by Joanna Nadin
“I never met him,” I say.
“What’s his name?”
“Tom, OK?” I blurt. “What about yours, where’s he?”
Eva’s pupils narrow to a pinprick, so that she looks alien. And I think, I’ve done it now. I’ve messed up. That he’s dead. Or in prison.
But then Jake laughs. “He’s down at the Red Lion, same as every night.”
And Eva smiles, like I’ve passed some test. Bored now, she turns to her brother. “Do you remember when he . . .”
But I don’t hear the end. I feel Danny’s hand slide under mine, his fingers reach and curl around my own. I check Eva, in case she’s seen, but she’s still talking. Off on one about some other night, some other year. He squeezes gently, then pulls away again. And my heart slows, the wings stop beating.
“Why don’t you ask your mum?” he says quietly. “About him, I mean.”
“I . . . It’s too complicated,” I say eventually.
Way too complicated. When I was a kid, tiny, she told me he was a famous sailor, Tom the Magnificent. That he was busy fighting sea monsters and pirates, protecting mermaids. That he would only come back when there were no more battles to be fought. And I would make her tell me stories of the giant squid and the whales, of how I was lucky he was out there, keeping the seas safe. Again and again I would beg. Until I was old enough to know that Moby-Dick was just a story, and pirates, the ones with eye patches and parrots, died a long time ago.
Then she would tell me she waited for him, but he never came. That he wasn’t a brave hero. He was a coward. Tom the Feeble. Tom the Weak. And we didn’t need one of those. That was the last time I asked. I was nine.
Cass said we could hunt him down anyway, as soon as I was sixteen. We could go to some place up in town and demand my birth certificate and stuff. But on my sixteenth she was too busy chasing Ash. And I’d already seen my birth certificate by then anyway, found it stuffed in a drawer full of bills. Under FATHER it just said, “Unknown.”
And I’ve been here long enough now to know that I’m never going to bump into him. That it’s as likely as him fighting a serpent or kissing a mermaid. That I’ll never get to ask all those questions I’ve written in my head:
Does he like licorice too?
Does he eat the biscuit off the top of an Oreo, then scrape off the white inside with his teeth?
Did he love her?
Did he know about me?
Is that why he left?
Eva is asleep on the sofa, and not even Jake can make her move. Danny walks me home.
He doesn’t touch my hand again. But the moment hangs there between us, lit up.
“What about yours?” I say.
“My what?”
“Family.”
“Not much to tell. My mum and sister have moved away, gone up-country to live with my stepdad.”
Stepdad. I didn’t know. But why would I? I never asked.
He can see me working it out. Like a puzzle. “He’s a copper,” he adds. Like that explains it.
“Why didn’t you go with them?” I can’t imagine letting Mum go without me.
He shrugs. “I don’t know. Felt like I was intruding, I guess. She’s his, you know? My sister. Half sister,” he corrects himself. “They’re all right, though. I see them at Christmas and stuff.”
Then I ask him the million-dollar question. “What about your dad? Your actual one.”
“Up-country, too. Comes back in season. When the work’s good.”
“What’s he like?”
“I dunno. Looks a bit like me. That’s it.”
“Don’t you want to know more?”
“I know enough.”
I think he’s cross with me. But it’s not that. It’s genuine. He doesn’t need him. He’s like Mum. And I wonder who his family is now.
We stop at the gate. I lift the latch up, hear the metal clunk and whine as it moves on its rusting hinges.
“You want to swim again?” he says quickly.
I stop and bring my eyes up to meet his.
“Tomorrow?” Shit. It’s so obvious. I’m obvious.
“I can’t. The café,” he says. “We stay open late on Fridays and Saturdays.”
“Right. Sure. Whatever.” I try to affect nonchalance. But I’m pretty sure it comes off as nerves.
“Sunday. In the morning?”
“I have to work,” I say. Glad of the excuse.
“Monday, then?”
“What time?”
“Not sure. I’ll call. Let you know.”
“OK. Monday. It’s a date.” Oh, God. I feel blood rush to my cheeks, so hot I’m sure the air around me must steam. “I didn’t mean —”
But he doesn’t skip a beat. “A date,” he says. “See you.” And I watch him walking backward, watching me. Then he sticks his hands in his pockets and turns. I realize my fingers are gripping the cold iron of the gate latch. The knuckles white. I release them. A date. Is it? Do I want it to be?
And I know I do.
AT FIRST Eleanor uses the picture as an excuse to see him. She goes back two, three times, stands and admires the fine brushstrokes around the shoreline, the way the light catches the surface of the water, waiting for him to beckon her in.
She finds him fascinating; his otherness. The way he smiles so easily. The way he smells — of oil and turpentine. She will learn to love that smell.
On her fourth visit she realizes she has fallen in love. A ridiculous, inconvenient, overwhelming love. But she cannot tell him. And cannot have him. So instead she transfers this feeling into the blues and greens of the watercolor. She becomes obsessed with it, and wants it, wants it badly. But it is two hundred pounds. And that sort of money he will trace, will see the missing check stub, watch its passage out of the account, as he runs through her spending, line after line.
“You could work for it,” Alex says one day.
“Wh-what?” she stammers.
“No . . . I don’t mean — It’s just . . . I could do with someone to help. Just the odd morning. So I can paint. It’s a waste of light, sitting in here.”
She knows what Roger will say if she asks him, asks for permission. So she blurts out a “Yes.” So it’s too late. So he cannot change her mind for her. So by the time she sits down to supper, she is already planning what she will wear.
Roger eyes her over the rim of his whiskey tumbler. “What in God’s name do you want a job for?”
“It will be good for me,” she explains. “Get me out of the house.”
“What will the Listers think?”
Eleanor pictures Carol, her wasp-thin waist and wasp-sharp comments. She knows exactly what she will think. But it wasn’t a question. He doesn’t need an answer.
“It will have to stop soon,” he says. “Once you’re pregnant, you’ll have no time for a job.”
“I know,” she says.
He nods. And, satisfied he has won a small victory, he goes back to his soup, the conversation over.
But Eleanor’s head is still full of words. It will come to an end, she thinks. All good things come to an end. But for now, it is just the beginning.
He gives her the painting the first week.
She protests. “I haven’t earned it yet.”
But he pushes it onto her. “A gift, then. You can say it’s worthless. That way he won’t guess.”
“Guess what?” she says. But the minute the words leave her lips, she already knows the answer.
She doesn’t hang the painting. She wraps it in a blanket and hides it in the attic, leaning against a box of her school certificates, her gymnastic awards. Her old life. She doesn’t need them anymore, just as she doesn’t need the painting. Because now she has something better. She has him.
SUNDAY AT the Laurels is no different from Thursday. No weekend excitement here. The same food, the same TV, the same endless waiting for death’s release.
But Number Seven is different. This time he doesn’t think I’m his granddaughter
. Doesn’t slip behind his eyes, vacant, lost. This time he nods a hello, then goes back to his book, absorbed despite the hum of the vacuum, despite my gangly frame edging around him, dusting the photographs, the stacked books. I glance at the cover of one. It is a glossy, coffee-table thing, an art book. Rothko’s Light Red Over Black.
I saw the real thing once. At the Tate Modern. Mum took us, me and Finn, Cass tagging along for something to do while her mum got her nails done. We were eleven. Cass pushed Finn in his buggy, let go of him in the Turbine Hall, Finn shrieking with delight as he careered along the concrete, hands waving at the ceiling, reaching for the light. He crashed into a woman, and that was the last time Cass was put in charge of the stroller. She got bored after that. Wanted to go to the aquarium to see the sharks. But Mum wanted to see the Rothko, so we trailed upstairs, Cass complaining about how boring pictures were, me joining in to keep face. But when I got into the room, found myself dwarfed by these giant-tall canvases of magentas and blacks and oranges, the moaning and tutting and begging stopped. I was lost for words.
I click off the vacuum and it whirrs into a silence as heavy as the buzz before.
“I love Rothko,” I say.
“Huh?” He looks up, confusion etched on his face.
I’m worried he’s gone again. “Rothko.” I point at the book, desperation staining my voice.
But his eyes focus, and the corners of his mouth flicker upward into a smile. “An abstract fan, then,” he observes. Not a question. But I answer anyway.
“I guess. Not Pollock, though. Or Hodgkin.”
“You know your art.”
I shrug. But he’s interested; lit up suddenly.
“What’s your name?”
“Billie. Billie Paradise.”
“Funny surname.”
“It should be Trevelyan,” I explain. “But my mum changed it.”
“Trevelyan.” He rolls the word around his tongue. Like he’s testing it. “I once knew a Trevelyan. Worked for me.”
“Will?” I blurt out. But I know before it leaves my lips that it couldn’t have been. He was, what, eighteen when he died? Too young for a job, surely. And, anyway, he was at boarding school most of the time.
“No. A girl. Woman. What was her name?”
“I . . .” I want to say Het — Mum. But it couldn’t have been her, either. She never worked when she was growing up. She told me. Her father forbade it.
“What was it?” he asks someone. Me? No — himself. His eyes narrow in anger as he searches for a memory, a secret that has been locked up in his head.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say.
“But it does. It does . . . Goddamn it.” He claps the book covers shut, sending motes of dust flying about in a shaft of light.
It’s then I notice.
“Look,” I say. “The sun.” I sound like a child. Or like I’m talking to one.
But it is a new, childlike thing of wonder. Because after weeks of relentless rain, the room is suddenly bathed in gold. Shiny. Outside it glints off the windshields of the cars waiting for petrol.
“It’s hot,” he says. “Too hot.”
I turn and look at him sitting there, swaddled in a thick cable-knit fisherman’s sweater. The double glazing like a magnifying glass, focusing the sun on the wool, while behind him the radiator chugs out its own infernal heat.
“I’ll open the window,” I say. But when I try to lift the handle, I realize it’s locked, and there’s no key here. In case he tries to jump, I realize. To escape.
When I look back to apologize, I can see him struggling. Twisting his arms this way and that, like he’s Houdini in a straitjacket. Only I can tell there’s no ta-da moment with this.
“Here, let me help you.”
He holds his arms out so I can pull the sleeves down and off him, free him. I take the hem in my hands, start pulling it up and over his head. But for a second, his face is covered, wrapped in gray wool, trapped in the dark. And he panics. The noise isn’t human. It’s a desperate, animal sound. A howl or a moo or something.
I yank the sweater down.
“It’s OK,” I say, trying to calm him. “I’m here. You’re here.”
He is dazed and confused.
“What were you doing?” he shouts.
“You were hot,” I explain. “You wanted to take your sweater off. I . . . I was helping.”
“Who are you?”
I sigh inside. But force it out. “Billie,” I say. “I’m Billie. Billie Paradise.”
He thinks for a minute.
“Funny surname.”
“Yeah, I . . .” And I’m about to go into it again. The Trevelyan thing. When I think of something else.
“What’s yours?”
“What’s what?”
“Sorry. Your name?”
He pauses for a moment. And I feel the desperation rise again, the butterflies. But then he turns to me. Clear. Focused.
“Shaw,” he says. “Alexander Shaw.”
When I get out, the sun is still hanging around. And someone else with it. Mum. She’s sitting on the wall at the end of the drive while Finn kicks the last kernels of pea gravel into an imaginary United goalpost, falls to his knees to the roar of an unseen crowd.
“Finn. Your knees, baby.”
Mum is wearing a summer dress, her arms bare, the flesh pale and stippled with goose bumps. I flick a glance back and see Debs at the window. See the curiosity in her eyes. Or contempt, maybe. Thinking Mum’s the one that needs shutting up in a home. Walking around dressed like that. I feel embarrassment flush my cheeks. For a second I hate her, Mum. Then hate myself more for caring. Why does she do this stuff?
I turn back. “What’s going on?” I ask.
“Nice to see you, too.” She jumps down from the wall, lands with a thwack on the ground. And I see what she’s got on her feet. Flip-flops. Christ.
“I didn’t mean . . . It’s just that —”
“Joking, babe. Summer’s here. Thought we could go to the beach.”
It’s March. It’s freezing. But something tells me I need to shut up now, play along. So I smile, say, “Great,” and try not to let her see me wrap my scarf tighter around my neck.
But as we walk back down toward the town, Mum’s enthusiasm infects me.
“Look,” she says. “A whole new world.”
And she is right. It is a whole new world. The sunlight shimmers on the water, ricochets off slate roofs. The town is transformed, the way London is when the snow falls and muffles the dirt and noise in a blanket of clean white.
Mum links her arm through mine, Finn racing ahead. And I ignore the eyes on us. Ignore the stares and the people thinking “What the hell?” And instead I wrap myself in my family, like a force field, protection against the enemy. And I soak up the sun.
Mum’s good mood lasts until six. She takes us digging for sandworms, then for ice cream from the Fudge Factory, the woman behind the counter laughing, saying it’s the first sale she’s had in months. Takes us all the way back up the hill with promises of pizza for tea and staying up late. But then we open the door, see the answering machine blinking its red eye at us. As if to say, “I know something you don’t know.” And everything turns to black.
There are two messages. The first is Danny. About swimming. I’m to meet him at two because he’s on an early shift and the pool will be empty then. And so my stomach is already alive by the time the second message kicks in. Mum’s hanging around me, Finn under her arm singing “Billie and Danny up a tree, K. I. S. S. I. N. G.”
“Ssshh,” I say. “I can’t hear.” Thinking maybe Cass has finally gotten around to ringing. Or it’s work. Or Danny again. Changing the time. Canceling. Letting me off, and my butterflies out.
But it’s a man’s voice. Deeper than Danny. Older. His voice rich with breeding, money. A sugar-daddy voice, Cass would say. And this sugar daddy has a name.
“Henrietta . . . Het . . . It’s Jonty.”
He pauses, wonderi
ng what to say next, I guess. Leaving a gap big enough for Finn to fit in “Who’s Jonty?”
The name jolts my memory. I can see it spelled out in Eleanor’s looped italics underneath a photo of two boys with a carrot-nosed snowman. Will and Jonty, Christmas 1977. It’s someone from back then. Someone Mum knew.
I turn to her, looking for the same recognition. But whoever he is, whatever he is to her, she doesn’t want to remember, and instead of nostalgia, anger floods her eyes.
I reach for the answerphone, trying to cover it before she can hit DELETE. Instead she pushes it to the floor and tries to stamp on it with her pink Havaianas. All the time she’s swearing to herself, at me, at him.
“For Christ’s sake, Billie. This is why I told you to turn it off.”
“Who is he?”
“Nobody. God.”
Then I realize. Or I think I do. It makes sense. It’s so obvious. “He’s my dad,” I blurt out.
Mum looks up at me, her face pale, her cheeks flushed with effort, or embarrassment. And I think, This is it; she’s going to tell me.
But instead she shakes her head. “No, Billie, he’s not. He’s nobody. A nobody.” And then she raises her leg and brings it hard down on the answering machine again. “Nobody,” she repeats. “Nobody.”
“Mum, stop,” Finn pleads.
But she doesn’t. She stamps on and on. Which would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. And then, finally, I hear a crack. And Mum stops and steadies herself against the wall, her breath coming fast and hard.
Finn is crying. But Mum can’t hear him. All she can hear is the voice inside her head. And the voice tells her to walk away. To shut herself off. And she does. So it’s me who crouches on the hallway floor, holds Finn, hauls him up and then lays him down on the sofa, scans through the channels to find cartoons, makes him pizza for tea.
And that’s how we sit for three hours. Our faces sticky with cheese, our eyes glazed with Transformers. Just me and Finn. At nine, Mum still hasn’t come down, so it’s me who tells him he has to go to bed, makes him clean his teeth, reads him four pages of Harry Potter before I realize his eyes are shut and he is lost in another world, fighting his own dragons. And demons.