Eden

by Joanna Nadin

  “I miss you too,” she says. “We’ll see each other, I promise. It’s just … it’s hard right now, with his dad and everything. He needs me.”

  I need you, he thinks. And as he looks into her eyes, he knows she needs him too. He just has to wait.

  AUGUST 1988

  WHEN I open my eyes he hasn’t flown away on his feathered wings. Yet I’ve moved: I’m out on the deck now. He must have carried me here for air, and light.

  I can see him more clearly now. There’s no halo, of course not. Just a tangled mop of hair. And in place of an angel’s robe he’s wearing a faded T-shirt and tight black jeans. He’s not an angel. Yet he’s not from this world either, or he’d be in deck shoes and chinos like the weekenders, or work clothes like the village boys.

  I sit up, my head dizzy from the fall, from the fright. “Penn,” I say. “You’re Penn.”

  He frowns. “Who are you?”

  “Evangeline,” I say. “Evie.”

  “Not Bea,” he says. “God, of course not.” He looks away then, as if he’s fighting back tears, or anger, or disappointment.

  “No.” I am nobody. I am the not-Bea, the wannaBea. The never-will-Bea.

  But yet, to him, I am somebody. Somebody he has heard of, at least.

  “Her cousin,” he says, remembering.

  I nod, my own face frowning now.

  “You weren’t at her funeral,” I say.

  “I—”

  “Your father,” I blurt. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… He – he died?” I say pointlessly.

  “Y–yes. He died. I couldn’t come then. I’m— I’m so sorry. I—”

  “It’s OK,” I interrupt quickly.

  His accent is rootless. Not the braying drawl I imagined it would be.

  “You came now,” I say. Like he said he would in his letter. He came anyway.

  “Yes, I— I hitched.”

  “She hitched all the time,” I say. “To Calenick. To Plymouth even.”

  But he’ll know this. He won’t want to hear it now and be reminded of her. I fall silent again.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Nothing,” I say. I hug my arms around my legs. It is hot, yet I am shivering, my skin dappled with goosebumps. “She’s gone,” I say. “Aunt Julia – Bea’s mum, I mean. If that’s who you came to see,” I add.

  “It’s not who I came to see.”

  Then who? Why come? To see Eden? To see me? I push the last thought away as I feel my face redden. He was Bea’s. I peek a sideways glance at him – at this last piece of her, and then I realize why he’s here. He doesn’t want Eden or me. He wants to see Bea. Or rather traces of her, particles of her. He wants to piece them together so he can know all of her, remember everything.

  Just as I do.

  He reaches a hand out to me. I take it; let him pull me up. “I’m sorry I scared you,” he says. And he smiles. And I see what Bea saw. That he has strength and grace and beauty. And secrets. Bea loved secrets.

  I let his hand drop then, awkward again, shove mine into my pocket. “Me too,” I reply. Because I know that for a split second, in the shadow of the boathouse, with his body blocking the sun, he thought I was her. He thought I was a kind of resurrection, a ghost, a double.

  “I should go,” he says. “This was a mistake. I—”

  And I feel another sudden lurch of fear at the loss of him so quickly. “Stay,” I say, the word pushing past my lips, blurting out before I can trap it under my tongue.

  “What?”

  “I mean it,” I say. “Stay. For a bit. If you want.”

  “I want,” he replies.

  And I feel the heaviness seep out of me, I am light as air, as gossamer. “You can sleep here in the boathouse,” I say, words falling over themselves now. “We used to. And there’s running water. A stove, look. And I can get you stuff. Food and things. From the house.”

  He nods as he watches me whirl around him. I am dancing with determination, and desperation and delight. But then he catches me, stops me mid-turn.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” he says. “About me, I mean.”

  “But why?”

  “I— I just don’t want them talking… I mean I don’t want to talk to other people. My father— I shouldn’t even be here. If I’m going to stay, let’s keep it a secret. Just … just between you and me.”

  I feel heat in my face again. He wants to talk to me. He wants to know me. And in that second I understand. We can make it better for each other. I am all that is left of her for him and he is all that is left of her for me. We both feel guilty. We both argued with her.

  “I won’t tell,” I say. “Promise. Wait here. I won’t be long.”

  And I am flying again, up the path to Eden. And I feel it, I feel how I used to feel with Bea at the beginning of summer. On the brink of something; an adventure.

  An awfully big adventure.

  MAY 1988

  THE CROWD heaves in one violent surge to the stage, and James and Bea are carried on the wave, their cheers lost in the sound of fiddles and a drunken drum roll.

  He saved weeks for this gig – two tickets to the Pogues at the Town and Country Club. His grant money set aside in an old tobacco tin, he’s been living instead on baked beans and end-of-night chips blagged from Nihal downstairs; spent his evenings soaking up the free heat of the library to avoid putting another 50p in the meter.

  It was worth it though, because now he’s here, with her, in the crush of bodies, and the smell of sweat, smoke and cheap alcohol.

  She pulls him to her and they reel to the sound of “Sally MacLennane”. Their arms linked, he spins her around. She is a bright star in orbit and he is at the centre of her universe. This is all he wants, all he’s ever wanted. And it is here and it is now. Thanks to his tickets, and her guilt.

  The crowd washes stagewards and another jigging couple – a pair of beery Belfast boys – knocks into them, pushing her into his arms and crushing her against his chest. He looks down in panic, but she is laughing, intoxicated by the raw thrill of it, and delight rises again in him too.

  “It’s you and me against the world,” he shouts.

  “We’re Bonnie and Clyde,” she laughs, “Superman and Lois Lane.”

  And he is Superman. He feels it inside him tonight; mercurial, unstoppable. He pulls her face to his and kisses her hard, pushing his fire into her.

  But she jerks her head away. “Just don’t… Don’t spoil it. OK?”

  “I’m sorry. I thought—”

  “Dance with me,” she pleads. “I want to dance.”

  And she does. He watches as she spins on the arm of a stranger, his bright star disappearing into the crowd, out of his orbit.

  Bea is still spinning as she gets into bed beside Penn three hours later, giddy with the thrill of beer and dancing, and … James. She pushes the thought from her mind, along with the vestige of the girl she used to be. That girl – the one who just wanted to be wanted, who let all the boys kiss her just for the satisfaction of knowing that for those few minutes she was the centre of their world – is gone, has to be. For now she has everything she has wanted: this new life, this new love, real love. She won’t ruin it.

  She curls her still-clothed body round Penn’s sleeping form, feels him stir and waken.

  “Bea?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she murmurs. “It’s me.”

  It’s me and you. We are Bonnie and Clyde, she thinks. Not me and James. Me and you.

  AUGUST 1988

  THE CREEK is an ever-moving thing, bringing endless possibility on its slow, brown tide. In the winter it’s swollen with rains and snow, taking with it a wash of china clay from the docks upriver. In the summer, the surge of seawater carries tin cans and crisp packets, the chewed balsa wood of lolly sticks; detritus from other lives. More than once it has borne a body, bloated and blue, its swollen limbs catching on the banks.

  But today it has brought something else. Someone else. He is flotsam washed up by the water �
�� not a Coke can or the torn, faded wrapper of a Cornetto, but real treasure; a pirate’s chest, a message in a bottle. A piece of Bea. He has been sent to me. And so I must do all I can to keep him. So I pack anything and everything, guessing at what he likes and what he’ll need: a fruit cake from the larder; plastic bottles to collect water from the holy well; new batteries for the cassette player; a toothbrush and paste; a copy of The Tempest, its margins a scrawl of O-level notes and doodles of sea creatures; a tin of humbugs, striped like bees; half a bottle of French brandy kept in the larder for Crêpes Suzette, its dark amber diluted by the tea Bea added to hide her late night swigs; my sleeping bag, still fusty with the grass and dust of last summer. I pack for a single sleepover and for a month of Sundays. There’s so much I want to give him. By the time I get to the back door, I’m laden with goods, like a packhorse. I have had to leave behind a box of chocolates tied up in a scarlet ribbon, a jar of preserved peaches, a book of poems, its illustrations edged in gilt. No matter. I can come back for them later. There will be tomorrow. Please let there be tomorrow.

  I stumble down the step, like a smuggler carrying contraband, and a heavy secret. The sleeping bag knocks against my thigh and the mints rattle inside their tin, like a hive of sweet insects. I am so lost in the story of it all that I have forgotten to listen out for the tick-tock of the crocodile.

  “Woah!”

  I yelp in shock and feel the worn rubber of my shoe slip on the gravel. Then two hands grasp my arms as I pitch forward. I don’t have to look up to know who it is. I can feel it in the callouses of his fingers, in the surety of his grip: Tom.

  “I’m fine.” I shrug his arms away and right the pack on my bag.

  “Are you running away?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I lie. To Neverland, I think.

  “Can I come?”

  I panic, blurt out a staccato “No”. Then I panic again at this betrayal of my secret – Penn’s secret. “I— I’m just going to the creek. On my own.” I add. “I need to be alone.”

  He nods, understanding. “Well, I’m glad you’re out.”

  I change the subject. “I thought you’d gone to Liskeard.”

  “I did,” he smiles. “But the market’s over,” he says. “It’s gone one.”

  “Really?” Have I been at the house for over an hour? I feel panic rise in me, a swarming in my fingers and toes willing me to move, to run.

  “Why? What’s the hurry?”

  “Nothing,” I say quickly. “Just, time flies and all that.”

  “When you’re having fun?”

  I stare at him, incredulous. “This isn’t about ‘fun’. This is so far from fun.”

  This is about something else, something more. It’s about death, and life – keeping Bea alive. Penn has memories of Bea I must dig out, gather up like cowrie shells or sea glass. For my own are clouded with time and dust now, and distorted by cruel words and selfishness. Whereas Penn’s, Penn’s will be clean, true, new. He can tell me new thoughts, new hopes, new fears. He can explain why she was coming, and why she never arrived. Maybe, maybe.

  “I— I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” His hand covers his mouth as if to keep him from saying anything else.

  But it’s me who’s gone too far. I don’t want him worrying about me, following me.

  “No, I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s just…”

  “It’s OK,” he says. “I understand. More than you think.”

  He’s going to say he feels the way I feel. He’s going to say he loved her too. But I don’t want to hear it. Not now. I don’t have time to listen, or think about what that word does or doesn’t mean. I need to get back to Penn, before he changes his mind. Before I lose him too.

  “I have to go. Before the tide goes out,” I add. “I want to swim.”

  “Sure,” he shrugs. “But … if you need me … I mean, if you need something, anything. You know where I am.”

  I nod. “Thanks,” I murmur. “I’ll see you soon,” I promise.

  “Sure,” he mumbles.

  And I am gone. Stumbling, running, as fast as I can. As fast as I dare with my precious cargo strapped to my back. “Please be there, please be there,” I repeat to myself as each footstep hits the earth. “Please be there.” Until at last I burst out of the enchanted forest, a desperate, drunken Tinkerbell staggering into the bright lotus-land of the creek.

  The deck is deserted, the boathouse silent now, empty. I swing round, desperately scanning the horizon. For what? For a boat sailing into the sunset? But the sun is high in the sky, and I don’t even know if he can row. I feel dizzy again, my legs trembling from the run, from the weight, from the disappointment. And then I hear it.

  “Evie,” a voice says. “Evie. I’m here.”

  And I look, not out to the sea, but back into the inky green stillness of the creek. And I see him. Waist-deep in the water and half naked. Not the strong, oat-fed boy I imagined, but fragile, his skin paler. As if he is half ghost, half boy. But he is beautiful.

  And he is Bea’s.

  I feel heat flush my cheeks with embarrassment. And I look away as he wades out of the water and takes the towel I have brought.

  “Thanks.” As he wraps it round his waist, I catch a glimpse of his shorts. Faded blue, like school swimming trunks. And I hate myself for liking him even more, for feeling what Bea must have felt; that he doesn’t swagger or show off, that he wouldn’t wear Ralph Lauren board shorts to prove he is someone.

  “I brought you stuff,” I say quickly.

  “So I see,” he smiles. Then adds, “Thanks.” As if he might have seemed ungrateful. As if he, too, is trying to please.

  I’m awkward in his presence; a schoolgirl again, for that is what I am, I remember. I’m not the dazzling bright drama student that Bea is – was. I’m chalk dust and knee-length socks and a box-pleat pinafore.

  “Here,” I say, and I rummage again in my bag then hand him my treasure. He nods and hands me a gift in return. It’s a cassette, not a shop-bought one, but home-made, a mixtape.

  The radio-cassette is old, its plastic back warped, the casing rusted. And so I say a silent prayer as I push the new batteries in and press play.

  At first there’s just the buzz of static: white noise crackling off the walls and fizzling into the ceiling. But then I hear the sudden striking of piano keys, the murmur and swell of a jeering, cheering crowd that pushes the air from me as a memory is dragged to the surface. I know this. Bea used to play it – a song that drifted down the stairs, or filled the kitchen with its defiant noise until Aunt Julia could no longer stand its minor chords and morose lyrics and would switch the player back to Radio 4 and The Archers.

  “Last Night I Dreamt…” I say.

  He smiles, finishes the title for me. “…That Somebody Loved Me.”

  I nod. The Smiths. God, Bea and I loved the Smiths.

  “I saw them,” he says. “You know, live.”

  “Really?” I am childishly excited. I have never been to a gig, to a disco even.

  “Twice, actually,” he says. “April the fourth at the Palace. Then the Free Trade Hall, October the thirtieth. Two different years though,” he adds, as if he must lessen this display of devotion.

  “You went all the way to Manchester? Twice?”

  He is silent for a second, stares at me as if I am the strange one for not going.

  “It’s not that far,” he says finally. “Not really.”

  “No,” I say, anxious not to be the odd one out, to be back in the triangle that is Penn, Bea and me.

  The song changes then, to the slow, mournful sound of a woman’s voice. It is a lament in song and I recognize it from another tape that Bea made; one that I played again and again until it stretched and snapped and no amount of Sellotape could fix it.

  It’s “Song To the Siren” and I listen – we listen – as Elizabeth Fraser’s voice soars and sinks as she sits on the rocks in our imagination, mermaid-like in our heads, and mourns a love lost.


  “I— we used to…” But I trail off.

  He takes my hand and I start at his touch; at the intimacy and yet the normalcy of it. And I feel a sudden jolt of fear at my want for this boy. My need for him.

  Though maybe it’s not him I want. Maybe it’s what we share.

  For we do share something. We share Bea. She has tied us together, and I don’t want to loosen those ties, not yet. I want them tighter. I want to be bound to him so that I can feel her again. And so I let him hold me, I don’t let go. I won’t let go.

  MAY 1988

  BEA STANDS on the lowest of the three high boards; her feet over the tip, her arms wide in worship, the people below her – her congregation – as small as ants. She has done this before, here at the lido this summer, and before at the point at Eden. She’s not scared, she’s invincible, beautiful Bea, and for just a few seconds of serendipitous perfection, she can fly.

  She slinks, slick with water and shining with satisfaction, back to her towel and to Penn.

  “Your go,” she smiles.

  “Maybe later,” he says.

  But he won’t. Not later, not today, not ever.

  Bea rolls her eyes. “You’re like Evie,” she says.

  “Evie?”

  “You know, my cousin. I told you about her?”

  He nods, remembering.

  “She swears she wants do it, climbs to the top of the point, and then has to climb all the way down again.”

  “I’m not scared,” he says.

  But he is.

  He can swim. His father made sure of that; ignored his pleas and protestations and made him jump from the side of a yacht at La Napoule. “In at the deep end,” he said. “Best way to learn.” And learn Penn did. But he’s never managed to conquer his fear of heights, despite numerous trips up lighthouses and church towers and being forced to climb ladders. However many times he tried, he’d end up stuck, with his father raging at him from below as Penn, bilious and weak, clung to walls or rungs as if they were life itself.

  “How awful,” she had said to him.

  “I’ll get over it,” he had shrugged.