The Book of Tomorrow (7 page)

I don’t know how I did it but I managed to kill the excitement for raiding my repossessed house in which my father had killed himself. Instead we got drunk and plotted against Arthur and Rosaleen and their evil country ways. I told them—no I didn’t just tell them, I
revealed
to them—about Marcus and the bus of books and they laughed, thinking him an absolute dork, thinking of the travelling library as the most ridiculously boring thing that they had ever heard of. It was bad enough to have a room full of books but to make books even more accessible, well, that was a downright dorkfest.

That hurt me so much but I couldn’t quite understand why. I tried to hide it, but the one source of excitement and escape I’d experienced in the month since Dad died was shredded in an instant. I think that’s when I started building a wall up between us. They knew it too. Zoey was looking at me with those squinted dissecting eyes that she gives anybody that’s in any way different, different being the worst possible offence in the world to her. They didn’t know why, they never thought that the emotional impact of what I’d just gone through was going to change not just me for a few weeks, but the very core of me for ever. They just thought living in the country was having a bad effect on me. But I’d been trampled on like a plant that has been crushed underfoot but not killed, and just like the plant I’d no choice but to grow in a different direction than I had before.

When Zoey grew bored, or scared, of discussing things she knew nothing of, she called Fiachrá Garóand the third muskateer, Colm, who I call Cabáte—which means ‘cabbage’ in Irish. I’d never ever spoken to him properly in my life. Zoey paired off with Garóid, Fiachrá was partnered with Laura, which Zoey had seemed to have got over, and Cabáiste and I just sat and watched the sea, while the other four rolled around in the sand making sloppy noises, and Cabáiste glugged occasionally on a nagin of vodka, and I expected to be groped at any moment. He covered the bottle with his mouth and knocked back another mouthful, and I waited for that wet, sloppy, vodka-tasting kiss that slightly stung and made me want to retch at the same time.

But he didn’t do that.

‘Sorry about your dad,’ he said quietly.

His comment took me by surprise and then suddenly I became so emotional I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t answer him, I couldn’t even look at him. I looked the other way and
allowed the breeze to blow my hair across my face, hiding and sticking to the hot tears that rolled down my cheeks.

The fact I’d been trampled on was obvious. What I called into question time and time again was which direction I was now growing in.

Whenever I left home for a longer length of time than usual, say to go on a school trip abroad, or when I went on shopping trips to London with friends, I always used to bring something with me to remind me of home—just something small. One Christmas we were at a buffet in a hotel and my dad stole a little plastic penguin that was sitting on top of a pudding and he put it in my dessert. He was trying to be funny but I was having one of those days, which was much like most days, where nothing he said or did could possibly be conceived of as funny, and so somehow the penguin ended up in my pocket that day. Then months later, when I was away, I put my hand in my pocket and found the little penguin, and laughed. Dad’s joke, though months way too late and not in his presence, I finally found funny. Somehow on that trip, it ended up in my washbag, and it travelled the world with me.

You know one of those things that you only have to look at and it instantly connects you to something else? I’m not a sentimental person; I never felt that attached to anything or anyone at home. Not like some people, who just have to look
at something, like even a piece of fluff, and it sends tears to their eyes because it vaguely reminds them of something somebody once said once upon a time at home, when hindsight, whispering into their ear like the devil, tells them they were happy. No, bringing something with me was just a little ammunition really, to make me feel like I wasn’t totally and utterly alone, that I had a little piece of home with me. Not sentimentality, just simple plain old insecurity.

I certainly wasn’t attached to the gatehouse in any way. I’d only been there for a couple of days but during my great escape to Zoey’s house, I brought the book I’d found in the travelling library with me. I still hadn’t managed to unlock it and I certainly had no intentions of reading it while I was there, not when they were so busy telling me about their new source of entertainment—wait for it—going out without underwear on. Honestly, I had to laugh. There was a photo of Cindy Monroe, a six-and-a-half-stone, five foot tall, American reality star, getting out of a car to go to a club the day of her release from forty-eight hours spent in gaol for drink-driving, and she wasn’t wearing any knickers. Zoey and Laura seemed to think this was a great new leap forward for women. I think that when the women’s lib took off their bras and burned them, this wasn’t exactly what they were hoping for. I said this to Zoey and she studied me thoughtfully, her eyes squinting almost closed like she was the Queen of Hearts about to decide whether to chant ‘Off with her head!’ or not. But then she opened her eyes wide and said, ‘No it’s fine, my top was totally backless so I couldn’t wear a bra either.’

Totally backless. Very dead. Another one of those phrases. It was either backless or it wasn’t. I’ve no doubt that it was.

Anyway, when I was sent away to Zoey’s house—‘sent away’ being the operative words—I felt like I’d been told to
go sit on the naughty step to think about what I’d done. Despite the fact I should have felt that I was heading home, that I was heading towards feeling more whole again, I didn’t feel like it at all. And so, I brought a piece of the new world with me. I brought the book. I knew it was there in my bag when I was sleeping on the pull-out bed in Zoey’s room, and as we stayed up all night talking about everything, I knew that it was listening to me, this foreign thing from my detested new life, gaining an insight into the life I once had. I had a witness. I felt like telling it to go home and tell what my life used to be like to all the other things there that I loathed. The book felt like my little secret from Laura and Zoey, a pointless and boring one but a secret all the same, lying beside me in my overnight bag.

And so when Arthur’s Land Rover turned into the side entrance to Kilsaney Demesne, and I was gobbled up again by my new desperate non-life, I decided to take the book and go for a walk with it. I knew it would kill Rosaleen if I didn’t arrive back and fill her in on the no-knickers-wearing trend, and as it was always my duty to punish, I set off. I also knew that Mum would still be in the same place, sitting in that rocking chair, not rocking, but I allowed my mind to pretend she was doing the exact opposite, like out in the garden doing naked pirouettes or something.

I’d never walked
around
the grounds before. To and from the castle, yes, but around the one hundred acres, no. All of my previous visits had been made up of tea and ham sandwiches in a quiet kitchen while Mum talked about things I didn’t care about with my strange aunt and uncle. I’d do anything—eat twenty sloppy egg sandwiches and two slices of whatever cake was going—to get out of that kitchen and wander in the front garden that wrapped its way around to the back. Nowhere else interested me. I wasn’t much of an
explorer, anything that involved movement bored me. I was never intrigued enough by anything to take things that little bit further. On that day I still wasn’t, but I was bored and so I dumped my overnight bag, which Arthur snot-snorted at and brought into the house for me, and I was gone.

I walked away from the house, away from the castle, along a narrow roadway. The route was heavily shaded by the thirty-metre-tall native oaks, ash and yew which lined it. It smelled sweet. The ground was soft, thousands of years of falling foliage and bark laid on the earth, giving me a spring in my step as if I could run from corner to corner in Lycra doing somersaults. It was a hot day, but I was cool under the elderly trees. The birds were like hyperactive monkeys, with constant chirpy calls and doing Tarzan-like swoops from one tree to another. Tired from my all-nighter with my friends, I just kept walking, my head bursting with their conversations, the things I had learned—Laura had had to take the morning-after pill—but none were as loud as the conversations I was havingwith myself in my head. That, I could never switch off. I don’t think I’d ever thought so much, and talked so little, in my life.

Every now and then, when the trees broke their security barrier, I could see the castle in the distance, looking out over its lawn, at the lakes that dotted the grounds, at the majestic trees that stood alone punctuating the landscape. Lone tall and elegant poplars raised up like feathers to tickle the sky, wide oaks with heavy caps spread like wild mushrooms. Then the castle disappeared again, playing peekaboo with me, and the pathway began to curve to the left so that I would soon be able to turn and face the keep head on. Another twenty minutes’ walk and I could see the main gateway further up ahead on my right. I immediately slowed. The darkened gothic entrance did not appeal to me, all chained up like some
prisoner of war left to rot along the side of the road. Long grasses and whatever else decrepit weeds there were climbed the relatively new gate and poked out through the rusted bars, like long gangly starved arms waving at passing cars to be fed or released. The once grand roadway that led directly to the castle had been ignored, unused and unmaintained. It was overgrown and hidden by grasses, like the yellow brick road in the
Return to Oz
. I shuddered. Despite losing its glory, I didn’t take to it as I had to the castle. Its scars were grotesque. Unlike the castle’s which made me want to raise a hand and trace them with my finger, these scars were ugly and made me want to look the other way.

I decided to find another route to take, anything to prevent me from passing that ghastly gothic gate and so I broke through the trees and walked across the grounds instead. I felt safer then, cocooned in the bosom of the trees rather than on that well-worn path which Normans and their horses had pounded, wildly waving in the air peasants’ severed heads on the tips of their swords.

The tree trunks were fascinating, aged and wrinkled like elephants’ legs. They twisted around one another like lovers. Some rose from the ground arched as though in agony and reaching out, then growing on, turning and shifting to a new position. The roots snaked their way from under the surface, rising above the ground and back down again gracefully, as though they were slippery eels in the waters. I tripped often on a raised root, and was caught each time by a helpfully placed tree trunk. The trees did that—tripped me and caught me, tickled me with their leaves and webs, and smacked me in the face with their branches. I pulled back branches in order to pass by, and felt them immediately spring back like catapults to spank me cheekily on the behind.

From one city of trees I made my way to another. The air
smelled sweet, bees filled the flowering trees, greedily hopping from one cluster of petals to another, wanting it all, too impatient to choose just one. Around me on the floor was fruit of some kind, there from seasons ago, some decayed and rotten, some dried out like prunes. I stopped to pick one up and tried to decipher what it once was. I smelled it. Vile. As I dropped it and wiped my hands, I realised the trunk beside me was covered in engravings. The poor tree had been carved into over and over again, like a pumpkin emptied of its flesh to bear its fangs. Clearly it hadn’t been inscribed all on the same day, nor the same year, not even the same century. From seven feet up all the way down it was covered in various names etched into the bark, some framed by hearts, others in boxes, but all declaring eternal friendships and loves.

I ran my finger over the names ‘Frank and Ellie’, ‘Fiona and Stephen’, ‘Siobhan and Michael’, ‘Laurie and Rose’, ‘Michelle and Tommy’. All declared eternal love.
‘2gether, 4ever’.
I wondered if any of them still were. None of the other trees bore the same scars. I stepped back to examine the area and discovered why. There was more of a clearing around this tree. I could imagine blankets laid down, picnics and parties, friends gathering and lovers sneaking out to be together under the fruit tree.

I left the orchard and searched for the next tree town. A wall came into view ahead of me and suddenly my game with the trees was over.

I tried to tread carefully without making a sound, but the woods gave me away. Exaggerated sounds and echoes of twigs snapping and crunching beneath my feet and leaves rustling as I pushed through them alerted the walls to my arrival. I didn’t know what building was ahead of me but it wasn’t the castle, for that was too far away. I didn’t know of any other buildings on the grounds apart from the dilapidated cottages
at the other three gate entrances, long closed up as though there was a day, the unspoken day, when everybody upped and left. The stone of the wall wasn’t the same as the castle’s but to my unexperienced eye it wasn’t far off. It was old and crumbling. The top of the wall was uneven, it no longer touched what it once reached for. There was no roof, just a wall. I couldn’t see a door or a window for the wall’s entire length, and for the most part, unlike the castle, it had survived the bites life liked to take for energy to keep going. I stepped to the edge of the woods, feeling like a hedgehog that has just left its natural habitat to be faced with a main road, revealed by headlights, and tentative. I left my tall friends behind, and under their watchful eyes I walked the length of the wall.

When the wall ended, I turned the corner and saw it continue down another way. Then suddenly I heard a woman humming, from behind the wall. I got a jolt. Apart from my uncle Arthur, I wasn’t expecting to come across any other human. I hugged the book close to my chest and listened to the humming. It was soft, sweet, happy, far too liberated to be Rosaleen, too joyous to be my mother. It was passing-the-time kind of humming, a distracted sound, a tune that wasn’t familiar to me, if it was a real one at all. The summer breeze blew and it brought a sweet smell and her song along with it. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the wall, directly the other side from her and I listened.

As my head touched the brick, she stopped humming and my eyes opened quickly and I straightened up.

I looked around. She wasn’t in sight, and so I couldn’t have been spotted. When my heart slowed to its normal rhythm she began humming again. I moved along the wall, my fingers trailing over the grey stone, tracing the wall, cobwebs, crumbling rock, the smooth of some parts, the rough edges of
others beneath my hot fingers. The sun beat down on me, the trees no longer my personal parasol. The wall came to an abrupt stop and I looked up to see a large ornamental stone archway marking the entrance.

I peeked my head inside so that I wouldn’t be revealed to the mystery hummer and discovered a walled garden, immaculately kept. From my position outside the arch I could see a rose garden, large formal beds set against the backdrop of climbing roses, fully bloomed, which lined both sides of the footpath from another entrance. I dared to move a little more to see the rest of the garden. In the centre were more flowers—geraniums, chrysanthemums, carnations, others I couldn’t name. Flowers tumbled out from hanging baskets and oversized ornamental stone pots that lined the central walkway through the garden. I couldn’t quite believe this little oasis amidst all the green, as though somebody had taken a fizzy drink, shaken it and opened it here in the middle of these crumbling walls and this colour had burst out, spraying every inch with different shades. Bees were flying from one flower to the other, vines climbed up the walls twined around beautiful flowers. I could smell the rosemary, lavender and mint of a nearby herb garden. There was a small greenhouse in the corner of the garden, beside that a dozen or so wooden boxes on stands, and then I realised that swept away by my curiosity I had unknowingly wandered into the garden and the humming had stopped.

I wasn’t sure what to expect but I definitely wasn’t expecting what I saw. At the end of the garden the source of the humming, and the person that was currently staring at me as though I had arrived from another planet, was dressed in what appeared to be a white spacesuit, her head covered in a black veil, her hands in a pair of rubber gloves and on her feet a pair of
calf-length rubber boots. She looked like she’d just stepped off a spaceship and into a nuclear disaster.

I smiled nervously and waved my free hand. ‘Hi. I come in peace.’

She stared at me for a little longer, frozen still like a statue. I felt a little bit nervous, a little bit awkward, and so when that happens, I did what I usually do.