Paradise (24 page)

ELEANOR ANSWERS
the door, and though he has rung to arrange the meeting, she still feels a wave of surprise run through her. It is the first time she has seen him since Roger’s funeral. But she brushes it lightly away and paints a smile on her lips.

“Jonathan,” she says. “Come in.”

At first she is angry. At the years of living a lie. At the truth that her own son was a bully. And a drunk. Like his father before him.

But he is gone. And she has cried her tears for him.

But Het, Het is alive.

She will find her, she thinks. She will drive to London and find her.

The minute the words fill her head, joy fills her heart. And she cannot stop herself. She packs a small case, enough for a night, two at most. She will find a hotel. Because it is too soon to stay. There is too much to be said. Too many explanations and apologies. And she will. She will apologize. For that night. And for the years before. The years of never holding her, never telling her that she loved her. Because she was hers.

Because she was his.

She will tell her that she has saved money. For her granddaughter. That she changed her will and opened an account. Put back the money that should have been Het’s.

But first she has to tell Alex. Has to tell him everything. There are to be no more secrets. Because secrets aren’t benign. They aren’t just scratches in the table. Or a single kiss. They are dangerous things. Things that eat away at you, that, when you strive to hide them, beat louder, threatening to reveal themselves. Things that hurt.

Except this one,
she thinks. For the hurt was done long ago. And now, this secret will heal.

AT SCHOOL
once I wrote this story, some complicated thing with a witch and a dragon and a fairy-tale castle. Only I couldn’t work out how to end it, so I just did that “And I woke up and it was all a dream” trick. And I guess I was waiting for that to happen. I thought I’d open my eyes and I’d be back on the sofa in Peckham under that faded duvet, watching Saturday-morning telly. That the mail was just bills, that Mum and Finn would come back with bread and milk, that Cass would charge up the stairs with some raging hangover and a new love bite and a “You won’t believe what Ash did.”

But it never happens like that. Life isn’t like stories. At least, not the ones I read, or wrote.

I woke up on the pier, on the damp wood, coughing and puking seawater from my stomach and lungs. The coast guard pulled me out. Then Mum and Finn and Danny, one by one. Our lips blue, our skin white.

The undertow didn’t drag us under. But the past did. Got all of us, in the end.

But we’re not burying it this time. Not running away.

Luka came. Of course he came. With Nonna and Nonno and Martha in her beat-up Toyota. They arrived just before they discharged Finn, packed him in the back, squashed between Nonna and me, and drove us all back to the house. Martha lasted a week before she missed the city. Better than Cass. She lasted a day. Came down on the train with a fake Prada suitcase and a bikini. Then said she couldn’t stay ’cause she had school and everything. Everything.

But Luka stayed.

And Mum? Mum’s getting treatment from this doctor up at the hospital. Private therapy. She’s paying for it. With her own money. Martha found the bankbook when she was cleaning. Fallen down the back of the bookshelves. Fifty thousand in trust. Enough to pay the back rent, and the bills for years to come.

Money doesn’t buy happiness, Martha said, but it buys you a big-enough boat to sail right up to it.

And Mum’s doing OK. I told her the truth, about that night. About Dad and Will. And she’s talking about it all. And shouting. She rang up Jonty and shouted at him for ten minutes straight, then hung up and said, “That’s closure.”

I didn’t lose my job. Debs said beggars can’t be choosers, and Lisa is signed off for six months with backache, so she needs me three days a week. And I guess I don’t need the money. But I need something to do.

Because I’m missing the rest of the school year. Finn, too. Mum said Luka can do some parenting for a change, instead of that bloody guitar.

But he’s found a way around it. He set himself up doing music classes in that old gallery. Like
School of Rock,
or something. He plays with Danny, too, sometimes. Says he’s good. Says he can get him session work, if he wants.

But he doesn’t. Not right now. Because that would mean going away. Going up to London. And neither of us wants that. Not yet.

We’re not together. That would be too weird. But I came here to find out who I was. And I thought I needed to find my dad to do that. But instead I found Danny. He’s part of my family now.

We could have ignored it. Could have run away. Together, or alone. But it would have pulled us back, in the end. Like it did Mum. It’s who we are. We can’t change it. Or fight it.

We just have to find new ways to live. And to love.

ALEXANDER SHAW
sits at the window, looking out over the forecourt of the garage. A girl, woman really, is filling her car with petrol.

It’s the car that jogs his memory. A Pallas. With fawn leather seats and a suspension that rose as you turned on the ignition. A strange sensation, he thought, as if you were being lifted in a space machine, a rocket.

He remembers the smell, too. Of cigarettes and a plastic air freshener, the liquid domed over the amber of a traffic light. Get set. And perfume. Her perfume.

She smelled of it that day. The last day he saw her.

“I have to go,” she says. “I have to find her.”

“I will come. Can I come?” he asks. He takes her hand in his own. Feels the fine-boned fingers, the hard gold of her wedding band, the chilled January.

She tightens her hand around his, feels the rough, calloused palm, the bone-swollen fingers.
An artist’s hands,
she thinks. Hands that have colored the wash of the sea with deft strokes of Prussian and cobalt. Hands that have held her face as he kissed her. That have unzipped a navy dress, and touched the bare flesh beneath.

But that was then.

She brings her other hand to meet their grasp, closes it around them, then kneels beside him.
Like Mary Magdalene,
he thinks. Or a begging child, imploring him.

“No,” she says. “No, you can’t come. But I need to tell you something.”

She stands now. Removes her hands from the tangle they have twisted themselves into.

“It’s our secret,” she insists.

He nods, then laughs. “I’ll forget anyway.”

It is the last time he sees her.

That evening a woman comes to see him, the one with the dark hair and the smell of pine needles. She tells him she is dead. Gone. There was an accident on the main road.

And for a second, then, he feels the sudden stab of pain, of loss. But by dinnertime he has forgotten. Forgotten her name even.

But today he remembers. And he remembers their secret.
I will write it down,
he thinks.
So I can tell her when she comes. Tell her who she is. That she is mine. My flesh and blood. My granddaughter.

What is her name?
he asks, as he searches in the bedside drawer for a pencil.

Billie. That is it. Billie.