Paradise

by Joanna Nadin

  I stand to leave, and the greasy-haired man looks up from his Sun.

  “You’ve only had ten minutes,” he says, his voice thick, clotted with cigarette tar, the vowels drawn out and lazy, like the cabbie’s.

  I shrug. “I’m done,” I say.

  He nods. “You on holiday?”

  I shake my head. “No. It’s just — I’ve moved. And the computer’s not unpacked,” I tell him, needing to explain my presence somehow, this pathetic figure. What I don’t tell him is that the computer is broken after Mum threw a glass of water over the keyboard in one of her rages at Luka. And that I’ve barely got the money to pay for an hour of surfing, let alone a new hard drive.

  He nods again.

  I go to pull the door open, to let the wet in and myself out. But he stops me. He’s holding something out in his yellow fingers.

  “Here,” he says. “Make up for the minutes you didn’t use.”

  I take it from the chewed yellow fingers. It’s a postcard. From a stand next to the counter. The picture is of Seaton. But not the one outside. This one is in Technicolor. The sea an impossible blue, crowds of sunbathers in decades-old outfits on sand the color of custard.

  “’S’not always raining,” he says. “Send it home,” he adds. “Make ’em jealous.”

  “This is home,” I say to myself. Whether I find him or not, this is it now. I look at the cardboard paradise in my hand. And I hope he’s right as I step out into the gray and the wet and the cold, cold town.

  IT IS May and Het is back in Cambridge. The air here is soft, light, breathing spring into the honey-colored stone and still river backs. Hundreds of miles away from the stubborn wet of Seaton, the murky tides and the endless hammer of rain on the pier as they lie beneath it, arms and legs in a sand-coated tangle, lips touching and drinking each other in, filling each other with words and wonder at the newness of it, the realness.

  Het finds the postcard in her pigeonhole outside the common room, sitting on a week’s worth of rush-printed flyers for rave nights at the Junction and marches against the poll tax. The colors are acid bright against the faded pastels, bleeding out onto her fingers. At first she thinks it’s Will’s idea of a joke. Cheesy seventies postcard from home. “Wish you were here” and all that. Or her mother’s, perhaps. Although she knows in either case it would be a lie. But then she turns it over.

  “Wish I was there,” it reads. Four words and an x. A kiss, or to mark the spot.

  But the writing is neither Will’s nor Eleanor’s. And Het finds her left hand clutching at the narrow wooden slots, as her heart races and her head dizzies with the thrill of it.

  It is from him.

  I’LL SEND it, I think. I’ll send it to Cass. So she can laugh at the land-that-time-forgot I’ve been transported to. But Cass doesn’t care about stuff like that. She’d toss it like an empty cigarette pack or a used tissue. So I pick someone who does. I pick Luka.

  There’s a postbox across the street, and I run out into the road, dodging a white panel van. I forget this isn’t Peckham High Street, an endless stream of buses, cars, lorries on their way to the West End and beyond. The van honks a reprimand, and I mouth an apology. That would be something. Getting run over in a dead-end town.

  The next post is at 11:15. I check my watch. 10:30. I don’t have time to go home and get a pen. I fumble in the deep pockets of the Burberry, but the lining is ripped in the left, and the right only turns up coins and a stick of Juicy Fruit. The postcard is getting damp, threatening to turn to mush. I need somewhere to borrow a pen, to sit and write it. I could go back to the Internet place, but I don’t want to talk to the nicotine man again. Besides, I need to find somewhere, a place that’s mine. Like the Crossroads on Victoria Street. This old Italian greasy spoon. Cass and I would sit there, eking out one tea for hours. Laughing with Roberto at the builders on the Trivial Pursuit machine; watching the world, or Peckham, go by.

  There’s a restaurant, the Excelsior. Leatherette banquettes the color of liver, and paper napkins in dirty glasses. In the windows are faded photographs of food: steak and chips, a trifle, green tinged now, so they seem dusted with mold. I mentally cross it off a list, though they don’t open until twelve anyway. Half the town is shut up. For the day, or for the season. I wonder where everyone goes. If they just sit it out behind their lace curtains, waiting for Easter and the tourists to start trickling in. Or if they’ve gone up to London, like Dick Whittington, like Mum, looking for streets paved with gold. And I’m pricked again by the thought that I’ve come here for this. For nothing. For rain and a boarded-up pier and empty shops. Nothing on the pavement but puddles and dog shit and gum. Same as everywhere.

  I’m about to turn back up the hill when, on the corner, near the front, I hear the jangle of a door open, see a triangle of light shining onto the wet road. A girl comes out. Fifteen, sixteen, dressed in the gray of a school uniform. Her hair a mass of pale curls glowing in the light behind. She lights a cigarette, smoke mingling with the fog of her breath as she huddles in the porch. Like Cass outside the Wishing Well. And I feel a rush of something — excitement, or relief. I walk toward her, toward the light and the heat and the dry. As I get closer I hear some indie band blaring out, the sound of low-slung guitars leaking under the door frame; see blue tiles and a flash of red, and a sign. JEANIE’S. It’s a café and it’s open.

  The girl pulls hard on her cigarette and looks me up and down, as if she’s trying to add it up — the wet, lank hair, the coat, the boots. I smile, mumble a “Hi.” She says nothing, just leans back to let me past, one eyebrow arched. She smells of cigarettes and too much perfume. The cheap stuff that comes in a spray can. As I push open the door she breathes out, letting smoke curl up through her hair. She is all that. And she knows it.

  She follows me in, and I think for a minute she’s going to trail me to the counter, flank me, demand to know who I am and what I want. But maybe I’m not worth it, because from the corner of my eye I see her blazered back head for a table, slump down in a plastic chair opposite a guy, older, but with the same eyes. Her brother, I guess.

  The café is done out like some textbook seaside cliché. Red-gingham tablecloths. Blue walls. But, like everything around here, it bears the signs of slow decay. The tiles are cracked, grime clinging to the grouting. The Formica tables propped on crumpled newspaper to keep them upright.

  On top of the counter is a sponge cake; homemade. Underneath, juice cartons, Mars bars, and millionaire’s shortbread. God, I used to love that stuff. Begged Mum to bring it back from Martha’s. Finn dancing around, happy that he was eating the same as a real millionaire, thinking somehow he’d be one now. The music blares from a CD system. I recognize it now. Kaiser Chiefs. It seems out of place here. Out of time.

  I feel him before I see him. I’m still looking at the shortbread, wondering if I’ve got enough for a piece, for a slice of hope, when something shifts in the air and I hear someone coming out of the kitchen at the back, see a black shape appear behind the counter. Then I look up. And everything changes.

  I wasn’t looking for him. I wasn’t looking for anyone like that. Mum always told me — even if I didn’t tell myself — that I didn’t need a boyfriend. Not yet. But maybe it was like the key again. Serendipity; fate. Even though I didn’t believe in it.

  I used to laugh at that stuff in magazines. Love at first sight. That your heart could stop. But I swear in that second, everything stood still. The earth ceased turning, and there was this sucking silence, draining everything around it, drawing the breath out of me. Then suddenly the world switched on again. The Kaiser Chiefs sang “Ruby,” and I could hear the chink of china on china, smell bacon fat and coffee, feel my hand on cold glass. And him.

  He was older. Eighteen, I guessed. Tall, taller than me. And had this grace about him. But strength, too, and confidence, without being arrogant. Like he knew who he was. Like he didn’t care what anyone thought.

  Maybe it wasn’t fate. Maybe I’d willed this. Want
ed this to happen. And he was just there at the right time. A coincidence. I’d waited at school. For a knight in shining armor who would ride in and rock my world, take me out of it. But all I got were kids like Ash and Leon, joking and smoking and thinking they’re all that.

  Yet now, here was a knight. And he didn’t ride in. And he had long hair and a faded tour T-shirt instead of armor. But whatever, it happened.

  “All right?” he says. “What can I get you?”

  His voice is soft. The accent is there, but it’s different on him. Makes him sound outdoorsy, a surfer.

  I mumble back, still looking at the counter, unable to meet his eyes. I know I won’t be able to eat shortbread. That it will stick in my throat, dry now from fear, or anticipation.

  “Apple juice,” I say. My voice is cracked. I cough and repeat it. Adding a “Sorry.” “And a pen,” I say, remembering.

  I reach into my pocket for change, and I dump a handful of coins on the counter before he can reach his hand out. Don’t want to touch him, in case he can tell. A fifty-pence piece rolls onto the floor, and I feel my face redden.

  “Sorry,” I say again.

  He laughs. “It’s OK. Really.”

  I turn to glance at the girl. She’s watching me, mouth open slightly, a smile on the edge of her lips, but not a friendly one. A crocodile smile. The kind that comes with a catch.

  When I look back he’s smiling, too. But this one is hiding nothing. This one is true. And it’s meant for me.

  “Here,” he says.

  In his hand is a juice box and a blue Bic pen. I hesitate, hoping he’ll put them down, but instead he reaches farther toward me. I hold my hand out and close it around the pen and carton. Our fingers touch for a second, and I feel it, a burning heat, like he’s some storybook superhero. Except he’s not; he’s real. And in that instant I know, and when I meet his eyes, I see something there. A look that says he knows, too.

  I sit at the corner table. Away from the girl, my back to the counter. It takes me all of thirty seconds to drink the juice and scribble on the postcard. My new address. And our old one. The top-floor flat off the main street, with the broken-down boiler and the glue stains and the F-I-N-N carved into the kitchen table when Mum wasn’t looking. When I left the Internet café I thought I’d be funny, write, “Wish I was there.” But in a few minutes everything has changed. I’ve changed. And instead I write, “Wish you were here.”

  Because I don’t want to go back. Not even if I don’t find my dad. Because I’ve found someone else. And I don’t know his name. But I’m sure of it. That it’s him, and always has been.

  THE FIRST time Het sees him is at the fair.

  It is Easter and she is home from Cambridge to spend two clock-watching, tick-tocking weeks avoiding her father and ignoring her mother, bolting down her dinner so she can spend more time lying on her bed, refusing the pleas to get some fresh air, some exercise.

  But the house is stifling. Her father boiling over some imagined slight on her mother’s part. Will playing American rock so loud the bass notes reverberate through her. Het needs air. So she tells her mother she is going to the fair. Eleanor purses her lips, says isn’t she too old? And besides, Jonty is coming for supper — doesn’t she want to see him?

  But Het doesn’t. She wants cotton candy and coconut games and goldfish in bags. She wants to fly. So at six o’clock she pulls her tangle of hair back into a ponytail and picks her old Crombie coat off the peg in the hall.

  “Good God, you’re not going out like that?” Her father stares in disbelief at this child in old man’s clothing.

  But she is going out like that. She bursts out of the door and runs down the hill, breathing in great gulps of briny air, feeling the sting of it on her face, its stickiness in her hair. Not caring that she will pay for this later. When she has to wash the sea from the heavy tweed before rot sets in. And endure the questions from her mother, and silence from him.

  That night she rides rockets and eats a toffee apple, biting through the cracking cherry red to the soft, woody flesh beneath. Then, when she is done, she throws the stick carelessly onto a pile of polystyrene burger boxes and climbs up onto the Tilt-A-Whirl. Ignoring her mother in her head, telling her she’ll be sick, that she always is.

  That’s when she sees him. Leaning over her as he clunks the safety barrier into place. Het looks up at the face just inches from hers and sees something, some trace element, a mineral she knows she needs, that she has been waiting for. She opens her mouth to speak, but instead he kisses her. Right then, before he’s even said a word to her, before he even knows her name, he leans in and pushes his mouth onto her toffee-apple lips. He tastes of cigarettes and peppermint and life.

  “What are you doing?” she says when he pulls away.

  “Something.” He laughs. “Everything.”

  And instead of heavy shame, she feels weightless. And she knows in that instant it is him.

  BUT, JUST like that, like a superhero, like a knight, he’s gone. I sit in the café for two mornings straight, clasping a cracked mug of cold tea; scum clinging to its surface, I’ve made it last so long. Behind the counter is a woman, older, hair scraped back in a thin ponytail, gold earrings and necklaces like she’s 50 Cent. The music’s changed, too. Mariah Carey and Beyoncé. Like it’s a different place. I wonder if I made him up.

  I figure I should forget it. Can’t keep waiting. Like a stalker, a sad case.

  Besides, I have to visit my new school, meet the headmaster. Finn has seen his already, Saint Mary’s Primary, full of toilet-roll puppets, and murals of tigers, and guinea pigs in a cage. He wants to start now so he can paint wild animals, hold the guinea pigs, but the headmistress says he’s to wait until after Easter; it’ll be easier then. She’s set him a project, something to do with the Tudors. Mum is delighted, says his old school would never have done that. Says it shows how right she was, how right we were, to move away.

  Mum wants to come with me, too, to see the new-computers-and-no-graffiti of her imagination. More evidence for her. But I fob her off, say I’d rather go alone, tell her it’s about independence. And anyway, Finn needs her to do stuff on Henry VIII.

  She’d be disappointed anyway. Seaton High isn’t bright and shiny and new. It’s old, and dirty. A great drafty Victorian thing, the walls glossed in wipe-clean Starburst orange and green. Like Peckham Park was before they knocked it down and built the Academy, as if shiny chrome and glass and new carpet would change everything. Still the same teachers, the same kids from the same projects. Same dealers at the gates. And within a month the chrome and glass is sticky with handprints and the carpet stained with Coke and spit and blood.

  I’m not fooling myself like Mum. School is school, and it’ll be the same here as it was there, as it is everywhere. Only this one is here. In his town. Near him.

  I sit in the corridor outside the headmaster’s office, on a plastic chair with gum stuck to the underside and Dane carved into the back. Kids stream past talking about last night’s TV and tomorrow’s game; voices hushing when they see me, then whispering behind folders covered in stickers and cartoons and Lianne Justin. Then the bell rings, and they disappear, like a shoal of fish, scattering through open doorways, flickers of uniform blue. Then I’m alone in the Dulux orange glow again.

  I’m still waiting when I hear someone slump into the chair next to mine; smell too much perfume and cigarettes, and mint to cover them, failing to hide a dirty habit. I turn to say something, hello, I guess, but I see who it is, see the tight curls, and that smile, that sneer.

  “I know you,” she says.

  I don’t reply. Not sure what I’m supposed to say.

  “You were in the café. Where you from? Truro?”

  I shake my head. “London.”

  “My cousin lives in London. Shona. In Wood Green.”

  She looks at me, waiting. In case I know her.

  I shrug. “It’s kind of a big place.”

  “Like, duh.” She takes t
he gum out of her mouth and sticks it under her chair.

  I smile and she shoots me a look.

  “How come you moved here, then? It’s a hole. Should have stayed in London.”

  “It’s . . . complicated,” I say finally. “My mum grew up here. We inherited a house.” For a second I think about mentioning my dad. But what would I say? That I’m looking for a man called Tom who could be anything from thirty to ninety, for all I know, and who might, just might, have come from around here. It’d make me sound desperate. Crazy, even. So instead I just add, “Whatever.” Like it balances it out. The thought. The childish thought.

  “So, you know anyone?” She twists a curl slowly around a bitten-nail, chipped-polish finger, lets it spring back.

  “No.”

  She thinks about this. And for a minute I think she’s looking at me like Cass used to look at half the girls at the Academy. Like I’m sad, Billy-No-Mates. And that she’ll dismiss me like Cass did them, flick cigarette ash on me. But instead she says, “Wanna meet us down the Clipper later?”

  I start, then hide it. Affect disinterest. Playing the game. “Who’s us?”

  “Me. Jake — that’s my brother. His flatmate.”

  I shrug. “Maybe. I don’t know.” Don’t know what Mum will say. Where I’ll get the money.

  “Well, whatever,” she echoes. “We’ll be there at eight.”

  I nod.

  “Billie Paradise?”

  We both look up. A woman, the secretary, is standing in the doorway, waiting for me.

  “Yeah,” I say, standing. I turn to the girl. “See you.”