Eden Read online

  And oh how I sulked. I sulked with the same determination with which she ignored me. Because I couldn’t play alone any more. I was a cowboy with no Indian, a Wendy with no Pan. I would sit in my own room and curse, pray for a plague of locusts or frogs, make pacts with shadowy figures I conjured up in my own netherworld of self-pity. Until I was forced to admit our days of Hansel and Gretel were over. And that’s when I turned to Tom. He became my partner in crime, my faithful sidekick, and I his. Though I hoped, prayed, I would be more. Then one night we rowed back late from the village and collapsed side by side in the boathouse, too heavy-limbed and lazy to make it any further than the creek.

  Even now I still feel the heft of the boards beneath my back, the sheet clinging to my sweat-sticky body, the perfect proximity of him.

  “Are you awake, Evie?” he said.

  “No,” I replied.

  He laughed, then. “Me neither.”

  “I’m hot,” I said, cursing myself for stating the obvious. For not being able to articulate what I really wanted to tell him.

  “I’m hot, too,” he echoed.

  And then it happened. He went first: stripped off his T-shirt and shorts. And though it was dark, and he was no more than a silhouette, a shadow, I knew he was naked. And, though I’d seen him like that so many times before as children, this, this was different. This meant something else.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  And, with the sound of my heart pounding in my chest, and his breath quickening, I peeled off my clothes until only my white knickers remained in their pathetic, virginal glory. They should be black, I remember thinking, or lacy. I should have borrowed some of Bea’s.

  But Tom didn’t notice. Or didn’t care. Because then, there, on the floor of the boathouse, the same floor we’d played Peter Pan on, played pirates on, he kissed me.

  The rest is a jumble of images – ones I have had to imagine, conjure from the darkness that shrouded us: my hands on his chest, his back; his moving down my legs, then up again; my knickers pulled aside. Then my hand pushing his away, panic slowly taking hold: that I can’t do this. That I’m not like Bea. I’m not Bea.

  “It’s OK,” he says. “It’s fine.”

  But it isn’t.

  We lay in silence until sleep took him, and then, before the clock struck twelve, I ran away from the shame of it. Not of what happened, but what didn’t. That I couldn’t go through with it after all. That I was the child he always thought of me as.

  I awoke the next day to an afternoon so blistering I had no choice but to swim. I will tell him, I thought, as I pulled on my bathing suit. I will tell him that I’m sorry, that I love him, that I do want him, I do. And he will understand. Of course he will.

  So convinced was I of the absolute truth of this that I didn’t think to wonder whether he wanted me too.

  But then I heard it, that laughter, a peal of applause scattering through the trees, then his, lower, wine-sodden, then silence. A silence that urged me on as strongly as it told me to go back. Because when I emerged from the woods to seek its source, I saw it was a silence borne of a kiss.

  That was the last time either of us came here.

  I slide the rusting lock from its housing, and step from a world where everything is in flux into one in which nothing has changed.

  For there is the table and chairs. There are the red-checked curtains; the gingham faded now in the sun, but still bright, still sending out its cheery welcome. The camp bed unfolded, waiting for weary occupants, its rickety legs bowed on one side from where Bea tried to use it as a trampoline.

  My chest tightens, and I feel the strange fullness and emptiness of it all; of a world suspended in aspic, and yet in the centre of it all is a Bea-shaped hole, so that at any minute this precarious construction might collapse in on itself.

  I have made a terrible mistake staying here. I should have gone to London with Aunt Julia. I will call her, I think, and go on the next train.

  But as I turn to go, I see a rucksack in the corner, leaning against the wall, a dull green against dirty whitewash. The kind you get from army surplus. Bea and I customized ours with swirling felt-tip paisley patterns and pin badges of bands. But this one has no pen marks. No badges. There is no clue as to who owns this bag. It is clean and new and unspoilt.

  All I know is that whoever left it must be coming back.

  DECEMBER 1987

  TERM IS almost over and Hamlet has closed its run, a success. James is praised for his part, but Bea and Penn are a “triumph”, their chemistry “undeniable”.

  This crackling, electric thing between her and Penn has taken Bea by surprise. Though she willed it, hoped it. It had been there when rehearsals had started. In every word spoken, every choreographed glance, touch. She was afraid it would be lost when they had to kiss. That somehow the stark practice room, the strip lights, the stares from Ben, from James and the stage hands, would drive it away. But even on a wet afternoon, surrounded by everyone, with the sounds of traffic on the Lewisham Road and the smell of coffee and someone’s stale crisps, she had felt something, everything; she had felt as if she had touched his very soul, and he hers.

  They had repeated the kiss later, in her room, under the pretext of another run-through.

  “That wasn’t a rehearsal,” he said, when he finally pulled away. “Not for me.”

  Bea couldn’t speak, just shook her head and pulled him back to her.

  It wasn’t until later, when they were lying next to each other in the narrow space of a single bed, that she found the words. “I knew it would be like this,” she whispered. “Didn’t you? Didn’t you just know it?”

  He nods, pushes a strand of damp hair back from her face. “I’ve wanted you for ever. Since the first time I saw you.”

  Bea feels a rush of relief that she was right all along. That love could feel like this. For the first time she has done something right. She can stop searching now.

  “We won’t tell anyone at college, though,” she insists. “Not yet.”

  “But— Why not?”

  “I— It’s not that I don’t want to. I want to tell the world, believe me. They should know how good this is. Just— I need to let them – him – down gently.”

  For a moment she thinks Penn is angry, is going to insist. But he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t, she tells herself. He understands her and her odd feelings for this strange boy. “Whatever you want,” he says. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “After the show,” she thinks aloud. “We can tell people after the show.”

  James watches them – Queen Bea and King Penn – being carried by their adoring crowd to the palace on Telegraph Hill, and he one of the throng. He has watched them like this for weeks, worrying, suspecting, that something has been finalized between them but never finding anything concrete. She has been vague in her answers, changing the subject and imploring him not to “talk shop” all the time.

  “I tell you everything about me,” he announces one evening. “Did you know that?”

  But she doesn’t rise to it. Just says, “I’m glad.”

  He tries another tactic. “Gina Seaton tried to kiss me in the green room.”

  “Really?” The disbelief she fails to hide hurts him. As if she cannot imagine anyone wanting him that way.

  “Really,” he repeats. “I said no.”

  “Well, you’re a fool,” she replies finally. “She’s got fantastic tits.”

  And now they are here, all three of them. In a house bought for Penn by his father; an investment, for everything comes down to money. His parents will do it up once Penn is gone and sell it for a fortune. But for now, the decaying Victorian terrace has gained a kind of notoriety on campus, its tenants the most daring, its parties the most decadent, its drug supply guaranteed by a man called Sugar Slim. The house is their palace and their playground.

  Only James sees it for what it is: nothing but a larger version of the back-to-backs at home on Hornby Road. The swirled nylon car
pets in psychedelic brown and orange and yards of cheap anagylpta to cover the cracks in the walls are a reminder of everything he left behind. He feels needling shame as he recognizes a fake Canaletto as the same gaudy print that hangs above the mantel at his Aunty Maureen’s semi.

  He climbs the staircase, stepping over bodies in this cut-price Bruegel or Hogarth. Their heads bowed, they strain to hear each other over Mick Jagger’s swagger as they regurgitate theories from student papers and bar-room politics, concepts they cannot truly understand – not like he and Bea. They are cuckoos, hermit crabs, inhabiting the lives of the working class as if they were their own, as if the fight was theirs to battle. Yet he, he is different. His was an accident of birth: the wrong place, the wrong parents. Parent. He is destined to a life with better lighting, and wine from well-stocked cellars, not pound-a-bottle Bulgarian vinegar from Anil at the Minimart.

  He can’t stand to listen any longer, so he pushes open the nearest door, looking for escape, but finds instead that he has walked into the lion’s den.

  They’re against the wall: his broad, rugby-built back covering her body so that it is her hand that James recognizes first, the turquoise and silver of her ring glinting as she pulls his head to hers. Penn pushes into her body, and her foot falters, shifting her into view. And even though Bea’s eyes are closed, James imagines that he sees in them want, lust, love.

  Feelings he has waited so long to see in her face, and now they are not for him.

  But for Penn.

  He closes the door silently, walks back down the stairs, out of this pleasure-dome, and back to his own small, stark reality.

  The flat is above a kebab shop on the Old Kent Road, a single room that seems to heave with furniture – a bed that doubles as a sofa; a desk; an easy chair, its springs collapsed and jutting through the nap-worn fabric. There’s no kitchen – instead a stove and sink have been forced uncomfortably under the grimy sash window, so that when he boils an egg or cleans his teeth he looks out on a vista of industrial bins and, beyond, the slow, painful procession of Folkestone-bound lorries.

  The bathroom is down a strip-lit corridor – a single shower and toilet he shares with a Geordie bricklayer and three generations from Nigeria, so that more than once he’s had no choice but to urinate in his own sink, or out of the window into the yard below. And the smell. Cheap meat and chip fat clings to every surface in a thin patina of grease, so that even the clothes pushed to the back of the cupboard that stands for a wardrobe carry the same stale odour as the workers downstairs.

  He could have gone into halls – the big new-build blocks up near Deptford with bright walls, clean carpets and an en suite. Could have had two meals a day cooked for him, and a cleaner once a week. But then he’d be one of them with their cheques from daddy and their shiny new complete sets of Shakespeare and their identikit posters – Betty Blue, The Wall, Che. He would have been no better than his da, doing what’s expected of him. Those kids in halls reminded him of sheep, or, worse, rats. Whereas, living like this, he is the Pied Piper.

  So he found the rooms in Loot. £140 a month inc. bills, no DSS, Old Kent Road – a Monopoly address, the brown-topped back alley his sisters dismissed so airily, holding out for the glamour of Mayfair or Pall Mall. A road he, too, once balked at as a child playing the game on Boxing Day. But his ma laughed and said, “It’s London. Doesn’t matter where you are in London, Seamus, all of the streets there are paved with gold.”

  And while he is yet to see a gilded glimmer amongst the dog shit and spit and discarded cans that litter the pavement outside, it is cheap, it is close to college, and most of all, it is his and his alone.

  And Bea’s, one day, he had hoped.

  But now, as he sits at the window, bathed in the sour acid orange of streetlights, he realizes what a fool he has been. He can’t compete with Penn. Not in terms of tangible, touchable things.

  He needs an edge. He needs words or deeds that will outshine even a king. Or a secret that only he can tell. And he smiles into the night sky, for now he has renewed purpose. He will give Bea things Penn cannot: experiences, places, feelings. He will show her he is not just worthy, but that he is the better man.

  He doesn’t know how, or when, or what yet. Just that he will.

  AUGUST 1988

  I CROUCH down, my fingers shaking as I try to unlatch the webbing, fumbling over the cold metal of the buckle. But then it’s done, and as I pull back the flap I feel myself hold my breath, as if I’m Jim Hawkins knelt at a treasure chest, about to find gold bullion, or a gun.

  But it’s neither. No bright glint of florins, no hard iron of a barrel, just the soft, dull cloth of T-shirts and trousers and the broken spines of books. I pull out copies of On The Road, a Wesker Trilogy, Hamlet, the stuff of A-level set texts, or the idle dreams of a wannabe Holden Caulfield. I feel like Hayley Mills in that black and white film where she thinks she’s found Jesus in her barn, and he turns out to be nothing but a common thief, a criminal. Only he, whoever he is, does not even seem to be that.

  I push the books back down into the bag and go to relatch the buckle when I see an envelope sticking out from one of the side pockets. Its fatness beckons me and I pull it out, like a rabbit from a hat.

  And then I start. For there is money, lots of it – wads of it. Not the neat kind you see in gangster films, fresh from a bank, but different notes, a jumble of browns and purples and reds. But it’s not that that’s jolted me. It’s the address on the front that stops me in my tracks, that sends my stomach to my mouth and tremors to my feet: Will Pennington, 73 Pepys Road, Telegraph Hill, London.

  There’s a sound behind me, the creak of a deckboard swollen with saltwater and dried in the sun. “As if by magic” I think. But when I turn, it’s not Tom I see. It’s another boy. Thinner, slighter. His face in shadow, he’s framed in the doorway, light haloing out behind him like the archangel Gabriel so that, for a second, I think I can see his wings. Then he steps forward, his face clear now, pale, as if he’s seen a ghost. Maybe he has, for he says a single word, and I feel the ground give way beneath me and darkness descend.

  Because what he says is, “Bea?”

  APRIL 1988

  SHE SLIPS into the role of Penn’s girlfriend with the same elegant ease that she becomes Ophelia, Viola, Blanche DuBois. She moulds herself to the shape of his world – the late nights running to early mornings, the parties, the plans for post-graduation: an experimental piece at a festival in Venice. He tells her about his father – about his dark moods, and the dark clouds that have appeared on his lungs edging out the anger and replacing it with a fear that makes him clutch at his family for the first time.

  “It’s sad, really. Pathetic,” he says.

  “What is?”

  “That it takes disease to cure him.”

  “You think he’s cured?”

  “Of being a complete bastard? For the moment. Until…” Penn trails off, disappears into himself.

  She holds him then, tighter, closer than she has ever held him before and whispers to him that she understands what it means to feel a father’s disappointment. Their bitterness at you and at what you might become radiates from them – a seamless aura of imagined loss.

  Penn takes her to meet him, at the Commons, for he still goes to work, despite this thing that grows like mould inside him. They walk hand in hand behind him down the green-carpeted corridors for tea on the terrace above the grey-brown waters of the Thames.

  “So what do your parents do?” his father asks her.

  “My father’s a midget strongman in the circus,” she deadpans. “And my mother was a charwoman.”

  Penn kicks her under the table and she fails to stifle a laugh.

  But the old man smiles, lets himself be the butt of the joke and Penn squeezes her hand and she knows she’s done the right thing. She is proud and pleased that being Bea is the right thing.

  Later she tells Penn of the river at home, the creek, how different its greenness, its wooded b
anks are to this vast muddy thing called the Thames. She tells him she’ll take him there one day, to Eden.

  “You can meet everyone,” she promises. “There’s this old woman at the Post Office – Mrs Polmear – she’s like a walking gossip column. And the Rapsey twins – Joyce and Edna. Can you imagine still living with your sister when you’re in your fifties?”

  Penn shrugs and Bea remembers with shame that, like her, he is an only child. But unlike her, he doesn’t have an Evie.

  “You’ll like her,” she says. “She’s like me.”

  “Is she strange, then?” he laughs and pulls her to him.

  “Yes, very,” she laughs.

  “Does she look like you?” He traces his finger down her collarbone, pushes his hand into her bra to feel her breast.

  “A bit,” she breathes.

  “Does she kiss like you?”

  But Bea doesn’t answer, for his mouth is on hers, his hands are on her. Evie is forgotten, drowned out in the surge of their desperation, their need and the swell of The Smiths on his new CD player singing, “There is a Light”.

  By Easter she’s given up her room in halls and moved the flyblown mirror into the house on Telegraph Hill, her beaded dresses hung about the walls like bright butterflies pinned and mounted on paper.

  And James watches it all, a spectator at a vital match as Penn and Bea’s lives take centre stage, and his own is pushed further into the wings. Bea misses lunches with him, leaves notes pinned to the board to tell him she can’t run lines because she’s going to the country for the weekend.

  “You’re disappearing,” he tells her. “He’s taking you all for himself.”

  But she laughs it off. “He doesn’t own me. He doesn’t tell me what to do.”

  No one tells Bea what to do, least of all him. So he tries another tactic.

  “I miss you,” he admits. “I miss how we used to be.”