by Joanna Nadin
But Mum says there’re schools there. And they won’t have to use dog-food tins instead of Pyrex jars in science, won’t have a nursery for all the Year Elevens who’ve had kids.
I say, “If they’re that good, then they’ll be full.”
But Mum says she can homeschool until a place comes up.
And I’m three points down.
The next morning I try again.
“You hate the sea,” I say.
And it’s true. That time in Margate she sat up high on the sand, her back to the stone wall of the promenade, like she was fastened. A shell. Wouldn’t even let the water spread over her toes. Luka had to take me and Finn into the shallows.
“I did,” she says. “But it’s different now. It’s all different, don’t you see? Don’t you understand?”
And I nod. Because I want her to think we’re still all right. But I don’t. Understand, I mean. Why she wants it so bad. Why she wants to go back to the place she’s run from for sixteen years. To the people. She’s the one who’s always saying stuff like “It’s not where you come from, Billie, it’s where you’re going that matters” and “You can choose who you want to be. Who do you want to be, Billie?”
But I don’t know. Who I am. Or who I want to be.
I slump on my elbows and look at myself in the mirror. See myself in the scratched glass draped with necklaces, surrounded by gig passes and notes from Cass tacked to the chipped gold frame. Who am I? I think. Then I cringe at myself, at how lame it sounds. Like one of those self-help books that Mum’s friend Martha reads, or some High School Musical shlock. Only it’s not a book or a film. It’s real.
And, as I stare at my reflection — at my hair, lank and dark, the opposite of Mum’s thick, wild blond; at my pale skimmed-milk skin — I wonder if she’s wrong. If it’s a lie that the past doesn’t matter. Because we’re made up of our past. Of our parents. I think of Finn. And I can see which bits are Mum, the same hair, the same smile, and which are Luka, his brown eyes, his wide hands — guitarist hands, Luka says. But when I look at me, there’s this stranger.
Then something clicks inside me. This little switch. Or a seed. Like the pink and black of a runner bean, it splits and something grows. A need. And I pull open a drawer and scrabble under the postcards and the Tube tickets and the pink Post-its to find what I’m looking for. A blank piece of paper. And a pencil. And I start to draw. But not all of me. I take away the bits that are Mum, the cat eyes, the too-big lips that she hates, and Luka loves.
I only draw what I don’t know. My nose, the high forehead, the hair. But when I look at the sketch, at what’s left, it’s like one of those facial composites on Crimewatch. Or that kids’ game where you slot different face sections in. Nothing fits. I can’t see him.
I know nothing about Tom. My dad. Never have. Just that Mum loved him, and he left. I don’t know how tall he is, what color his hair is. I’m guessing pretty tall, because I’ve already got four inches on Mum. And dark. But I don’t know for sure. There are no photos. No letters. And Mum doesn’t talk about him any more than she talks about Will or her parents. I have no idea who he is. Maybe an artist. Because this must come from somewhere. Like Finn’s guitar hands. These things don’t just happen, and Mum can’t draw. Her birds are like aliens. Blobs with slits for eyes and wings in the wrong places. But I know I’m good. Good enough, anyway.
And for the first time in a long time I want to know. Because I figure unless I know who he is, I don’t know who I am. Or who I want to be. And that’s when I decide we can go. Because I want to find him. To find me.
HET SITS at her mother’s dressing table. She is ten. Too young to be wearing the lipstick that coats her mouth and cheeks; thick red grease, like a clown child. Too young for the cloud of Chanel that surrounds her. Too young, too, for the tears that are trickling down her cheeks, taking a layer of soot-black mascara with them, running rivulets to her chin before dripping noiselessly onto the white smocking of her dress.
You can’t cry in a mirror, she remembers. Can’t cry if you look at yourself. And so she stares hard at her reflection, willing the tears, this feeling, to stop. But Will’s fact is a lie after all. Or she is the exception. A freak. An aberration.
She blinks away the inky salt of her tears and looks harder. She has her mother’s eyes, her mouth. Just like Will. So why is she so different? She repeats her father’s words silently to herself: “Why can’t you be more like your brother?” But the Het in the mirror doesn’t know either, just shrugs and lets another Elizabeth Arden tear stain her collar.
Why can’t she be like him? Why can’t she feel like he does? Why can’t she dig for lugworms with Jonty, screaming with laughter as they disappear farther into the waterlogged sand, too quick for the steel of the spade? Why can’t she wake happy that the sun is drenching her bedspread, filling everyone it touches with drunken joy, pulling them to the beach, to the fairground, into cafés and arcades? Everyone except her. Why, instead, does she feel this grayness that not even lipstick can hide? This weight that keeps her inside the cold, quiet granite of the house and pins her to her bed for hours, staring wordlessly at a crack in the plaster.
Then she hears the creak as her mother’s heels dig into the wide staircase, feels the minute change in air pressure. And Het stops sniffing and silently slips to the floor, crawling under the lace-edged valance of her parents’ bed, where she will stay for two hours, until her father’s anger-soaked baritone chases her out for supper.
FOR A MINUTE I think I’m going to chicken out. When we’re sitting at Paddington, I think, I could do it. I could get off the train right now. Go to Cass’s. Or back to the flat.
Mr. Garroway doesn’t even know we’ve gone yet. Mum doesn’t want to ring. Knows he’ll come around and demand the back rent there and then. Rent we don’t have. Not yet. She says he’ll find out soon enough, when he turns up and all that’s left is an empty flat and a boiler that’s on the blink.
Before we left, I looked around: at the pencil notches on the kitchen wall marking off the months and years of Finn’s growth in half-inch increments. Day-Glo magnets clinging to the fridge — the f, i, and n’s long missing — spelling out nonsense words now, gobbledygook. A picture of a horse by a seven-year-old me that I glued to the door because we’d run out of tape. Pieces of us.
“But not us,” Mum says. “None of it. Just ephemera.”
I looked it up. It’s an insect, a mayfly that only lives for a day or something. But I know what she means. I know why she made us pack the rest up and take bagful after bagful to the charity shop. Not just because of the train. But because all that matters is us: me, her, and Finn. Stuff comes and goes. We are our own world and possessions.
“What about my chair?” Finn begs.
Mum looks at the tiny wooden thing, made by his grandpa, his “nonno”— Luka’s dad. Too small for Finn to squeeze into now, so a plush giraffe and Buzz Lightyear lie tangled together on the worn pine, an improbable pair. “There’ll be furniture there,” she says. “Or we can get new stuff.”
What with? I think. Mum hasn’t got a job. Hasn’t had one for a year now. And before that they only lasted a few months before she’d start turning up late, or not at all. Or argue and get fired. But I don’t say anything. Because I know what she’s doing. She’s starting again. She wants new things. New people. And so I fit my world into two suitcases. My jeans, the denim soft and faded with two years of washing, but Cass’s name in a heart stubbornly ingrained in black Bic on the knee. My cowboy boots that I begged for for months because Cass had a pair. My paints and sketch pad, every page filled with graphite lines: Finn eating a Cornetto, the ice cream trickling down his chin; Luka sitting at the table, playing guitar. Moments gone. Dead. I push the pad down to the bottom of the blue vinyl. My secret.
Cass comes over to say good-bye. She’s crying, crocodile tears welling in the corners of her eyes, then slipping over her waterproof mascara, saying how I have to get a mobile because it’s my
human right and Mum is abusing me or lying, even, that it’ll radiate my brain but if I don’t, then she’ll e-mail or write, even, like in a film, with proper paper and everything. Then she checks her makeup in the mirror, the gold frame exposed, naked, the notes binned, necklaces hanging in the Salvation Army. Says she has to go because she’s meeting Stella down at Cinderella’s. Then she gets up and hugs me, and fans her eyes, as if she’s willing the tears to stay in. But I know she won’t cry again, because there’s only so much that her Maybelline can take, and because Ash is going to be at Cinderella’s, too. I know this because she’s wearing a crop top, her tan tummy a flash of brown goose bumps between the red check and denim blue.
And I don’t cry either. Not then. Not when we close the door for the last time and leave the note on Mrs. Hooton’s mat; not on the 36 when we pass Oliver Goldsmith Primary, where Cass and I first met; not when we’re on Vauxhall Bridge and I look down the river at the Eye and the Houses of Parliament and the picture-postcard London.
But now, sitting in the InterCity on Platform 5, my eyes fill with tears, as my head fills with insects, the mayflies we’re leaving behind. I think of Luka coming back to the flat to find someone else in our place and his stuff in a box in the hallway. Of Finn’s “nonno” and “nonna,” in a flat just a mile from here, Polaroids of Finn and me grinning out from the silver frames that crowd their windowsills like an army of memories. And I’m scared that we will die and disappear; that they won’t care; that we are ephemera, too. And I’m scared we’re not; that we are more than fragile wings and faded photographs; that part of them will be missing forever.
I hear the shrill note of the conductor’s whistle, the last-minute clatter of bags and feet on the platform before the doors are slammed, and I am suddenly aware I am trapped in this tin carriage, being taken away from my life to a new one I’m not even sure I want. The insects are in my stomach now, and I stand suddenly, nauseous, panicking.
“Billie?” Mum questions.
“I need the loo,” I say. I lurch down the aisle, pushing past tutting men in suits, clutching at the backs of seats to steady myself and push me closer to the exit. My cases are at the bottom of the luggage rack. Too heavy to pull out now. Not enough time. They’re just stuff, I say to myself.
But when I get there, when I’m standing at the open window, my lungs heaving, my knuckles white, gripped around the cold metal of the handle, I think of him. Of the part of me that’s missing. Not even a Luka, coming and going, in and out of my life. Never there at all. My hand relaxes on the handle, blood rushing back to the tips of my fingers, and I look up to meet the eyes of the conductor, his whistle touching his lips, waiting to see which way I’m going to go. I drop my hand and pull it inside the window. And the conductor closes his mouth around the whistle and blows.
I’m back in my seat as the train pulls out of the station. Past the stucco terraces, past the horses under the Westway. Past the high-rise with the Polaroid army on the windowsill. Finn sees it, too. Asks if Nonno and Nonna can come and stay. “Yeah, ’course,” says Mum. But she’s not really listening. She’s not really here. She’s somewhere else, in another carriage, another time.
Because she did it before. Caught a train along this line, but on the other side of the tracks. Left home and came to London. She erased her world, her past. Now she’s doing it again. Rubbing out the flat and the debt and the never-quite-enough of Luka.
But then I remember something Luka said about the past. That it never really goes away, that it catches up with you, grasping at your ankles and pulling you back. Wherever you hide, it will find you in the end. And I wonder if it’s found Mum. If this is a new start. Or if she’s going back to the start.
HET WAKES and pulls up the thick cotton blind on the sleeper car. The night-shrouded fields and gray granite walls she left behind have given way to early sunlight and the 1930s redbrick world of West London. She heaves herself upright on the narrow bunk and lets her legs drop to the floor. Leaden with sleep, they bang against the leather of her bag.
She touches her belly, swelling now, aware that she hasn’t eaten for hours, since last night. Her last supper. Cold boiled ham, and beans from the garden. Eaten in silence, save for the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall, marking out the seconds and minutes until she could leave this family of strangers behind.
Her stomach gurgles and she looks up, embarrassed. But the bunk above her is empty. She is alone.
She roots around in the front pocket of her bag until her fingers find what she is looking for. She pulls out a stick of peppermint rock and unwraps the cellophane. A slip of paper flutters to the floor, a black-and-white beach scene and the words A GIFT FROM SEATON. Het sees it but doesn’t pick it up. In an hour it will be swept away, ephemera. Like the pink letters stretching through the rock, Seaton will disappear, will be sucked into sweet sugary nothing. What’s real, what matters, is what’s in front of her. Martha’s flat, and London, and this new life inside her. Her new life.
I WAKE up with the sound of rain hammering against the reinforced glass, Mum’s breath warm in my ear, whispering that we’re here. I open my eyes to the fluorescent glare of the carriage. Outside it’s pitch-black, late now. I strain to see the landscape, but all I can make out is my own bleary-eyed reflection. The train is slowing, the wet iron of the rails squealing a protest as its brakes lock on. I stare at the window, and slowly my sleep-soaked face, Finn’s excitement, Mum’s expectation all melt away under the orange sodium glow of the platform lights, and we see where we are, where we’re going. Black letters on white, spelling out our new world: SEATON.
“Are we here? Are we?” Finn demands, though he can read as well as me.
Mum smiles. “We’re here. Come on. Get the bags.”
“It’s raining,” I say, disappointment taking the edge off the fear I feel.
For a second I think I see a glimpse of it in Mum, too. But, if it’s there, she forces practicality to push it down.
“We’ll get a cab.”
“Like on holiday,” says Finn.
Mum laughs. “Just like on holiday.”
But, even with our suitcases, and the tang of sea in the air, I don’t feel like I’m on holiday. This isn’t the newness of Margate, or Majorca. This is something else: older, deeper. And if I feel it, having never been here before, except as a tiny seed inside her, then Mum must feel it, too.
I lean into her in the back of the cab, feel her arm snake around me, the other already holding Finn, pulling him down into his seat as he strains to find the sand and the sea and the donkeys.
“What do you think?” she asks.
I look out at night-shuttered shops and arcades, neon signs with bulbs missing, so that Tenpenny Falls appears as though it cut its price to a penny; El Dorado is in an illegible scrawl, and I think of Magic City. Cass and Ash playing the slots and drinking cheap lager from brown paper bags.
“Like Peckham,” I say. “But wetter.”
The rain drums against the roof of the taxi, sweeping over the windshield in a sudden, blinding arc as we turn out of the town center and begin to climb a steep hill.
“It’s not always this bad,” the cabbie says. The first words he’s spoken, save for the “Where to?” at the station and the grunt as he heaved six suitcases into the boot of his rusting Ford Mondeo.
“Oh, I know,” says Mum. “I grew up here.”
The cabbie snorts. Meaning what? That she doesn’t talk or look like she grew up here. That we’re outsiders. That we’ll never fit in. Thoughts that will prick me, prod at me again and again in the weeks and months ahead. But right now I bat the accusing fingers away. Because the cab has stopped. We’re here.
Cliff House towers over us, important. Solid granite walls, stained glass in the door, dark now, but in my head I see it backlit with the warmth of a chandelier. It isn’t a palace. Not really. There are no turrets, no arrow slots for windows. But, even in the rain and half-light, it’s a fairy tale. So far from the f
lat in Peckham that I have to choke back a laugh. Because how can I have grown up there, and Mum here? How can she have given up all this for so little? But even as I ask I know the answer. Because I was what mattered. Not five bedrooms, and two floors, and a garden the size of a park. Because they would have been empty without me there. And they didn’t want me there. Until now.
Mum shakes me from my imagined palace. “Have you got the key?” she asks frantically, the contents of her purse tinkling onto the black-and-white tiles of the path as she upends it in the search.
For a second I panic. That I have forgotten it. That it is sitting laughing to itself on the scratched kitchen table in Peckham. But then I remember slipping it into the pocket of my black dress, its weight pulling the fabric, threatening to pull the stitches away from the seam. I push my hand inside, and it is there, the metal pressing against my hip bone.
“Here,” I say, and I hold it out to her.
“No, you do it,” Mum replies, still picking up the cab change from the floor, precious coins that she knows we need, though she’ll spend them without thought.
“Let me,” begs Finn. “I’ll do it.”
“No,” says Mum. “It’s Billie’s, remember.”
“’S’OK.” I shrug. And it is. Because I don’t want to do it. In case it doesn’t fit. Or it is the Ark of the Covenant, or Pandora’s box, letting out something wonderful and terrible all at once.
But none of this happens. The key fits, and instead of shrieking, I hear the satisfying clunk as the frame releases its grip on the door and it swings heavily, silently open.
Finn looks up for a light switch and finds one, a brown Bakelite circle, a relic from another age. He pulls it down with a sharp click.
“Wow,” he says. And for once I am caught up in his fever. Because, even though the floor is strewn with mail, this isn’t the bare concrete of the flat hallway. This floor is crisscrossed in wooden parquet, like one of those Magic Eye paintings, concealing a secret pattern. And beyond that, carpet takes over, not the rough burlap mats that mark your knees and wear holes in your socks, but actual soft, sage-green carpet.
