Eden Read online

  Penn her boyfriend cannot come. His own father is ill – dying, Call-Me-Cassie says. How can he travel when another life hangs in the balance; an important life – an MP? “He doesn’t love her,” I railed back at her. “He cares more about an old man who’s nearly dead anyway.” But even as I spit the words out I know it’s a lie. Penn loved her. He called Aunt Julia to tell her so, to say how special she was, how lucky he was to have known her, even if only for less than a year.

  Of course he loved her. Everyone did. Even Tom.

  Why isn’t he here? I scour the seats for his familiar slouch, for the hair that falls over his eyes so that he has developed a tic, a constant push to secure it behind his ear for a second before it falls again. But I can’t spot him. I don’t want to see him anyway, I tell myself. I don’t care. I don’t need him.

  But then I feel it. A change in the light as someone steps from the sun-soaked churchyard into the stony grey of the church. Heads turn and I turn with them, and I see him. He is standing in the doorway between his parents, hair covering downcast eyes, uncomfortable in an ill-fitting suit and someone else’s tie. But then he looks up, meets my gaze. And that is when it hits me. The reality of it. Bea is dead.

  All my hopes of a mistaken identity – of her appearing at the font demanding to know what on earth we thought we were up to in our gothic lace and black hats without inviting her – dissolve like sugar in the harsh acid of vinegar when I see Tom, when I see that hollow expression, that loss etched on every inch of his face. That is when I swallow the cherry. And feel it drop down and nestle snugly onto the top of four slices of pie, and at the same moment, I feel the world has swallowed me whole.

  If the funeral was purgatory, then the wake is hell. Guests swarm over the lawn like ants, clad in the black armour of their mourning clothes, picking at cold meats and cucumber sandwiches and drinking lukewarm wine. I stand on the outskirts, my back against the cedar tree, clutching a glass of flat, tepid Coke like a talisman to ward off well-wishers. Eddie Maynard is heading across the lawn towards me. The three beers inside him and heat of the midday sun are slowing his course and swerving it. I watch him knock into one of the Rapsey twins and, as he over-apologizes, I duck behind the tree, down the path and through the pantry door to peace.

  But someone has got there before me.

  “Tom?”

  “Evie?”

  The shock passing over his face becomes something else. Something so potent that I have to put my hand to the countertop to keep myself grounded. I have seen that look before. Last summer, when I ran through the trees to find him and Bea at the creek. The look is guilt.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” he replies, quickly.

  “Are you looking for something?” My eyes flick across the room, wondering what it could be that he wants so much. Something of Bea’s, maybe, a memento.

  But he shakes his head. “Not looking…” He pauses, breathes deeply, as if he has forgotten to until now. “Hiding.”

  I nod slowly, in reluctant recognition. “Me too.”

  He smiles at me, a conspiratorial thing, an “I know you, I know what you’re feeling”. And I feel it then – that ache, that need for him to see me as more than I was; just a friend, almost a sister.

  “I can’t believe—” he begins.

  “Don’t,” I interrupt.

  “Evie, we need to talk. I have to tell you—”

  “No. No you don’t.” I don’t want to hear him say her name. I don’t want to think about them; don’t want to feel that pain in my chest at the way they clung to each other.

  “I— I have to go,” I stammer. And before he can stop me, I bolt, down the passageway and on through the house. But as my feet clatter up the stairs I realize that running isn’t enough, for the second I stop the grief will catch up with me. I need something stronger. More chemical.

  The tablets are in the back of Aunt Julia’s bedroom drawer. Bea and I found them when we were hunting for adult secrets – for condoms and cigarettes. And they’ve stayed in the same place ever since, only the date on the prescription changing year to year. I push down the childproof cap that isn’t, turn it and then scatter a handful into my sticky palm, a handful that is too small to miss, but large, still. I count them. Seven. Not enough to die, but enough to lose a week. And with that I swallow a single bitter pill.

  AUGUST 1987

  SEAMUS LIES on the now-faded, outdated Superman of his duvet cover, eyes closed, one arm flung back like the flying hero, the opening chords of “Last Night I Dreamt…” filling the four walls of the attic. His mam had bought him this bedset and he’d refused to part with it all these years, even now at the age of eighteen.

  The day of his mam’s funeral, Seamus was nine. The only boy of five live births, he sat on the pew at the front of Our Lady of Lourdes, wedged in between two of his big sisters, the nylon of his borrowed blazer chafing his newly shaved neck. He reached up to scratch and his elbow knocked into Brigid’s left breast.

  “Ow.”

  He felt the lightning-quick dig of an eleven-year-old elbow in retort. Sharp and deliberate, it jabbed into his ribs, pushing him into Theresa who was flanking him on the other side.

  “Bloody hell, Seamus. Quit mithering,” she snapped, her hand flying to her hair to check the Silvikrin was doing its job, that the painstakingly styled flicks were still in place. “Or e’ll ’ave you,” she added pointlessly.

  Seamus looked frantically down the row, but his father was five seats away. An unbreachable gap of uniform-clad sisters and his Aunty Maureen, weeping noiselessly into an ironed handkerchief, lay between them.

  His dad had patted his shoulder that morning. Not the usual “Jesus, will ya get out of the way” swipe. But a lighter, “it’ll be fine, just don’t bloody cry” touch. That was the closest he’d ever been to his father – as a sickly infant, in and out of St Augustine’s so often the cleaners knew him by sight, by the sound of his mewling cry; as a mud-dirtied scabbed-kneed littl’un; throughout his mam’s trouble – and it was the closest he’d ever get. That gap of four women had widened by the passing of years. Grammar school, music – Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure, The Smiths, make-up – an eyeliner and nail polish hocked from Brigid’s dressing table, and, finally, the arrival of Deirdre Eckersley from Gidlow Street and another sister to add her whine to the clamouring throng, had all increased the gulf.

  Deirdre is nothing like his mam. No singing along to Bonnie Tyler on Radio 2 while she washes up seven sets of breakfast bowls. No Fairy-soft hand riffling his hair at the tea table, laughing away his indignation at stew, promising him jam on his rice pudding if he eats it all up. No lips brushing his ear at bedtime, whispering in a faint Cork lilt that he mustn’t worry what his da says, that he is her special boy, that he will go so far in life, fly so high, that he will have to wear a suit to protect him from the sun, will need binoculars to look back down at her from his giddy heights.

  No, Deirdre is nothing like that. She is hard corners and sharp words. No soft hands from the dishwater. That is his job now. No soft talk, just an “eat it or you know what you’ll get” at tea, and a knock on the wall and “turn out that bloody light” at bedtime. He is not her special boy. He will not go far. He will end up in bloody borstal if he carries on the way he is. Holy Mary, Mother of God, what does he think he is playing at?

  But he knows exactly what he’s playing at.

  He’s alone in this humdrum town, he understands that now. In the cream-gloss, chalk-dust corridors of the grammar, on the steamed-up top deck of the 72 bus with its back-seat snogging and illicit trade in sweets and cigarettes and dirty magazines, in this jerry-built house of bar heaters and bare floorboards.

  But down south, just three hundred miles and three weeks away, is another life. One with conversations that don’t feature United or Athletic or racing. One with shelves filled with Keats and Yeats instead of Reader’s Digest. One with supper, not cheap-as-chippy tea; wine, not bitter;
and Pears soap instead of the acrid, yellowing bars of coal tar that Deirdre makes him wash with, wash his mouth out with. This life will be his for the taking. Drama school in London. Where he will take the lead, be centre stage, be the boy his ma knew he could be. Where he’ll no longer be Seamus, but James. A man of class, of means, of mystery. Like James Bond, like James Dean.

  The song is over, its three-minute perfection fading to static. Seamus holds himself in its comforting hum until the talking and walking and eating and evacuating that continues around him in a ceaseless, mindless cycle in this house of cards penetrates the paper-thin walls of his room. He hears Brigid singing tunelessly along to a song in her head, by some vacuous pop star that she has fallen hopelessly, irrevocably in love with, until next week. Hears the rhythmic thud, thud of his half sister Siobhan jumping rope in her room. Hears the bang, bang, bang of Deirdre banging her broom handle on the ceiling in retort. Hears the shuddering stop of his da’s Transit van outside. This van, with its slipping clutch, choking exhaust, and back full of valves and ballcocks and plastic piping, is promised to him one day; a day his da can proudly add “& son” to the decal “Gillespie” on the back and sides.

  A day that they both secretly, silently, know will never come.

  The van door clunks shut, and a few seconds later the front door slams in echo. And then the sounds of the house alter to accommodate this incomer. The skipping and singing come to a faltering halt to be replaced by the rattle of the chip pan and the clatter of frozen fishfingers onto the grill tray. Then the TV is flicked on, the petty arguments start and Seamus drops the needle back on the record and lets Morrissey and Marr drown out the disappointment of this flock-papered, broken-biscuit, so-called life.

  JULY 1988

  THE PILLS ran out three days ago. The last satisfying, slow descent into a place devoid of sharp feelings, where hard edges are blurry, soft as cotton wool, where I am comfortably numb. Now, as I lie awake on my bed in the room Bea and I shared, I see everything. I hear everything.

  Eden is almost empty. Like a rat from a sinking ship Uncle John fled to the city after the funeral. Someone called Harry had phoned with an emergency, and they couldn’t do without him. And now there is only Aunt Julia, Call-Me-Cassie, and me.

  And Bea.

  I hear her. I see her everywhere. The thud of a hardback book slipping from her hand onto the faded cabbage-rose carpet. Her soft breathing when I would wake early on summer mornings, roused by the crack of sunlight across my pillow, while she, shaded, slept on past breakfast. Her leg dangling from beneath a tangled sheet, fishing for cooler air, the toenails a chipped scarlet stolen from Aunt Julia’s dresser, matching my own. Always matching. Matching pirouetting ballerina pillowcases, matching custard-yellow candlewick covers, matching mule slippers we begged for from Dingles in Plymouth, that flick-flacked so satisfyingly on the flagstone floors.

  “Paper dolls” they used to call us: cut from the same tall, pale sheet. Our legs measured exactly twenty-nine inches, as if mine had defied their two-year disadvantage and determinedly grown to equal hers. Our noses were freckled in the same spattering pattern, though she had thirty-seven, and I forty-three. Our hair bobbed to our chins in an identical shade of brown. Somehow the few genes we shared through my mother and her father had conspired to make up for our lack of siblings and blueprinted instead into cousins.

  My grandfather said I was a loner as a child. But I wasn’t, not really. I was just in a sort of limbo, a without-Bea time, when I got on with the long business of waiting for Aunt Julia to bring her back here for the holidays so that the world could start turning again. Even at school I preferred to play my own private hopscotch rather than join in the noisy games of tag or stuck-in-the-mud or kick-the-can. For why would I want to chase and be chased by girls who weren’t as brilliant, or bright, or beautiful as Bea? No, I would wait until Bea returned and then I would teach her all I had learned – to catch pollack from the harbour wall, to body surf the waves that crashed onto the gritty sand of the cove. And she in turn would teach me to plait my hair, paint kohl on my eyelids, to French kiss my pillow in practice for the real thing.

  Until one day she didn’t.

  I feel a surge of nausea as the truth I have dampened down is now borne by butterflies, bright, glistening into the air: I didn’t lose Bea in the fire. Nor even last summer when she kissed Tom, and then left for college in London. The truth is she had already slipped away from me.

  It started when she was fifteen years old and I just fourteen. She’d been to stay with a school friend – Kate Flint, “Flinty”, who had a perm and a parrot called Longjohn, and whom I loathed and admired in equal measure. When Bea returned, eight days, ten hours and seventeen minutes later, she was laden with three things: a copy of Lace, ten plastic bangles that clattered annoyingly up and down her arms whenever she moved, and the faded purple of a bruise just above her right shoulder.

  At first I felt delight, that she and Flinty had fought like children, that their tight-knit affair was unravelling. “Oh, Evie, it’s not a bruise,” she laughed. “It’s a hickey.”

  She told me about him. His name was Miles, the best friend of the brother of Flinty’s friend Ruby Woo. He was a whole year older, and a whole twenty pages of the Teen Guide to Relationships more experienced. She whispered the words across the four-foot-wide strip of carpet and discarded socks and battered books that separated our beds. Yet that night it felt as wide as the Atlantic. Because, while I lapped up the story like sweet sugar slush, it left a bitter aftertaste on my tongue, for I knew she’d said it all before. That Flinty had heard it first in fuller, more lurid detail, had giggled with her over the practised way he undid her bra, gasped that he’d asked her to touch his “thing”, clapped her hands together at their ill-thought-out promise to duck school and meet under the clock at Waterloo on the first Friday in October.

  And so it began. The paper-thin sliver of air between us became a gaping chasm that widened on a weekly basis: The time she had her ear pierced twice in the back-street salon in Plymouth while I lay shivering in bed with unseasonal flu. The time she “forgot” we’d said we’d paint the boathouse door cherry red, like Madonna’s lips, and I came down to the creek to see a half-finished mess of pea green and Bea inside with a boatbuilder’s boy called Cal. The time she didn’t come for the holidays at all. Went to Switzerland to spend two weeks in a chalet with Greta Johansson and her two brothers, and a ski instructor called Nils.

  And the things we shared – our skinny, boy-thin bodies, our wide lips, our pale-as-milk skin – disappeared, disguised under so many layers of ra-ra skirts and Maybelline mascara and a lipstick named Twilight Teaser. Until her things – her new make-up, her new clothes, her new self – became too much for our childish room with its twin wooden beds and yellow spreads and circus-themed wallpaper. And so Aunt Julia moved her to the attic, to an ivory tower and canopied double bed, where she could whisper under the covers with the endless stream of schoolfriends – the Hatties and Letties and Charlie-not-Charlottes who were driven down for the sea air, and the swimming, and the novelty of village boys. While I was left behind with her childish toys; her rejects.

  I stare at Bea’s old bed and the menagerie of stuffed animals that still colonizes it – three grey rabbits with pale silk ears, a worn plush monkey, a real-fur koala with a hard plastic nose and scratchy toes. They stare glassily back at me like a malevolent zoo. I shiver, with cold, or something else, sadness maybe. I can’t stay here, here with the circus on the walls and the zoo on the bed and the No Bea. I slip out of bed and pad along the landing, my bare feet instinctively avoiding the boards that creak or crack under pressure; a path mapped fastidiously by Bea and me years ago to avoid capture by pirates or monsters, or worse, Aunt Julia.

  At the end of the landing, I turn, and start the steep, narrow climb to the attic. The door is shut, has been shut since Bea’s last visit home from college last year. I feel the ridges of the beehived handle rough in my palm, then turn
it slowly, and push.

  There is no phantom, no brush of gossamer shroud against me, only a gasp of stale air, as if the room has been holding its breath. But as it exhales I feel my own lungs stopper up. There’s no need to turn on the light; the moon shows me all I need to see: The mirror, obscured now by only a thin curtain of beads and ribbons, those that were not taken to London. Knickers still spilling out of the drawer, a froth of lace and coloured silk. Make-up spilling across the dresser top, nail polish dripping onto the floor, great gobs of blood red on the pale carpet. The unmistakeable cloying note of her bottle of White Musk. And a book – a battered board-covered edition of Peter Pan.

  We never stopped loving that story. We played for hours at being Peter and Wendy, Hook and the tick-tocking crocodile, the insolent Tinkerbell. Yet we both knew that really we were the Lost Boys, raised by Eden, and by an array of Wendys – the housekeepers my grandfather employed; my infant school teacher Mrs Penrice; Hannah – Tom’s mother, and my own mother’s friend.

  I put my hand on the dresser to steady myself and feel it knock something to the floor. When I stoop to retrieve it I see it is an unopened letter addressed to Bea. I don’t recognize the writing, our address mapped out in a deep, blue-black ink, the loops extravagant yet exact. I check the postmark: Hampshire. Hampshire, I think, Hampshire. I know someone who lives there. I dig into my head, poke fingers into dark recesses. And that’s when I see it: the date. This isn’t an old letter. This letter was sent the day that Bea died.

  I sit on the edge of her princess-and-the-pea bed, the envelope crackling in my hand. I wrestle with myself for pointless seconds before the need to read the letter beats any reason not to and I slide a finger under the flap and open it in one clean, swift rip.

  Cobham House

  Wick Lane

  Tetlow

  Hampshire

  6th July 1988