Read Time of My Life Online

Authors: Cecelia Ahern

Tags: #Fiction, #General

Time of My Life

BOOK: Time of My Life
3.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Cecelia Ahern

The Time of my Life

Dedication

For my precious girl, Robin

Epigraph

‘You used to be much more … “muchier”.

You’ve lost your muchness.’

The Mad Hatter to Alice in the film of
Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

I didn’t read the rest. I didn’t need to, I…

Chapter Two

I’d heard about this kind of thing happening which is…

Chapter Three

I was halfway through the bottle of wine by the…

Chapter Four

On the fateful Saturday that I’d been dreading ever since…

Chapter Five

Sunday. It had loomed over me all weekend like that…

Chapter Six

Silchesters don’t cry. It was what my father had told…

Chapter Seven

‘We were up at four thirty this morning,’ he panted,…

Chapter Eight

A week later I awoke at seven a.m. in a…

Chapter Nine

‘He did the Inca Trail last week, did you see…

Chapter Ten

I took a forkful of my three-bean salad, in which…

Chapter Eleven

We had arranged to meet the following day in Starbucks…

Chapter Twelve

He wanted to begin our journey together by seeing where…

Chapter Thirteen

I was standing on the fire escape, secret smoking location…

Chapter Fourteen

I regretted arranging with Melanie to meet the following night.

Chapter Fifteen

‘So tell me about your dad,’ Life asked the following…

Chapter Sixteen

‘What do you want to do today?’ I asked.

Chapter Seventeen

‘I have to go to him,’ I said, pacing.

Chapter Eighteen

‘What are you talking about?’ I stayed at the door,…

Chapter Nineteen

I was woken by the clatter of keys on the…

Chapter Twenty

‘So you’re Lucy’s life.’ Nosy was sitting on the edge…

Chapter Twenty-One

I sat at the dining table in my parents’ home…

Chapter Twenty-Two

‘Don, I’m so sorry,’ I said straight away, ignoring my…

Chapter Twenty-Three

I didn’t sleep very much that night. Life wasn’t snoring…

Chapter Twenty-Four

From the corner of my eye I saw Jenna slip…

Chapter Twenty-Five

Blake and I were face to face in the people…

Chapter Twenty-Six

‘I’m sorry, I need to do what?’

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I awoke to a fully dressed Life watching me from…

Chapter Twenty-Eight

‘Mum, are you awake?’

Chapter Twenty-Nine

‘Blake.’ My voice was a barely a whisper but they…

Chapter Thirty

I lay in bed for a week – at least…

Epilogue

Other Books by The Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

Dear Lucy Silchester,

You have an appointment for Monday 30 May.

I didn’t read the rest. I didn’t need to, I knew who it was from. I could tell as soon as I arrived home from work to my studio apartment and saw it lying on the floor, halfway from the front door to the kitchen, on the burned part of the carpet where the Christmas tree had fallen – and landed – two years ago and the lights had singed the carpet hairs. The carpet was a cheap old thing chosen by my penny-pinching landlord, a grey worn industrial yarn that looked as though more feet had trodden over it than the apparently ‘lucky’ testicles of the bull mosaic in Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II in Milan. You’d find a similar kind of fabric in my office building – a more appropriate location as it was never intended to be walked on barefoot, made only for the steady stream of on-foot shiny leather-shoe traffic moving from cubicle to photocopier, photocopier to coffee machine, coffee machine to emergency exit stairwell for a sneaky smoke, ironically the only location which failed to alert the fire alarm. I had been a part of the effort to find the smoking spot and each time the enemy had located us, we began efforts to find a new safe house. The current place was easy to find – hundreds of butts in piles on the ground to mark the spot, their lives sucked out of them by their users in panicked distressed frenzy, their souls floating around the insides of lungs while their outsides were dropped, stamped on and deserted. It was a place more worshipped than any other in the building, more than the coffee machine, more than the exit doors at six p.m., most certainly more than the chair before the desk of Edna Larson – the boss lady – who ate good intentions like a broken dispenser that swallowed your coins but failed to spit out the bar of chocolate.

The letter lay there on that dirty singed floor. A cream woven envelope with grand George Street font declaring my name in certain no-doubt-about-it black ink, and beside it, a gold embossed stamp, three swirls joined together.

The triple spirals of life. I knew what it was because I’d received two similar letters already and I’d Googled the symbol. I’d failed to make an appointment for either of the requests to meet. I’d also failed to phone the number supplied to rearrange or cancel. I’d ignored it, swept it under the rug – or would have if the Christmas tree lights hadn’t set fire to the shagpile that used to be there – and forgotten about it. But I hadn’t really forgotten about it. You never forget about things you’ve done that you know you shouldn’t have done. They hang around your mind, linger like a thief casing a joint for a future job. You see them there, dramatically lurking nearby in striped monochrome, leaping behind postboxes as soon as your head whips around to confront them. Or it’s a familiar face in a crowd that you glimpse but then lose sight of. An annoying
Where’s Wally?
forever locked away and hidden in every thought in your conscience. The bad thing that you did, always there to let you know.

A month on from ignoring the second letter and this one had arrived with another rescheduled appointment, and no mention of my previous failures to respond. It was like my mother – its polite failure to acknowledge my shortcomings was making me feel even worse.

I held the fancy paper at the corner between my thumb and forefinger and tilted my head to read it as it flopped to the side. The cat had pissed on it again. Ironic really. I didn’t blame him. My illegally owning a pet in a high-rise apartment block in the middle of the city and holding down a full-time job meant the cat had no opportunity to go outside to relieve himself. In an attempt to rid myself of my guilt I had put framed photographs of the outside world around the apartment: the grass, the sea, a postbox, pebbles, traffic, a park, a collection of other cats, and Gene Kelly. The latter obviously to service my needs but I hoped the others would dispel any longing he had to go outside. Or to breathe fresh air, to make friends, to fall in love. Or to sing and dance.

As I was out five days a week from eight a.m. often to eight p.m. and sometimes didn’t come home at all, I had trained him to ‘eliminate’, as the cat trainer had phrased it, on paper so he would get used to using his litter box. And this letter, the only piece of paper left lying on the floor, was surely just a confusion to him. I watched him move self-consciously around the edge of the room. He knew it was wrong. It was lurking in his mind, the thing he’d done that he knew he shouldn’t have done.

I hate cats but I liked this cat. I named him Mr Pan after Peter, the well-known flying young boy. Mr Pan is neither a boy who will never age nor, oddly enough, does he possess the ability to fly, but there is a strange resemblance and it seemed appropriate at the time. I found him in a skip down an alleyway one night, purring as though in deep distress. Or perhaps that was me. What I was doing down there shall remain private but it was raining hard, I was wearing a beige trenchcoat and after mourning the loss of a perfect boyfriend over too many tequilas, I was doing my best to channel Audrey Hepburn by chasing the animal and calling out ‘Cat!’ in a clear and unique, yet distressed tone. Turned out it was a day-old kitten and it’d been born a hermaphrodite. Its mother or owner, or both, had shunned it. Though the vet informed me that the kitten had more male than female anatomy, naming him felt as though I alone took the responsibility of choosing his sex. I thought of my broken heart and my being passed up for a promotion because my boss had an inkling I was pregnant – though it was after the holidays and my annual gorge-fest had been a wild boar short of a Tudor banquet – I’d been through a particularly horrific month of stomach cramps; a street bum had groped me late one night on the train; and when I had enforced my opinion at work I’d been called a bitch by my male counterparts and so I decided life would be easier for the cat as a male. But I think I made the wrong decision. Occasionally I call him Samantha or Mary or something feminine and he looks up with what I can only describe as thanks before sloping off to sit in one of my shoes and gaze wistfully at the stiletto and the world he’s been deprived of. But I digress. Back to the letter.

I would have to attend the appointment this time. There was no way around it. I couldn’t ignore it; I didn’t want to irritate its sender any further.

So who was the sender?

I held the drying page by the corner and again tilted my head to read the flopped paper.

Dear Lucy Silchester,
You have an appointment for Monday 30 May
.

Yours sincerely,

Life

Life. Why of course.

My life needed me. It was going through a tough time and I hadn’t been paying enough attention to it. I’d taken my eye off the ball, I’d busied myself with other things: friends’ lives, work issues, my deteriorating and ever needy car, that kind of thing. I’d completely and utterly ignored my life. And now it had written to me, summoned me, and there was only one thing for it. I had to go and meet with it face to face.

BOOK: Time of My Life
3.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

After Visiting Friends by Michael Hainey
Smooth Moves by Betty McBride
The Hawk And His Boy by Christopher Bunn
Under False Colours by Richard Woodman
Under Fishbone Clouds by Sam Meekings
The Thread by Ellyn Sanna
Always Upbeat / All That by Stephanie Perry Moore