means nothing. As though your knowledge of their allergy to ginger and their penchant for dancing around in their underwear to Bruce Springsteen isn’t enough to hold you together. The little things you loved so much about a person become the little things they are suddenly embarrassed you know. All that while you’re walking away in that awkward, uncomfortable silence.