Roar. Cecelia Ahern
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Cecelia Ahern 2018
Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cecelia Ahern asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008283490
Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008283513
Version: 2019-04-15
For all the women who …
I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore.
Helen Reddy and Ray Burton
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1. The Woman Who Slowly Disappeared
2. The Woman Who Was Kept on the Shelf
3. The Woman Who Grew Wings
4. The Woman Who Was Fed by a Duck
5. The Woman Who Found Bite Marks on Her Skin
6. The Woman Who Thought Her Mirror Was Broken
7. The Woman Who Was Swallowed Up by the Floor and Who Met Lots of Other Women Down There Too
8. The Woman Who Ordered the Seabass Special
9. The Woman Who Ate Photographs
10. The Woman Who Forgot Her Name
11. The Woman Who Had a Ticking Clock
12. The Woman Who Sowed Seeds of Doubt
13. The Woman Who Returned and Exchanged Her Husband
14. The Woman Who Lost Her Common Sense
15. The Woman Who Walked in Her Husband’s Shoes
16. The Woman Who Was a Featherbrain
17. The Woman Who Wore Her Heart on Her Sleeve
18. The Woman Who Wore Pink
19. The Woman Who Blew Away
20. The Woman Who Had a Strong Suit
21. The Woman Who Spoke Woman
22. The Woman Who Found the World in Her Oyster
23. The Woman Who Guarded Gonads
24. The Woman Who Was Pigeonholed
25. The Woman Who Jumped on the Bandwagon
26. The Woman Who Smiled
27. The Woman Who Thought the Grass Was Greener on the Other Side
28. The Woman Who Unravelled
29. The Woman Who Cherry-Picked
30. The Woman Who Roared
About the Author
Also by Cecelia Ahern
About the Publisher
1
There’s a gentle knock on the door before it opens. Nurse Rada steps inside and closes the door behind her.
‘I’m here,’ the woman says, quietly.
Rada scans the room, following the sound of her voice.
‘I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,’ the woman repeats softly, until Rada stops searching.
Her eye level is too high and it’s focused too much to the left, more in line with the bird poo on the window that has eroded over the past three days with the rain.
The woman sighs gently from her seat on the window ledge that overlooks the college campus. She entered this university hospital feeling so hopeful that she could be healed, but instead, after six months, she feels like a lab rat, poked and prodded at by scientists and doctors in increasingly desperate efforts to understand her condition.
She has been diagnosed with a rare complex genetic disorder that causes the chromosomes in her body to fade away. They are not self-destructing or breaking down, they are not even mutating – her organ functions all appear perfectly normal; all tests indicate that everything is fine and healthy. To put it simply, she’s disappearing, but she’s still here.
Her disappearing was gradual at first. Barely noticeable. There was a lot of, ‘Oh, I didn’t see you there,’ a lot of misjudging her edges, bumping against her shoulders, stepping on her toes, but it didn’t ring any alarm bells. Not at first.
She faded in equal measure. It wasn’t a missing hand or a missing toe or suddenly a missing ear, it was a gradual equal fade; she diminished. She became a shimmer, like a heat haze on a highway. She