Paradise End

by Elizabeth Laird

  She was looking at me. Her eyes were the same sea colour as Tia’s. I stared back. My mouth was hanging open, I expect, in an embarrassing way, but I was noticing something strange, a kind of blurring round her eyes and an uncertain, drooping twist to her mouth. If she’d been a painting, instead of a living person, you’d have thought the artist’s brush had wobbled.

  Beside me, I felt Tia stiffen.

  ‘This is Carly, Mimi,’ she said quickly. ‘She’s a friend of Camilla’s. She lives just near here. We’ve played tennis together at Camilla’s house.’

  I nearly turned my head to stare disbelievingly at Tia, but I stopped myself in time. She was giving me an alibi, I could see that. I could just imagine what would have happened if she’d said, ‘This is Carly, she lives in that three-bedroom semi down the street, the one with the paint chipped off the front door, she’s got a revolting little sister called Lauren, she goes to that rough comprehensive on the edge of Torminster, I’ve got no idea who she is, I just picked her up outside our front gates, and by the way we’ve decided to be friends.’

  It would have been, ‘Out you go, you dirty common little girl. This is no place for the likes of you.’

  At least, that’s what I thought Tia’s mum would have said.

  Instead, she looked at me vaguely and said, ‘Near here? Good heavens. I didn’t think anyone lived in this wilderness.’ Her voice was odd, a little thick and slow. ‘Camilla’s mother is amazing. She knows simply everyone.’ She flashed me a smile that was so lovely I almost gasped, but shut it off her face at once, as if to tell me that she hadn’t meant it. Then she turned back to Tia.

  ‘You’ll have to have supper on you own tonight after all, darling. Lally rang. She’s having a party, and Max Starsky’s going to be there. He’s over here from LA. What a lucky chance! Otto’s taking me up in his car. Graziella will do you something on a tray.’

  ‘Mimi!’ Tia’s voice was sharp with disappointment. ‘You said you’d be at home tonight. You promised! Who’s Max Starsky anyway?’

  Her mother gave a trilling laugh.

  ‘Only the hottest new director in Hollywood. As if you didn’t know!’ She had already turned away. ‘Now don’t be a bore, sweetie. I’ve absolutely promised Lally. Get your little friend to stay. Carly, is it? I’m sure you’ll have lots of fun, both of you.’

  She turned, putting a hand on the door frame to steady herself, and went out, and the room seemed suddenly darker.

  I turned to look at Tia. She was biting her lip.

  ‘Every Friday.’ He voice was shaky, and I couldn’t decide if she was angry or trying not to cry. ‘She does this to me every single Friday. I thought at least this weekend, when I’d got a half-day and was home so early . . .’

  She stopped. I nearly asked her something about Camilla, whoever she was, but I didn’t. Camilla had been my entry ticket, that was all. Somehow, I didn’t like to ask her about Otto, whoever he was, either.

  ‘I thought I was going to die of embarrassment just then,’ I said, trying to cheer Tia up. ‘Do you think she heard me say all that stuff about the mad miser and his willy?’

  Tia’s face lightened. She grabbed my arm and pulled me towards the door. I was glad to get out of that gloomy old dining room anyway. The pictures were giving me the creeps, especially the one of the old guy, with all his smoky factories.

  ‘Who cares?’ she said. ‘He was a miser, as a matter of fact, old Joshua Braithwaite. And it’s true, he did go a bit mad in the end. Quite dotty really. I didn’t know he showed people his thing though. How thrilling. Wish I’d seen it.’

  ‘But he was your great-great-something-grandfather,’ I said, slightly shocked.

  ‘So what?’ A change had come over Tia. She seemed happier and more carefree all of a sudden, as if a worry had gone. ‘Everyone’s got weird ancestors. I bet you have.’

  ‘I haven’t got any ancestors,’ I said. ‘Well, not that I know about. Except for Mum’s great-uncle Albert. He was killed in the First World War. He got shell shock and jumped out of his trench one night, shouting rude words at the Germans. They shot him.’

  ‘There, you see?’ said Tia. ‘You’ve only got one ancestor, and he wasn’t exactly ordinary either.’

  ‘My nan’s OK though.’ We were walking up the great staircase and I was running my hand up the banister, loving the touch of the wood, as smooth as silk. ‘There’s nothing wrong with her, I can tell you. She practically runs the community centre down in Hartwell-on-Sea, and the only time she goes mad is when kids break in and smash the place up.’

  We’d got to the top of the staircase now and were standing on the gallery there, looking down into the hall below.

  ‘This is so amazing,’ I said, letting myself sound impressed for once. ‘I can’t believe I’m here.’

  ‘You wouldn’t, would you,’ Tia said suddenly, ‘stay, I mean? For supper? Graziella’s a brilliant cook.’

  ‘I can’t. I told you. Mum’ll do her nut if I’m not home soon. She’s probably rung round the undertakers already’

  ‘Call her then,’ said Tia. ‘My mobile’s in my bedroom. Tell her you’re here and that you’ll be late home.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, but I did. I knew I wanted to stay, and that I’d make Mum let me, however much she moaned about it.

  5

  I don’t know what I’d expected Tia’s bedroom to be like, that first time, but when I stepped into it, before I’d looked round properly, I thought it was like a dream of everything everyone thinks they want. And come to think of it, of everything they didn’t even know they wanted in the first place.

  The room was big for one thing. Big? Enormous, just like the rooms downstairs. There were three long windows along one wall, and two along another wall, and the sun was streaming in, making everything dazzle.

  The bed was double, a four poster, with white-muslin curtains and cushions and soft toys piled up on it, and there was a rose-coloured sofa and a couple of pink armchairs, and a white desk, miles long, with a computer on it, and bookshelves full of new books, and pictures of horses and women in white dresses in frames on the walls.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Tia said. ‘I don’t. I wanted it to be purple and silver. But Mimi thinks I’m still four years old and she made the designer do everything in pink.’

  ‘The designer?’ My mouth fell open. ‘You mean someone else designed all this? Didn’t you choose your stuff yourself?’

  Tia shook her head.

  ‘No. I wanted to, but I don’t suppose I’d have been any good at it. Mimi says I’d have only made it look a mess, but I think it looks a mess now.’

  I saw what she meant. The candy pink of the armchairs, the pink roses on the curtains and the pictures on the walls were sickly and babyish now that I looked more closely.

  ‘I bet you’d have done it better,’ I said. ‘At least you wouldn’t have done everything in pink. This lot looks like a pile of candyfloss with jelly beans stuck all over it.’

  I must have sounded nastier than I meant to, because she bit her lip and looked hurt. I should have said something nice to take the sting away, but I was too busy looking round the room, feeling jealous and irritated that Tia had so much and she’d done so little with it. I was doing a lightning plan in my head of what I’d do if the room was mine.

  ‘You could add some purple stuff anyway,’ I said. ‘It would go with the pink. You could dye your bedspread purple. And those cushion covers.’

  ‘Dye the bedspread?’ She was staring at me. ‘Can you get things dyed? I didn’t know.’

  ‘You don’t get things dyed. You do it yourself,’ I said impatiently. ‘You get a tin of dye, read the instructions, shove it all in the washing machine, and there you are! Mum’s always dyeing stuff round our house when things get stained and faded and all that. It’s fun.’

  ‘Wow.’ Tia looked scared and excited at the same time. ‘I couldn’t though. I couldn’t possibly.’

  ‘Why not?’

&nbs
p; ‘Mimi would kill me. This bedspread comes from Switzerland. It’s handmade Thai silk.’

  ‘It wouldn’t spoil it or anything,’ I said, though I was beginning to feel doubtful. ‘At least, I don’t think it would. It would just change the colour. Know what I’d do? I’d dye it first and have the row afterwards.’

  She wrinkled her nose.

  ‘How would I get the dye?’

  I sighed impatiently.

  ‘You’d go out of the house and down the lane,’ I said, as if I was talking to a small child, ‘and catch the bus to Torminster. Then you’d go to Hardwicke’s in the high street, and . . .’

  ‘I’ve never been on a bus. I wouldn’t know what to do.’

  ‘You’ve never been on a . . . Oh.’

  That shut me up. I couldn’t have been more amazed if she’d said she’d never eaten a pizza or been to the cinema. The funny thing was that I didn’t envy her this grand, big bedroom any more. It felt like a hotel room, a place that wasn’t hers at all.

  ‘What’s your room like?’ she asked.

  I took a deep breath. I didn’t know where to begin. You couldn’t imagine anything more different than Tia’s room and our bedroom at home.

  ‘Well,’ I said feebly. ‘I don’t know how to describe it really.’

  And I didn’t. Not to Tia anyway. For a start I couldn’t bear to tell her that I had to share it with my horrible little sister, and that it was so small it would have fitted into hers about five times over.

  As a matter of fact, between you and me, I don’t think I’ve done too badly, given what I’ve had to start from. I’ve got these tap-dance posters – you should see them – all over my side of the room. They’re in black and white, and really cool. They gave me the idea to make black and white a theme, to create a sort of style. Don’t get the wrong idea. ‘Style’ sounds much too grand. I mean, I haven’t got much space, and all the furniture’s been there forever and looks as if it came out of a junk shop, and I can’t do anything about the yellow walls, so I have to try and imagine the look I want.

  The posters are the main thing, and I’ve stuck an old white beaded shawl that my nan gave me on the wall above my bed and draped a black scarf round the lampshade. The light effect’s good. Kind of weird, but good. Our clothes are on a rail behind a curtain. Hardly room for anything, of course, and Lauren takes more than half the hangers, but I’ve got my own shelf under my own mirror for my make-up, and my own desk. OK, so it’s more a shelf than a desk, but I keep my school stuff on it, and my mascot (he’s a little green monster and I know he’s embarrassing, but I’ve had him since I was a baby and I really love him), and this stunning black vase that I got in the school garage sale, to keep my pencils in.

  Stand on Lauren’s side and turn your back on all her junky little kid’s stuff and look at my half of the room with your eyes nearly closed, and it’s not that bad really, when I’ve tidied it up. Only usually everything’s buried under mounds of clothes.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, taking a deep breath, as I tried to think how to explain all this to Tia. ‘I’ve got these fantastic posters. They’re all on tap dance.’ I could see a puzzled crease between her eyes, but I’d got going now so I went on. ‘My first was a big one of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It’s so classy, you’ve no idea. And then I wrote off for my Savion Glover. That’s brilliant. And I’ve got the Tap Dogs now too. They’re amazing. All boots and Levi’s. Really powerful.’

  I stopped. Tia’s eyebrows were raised in questioning points above her eyes. She didn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about, I could tell. I gave up.

  You’d probably think they were boring if you ever got to see them, I said silently in my head, and the contrast between my horrible, cramped, shared bedroom and Tia’s luxury palace hit me all over again.

  ‘It’s all a mess at home,’ I said out loud.

  She looked as if she was about to ask a whole stack of questions, so to get her off the subject I said quickly, ‘Where do you keep your clothes? There aren’t any cupboards in here.’

  ‘They’re in my dressing room,’ said Tia.

  ‘Your what?’

  I couldn’t help the way it came out, with a snort. ‘My dressing room’. I mean.

  She opened one of a pair of doors at the far end of her bedroom. I followed her, and looked over her shoulder into a much smaller room (well, it was still bigger than Sam’s room at home), with cupboards all the way down one side, and a dressing-table thing with mirrors on it at one end.

  Then she opened one of the cupboard doors, and pure envy attacked me again, biting me like a little green snake sliding out from nowhere and shooting a dose of poison into my veins.

  I just stood there, looking at Tia’s clothes. There were hundreds of them. Thousands of them! Jackets and tops, trousers, skirts, hats – hats! – and whole racks of party stuff, velvet and chiffon and Lycra and satin, beads and feathers and bits of sparkle. And shoes! Leather boots (pairs and pairs of them) and strappy sandals and silvery slipper things, and shoes for doing special things in, like riding boots, and rope soles for the beach, and those green-soled shoes for tennis. No tap shoes though, or ballet. I was glad about that, in a way.

  ‘Shame, isn’t it,’ I said nastily, ‘that you can only ever wear one pair of shoes at a time?’

  I’m not sure if she heard me. She’d opened a door off her dressing room into a bathroom.

  I knew what to expect by now. It would be the glitziest bathroom I’d ever seen, all sparkly and tiled with gold bits everywhere. I was right. It was.

  ‘Aren’t you the lucky one,’ I said. ‘Sell these gold taps and you could feed an African family for a year.’

  That’s the sort of thing Mum says sometimes, and it always infuriates me. I couldn’t believe I’d said it myself.

  ‘I know.’ She looked embarrassed. ‘Don’t think I wanted all this stuff. I didn’t.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. It was done by designers.’

  ‘Yes. Mimi just told them to do the most expensive thing they could because Daddy was paying for it. She didn’t care what it looked like as long as it cost him as much as possible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s the way she feels about him, I suppose. She really hates him now.’

  I shivered. It was as if I’d smelt something nasty. The glitzy bathroom was giving me the creeps.

  ‘At least you’ve got it to yourself,’ I said, trying to think of something nice to say. ‘In our house you’ve only been in the bathroom for a nanosecond when everyone’s banging on the door telling you to get the hell out of there.’

  She pounced on this. I couldn’t believe how fascinated she was by my boringly ordinary life.

  ‘How many people are there then, in your family? Do you live with both your parents? Are they together?’

  ‘Yes. And there’s Lauren and Sam. I told you about Lauren. Sam’s my older brother.’

  ‘You are lucky,’ she said again, and I was amazed to see that she looked as jealous of me as I’d been feeling of her a few minutes earlier. ‘I always wanted an older brother. It must be fantastic’

  I stared at her.

  ‘Tia, Sam’s the biggest pain in the butt you ever met. Think lazy slob crossed with flashes of Rottweiler and the biggest ego in Northern Europe. Except when he wants to borrow my Walkman, which he does all the time, since his was bust. Then smarmy’s not the word for it. I’m telling you, a brother like Sam is a living, breathing assault on my human rights.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked disappointed. ‘But don’t you do things together? Go to films, or go out for meals or something?’

  ‘Me?’ I burst out laughing. ‘Go out with Sam? You seriously have to be kidding. I mean kidding.’

  ‘Some people go round with their brothers.’ Tia sounded almost obstinate. ‘Mimi used to go to dances with Frost whenever they weren’t quarrelling.’

  ‘Frost?’

  I was staring at her, mystified. Visions of her mum wrap
ped up in winter woollies dancing through the snow flashed through my head.

  She smiled at the look on my face.

  ‘Frost’s my uncle,’ she said. ‘He’s Mimi’s twin brother.’

  ‘Right.’ I sat down on the sofa beside her. ‘Let’s get this straight. You’ve got an uncle whose name is Frost?’

  Tia threw her head back and laughed.

  ‘I wish you could see your face, Carly. Frost’s only his nickname. His real name’s Frederick, but no one ever calls him that.’

  ‘I don’t blame them.’ I shook my head. ‘You could call him Fred though. Why Frost?’

  Before she could answer, somewhere in that huge house, miles away, a telephone rang. I clapped my hand over my mouth.

  ‘Mum! I haven’t called her!’

  Tia jumped up, grabbed a slim mobile in a mint-green cover from beside her bed and put it into my hands.

  I dialled the number, and as it rang I turned away. I didn’t want Tia to hear the racket there always was in our house at five o’clock in the afternoon – Sam yelling about his lost football boots, and Lauren with the TV turned up to maximum, and Mum screeching at her to turn it down.

  Mum answered it herself, thank goodness.

  ‘Carly? Are you all right? Where are you? Did they keep you in after school? They should have let me know.’

  ‘No, Mum. I’m at Tia’s. At Paradise End. She says I can stay to tea.’

  ‘Oh.’ Mum sounded doubtful. ‘I don’t know. What about your homework?’

  ‘Done most of it. Please, Mum.’

  ‘Look, Carly.’ She was thinking of reasons to say no. I could almost hear them clicking round in her brain. ‘I’ve got the tea half ready now. You could have given me a bit of notice. Anyway, they won’t have catered for you. You can’t just land on people like that.’

  ‘It’s not like that here, Mum. It’s OK. Really.’

  ‘No, love.’ She was firming herself up, I could tell. ‘We’re doing your costume for the display tonight. I want you back here by six. We can fix another time for you to stay longer when I’ve had a word with Tia’s mother. Is she there now? Can I speak to her?’