Cecelia Ahern - The Book of Tomorrow

They say a story loses something with each telling. If that is the case, this story has lost nothing, for its the first time its been told.

This story is one for which some people will have to suspend their disbelief. If I wasnt me and this wasnt happening to me, I would be one of those people.

Many wont struggle to believe it, though, for their minds have been opened; unlocked by whatever kind of key causes people to believe. Those people are either born that way or, as babies, when their minds are like little buds, they are nurtured until their petals slowly open and prepare for the very nature of life to feed them. As the rain falls and the sun shines, they grow, grow, grow; minds so open, they go through life aware and accepting, seeing light where theres dark, seeing possibility in dead ends, tasting victory as others spit out failure, questioning when others accept. Just a little less jaded, a little less cynical. A little less likely to throw in the towel. Some peoples minds open later in life, through tragedy or triumph. Either thing acting as the key to unlatch and lift the lid on that know-it-all box, to accept the unknown, to say goodbye to pragmatism and straight lines.

But then there are those whose minds are merely a bouquet of stalks, which bud as they learn new informationa new bud for a new factbut yet they never open, never flourish. They are the people of capital letters and full stops, but never of question marks and ellipses

My parents were those kinds of people. The know-it-all kind. The if its not in a book or I havent heard it anywhere before then dont be ridiculous kind. Straight thinkers with heads filled with the most beautifully coloured buds, so neatly manicured and so sweetly scented but which never opened, were never light or dainty enough to dance in the breeze; upright and rigid, so matter-of-fact, they were buds till the day they died.

Well, my mother isnt dead.

Not yet. Not medically, but if she is not dead, she is certainly not living. Shes like a walking corpse that hums every once in a while as though testing herself to see if shes still alive. From far away youd think shes fine. But up close and you can see that the bright pink lipstick is a touch uneven, her eyes are tired and soulless, like one of those TV show houses on studio lotsall faade, nothing of substance behind. She moves around the house, drifting from room to room in a dressing gown with loosely flapping bell sleeves, as though shes a southern belle on a mansion ranch in Gone with the Wind, worrying about worrying about it all tomorrow. Despite her graceful swanlike room-to-room drifts, shes kicking furiously beneath the surface, thrashing around trying to keep her head up, flashing us the occasional panicked smile to let us know shes still here, though it does nothing to convince us.

Oh, I dont blame her. What a luxury it must be to disappear as she has, leaving everyone else to sweep up the mess and salvage whatever fragments of life are left.

I havent told you a thing yet, you must be very confused.

My name is Tamara Goodwin. Goodwin. One of those awful phrases I despise. Its either a win or its not. Like bad loss, hot sun, or very dead. Two words that come together unnecessarily to say whatever could be said solely by the second. Sometimes when telling people my name I drop a syllable: Tamara Good, which is ironic as Ive never been anything of the sort, or Tamara Win, which mockingly suggests good luck that just isnt so.

Im sixteen years old, or so they tell me. I question my age now because I feel twice it. At fourteen, I felt fourteen. I acted eleven and wanted to be eighteen. But in the past few months Ive aged a few years. Is that possible? Closed buds would shake their heads no, opened minds would say possibly. Anything is possible, they would say. Well, its not. Anything is not.

It is not possible to bring my dad back to life. I tried, when I found him lying dead on the floor of his officevery dead, in factblue in the face, with an empty pill container by his side and an empty bottle of whisky on the desk. I didnt know what I was doing but I pressed my lips to his regardless, and pumped up and down on his chest furiously. That didnt work.

Nor did it work when my mother dived on his coffin at the graveyard during his burial and started howling and clawing at the varnished wood as he was lowered into the groundwhich, by the way, was rather patronisingly covered by fake green grass as though trying to fool us it wasnt the maggoty soil he was being lowered into for the rest of eternity. Though I admire Mum for trying, her breakdown at the grave didnt bring him back.

Nor did the endless stories about my dad that were shared at the do afterwards during the Who Knows George Best storytelling competition, where friends and family had their fingers on the buzzers, ready to jump in with, You think thats funny, wait till you hear this One time George and I, Ill never forget the time George said All were so eager, they ended up talking over one another, and spilling tears and red wine on Mums new Persian rug. They tried their best, you could tell, and in a way he was almost in the room, but their stories didnt bring him back.

Nor did it work when Mum discovered Dads personal finances were about as healthy as he. He was bankrupt; the bank had already put in place the repossession of our house and all the other properties he owned, which left Mum to sell everythingeverythingthat we owned to pay back the debts. He didnt come back to help us then either. So I knew then that he was gone. He was really gone. I figured if he was going to let us go through all of that on our ownlet me blow air into his dead body, let Mum scratch at his coffin in front of everybody, and then watch us be stripped of everything wed ever owned, I was pretty sure he was gone for good.

It was good thinking on his part not to stick around for it all. It was all as awful and as humiliating as Im sure he feared.

If my parents had flowering buds, then maybe, just maybe, they could have avoided all that. But they didnt. There was no light at the end of that tunnel, and if ever there was, it was an oncoming train. There were no other possibilities, no other ways of doing things. They were practical, and there was no practical solution. Only faith and hope and some sort of belief could have seen my father through it. But he didnt have any of that, and so when he did what he did, he effectively pulled us all into that grave with him.