Eden

by Joanna Nadin

  “Evie!” he screams. “Come here.”

  But I’m gone, along the landing, into Aunt Julia’s room. There’s a phone in there. A spare one so she could have privacy to shout at Uncle John, to moan about the weather or the locals. I’ll call the police, I think. And they will come, sirens screaming, and arrest him.

  But when I get there the phone has gone. He must have hidden it when I slept. I feel a pain in my bladder, threatening to give way, my stomach rise in a cloud of butterflies. Not now, I plead. I have to hide. I have to hide.

  I’m hidden. Pushed to the back of the cupboard in the coats and the cloaks and the fur. I hear his footsteps creak along the boards, for he doesn’t know their secrets, not like Bea and I. “I know you’re in there,” he calls. “I’m coming to get you.” He’s angry now. Doors are flung open and then kicked shut again. Curtains are pulled from their poles, the rings clattering to the floor. Then there are more footsteps, and something moves on the other side of the door, blocking the light from the keyhole momentarily. He’s there. He has found me. I can hear his breath, heavy and fast. Just as he must be able to hear mine. I wait for the handle to turn. Wait for him to say “Got you.”

  But instead I hear a retreat. His rasping breath fades with his footsteps down the corridor. It’s a trick, I think. He’s crept back silently and is waiting behind the door to pounce on me when I open it.

  But then I hear the tread of feet on gravel outside, then the clank of a heavy iron latch being lifted and dropped. The outhouse. He thinks I am in the outhouse.

  It’s my last chance. I have to get out of Eden and into the woods before he realizes his mistake. He won’t remember the way, I think; he only came here once and in the dim light of the storm. And so I run. No, I fly – fly between oaks and ashes, through deep puddles that shower my legs with filth. I am halfway there now, can see the tin roof of the boathouse through the trees – a beacon, a buoy.

  But then I catch sight of something else. A flash of a figure in red to the side of me. What was he wearing? Oh shit, it’s him. It has to be him. I don’t have to time to get Jorion. Think. Think… I will swim across the creek. I’m faster and stronger than him in the water. I swerve to take the short cut around the boathouse. But as I reach the edge of the makeshift quay, my flip-flop catches on something, and I feel myself falling; can almost see myself fast and slow all at once, tumbling through air, as the viscous green of the water comes up to meet me. I hit my head on the hard, grey stone beside the creek.

  Then all I see is black.

  JULY 1988

  BEA SITS on the bed in the attic at Telegraph Hill, her arms gripped tightly around cold, bare legs, her world upended. She sees now what love can do, what havoc it can wreak, what lives it can destroy. But she’ll make it all right; with Evie and Tom, with her mother and father even. She’ll go back to Eden and open the house, decorate it, throw a welcome party like no other, have a last summer to end all summers before the house is sold and they must all move on to new lives.

  She checks her watch and realizes she has been sat here too long. The vodka – her Dutch courage – has lengthened the seconds into minutes, minutes into hours. It’s ten now and she can’t reach Paddington in time to catch the train, not even in a taxi. But there’s no urgency, not really. She’ll just go in the morning. She’ll feel better then anyway, after she’s slept and taken a shower; washed the smell of him from her.

  It’s one in the morning. The rain has stopped now and the air on Telegraph Hill is clearer, cooler than the exhaust-wrapped smog of the Old Kent Road. But James is hot. He is on fire.

  The plan is simple. And he is a fucking genius. He is Superman; he is the Wonderful Wizard of Oz; he is Batman and the Joker, Sherlock and Moriarty all at once.

  The windows of Penn’s house are black, dead eyes to the world. No one is home, just like she said. He slips his hand under the mat. WELCOME, it says, and he replies with a silent thank you as he feels the cold, hard outline of a single key.

  He lets himself in, then listens. But the house says nothing, and he hears only the electric hum of the fridge. He’ll be quick anyway, just in case someone comes back.

  Penn keeps it in a tin under his bed; Bea told him. Dirty money stashed away from the Coutts account – and the eyes of his father – to pay for the next eight-bar, the next ounce, the next obliterated night.

  James sits down on the floor, legs crossed, the tin in his lap. Then he lifts the lid, opening it slowly, carefully, like it is a chest of buried treasure.

  And it is treasure.

  Ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand. I’m Robin Hood, he repeats to himself as he sets the notes in piles. I’m stealing from the rich, and the lazy and the stupid, to give to the poor. I’m a hero, he thinks, and the thought is edifying.

  There’s nearly two thousand in there. Enough for him to make a start somewhere bigger, better than his flat on the Old Kent Road. He’ll get an apartment in Docklands maybe, high up in a tower, where everything is shiny and new. No cracks and stains and reminders of what used to be. He stuffs the money in a Jiffy envelope he finds on the desk. Then next to it he sees a packet of Marlboro. Penn’s cigarettes; Jimmy Dean’s cigarettes – not like the roll-ups he has to smoke. He’ll have one, he decides. He deserves one. And so he takes the Zippo and runs his thumb sharply on the flint, and a petrol-blue flame flickers and fills the room with a dull glow.

  But, as he lifts it towards the cigarette in his mouth he has a sobering, sinking thought. What if Penn begs her to come back to him? What if he promises her riches: clothes, jewels, his undying, unwavering love? Promises to marry her. Promises her the house, this house. That they can be there together, just the two of them.

  And it comes to him in another match-bright burst. He has to destroy what Penn has. He has to burn it, just like his dad did. Burn it all: the swirling Van Gogh whirls of orange-starred carpet; the bed where he fucked her, betrayed her; the blue-faced lady looking down on it all. Then, out of the ashes they will rise, he and Bea, into a new, light, bright day; fly to the sun-skimming tower in the East. Because then she cannot go back, can never go back.

  And so he lights up the cigarette, but instead of taking a long, low drag, he pushes the red tip slowly, carefully into the cotton of the bedspread; waits for smoke to curl, sending white tendrils to the ceiling; waits for the small brown hole to spread, to eat up the fabric, its edges hot, hungry. The voices in his head begin to speak. This is it, they say. You’ve done it. You’ve won. They clamour, proclaiming his triumph, applauding his heroism. And they’re loud, so loud now that they drown out the fridge, and the crackle of the flames that lick at the wallpaper, and his own footsteps retreating down the tiled hallway.

  And they’re loud enough to drown out the sound of a girl far up and away in the attic, as she turns heavily in her drink-soaked sleep, a packed rucksack next to her bed, and thoughts of Eden dancing in her dreams.

  AUGUST 1988

  WHEN I come to, the first sensation is one of pain; a deep throbbing in my forehead, the sharp sting of cuts across my calves and thighs wet with salt water. I’m dizzy, too, so that when I try to stand, a whirl of shooting stars dances in front of my eyes, a giddy merry-go-round, a Catherine wheel set off inside my head.

  “Don’t,” he says. “Don’t try to move. Not yet.”

  I start at the voice.

  “It’s OK, Evie. It’s all OK now.”

  “Tom.”

  As if by magic, he came. He came and pulled me from the water.

  I’m safe, I think. Nothing else can happen now. Nothing can harm me. I should never have doubted it – doubted him.

  And yet, something is wrong. Something… What is it? I turn this way and that, searching for the missing piece. Then I catch it again, on the wind.

  Smoke. Something’s burning. But it’s not the fields this time, not the stubble of wheat and corn. It’s an acrid, tainted, smell: rubber and plastic and the nylon of new carpet; and older things too – wood panels, ve
lvet drapes, the foxed pages of books.

  Eden. Eden is on fire.

  “The h–house.” I find my voice, a scratchy stammer at first, then a painful, screaming sound, a keening. “The house!” I haul myself to my feet.

  “Don’t,” Tom begs. “You can’t.”

  But I have to, because that house is all I have of Bea. She’s in there, somewhere. And I can’t let this happen again.

  “I’m coming with you then,” he says, and he puts one arm around my waist, then holds me as we drag and stumble our way back to Eden.

  I don’t know what I hoped for or expected. Did I want James to be inside, his body blackened on a funeral pyre of fur coats and beaded dresses? Or did I pray that, having quenched the fire to a plume of smoke with buckets of water, he had collapsed on the lawns, sobbing?

  But the scene that confronts us is neither of these. In this picture, he’s standing on the sweep of gravel in front of the house: tall, magnificent, his eyes alight with reflected flames, his limbs burning with his own internal electricity.

  “James,” Tom says, carefully, so as not to startle him. “James, what have you done?”

  He doesn’t turn, but carries on staring, crazed, into the ravenous fire that chews through Eden’s curtains with its charred teeth and dragon’s breath. “Do you see it, Evie?” he says. “Do you? No one can take Eden now. It’s yours for ever. This is for you. I did it all for you. Just like I did for Bea, too. I burned Telegraph Hill so that she’d be free. Free from him. From that – that fake, that charlatan. Then she could be with me. But she – she—”

  It takes a second for what he’s saying to sink in. And then it all falls into place. Images flash across my inward eye: Bea asleep in the house on Telegraph Hill. CLICK. James letting himself in. CLICK. Him watching flames take hold, feeling the power in his hands, to destroy, to create. CLICK.

  I let out a sound, an animal sound, a half moan. “You killed her. You killed Bea.”

  “She shouldn’t have been there,” he spits, like it’s her fault. “She should have been on the train. She said she was catching the train.”

  “But she didn’t,” I sob. “She stayed.” He didn’t burn her past. He burned her now, her future, all our futures.

  I look at him. At this man, this boy, this pathetic, never-grown-up Peter Pan, standing wide-eyed and desperate. I hate him. I should hit him, launch myself at his body, my fists pummelling into his chest, his stomach, his face. Should avenge Bea, should avenge myself, for it is me he is burning now, me he is destroying. But the fight is gone.

  In the distance I hear the sound of sirens, then the angry buzzing of a saw or cutters, of blades slicing through a padlock. Not even iron can keep the world out. We were never safe. We were fools. I was a fool.

  I hear movement behind me, feel a hand rest on my shoulder.

  “We’ll take it from here, son.”

  A man in uniform, a policeman or ambulance driver maybe, lifts my arm, detaching me from Tom. He pulls to resist.

  “It’s OK, you can come,” the man says. “We’ll need to check both of you.”

  “What about him?” I say, pointing at James. “What will happen to him?”

  “We’ll check him too. But the police want to see him.”

  Something flaps past me on the wind. A singed paper, or a moth, shaken from its sleep by the heat and noise. I gasp.

  “Come on, love.”

  The man lifts me, so that I’m suspended between him and Tom, my legs useless, dangling, the toes barely touching the ground. They turn me towards the ambulance, but I strain my head to find the moth, the mote, again. But when I look, it’s gone, and in its place I see her. I see Bea. But she isn’t scared, she isn’t screaming. She is still, calm. For now it’s over. Now I know. Now she can leave. We can both leave.

  JULY 1988

  JAMES WAKES late, turns over in his bed and hears a crackle, feels a strange lump under him, digging into the small of his back. He reaches down and pulls out a fat brown envelope, and then he smiles. He did it. He is Dick Whittington after all. He is Superman. He is a Knight in Shining Armour. Wait till I tell Bea, he thinks; till she comes back and sees what I’ve found, what I’ve stolen for her.

  It’s four days before James knows the truth of what he’s done.

  He’s sitting in a café, a cracked mug of tea and a copy of Loot on the Formica in front of him. The page is marked; inky rings of hope circling flats in Chelsea, Clapham, Canary Wharf. Places with ambition, like him.

  A workman in site-blackened boots and the bright orange of a high-vis jacket rises from a table across the aisle. He carries a copy of the South London Press in his hand.

  “Want this, son?” he offers.

  James doesn’t usually read the papers. They’re too full of sad lives and half achievements. But he’s got nothing else to do until his first viewing in Docklands at four, then ten long weeks stretching out in front of him until she comes back. And this will fill an hour.

  “Cheers,” he says. And turns to the front page.

  NOW

  EDEN WAS alight for two days while men battled to save her. But she was too far gone; James had done too good a job. By the time the engines got there the flames had taken hold of the attic, smoke billowing from windows blackened like poked-out eyes. And the sound; God, the sound. No one tells you what fire sounds like. It’s not the gentle crackle of logs behind a grate, but a great, creaking, sucking, deafening roar, a thundering noise of death, destruction. Did Bea hear this? I thought. Did she wake, screaming, to the splintering of floorboards, the crash of lintels falling through floors? But I have to let the thoughts go, let them fly on the wind like charred slips of paper, of curtain, of letters once squirrelled away; ephemera now. I can’t let myself be her. I can’t remember the way she died, only the way she lived – burning bright and soaring above us all.

  “If you play with fire, you get burned.” I remember Aunt Julia’s words; a warning to me and Bea as we sat on the scullery floor striking matches in turn. But still we played a dangerous game.

  Now, each time I’m pulled back from my dreams of Eden, to the now-me, I begin another, a game of “what ifs” and “if onlys”.

  What if I’d replied to Bea’s letters, instead of sinking into a sullen, stubborn silence; my fragile, egotistical self still smarting from the fact that she had another life about which to write at all?

  What if I’d done as Aunt Julia asked – begged – and left in June, gone with her to her new apartment and new life in London?

  What if I’d listened to Tom that time, instead of dismissing his pleas, his protestations about Penn as nothing more than the powder-light residue of his vague affection for me, or for Bea?

  Would it have been different if I’d been different? If I’d been stronger? Taller? If my hair had been cropped or curled, or shone with the brilliance of bottle blonde, instead of falling in dark, heavy hanks? If I’d been more like her? Or nothing like her at all?

  What if it had happened today, now that we have Google and Facebook, now that our lives trail through the ether like a stick dragged in sand; names and faces and deeds trapped like flies in the invisible amber of the internet?

  If I could turn back time, if I could alter just one of these, would Bea be alive, filling my head, my heart, with her wild ideas, her unfailing conviction? Would Eden still stand, a jewel, its dull glint flickering in the dark hand of the forest?

  But then I put away the dice, the cards. Because I can’t change what has been; only what I take from it.

  I went to see him once in prison, years later. He’d written a letter, asked if I would come. When I saw it on our hallway floor, when I recognized that handwriting spelling out my maiden name in spidery biro, I felt my stomach surge, smelled matches in the air. It took me a week to open the envelope, still longer to agree to go. But go I did. I had to. I had to hear what he had to say.

  Sorry. That was it. He wanted to say sorry. For Bea, and for Eden. He’d meant to say it w
hen he came to Cornwall. He’d thought if I was like Bea, then I might understand why he’d done it, that I might understand him. Then, when I thought he was Penn, he’d let me believe it. I asked him why, but he didn’t know, other than jealousy and a talent for pretending.

  He was someone else, he told me, when he did it, when he set the fires. Not himself; not James or even Seamus. He said he’d been diagnosed with some kind of disorder. I forget the name. But it meant he lost pockets of time, time when he turned himself into a greater version of himself, a superhero almost. Or a villain.

  Penn doesn’t understand why I went to see him. Said he could have killed me. Like he killed her. For of course I met Penn, the real Penn. We take tea sometimes, in the staid, sleek-carpeted lounge of a hotel in Piccadilly. Though less frequently these days, for work and children take up his time, as they do mine.

  But what Penn cannot see, cannot admit, is that I was dead already, a corpse trapped in that coffin of a house, of a life. I thought I wanted Eden. I thought Eden was my freedom. But instead it had become my prison.

  Maybe James knew that. Maybe he blew away my past like ashes on the salt wind. And, like a phoenix – like the bird he’d had tattooed on his shoulder in a Manchester back street – I rose, stronger, more alive. Maybe.

  And without me and James, there would be no me and Tom.

  Yes, Tom. It didn’t start at once. I didn’t stay with him at the Millhouse, I went to Aunt Julia’s first, and then school; a new one, a day school. It was seven years later; I’d finished my Masters and was sitting in a café in Paris, in the 6th, reading a paperback in the first of the spring sunshine. And when I looked up, there he was. As if by magic.