Читать книгу Postscript - Cecelia Ahern, Cecelia Ahern - Страница 11

I did not kill Angela, I know that, but I cried as if I did. I know that a phone call, a visit to Angela or an agreement to take part in one of her events would not have prolonged her life, and yet I cried as if it could have. I cried for all the irrational beliefs that stampeded through my head.

As Angela had been a generous contributor to the shop, Ciara feels obligated to attend her funeral and, despite Gabriel disagreeing, I feel I have even more reason. I had been hiding from Angela in the weeks before her death, I had shut her down so many times. We don’t often remember how we meet, we mostly remember how we part. I didn’t give Angela the best impression when we met, I want to say goodbye to her properly.

Her funeral is in Church of the Assumption in Dalkey, a picturesque parish church on the main street opposite Dalkey Castle. Ciara and I pass through the lingering crowds outside and go directly into the church and sit near the back. The funeral attendees follow the coffin and the family inside and the church pews fill. Leading the procession is a lone man, her husband, the man I spoke with on the phone. He is followed by crying family and friends. I’m satisfied to see he is not alone, that people are sad, that Angela is missed, that her life contained love.

It’s clear the priest didn’t know Angela very well, but he does his best. He has collected the core information about her, like a magpie drawn to shiny items, and he has a kind delivery. When it’s time for the eulogy, a woman takes to the podium. A TV screen is wheeled into the old church, wires and all.

‘Hello, my name is Joy. I would love to say a few words about my friend Angela, but she told me I couldn’t. She wanted to have the last word. As was usual.’

The congregation laughs.

‘Are you ready for this, Laurence?’ Joy asks.

I can’t see or hear Laurence’s response but the screen comes to light anyway and Angela’s face fills the screen. She is thin, clearly this was filmed in her final weeks, but she is beaming.

‘Hello, everybody, it’s me!’

This draws gasps of surprise, and the tears flow around me.

‘I hope you’re all having an awful time without me. Life must be dreadfully dull. I’m sorry I’m gone, but what can we do. We must look forward. Hello, my darlings. My Laurence, my boys, Malachy and Liam. Hello, my little babies, I hope Grandma isn’t scaring you. I hope to make things a little easier for you. Well, let’s move it on. Here we are in my wig room.’

The camera turns around, held by her, to survey her wigs. Wigs of various shapes, colours and styles sit on mannequin heads on shelves.

‘This has been my life for some time, as you all know. I thank Malachy for bringing this one home from a recent music festival,’ she zooms in on a Mohawk. She lifts it off and places it on her head.

Everybody laughs through their tears. Hankies flying, tissues being taken out of handbags and passed along the pews.

‘So, my darling boys,’ she continues, ‘you three are my most precious people in the whole entire world and I’m not ready to say goodbye to you. Beneath these wigs I’ve taped envelopes to every head. Each month I want you to remove a wig, place it on your head, open these envelopes, read my notes, and remember me. I’m always with you. I love you all and thank you for the happiest, most blessed beautiful life a woman, wife, mother and grandmother could wish for. Thank you for everything.

‘PS,’ she blows a kiss, ‘I love you.’

Ciara grabs my arm and slowly turns to look at me. ‘Oh my …’ she whispers.

The screen goes black and everybody, everybody is crying. I can’t imagine how her family feel after this. I can’t look at Ciara. I feel sick. I feel dizzy. I feel like there’s no air. Nobody is paying the slightest attention to me but I feel self-conscious, as if they all know about me, and what Gerry did for me. Would it be rude for me to leave? I’m so near to the door. I need air, I need light, I need to get out of this claustrophobic suffocating scene. I stand and steady myself on the back of the pew then walk towards the door.

‘Holly?’ Ciara whispers.

Outside, I suck in air, but it’s not enough. I need to move away, get away.

‘Holly!’ Ciara calls, hurrying to catch up with me. ‘Are you OK?’

I stop walking and look at her. ‘No. I’m not OK. I’m definitely not OK.’

‘Shit, this is my fault. I’m so sorry, Holly. I asked you to do the podcast, you didn’t want to and I practically forced you, I’m so sorry, this is all my fault. No wonder you were avoiding her. It all makes sense now. I’m so sorry.’

Her words somehow manage to steady me, it’s not my fault for feeling like this. This happened to me. It’s not my fault. It’s unfair. She’s offering sympathy. She hugs me and I rest my head on her shoulder, back to feeling weak and vulnerable and sad. I don’t like it. I stop myself. My head snaps up.

‘No.’

‘No what?’

I wipe my eyes roughly and charge towards the car. ‘This is not who I am any more.’

‘What do you mean? Holly, look at me please,’ she pleads, trying to meet my eye as I look around wildly, desperate to sharpen my focus, desperate to get things in perspective.

‘This is not happening to me again. I’m going back to the shop. I’m going back to my life.’

The skill I discovered when I began working with my sister, after the magazine I worked for folded, is that I’m good at sorting. While Ciara is a magnificent creature when it comes to dealing with the aesthetic, beautifying the shop and placing each item in a place of importance, I could happily, and do quite happily, spend long days in the stockroom emptying boxes and bin liners of the things people no longer want. I get lost in the rhythm of it. These actions are particularly therapeutic in the days that follow Angela Carberry’s funeral. I empty everything on to the floor, sit down and go through the contents of handbags and pockets, sorting the precious from the trash. I polish jewellery until it sparkles, shoes until they shine. I dust off old books. I discard anything that’s not appropriate: dirty underwear, odd socks, used handkerchiefs and tissues. Depending on how busy I am, I can be nosy and get lost in studying receipts and notes, trying to date the last use of the object, understand the life of the person who lived with it. I run the clothes through a rinse wash, I use a steamer to smooth wrinkled fabric. I treasure anything of value: money, photographs, letters that should be returned to their sender. As far as possible, I make detailed notes of who owns what. Sometimes the possessions will never be reunited with their owner; those who have dropped boxes and bags off without contact details are just happy to be rid of their clutter. But sometimes I manage to matchmake. If we don’t feel we can sell the product, if it’s not right for Ciara’s vision, then we repackage them and give them to charities.

I take what’s old and make it new and I’m rewarded by the belief that there is value in my work. Today is a good day to get lost in a cardboard box filled with possessions that became objects as soon as they were dropped into the bag. I lift a box of books from the stockroom and carry them to the shop floor. Again I sit on the floor, wiping covers, folding back dog-eared pages and flicking through the pages for bookmarks of value. Sometimes I find old photographs that are used as bookmarks; mostly I don’t find anything, but every find is important. I’m lost in this world of sorting when the bell rings above the shop door.

Ciara is across the other side of the shop battling with a disarmed and beheaded mannequin as she tries to squeeze a polka-dot tea dress onto its body.

‘Hello,’ she greets the customer warmly.

She is better with customers than I am. I focus on the products when given the choice and she focuses on the people. She and Mathew opened the shop five years ago after they bought it as a house on St. George’s Avenue in Drumcondra, Dublin. The front of the house already had a floor-to-ceiling window built in, from its former life as a sweet shop. They live upstairs in a flat. As a second-hand shop on a quiet terraced street, we don’t attract much in the way of passing trade, but people travel to get here, and the local university provides plenty of students as customers, lured by the cheaper prices and the cool factor that comes with wearing vintage. Ciara is the star of the shop, hosting evening events, attending trade fairs, contributing to magazines, and a sometime-TV-presenter of breakfast television fashion slots, displaying the latest arrivals to the shop. If she is the heart of this shop, Mathew is the brains who handles the accounts, runs their online presence and oversees the technical side of the podcasts, and I’m the guts.

‘Hello,’ the customer, a woman replies.

I can’t see her, I’m hidden behind a display unit, sitting on the floor. I’m already zoning out and allowing Ciara to do her thing.

‘I recognise you,’ Ciara says. ‘You spoke at Angela’s funeral.’

‘You were there?’

‘Yes, of course. Angela was a fantastic supporter of the shop. My sister and I were there. We’ll miss her, she was a powerhouse of a woman.’

So now I’m listening.

‘Your sister was there too, you say?’

‘Yes. Holly, she’s … busy at the moment.’ Ciara uses her smarts and remembers that I will not wish to speak to this woman, as I have not wanted to speak about the entire funeral episode since it happened two weeks ago.

I did what I said I would do. I returned to the shop, I went back to my life, I tried not to think of what happened at the funeral for one second, but inevitably I did. I can’t stop thinking about it. Angela was clearly inspired by my experience with Gerry’s letters to do the same for her family in her final weeks, this I understand, but what I don’t understand is her business card. What on earth was she intending on doing with the PS, I Love You Club? Over the past few weeks I’ve wanted to know and I didn’t want to know and yet, here I am, not wanting to be seen but wanting to hear at the same time.

‘Did Holly …’ The woman abandons her question. ‘My name is Joy, pleased to meet you. Angela loved this shop. Did you know this is the house she grew up in?’

‘No! She never mentioned it. Never, I can’t believe it.’

‘Yes. Well, it would have been like her not to say. She and I were school friends, I lived around the corner. We recently reconnected, but I know she would have enjoyed seeing her belongings in the place she grew up – not that we had such fine things back then. I still don’t.’

‘Wow! I can’t believe this,’ Ciara replies. Sensing this woman is not here to browse, she extends her usual wonderful and, in this instance, annoying, hospitality. ‘Would you like a tea or coffee?’

‘Oh, a tea would be lovely, thank you. With a small drop of milk, please.’

Ciara goes into the back rooms, and I hear Joy walk around the shop. I pray that she won’t discover me but I know that she will. Her footsteps near me. They stop, I look up.

‘You must be Holly,’ she says. She has a cane.

‘Hello,’ I say, as though I hadn’t heard a word her and Ciara had said.

‘I’m Joy. A friend of Angela Carberry’s.’

‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

‘Thank you. She went fast in the end. She declined so quickly. I wonder if she had a chance to speak with you.’

If I was polite I would stand up. Stop this woman on a cane from having to lean down and talk to me. But I’m not feeling polite.

‘About?’

‘About her club.’ She reaches into her pocket and retrieves a business card. The same one that Gabriel had shown me.

‘I received the business card, but I have no idea what it’s about.’

‘She gathered – well, she and I both gathered a group of people who are fans of yours.’

‘Fans?’

‘We listened to your podcast, we were so moved by your words.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I wonder if you could meet with us? I want to continue the good work Angela began …’ her eyes fill. ‘Oh, I’m very sorry.’

Ciara returns with the tea. ‘Are you OK, Joy?’ she asks when she sees the woman with a cane crying, while I’m still sitting on the floor with a book in my hand. She throws me a look of confusion and horror. Her cold-hearted sister.

‘I’m fine. Yes, I am, thank you. I’m very sorry for the imposition. I think I’ll just … gather myself.’

‘There’s no need to leave, take a seat over here.’ Ciara guides Joy to an armchair beside the dressing room, a corner of the room with a mirror and dramatic draping, still in my line of vision. ‘You stay here and rest until you feel right. There’s your tea. I’ll get you a tissue.’

‘You’re very kind,’ Joy says, weakly.

I remain on the floor. I wait for Ciara to leave before speaking, ‘What’s the club about?’

‘Did Angela not explain it to you?’

‘No. She left the business card here for me, but we never talked.’

‘I’m sorry she didn’t explain it to you. So please do let me. Angela was shining like a light after she attended your talk; she came to me with her idea, and when Angela Carberry got something in her head she was bound to it. She could be very persistent, and not always in the right ways. She was used to getting what she wanted.’

I think of Angela’s hand squeezing my arm, her nails digging into my flesh. The urgency that I misread.

‘Angela and I were in school together but we lost contact, as you do. We met each other a few months ago and because of our illnesses I think we connected more than we ever had. After she heard you speak, she called me and told me all about it. I was as greatly inspired by your story as she was. I told a few others who I felt would benefit.’

As Joy takes a breath I realise I’m holding mine. My chest is tight, my body is rigid.

‘There are five of us – well, four of us now. Your story filled us with light and hope. You see, dear Holly, we got together because we have something that bonds us.’

My fingers are clenching the book so hard it’s almost bending.

‘We have all been diagnosed with terminal illnesses. We joined together not just because of the hope that your story inspired in us but because we have a shared goal. We want to write letters for our loved ones as your husband did for you. We desperately need your help, Holly. We’re running out of ideas and …’ she breathes in as if summoning the energy, ‘all of us are running out of time.’

Silence as I pause, freeze, try to absorb that. I’m speechless.

‘I’ve put you on the spot and I’m very sorry,’ she says, embarrassed. She attempts to stand, with the cup of tea in one hand and her cane in the other. I can only watch her; I’m too stunned to feel anything but numb to the sadness of Joy and her fellow club members. If anything, I’m irritated that she would bring this back into my life.

‘Let me help you,’ Ciara says, rushing over to take the tea and hold her arm to assist her.

‘Perhaps I’ll leave my phone number for you, Holly. So that if you want to …’ She looks at me to finish her sentence but I don’t. I’m cruel and I wait.

‘I’ll get a pen and paper,’ Ciara says, jumping in.

Joy leaves her details with Ciara and I call goodbye as she makes her exit.

The bell rings, the door closes, Ciara’s footsteps click-clack across the wooden floors. Her 1940s vintage peep-toe heels, worn with fishnet stockings, come to a halt beside me. She stares at me, studies me, and I’m quite sure she has eavesdropped and heard it all. I look away and slide the book on to the shelf. Here. Yes, I think it will look good here.