Copyright © Cecelia Ahern 2009

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

This story is one for which some people will have to suspend their disbelief. If I wasn’t me and this wasn’t happening to me, I would be one of those people.

Many won’t 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 there’s 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 people’s 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 information-a new bud for a new fact-but 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 it’s not in a book or I haven’t heard it anywhere before then don’t 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 isn’t dead.

Not yet. Not medically, but if she is not dead, she is certainly not living. She’s like a walking corpse that hums every once in a while as though testing herself to see if she’s still alive. From far away you’d think she’s 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 lots-all façade, 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 she’s 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, she’s kicking furiously beneath the surface, thrashing around trying to keep her head up, flashing us the occasional panicked smile to let us know she’s still here, though it does nothing to convince us.

Oh, I don’t 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 haven’t told you a thing yet, you must be very confused.

My name is Tamara Goodwin. Goodwin. One of those awful phrases I despise. It’s either a win or it’s 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 I’ve never been anything of the sort, or Tamara Win, which mockingly suggests good luck that just isn’t so.

I’m 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 I’ve 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, it’s 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 office-very dead, in fact-blue in the face, with an empty pill container by his side and an empty bottle of whisky on the desk. I didn’t know what I was doing but I pressed my lips to his regardless, and pumped up and down on his chest furiously. That didn’t 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 ground-which, by the way, was rather patronisingly covered by fake green grass as though trying to fool us it wasn’t the maggoty soil he was being lowered into for the rest of eternity. Though I admire Mum for trying, her breakdown at the grave didn’t 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 that’s funny, wait till you hear this…’ ‘One time George and I…’, ‘I’ll never forget the time George said…’ All were so eager, they ended up talking over one another, and spilling tears and red wine on Mum’s new Persian rug. They tried their best, you could tell, and in a way he was almost in the room, but their stories didn’t bring him back.

Nor did it work when Mum discovered Dad’s 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 everything-everything-that we owned to pay back the debts. He didn’t 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 own-let 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 we’d 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 I’m sure he feared.

If my parents had flowering buds, then maybe, just maybe, they could have avoided all that. But they didn’t. 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 didn’t have any of that, and so when he did what he did, he effectively pulled us all into that grave with him.

It intrigues me how death, so dark and final, can shine a light on the character of a person. The lovely stories I heard about Dad during those weeks were endless and touching. They were comforting and I liked getting lost in those tales, but to be perfectly honest, I doubted if they were true. Dad wasn’t a nice man. I loved him, of course, but I know he wasn’t a good man. He and I rarely spoke and when we did, it was to argue over something, or he was giving me money to get rid of me. He was prickly, snapped often, had a temper that flared easily, he forced his opinions on others and was rather arrogant. He made people feel uncomfortable, inferior, and he enjoyed that. He would send his steak back three or four times in a restaurant just to watch the waiter sweat. He would order the most expensive bottle of wine and then claim it was corked just to annoy the restaurateur. He would complain to the police about noise levels of house parties on our street that we couldn’t even hear, and he’d have them shut down just because we weren’t invited.