Paradise (2 page)

By Tuesday I can’t stand it any longer. I’ll be back at school tomorrow, and I don’t want to leave Mum alone in the house with it. Don’t know what she’ll do if she finds it. As it is, I hide the big knife from the kitchen. Just in case.

I don’t say anything, just hand the envelope to her at breakfast, with this look on my face like I’m giving her my school report and there’s not even a C on it, let alone a B. I feel Finn yank my sleeve, hear him demand to know what it is, but I shrug him off because I’m watching Mum, hidden under her shroud of dirty blond, her knees inside the black mohair of one of Luka’s sweaters, bare feet poking out. And I wait.

When she got a letter telling her that her father had died, she said nothing. Just shrugged and dropped it in the bin and went back to buttering toast.
But this is different,
I think. This is her mother. She was inside her once. Part of her. She has to lose it.

But she doesn’t, just stretches her legs to the floor and turns her head to me. And as she pushes her hair behind one ear, I see she is smiling.

“I should have told you before,” I say. “I mean, I meant to. It’s just — I didn’t know what you would —”

“It’s fine,” she interrupts. “Really.”

“We don’t have to live there. Cass says I could sell it —
we
could sell it, I mean. Pay the back rent here. Or buy it, even. Or one of those big houses on the Grove, near Cass, and —”

“No,” she says. “It’s a sign. It’s serendipity. We’ll go. We’ll move.”

My stomach is alive again. Butterflies battering against the sides, trying to get out.

“What’s serendipity?” asks Finn. “And where are we going?”

“Fate,” she replies. “Good fate. And it’s taking us to the seaside.”

“Like Margate? Will there be donkeys? Can we stay for dinner?”

“Yes.” She nods. “Yes, there’s donkeys. And, yes, we can stay. Not just for dinner, though. For the night. For a thousand and one nights.” And her smile widens, as if she’s just realized what she’s said.

Finn yelps with delight and flings himself onto Mum. I watch as she basks in his adoration. Then, infected by his eight-year-oldness, she wraps him around her and stands, dancing him across the painted floor, Finn screaming as she whirls to the tinny sound of the radio. But I don’t dance. Instead, the butterflies surge upward and I have to fight to push them down.

“And Dad will come?” Finn says, breathless. “And we can swim in the sea like sharks?”

“Yes,” Mum says, her eyes closed, still dancing. But I know she doesn’t mean it. This is her escape. Her get-out-of-jail-free card. “We don’t need anyone. We have us.” That’s what she always said, even before Finn came. “Us is what matters. We are all the family we need.”

And part of me believes her. That it’s just us. And that home will be wherever we want it to be. But then I think about Cass. Whom I’ve known since forever. Who bought me my first Beanie Baby. My first tampons. My first drink. About Luka. Who’s not my dad, but is the closest I’ve ever gotten. And as good as I’d ever want.

“It’s my key,” I say in desperation.

Mum stops and lowers Finn down, one arm around him, the other reaching out to stroke my face.

“I know,” she says. “And it’s your decision.”

“Please, Billie,” begs Finn. “Please.”

I look at him, his eyes wide with worry, scared I’ll shatter his sand-covered, peppermint-rock-flavored dream.

“I’ll think about it,” I say. “I need to think about it.”

But as Mum pulls us tight to her and carries us around, the ceiling a kaleidoscope of broken lightbulbs and patches of damp and purple-felt-tip planets, I know I’m losing the fight.

SHE TELLS
them not because she wants to, but because she has to. Because Tom has begged her, and because she knows there is no other way.

Maybe she will feel a weight lifted, she thinks. Maybe relief will wash over her. Like the problem pages say it will. But Het can see them in her mind’s eye, the women at the magazines, in their glossy world, rose-tinted glasses with their glasses half full, always half full.

And Het’s glass is empty.

Her mother touches three polished fingers to her lips, trying to catch the “Oh, Hetty” that escapes from them. But Het hears it, hears the fear.

Her father says nothing. Lets nothing out. Just stands there for a second, his jaw set with tension, straining to contain his rage, his disappointment and disgust. Then he turns and walks out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

Eleanor flinches at the sound, at the gust of air that scatters a sheaf of papers across a side table and onto the carpet. Het waits for her to say something. To do something. To hold her, to say it’s going to be all right.

But instead she stands quickly, scoops up the stray papers and places them neatly in a pile back on the table. Then walks smartly out of the room.

It’s not going to be all right.

Het is lying on her bed when she hears the tread of the stairs. Two sets of feet, one in black brogues, size ten, one smaller, in heels. She has learned their rhythms, their meanings over the years. The prickling irritation of one; the threat of the other.

Het looks at the shoes in the frame of the doorway.
Like policemen,
she thinks. Bringing bad news.

“I have made an appointment for you,” he tells her.

“It will be quick,” Eleanor adds. “Over with.”

Het looks up from the floor. “I’m keeping it,” she says simply.

“But —” her mother starts.

“The university won’t allow it,” he interrupts. Then slower, calmer he says, “I won’t allow it.”

Het turns over to face the window. “It’s not up to you.” She watches as this sinks in. Then she adds the punch line: “Anyway, I’m not going back.”

“But all your hard work . . .” Eleanor gasps. “It’s what you always wanted.”

“No,” Het says calmly. “It’s what you always wanted.”

For seven seconds there is silence. Het counts them. One elephant, two elephant . . . Then the door closes and the feet tread their familiar step along the corridor, but quicker now; then another door slams, and Het can hear raised voices, accusations, blame, the heavy slap of a hand against a rouged cheek. She pulls a pillow over her head and fills her glass another way. Fills it with him.

Two weeks, he said. Enough time for him to earn some money from the fair. For Martha to find them somewhere to stay.

Two weeks and she will be gone. She will leave all this weight, this dull, aching, impossible life behind. And she will be his. Forever.

I’M SITTING
in my bedroom, curtains open, London night seeping in through the gaps in the broken sash window. The sound of traffic, the smell of fried food, the shrieks of hamburger-happy girls bathed in the golden glow of McDonald’s. Sheer teeming life that dances down the dirty pavements twenty-four hours a day. My life. A life I’m not sure I want to leave for a dead-end seaside town.

It’s different for Finn. He’s a kid. All he can see is cotton candy and the roller coaster and donkey rides on the sand. But what would I do there? Who would I be?

Cass says she’d kill to get out of London, live by the sea, with her year-round tan and surfers checking her out, waiting on her every move. But the beaches she’s lain on are in Corfu not Cornwall. And she’d never leave London anyway. Not if it came down to it. She says she feels dizzy if she has to go to Zone 3. And when our year went to Windsor Castle for the day, she told Mr. Hegarty she got travel sick and stayed behind in the library all day. She
is
London. She’d fade like a hothouse flower if you took her out of the noise and the dirt. And I wonder if I’d be like that. If I’d shrink even further into myself. If I’d wither. Stop breathing. And I add it to my list of excuses.

“I like London,” I say to Mum. “It’s alive. There’s museums and art galleries and stuff.” Every word practiced, knowing that this has been her argument in the past. Her reason for coming, for staying.

But not now, not anymore. Mum says London is a bad place to raise a kid. She means Finn. “But what about me?” I say. “You raised me here. What’s so wrong with how I turned out?” But then I think of the time she and Luka came home early one night, and Cass was in their bedroom with Ash Johnson. You’d have thought it was me in there, the way she went off. And I said I’d begged Cass not to. But it’s hard to say no to her. And I remember what Mum said: that Cass was a bad influence, out of control. And what she didn’t say: that maybe I would go the same way. And I think,
Mum one, Billie nil.

I say, “What about school? I can’t just leave after one term of A levels.”

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.