Paradise (4 page)

“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 flat 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.

“Don’t just stand there all night,” says Mum. “Come on.”

I turn to look at her. Trying to read her. But all I can make out is impatience and cold.

“I’m hungry,” says Finn, and he instinctively stoops to scoop up the mail. “Can we have pizza?”

“It’s too late,” Mum says, laughing. “And I don’t even think they deliver food here. It’s not like London. People cook.”

Finn shrugs and heads down the hall. To check the fridge, I assume. I turn back to Mum, still framed in the doorway, her hair a halo, the wind and rain a
Wuthering Heights
backdrop to the wild Cathy standing before me. I hesitate. But I need to know.

“Are you OK?” I ask.

Mum tips her head to one side. As if she might tell me a secret. But instead, she rolls her eyes. “I’m knackered,” she says. “And this wind is hideous.” She slams the door behind her and follows Finn.

The fridge is empty, but Mum starts rooting in cupboards. “Pasta?” she says, holding up a half-full packet of penne.

“With what?” asks Finn.

She looks again and finds a bottle of ketchup and a tin of tuna. Finn makes a face. But she kisses it away. “It’ll be lovely,” she says. “We ate it all the time when I was a student.” And she opens the packet and pours it, clattering, into an expensive-looking saucepan from an overhead rack.

“Can I look around?” asks Finn.

Mum nods, dropping the packet without thought into the bin under the sink. Finn disappears into the house, his feet a soft thud on the carpet, fading up the stairs.

Mum looks at me. “Go on,” she says. “You can go, too, if you want.”

So I do.

Finn finds it first. I hear him call, “Dibs,” and I know he’s claiming the best bedroom. The biggest one. Or the one with the sea view. Or the secret passage.

But the secret’s bigger than that.

The walls are covered with certificates. Awards for swimming, for rugby, for rowing. Silver trophies glint and wink on polished shelves. And by the bed a stack of comics sits waiting to be read.

But not by Finn. By Will.

The room looks like it hasn’t changed since the day he died. The bed made. The curtains drawn. His shoes lined up neatly in a row against the wall. A shrine to a boy who went before I was even born. And I realize she lived like this for sixteen years. Eleanor. My grandmother. One child gone away. And one dead. Nothing more than ghosts.

But ghosts haunt you. And I think of Mum downstairs. And I run.

“Mum,” I blurt.

“What?” Mum looks up. But her face is serene. She’s seen nothing.

“I . . . It doesn’t matter.”

Mum shrugs and lights the gas stove. And I watch her moving around this kitchen, like she’s never been away. Like it’s hers. Yet it’s so clearly not. The surfaces are uncluttered, the painted oak cupboards free of tacked-up photos, the countertops clean, no knife tracking its surface because someone can’t be bothered to find a chopping board. I wonder about the last time she was in here. And I wonder where she’s put the memories. If she’s boxed them away. Or left them behind like so much unwanted furniture.

Finn comes back full of things he’s found, the elephant’s tusk and the stuffed bird, and
can he have the bedroom at the back?
Mum smiles, says he can have anything he wants. And as we sit down to eat, she calls it our banquet, a feast fit for a king. And I smile and think,
This is OK; this is good.
She’s good.

It’s gone eleven when we’re done, plates piled unwashed on the drainer, ketchup trailing a syrupy drip down the glass bottle onto the table, water puddle on the floor where I turned the tap on too far. Already we’re making our mark.

“So, bed,” announces Mum.

“No,” protests Finn. “I want to see the garden.”

Mum laughs. “It’s too dark, and you’re too tired.”

“I’m not,” he insists predictably. But his eyelids are half closed, his skin pale, ghostlike.
More like me now,
I think.

“Go on,” she says. “You can leave your teeth tonight. Do them harder in the morning.”

“Yes!” Finn has scored a cup-winning goal and races off, up the stairs to his new bedroom.

“Where shall I sleep?” I ask.

Mum is scraping leftovers onto her plate, doesn’t even look up. “Up the stairs, to the left. Last one along the corridor. My old room,” she adds.

I pause, confused. “Don’t you want it?”

She shakes her head, lets her eyes meet mine. “I’ll sleep in the spare room. It’s bigger.”

“Oh, thanks.” I feign hurt. “Are you coming?”

“I’ll be up in a bit,” she says. “You go. Really.”

She’s going to have a smoke. Keeps the packet behind the radio at home, does it late at night out of the kitchen window, when she thinks we’re asleep. But I can smell it on her, tangled in her hair in the morning. Another secret.

“’Night, then,” I say, and I lean down to kiss her.

Mum tilts her cheek to my lips, and I feel her breath against my own as she whispers, “’Night, Billie.”

And I’m not sure what more to say, so I leave her, sitting at the table she sat at sixteen years ago, her head full of something, or nothing, and I climb the wide, galleried staircase. I wonder what I will find at the top: a four-poster with a canopy draping around, a tiny replica pram full of porcelain dolls, a princess’s chamber — or a room full of teenage Mum, posters for bands I’ve seen on
Top of the Pops 2,
a wardrobe packed with rah-rah skirts and batwing tops.

But it’s neither. It’s just yellow wallpaper, clean and bare, not even a thumbtack hole marking its faint, flowered pattern, and a single wooden bed. The wardrobe and shelves are empty, the windowsill home to nothing more than a scattering of dust.

At first I think I’ve got it wrong. That I took a wrong turn on the landing and this is the spare room. But I check again, and this is it: left at the top of the stairs, last room along. I don’t get it. I saw Will’s room. Like any day he would walk back in the door and it would be ready for him, nothing moved, nothing thrown away. Yet Mum’s has been scoured clean. As if she’s the one who died. The one they needed to forget.

But I’m too tired to think for long. Too tired to dig in my bag for a clean T-shirt. Instead, I peel off my sweater and tights and crawl under the crackling white sheets and wool blankets, ready to curl into sleep. But as I draw my legs up, my knee brushes against something. I gasp, and freeze, scared I’ve found a dead cat. Or a live demon.

But there’s no smell, no sound, no heat.
Whatever it is, it’s nothing,
I think. It is benign. So, slowly, carefully, I reach down and feel the nap of velvet against my fingers. When I pull it out I see it’s not a demon. But it’s not nothing either. It’s a toy. A rabbit. Mum’s rabbit. And I fall asleep with it clutched to my chest.

ELEANOR STANDS
in the doorway, her shoulders hanging, a roll of bin bags in her right hand; the thumb of her left playing with her wedding ring, a thin, pale band of gold, turning it this way and that.
This cannot be right,
she thinks. A lifetime, nineteen years of Het. All of it to be wrapped in black plastic. Discarded like a cracked teapot.

Eleanor stiffens. He is behind her now. She can smell the alcohol rub from the day’s surgery, hear the labored breathing, a soft rasp she once feared, and now hopes, is something more than just middle age.

“All of it,” he says.

She hesitates, trying to find an excuse he will accept, knowing that sentiment will be swatted like a lazy bluebottle. “But it’s such a waste,” she protests finally. “Can’t we at least save it for charity?”

“She’s gone,” he says. “Dead. You bury the dead.”

The following day he drives eight black bin bags to the refuse site and lays her to rest in a yellow Dumpster. Her nineteen years worth no more than someone’s shattered mirror and four paint-chipped chairs.

In Het’s doorway, Eleanor twists her wedding ring. In her right hand she is clutching something else. A soft, velveteen thing, with long ears and a cotton-wool tail. A thing forgotten, or hidden. She hears wheels crunching on gravel, his Jaguar, its soft engine no longer purring a welcome but a warning. Quickly, quietly, Eleanor holds the toy to her face and breathes Het in for the last time, a fusty, child smell. A smell of years of love. Of life. Then she pushes it down beneath the crisp sheets of the single bed, made up now for guests who will never visit. If he finds it, what will she say? That it was a mistake. That she must have missed it in her hurry. That Rose, the housekeeper, must have done it; one of her superstitions.

But he doesn’t find it. It is another secret, another skeleton. Slipped through a crack for someone to dig up and piece together later.