Paradise (11 page)

“We could get fish and chips,” I say.

But it’s no good. Mum doesn’t want fish and chips. She wants liver-colored leatherette and napkins in glasses and steak and ice cream sundaes. She wants the Excelsior.

“We’re rich,” she says, and laughs. “Millionaires.”

“Are we really?” asks Finn, his chin shiny and bright with chocolate sauce and hundreds and thousands.

“No,” I should say. “We’re not. Not really. We’re broke. With a drafty house that will leak money like it leaks heat.”

But I’m high on ice cream. On hope. Like Mum. So I lie for her.

“Almost,” I say.

And even though dinner costs more than fifty pounds. Even though Mum spends another tenner on the way home buying more wine. Even though Finn is sick in the night, an ice-cream stream of indulgence flushed away. For that moment, reflected in Mum’s eyes, we are. We are almost millionaires.

TOM IS
everything Jonty isn’t. Not just his height, his build: tall and lean rather than rugby solid. But the way he is with her. The way he holds her, the way he talks to her like she matters, like she’s all that matters. Not like Jonty’s braying monologues. Where Het gets the feeling he’s just enjoying the sound of his own voice. Tom listens, too. Listens to her tell him about college. About how she doesn’t fit. Never has.

Het hears Will’s voice, reasoning with her: “He’s just not one of us, Het.” And he isn’t. But he’s not what Will thinks he is either. One of them. A no-good Gypsy. Not like Jimmy, with a girlfriend and a kid and a string of women. Tom belongs to nobody. Like her.

He takes her out to dinner. To the Excelsior. He heads for a booth at the back, but she pulls him to the window, where they can see, and be seen. The seat is the color of blood. Leather, or vinyl probably, her bare legs sticking to the surface, sweaty with excitement and the heat of July.

She can barely finish her steak, chewing each mouthful until it is nothing but gristle, her mouth too dry to swallow. But he orders dessert anyway, if only to show he can. The waiter brings a sundae.
An absurd thing,
she thinks. A show-off dessert. He feeds her from a long silver spoon, cream and a cherry, a taste of sugar and boiled sweets. She shakes her head at another and watches him instead, eating this beautiful thing, this work of art, until there is nothing left but a tiny pool of melted vanilla.

Dinner costs twenty-five pounds. A weekend’s wages from the fair. But it is worth it. She is worth it.

“Next time it’s my treat,” she tells him.

He shakes his head but she insists. And on Saturday she takes him for fish and chips, eaten out of the vinegar-soaked newspaper on the seafront. It is perfect. Like him.

THE NEXT
day Mum goes out and spends a hundred and fifty pounds in two hours. On what, I don’t know. A new camera. DVDs for Finn. Food: bags of two-pound-a-go arugula that will lurk in the fridge until they melt into inedible brown slime. Instead of pasta, we have high tea. Every meal an elaborate display of shop-bought cupcakes, quails’ eggs already peeled, sausages on sticks, jam sandwiches cut into heart shapes, like I’m a princess. Or a kid. Like Mum is a kid. It’s like when Cass’s dad first went to live with the Stepmonster and every day Cass had chips for tea. Chips with everything, like they could make it all better. Only they didn’t. Cass got so sick of them she said she could taste them in her mouth if anyone even said the word.

*  *  *

A few days later, Mum puts a plate of cheese straws down on the table for breakfast, and I can’t stand it anymore. We need money.

“I’m going out,” I say.

I don’t tell her where. Won’t until I get back, until I’ve got something. It’ll be easy, I tell myself. Resort towns are full of jobs. Cleaners and waitresses. And I walk down the hill, ignoring the weather, and the shuttered windows, and every other reminder that this isn’t Brighton or Blackpool, and it isn’t high season.

The Grand is a joke. Maybe once upon a time it lived up to its name. But now its paint is peeling, the red nylon carpets worn and stained. Brass lamps give everything a seedy glow. It is tatty, tawdry, faded. But I figure at least the cleaning should be easy. I mean, it’s not like they’ll sack me for missing a bit. I put on my I’m-totally-reliable-and-don’t-ever-do-drugs face and walk up to the desk. The receptionist is older, and fat, her breasts squeezed into a too-small bra under a shiny satin shirt.

“Hi. I’m looking for work.”

She raises a fat boiled-egg eye from her
Chat
magazine but doesn’t say a word. I try harder.

“Cleaning, or, um, waitressing?”

“We’re empty. Try at Whitsun.”

“Oh.” I do my winning smile and am about to ask for a pen and paper to leave my name and address when I realize she’s not even looking at me anymore; she’s gone back to Kelly-from-Harlow’s true confession.

It’s the same at the Palace, and the row of seedy B&Bs on the main road. Laughing, raised eyebrows, and “Come back in a few months.” But I don’t have a few months.

In the window of the Excelsior is a handwritten ad for a sous-chef. I don’t even know what a sous-chef is, but I figure the hours will be OK because restaurants don’t really open until after school. But the owner, his accent slipping from Cornetto-ad Italian to broad Cornish, tells me I need experience; it’s not McDonald’s. I look at the pictures of the green meals.
It so isn’t,
I think. And for once I find myself wishing it were. That I was back in Peckham, under the Golden Arches. Anyone could get a job there. Even Ash, for a few weeks anyway. Before he started swiping stuff.

“You could try Jeanie’s.”

I come to. “What?”

“The caff.” He nods down the road to the seafront.

There it is. The cracked-tiled, red-gingham, Danny-full café.

I nod. “Thanks.”

He shrugs and slices another shriveled lemon.

Danny’s not there. It’s the woman again — Pat, he said her name was. But maybe that’s better. Don’t want to have to ask him. He might make excuses.

“What can I get you?” Pat smiles, and I can see now why Danny likes her. She looks kind. Happy.

“Um. Actually a job.” I pull my face into an apology. “I know Danny,” I add. Like it’s worth something.

“Oh, sorry, love. There’s nothing right now. Barely enough for me and Danny. Maybe in the summer. Or if he ever gets off his backside and goes to college, like he ought.”

“Oh. OK.” He’s leaving. Or he might be.

“You’re a friend of his?”

“Yeah.” But am I? A friend? I don’t know what I am to him. Or he to me. So I blurt out, “A friend of a friend, really. Eva. His flatmate’s sister.”

She nods. Like it’s all clear to her. I wish it were to me. “Tell you what, leave your name and number, and if anything comes up, I’ll give you a ring.”

I scrawl my name on a piece of paper, then realize I don’t know the number.

“It’s in the book,” I say. “Trevelyan. The Cliff House.”

Pat frowns for a fraction of a second. Like it doesn’t add up.

“My grandmother’s,” I say. “She died.” Like that explains everything.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t know her,” I say quickly, making it all right.

“I’ll find the number, love.” She nods.

“Thanks.” I turn to go. Then I let the words out, fast, before I chicken out: “Say hi to Danny for me.”

Pat nods. “Sure.” But she’s distracted. Won’t remember.

And I walk out onto the street again, with no job, and no idea what I’m doing.

I don’t feel like going back to the hotels. For more “Sorry, love’s” and empty shrugs. Instead I turn right and cross the road to the front, then down the stone steps to what passes for a beach. Muddy-looking sand, piles of seaweed tangled with plastic bottles and old baby wipes. The great British seaside.

Water whips off the sea and stings my face. Even the rain is salty here. It is cold, freezing, but this idea grips me, this need, and I reach down and pull off my cowboy boots, my striped socks, roll my jeans up my calves, and then I walk down the shelving sand into the sea.

I don’t go far, just a yard or so, the water reaching below my knees, but even here I can feel it, clawing and dragging at my ankles, desperately pulling me out, claiming me. The wind rushes against my back, and for a second I lose my balance and stumble, stubbing my toe against something, a rock, or rubbish. My hand plunges into the water to steady myself, drenching my sleeve.

“Shit,” I shout.

But the wind takes it away. No one is listening. Can’t even hear me. And I long for that flat with the solar system on the ceiling and the bare board floor and Luka singing and playing and me and Cass lying on my bed, head to toe, chewing strawberry shoelaces and singing to the radio.

He’s not here. My dad. Even if he was, how would I ever find him? And Danny’s going. If not now, someday soon. To college. Of course. That’s why he’s working in the caff. Must be. Because it’s hardly a career choice. Then it will be just me, Finn, and Mum. And I’m not sure that’s enough anymore. I want something, someone else.

Tears run down my face, taking my employ-me mascara with them. I wipe them away with a sea-soaked sleeve. Salt water surrounds me, sand crunches gritty in my teeth. I want to go home.

I turn and trudge out of the shallows. Pull on my socks and boots, the cotton clammy and damp, catching on my wet feet and bloody toes. On the way back to the house I see the charity shop Mum made us take the bags to. I don’t ask for a job, know they don’t pay. Instead I use my last pound and buy back a thing of hers, of my grandmother’s. I buy back the locket.

And later that night, I fix the broken link with a piece of cotton, and I fasten the gossamer chain around my neck and slip the cold, hard pendant under my T-shirt, against the bones of my chest. The photo still inside. A piece of him. Of me.

HET IS
nine. She is in the sea with her brother, while her mother sunbathes on the tourist-packed sand. The water laps at Het’s chest. She is in farther than she has been before. But she likes the cold, likes the way the water stains her red swimsuit a deep maroon, likes the way her arms goose-pimple, the skin tautening, then relaxing as she thrusts them into the hot sun.

Het has to squint to see Will stamping in the shallows, pretending his plastic net is a harpoon to stab the minnows that dart around his toes. Behind him she can see their mother in her wide hat and black bikini. Het thinks she looks like a film star. Like Marlene Dietrich. It makes her mother laugh. But her father thinks she should cover up. The sun is bad for you, he says. Makes your skin grow in tight hard moles that will eat you up from the inside. Eleanor tuts, and Het thinks he is just being mean. He’s an indoors person, her mother says, explaining it away.

A man has stopped to talk to Eleanor. Not her father. This man’s hair is not clipped short at the back; it curls defiantly over his collar. And his shirt isn’t tucked in neatly; instead it flows loose around his linen trousers and gapes open at the neck so that Het can see a scattering of white in the hair on his chest. Her mother stands, shading her eyes with her hand. And Het watches as the man touches her on her back. A big wide palm against bare skin. Het recognizes him. It is the man from the gallery in town. In his shop are pictures of the cliffs, of beaches, of blue boats bouncing on the water.