The Year I Met You. Cecelia Ahern

       4

      One of the things I liked about the Christmas break just gone was that nobody was working, it put us all on the same level. Everyone was in holiday mode, I didn’t have to compare and contrast me from them, them from me. But now everybody is back at work, so I am back to feeling how I felt before the break.

      Initially I felt shocked, my whole system felt shocked, and then I believe I went through a grieving process as I mourned for a life that I’d lost. I was angry, of course I was angry; I had considered Larry, my colleague, my firer, to be my friend. We went skiing together every New Year, I stayed in his Marbella holiday home with him and his family for a week every June. I was one of the few invited to the house for his daughter’s over-the-top debs gathering. I was one of the small inner circle. I had never considered that he could take this course of action; that, despite the often heated arguments, our relationship would come to this, that he would very simply have the balls to do this to me.

      After the anger, I was in denial about it being a bad thing that had happened. I didn’t want losing my job to own me, to define me. I didn’t need my job, my job needed me – and too bad, it had lost me. And then Christmas came and I got lost in social events; dinners and parties and drunken festivities that made me feel warm and fuzzy and forgetful. Now it is January and I feel as bleak as the day outside, for I am overcome by a new feeling.

      I feel worthless, as though a very important part of my self-esteem has been utterly diminished. I have been robbed of my routine, my schedule which once determined my every single waking and sleeping hour. Routine of any kind has been difficult to establish; there don’t seem to be any rules for me, while everybody else marches to the beat of their own important drum. I constantly feel hungry, metaphorically and literally. I am hungry for something to do, somewhere to go, but I’m also hungry for everything in my kitchen because it’s there, right beside me, every day and I have nothing better to do than eat it. I am bored. And as much as it pains me to say it, I am lonely. I can go an entire day without any socialisation, without a conversation with anyone. I wonder sometimes if I’m invisible. I feel like the old men and women who used to bother me by engaging in unnecessary chit-chat with the cashiers while I was stuck behind them, in a hurry, wanting to get on to the next place. When you don’t have a next place to go to, time slows down enormously. I feel myself noticing other people more, catching more eyes, or seeking out eye contact. I’m now ripe and ready for a conversation about anything with anyone; it would make my day if somebody would meet my eye, or if there was someone to talk to. But everyone is too busy, and that makes me feel invisible; and invisibility, contrary to what I believed before, lacks any sense of lightness and liberty. Instead it makes me feel heavy. And so I drag myself around, trying to convince myself that I don’t feel heavy, invisible, bored and worthless, and that I am free. I do not convince myself well.

      Another of the bad things about being fired is that my father calls by, uninvited.

      He is in the front garden with my half-sister Zara when I arrive home. Zara is three years old, my dad is sixty-three. He retired from his printing business three years ago after selling it for a very good price that allows him to live comfortably. As soon as Zara was born he became a hands-on husband and father while his new wife, Leilah, works as a yoga instructor in her own practice. It is lovely that Dad has had a second chance at love, and also lovely that he has been able to fully embrace fatherhood, properly, for the first time in his life. He fully embraced the nappy-changing, night feeds, weaning and anything else that raising a child threw at him. He glows every day with the pride he has for her, this remarkable little girl who has managed to do such incredible things all by herself. Grow, walk, talk. He marvels at her genius, tells long stories about what she has done that day, the funny things she has said, the clever picture she drew for one so young. As I said, it is lovely. Lovely. But he views it with a first-time joy, a beginner, someone who has never seen it happen before.

      In the last few weeks it has made me think, because I’ve had time to, and I wonder where was his wonderment, his absolute shock and awe, when Heather and I were growing up? If it was ever there at all, it was hidden by the mask of inconvenience and complete bafflement. Sometimes when he points out something wonderful that Zara has done I want to scream at him that other children do that too, you know, children like Heather and I, and how incredible we must have been to have gotten there first over thirty years ago. But I don’t. That would make me bitter and twisted, and I am not, and it would create an energy around something where there is nothing. I tell myself it’s the idleness that leads to these frustrating thoughts.

      I often wonder, if Mum was alive, how would she feel seeing Dad as the man he is now – loyal, retired, a dedicated father and husband. Sometimes I hear her on her forgiving, wise days being all philosophical and understanding about it and other days I hear the tired voice of an exhausted single mother that I grew up with, spitting venom over him and his insensitivities. Which of her voices I hear may depend on what mood I am in myself. Mum died from breast cancer when she was forty-four. Too young to die. I was nineteen. Too young to lose a mother. It was most difficult for her, of course, having to leave this world when she didn’t want to. She had things she wanted to see, things she wanted to do, things she had been putting off until I was finished school, an adult, so that she could begin her life. She wasn’t finished yet; in many ways, she hadn’t even started. She’d had her first baby at twenty-four, then me the accident at twenty-five, and she had raised her babies and done absolutely everything for us and it should have been time for her.

      After she died, I lived on campus and Heather stayed in the care home she had moved into while Mum was undergoing treatment. Sometimes I wonder why I was so selfish and didn’t decide to care for Heather myself. I don’t think I even offered. I understand that it was necessary for me to begin my own life, but I don’t believe I even thought about it for a moment. It’s not selfish not to want to, but it was selfish not to think about it. I look back and realise I could have been more helpful to my mother at the time too. I feel like I let her go through it all alone. I could have been there more, accompanied her more, instead of asking her about things afterwards. But I was a teenager, my world was about me then, and I saw my aunt being there for my mum.

      Heather is my Irish twin: older by one year. She treats me as though I am the baby sister by many more years. I love her for this. I know that I was an accident, because my mum had no intention of planning another child so soon after the birth of Heather. Mum was shocked, Dad was appalled; he could barely cope with a baby in the first place, let alone one with Down syndrome, and now there was a second child on the way. Heather scared him; he didn’t know how to deal with her. When I came along, he moved further away from the family, seeking out other women who had more time on their hands to adore him and agree with him.

      Meanwhile my mum dealt with