The Book of Tomorrow by Cecelia Ahern

was passing-the-time kind of humming, a distracted sound, a tune that wasn’t familiar to me, if it was a real one at all. The summer breeze blew and it brought a sweet smell and her song along with it. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the wall, directly the other side from her and I listened.
    As my head touched the brick, she stopped humming and my eyes opened quickly and I straightened up.
    I looked around. She wasn’t in sight, and so I couldn’t have been spotted. When my heart slowed to its normal rhythm she began humming again. I moved along the wall, my fingers trailing over the grey stone, tracing the wall, cobwebs, crumbling rock, the smooth of some parts, the rough edges ofothers beneath my hot fingers. The sun beat down on me, the trees no longer my personal parasol. The wall came to an abrupt stop and I looked up to see a large ornamental stone archway marking the entrance.
    I peeked my head inside so that I wouldn’t be revealed to the mystery hummer and discovered a walled garden, immaculately kept. From my position outside the arch I could see a rose garden, large formal beds set against the backdrop of climbing roses, fully bloomed, which lined both sides of the footpath from another entrance. I dared to move a little more to see the rest of the garden. In the centre were more flowers—geraniums, chrysanthemums, carnations, others I couldn’t name. Flowers tumbled out from hanging baskets and oversized ornamental stone pots that lined the central walkway through the garden. I couldn’t quite believe this little oasis amidst all the green, as though somebody had taken a fizzy drink, shaken it and opened it here in the middle of these crumbling walls and this colour had burst out, spraying every inch with different shades. Bees were flying from one flower to the other, vines climbed up the walls twined around beautiful flowers. I could smell the rosemary, lavender and mint of a nearby herb garden. There was a small greenhouse in the corner of the garden, beside that a dozen or so wooden boxes on stands, and then I realised that swept away by my curiosity I had unknowingly wandered into the garden and the humming had stopped.
    I wasn’t sure what to expect but I definitely wasn’t expecting what I saw. At the end of the garden the source of the humming, and the person that was currently staring at me as though I had arrived from another planet, was dressed in what appeared to be a white spacesuit, her head covered in a black veil, her hands in a pair of rubber gloves and on her feet a pair ofcalf-length rubber boots. She looked like she’d just stepped off a spaceship and into a nuclear disaster.
    I smiled nervously and waved my free hand. ‘Hi. I come in peace.’
    She stared at me for a little longer, frozen still like a statue. I felt a little bit nervous, a little bit awkward, and so when that happens, I did what I usually do.
    ‘What the fuck are you staring at?’
    I don’t know how she took that, seeing as she had a Darth Vadar helmet on. She stared at me a little longer and I waited for her to tell me that I was Luke and she was my father.
    ‘Well, now,’ she said brightly, as if snapping out of a trance, ‘I knew I had a little visitor.’ She took her entire head attire off, revealing herself to be far older than I expected. She must have been in her seventies.
    She came towards me and I half expected her to jump from one foot to the other as though there was no gravity. She was wrinkled, very wrinkled, her skin falling downward as though time had melted her. Her blue eyes sparkled like the Aegean Sea, reminding me of a day out on Dad’s yacht where when you looked down, the sea was so clear you could see the sand and hundreds of multicoloured fish beneath. But there was nothing beneath her eyes, so translucent they practically reflected back all of the light. Then she took off her gauntlets and held her hands out.
    ‘I’m Sister Ignatius,’ she smiled, not shaking my