How to Fall in Love (22 page)

‘Who is that?’ I whispered.

‘Irma Livingstone,’ Amelia replied, rolling her eyes. ‘I curse the day I ever said yes to Elaine. Irma’s her teacher at the “How to Fall in Love” course, and Elaine thought it would be a wonderful idea to bring her here and ask her to read from her book. She’s been reading for an hour.’

Amelia handed me the book.
How to Own Your Erogenous Zone
.

‘Why? Who owns mine right now?’ I asked, glancing over it unimpressed before Adam plucked it from my hands.

An old man in the front row had fallen asleep and was snoring loudly, a young bookish woman was scribbling copious notes, and one man seemed to be trying to hide a very large erection, unbeknown to Elaine, who was making eyes at him in the hope of getting a date.

Irma noticed Adam’s presence. ‘I was going to finish there, but I see we have company. Next I’ll read chapter four: the pleasure of pleasuring yourself with your partner. I should warn you, this is quite an erotic passage – if you’ll pardon the pun.’ She smiled at Adam.

‘Great,’ Adam grinned at me. ‘I love erotic passages. You girls go and talk. Toodle pips.’

I couldn’t help but laugh as Irma’s honey voice started to slowly, sensuously read her erotic passage.

Once we were in the quiet of Amelia’s home above the shop we could talk. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m okay.’ Amelia sat down, looking tired. ‘It’s quiet without her. Lonely.’

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been here for you.’

‘You have. Besides, you have enough going on with Simon and Adam and Barry. And Adam,’ she added with a little smile.

‘Stop.’ I shook my head, not able to go there.

‘Barry sent me a nice text about Mum.’

‘Well, that’s good to hear, for a change.’

‘How are things going with Adam?’

‘Fine. Good. He’s getting there, you know. Soon he’ll be okay on his own. He won’t need me any more so
… It’s great.’ I heard the shake in my voice and how fake and ridiculous it sounded.

‘Sure.’ Amelia smiled. ‘You’re very good to help him.’

‘Yeah, well, he’s going through a tough time.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Amelia was biting her lip to stop smiling.

‘Stop.’ I shoved her gently. ‘I’m trying to be serious here.’

‘I know, I can see that.’ Amelia laughed. Then her smile quickly turned to a frown.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’ve been going through her things.’ She stood up and retrieved papers from a kitchen drawer. ‘And I found these.’

She handed me a bundle of papers. There was too much to take in, so I looked at her. ‘Tell me what I’m looking at.’

‘A storage unit. In Mum’s name. She never told me anything about it, which is odd, because I took care of all her affairs. It was paid for by direct debit from an account I don’t recognise.’

She showed me the number. I wasn’t expecting to recognise it, but I did. It was the account my rent went to each month. Dad’s company. Amelia missed my reaction and so I swallowed, waiting to see where this was leading.

‘I wouldn’t have known anything if I hadn’t found this envelope with a key in it and details of the storage unit. It’s from ten years ago. Look at the address on the envelope.’

The postal address was that of Rose and Daughters Solicitors.

‘Do you know anything about it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Definitely not.’ Amelia’s look told me she didn’t believe me. ‘Okay, not until two seconds ago when I saw the account number. Amelia, I promise you they never mentioned anything to me. They’re handling your mum’s will, aren’t they?’

She nodded.

‘Is there any mention of the contents of the storage unit in the will?’

‘I don’t know, I haven’t been into your dad yet to hear it. But … I really thought I knew what was in Mum’s will. We’ve talked about it.’

‘Let’s ask my dad.’ I took out my phone. ‘Simple, we’ll solve this right now.’

‘No.’ Amelia took the phone from my hand. ‘No. No quick fix-its right now.’ Seeing my offended expression, she explained: ‘What if your dad tells me I can’t go in there?’

‘He won’t say that. Why would he? Her property is your property now.’

‘What if I’m not supposed to know about it? As soon as we ask him, I’ll be sealing my fate. I want to go and find out what’s in there for myself.’ I watched as her eyes clouded and she became lost in a thousand thoughts in her head. ‘Why would she go to all this trouble for me not to see what’s in there?’

The following day Amelia and Adam and I made our way down the corridor of ‘Store-Age’ a self-storage facility situated in a large retail park in Dublin. The doors on the units were luminous pink, as was the logo, to make it visible to traffic on the nearby motorway. It was enough to give me a headache, especially after a sleepless night spent trying to plot out Adam’s future, but I reminded myself I was there to support my friend. In truth I was glad of the distraction provided by the unexpected turns Amelia’s life was taking. Adam’s mood had dipped again as his thoughts returned to a future spent in servitude at the family firm, and my idea of that morning – to present him with a gratitude journal in which he was to write each day, listing five things he appreciated, so that by the end of the week he would have thirty-five things, went down like a stone in a well. We’d turned to his crisis plan and he had opted to clean out my fridge rather than acknowledge what he appreciated about his life. It said a lot. Clearly, if I couldn’t resolve the Basil Confectionery issue, the success with Maria would be in vain.

While mulling that over, I tried to keep the atmosphere light for Amelia.

‘Maybe your mother was a secret agent and inside the storage unit is a collection of secret identities, wigs and passports, briefcases with concealed compartments,’ I mused, continuing the game we’d been playing on the car journey over.

I looked at Adam, to hand it over to him.

‘Your father had a large porn collection that he didn’t want you to know about.’

Amelia winced.

‘Your parents were into S&M and this is their secret lair,’ I said.

‘Nice,’ Adam complimented me.

‘Thanks.’

‘Your parents embezzled millions and stored it here,’ Adam said.

‘I wish,’ Amelia muttered.

‘Your mother stole Shergar,’ I said, and Adam cracked up.

Amelia stopped abruptly in front of a luminous pink door, and we walked into the back of her. She composed herself, glanced at me and then placed the key in the door, slowly turned it and pushed the door open, leaning as far away from the room as possible in case something leapt out at her. We were greeted with musty darkness.

Adam fumbled with the wall and switched the light on.

‘Whoa.’

We stepped inside and looked around.

‘Your mother was Imelda Marcos,’ I said.

Each wall of the ten-by-ten-foot room was lined with shelving units crammed with shoeboxes. Each shoebox was labelled with a year, starting from the bottom left-hand corner with 1954 and ending on the opposite wall with a box dated ten years ago.

‘That’s the year they married,’ Amelia said, going to the box and opening it. Inside was a photograph of her parents on their wedding day, along with a dried flower from the bride’s bouquet. There was a wedding invitation, the prayer manual from the ceremony, photos from their honeymoon, a train ticket, boat ticket, cinema stub from their first date, a receipt from the restaurant, a shoelace, a fully completed
Irish Times
crossword – all neatly filed away. Forget a memory box, it was a memory room.

‘My God, they kept everything!’ Amelia ran her fingers delicately along the row of shoeboxes, stopping at the final year. ‘The year Dad died. He must have done all of this.’ She swallowed hard, smiling at the thought of him curating this collection, then frowning, hurt by the fact they’d kept it from her.

She reached for another box at random and searched inside, then pulled out another and another. One by one she searched each box, exclaiming with delight as she found item after item representing a memory in their lives, and a memory in hers. Old school reports of hers, the ribbon she wore on the first day of school, her first tooth, a lock of hair from her first visit to the hairdresser, a letter she’d written to her father when she was eight years old apologising after they’d quarrelled. I began to wonder whether we should leave her alone in the room, sure she would want to spend endless hours poring through each box, reliving each year of her parents’ married life and her life. But she needed someone to share her memories with and Adam was patient enough to stay alongside me so we could do that for her. Even he seemed touched by what he saw and I hoped it would be a good form of therapy for him to witness this love captured in a room.

She held up a photo of her parents in the Austrian mountains. ‘That was at my uncle’s holiday chalet,’ she said, smiling as she studied the photo, running her fingers over their faces. ‘They used to go there every year before I was born. I saw the photos and begged them to bring me, but Mum couldn’t go.’

‘She’s been sick since you were a child?’ Adam asked.

‘Not at the beginning. She had her first stroke when I was twelve, but before that she was too afraid. She became very nervous about travel after she had me. I suppose it’s a mother thing
…’

She looked at us for confirmation, but neither of us could answer, having grown up without a mother.

‘I had no idea they’d hung on to all this stuff.’

‘I wonder why they kept it from you,’ Adam said, more to himself than Amelia, too engrossed in browsing the shelves to register what he was saying.

It was the elephant in the room and he’d pointed at it and shouted. He realised that as soon as he’d said it and he quickly tried to cover his tracks. ‘How amazing that they kept all of this.’

It was too late. Amelia had an odd expression on her face. He had reminded her that this room was a secret that they hadn’t wanted to share with her. Why?

‘Amelia?’ I asked, concerned. ‘Are you okay? What is it?’

As if snapping out of a trance, Amelia leapt into action and began scouring the shelves as though she knew what she was looking for and hadn’t a second to lose. She ran her finger along the dates on the boxes.

‘What are you looking for?’ I asked. ‘Can we help?’

‘The year I was born,’ she said, standing on tiptoes to read the dates on the upper shelves.

‘Seventy-eight,’ I told Adam. At six feet tall, he could reach more easily than we could.

‘Got it,’ he said, retrieving a dusty box.

He was just bringing it down to Amelia’s level when she reached up and accidentally punched the box, and sending it flying across the unit. The lid popped open and the contents cascaded through the air and scattered all over the floor. We got down on our hands and knees to retrieve as many bits as possible. Adam and I bumped heads.

‘Ow,’ I laughed and Adam reached out to rub my head.

‘Sorry,’ he winced, feeling my pain. He looked at me with those big blue icy eyes and I melted. I would gladly have stayed in that little room of love with him for ever. The thought excited me, gave me a glow; it was nice to have a crush again. It had been so long, and after Barry I’d begun to worry that I’d never feel that way about anybody ever again, but there it was, alive inside of me, this ball of nerves and anxiety and excitement every time he looked at me. But then as soon as it happened, the reality of my situation hit me and it slithered away to the corner again.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked gently.

I nodded.

‘Good,’ he said with a small smile and I felt like I was buzzing from head to toe, just zinging.

I became paranoid then and realised Amelia, who was standing beside me, had gone very quiet. Assuming she was witnessing our moment, I looked up and saw tears rolling down her cheeks as she read a piece of paper in her hand. I sprang to my feet.

‘Amelia, what’s wrong?’

‘My mother –’ she handed me the handwritten note – ‘was not my mother.’

My dear baby Amelia,

I’m sorry I am not able to care for you as I should. When you are older I hope you understand that this decision was made purely with love and nothing else. I trust you are in safe and loving arms with Magda and Len. I will think of you always.

Love and forever,

Your mummy

Back in Amelia’s kitchen I was reading the note aloud to Amelia and Elaine. Amelia was pacing the floor, having moved from shock to grief, and now to an uncomfortable snappy anger, which made Elaine and I wary of what to say. Elaine was fingering the items in the shoebox: baby booties, a cardigan, a hat, a dress, a rattle, among other things.

‘These were all handmade,’ she said, interrupting Amelia’s rant.

‘So?’ Amelia snapped. ‘That’s hardly the issue here.’

‘Well, this is Kenmare lace.’

‘Who cares what lace it is?’ Amelia snapped again.

‘It’s just that it’s not made by many people, not even now, so in the seventies there’s only one place that would have made it.’

Amelia stopped pacing and looked at Elaine, realisation growing on her face.

‘Now, now,’ I had to stop the silliness. ‘Let’s not go there. I’m sure this could have been made by anyone in the world, Elaine. We mustn’t go getting Amelia’s hopes up about finding her parents.’

‘Finding my parents?’ Amelia whispered, stunned. It was as if the thought hadn’t yet occurred to her. She had been so wrapped up in wondering why her adoptive parents had kept this from her and how they could have lied to her for so long, that she hadn’t yet come round to thinking about the possibility of finding her real parents.

‘All I’m saying is, this is Kenmare lace, made with love and care. I know, because I started a lace-making class to meet men. Every single item in this box points to Kenmare. The lace is Kenmare lace and the sweaters are from Quills, which is Kenmare.’

‘There’s no way you could recognise the knitting is from Quills,’ I said, in a rush to derail this ridiculous train of thought.

‘The label is on it,’ Elaine said, showing it to me. She looked up at Amelia. ‘Amelia, I think your biological mother is in Kenmare.’