The Gift. Cecelia Ahern
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Lou enough time to rack his brain for the sergeant’s name. Lou turned off the music he’d been blaring and took a closer look at the man in the wing mirror, hoping it would trigger the memory of his name.
The man parked himself outside Lou’s door and leaned down to look into the open window.
‘Mr Suffern,’ he said, without a note of sarcasm, much to Lou’s relief.
‘Sergeant O’Reilly.’ He remembered the name right on cue and threw the man a smile, showing so many teeth he resembled a tense chimpanzee.
‘We find ourselves in a familiar situation,’ Sergeant O’Reilly said with a grimace. ‘Unfortunately for you, we both head home at the same hour.’
‘Yes, indeed, sir. My apologies, the roads were quiet, I thought it would be okay. There’s not a sinner around.’
‘Just a few innocents. That’s always the problem.’
‘And I’m one of them, your honour,’ Lou laughed, holding his hands up in defence. ‘It’s the last stretch of road before getting home, trust me, I only put the foot down seconds before you pulled me over. Dying to get home to the family. No pun intended.’
‘I could hear your engine from Sutton Cross, way down the road.’
‘It’s a quiet night.’
‘And it’s a noisy engine, I know that, but you just never know, Mr Suffern. You just never know.’
‘Don’t suppose you’d let me off with another warning,’ Lou smiled, trying to work sincerity and apology into his best winning smile. Both at the same time.
‘You know the speed limit, I assume?’
‘Sixty kilometres.’
‘Not one hundred and …’
The sergeant suddenly stopped talking and bolted up to stand upright, causing Lou to lose eye contact with him and instead be faced with his belt buckle. Unsure of what the sergeant was up to, he stayed seated and looked out the window to the stretch of road before him, hoping he wasn’t about to gain more points on his licence. With twelve as the maximum before losing his licence altogether, he was perched dangerously close with eight points already. He peeked at the sergeant and saw him grasping at his left pocket.
‘You looking for a pen?’ Lou called, reaching his hand into his inside pocket.
The sergeant winced and turned his back on Lou.
‘Hey, are you okay?’ Lou asked with concern. He reached for the door handle and then thought better of it.
The sergeant grunted something inaudible, the tone suggesting a warning of some sort. Through the wing mirror, Lou watched him walk slowly back to his car. He had an unusual gait. He seemed to be dragging his left leg slightly as he walked. Was he drunk? Then the sergeant opened his car door, got back inside, started up the engine, did a u-turn and was gone. Lou frowned, his day – even in its twilight hours – becoming increasingly more bizarre by the moment.
Lou pulled up to the driveway feeling the same sense of pride and satisfaction he felt every night when he arrived home. To most average people, size didn’t matter, but Lou didn’t want to be average and he saw the things that he owned as being a measure of the man that he was. He wanted the best of everything and, to him, size and quantity were a measure of that. Despite being in a safe cul-de-sac of only a few houses on Howth summit, he’d arranged for the existing boundary walls to be built up higher and for oversized electronic gates, with cameras, at the entrance.
The lights were out in the children’s bedrooms at the front of the house, and Lou instantly felt an inexplicable relief.
‘I’m home,’ he called to the quiet house.
There was a faint sound of a breathless and rather hysterical woman calling out movements from the television room down the hallway. Ruth’s exercise DVD.
He loosened his tie and opened the top button of his shirt, kicked off his shoes, felt the warmth of the underfloor heating soothe his feet through the marble, and started to sort through the mail on the hall table. His mind slowly began to unwind, the conversations of various meetings and telephone calls all beginning to slow. Though they were still there, the voices seemed a little quieter now. Each time he took off a layer of his clothes – his overcoat flung over the chair, his suit jacket on the table, his shoes kicked across the floor, his tie onto the table but slithering to the floor, his case here, loose change and keys there – he felt the events of the day fall away.
‘Hello,’ he called again, louder this second time, realising that nobody – i.e. his wife – had come to greet him. Perhaps she was busy breathing to the count of four, as the hysterical woman in the television room was doing.
‘Sssh,’ he heard, coming from the second level of the house, followed by the creak of floorboards as his wife made her way across the landing.
This bothered him. Not the creaking, for it was an old house and not much could be done about that, but the being silenced was a problem. After a day of non-stop talking, of clever words of jargon, persuasion and intelligent conversation, deal opening, deal development and deal closing, not one person he had met with had at any point told him to Sssh. This was the language of teachers and of librarians. Not of adults in their own homes. He felt like he’d left the real world and entered a crèche. After only one minute of stepping through his front door, he felt irritated. That had been happening a lot lately.
‘I’ve just put Pud down again. He’s not having a good night,’ Ruth explained from the top of the stairs, in a loud whisper. This kind of speech, though Lou understood, he did not like. Like the Sssh language, this adult-whispering was for children in class or teenagers sneaking out of or into their homes. He didn’t like limitations, particularly in his own home. So that irritated him too.
The ‘Pud’ she referred to was their son Ross. A little over a year old now, he still held on to his baby fat, his flesh resembling the uncooked dough of a croissant or that of a pudding. Hence the nickname Pud, which, unfortunately for the already christened Ross, seemed to be sticking around.
‘What’s new?’ he mumbled, referring to Pud’s lack of desire to sleep, while searching through the mail for something that didn’t resemble a bill. He opened a few and discarded them on the hall table. Pieces of ripped paper drifted from the surface and onto the floor.
Ruth made her way downstairs, dressed in a velour tracksuit-cum-pyjamas outfit, he couldn’t quite tell the difference between what she wore these days. Her long brown chocolate hair was tied back in a high ponytail and she shuffled towards him in a pair of slippers – the noise grating on his ears, worse than the sound of a vacuum cleaner, which, until that point, had been his least loved.
‘Hi,’ she smiled, and the tired face disappeared and there was a glimpse, a tiny flicker, of the woman he had married. Then, as quickly as he saw it, it disappeared again, leaving him to wonder if it was he who had imagined it, or if that part of her was there at all. The face of the woman he saw every day stepped up to kiss him on the lips.
‘Good day?’ she asked.
‘Busy.’
‘But good?’
The contents of a particular envelope took his interest. After a long moment he felt the intensity of a stare.
‘Hmm?’ He looked up.
‘I just asked if you had a good day.’
‘Yeah, and I said, “busy”.’
‘Yes, and I said, “but good”? All your days are busy, but all your days aren’t good. I hope it was good,’ she said, in a strained voice.
‘You don’t sound like you hope it was good,’ he replied, eyes down, reading the rest of the letter.
‘Well, I sound like I did the first time