What We Have Learned Today

Friday 7 August

I heard Mum and Laurie talking until the sun came up. I don’t know what they were saying, but the tone was a lot more improved than it has been over the past couple of weeks. Sister Ignatius has been helping them talk through everything. It’s like anything bad or scary that happens, when you finish it or get through it you’re so relieved you forget how terrifying it was or how miserable you were and you want to do it again, or you just remember the good parts, or you tell yourself it’s helped you get to the new part of yourself.

All is not well in this household. All is not perfect. But then it never has been. Gone is the elephant from the room, though. He was released, is running riot down the roads, while we all try to tame him. It’s just like when a card dealer shuffles the pack‑he messes them all up, ruins the order just so he can deal and the pack will eventually find its way to order again. That’s what had happened to us. A long time ago things were shuffled, we were all dealt our cards. Now, we’re tidying them up, trying to make sense out of them all.

I don’t think Mum or I will ever forgive Laurie, Rosaleen and Arthur for keeping such a secret from us, for propelling such a lie for so long. All that we can do is try to understand that Laurie did it because he wanted the best for us, no matter how misguided it was. He tells us that he did it because he loved us and he thought it would give us a better life. It’s not forgivable, and it’s not enough to hear all that Rosaleen had told him, how she’d swayed his opinion, how she’d fed him and Mum with so many lies that they didn’t know what they were doing. It’s not forgivable, but we have to try to understand. Maybe when I understand it properly I can forgive it. Maybe when I can understand why both Mum and Dad lied to me about my real father, I’ll be able to forgive it. I think that’s all a little too far off for me to imagine. But I can thank Laurie for giving me such a wonderful dad. George Goodwin was a good man, an amazing father, thinking of us, again no matter how misguided, until the end. He fought his father all the way to the end of his father’s life about developing Kilsaney. He knew it was the one thing that my biological father could have left behind for me, had things gone the way they should have, had he not perished in the fire. It was also Mum’s home. Where she grew up, where she carried all of her memories, and when the banks came knocking, he couldn’t let it go. I would rather have my father than Kilsaney, but I know how much he loved us, what he was attempting to do. Both of my fathers gave up so much for us. I can only thank them and feel fortunate to be loved so much by two people. That may be completely incomprehensible to anybody else, but it’s my life, it’s how I’ve learned to cope.

Arthur is back and forth to Rosaleen in the hospital every day. She’s been the luckiest person in the world to have him and she never knew it. She’ll know it now, when everybody else has turned their backs on her. And Arthur is still there, despite discovering all that she’d done, trying to bring back the woman he loves. I find his loyalty to her unfathomable but then again, I’ve never been in love. It seems to do crazy things to people. He just wants her to get better but, between you and me, I don’t think she’ll ever get out of that place. Whatever is wrong with Rosaleen is so deep‑rooted that it has reached from her past life and is growing far into her next life, already uprooting whatever is sprouting there.

Arthur and Laurence have been reunited. Arthur will never forgive Laurence for what he did, for making him promise to be a part of this entire thing. But I think he’ll forgive him quicker than he’ll ever forgive himself. He tormented himself every single day about not having stepped forward, for not stopping the plan from going ahead, for allowing the lie to grow, watching me growing up while my father was across the road in a room, watching my mother grieve while her love was right across the road. He says lots of things stopped him, but seeing how much my mum loved George and how much of a great father he was was the greatest reason of all. I suppose it’s easier to see the way out of anything when you’ve found your way out of that maze. When you’re stuck in the middle, in a series of dead‑ends making circles, it’s difficult to make any sense of anything. I know that feeling.

Me? I’m a little wobbly but oddly, I feel stronger. I’ve said goodbye to Zoey and Laura completely after they asked for photographs of my burned hand for their Facebook pages. I’m planning on inviting Fiona, the girl who gave me the book at the funeral, to this house very soon. When things have calmed down at least a little.

So that’s the story. The whole story. As I said at the beginning, I don’t expect you to believe it but it’s the truth, every single word of it. All families have their secrets, most people would never know them, but they know there are spaces, there are gaps where the answers should be, where someone should have sat, where someone used to be. A name that is never uttered, or uttered once and never again. We all have our secrets. At least ours are unearthed now, or at least, are beginning to be. I constantly wonder how much of my life I would have learned if it hadn’t been for the diary. Sometimes I think I would have found out sooner or later, most of the time I think that’s what the diary’s purpose was, because it most certainly had a purpose. It led me to here. It helped me discover the secrets but it also made me a better person. That sounds really slushy, I know, but it helped me to realise that there are tomorrows. Before, I concentrated on just now. I would say and do things in order to get what I wanted in that instant. I never gave a second thought to how the rest of the dominoes would fall. The diary helped me to see how one thing affects another. How I can actually make a difference in my life and in other people’s lives. I always think back to how I was drawn to that book in Marcus’s travelling library, almost like it was there just for me that day. I think that most people go into bookshops and have no idea what they want to buy. Somehow, the books sit there, almost magically willing people to pick them up. The right person for the right book. It’s as though they already know whose life they need to be a part of, how they can make a difference, how they can teach a lesson, put a smile on a face at just the right time. I think about books a lot differently now.

When I was in primary school the teacher used to tell us to write a paragraph at the end of every day titled ‘What I Learned Today’. I feel in this circumstance it would take far less to say ‘What I Haven’t Learned’, for what haven’t I learned? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’ve learned so much, I’ve grown so much and it’s never ending.

I thought this whole thing‑finding out who I am‑was the purpose for the diary. I thought after the fire the diary would become a notepad again and I would have returned it to the travelling library and replaced it on the non‑fiction shelf and allowed somebody else to benefit from it. But I can’t do it. I can’t let it go. It continues to tell me about tomorrow and I continue to live it and sometimes I try to live it better.

I closed the diary, left the castle and made my way toward the orchard where I’d arranged to meet Weseley by the apple tree with the engravings.

‘Uh‑oh,’ he said eyeing the diary under my arm. ‘What now?’

‘Nothing bad.’ I sat down beside him on a blanket.

‘I don’t believe you. What is it?’

‘It’s actually about you and me,’ I laughed.

‘What about us?’

I raised my eyebrows suggestively at him.

‘Oh, no!’ He threw his arms up dramatically. ‘So now, as well as saving you from burning houses, I have to kiss you?’

I shrugged. ‘Whatever.’

‘Where does it happen? Here?’

I nodded.

‘Okay. So.’ He looked at me seriously.

‘So,’ I replied. I cleared my throat. Readied myself.

‘Does it say that I kiss you or that you kiss me?’

‘You definitely kiss me.’

‘Okay.’

He was silent for a moment and then he leaned in and kissed me tenderly on the lips. In the middle of the most luscious nicest kiss I’d ever had, he opened his eyes and pulled away.

‘You just made that up, didn’t you?’ he asked, eyes wide.

‘What do you mean?’ I laughed.

‘Tamara Goodwin, you just made that up!’ he grinned. ‘Give me that book.’ He swiped it from my hands and pretended to hit me over the head with it.

‘We have to make our own tomorrows Weseley,’ I teased. I fell back on the blanket and looked up at the apple tree that had seen so much.

Weseley leaned over me, our faces close together, our noses almost touching.

‘What did it really say?’ he asked softly.

‘That I think it’ll all be okay. And that I’ll write again tomorrow.’

‘You always say that.’

‘And I always do.’

‘Are you ready?’ he asked, studying me closely.

‘I think so,’ I whispered.

‘Right.’ He sat up and pulled me up with him. ‘I brought this.’

He took a clear plastic bag from beside him and held it open. I dropped the diary in. Reluctantly at first, then as soon as it was in, I knew it was the right decision.

He wrapped the diary up in the plastic bag and handed it back to me.

‘You do it.’

I looked up at the apple tree, at the engravings of the names of my Mum, Laurie, Arthur, Rosaleen and the dozens of others who had so many hopes for tomorrow under this tree, and then I kneeled down and placed the diary in the hole that Weseley had dug and we filled it again with soil.

I didn’t lie when I said I couldn’t let it go. I can’t let it go. Not completely. Maybe some day when I’m in trouble again I’ll dig it up and see what it has to say. But in the meantime, I’ll have to find my own way.

Thanks for reading my story. I’ll write again tomorrow.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 720