Paradise

by Joanna Nadin

  “What are you doing?” Mum asks.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Well, maybe something. I don’t know.”

  She doesn’t reply. Just stares into the bottom of her coffee cup, looking for God knows what. Hope. Inspiration. The secret of the universe.

  I go to the dining room next. The mahogany dresser. The shelves have been cleared of crystal paperweights and silver salvers, but underneath, the cupboards are crammed with paper and folders and files. Billie Paradise: dix points.

  I’m not sure what it is I’m looking for, but I figure I’ll know when I see it. A will, or insurance documents, or bank statements, or something. I can hear Cass in my head: “Oh, my God, it’s totally like CSI. You are so the one with the accent and the legs.” And I laugh. But it’s not funny; it’s so far from funny.

  It’s not there. But I find something else. Something that makes me forget about the bills, and the money.

  It’s at the bottom of a drawer. A gray cardboard file, with a single word on the cover, in blue-black ink, the l’s in loops, alive. It says, “Will.”

  Inside are more certificates, too many to hang on the walls, letters of commendation, school reports, As and Bs from English to Latin. No “Could do better’s.” No “Not performing to the best of her ability’s,” which dotted mine and littered Cass’s.

  I read the newspaper cuttings. Rowing competitions, rugby tournaments, and him, always him, his name in lights, his face black-and-white but colored with pride.

  Somehow, this flimsy cardboard contains him. This strong, substantial, incredible boy. Full of promise, of life.

  Then I find it. The last cutting. No smiling head shot, no glowing headline. Instead, four short printed words shout out what I knew, and what I didn’t. “YOUNG RUGBY STAR DROWNS.”

  I feel dizzy. Weak. As if the words have sent me spinning like a top. Because it wasn’t a disease, wasn’t a car crash. The things I’d wondered, imagined. He fell from the pier and drowned. And I remember that night, the first night with Danny. On the end of the boardwalk with Eva and Mercy. Remember Jake grabbing me, the water beneath us, and the story they told. About the undertow, about how it pulled you down, that you couldn’t fight it.

  And then I know why Mum stays away. Why she’s so scared of even the swimming pool. Because of this. Because it was the water that killed her brother.

  IT HAS been two days when the policeman finally calls. Two days of hand-wringing silence and Carol fussing with sweet tea and sour gin.

  Roger answers the door; Eleanor’s legs are too weak, her voice long gone.

  The policeman is young, Eleanor thinks, too young to be the detective that his stripes proclaim. Too young to speak these words, to bear this news. Not much older than Will.

  He sits awkwardly on the wingback chair, waiting for the cup of tea that Carol insists on making, before finally telling her what she has been expecting, dreading.

  “We’ve found a body,” he says.

  * * *

  A body, not a boy. That is all he is now. Muscle and sinew and skin. Laid out on a slab in the same hospital that his father works in.

  They bury him a week later. Close the door to his room. Place the file in the drawer and push it shut. Ephemera. It is nothing. Not the essence of him. Just things.

  But his ghost. His ghost will haunt them forever.

  I PHONE in sick to work. Say I’ve got some viral thing. Debs swears. Says now she’s going to have to do a double shift because Lisa’s still off. For a second I think I’ll change my mind. Because God knows we need the money. But I need this more.

  Mum is still holding the cup of coffee, stone cold now. As I walk in she looks up and I see the dark circles under her eyes. Heroin chic. Not.

  “Where are you going?” Her voice is tinged with something. Worry? Panic?

  “Just out.” It’s no use talking to her about it. Not with the way she is. She’ll only cry. Or worse.

  She puts down the cup, stands suddenly, the chair clattering on the floor as she reaches to hold my arms in her white fingers. “With Danny?”

  I can’t do this now. Can’t do the “Be careful, you’re only young, look what happened to me” thing.

  “He’s just a friend,” I assure her. “OK?” I take her arms and put them down at her sides. “That’s all. A friend. You don’t need to worry. It’s fine. I’m fine.”

  “A friend,” she repeats. “OK.”

  “I have to go, Mum,” I say. And I kiss her on the cheek and leave her, wrapped in the quiet chaos of her own world.

  But as I get to the door I realize I have no idea where I’m going or how to get there.

  So I do what any damsel in distress does. Find a knight in shining armor.

  “The cemetery,” he says. “Pensilva.”

  I nod. Of course. “You know where it is?”

  He breathes out heavily. “Yeah.”

  “Is it weird to want to see him? See them?” I ask. “Like, wrong?”

  “No.” Danny shakes his head. “It’s closure. Isn’t that what they call it?”

  “Yeah.” And I see Martha in her mirrored skirts, putting on her fake German accent, but meaning it anyway, as she begged Mum to call Eleanor, to have it out with her. To get closure.

  “Oh, Billie, I’m so sorry,” he says.

  “I knew he was dead,” I say. “It’s not like it was a surprise. But it’s made it real somehow. Made him real. Do you see?”

  And he does. Of course he does.

  He borrows Jake’s van and we drive there in silence. When we stop, get out onto the rain-soaked sand of the car park, he reaches for my hand, keeps it in his until we find them.

  They’re side by side. Three of them. Eleanor, Roger, and William. Like the Three Bears. Or Three Wise Monkeys. Speak no evil. Their lives and deaths etched in pink-brown quartz, flecked with silver scales. Like salmon, I think. And I try to smile, but instead the tears come, and they don’t stop. I kneel on the damp ground, my hands deep in the cold soil of the graves, and I cry for their loss, and for mine. For the memories we never shared, for the hours, days, weeks spent in our own worlds, when we could have been in each other’s.

  I cry until the rain starts to drip its steady suffering, until Danny pulls me up and to him, tells me we need to go, that it’s late, that he has to get the van back.

  “I don’t need to go, though,” he says, his lips warm against my neck. “I could come back with you. Or we could go out. Do something. Swim, even?”

  But I don’t want the muffled weight of water pulling me under. I want clarity, light. I want to be up in the air. I want to fly. Want to feel drunk and dizzy and dazed and anything, anything but this. I tilt my head back, let Danny pull damp strands of hair away from my eyes.

  “Take me to the fair,” I plead. “Will you? Will you take me to the fair?”

  HET CALLS home. Two weeks after they find Will’s body in the water. Two days after they find Tom’s.

  She swore to Martha that she wouldn’t, that she didn’t care what they thought of her. And it was true, of him. But her mother . . . She thinks of her in that house with him, remembers her sitting at the dressing table, the veins in her throat taut with worry, with sadness. Feels the life inside her. Filling her with hope. Hope she wants to share, has to share, despite everything that has gone before.

  “Mother?” she says carefully, quietly.

  “Het? Oh, Het.”

  She can hear relief flood her mother’s voice in the space of three words. But then she hears something else. The clatter of a receiver being dropped, and then a rasp of heavy breath as it is picked up again. Breath that smells of whiskey and Hamlet cigars.

  “They’re dead,” the voice says. “Do you hear me? Dead.”

  Het feels the ground give way underneath her. She sinks into a beanbag, sending tiny pearls of polystyrene skittering across the floorboards.

  “Who —? Who is dead?” she asks.

  “Your brother. And that boy. He killed him. Hit Jonty.
Killed Will. Pushed him off the pier. Jonty saw it. Saw it all.”

  Het can’t keep it down. She bolts to the bathroom and heaves up a string of vomit and with it a great screaming cry of pain.

  When she picks up the receiver again, she hears a click and then the dial tone. It is the last time she will ever speak to them.

  I WANT to be taken away. And the fair is another world. Swarming and bright and loud; the music pumping so hard I can feel it in my chest. Half real, half fantasy. Or freak show. Where hard white sugar can be spun into soft pink peaks, where you can watch yourself morph from a giant into Rumpelstiltskin, and where you can lose yourself in the crowds and the smell and the noise.

  And I do. I ride rockets and the octopus and the Tilt-A-Whirl, trying to lose me, lose Will, lose Eleanor and all of them, to spin and speed them out of me.

  We’re stumbling off the cakewalk, giddy with it, when Danny stops suddenly, letting go of my hand, so that I pitch forward and knock into some girl in a hoodie who swears as Cherry Coke sloshes over her hand, and she gives me a hard-as-nails, hard-as-Cass stare.

  “Sorry. I’m sorry.” I turn to Danny. But he’s not looking at me. He’s staring at this guy at the goldfish stall. This tall, dark man who has Danny’s eyes, and height, and that slow, lazy smile.

  And it hits me like a slew of rainwater. Cold and shocking. Waking me from the dream I’m trying to find my way back to. Because I know in that second who he is. He is Danny’s father. An overgrown version of the boy at my side, a hall-of-mirrors man, talking the talk, swapping gold coins for darts, without taking his eyes off Danny for a second.

  I reach for Danny’s arm, hold it, run my hand down to his.

  “We should go,” he says.

  I don’t get it. “Don’t you want to, I don’t know . . . say hello?”

  Danny shakes his head. “Not now.”

  And then I do. I get it. That nothing’s ever easy. Families are never easy. Not mine with no dad, no money, and Mum on another planet. Not Danny’s with his mum gone to a cozy new semidetached life and this half stranger riding in for a few weeks a year like some cowboy. Not Cass’s. Not Eva’s. No one’s.

  “Let’s go to yours,” I say.

  As we walk away, out of this Neverland, I glance over my shoulder, catch him watching us through the crowd. He’s got this look on his face. This “Who are you, kid?” look. The same look I got from Eva. From Debs. From the guy in the Internet café. But for once it doesn’t freak me out. Or piss me off. Because I know who I am. Who I want to be. Tonight, at least.

  I want to be Danny’s.

  We’re in his bedroom. Eva and Jake next door, arguing over something and nothing.

  “He was never my dad,” Danny says, his fingers tracing a pattern on the duvet, his eyes watching the fast movements. “Not really. Not like he changed a nappy when he was here. Or sent a birthday card when he wasn’t. Just a bloke, really. A bloke who slept with my mum.” I touch his face, and his eyes flick up and meet mine. “We’re the same,” he says. “You and me.”

  “The same,” I repeat.

  He looks at me, into me. And as we kiss, I know it is true. That I am him. He is me. We are each other.

  “Stay,” he says. And I could, I think. Could stay in this little room, with the sea outside the window and the curtains that don’t close and the halfhearted two-bar heater. Could fall asleep, with his chin against my shoulder, his arms around mine, our bodies locked like a Chinese puzzle. But . . .

  “I can’t,” I say. “Mum.”

  “Not that,” he says. “I mean here, in Seaton. Don’t go. Ever.”

  “But what about college?” I ask. “I thought —”

  “It can wait. Until you can go. Until —”

  And I kiss him my answer. Because I am surer than ever. That I want to be here. In this rain-sodden granite-gray dead-end town. I don’t want to go back to London. Don’t want to spend another Saturday night standing outside Magic City with a bottle of Breezer in my hand and Cass’s borrowed shoes pinching my toes and her laugh digging at my heart.

  I want to stay. I want to be with him. Forever.

  “HAVE YOU . . . ? I mean, have you done this before?”

  Het shakes her head, and drops it, half proud that at nineteen she is a virgin. Despite Jonty’s pushing insistence. Despite the pleas and the threats. Half ashamed that she has no idea what to do. And that he does. She knows that there have been others. Kelly. Maybe that other girl, too. She remembers the glittered lettering on the back of her top. Debs. That was it.

  Tom lifts her chin, places his fingers against her cheek. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “None of it, none of what’s gone before.”

  Then he pulls her gently to him and kisses her.

  Afterward they lie silently in the dark, their arms still holding the other, legs entwined. Like a strange two-headed creature, she thinks.

  “I love you,” he whispers into her hair.

  And Het smiles, not just because of these three small words, but because, instead of emptiness, her heart is full, full to bursting.

  I COME downstairs the next morning to find Mum eating cornflakes out of the packet, like crisps. And I know that I can’t tell her about Will yet. About the folder. Or about Danny. The way I feel about him. The way he makes me feel. I know that I’m going to have to bury more secrets like beating telltale hearts.

  But I have to tell her something. I have to do something to keep us here. Me here, with Danny. So I send Finn up to change his Batman pajamas that he’s been in for two days. Tell him to shower, to clean his teeth.

  “You’re not my mum,” he says. But even he knows that right now, that’s exactly who I am.

  So I sit down and do what I think a mum should do. I take her hand in mine and I tell her something. The only bit she needs to know right now. That we can’t afford to live here. That we have to sell it. Find somewhere smaller. Cheaper. With windows that keep the rain out and the heat in.

  And I wait for her to shoot back. To tell me I’m talking rubbish. That we’re millionaires. That we can live on cornflakes and shortbread. But instead, she just squeezes my hand weakly, then pulls her own away.

  “I’ll ask the estate agent to come, then,” I say. “To value it, I mean. I can go on the way to work.”

  I look at her. At her face, pale and taut across her cheekbones, the skin gray. Her fingers shaking as she reaches inside the cellophane for another mouthful of cereal. And I know it’s not just an estate agent I need.

  “I’ll call the doctor, too.”

  That’s when she shoots. Her hand cracking on the table like a single gunshot. And a single word. “No.”

  “Bu —”

  “I’m fine,” she says. “I’m tired, that’s all. Tired. Not a bloody loony tune. Christ, Billie. See the estate agent, OK? Just do it.”

  She stands and slams the cereal on the counter. Grabs the kettle and fills it noisily, the tap on too hard so the water ricochets off and soaks the tiles and her dress. She jumps back and drops the kettle in the sink. “Shit.”

  “Mum?”

  She raises one hand to her face, grasps the elbow with her other. And she starts shaking, her head bobbing up and down unevenly, gasps of breath sounding in time with the clock. It’s not until she turns to me that I see that the gasps aren’t tears, that the shaking isn’t her all racked with sorrow. It’s laughter. She is laughing.

  “I’m sorry,” she pants.

  “What happened?” Finn is back. Unshowered, but in clean clothes at least.

  “Nothing, baby,” Mum says quickly. “I just had a little accident.”

  “Ugh,” he says, looking at the darkening stain on her dress.

  “Oh. God. No!” she says. “Not that. The tap. I was just —” But she’s off again. Laughing. Finn with her. Then she turns the tap on and they’ve got glasses and they’re throwing water over each other, over the table, the floor.

  But not over me. I leave them to it and walk down the hill to
town.

  I expected the estate agent to be some fat cat in a pinstripe suit. Like the hotshots in Peckham, driving X5s and stinking of Versace, their blakeys tapping along the main street. But he’s not. He’s this thin, mousy, middle-aged man in a beige shirt and brown tie. Like he wants to disappear into the studded walls behind him.

  “I need proof of ownership,” he says, like I knew he would. Because how often do sixteen-year-olds tell you they want to sell the family estate. So I hand him the title deeds and the letter. The one I got that day back at the flat, wrapped around the magic key. Not so magic now.

  Except for Danny.

  “Are you looking to move within the area?” he says.

  “I . . .” I realize I haven’t asked Mum. Or told her. What if she wants to go back? Or needs to go back? If the ghosts are what’s killing her? But I can’t. I have to find a way. “I think so,” I say. “Yes. Yes, I am — we are.”

  “Well, here.” He hands me a wodge of papers; details of row houses and bungalows. Ones like Eva’s. Tight rows, opening out onto the street. No long gardens, no gates, no drawbridges. No more castles. That fairy tale is over.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I’ll give them to my mum.”

  But I won’t. I push them inside the ripped pocket of the Burberry. With twenty pence and a half-chewed piece of Juicy Fruit wrapped up in silver foil. And later I’ll put them under my bed, or in a drawer. Where she can’t find them. Not yet.

  “So, just some twenty-four-hour thing, was it?”

  I nod.

  Debs is outside the Laurels, a ciggie hanging on her lower lip while she talks, the smoke curling past the creases of her lips, up into the bleach of her hair. I wonder how old she is. Maybe the same as Mum. But she looks a decade more.

  “You’re not supposed to be back for two days,” she says. “Case you give it to ’em in there.” She gestures behind her.

  “But I —”