Eden Read online

  “We both made a mistake, OK? It was … it was never meant to be. For any of us.”

  “You mean that?”

  Do I? Ten days ago, a week, it would have been a lie, a big fat lie. But now. I think of Penn, of what he is, and what he might be.

  “Yes. We were friends. That’s all.”

  “We can still be.”

  I look up at him from under a curtain of dripping hair. “If you were my friend, then you’d leave me be.”

  He shakes his head. “Fuck’s sake, Evie.”

  The word digs into me, biting. Not because I haven’t heard it before – Bea and I practised it, rolled it in our mouths, the delicious forbiddenness of it – but because I have never heard Tom say it. Not once. Not when his gutting knife slipped and he sliced into the top of his finger, his blood coagulating on the scales of a dead bass, mixing with its own. Not when I told him about the divorce. Not when he saw Bea with John Penrice the day after she’d kissed him.

  I’ve gone too far, and I need to pull it back in, before it – this row – becomes a thing I cannot control at all.

  “Have you told Julia?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Don’t,” I say. “Please. It’s— he’s a friend of Bea’s. From uni. His name’s Penn. Will Pennington. We’re just— We talk. About her, OK?”

  He pauses, and I wonder if he believes me. If he knows who Penn really was to Bea; if she told Hannah that Christmas when she came over. If she told him.

  But if he knows, he doesn’t let on. “How long is he staying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Evie—”

  “I don’t.”

  “Just be careful,” he says finally.

  “I will,” I say. “I am.”

  But that night I can’t sleep. In a bid to drive out the damp and dry out the paint, the decorators have switched on the central heating, so that Eden, once my stone-cold sanctuary, has become a suffocating hothouse. With heaving, complaining effort, rusting radiators churn a metallic fug into every room, filling halls and corridors with their groaning and clanking, like a ghost in chains.

  I throw the windows wide in desperation, gulp down the night air as if it’s a thirst, this feeling. I count sheep, count stars, count threads on the counterpane. But I can’t keep him out, and the sheep scatter to make room for Penn. My head is full of him, pressing its own internal shutter on an album of snapshots: Penn in close-up, squinting into the sun, CLICK; Penn asleep on the deck, a tidemark of salt tracing a bracelet around his wrist, CLICK; Penn in the water, his hand touching my hair, his lips touching mine—

  I stop myself. The camera has lied. That didn’t happen. That can’t happen.

  A wave of disgust washes over me. Because he’s not mine to kiss, he’s Bea’s— was Bea’s. And it’s not me he wants, it’s her. I’m just a poor facsimile, a hastily drawn copy, like a child’s rendition of the Mona Lisa. You can see who I’m supposed to be, but the lines are wrong, there are details missing, the nose is slightly too big, the smile lopsided. And yet, and yet…

  “Tell me what to do, Bea,” I say. “Help me.” But though I say it aloud I know she won’t answer. That this is down to me. Everything is down to me now.

  I think back to Tom in the woods. His warning. “Be careful,” he said. And I make a pact with myself. Tomorrow I won’t go to the boathouse. Tomorrow I’ll stay here at Eden. I’ll stay with Bea. I’ll sort out her treasures for her before it’s too late. I’ll put them in a box and seal it tight, so that I can take them with me when I go. Nothing happened between me and Penn. And nothing will happen. It’s fine. I’m fine.

  And yet even as I say the words, I see his face again, and I know it’s useless. I’m not saved at all, I think. I’m drowning. And, worse, I chose to jump. I chose this fate.

  Or maybe it chose me.

  MAY 1988

  BEA LIES face down on the bed, in the almost-dark of drawn curtains and pale morning light. She is swimming in sound – in scorn, and spat-out words and a door slammed in anger. Its thin, bitter fluid envelops her, so that she shivers despite the mild May air.

  Penn’s father has got worse. The cures have failed and now he’s in hospital a hundred miles away in Hampshire, a frail shell of the man who hailed colleagues in the soft-carpeted corridors, who downed glass after glass of red wine and talked loudly of Thatcher on the terrace.

  “Please come,” Penn begs her. “I need you.”

  “You don’t,” she replies. “You’ll be fine. Besides, I can’t, I have to rehearse.” But this is a lie and they both know it, for the play is still weeks away. But she can’t tell him the truth because it’s pathetic and reveals her to be lacking, cruel even.

  She went with him to the hospital before. Imagining the urgency of a hospital drama, she painted herself Florence Nightingale in the picture; an angel sent to revive him and reconcile him with his prodigal son. But the reality bore no resemblance to her version. There were no dashing doctors, no heartfelt “sorry”s; just endless waiting in corridors hung with the smell of disinfectant and death.

  “I suppose you’ll be seeing James?” he says.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. What does it matter?”

  But it does matter. Today she needs to see him, to get away from this stifling, choking thing she is trapped in. Not Penn, she tells herself. It’s not Penn she’s escaping. But even so, when James arrives an hour later, she follows him out of the house, feeling sweet release as the door slams behind her for the second time that day, knowing there will be no more raised voices, no suffocating silences, no pretence that they can’t see death lurking at the door. For Bea needs life. Penn will understand that. Penn will forgive her for that. Eventually.

  “Where are we going?” she asks.

  “On a magical mystery tour,” he promises with a bow and a flourish.

  Bea laughs. “The Taj Mahal? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon?”

  “No.”

  “Bibendum then, to eat a dozen oysters? Or ice cream – knickerbocker glories at Joe’s?”

  “Nope.”

  She sighs with mock disappointment, shakes her head. “No class, that’s your problem.”

  “Class and money aren’t the same thing,” he says suddenly.

  She reddens with sudden, unfamiliar embarrassment. “I didn’t mean… It was a joke. You’re all class.” And she links her arm through his.

  “This?” she asks, not even bothering to hide the distaste. “Seriously? This is it?”

  They’re on the edge of a Peckham estate. Four blocks of grey, no-hope flats tower over them, grim sentinels keeping watch over a landscape of broken glass and no ball games.

  “Close your eyes,” he tells her. Then he moves behind her and places his palms over her face.

  “No.” She pulls away and turns to face him. “You’re scaring me now.”

  “Don’t be scared. You have to trust me.”

  “I—”

  He takes her hands in his and grips them tight. “Do you trust me?” he asks, and his face is etched with such urgency, such need, that there can only be one answer.

  “Yes,” she whispers. “Yes, I trust you.”

  And so she shuts her eyes, and lets him take her by the hand and lead her blindly forward. She trips through the empty cans and overflowing bins, through the high-rises and low lives, until she hears the sounds change: the flat, concrete hollowness becomes a softer, kinder thing and his voice, calm now, tells her, “This is it. We’re here.”

  She opens her eyes and starts. Her mouth falls open and her breath pulls in sharply as if she is about to speak, but there are no words. Instead she nods, bewildered. Because it’s a kind of magic trick he has pulled, a sleight of hand, for she’s no longer on a sink estate surrounded by graffitied walls and boarded windows, cars held together with gaffer tape and prayer, like the lives of those who own them, borrow them, steal them. Instead there are trees – oaks, a silver birch, a dark, berry-hung yew; a lawn, overgrown, its soft fa
bric sequined with buttercups and daisies; and, down a nettle-choked path, a summerhouse, its pale, sandstone cupola sheltering two painted wooden benches. She has gone from bitter browns and dead greys to this green, this life.

  “I—” she falters.

  “My secret garden,” he says.

  “How did you find it?” she manages at last.

  “I got lost,” he says. “And I found this.”

  James doesn’t tell her why he was lost. Walking gets rid of the rage he feels when he sees her with Penn. And he walks most days, sometimes all day, and has covered the length and breadth of the city, from the clipped, cloistered afternoon suburbia of Penge to the flashing lights and fucking of late-night Soho. He’s walked from the sound of Bow bells to the shadow of Big Ben, has walked past stucco townhouses and through prefab estates. He’s seen this entire city’s ugliness, but sometimes, he comes across a place of pure, staggering beauty, a place paved with gold. Like this.

  “Eden,” she says. “It’s Eden.”

  He shakes his head. “Better than,” he says. “Because this is real.”

  “No,” she says quickly. “No, you don’t understand. Eden, it’s where I live, in the holidays, anyway. The house in Cornwall?”

  He nods, remembering. She showed him a picture once, of her on a boat. Bea was standing, precarious in a pink dress, a big, out-of-place thing with a bodice and beads, while another figure, her T-shirted back to the camera, rowed her to shore.

  Tears spill down Bea’s cheeks, black rivulets of mascara running across pale skin.

  “What is it? Do you miss it?” His concern is urgent. Because these tears are real, not the crocodile ones she keeps for the stage, or made of the liquid glycerine she keeps in her pocket for the rare times she is unmoved. This is unmanufactured sorrow, grief even, that doesn’t fit with the story she has told of boredom, of counting down endless, pointless days until she could be here, in London. “I thought you didn’t want to go back? You stayed here all Easter. You could have gone, if you’d wanted. Couldn’t you?”

  She shakes her head. “We had a row.”

  “Your mam?” he blurts, his concern letting the word slip out, a single syllable betraying the past he has worked so hard to escape.

  But wrapped in her own worry, she doesn’t notice. “No,” she says. “Evie. My—”

  “… cousin,” he finishes.

  “You know about her?” she says.

  Of course he does. He’s overheard this piece of information and kept it safe; a jewel to admire, Fagin-like, when he is alone.

  She wipes her face on her arm, transferring a smudge of black to the thin, green cotton of her cardigan. “It was a stupid thing, last summer. My fault,” she adds quickly. “Then I should have stayed longer at Christmas. But there was Penn. And then at Easter we had the festival the first week, and after that, I don’t know, it just got harder. I did write to her. Twice. Or three times maybe. But she never wrote back.”

  “She doesn’t own you,” he tells her, angry that someone could try to monopolize her, take her away from him.

  “No. I know. It’s just … it goes back further. We were like sisters, and then— and then we weren’t. And I let it happen. I let it drift. She said she’d never forgive me.”

  He doesn’t believe her. Who could not forgive this goddess? He, he would forgive her anything; does forgive her anything. He feels a surge of an idea inside him – a way to help both of them. To get her away from Penn, this boy who is ruining her, breaking her.

  “So go back. I’ll come with you. We’ll go now!”

  But Bea shakes her head. “She won’t be there. She’s at school.”

  “Oh.”

  “I could write?” she says.

  He thinks of the letter his sister Brigid has sent. Thinks of how she must have called the college, begged for his address. But he doesn’t want to hear about her sorry life: the new husband and the nights down the John Bull and the days on the line at the sweet factory. Doesn’t want to tell her about his brilliant one. Not until it is just that – until it is the shining thing he always said it would be.

  But Bea’s life is already gleaming.

  “Can I be in your Eden?” he asks.

  “Yes. You can have a lead part. You can be Prospero.”

  “And this is our island,” he declares. “Our Eden. Our paradise.”

  Bea smiles, and lets him lead her into the garden. He shows her the orchids like bees, the mosaics patterning the paths, the wild parakeets. She is happy. She will write to Evie again. She’ll tell her she misses her. That she can’t wait to see her, can’t wait to be at Eden. That it will be like it was before, for all of them – her and Evie and Tom. That she will make it right between them, she will.

  But later, as they sit in the summerhouse and the light fades and air cools, Bea realizes that this perfect day will soon be gone, and she knows that she won’t write. Not again. Her life is here now. Has to be here.

  Her and Penn. Not Evie. Penn.

  AUGUST 1988

  I’M WOKEN by the phone. Its insistent trill cuts shrilly through the fog of sleep, a cruel alarm clock. I fumble for my watch on the dressing table, open one eye. It’s twenty past eight. “Who would call at this time?” I think. “Who would call at all?”

  And then I’m wide awake, sat bolt upright. Aunt Julia. Aunt Julia would call. Because Tom’s told her about Penn. And she wants to know what’s going on. What do I think I’m playing at? Why is he staying there? Where is he sleeping? Where am I sleeping? I hear her questions bombard me in my head.

  Or maybe it’s not her but Penn’s mother asking why he didn’t take the train. Why he never made it to Venice.

  The phone stops, and I feel minute, momentary relief, but then it starts again, each ring jabbing at me: get up, Evie, get up and explain yourself. I have to answer it. If I don’t she’ll ring again, and again until I do. I throw back the sheet and run across the landing in my vest top and knickers, my feet hitting every creaking board under the carpet then slapping against slate, the scratches from yesterday stinging with every step, reminding me, punishing me for that, for those feelings.

  I’ll tell her just enough and no more, I think. I’ll say he was a friend of Bea’s. Just a friend. It’s the truth, I lie.

  I pick up the green receiver, and brace myself. “Hello?”

  “Evie?”

  The voice is cut-glass, the kind that orders gin and tonic or a Martini shaken, not stirred. It’s her.

  And it’s me. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, it’s Evie.”

  “Well who else would it be, I suppose.” Her voice sounds resigned. Not angry. Just, well, resigned.

  I try to laugh. But it sounds odd, more like a cough. As if I have forgotten how.

  “Are you ill?”

  “No,” I reply quickly. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

  “Well, good. That’s good.”

  We speak for five minutes. Five minutes of “are you eating enough?” and “how is the weather?” and “have they started the bedrooms yet?” Five minutes of saying nothing. Because there is nothing to explain. Tom didn’t call. He didn’t tell her.

  I’m safe.

  So why do I feel anything but?

  I try to stay in. I try to shutter myself inside the foot-thick granite walls of Eden, and ignore the call of the creek, the call of him.

  I take clothes from the dryer, mechanically fold them into piles: socks, knickers, T-shirts. I make myself toast, cut it into soldiers, chew methodically on one before tipping the rest in the bin. I watch the decorators with their tins of hide-all magnolia, offer to help. But it’s suffocating, all of it: the repetitive slap-slop of paint on walls, the inane sing-song of the radio, the creeping change with every completed wall or window frame. My chest is tight; the absurdity, the pointlessness of my efforts a vice around my ribcage. I can’t breathe. The now-dry heat of the house has given way to a new humidity, the air heavy with the pressure of rain that will not fall, as if it
is conspiring to taunt me, goad me into action.

  As if it knows there’s only one place I want to go.

  I can see him sat on the deck facing the water, his back to me. He’s writing something, a diary maybe, or a postcard. At the sound of my steps he stops, puts it away in his bag and turns to me.

  And he smiles.

  And my heart sings.

  “I thought you weren’t coming.”

  “I wasn’t,” I say. “But then I did.” It’s garble. But I can’t say the words, can barely find them.

  “You want to swim?”

  I shake my head.

  “Go somewhere then? Calenick?”

  “Not Calenick,” I say quickly. I couldn’t stand people’s quick, sly glances, nor their pity.

  “Where then?”

  “The point,” I say.

  “The point?”

  “You’ll see.”

  You can’t walk to the point. There are no roads. Even from the right side of the river it’s a two-mile hike through a tangle of thickets and barbed wire. From here, there’s only one way to reach it: by boat.

  My back to the sun, I pull hard on Jorion’s oars. The wood complains, creaking in the rowlocks: “Where have you been?” “Why have you forgotten us?”

  But I’m here now— we’re here. He leans back against the stern of the boat, watching me, as I watch him. He’s changed. His skin is darker now, his hair blonder. He looks like a wild boy, a local. Or like Pan. The Pan of our imaginings.

  The hull scrapes something, unseating him.

  “Shit,” I exclaim. “Sorry.”

  I turn to see the black of sea-slick rock. There are quick bursts of white, like smoke, as water shatters against its ragged edges, then settles. We’re here.

  I throw the painter out, and, jumping, follow it, tie it to the iron ring at the foot of the cliff, a relic from the tin trade maybe, or smugglers. Though Bea said it was left for us, put there especially.

  “So this is it,” he says.

  “Are you disappointed?”

  “No. Never.”

  “It’s a climb though.”

  “I like heights.”