The Book of Tomorrow (6 page)

‘Coldplay,’ he responded. ‘Pizza…I don’t know.’

‘Okay,’ I laughed, ‘so you don’t read.’

‘Nope.’ He sat up on a ledge. ‘But I’m hoping that this experience will positively change me for the better and that I will be converted to a reader.’ He spoke lazily, his voice so lacklustre and unconvincing it was as though he was repeating something he’d been told himself.

I studied him. ‘So what happened, Daddy asked his friend to give you a job?’

His jaw line hardened and he was silent for a while, and I felt really bad, like I should take back the comment. I don’t even know why I said that. I don’t even know where that came from. I just had a weird feeling that I must have been close. I think maybe I recognised a part of me in him.

‘Sorry, that wasn’t funny,’ I apologised. ‘So what happens here?’ I said, trying to break the tension. ‘You travel around to people’s houses and give them books?’

‘It’s the same as a library,’ Marcus said, still a little cool with me. ‘People join up, receive membership cards and that allows them to take out books. I go to the towns where there aren’t any libraries.’

‘Or life forms,’ I said, and he laughed.

‘You’re finding it tough here, city girl?’

I ignored that comment and kept studying the books.

‘You know what people around here would really appreciate instead of books?’

He smiled suggestively at me.

‘Not that,’ I laughed. ‘You could actually make some money out of this thing if you got rid of the books.’

‘Ha! Now that’s not very cultured,’ he said.

‘Well, there’s no bus service around here. Apparently there’s a town fifteen minutes drive away—how is anybody supposed to get there?’

‘Eh…the answer would be in your question.’

‘Yes, but I can’t drive because I’m—’ I stalled, and he smiled. ‘Because I’m not
able
to drive,’ I finished.

‘What? You mean Daddy didn’t get you a Mini Cooper yet? That’s totally uncool,’ he imitated me.

‘TouchÉ.’

‘Okay,’ he jumped off the table, filled with energy. ‘I have to go there now. How about we go to this wonderful magical town that no human legs can reach.’

I giggled. ‘Okay.’

‘Don’t you need to run it by somebody? I don’t want to be done for kidnapping.’

‘I may not be a
driver
but I’m not a child.’ I kept my eye on the bungalow. Rosaleen was gone a long time.

‘You’re sure?’ he asked, looking around. ‘Please just tell someone.’

He looked anxious and just because of that I took out my phone and called Mum’s mobile, which I know she hadn’t touched for a month. I left a message.

‘Hi, Mum, it’s me. I’m outside the house in a bus full of books and a cute guy is going to drive me to the town. I’ll be back in a few hours. In case I don’t come back, his name is Marcus Sandhurst, he’s five foot ten, has black hair, blue eyes…Any tattoos?’ I asked.

He lifted his top. Ooh he was ribbed.

‘He’s got a Celtic cross on his lower abdomen, no chest hair and a silly smile. He likes
Scarface
, Coldplay and pizza, and is hoping to get into books in a big way. See you later.’

I hung up and Marcus burst out laughing. ‘You know me better than most people.’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said.

‘Are you always so misbehaved?’ he asked.

‘Always,’ I responded, and climbed into the passenger seat in preparation for my adventure out of Kilsaney Demesne.

There were twelve minutes of a comfortable and not-for-one-second awkward conversation with Marcus, before reaching the town. Only ‘the town’ wasn’t at all what I was expecting. Even with my expectations lowered to an all-time low, it was so much worse. It was a one-horse town, with not even a horse in sight. A church. A graveyard. Two pubs. A chipper. A petrol station with a newsagent. A hardware store. Full stop.

I must have whimpered because Marcus looked at me, worried.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘What’s wrong?’ My eyes widened as I turned to him. ‘What’s
wrong
? I have a Barbie Village from when I was like,
five
, bigger than this at home.’

He tried not to but he laughed. ‘It’s not that bad. Another twenty minutes and you’re in Dunshauglin; that’s a proper town.’

‘Another twenty minutes? I can’t even get
here,
to this shit hole on my own.’ I felt my eyes heat up with frustration, my nose started to itch, my eyes began to fill. I felt like kicking
the bus down and screaming. I grunted instead. ‘What the hell am I going to do around here on my own, buy a shovel in there, and dig up the dead over there? And have a bag of chips and a pint while I’m doing it?’

Marcus snorted, and had to look away to compose himself. ‘Tamara, it’s really not that bad.’

‘Yes it is. I want a fucking skinny gingerbread latte and a cinnamon roll, now,’ I said very calmly, aware that I was beginning to sound like Violet Beauregarde from
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. ‘And while I’m there I want to use my laptop and avail myself of their Wi-Fi service, go online and check my Facebook page. I want to go to Topshop. I want to Twitter. And then I want to go to the beach with my friends and look at the sea and drink a bottle of white wine and I want to get so drunk, I fall over and vomit. You know, like normal things that normal people do. That is what I want.’

‘Do you always get what you want?’ Marcus looked at me.

I couldn’t answer. A giant lump of oh-my-god-I’m-in-love-kind-of-feeling had gathered in my throat. And so I just nodded.

‘Okay,’ he said, perking up, and I swallowed, my Marcus crush sent flying down my oesophagus into my stomach. ‘Let’s look on the bright side.’

‘There is no bright side.’

‘There’s always a bright side.’ He looked left and then he looked right, he held his hands up and his eyes lit up. ‘There’s no library.’

‘Oh my god…’ I head-butted myself off the dashboard.

‘Right,’ he laughed and turned the engine off, ‘let’s go somewhere else.’

‘Don’t you need the engine
on
to go somewhere else?’ I asked.

‘We’re not driving,’ he said, and climbed over the top of
the driver’s seat and into the bus. ‘So, let’s see…where should we go?’ He moved his finger along the spines of the books in the travel section and walked alongside them reading aloud, ‘Paris, Chile, Rome, Argentina, Mexico…’

‘Mexico,’ I said straightaway, kneeling up on the seat to watch him.

‘Mexico,’ he nodded. ‘Good choice.’ He lifted the book from the shelf and looked at me. ‘Well? Are you coming? Flight’s about to leave.’

I smiled and climbed over the back of the seat. We sat on the floor, side by side, in the back of the bus and that day, we went to Mexico.

I don’t know if he knows how important that moment was to me. How much he actually saved me from myself, from absolute despair. Maybe he does know and that’s exactly what he was doing. But he was like an angel who came into my life with his bus of books at exactly the right time, and who whisked me away from a terrible place to a faraway land.

We didn’t stay in Mexico for as long as we’d hoped. We checked into our hotel, double bed, dumped our bags, and headed straight for the beach. I bought a bikini from a man selling them on the beach, Marcus had ordered a cocktail and was going to go on a jetski alone—I was refusing to get into a wet suit—when the knock came on the bus and an elderly woman who eyed me suspiciously stepped on to find something for her to pass her time in. We got to our feet then and I browsed the shelves while Marcus played host. I came across a book about grief; about learning how to deal with personal grief or a loved one suffering from grief. I hovered by that book for a while, my heart pounding as though I’d found a magic vaccination for all worldly diseases. But I couldn’t bring myself to lift it from the shelf—I don’t know why. I didn’t want Marcus to see, I didn’t want him to ask me about it, I
didn’t want to have to tell him about Dad dying. Then that would mean I’d be exactly who I was. I was a girl whose dad had just killed himself. If I didn’t tell him, then I didn’t have to be that girl. Not to him, anyway. I would just be her on the inside. I’d let her rage inside me, bubble under my skin, but I’d go to Mexico and leave her behind in the gatehouse.

My eye fell upon a large leather-bound book in non-fiction. It was brown, thick, no author’s name or title along the spine. I pulled it out. It was heavy. The pages were jagged along the edges as though they’d been ripped. ‘So you’re like a Robin Hood of the book world,’ I said, as soon as the old woman had left with a racy romance under her arm, ‘bringing books to those who have none?’

‘Something like that. What have you got there?’

‘Don’t know, there’s no title on the front.’

‘Try the spine.’

‘Not there, either.’

He picked up a folder from beside him and licked his finger before flicking through some pages. ‘What’s the author’s name?’

‘There’s no author’s name.’

He frowned and looked up. ‘Not possible. Open it up and see what’s on the first page.’

‘I can’t,’ I laughed. ‘It’s locked.’

‘Oh, come on,’ he smiled, ‘you’re taking the piss, Goodwin.’

‘I’m not,’ I laughed, moving towards him. ‘Honestly, look.’

I passed it to him and our fingers brushed, causing a tingle of seismic proportions to rush through every single erogenous zone that existed in my body.

The pages of the book were closed with a gold clasp and attached to that was a small gold padlock.

‘What the hell…’ he said, trying to pull at the lock, making a series of grimaces that had me smiling. ‘Trust
you
to choose
the only book in here that doesn’t have an author or title and is padlocked.’

We both started laughing. He gave up on the padlock and our eyes locked.

This was the bit where I was supposed to say, ‘I’m only sixteen.’ But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I told you, I felt older. Everybody always thought I looked older. I wanted to be older. It wasn’t like we were going to have sex on the floor, he wasn’t going to be in prison for staring at me. But still. I should have said it then. If we were in some old
Gone with the Wind
-style southern early nineteenth-century book, back in the good old days where women were men’s property and weren’t protected at all, then it wouldn’t have mattered, we could have rolled around in the hay in a barn somewhere and done whatever we wanted and nobody would have been accused of anything. I felt like hunting down that book from the shelves, opening it and jumping into the pages with him. But we weren’t. It was the twenty-first century. I was sixteen, very nearly seventeen, and he was twenty-two. I’d seen it on his ID card. I had experience in knowing that a guy’s horn didn’t last until my seventeen birthday. It was rare they felt like coming back in July.

‘Don’t look so sad,’ he said, and reached out and lifted my chin with his finger. I hadn’t realised he’d come so close to me and there he was, right before me. Toe to toe.

‘It’s only…a book.’

I realised I was hugging it close to me, both my arms wrapped around it tightly.

‘But I like the book,’ I smiled.

‘I like the book too, very much. It’s a cheeky very pretty book, but it’s obvious we can’t read it right now.’

My eyes narrowed, wondering if we were talking about the same thing.

‘So, that means we’ll both just have to sit and look at it, until we find the key.’

I smiled, and I felt my cheeks pink.

‘Tamara!’ I heard my name being called. A screeching, desperate call. We stopped gazing at one another and I rushed to the door of the bus. It was Rosaleen. She was running across the road toward me her face scrunched up, her eyes wild and dangerous. Arthur was standing on the pavement beside his car, looking calm. I relaxed a little then. What had Rosaleen all riled up?

‘Tamara,’ she said, breathless. She looked from Marcus to me, appearing like a meerkat again, on high alert. ‘Come back to us, child. Come back,’ she said, her voice shaky.

‘I am coming back,’ I frowned. ‘I’ve only been gone an hour.’

She looked a little confused then, looked at Marcus as if he was going to explain everything.

‘What’s wrong Rosaleen? Is Mum okay?’

She was silent. Her mouth opened and closed as if she was trying to find words.

‘Is she okay?’ I asked again, panic building.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course she’s fine.’ She still looked confused, but beginning to calm.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘I thought you’d…’ she trailed off, looking around the village now and, as though realising where she was, she stood up straight, ran a hand across her hair to smooth it down, fixed her dress which was crumpled from the drive. She took small breaths and she visibly calmed before us. ‘You’re coming back to the house?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I frowned. ‘I told Mum where I was going.’

‘Yes, but your mother…’

‘My mother what?’ My voice hardened. If everything was so okay with my mother, then my telling her should have been fine.

Marcus’s hand was on my back, his thumb comfortingly circling the small of my back, reminding me of Mexico, of all the other places I could be.

‘You should go with her,’ Marcus said quietly. ‘I have to move on now, anyway.You can hold on to that.’ He nodded at the book I was hugging in my arms.

‘Thanks. See you again?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Of course, Goodwin. Now go.’

As I walked across the road and sat in the back of the Land Rover, I noticed the three male smokers standing outside the pub, staring. It’s not unusual to be stared at but it was the way they were staring. Arthur nodded at them. Rosaleen kept her head down, her eyes to the floor. The three men’s eyes followed us, and I stared back, hoping to figure out what exactly was their problem. Was it because I was new? But I knew it wasn’t, because they weren’t looking at me. All eyes were on Arthur and Rosaleen. In the car, nobody said a word the entire way home.

Inside the house, I went to check on Mum despite Rosaleen telling me not to. She was still sitting in the rocking chair, not rocking, and looking out at the garden. I sat with her a while and then left. I went downstairs to the living room, back to the armchair I’d been sitting in before Marcus called. I reached for the photo album but it was gone. Tidied away by Rosaleen again. I sighed and searched for it again on the bookshelf. It was gone. I went through every single book on that shelf, but it was nowhere to be found.

I heard a creak at the door and I spun round. Rosaleen was standing there.

‘Rosaleen!’ I said, hand flying to my heart. ‘You scared me.’

‘What were you doing?’ she asked, her fingers creasing and then smoothing the apron over her dress.

‘I was just looking for a photo album I saw earlier.’

‘Photo album?’ She cocked her head sideways, her forehead wrinkled, her face pinched in confusion.

‘Yes, I saw it earlier, before the library came by. I hope you don’t mind, I took it out to look at it but now it’s…’ I held my hands up in the air and laughed. ‘It has mysteriously vanished.’

She shook her head. ‘No, child.’ She looked behind her and then lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Now hush about it.’

Arthur entered then, with a newspaper in his hand and she went quiet. He glanced from me to her.

She looked at Arthur nervously. ‘I better see to the dinner. Rack of lamb tonight,’ she said quietly.

He nodded and watched her leave the room.

The way he watched her made me not want to ask Arthur about the album. The way he watched her made me think a lot of things about Arthur.

Later that evening, I heard them in their bedroom, muffled sounds that rose and fell. I wasn’t sure if it was an argument or not but it felt different from the way they usually talked. It was a conversation, instead of a series of comments thrown to one another. Whatever they were talking about, they were trying hard for me not to hear them. I had my ear up against the wall, wondering about their sudden silence, when my bedroom door opened and Arthur was there staring at me.

‘Arthur,’ I said, moving away from the wall, ‘you should knock. I need my privacy.’

Considering he’d just caught me with my ear to the wall he did well not to say anything.

‘Do you want me to bring you to Dublin in the morning?’ he grumbled.

‘What?’

‘To stay with a friend.’

I was so delighted, I punched the air and got straight on
the phone to Zoey, either forgetting to pursue or not caring as to the sudden reason for my expulsion. And so that was the time I went to stay with Zoey. It had been only two nights in the gatehouse and already I felt different returning to Dublin. We went back to our usual patch on the beach beside my house. It looked different and I hated it. It felt different and I hated that too. By the entrance gate to my house a For Sale sign had been erected. I couldn’t look at it without my blood boiling, my heart rate rising and feeling an overwhelming desire to scream like a banshee, so I didn’t look. Zoey and Laura were already studying me as though I had landed from another planet, gutted their best friend and zipped on her outer layer of skin like a sleeping suit, and everything I said was being picked at, analysed, misconstrued.

Seeing the For Sale sign, my two friends, with the sensitivity of a ‘Geronimo’ became excited. Zoey chattered incessantly about breaking into the house and spending the afternoon there, as though at that exact time in my life that was the appropriate thing to say. Laura, a little more genteel, looked uncertainly at me while Zoey’s back was turned to face the gate and assess the situation, but when I didn’t object, she went along with the idea, swept out into sea like a freshly flushed shit.