Paradise (3 page)

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 café
s 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
.