Eden

by Joanna Nadin

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asks me.

  “I am grown up,” I say. “I’m not a child.”

  He laughs. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.”

  And I feel the irritation pop and dissipate, like a tiny bubble; laugh with him. “I don’t know,” I say. For I can’t repeat my childhood answer; can’t tell him what I told my grandparents, teachers, Tom. Then, thinking, remembering something Bea said: “I want to read the complete works of Shakespeare,” I say. “I want to understand jazz, I want to fall in love with an older man.”

  “So just two to go, then.”

  I smile. “What about you?”

  “I don’t ever want to grow up,” he says. “When you grow up your heart dies. You stop caring about beauty and poetry and music, and start buying The Sun and saving for holidays in Benidorm. I’m going to stay young for ever.” And it’s not a wish, but a promise.

  “Like Peter Pan,” I say.

  “Just like Pan.”

  The sun is high in the sky now. Half the day is gone already, half this wondrous, precious, perfect day. We have moved little from the bed, only to fetch water, some fruit or to open the windows wide to let in air. The smell of summer grass, and salt winds, and something else now, something unpleasant, rough, fills the room.

  “What is that?” he asks. “That smell.”

  “Smoke,” I say. “They’re burning the fields.”

  I have come to hate that smell, not just for the eye-stinging smog that imprisons you in the house for a day, or the charred black slivers of corn stem that flit through open doors, stick to your lotion-sticky skin, but because it signifies summer’s end. The end of Eden. Mixed up in the burning vegetation is the smell of school; of overboiled vegetables, of the beeswax on the gymnasium floor, of the unfamiliar soap and hairspray of nine other girls in beds next to mine, none of them Bea.

  “I lied,” I say, suddenly. “When I said that thing about Shakespeare, that wasn’t true. Well, I mean I do want to read them, but not just that.”

  “So you do have a burning ambition,” he smiles. “I knew it.”

  “Not— not in the normal way,” I stammer. I am unsure how to tell him, what to tell him.

  “What do you mean?”

  And then it comes out, because I cannot physically keep it in any longer. Because time is running out. The decorators are nearly done and then Aunt Julia will be back. “I don’t want to go,” I say. “That’s it. When I grow up I don’t want to be an actress or anything like that. I just want to stay here. At Eden.”

  I wait for the laugh, the roll of eyes, or the “I don’t think you get it.” But they don’t come. Instead he sits up, pulls me with him, says just two words:

  “Then stay.”

  I don’t understand. “But it’s decided,” I tell him. “The house is for sale. I’m going back to school, then to Aunt Julia’s at Christmas.”

  “Did you decide?”

  “Well, no—”

  “Then it doesn’t have to happen.” He speaks with precision and determination. He is someone else; is his father, I think, the public speaker, the man who made things happen, who stopped them. “The house is half yours, right?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But nothing. You want to stay, yeah?”

  “Yes?”

  “Then we’ll stay.”

  “Both of us?”

  “You and me against the world, remember.”

  I nod. “But how?”

  “Watch.”

  And I do. I watch as he stops time in its tracks. As he pulls dustsheets off furniture in a triumphant “ta-dah!” And there, underneath, are gleaming tables, soft velvet chairs that smile blinking in the sun. I watch as he stacks paint pots and white spirit in the outhouse, hauls rolls of wallpaper, brushes a pair of overalls into a pile on the gravel. “We’ll burn them,” he says. “It’s not just an end though. A new beginning. The start of us.”

  And so we burn it all; a spilling, toppling bonfire in an old dustbin. I think of Bea. This fire should scare me, send me scuttling back into my torpor, into that strange, lost state of wandering without my Wendy. But now, with Pan beside me, everything is different.

  “You feel it, don’t you?” he says.

  And I do. The searing heat scalds my fingers and the flames dance in my eyes. They are purging us. All the old, the bad things, are being destroyed, rendered nothing but ashes and air. And so they can’t harm me now. No one can harm me now. No one can take me away from Eden. The phone has been unplugged, the gates closed, the key to the padlock buried deep in the back of a drawer; a sign to the world that we will not leave. And they can’t come in. Only if they dare brave the river and the woods and only Tom has ever done that. But this new, unstoppable, invincible me can handle Tom. Now that I no longer want him, need him, love him. I am Penn’s now, and he is mine. “You and me against the world.” We are all we need.

  And so, the last furls of smoke curling into the fading afternoon sky, hand-in-hand we walk into Eden, close the doors on the world; on danger, on badness, on change.

  So happy, so high am I that I don’t think to check what, who, I have locked in.

  JULY 1988

  IT’S TWO days before Bea can face Penn. Two days of sleeping on the floor at Hetty’s; of eating cereal from the packet and watching endless, mindless television.

  “You have to go home,” Hetty says when she gets home from the bar to find Bea staring at white noise in a sea of Sugar Puffs. “You have to talk to him.”

  And so, at two in the morning, Bea walks slowly, steadily up Telegraph Hill.

  He’s awake when she finds him, halfway-through-a-bottle-of-whisky drunk, lying bare-chested on his bed. His hair needs a wash; the sheets too. Bea wonders who else has left their mark on there and feels a surge of nausea so strong that she has to hold her breath and clench her fists to push it down. But she won’t cry. She won’t give him the satisfaction.

  “Babe,” he says. “Want a drink?” He takes a swig from the bottle and then holds it out to her.

  She shakes her head. “Is it true?” she asks.

  He takes another swig. “Is what true?”

  “You and—” She cannot say her name. “… that girl.”

  “You’ll have to be more specific.” He raises the bottle to his lips but Bea snatches it away, drops it onto the floor where it seeps its brown contents in a widening pool.

  “Jesus, Bea. What the fuck?”

  “Did you sleep with her?”

  “With who?”

  She balls her fists again, musters the strength to spit the name out. “Stella French.”

  He stares at her, incredulous. And she waits for the denial. Of course he’ll refute it. He’ll tell her she’s imagining things and is a fool for listening to gossip, for listening to James. She wants him to tell her that it’s jealousy, that’s all, the green-eyed monster. James is trying to stir things so he can have her to himself.

  But instead he drops his eyes and says a single life-changing, heartbreaking word.

  He says, “Yes.”

  Bea claps a hand over her mouth, a fake gesture she thinks, one she’s been warned off by tutors on stage. But here, in real life, her hand flies to her face without thinking, as if to keep something in: her words, or tears, or anger.

  “Babe.” He tries to grasp her free hand but she snatches it away.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Bea, don’t be like this. I was drunk, and upset and you— you were gone.”

  “Oh, so it’s my fault, is it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  He paused. “It didn’t mean anything. She doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Yeah? But nor did I. Not when you were screwing her. I meant nothing to you then.”

  “Bea, you need to calm down. You’re overreacting.”

  “Fuck you.” She picks up the bottle and throws it against the wall, where it smashes and drops behind the headboard, a shower
of glass and liquor raining down on the pillows.

  “Bea, pack it in.”

  But she won’t. She picks up a shoe and hurls it straight at Penn this time. He ducks, but she’s a good shot. She learned from Evie how to catapult, how to bowl a tennis ball, and it glances off his shoulder.

  “Fuck’s sake. That hurt.”

  “Good,” she snaps. “Now you know how I feel.”

  She looks around for more ammunition, so that she can beat it out of him, out of her. But Penn is wired now, adrenalin drowning out the whisky, and he grabs her, pulls her to him and her struggle lasts only seconds before she collapses into him.

  “You’re the one,” he says. “It’s always been you.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she sobs.

  “But you have to.” He is shaking her by the shoulders now. “You have to.”

  She stares at him, at this boy she loves, at this boy she believed was the one, too. Who she thought would end, erase all that had gone before. But what if she was wrong? What if she chose the wrong boy? What if—

  “Let go,” she says.

  “Bea—”

  “I said let go.”

  “You can’t leave. I have to go to Hampshire in the morning. I need you with me. I need—”

  “I don’t care what you need any more.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Isn’t it? Because you know me so well? Yeah? Well, you’re not the only one.” James knows me, she thinks. He knows me better even.

  She turns to leave.

  “Where are you going?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “Are you going to Hetty’s?”

  “Yeah,” she lies. “I’m going to Hetty’s.”

  But when she gets to the bottom of the hill, it’s not left she turns to Peckham, but right. Right towards the Old Kent Road, and right towards a bedsit above a kebab shop with a cooker in the corner and a bathroom down the hall.

  Right towards James.

  AUGUST 1988

  FOR THREE days we hold on. Three days in our own small paradise. Three days of sleeping late, past the song of blackbirds, past the distant hum of motorboats, and the call of the ferry, until the sun had begun its slow descent to earth again. Three days of lying, curled in our still-damp sheets, or in the hot, foggy steam of the bath, listening to him read Keats and Yeats, explaining the world, explaining us. Three days of dancing in the drawing room to our stack of battered tapes; with wild, reckless abandon to Joy Division and The Wedding Present, then slow, melting waltzes to the sorrowful sound of the Smiths.

  Without heating the house becomes cold once more. Shivering, he lights me a fire and we lie naked in front of it, the skin on our chests and thighs as red and raw as my heart. My love for him is a fever. When he says jump, I jump. If he asked me to die for him I would plunge the knife in a thousand times over. With him I’m safe, with him anything is possible, achievable.

  The world tries to get in. It rattles at the gates and tries to slip sideways through the railings. The decorators leave a note on the gate’s padlock, asking what’s going on, saying they need paying, and they want their things back. Tom comes too. He actually makes it to the back door; hammers on the window, so hard that I go and see him for fear he will break the glass.

  “What are you doing?” he rages.

  I pull Penn’s cardigan tighter around me. “Living,” I say, calmly.

  “Julia will go crazy, you know that.”

  “I don’t care,” I say. And I mean it.

  He turns to go, then changes his mind, comes back for one last try. “I don’t recognize you any more,” he says. “You’ve changed. You’re like, like—”

  “Say it, go on. I’m like Bea. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? I thought that was who you wanted?”

  He shakes his head, laughs, a guttural sound, scornful. “I wanted you. I told you. I wanted you but you said no, and she was the closest I could get.”

  My heart teeters for a second on the brink of something. But I do not let it fall. At the last moment, I pull it back tighter into me, into Penn.

  “You know she laughed at you,” I sneer. “That time. She never wanted you. You were nothing to her.” I’m on fire now, lit by Penn, my flames fanned by his love, his belief in me. “And this— this is me, I’m me. Not anyone else. You hear me?”

  But he doesn’t. I’m talking to an empty space. Tom has gone, disappeared back into the woods. As if by magic.

  And then Penn comes into the kitchen. He wraps his arms around me, holds me, and my fleeting doubt is over. The outside has tried its best, sent its bravest, cleverest soldiers, but no one can breach our barricades. Nothing can touch us in here.

  Then, on the fourth morning I wake early, shaken from a bad dream of a terrible claustrophobia of walls closing in on me. And a memory is sparked, of Bea reading Milton in her last summer here, her head lost in the poetry. Then another memory comes to me, of Sunday school as a child of five.

  I feel a lurch of nausea rise in me, tugged up like mud on roots. For I remember the stories now. Remember how it happens. That Paradise was lost in the end. Eden did fall. But it wasn’t plundered or pillaged from neighbouring lands or far-flung fiefdoms. Rather, it was destroyed by itself, ruined from the inside. And I realize that what we have isn’t sustainable. Despite the gates and the locks and the shutters, the world is closing in. Like the damp that’s returned to the pantry, rot is creeping into Eden. And I don’t know how to stop it.

  JULY 1988

  SHE COMES to him. Of course she does.

  James wakes at gone three to the sound of a desperate finger pressed against the doorbell. Wordlessly, he lets her in and then lets her curl up on his faded Superman duvet while he sits at the end of the bed and watches her sleep, his tattooed back against the wall, his soul open, waiting.

  Then, when she wakes, he listens as she tells him that Penn didn’t even bother to deny it. Just dismissed the infidelity, like he was waving away a moth. It meant nothing, he said. She was the one, she must know that.

  “Do you believe him?” he asks.

  Her head is hung low with shame and sorrow and her fingers worry at a pulled thread. She looks up at him, meets his eyes, says steadily, truthfully, “I don’t know what I believe any more.”

  And he knows he’s won. She’ll never trust Penn again now, but he, James, has never lied to her, never deceived her, never cheated her. She’ll see him now for what he is: clean and pure and true. And worthy of her, even without money and a house in the country and the title to come. And their little world will be perfect, for they won’t need much, just each other.

  Just him and Bea against it all. Him and Bea against the world.

  AUGUST 1988

  THE SIGNS are there, the clues. Like a trail of breadcrumbs laid before me. In the months, years, to come, I will see them clearly; white morsels against the dark woods. But now … now all I see is him.

  I have built a future with him in my head, woven a fiction of weddings and children and death do us part. I give him a silver box that had once belonged to my grandmother, worth hundreds, I know.

  “I can’t,” he says.

  “Please. I want you to have it.”

  “But I’ve got nothing to give you. No heirlooms.”

  “What did your father leave you?” I ask.

  “A broken heart,” he says. “And bad memories. Whatever good things, precious things I had, he destroyed them.”

  Sorrow wells in me, the swell of an orchestra in a minor key.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says, cutting the chords short. “None of them matter. You’re my family now.”

  Then he sees something, plucks it like a diamond from dark tarmac. “You know what we should do?”

  I shake my head, eager for his latest plan, his latest trick.

  “Write wills,” he says. “So we know that all of us goes to the other, when we die. That no one can take anything from us.”

  “Yes,” I say
, testing the idea. Then surer. “Yes, we must.”

  And so we do. We find the typewriter in a tea chest, dust off its keys like black buttons, reset the ribbon, load it with thick vellum the colour and richness of clotted cream. Then together, one-fingered and laughing with each clack and each inky letter imprinting, we write a contract to our love.

  To me he leaves his worldly possessions: his clothes, his books, his badges. And more precious things too: the thoughts in his head, the light of the sun, the “Song to the Siren”.

  To him I bequeath a beetle, bright and shining that crawled across the sheets one morning and lives now in a shoe box in the lounge. But more: I give him my heart, my soul. And Eden. Eden is to be his.

  And then we sign our names at the bottom. He goes first, trailing the fountain pen across the ridges in the snaking loop of a J. Then he stops and looks at what he has done, and I see a brief flicker of confusion. But just as quickly, it is gone, and with bold strokes he finishes with a flourish: “James Dean” it reads.

  I laugh, and sign my own: Marilyn Monroe.

  But as the days pass he becomes agitated. As though, while I shiver in the cold granite walls, he burns, is on fire. He’s taken to climbing on the roof and reaching over the parapet, his arms flung open as if he’s the figurehead on a ship, as if he is flying. “I’m king of the world!” he screams into the wind. “The creek, the trees, the sea. It’s all mine. This whole world is mine.”

  His, not ours, I think.

  And I feel a tiny crack open up in the plaster of our life. Its jagged black hairline runs through the pristine pale pink of the palace we have built.

  And someone else sees it too. For Bea is back, flown through the gap in an air brick, or the roof-hatch when he has gone out to survey his lands. And now she dances, moth-like, in and out of rooms, following me, taunting me. Be careful, Evie. Be careful who you love.

  Then, one afternoon as I wait for him to come down, I see on the window sill what I think is a dead bee, its wings a shimmering, clear lace, its furred body soft, touchable. But when I pick it up it shudders and I feel a red-hot needle stab into the pad of my forefinger. Gasping, I drop it, then pull out the sharp, black stinger. But it is too late, I am hurt, and the bee is dead.