Paradise

by A. L. Kennedy

  I need to follow her and tell her out loud that I will, at least, make sure to be a girl here, because I can never be anything else when I am with her. And I do like this, the immediate lifting off of years, there haven’t been so many times when I would have changed it.

  I can’t leave the room, though. I have to sit in my father’s armchair— he must be hiding in the greenhouse—and speak to the visitor he’s avoiding.

  “So . . .” Mrs. Anderson hadn’t anticipated me. She is shocked in a way that makes me suspect that she may not have known I exist.

  “Yes, I just thought I’d pop by. I was away. But I’m not any more . . . You’re a . . .”

  “I’m not long moved in over the road. Your mother brought me flowers the first day. It was a lovely gesture.”

  When I grin now, I actually do mean it. My mother brought flowers, because she does sometimes need to prune them and is proud of their qualities—it had nothing to do with Mrs. Anderson. Not that my mother isn’t also neighbourly. But her lovely gesture would have invited a mild, distant acquaintance, not the burden of having visitors indoors, disturbing the peace she enjoys here with my father. My mother calls on other people, if she has to—she doesn’t want them calling round on her. That’s how she is.

  I realise I’ve let the silence open up too far and Mrs. Anderson is finding inadequate distraction in her biscuit.

  “Sorry, Mrs. . . . ahm . . . Anderson, I’m a little sleepy. I was in Canada. And some other places.”

  “Really?” She is doing the proper thing—learning about the people attached to someone she considers a future friend. She wants to feel part of things.

  “Yes. Business. Slightly. Some money matters: getting money.” I tell her this before I realise that it makes me sound like a drug dealer and that she will now have to ask

  “So, what do you do?”

  Which I cannot answer with “Oh, a little theft, monstrosity, credit-card fraud and my hobbies include giving blow jobs to unpleasant men while I’m semi-unconscious. I also drink a lot.”

  But my mother returns to save me with “She used to be in cardboard, but now she has moved on.”

  And if “She used to be in cardboard” is the kind of absurdity that she would only produce under pressure, then “but now she has moved on” is layered with a savage faith and tenderness and is none of Mrs. Anderson’s business.

  Mother dips low as she sets my teacup on the table at my side and I understand that she is checking my breath for indications of betrayal. When there are none, she glances across with a burst of hope that turns my stomach. I want to admit that I have recently spent days being given tea in half-filled mugs—in case I spilled it—because liquids are troubling when you have the shakes.

  She straightens, sets her hand beside my neck and strokes my cheek. I had forgotten she used to do this, I had lost how wonderful it was that she used to do this and the smell of her hands which is the smell of softness and being a woman and her perfume: the sandalwood and fresh grass and safety and comfort of that—the lurch it makes in me back to five years old when we would stand together in the hairdressers, both newly trimmed, and we would look at ourselves in the big mirror, the rest of the world much smaller and less interesting behind us and we would say, as easily as please or happy birthday, “We love each other very much.”

  For two or three seconds I am afraid that one of us may say this now.

  Mrs. Anderson compares us as mother and daughter and finds this moving. “Has she been away a long time?”

  “Yes.” The one word loaded, extending invisibly into the sentence I’m meant to hear which is, “Yes, my daughter was away for a very long time, too long, but she’s come back now and I can possibly be free of how she used to be.”

  And I do want her to be free. I haven’t drunk today, or really yesterday and there were those several other sober days not long ago and this could be positive and something which ought to delight her. But it doesn’t feel positive. It doesn’t feel as if drink was the problem—more that I was and will be again.

  Still, no need to dwell on this. I will borrow my mother’s certainty while the room constricts with optimism, although no one has any right to be optimistic about me.

  Mother and her guest chat more easily, leaving me to relax and nod whenever nodding seems appropriate. Mrs. Anderson would like to ask me some more questions, but she is deftly coaxed aside and eased along into discussing her husband, his death, her moving house and coming here—this has the form of a story she’s often told before, but it works in her, all the same—there’s something about her allotted role in it which she can’t yet believe. I suspect there may be tears soon and then I don’t know what we’ll do.

  I wish for a chiming clock, a dog, a hailstorm—any reasonable distraction. But then my mother begins talking about change and the pair of them calm and I focus on this before my mother says, with no preamble, that she will retire in a month.

  Which immediately makes me the one who can’t believe.

  I know it’s due, I understand that, naturally, such eventualities do arise—only not for my mother. Not like this. There’s something unacceptable about this. Because nothing unavoidable should come near her, she should always have the opportunity to choose.

  The way she is in this living room, this evening, dressed in quiet flowers: the pattern of her blouse, the brooch at her throat: her hands are mildly older, perhaps her face, and her hair, is lighter, but she isn’t old. Not properly. Not in the way that drives you from your work and steals your health and takes you from yourself. So she shouldn’t have mentioned retiring while I’m here. It’s going to be her fault if I drop my cup, or sweat, or have to leave with uncompleted explanations.

  I wipe my top lip and know that she has noticed. We are both remembering I do that when I’m drunk and, although I am sober, I’ve started to blush.

  Retire—my mother repeats the word and I wait until she will turn to me again: I stop blinking, I hold still to let her search my face and I grin myself honest, grin and grin, because simply being honest won’t be enough, she won’t see it and I want to be the girl that she can trust. I want her to be sure.

  Mrs. Anderson, the good neighbour, interrupts. “It’ll be a change for you.”

  “Change is the thing. Yes.”

  “Of course.”

  “But we adapt ourselves, don’t we? And there are benefits.”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Anderson the good widow does her best not to sound bereft.

  I watch my mother and think that perhaps I have been convincing, because in the middle of speaking, quite out of place, she allows what is really a sigh to break are apart from benefits and she brushes at her skirt and I am afraid, because she seems happy, and if I can make her happy then I can make her sad again.

  And worse, this is the way we used to be: connected. We were beyond drink, before it, born to be completed in each other with no further help. She is the whole of my first thought: a memory of darkness and nothing wrong, only pulling in the sweet night warmth of her and being lost in it, back asleep inside the rightness of everything, loved beyond reason.

  Or standing in the bathroom doorway and watching my father shave: that unaccustomed sureness, fluid in his hands: the flick at the end of the stroke and then dipping his razor, shaking it in the basin and up again to clear himself into a deeper innocence, into a huge child with bright lines of soap still left at his sideburns, under his nose and then the rinse and then the towel and then his extraordinary newness.

  I watched him often before one morning—I don’t know why—I turned round to see my mother leaning against the wall behind me and watching him just as I was, soft and pleased. He smiled because he knew that we were there, but could pretend not to, could forget that he was shy and be handsome for us. And this was love. This was room enough for everyone to love and no harm done.

  When Simon was born I loved him, too—all of us, we were one another’s and I learned the sound of my mother’s voice saying l
ovebird, because that was my name and I cannot remember the word without hearing her in my head: and her other words, the way she would swear without swearing because I was a child—pig’s feet and old curtains and oh, Christmas—the words she still uses today, because she is naturally polite and because they belong to us now and are the way we used to be. She’s the only woman I’ve ever had any time for.

  This is why I finish my tea and carefully rebalance the cup on the saucer and watch the sunlight creep across the carpet and I don’t make excuses to hide to the bathroom, or any bedroom, because these are places where I drank. And it’s why I don’t go to the garden and find my father, because this might disturb him and my mother won’t have him disturbed. But it’s also why I’ll have to leave soon.

  “You have to go already?” My mother’s pain lurching out in the room. Mrs. Anderson won’t notice, but I see it in my mother’s hands, which are like my hands only graceful, and in the light of her eyes, which are like my eyes but not guilty, and in her lips which are like my lips, only clean, all her life clean. “Do you? Have to go?”

  “I’ll be back.” I mean this. “I dropped in on the way to somewhere else.” This is a lie and clatters down like a lie. “It’s that I’m tired. I didn’t expect that I’d still be this tired.” If she told me that I could rest here, I would go up to my room and be well, find a pure sleep. I would wake up later and sit on the living-room floor with my head leaned against her knee. “But I’ll be back.” If we were years ago and other people. If God allowed just anything.

  “You’re sure.”

  So now I’ve managed, I’ve taken her happiness. And I don’t want to act this out while I’m watched by a stranger, but there can’t be any other way—alone with her, I’d seem frightening and not better—I’d shake and weep and ruin her, swallow her hope.

  It has to be done like this. It has to be carefully levering to my feet and walking to take my mother’s hands and having her stand against me and holding her, holding how beautiful she is and made of something which could not stand the way I live and kissing her cheek and her ear and her hair and not crying, buckling that in, and being proud that I can show this to Mrs. Anderson who does not know us and who does not understand, but who surely must recognise love when she sees it.

  By the time I get home, I genuinely am tired, numbingly so, and I stagger through the business of undressing and drop into bed as if I’ve had a hard, long evening of the more usual type.

  When I wake—without hangover, or any specific regret—the curtains are open, as I left them, and the steel shine of a wet dawn is thumping about in the room until I can sit up and organise my senses, establish that the light is silent and the din is coming from my hall.

  Either a passing idiot has taken a strong dislike to my front door, or Robert is outside it and wanting to be in. Both possibilities make me unwilling to respond.

  “Hannah.” This narrows it down to the second option. “Hannah, come on.” For a while this narrowness offends me. “Please.”

  Then I climb into my jeans and sweater, because a dressing gown won’t be appropriate, not if I have to be stern, and I let him inside. He’s thick with pubsmell and swinging, heavy with drink, with taking it alone, beyond last orders, when it turns on you and makes you scared of yourself, unwelcome in your own head.

  He follows me into the room, kisses my cheek with gin as he jerks past to sit on the bed. “Sorry.”

  I go to my chair and watch him. I’ve seen the way he is before, I’ve been the way he is before—it’s like trying to climb out of a cone, some repulsively geometrical, deep-sided pit made of marble, or metal, or porcelain, or anything else that won’t give, that won’t warm, that won’t let you get a grip. You turn and you slide and you crane up to peer at the things you would like to do, while your moods swoop through you in patterns without sense. In this state, you can disappear under your skin, be lost, do your worst and then instantly forget.

  But Robert is mild, for now. “Really sorry . . . earlier . . . I was an arse.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  He rubs at his eyes, as if this will clear them. “Don’ say that.”

  “You said it first.” I’m hoping he’s drunk himself stupid and will stay with that.

  “Did, I did. Thass righ’. Did. Sorry.” He stares at the floor, frowning and then brightens, takes off his jacket methodically and makes a painful start on his shirt.

  I’m entirely sober, which puts us into separate languages, separate countries. “What are you doing, Robert?”

  “Time for undress.” He beams as if this is a wonderful, original idea, winks and then falters when I don’t wink back. Next, he shakes his head like an unhappy toddler, rocking on the bedspread. “No, doesn’t want that, Robert. You’re too stinking. I know, I know, I know, I know. Too drunk. I know.” But then he sets back in at his shirt buttons, his concerns evaporated. “If I have a lie-down.” And he does hinge on to his back, feet still firm on the floor, fingers even clumsier at his chest, confused. “Oh dear.”

  I move to stand above him, to frown at the hair blurred across his forehead and the weight of his hands where they’re lifted with each almost-dozing breath and the child that he is again, his helplessness. Under the pubsmell is the flavour of his skin, his full self, the Robert Gardener I have missed for weeks. So I can’t shout at him. I can’t be sustainably irritated that he’s brought me his apologies when he’s hidden deep in gin and can’t be blamed, or even found. I can only kneel to take his shoes off, his socks.

  “Wha’ you . . . ? Oh. Thass nice. Yeah. Thans.”

  I manoeuvre his legs until he is lying out flat on my bed and then watch him roll and curl on to his side with his back towards me. And I hug in behind him and I kiss his hair, which makes him stir a little, and I try to sleep while I hold him and hold the drinking in him, feel it twitch and sparkle as he dreams.

  Not that it lets us rest for long.

  “Hannah.”

  I’m half drifting, imagining I’m close by a high wooden fence, with animals kicking inside it. I need to see what they are.

  “Hannah.”

  I believe that one of them is talking to me.

  “Hannah.”

  Robert turns to face me in a scramble of coverlet and loosened clothes. The images of whip cord and slivers of moving life break up, then fade and I open my eyes to him. “It isn’t time to get up yet. Today’s Sunday.”

  “Want to tell you.” He’s drunk now in the soft, bleak way—the one that forces you to talk. It plays interrogator and you say out everything, because otherwise you know that it will eat you, you will disappear for always, never get free. “Want to tell you something.”

  “Okay, okay. What? I’m awake. What?”

  “But I can’t, though.” And he dives his arms round me, pulls in fast. “I don’t want to.”

  I’m becoming slightly claustrophobic, his fear hemming me in. “It’s fine. We’re both here, we’re both fine. We’re together. You can tell me stuff. I won’t mind. You know me: in the morning, I won’t remember. Neither will you.” At least half of that’s true.

  “I do love you.” As if this is an injury he’d rather not inflict.

  I’m not in the mood for injury. “And I do love you. So tell me.”

  I pat his arms and he loosens a touch, relaxes enough to mouth beside my cheek and then eases down till his head is a live, warm burden across my shoulder, beneath my chin. I’ve done much the same myself at other times, with other people—they can’t get a proper look at you when you’re tucked away like that.

  “Robert, what’s wrong?”

  “I can’t take you to see my parents.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t take you to see my parents.”

  This, in a positive way, is not what I expected. “That’s . . . okay. I don’t mind. I hadn’t—”

  “No, no.” He worries his head in tighter and I stroke my hand from his temple to his neck. I hold his voice. “I’m an onl
y child.”

  “That’s right.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” He breathes, lays his hand over mine and I’m finally sure he will tell me something now that I don’t want to know. There’s an old pain turning in him, I can almost hear it opening up the space for itself, stretching between soft tissues and harmless thoughts where I can’t reach it and lift it away.

  “I’m an only child. I haven’t seen my father since I was seventeen. I haven’t seen my mother since I was seventeen.” His palm is chill, his thumb rubbing my knuckles: back and forth, back and forth. “I woke up early in the morning. I was worried about my exams, my Highers. I wanted to be a dentist, but my maths wasn’t good and that made the chemistry difficult, the physics. But I needed them. I needed maths, too— I needed A passes in everything, because that’s what everyone said they would expect and I thought that was important. And this was the summer I’m talking about—I had only about three weeks left to cram it all in and I was up early to study—it’s what I was going to do that day, sit with my books. Because I applied myself, I was a good boy, a good pupil, well behaved.

  “That morning, it was noisy downstairs, distracting—and not our normal type of noise. People talking softly and walking about, a lot of walking about.”

  His thumb keeps moving, back and forth, and I can’t stop it, can’t try. I lean to kiss his hair, but he doesn’t notice.

  “And I was wondering why we had visitors and I was working things through in my mind and then I went into the bathroom and I was having a piss and I remember thinking: No. There’s something wrong. It’s finally gone wrong. And then I realised this was the one day that I would not ever forget—this would be the moment that explained me, the moment when I knew I was over—and part of it would always be the memory of standing and having a piss. It had to be like that, didn’t it? Otherwise, my life would be a tragedy and not a joke and God wouldn’t ever have that— or Luck, or Fate, or the way that I’m fucking made. Doesn’t matter who’s responsible, I have to be a joke.