Paradise End

by Elizabeth Laird

  The thought of my mum talking to Tia’s ‘Mimi’ made my skin prickle all over with embarrassment.

  ‘No! She’s out. Tia’s on her own. That’s why she wants me to stay.’

  ‘I see.’ Mum’s voice was even more disapproving, and I knew I’d lost. Mum’s so weird about me being in my friends’ houses if no one else is in. I don’t know what she thinks we’re going to do. Set fire to the place? Bomb our skulls out on drugs? Invite loads of sex-crazed boys round and have an orgy? I know this boring old village keeps growing (it’ll be a town soon, at this rate), but it’s not exactly the vice capital of the Western world. Too much imagination, that’s Mum’s trouble.

  ‘Back at six,’ she was saying firmly. ‘You can bring Tia round here if you like, but I want you home. Lauren! For God’s sake turn that thing down! You’ll have Mavis pounding on the wall in a minute.’

  I switched off the little green phone and handed it back to Tia.

  ‘This thing’s so cool,’ I said. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘New York,’ said Tia, making me gulp. ‘What did your mother say?’

  ‘She won’t let me stay. I didn’t think she would, actually. She’s dead strict about me being with people she doesn’t know. Worse than Dad, even though he’s a . . .’

  I stopped.

  Trust my big mouth, I was thinking. If you want to turn her off right away, try telling her your dad’s a policeman.

  ‘He’s a what?’ Tia was leaning forwards.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘No, you were going to say. What is he then, your father? What does he do?’

  At that moment, her posh accent really got to me. It really riled me. I stood up.

  ‘He’s in the police force,’ I said. ‘Look, I’ve got to go.’

  But Tia was looking up at me, fascinated.

  ‘Wow! But isn’t it dangerous? Don’t you get scared in case he gets hurt?’

  No one had ever said that to me before. It had always been things like, ‘Must be wicked doing those high-speed chases,’ or ‘Better not tell my brother. He hates the pigs,’ or ‘Watch out, here comes Sergeant Carly’

  I sat down again.

  ‘Mum gets worried when he’s out late at the weekend, sorting out drunks and fights and stuff when that big pub on the Crossways roundabout closes. He nearly got his face cut up with a Stanley knife last weekend.’

  ‘That’s just so scary,’ said Tia, shuddering.

  She was seriously impressed, I could tell. I leaned back against the silky rose-coloured sofa cushions, ready to show off. I try to keep as quiet as possible about Dad at school, but it was different with Tia. She wasn’t part of my world. She didn’t know anyone in it. She was looking in on us from the outside.

  ‘He was doing a drugs bust last week,’ I began. ‘Out on the bypass. Heroin dealers. They were squatting in an empty farmhouse. Dad and his team surrounded the place, wearing flak jackets and all, and . . .’

  Her little green mobile bleeped out strange chiming noises, not like anything I’d heard before, really unusual and classy.

  It was just as well, I suppose. My imagination was beginning to take over. Dad’s drug bust (actually, he’d only mentioned weed, not crack or heroin or anything) was getting mixed up with something I’d seen on TV.

  Tia had the phone to her ear now. She flicked her long blonde hair back and looked at me apologetically.

  ‘Hiya, Frost. No, Mimi’s out. Yes, with Otto. They’ve gone to Lally’s. There’s a director Mimi wants to meet or something. I’m all right, really. No, I’m not on my own. I’ve got a friend here. Carly. What? No, she’s staying all evening. Please, Frost. Don’t fuss. Mimi won’t be back late. She promised. Yes, of course Graziella’s here. I’m fine, really. Bye.’

  ‘But I can’t stay’ I said as she snapped the little phone shut. ‘Mum said I’ve got to be back by six, and it’s nearly that now.’

  ‘I know. Sorry. I just didn’t want him to make a scene. He’ll be furious with Mimi for going out this evening. They’ll have a row about it. They’ve been awful recently, since Mimi started going round with Otto. They fight all the time.’

  ‘What about?’ I wanted to keep her mind off Dad and my silly drugs story. Anyway, Tia’s family sounded so weird and interesting I wanted to know all about them.

  ‘Otto usually.’ She screwed her face up as she said his name. ‘And me sometimes. Frost keeps telling Mimi she’s a useless mother. He’s no good with people himself though, so I don’t blame her for getting furious when he ticks her off.’

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted her to go on.

  ‘And they’re always fighting over the house.’

  ‘What? Paradise End?’

  ‘Yes. My grandfather left it to both of them when he died, but Mimi was away acting all the time. And when—’

  ‘Wait. Stop!’ I interrupted. ‘What do you mean, she was away acting?’

  ‘She’s an actress. Didn’t I say?’

  ‘No.’ I was tingling with excitement. ‘Is she famous? Do I know her? Have I seen her in anything?’

  Tia shrugged.

  ‘You might have. She had a brilliant part about fifteen years ago. She was Claudia in Girl on a Beach.’

  I shook my head reluctantly. I’d never heard of Girl on a Beach.

  ‘Is it on DVD? I’d love to see it.’

  She looked away.

  ‘Yes, I’ve got it. I could lend it to you.’

  ‘What else? Has she been on TV? In soaps or anything?’

  ‘No. Just a few things. Nothing much.’

  Her voice was colourless. She stood up and went across to the window, standing with her back to me, looking out. Even I, with my thick elephant hide, could tell that somehow I’d offended her. I was burning with more questions, but I bit my lip and shut up.

  After a moment, she said, without turning round, ‘I was born after Girl on a Beach, just when she was making her breakthrough. She had loads of wonderful offers, but she couldn’t take any of them up because of me.’

  As plain as could be, I could hear Mum’s voice in my head.

  Never blame other people for things you fail to do yourself.

  ‘That’s got to be rubbish,’ I said. ‘If she was really good, having a baby wouldn’t have stopped her.’

  ‘But it did. Her face went puffy and she got fat, she says. She lost her looks.’

  ‘What do you mean? She’s the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen in my life. Who says she lost her looks?’

  ‘She does. It’s what she thinks anyway. She’s told me so hundreds of times.’

  She’d turned her back to me again and I couldn’t see her face. I felt my fingers curl up into fists.

  ‘Tia, that’s just cruel and stupid,’ I burst out. ‘Having a baby never stopped Madonna or – or Demi Moore or Catherine Zeta Jones or anyone. There had to be other reasons. Showbiz is a tough old world. You have to take the rough with the smooth.’

  I could hear Mrs Litvinov speaking through me, and I was afraid for a moment that I’d sounded silly, but when she turned to me, and I saw a smile flit across her face, I knew I’d said the right thing.

  ‘Oh, I can’t really see Mimi taking the rough,’ she said. ‘She can hardly cope with the tiny little bumps in the smooth. She gets furious if things even get a bit wobbly’

  ‘There you are then.’ I was triumphant. ‘She probably got all proud and conceited after her first big role, thought she was the world’s biggest star and started putting people down and making herself really unpopular. Teamwork in performance is so . . .’

  But I could see from her face that she’d had enough snippets of Carly wisdom for one day. Then I remembered something.

  ‘Hang on a minute. I thought you said she was never here because she was acting all the time. How come she’s away so much if she never gets any more roles?’

  ‘Oh, she does sometimes. Only little ones though. But mostly she’s seeing agents and going to parties where there are
directors and people. That’s how she met Otto. He’s an actor, only he hasn’t had any breaks yet. Mimi’s totally potty about him. She keeps taking him round to meet everyone. She says he’s going to make it big, and then because he’s her partner he’ll make sure she gets the parts she deserves. But he’s just using her, I know he is. He’ll climb up her like a ladder, then kick her over when he reaches the top of the wall.’

  There was a hard note in Tia’s voice that I hadn’t heard before.

  ‘You really hate him, don’t you?’

  She made a face.

  ‘He’s not worth hating. I just don’t like it when – well, when Mimi goes crazy about people who don’t care about her at all, and she goes silly and can’t think about anything else and . . .’

  Otto’s not the first one then, I thought.

  The new me, the sensitive Carly, knew it was time to back off.

  ‘Go on about Frost then,’ I said, trying not to smile at his name.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘How come they’re living together, Frost and your mum? I couldn’t ever live with Sam, not once we’re grown up.’

  ‘Oh, that.’ She shook her hair back, as if she was bored with the subject. ‘When my parents divorced and Mimi decided we’d live at Paradise End, my father said that as part of the divorce settlement he’d pay to do it up. Frost was jealous or something, I think, and he said if she was going to live here, he would too, and they’re sharing it now. Mimi lives here all the time, and Frost stays when he’s in Britain, except that he’s usually in Zurich, where he does something in a bank. I don’t know why Mimi decided to live here. She hates not being in town. She’d much rather live in New York or Paris or the middle of London. Sometimes I think she only stays here because she can’t bear the thought of Frost having it all to himself. Look, all this is so boring. You can’t possibly want to hear all about my ghastly family.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ I was totally riveted. I’d never heard anything like it. There’d never been anything so interesting and sneaky in my family. Mum and her sisters argue sometimes, and Dad complains that his brother never writes or phones except at Christmas, though Birmingham isn’t exactly a million miles away, but that’s about it. Tia’s family sounded as if it had walked straight out of an over-the-top American soap. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Tell me more. Who’s Otto? What’s he like really? He can’t be all bad. He must be a bit nice.’

  Then, as I looked at her, her face seemed to close up. She clenched her fists fiercely and said something really strange.

  ‘I’m waiting, that’s what I’m doing. I’m spending my whole life waiting, keeping quiet, out of harm’s way. I know it sounds weird, but that’s what it feels like. I’m just waiting to be free of them all, to find out . . .’

  ‘Find out what, Tia?’

  ‘What sort of person I really am.’

  She sounded almost angry. I wanted her to go on, but she wouldn’t. If I’d been feeling prickly, I’d have thought she was being stand-offish or snobbish, but I knew it wasn’t that. It was as if she’d panicked all of a sudden. For some reason or other, she was scared of saying too much, of letting me see too much.

  I went home then, and I knew, as the gates of Paradise End swung shut behind me, with Tia on the other side of them, that in spite of all her stunning clothes, and her gold taps, and her pink-silk sofa, and her handmade-Thai-silk bedspread, I didn’t really need to envy her.

  I looked back, when I was halfway down the short distance of street that separated her huge metal gates from our broken wooden one. She was waving at me, her arm stretched out through the bars, almost as if she was a prisoner, signalling to someone in the free world outside.

  6

  It was tap the next day, of course, being Saturday. In the warm-up practice session, Mrs Litvinov put me with Lizzie Fraser, who was going to do the hip-hop number with Simone in the display. I’m quite good friends with Lizzie. She doesn’t go to my school, so we don’t go round together with the same crowd, but that’s fine by me. My tap’s my own, and I keep it separate from school. I don’t mind sharing it a bit with Lizzie, who’s quite good (though not as good as me, to be honest), but I don’t want anyone else in on it, thank you very much.

  That’s a thing I’ve discovered about life. It’s good to keep things separate. I don’t like mixing school and home (except for a few best friends, the ones I can really trust), and I don’t like muddling up tap with school. Now I was finding out that I didn’t want to mix Tia and Paradise End with any of the other bits of my life. They were in a special compartment, on their own.

  Tap was tough that day. I don’t know what had got into Mrs Litvinov.

  ‘Rhythm! Keep in time with the music!’ she barked at us. ‘Stop dreaming, Carly. What’s the matter with you? Think that’s dancing? Looks more like the mad tramplings of a wounded elephant. Now pull yourself together and tap!’

  She’d never spoken to me like that before. I had to blink tears out of my eyes. Lizzie was lovely about it. She said, out of the corner of her mouth, ‘Silly old bat. She’ll look like an elephant herself soon if she gets any fatter.’

  Lizzie was really unlucky, though, because Mrs Litvinov heard, and she turned on Lizzie and tore her off the biggest strip ever, so that Lizzie was the one who was nearly crying, and all I could do was give her sympathetic looks and mouth ‘Sorry’ at her.

  Things were better after that, thank God, because the music started getting to me, the way it always does, and the rhythm kicked in, and there was that sudden magical click that judders through me, and my heart lifts, and my scalp tingles, and my feet start to go, and nothing can get in the way then. Nothing can go wrong.

  It wasn’t good enough for Mrs Litvinov though. She called Lizzie and me over when the music stopped.

  ‘It’s all very well getting carried away.’ She was frowning at us in that really scary way she has, when her nose starts to look pinched, and her hair, which is very curly, seems to go hard, bouncing round her head like black-metal bedsprings. ‘You can’t count on inspiration to carry you through when you’re up there on the stage dancing in front of Mr and Mrs General Public. Stage fright and inspiration don’t always go together, and then you’ll need technique to carry you through. And your toe hops, Carly, are a total disgrace. Turn your feet out on the day like that, and you’ll trip yourself up, never mind Lizzie. You do it like this. Look.’

  And off she went into a perfect routine.

  ‘Now, Lizzie, as for you . . .’

  She started on a whole thing about Lizzie’s springs, and I stopped listening, because I’d seen Lauren out of the corner of my eye, standing at the door with a grin all over her weaselly little face, and I could tell she was just loving it, hearing us being ticked off.

  ‘Costumes,’ said Mrs Litvinov, finishing with Lizzie at last. ‘How are they coming along?’

  ‘We’re working on it, me and Mum,’ I said quickly, with a sideways look at Lizzie. ‘Mum’s going to get in touch with you this week.’

  The truth was that nothing had happened. Mum kept saying she was about to start, but she never seemed to get round to it. Last night had been typical. She’d dragged me back from Tia’s to work on it, and then the phone hadn’t stopped ringing, and every time we’d got going, Lauren had interfered, and then Mum and I had had a row because her ideas were so horribly, awfully, cheapskate and sad, and then I’d gone to bed in what was, quite frankly, a filthy mood.

  ‘Mrs Litvinov’s right about technique, isn’t she?’ Lauren said as we pushed open the swing doors of the Wellesley Centre and walked out into the busy Saturday-morning high street. ‘Miss Tideswell says I’m—’

  ‘One more word,’ I said, stopping dead, grabbing her by the arm and wagging my finger in her face, ‘one word, and I’ll . . .’

  I stopped. I couldn’t think of anything bad enough to threaten her with.

  ‘You’ll what?’ said Lauren, looking pleased and excited, the way she does when she manages to get me
to lose my temper.

  Maybe it was because we were on our own, without Mum and Dad being there, or perhaps it was just that it was so easy to read her poor little mind. Whatever. Instead of losing my cool I started to laugh.

  ‘One day’ I said, ‘you’ll go too far, and your body’ll be found cut up in little chunks in dustbin bags on the rubbish dump.’

  She looked a bit disappointed.

  ‘No, but what are you going to do to me, if I don’t shut up? You haven’t said.’

  ‘I’m going to buy a packet of Starburst and not give you any.’ And I grabbed her hand and plunged across the road towards the newsagent on the other side.

  ‘Do you think, Carly’ Lauren said, as we came out of the newsagent and walked along towards the bus stop, ‘that if I work really, really hard . . .’ – she made a sort of gloopy noise as she moved her Starburst from one cheek to the other – ‘that I’ll ever be as good at tap as you are?’

  I looked at her suspiciously.

  ‘You can’t have another yet. You haven’t finished the first.’

  ‘No, I mean it.’ She was looking at me quite seriously. ‘Miss Tideswell says you’re the best they’ve had at the Wellesley Centre for years and years. Do you think it runs in the family? Do you, Carly?’

  ‘Search me,’ I said, and it was just as well that the bus came along at that moment, and that we had to run for it, because I might have handed the whole packet to her and regretted it for the rest of the day.

  We were just finishing off clearing up after lunch (Mum does a proper one on Saturdays, with sausages or spag bol or something) when the phone rang. Mum picked it up, but I was standing so close to her that I could hear every word of the voice at the other end. It was a woman, and she was speaking in a loud, posh voice. I could even hear her heavy, unsteady breathing.

  ‘Mrs McQuarrie?’

  ‘Yes?’ Mum said guardedly. I knew she was thinking it might be someone making trouble for Dad, and was ready to hang up.

  ‘I gather you’re a friend of Margaret Marchmont, Camilla’s mother,’ the disembodied voice went on, and my blood started freezing in my veins.