The Year I Met You Read Free Page A

the delivery.
    The wind outside howls with such force I wonder if it will lift the roof off. My next-door neighbour’s garden gate is banging constantly and I debate whether to go out and close it, but that would mean I’ll get blown around like the wheelie bins that are battering each other in the side passage. It is the stormiest weather this country – Ireland – has seen since whenever. It’s the same for the UK, and the US is being pounded too. It’s minus forty in Kansas, Niagara Falls has frozen, New York has been attacked by a frigid, dense air known as a polar vortex, there are mobile homes landing on clifftops in Kerry, previously sure-footed sheep on steep cliff faces are being challenged and defeated, lying beside washed-up seals on the shoreline. There are flood warnings, residents in coastal areas have been advised to stay indoors by miserable saturated news reporters with blue lips reporting live from beside the sea. The road that takes me most places that I need to go has been flooded for two days. At a time when I’ve wanted, needed to keep busy, Mother Nature is slowing me to a standstill. I know what she’s doing: she’s trying to make me think, and she’s winning. Hence all thoughts about myself now begin with Perhaps … because I’m having to think about myself in ways I never did before and I’m not sure if I’m right in my thinking about those things.
    The bark of the dog across the road is barely audible above the wind, I think Dr Jameson has forgotten to take him in again. He’s getting a bit scatty, or else he’s had a falling out with the dog. I don’t know its name but it’s a Jack Russell. I find it running around my garden, sometimes it shits, it has on a few occasions run into my house and I’ve had to chase it around and deliver it back across the road to the right honourable gentleman. I call him the right honourable gentleman because he is a rather grand man in his seventies, retired GP, and for kicks and giggles was the president of every club going: chess, bridge, golf, cricket, and now our neighbourhood management company, which handles leaf-blowing, street-lamp bulb replacement, neighbourhood watch and the like. He is always well turned out, perfectly ironed trousers and shirts with little V-neck sweaters, polished shoes and tidy hair. He talks at me as if he’s directing his sentences over my head, lifted chin and head-on nostrils, like an amateur theatre actor, yet is never blatantly rude so gives me no reason to be rude back, but just distant. Distance is all I can give someone I can’t truly fathom. I didn’t know until one month ago that Dr Jameson even had a dog, but these days I seem to know too much about my neighbours. The more the dog barks over the wind, the more I worry if Dr Jameson has fallen over, or been blown away into somebody’s back garden like the trampolines that have been garden-hopping during the storms. I heard about a little girl waking up to find a swing set and slide in her back garden; she thought Santa had come again, but it turned out it had come from five houses down the road.
    I can’t hear the party down the street, though I can see it. Mr and Mrs Murphy are having their usual family New Year shindig. It always begins and ends with traditional Irish songs and Mr Murphy plays the bodhrán and Mrs Murphy sings with such sadness it’s as though she’s sitting right in a field of dead rotten black potatoes. The rest of their guests join in as though they’re all rocking from side to side on a famine ship on stormy seas to the Americas. I’m not sad that the wind is lifting their sounds away in another direction, I can however hear a party that I can’t see, probably from a few streets away; a few words from those crazy enough to smoke outside are blown down my chimney, along with a distant rhythm of party music before it gets swiped away again; sounds and leaves circling in a violent frenzy on my doorstep.
    I was invited to three