Eden

by Joanna Nadin

  But he hadn’t. Not yet.

  “I’m sorry,” Bea says. “We shouldn’t have come.” For his father is struggling now, his determined clutch at life weakening, despite the chemotherapy and special diets and private room.

  “No, it’s good,” Penn assures her. “Good to be out.” And he pulls her to him to kiss her.

  “I’ll do it,” says James, jumping to his feet.

  He can’t believe he’s been handed this chance, this golden opportunity. He hadn’t even been going to join them.

  “We’re going to the lido,” she’d said. “Come with us.”

  “I should work,” he’d lied. Because he knew it was an afterthought, an invitation extended through guilt not desire.

  But she’d pouted and pleaded. “You don’t even have to get in. You can read a book and lounge like a lizard. Like the lizard king!”

  He’d shrugged.

  “Pretty please? With whipped cream, and hundreds and thousands, and a cherry on the top?”

  And it worked, just like they both knew it would.

  “OK, OK. Fine,” he’d conceded.

  She’d laughed and linked her arm through his. “You’ll love it, you’ll see. It’s perfect.”

  And it almost is. There are wooden cubicles in fifties ice-cream colours, and jewel-bright bikinis on bodies that are browned, lithe. A world away from the municipal baths on Park Road, with the yellow verruca bath, the clogs of hair that tangle around your fingers and toes, the pasty-faced Donnas and Debbies, their black regulation suits straining to contain their pale, potato-fed bodies.

  But every time he looks at her and sees her hands slick with Hawaiian Tropic as they glide over Penn’s already tan skin, a tight, hard ball of envy establishes itself in his gut again. What is it she sees in him? In this idle rich boy, this fool who won’t even dive from a board? He’s not brave, he’s not magnificent, he’s just hair and teeth and a lazy laugh.

  James has to show her what she’s overlooked, what she’s missing. And so, when Penn refuses to jump, he seizes his moment and pulls himself up, no longer caring that his trunks are a size too large and a decade too old; that his skin still carries the blueish tinge of too many Lancashire winters; that his swimming is amateurish.

  He walks past the springboard – that is for pratfalls and prats like Penn. Not even Penn. Instead he heads to the high boards, climbs to the tallest of the three. And then he stands on the edge of the still-dry concrete, his arms wide like wings, like Bea’s, his toes already in nothingness.

  He hears their voices, faint below him.

  “Jesus, what’s he doing?” says someone.

  “Jump!” yells a girl.

  “What?” Bea turns to her, anger in her sharp movement.

  “It’s safe,” the girl protests. “Or they wouldn’t have it. No one would use it.”

  “No one does use it.”

  But he does. He will. Because he’s not afraid. He’s on fire, he’s Icarus reaching for the sun. And so he steps off the platform and into the crackling air.

  And then he’s flying, swiftly, swiftly, and it’s a feeling of such purity and exhilaration that there’s no fear when he plunges into the water, just the knowing that he is alive.

  He surfaces and then half swims, half scrabbles for the side. She’s crouching there, her face etched with the surprise. It is the shock he had hoped for.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Course.”

  She laughs: a sound of undisguised relief. “You scared me.”

  And it’s his turn to laugh. “Good,” he says, and pulls himself up onto the paving slabs.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Again.” he says. “I’m going again.”

  And he does. He jumps again, and again, and the others clap and cheer every leap and plunge.

  All except for Penn.

  Penn is riven with envy. He is losing her, he thinks. He is losing his touch. This thing with his dad is distracting him. He needs to get back in the game, though. No, not a game. This time it’s real. She loves him. She tells him so again and again. And he loves her, he does. He could have had countless others: Anna, Jules, Stella. He could have Stella whenever he wanted. But he doesn’t want them. He wants her. It’s always been her.

  But as he turns onto his stomach so he doesn’t have to witness this circus, this charade, he realizes there’s a scene he’s never played before, has never even considered: What if she doesn’t want him? What if it’s James she wants after all?

  AUGUST 1988

  EACH MORNING I do the same: I pack hunks of bread, cheese, bottles of lemonade kept in the freezer to fend off the increasing heat, then run through the still-waking woods down to the creek to find him.

  Each morning I feel the same: the blankness when I open my eyes, then the strange nausea in my stomach when I remember – the loss of her, the gain of him; the panic when I see the corrugated roof of the boathouse – that it will be empty again, he will be gone; the same relief, elation even when I see him – the tangle of his hair, his sleep-heavy eyes, the slightness of his smile.

  Then one morning I’m bold enough, desperate enough to ask the question. I hug my knees, look at him sideways, affecting a kind of nonchalance that I am not feeling, that I never feel with him. “How much longer are you staying?” I say.

  “You want me to go?” he asks, his eyes clouded by hurt.

  “No, no,” I say quickly. “I want you to stay— I mean, you can stay. If you want,” I add.

  “Then I’ll stay,” he says, finally. “For a bit.”

  And I will take that “a bit”. For a bit is longer than a day. Maybe even a summer.

  “You could come to the house,” I say. “I could call Aunt Julia. She wouldn’t mind, I’m sure. I—”

  “No,” he snaps. Then softer, “No. I just—” He looks at me, his sudden anger slipping into urgency. “She’d want to talk to me. Ask me stuff. Want to talk about—”

  “Your dad,” I finish.

  He nods. “And— I didn’t tell you but I’m supposed to be in Venice. My mum paid for the ticket. But I didn’t want to go. Not after … everything. And so I lied. I told her I was getting the train, so it would take longer, give me some time, you know? But instead I came here. I wanted to come here. I wanted to— I don’t know… See Bea? And see you. Do you understand?”

  My heart surges, a soaring thing, with wings of gold. For I do understand. I do.

  I don’t court it, this feeling. I don’t even know if he shares it, or begins to. But I’m sure of one thing, one thing that brought us here, and now ties us, and that is Bea.

  We sit on the deck – our hands splayed on the wood, close but not touching; our feet pale, ghost-like as they dangle in the water – and we talk about her. The easy stuff at first: her insistence that Casablanca was her favourite film, yet it was Pretty in Pink that she watched over and over again, until the video got stuck in the player; the time she added a bottle of blue-black ink to the bath to turn us into mermaids, and we wandered about like cyanotic waifs for a week until it finally washed off; the time she painted his face with her lipstick and rouge, crowned him with her Cleopatra wig, and they went down to a club in Deptford, teetering on costume department heels, giggling into vodka-tonics as, in the dingy lights and drunkenness, they almost, almost got away with the disguise.

  Then the harder things: how she would disappear into her head for hours, sometimes days, living out a fiction she had created for herself – the consumptive Gothic heroine, the heroin-ravaged rock star. She would refuse to speak unless it was in character, unless you acknowledged this make-believe as a reality. She would talk as though to an invisible audience that she carried with her at all times, to witness her every word, her every move, because she had this skewed belief that there was no point doing anything if nobody was there to watch you do it.

  “That’s why I have to be in London,” she wrote. “Because it’s life itself, because it bursts with people to watch and be wa
tched by. Eden kills me. It’s like a morgue. I don’t know how you stand it any more.”

  Penn shrugs when I tell him this. “Some people need to escape, that’s all. Run away. No matter where they’re from.”

  “Like you,” I say. “Coming here.”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Did you run away before? To college, I mean. Was that what it was?”

  He pauses. “I think we all did,” he says finally.

  I imagine Bea and Penn and their friends, all of them fugitives, lost and found in their new world of bars and clubs and theatres and all the thrill of the fair. And for a second, just a second, I feel the ugly green of envy colour me.

  But it wasn’t all perfect in London, was it? There was the row. The one that drove her away. The one he wrote about in the letter.

  I hated him for it at first. For upsetting her. But now; now I see. He was confused, hurt, his dad was dying. It was understandable – whatever it was. And forgiveable. He needs to know he is forgiven, by someone.

  “It’s OK,” I tell him.

  “What is?” he asks.

  “Whatever happened between you and Bea. I’m not prying. Just … I’m sure she would have forgiven you.”

  “Like she forgave you?”

  I feel my chest tighten. “Yes, I… It’s complicated.”

  “What did you fight over?”

  I pause.

  “It’s OK, you don’t have to.”

  “No. It’s not that.” It’s not. I do want to tell, I just want to find the right words. Words that don’t render me the fool I am— was.

  “A boy,” I say at last. “Just a boy.” Then add quickly, “He meant nothing to her. That was why I was angry, I think.”

  I’m scared I’ve said the wrong thing, shouldn’t have brought up Tom at all.

  But when he speaks, it’s soft, sweet, not bitter. “I was like that,” he says. “Until Bea. She changed everything.”

  “You did for her,” I blurt. “She told me. She said you were…” I trail off, embarrassed now.

  “I was what?” he asks.

  I look down – searching for something: courage, honesty – then meet his eyes. “The One. She said you were The One.”

  He looks at me, lets the words sit there for one second, two, three. Then: “We should eat.”

  And so we do, carving up bread with a pocket knife as if we are castaways on an island, or smugglers hiding from the king’s men.

  Or from Tom.

  He works in the mornings, so our hours at the creek are safe from spies, but every afternoon he comes to the house to see what I need: food, drink, company, maybe. I tell him the same list every time: milk, a loaf, more cheese. He never asks why I’m eating so much. Maybe he thinks I’m feeding the mice, or the gulls that wheel above the water hoping for fish and ending up with chip wrappers.

  “Are you OK?” he asks.

  “Better,” I reply. “Getting better.”

  And I am, I’m sure of it. Because of Penn.

  I don’t know what Penn does when I’m at Eden. I want to stay, to watch what happens, hidden in the woods – his invisible audience. But I have to play out my charade to Tom, keep Penn from Julia – keep any boy from Julia, for she’d think I was too young or too delicate. And so I do what I have to, day after day. As the sun grows stronger, and the days seem dizzy with light, as time slows, as the armies of ants abandon their long march at midday, and even the flies can manage no more than slow, drunken arcs, I go back to the dark of Eden.

  Until one afternoon, my stomach heavy with bread and my head with the shandy I have found in the pantry, I fall asleep.

  When I wake it’s late. The sun is high in the sky – it is two now, three even. Time to go.

  “Shit.” I stagger to my feet, begin to gather my things, gather the evidence – bottles, a cracker packet, a can. A hand grasps mine, pulls me down again.

  “Don’t go.”

  “I have to,” I say, snatching up the rest of the rubbish, stuffing it into my bag. “I have to see someone. This – this friend of Julia’s.” It’s not a lie. He is. “If I’m late he’ll come looking for me. And he’ll find you.”

  “Just half an hour. We could swim,” he says. “Please?”

  And I know I cannot leave. I let my hands drop to my sides, let the bag slip from my shoulder to the floor.

  “I knew you would,” he says.

  I’ve swum in the creek since I was four; learnt to swim here. I have jumped off the pontoon in black school swimsuits, and gold bikinis; have even once, as a dare, dived in topless. And yet now I can’t take off my T-shirt because I’m embarrassed at what is underneath. Because I’m not her. Because underneath the black cotton triangles and beaded straps, I’m still a child; skinny, etiolated, my breasts barely more than the buds I had aged twelve. While she was a blossoming 32D, full-flowered at fifteen.

  I was a freak, I thought, a weirdo. I would look at Alice Cordwainer’s black C-cups spilling brazenly out of her top drawer, while I stuffed back the horror of my white 30A Cross Your Heart behind my knee socks and knickers. And then I would lie, late at night in the dorm, and trade impossible promises for breasts.

  “Please God make them grow and I will eat all my cauliflower at supper.”

  “Please God make them grow and I will never ever swear again, not even if Bea tells me to.”

  “Please God make them grow and I will believe in you for ever.”

  But God had other fish to fry – Petra Deeds’ missing periods, Holly Stanton’s fat thighs, Bea’s playing Mary in the school play – and he didn’t hear my pleas, or chose to ignore them.

  I take off my shorts but leave my T-shirt on, pull it down over my bikini bottoms.

  “Take it off,” he says. “You’ll get soaked.”

  “It’s fine,” I say quickly. “I’m just— cold. I’m a bit cold.”

  He shrugs. It’s thirty degrees, maybe more. But he doesn’t question me. Just smiles, and then steps backwards, walking to the water’s edge as if he will balance, Jesus-like, on the surface.

  But he is flesh and bone, and he sinks, a mere human after all, then rises a few seconds later, laughing as his arms bring with them a tangle of weed, the slick green fronds clinging to his skin and hair.

  “Poseidon,” he yells. “I’m Poseidon.”

  Not Jesus, then. A god.

  “Come on,” shouts the god. “Come in.”

  And so I do. I close my eyes, and I jump.

  We swim slowly, silently, circling each other at first until he stops and stands in the falling tide, and watches me, waits for me.

  I feel his eyes on me as I plough through the water, my arms reaching from breaststroke to crawl. I’m trying to shake the adrenalin that runs through me, tainting my blood, heating it. My feet skim the bottom, sending a swirl of sand up to the surface, so that I don’t see him reach out for me. He pulls me towards him. And then we are both standing, facing each other as if we’re in a ballroom, not the middle of a river. I drop my head, so that he can’t see what I’m thinking, but he brings it up again, raising my chin in his hand, moving it to touch my cheek, my hair.

  And then he says it, faltering, but sure. “You … you look like her.”

  I feel something shift in me, a giving, and I cannot tell if it is relief, or sorrow.

  “I don’t.”

  “You do. That day— the first day. I thought it was her. I really thought…”

  “Sorry to disappoint,” I say.

  “Oh, but you didn’t,” he insists. “You don’t.”

  “I miss her,” I say.

  “I miss her, too. But—”

  “But what?”

  “We…” But he trails off. And then we are wrapped in silence, waiting for the next step, the inevitable step.

  And I could take it. I could wrap my fingers in his hair, pull his face down towards mine. I could close my eyes, wait for his breath, warm on my wet skin, his lips on mine.

  But in the distance
the four o’clock ferry sounds its low lament across the bay, and the silence is shattered, the moment gone.

  “I have to get back,” I blurt.

  And without waiting for an answer, without waiting to see if he follows me, I swim hard and fast back to the boathouse. I haul myself up on the deck, then, still dripping, my shorts and shoes in my hands, I run away.

  Away from the possibility.

  Away from the what ifs.

  What if we kissed?

  What if he loved me?

  What if I loved him?

  I run barefoot, stones digging into my soles, their sharp edges tearing into my skin. I run as if my life, my soul depended on it. Maybe it does. He is – he was – Bea’s. That’s a lifetime of Hail Marys or an eternity in hell, surely. I run without looking back, and without looking where I’m going.

  And I run, of course I run, straight into Tom.

  I panic, scrabbling for the shoes that I’ve dropped on the ground, as I scrabble for something to say.

  “Hot, huh?” I manage, the words sounding like the panting of a dog.

  Nothing.

  “I— I went swimming.”

  “No shit.”

  I play a last desperate card. “We could go some time. Together. Maybe.”

  But it’s not enough. He laughs, a short, mirthless sound. “Who is he?” he demands.

  “Who’s who?” I try, as I go through the moments in my head. Replaying them, trying to work out what he’s seen. How much he’s seen.

  “Oh come on, Evie. Don’t treat me like that. I saw you. You and him.”

  I feel my fear – of being found out, of Penn having to leave, of losing this— this whatever it is – turn to bitterness and anger. “It’s none of your business. Not any more.”

  “What are you saying? That we’re not friends any more? That it would have been my business, if what— if…”

  “Say it,” I say. “If you hadn’t kissed her. Just admit it. Jesus.”

  “Yes, I kissed her. Because I was drunk and confused and I couldn’t have what I really wanted. All right? Happy now?”

  “No,” I snap. “No, I’m not happy. It was the next day, Tom. Like, hours later.”

  “I know,” he blurts. Then quieter, “I know,” he repeats.