by Joanna Nadin
But Luka stayed.
And Mum? Mum’s getting treatment from this doctor up at the hospital. Private therapy. She’s paying for it. With her own money. Martha found the bankbook when she was cleaning. Fallen down the back of the bookshelves. Fifty thousand in trust. Enough to pay the back rent, and the bills for years to come.
Money doesn’t buy happiness, Martha said, but it buys you a big-enough boat to sail right up to it.
And Mum’s doing OK. I told her the truth, about that night. About Dad and Will. And she’s talking about it all. And shouting. She rang up Jonty and shouted at him for ten minutes straight, then hung up and said, “That’s closure.”
I didn’t lose my job. Debs said beggars can’t be choosers, and Lisa is signed off for six months with backache, so she needs me three days a week. And I guess I don’t need the money. But I need something to do.
Because I’m missing the rest of the school year. Finn, too. Mum said Luka can do some parenting for a change, instead of that bloody guitar.
But he’s found a way around it. He set himself up doing music classes in that old gallery. Like School of Rock, or something. He plays with Danny, too, sometimes. Says he’s good. Says he can get him session work, if he wants.
But he doesn’t. Not right now. Because that would mean going away. Going up to London. And neither of us wants that. Not yet.
We’re not together. That would be too weird. But I came here to find out who I was. And I thought I needed to find my dad to do that. But instead I found Danny. He’s part of my family now.
We could have ignored it. Could have run away. Together, or alone. But it would have pulled us back, in the end. Like it did Mum. It’s who we are. We can’t change it. Or fight it.
We just have to find new ways to live. And to love.
ALEXANDER SHAW sits at the window, looking out over the forecourt of the garage. A girl, woman really, is filling her car with petrol.
It’s the car that jogs his memory. A Pallas. With fawn leather seats and a suspension that rose as you turned on the ignition. A strange sensation, he thought, as if you were being lifted in a space machine, a rocket.
He remembers the smell, too. Of cigarettes and a plastic air freshener, the liquid domed over the amber of a traffic light. Get set. And perfume. Her perfume.
She smelled of it that day. The last day he saw her.
“I have to go,” she says. “I have to find her.”
“I will come. Can I come?” he asks. He takes her hand in his own. Feels the fine-boned fingers, the hard gold of her wedding band, the chilled January.
She tightens her hand around his, feels the rough, calloused palm, the bone-swollen fingers. An artist’s hands, she thinks. Hands that have colored the wash of the sea with deft strokes of Prussian and cobalt. Hands that have held her face as he kissed her. That have unzipped a navy dress, and touched the bare flesh beneath.
But that was then.
She brings her other hand to meet their grasp, closes it around them, then kneels beside him. Like Mary Magdalene, he thinks. Or a begging child, imploring him.
“No,” she says. “No, you can’t come. But I need to tell you something.”
She stands now. Removes her hands from the tangle they have twisted themselves into.
“It’s our secret,” she insists.
He nods, then laughs. “I’ll forget anyway.”
It is the last time he sees her.
That evening a woman comes to see him, the one with the dark hair and the smell of pine needles. She tells him she is dead. Gone. There was an accident on the main road.
And for a second, then, he feels the sudden stab of pain, of loss. But by dinnertime he has forgotten. Forgotten her name even.
But today he remembers. And he remembers their secret. I will write it down, he thinks. So I can tell her when she comes. Tell her who she is. That she is mine. My flesh and blood. My granddaughter.
What is her name? he asks, as he searches in the bedside drawer for a pencil.
Billie. That is it. Billie.
Joanna Nadin is the author of the critically acclaimed young adult novel Wonderland. “Paradise,” she says, “began on a blistering August day on the cliffs above Loe Bar in Cornwall, England, notorious for its undertow. But as summer turned to bleak midwinter, and I watched a friend dragged down by the weight of depression, the book took a darker turn too.” Joanna Nadin lives in Bath, England.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2011 by Joanna Nadin
Jacket photographs: copyright © 2012 by Charlie Schuck/Getty Images (girl); copyright © 2012 by Marc Ohrem-Leclef/Gallery Stock (carnival)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First U.S. electronic edition 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number pending
ISBN 978-0-7636-5713-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7636-6202-8 (electronic)
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