Cecelia Ahern – The Year I Met You (страница 11)
So I stand at the window now and watch your unmoving body in your jeep, not caring whether you see me watching or not because I’m worried. Just as I’m thinking about going outside to assist you, the jeep door opens and you fall out. Head first, your back facing out as if you’ve been leaning it against the door. You slide down slowly and your head hits the ground. Your foot is tangled in the seat belt on the leather seat. You don’t move. I look around for my coat and then I hear you laughing. You struggle to untangle your foot from the seat belt, your laugh dying down as you become irritated and need to concentrate on freeing yourself as the blood rushes to your head.
You finally free yourself to begin your shouting/doorbell-ringing/banging act, but there is no response from the house. You honk the horn a few times. I’m surprised none of the neighbours tell you to be quiet; perhaps they’re asleep and they can’t hear. Perhaps they’re afraid, perhaps they watch you as I do, though I don’t think so. The Murphys go to bed early, the Malones never seem to be disturbed by you and the Lennons beside me are so timid I think they would be afraid to confront you. It is only Dr Jameson and I who seem to be disturbed by you. Your house is completely still and I only notice now that your wife’s car is not parked on the street as it usually is. The curtains are not drawn on any of the windows. The house appears empty.
You disappear around the back of the house and then I hear you before I see you. You reappear pulling a six-seater wooden table across the grass. The legs of the table destroy the grass, digging up the soil, leaving deep tracks as though you’ve been ploughing. You heave the table from the grass and on to the concrete. The wood drags across the ground, across the driveway behind the car, making an awful screeching sound which goes on for almost a minute. Sixty seconds of screeching and I see the Murphys’ lights go on down the street. Once you have dragged the wooden table on to the grass in the front garden, you disappear into the back garden again and take three trips to carry the six matching chairs. On the last trip you return with the sun umbrella and struggle to position it in the centre hole. You fire it across the garden with frustration and as it flies through the air, it opens like a parachute, takes flight and then lands, open, in a tree. Out of breath, you retrieve a carrier bag from the jeep. I recognise it as being from the local off-licence. You empty the bag, line up the cans on the table and then you sit down. You put your boots up on the wooden table, making yourself at home, and settle down as though you couldn’t be more comfortable and you couldn’t be more at home. You invade my head with your voice and now you are an eyesore, right in front of my house.
I watch you for a while but I eventually lose interest because you’re not doing anything other than drinking and blowing smoke rings into the still night sky.
I watch you watching the stars, which are so clear tonight that Jupiter can be seen next to the moon, and I wonder what you’re thinking about. What to do about Fionn. What to do about your job. Are we not so different after all?
It is 8.30 a.m. and I am standing in the garden with a builder named Johnny, a large red-cheeked man who acts like he detests me. Nobody is saying anything; he and his colleague, Eddie, leaning on the jackhammer, are just looking at me. Johnny peers over at you in the front garden, asleep in your garden chair with your boots up on the table, and then back at me.
‘So what do you want us to do? Wait until he wakes up?’
‘No! I—’
‘Well, that’s what you said.’
It is exactly what I said.
‘That’s not what I said,’ I say, firmly. ‘Isn’t eight thirty too early to start making so much noise? I thought the official start time for building works was nine a.m.’
He looks around. ‘Most people are at work.’
‘Not on this street,’ I reply. ‘No one works on this street.’ Not any more.
It is an unusual thing to say, but it is entirely true. He looks at me, confused, then back at the guy with the jackhammer like I’m crazy.
‘Look, love, you said you needed this done immediately. I have two days to finish this job and then I’m on to something else, so I either start now or—’
‘Fine, fine. Start now.’
‘I’ll be back at six to take a look.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Another job. Eddie can handle it.’
Without a word, Eddie, who looks about seventeen, puts on his headphones. I hurry inside. I stand at the window in the TV room that faces your garden and I watch you at the table, head back, in a peaceful sleep after your drunken stupor. You have a blanket draped over you. I wonder if your wife did this or if you got it from the car during the night after you woke up, freezing. Common sense ought to have told you to stay in the car and put the heater on, but you’re not one for listening to sense.
Something most definitely seems off this morning. Aside from the fact you are sleeping in the middle of your destroyed garden on lopsided, badly placed garden furniture for everybody to see, your house would usually be busy at this hour. The kids are back at school, your wife should be coming and going as she drops them off and goes about her errands, but there’s nothing happening this morning. There have been no signs of life from the house, the curtains are exactly as they were yesterday morning. Your wife’s car is gone. The umbrella is still stuck in the tree. There are no visible signs of your family at home.
Suddenly the jackhammer starts up and even from inside the house the noise is so loud that I feel the vibrations in my chest. I think for the first time that I should have alerted the neighbours to the disruption that will be occurring over the next few days as they dig up my perfectly fine paving to make way for some grass. They would have done that for me, I’m sure.
You leap up from the chair, arms and legs flying everywhere, and look around as if you’ve come under attack. It takes you a moment to assess where you are, what’s happening, what you have done. And then you take in the builder in my garden. You immediately charge over to my house. My heart pounds and I don’t know exactly why. We have never spoken before, not so much as a hello or a wave in passing. Apart from when you caught me watching you from my bedroom window on New Year’s Eve, you have never even acknowledged my existence, nor I yours, because I detest you and everything you stand for, because you couldn’t understand how any mother, even a dying mother, could be sad about leaving her child with Down syndrome in the world without her. I relive the comments I heard you and your callers say on that night that I fell in hate with you and by the time you reach my garden I am ready for the fight.
I can see you shouting at Eddie. Eddie cannot possibly hear you over the noise and the headphones, but he can see the man standing in front of him, mouth opening and closing angrily, hand on one hip, the other arm pointing to a house, demanding to be heard. Eddie ignores you and continues digging up my expensive paving. I make my way to the hall and I pace before the door, waiting for you to call. I jump when the doorbell rings. Just once. Nothing rude about it at all. A single push, a bright briiing, nothing at all like the routine with your wife.
I open the door and you and I are face to face for the first time ever. This is for my sister, this is for you, Heather, this is for my mother, for the unfairness in her having to leave the daughter she never wanted to leave. I say this to myself over and over, opening and closing my hands, ready to fight.
‘Yes?’ I say, and already it’s confrontational.
You seem taken aback by my tone.
‘Good morning,’ you say patronisingly, as if to tell me, that’s how to begin a conversation, as if you know the tiniest, minutest thing about polite conversation. You hold out your hand. ‘I’m Matt, I live across the road.’
This is very difficult for me. I am not a rude person, but I look at your hand and back at your unshaven face, your bloodshot eyes, the smell of alcohol emanating from every pore, your mouth that I dislike so much because of the words that come out of it, and I move my hands to the back pockets of my jeans. My heart drums maniacally as I do this. For you, Heather, for you, Mum.
You look at me, incredulous. You take your hand back, shove it into your coat pocket.
‘Have I missed something? It’s eight thirty a.m. and you’re digging up the ground! Is there something we should all know about? Some oil reserves, perhaps, that we can all share?’
You are still drunk, I can tell. Despite your feet being planted firmly on the ground, your body is moving in a circular motion like Michael Jackson’s leaning dance move.
‘If it’s disturbing you so much, maybe you’d find it easier to camp in your
You look at me like I’m the biggest, craziest bitch and then you walk away.
There are many things that I could have said. Many many ways I could have conveyed my disappointment in the way you discussed Down syndrome. A letter. An invitation to coffee, perhaps. An adult conversation. Instead I said that, on our first meeting. I am immediately sorry, not because I may have hurt you, but because I think I may have wasted an opportunity to actually do something important in the right way. And then it occurs to me for the first time that you probably don’t even remember that particular show. You have done so many, they probably mean nothing to you. I’m just an obnoxious neighbour who didn’t tell you about her building works.