Eden

by Joanna Nadin

  He finds me in the bathroom, my throbbing hand under the cold tap.

  “What happened?” he asks.

  “I pricked it on a needle,” I lie. “Stupid really.” Because I can’t tell him the truth. That this small hurt is just a warning of bigger ones to come. That I think Bea is telling me to stop trusting him, believing in him – in us.

  He takes my hand from the sink, kisses each wet, freezing finger in turn. “All better now. Nothing can hurt you now. I’ll protect you.”

  But the truth pulses through me like the insect’s poison. Bea is dead and I have stolen her boyfriend for my own. It can’t last. This Eden can’t last. “What about Julia?” I want to say. “What will you say to her? What about your mother? What’s going to happen to us?”

  But, “Come to bed,” he says.

  And I do. I slip between sheets and close my eyes to the fractures. So the next morning our paradise is papered over again. It is fresh and new and full of the possibility of perfection.

  But by that evening a criss-cross of faults has appeared: minute changes in his accent; his refusal to talk about his family when I have bared all about mine; why he hitched – why not bring his MG? – he has money for petrol after all; he’s not broke, far from it.

  “What does that matter now?” he demands. “We don’t need it. We’re not leaving.”

  “Well, at some point—” I begin.

  But that point hasn’t occurred to him, will not be acknowledged.

  “I thought you understood me, Evie. I thought you believed in me. I’m here to protect you. You don’t need anyone else. This is it now. Me and you. Just me and you.”

  And he holds me by the wrists so tightly, the pain squeezing tears from my eyes, that I can do nothing but nod, agree with him, tell him of course I believe him, of course he is right. I don’t need anyone. Don’t want anyone.

  Until, one day, something happens that tears a rent in the fabric so wide and severe that it cannot be sewn up.

  And who wielded the knife?

  Tom, of course. Who else but Tom?

  JULY 1988

  SHE STAYS for three days. For three days she is his, and his alone.

  Days that pass with the blind pulled down against the light, against Penn, against the world. Of eating only what they can scavenge from the back of the cupboard and the bottom of the biscuit tin. Of talking until they can hear the soft, steady rumble of the night buses give way to vans, lorries, taxis, and the swelling, impatient flow of commuters into town. Of lying in silent, dazed wonder at what they have, what they have done.

  Then, one evening he wakes and the room is cold and dark. The covers have been pulled back and the sun has already sunk behind the gas tower so that he knows it is late, gone five. He reaches across the sheets for her, but the bed is empty. Instead she is sitting at the window. But something in the atmosphere has changed, shifted. She is dressed now, with a cardigan pulled around her like a cocoon, hair pulled back in an elastic band.

  “Hey,” he says. “Come back to bed?”

  But she doesn’t answer. Instead she looks down, and in that instant he sees what has happened. Because there, in her lap, is a letter, two white sheets of looped, childish cursive, and an envelope addressed to a lost boy, a boy she doesn’t know.

  “Who’s Brigid?” she asks.

  “I—”

  “Actually, no. More to the point, who’s Seamus?” Each word is heavy, bitter.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “It would be. Christ, I don’t even know who you are – who I’ve been with… How could you? How could you lie to me?”

  “I wasn’t lying— I’m not lying,” he pleads. “I’m James. I just changed my name. That’s all. Just my name.” But he knows this is an untruth. That Seamus is gone. That he is new. The thoughts are coming hard and fast, the panic rising, battering inside his chest. He will tell her, tell her everything, he thinks. Tell her about da, and Deirdre, about his ma who told him he would fly to the sun.

  “Don’t. Don’t bother. It doesn’t matter anyway now.”

  Oh God, she’s going, he thinks. She’s leaving me. He stands then, his naked body exposed, vulnerable. “Please. Please don’t go.” He drops to the floor, scrabbles for his things, pulls on a T-shirt. “Is it clothes you need? I’ll get clothes for you. I’ll go back to the house. What else do you want? Do you want the mirror? We can put it here, on the desk.” He pushes aside books and papers, sending them scattering across the boards.

  “What are you doing?” She is looking at him oddly. She doesn’t understand.

  “Moving you in. You can live here. With me,” he adds, as if this part is unclear.

  “No.” She says it quietly. So that maybe it means a yes, he thinks.

  “It’ll be perfect. You’ll see. I can do anything,” he says. Then corrects himself; “I can do everything.”

  “No.” This one is louder. Definitive.

  “But you have to. Please,” he begs, grabbing her shoulders in his hands.

  She pulls back. “Stop it. You’re scaring me.”

  Then it hits him. And he wants to laugh. And cry. “You’re going back to Penn.”

  “Jesus. No. He’s not there, I told you. No one is. He’s in Hampshire. And the others, I don’t know. Home, I guess.”

  “But you’ll be alone. You can’t be alone.”

  “Yes… No— I… I’m not staying. I’m going back. I need to go back.”

  “Go back where?”

  “Eden,” she says. “I’m going home.”

  “But, but… ” His mind is racing with reasons, excuses. “Term’s not over,” he blurts. “And the house is being sold.”

  “Still, I—”

  “And Evie!” He grasps her name from the air like it is a firefly, glowing with hope, with possibility. “Evie won’t be there. She’s still at school. You said so.”

  “There’s only a week left of term. I’ve no work. And I can write to the school, or call even; tell Evie I’ll be waiting, that I’ll be there when she gets back. I need to get away.” Her voice is softer now, kinder. “Not just from Penn. From all of it, all of this. Do you understand?”

  He doesn’t. Not at all. Because why go to Eden when this, right here, this is paradise.

  “There’s a train from Paddington tonight; a sleeper. I checked.”

  “When? When did you check?”

  “You were asleep. I went to the phonebox.”

  “I could’ve come with you,” he says. But it’s desperate, and even he knows it.

  “Look,” she says, touching his arm, “I’ll write. OK?”

  He nods, defeated. And then quickly, efficiently, she is gone.

  AUGUST 1988

  “EVIE, PLEASE. You have to come.”

  Tom’s at the window again, banging, calling my name. But something’s changed. The anger is gone from his voice, and he sounds scared.

  “What is it now?” I ask quickly, anxious for this to be over, so that Penn doesn’t hear us or see us, and come down from his perch on the roof.

  “Evie, Julia rang.”

  I feel a roll, like the lurch of a boat in a savage sea. But I knew this would happen. That she would try to put an end to it all.

  “And what?” I ask, though I’m pretty sure I know the answer.

  “She tried you but the line’s dead.”

  “We unplugged it.”

  “Why?”

  “So no one can tell us to stop. That’s what she wants to do, isn’t it? Tell me to grow up, to open the gates, to let the decorators in.”

  “Yes— no, I… Look. He’s not who you think.”

  “What, you’re jealous?” I say.

  “Jesus, Evie. This is serious. What’s his name?”

  His name? “Penn,” I say. “Will Pennington.”

  “He told you that, did he?”

  “Yes. Of course. I’m—” sure he did? Am I? Or did I tell him? I think back, search my memory for that day, try to rerun the conversatio
n, what I said, what he said.

  “Will Pennington’s still in Hampshire. Julia got a letter yesterday, asking to meet up with her in London.”

  I feel my legs begin to buckle and I grab the window sill to hold myself up.

  “I don’t believe you,” I say. But maybe I do. Surely I do.

  “Believe her, then. She’s coming down tonight.”

  I feel my legs tremble again. Stand up! I scream at myself, be strong, be brave.

  “Look, I don’t think you should stay here. I don’t know who that, that— man is, but he’s not this Penn person.”

  I look up at the roof. And I see him there, leaning on the stone, watching us, listening to us.

  “Go away,” I say slowly, deliberately. Then, louder, desperate, “Leave me alone. Leave us alone.” I slam the door, turn the lock, and lean against its solidity, wait for him to go. To call Julia. Call the police.

  Leave us alone, I repeat, silently. But then another thought creeps in: Who is “us” any more? If he isn’t Penn up on the roof, then who is he?

  The truth will be in his rucksack. That’s where he keeps his worldly possessions, the ones he can’t store inside himself, for he refuses to hang anything in wardrobes or fold it into drawers. As if he’s expecting a flood, or a siege, or a great, raging fire.

  I turn it upside down, tip out a tumble of paperbacks and socks and other jetsam: a pine cone, a stone with a hole, a piece of snakeskin from the woods. And money. The muddle of banknotes inside that Jiffy bag I saw that first day. Is this the clue? But Penn is well-off. Having cash doesn’t make him not Penn. But then, why so much? Why all in used notes? Why not a platinum credit card on Daddy’s account?

  But it’s not enough evidence. I need something more. I root through the pile of stuff again, looking for rubies, for jewels, all the while hoping to get nothing but soil. And there it is – a gleaming Castafiore diamond, a Fabergé egg of a thing: a letter.

  I turn it over in my hands, feel the crackle of it. The handwriting is cramped, contained, not the extravagant hand of the letter on Bea’s dresser. And I feel the first blow, shattering the skimmed surface of our existence. Then another: the address on the front is for a town in the North, a place I recognize from jokes about flat caps and whippets and the grimness of it all. But the name I don’t know: “Brigid Sturridge”. Who is she? Is she his girlfriend? Is that why he and Bea argued? Maybe there are more girls. Maybe there are hundreds of me in houses just like this.

  But there is no other house like this, I think, and I tear open the letter. I am the only me. And he is Penn. He will be Penn.

  But he’s not. And the third blow strikes. Because the name at the bottom of the letter has no W or P. It begins instead with a J. Like the name he signed the day we bound our lives to each other. But it’s not Jimmy Dean, the name he claimed for himself.

  It’s James Gillespie.

  Oh God. I reel back, drop the letter as if it is searing the truth onto my skin. Because James Gillespie isn’t a stranger. He’s not just some chancer who happened to find the boathouse that day, who needed a bed, who wanted a girl, who went along with my story because it suited him.

  No, I’ve heard of James Gillespie before. And I know where.

  The letters are stuck between the pages of a book. The one with flying children and little lost boys. The one with Neverland. She sent them last year, before Christmas, before she swore never to come back and I swore never to speak to her again. I read them angrily then, hating her for this new life, wanting her to ask about mine, to come back to mine. But I was the bit part I’d always been, an afterthought. So I thrust them where they have sat ever since; a disappointment, saying nothing I needed to know or wanted to hear. But now, now they contain everything I need. Because in them are Penn, his wonder, his perfection, the conviction that he is the one who will end it all, all the flitting and flirting and never-quite-enough of the boys who have gone before. But there is someone else too: James. A boy she has met on her course, whom she thinks is odd, special. He’s from the North: Wigan. And he’s talented, a chameleon. “You should see him, Evie,” she says. “He can be anyone, anyone he wants.”

  And I hear it now. The slips in his accent, the short vowel in “bath” sometimes. That time he said “aye” but meant “yes”.

  Tom was right. He’s not who he says he is. And I should run. I should go now, flee into the woods and across the water to the village where I can sound the alarm.

  But I need to know why. I need to ask him why he’s done this thing to me. This terrible thing. And so I do run. But not down. I run along the corridor, and to the steps that lead to the attic, and beyond that, the roof. And with each step I feel the walls around me shatter, great yawning chasms ripping through the paint and paper, feel the flags crumble beneath my feet into powder and dust.

  For the world has shifted on its axis: summer has turned to darkest winter; heaven to a seething, searing hell; and Eden, Eden is falling.

  JULY 1988

  PENN SITS in a chair next to the bed; the hard wooden back forcing him out of his slouch into an uncomfortable upright position, and uncomfortable thoughts. For, as his father lies sallow and breath-laboured before him, patiently awaiting the cloaked death, the winged angels, all he can think about is Bea. Now she’s gone he sees his life for what it is alone: shallow and colourless.

  He knows he’s made a mistake. That Bea hasn’t flown from him but that he pushed her, as he pushed the others. And he knows that he needs to get her back before it’s too late.

  That night he calls Hetty, who tells him Bea left three days ago. But when he phones the house on the hill, it’s not her voice that answers but Hunter’s.

  “No idea, mate,” he drawls when Penn demands to know where she is, where she’s gone. “Not seen her in ages. Maybe she went home? In fact you’re lucky you got me, going myself any minute.”

  Yes, thinks Penn, when he’s hung up. She must have gone home. Gone back to Eden.

  He calls the number she gave him last Christmas, recalls their conversation, drunk on advocaat and desperate to see each other, remembers her promise to come back the next day – a promise kept. He hears the echo of the bell at the other end of the line, imagines it ringing in a hallway that mirrors the one he stands in, calling her down a tiled corridor to him.

  But this time she doesn’t come. The phone rings into nothingness and he eventually hangs up.

  She’s on her way, he thinks then, his belief still burning strong, lighting his thoughts, lightening them. She’s on a train, so he’ll write and it’ll get there tomorrow and she’ll open it and realize he loves her and only her.

  And then, when his father has gone, when he’s free of this tomb of a house, he’ll go to her, and begin life again.

  The blind has been raised now, and James sits at the window. It’s started to rain; fat drops falling fast from a black sky. He watches a drunk stagger under the streetlamps, a bus sending puddles sloshing from the gutter over his feet.

  He sees it all, all the dirt and the sadness and the sheer, relentless poverty. No gold glints on the streets outside, just wet pavement, and inside the mould-stained walls, the broken lampshade. Why would she stay here, anyway? She needs more, deserves more.

  So does he.

  And then he hears the scrape of starch and sulphur on sandpaper. It’s a tiny sound, but sharp, clear above the muffled hum of London. A match has been struck inside him. He feels the prick of heat from the burst of phosphorous, and then the answer to his problems is lit in front of him. White words hang in the air, burnt on his retina long after the letters have faded.

  He will bring her back. Back to him, and only to him. He’ll be Robin Hood; he will steal from the rich. He knows where to get money, and who to get it from. Then he can buy her a life fit for a princess; for his Maid Marian. A life so fabulous, and he so heroic, so special, that she will never want to leave again.

  AUGUST 1988

  I AM sick with dread, fear hardened in
to stone in my stomach as I climb out onto the bright, wide expanse of the roof. He’s there, king of the world, watching the woods, the river, the sea. But I can’t bear to look at it. Can hardly bear to look at him.

  “Who are you?” I say.

  “You know who I am.”

  “I know you’re not Penn.”

  He stiffens but says nothing.

  “I know your name is James Gillespie. Bea knew you. But I don’t know who you were to her. Or who she was to you.”

  But still he won’t answer me. And I’m angry now. I want to hurt him like he has hurt me. “Did she laugh at you like she laughed at the others? Did she kiss you then run away? Yes, that’s it. You wanted her, but you couldn’t have her. So you thought you’d have me. So tell me, who are you?”

  He turns now, his face contorted, his eyes alight, burning into me. “I’m Icarus,” he booms, his voice deep, sonorous. “I’m Hamlet. I’m Superman. I’m Peter Fucking Pan. I’m untouchable. Can you feel it, Evie? Can you? Can you feel it in me?” He grabs one of my hands and presses it to his chest. I try to snatch it away but he grips harder, pulls me towards the edge. “Shall we fly, Evie? We could jump together. It would be perfect. The perfect end, do you see?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I manage to gasp.

  “But I’m not. This is the most sensible thing we could do. The only thing we can do now. You and me against the world.” His hand is bruising me now, forming a welt across my wrist.

  “Please,” I beg. “Let me go.”

  He turns to me and smiles. “I’ll never let you go, Evie. Not you or Eden. You know that. You wanted this, remember. This was your idea.”

  And he is not lying now. He will not let me go. Not unless—

  “OK,” I say.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I’ll do it.” I force a smile. Then I lift my head, lift my lips to his.

  And it works. He drops my wrist to cup my face, to pull me closer, but in that split second I curl my hand into a fist, and punch him hard in the stomach the way Bea taught me. He doubles up, coughing. I think he’s going to vomit and for a second I worry that I’ve really hurt him. Then he looks up at me, eyes black with hate, and I run, faster than I have ever run before, my feet pounding the felting. I drop through the hatch, not caring that I’m going to fall to the floor. I stumble, and my knee scrapes the rough boards. It begins to bleed, but I don’t have time to staunch it now. I can hear him following me.