Eden (2 page)

She’d been sorry afterwards and had left a letter for Evie to say it was a mistake. But Evie would forgive her; she always did. Anyway, it was over now. She’d left them behind like the detritus of summer – lollipop wrappers and empty bottles and the deserted ice-cream stand. And here, in this breathless, beating city she will find him. The person who will end all that pathetic need, all that fooling around and flirting. She will meet an astonishing boy who will be all things at once: Superman and Lex Luthor – the dashing hero and the complicated, angry poet. And he will make her complete
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She’s missed the train into town and must wait for the next one. So she walks to the end of the platform, stands at its tip looking west into the very heart of the city. The metallic tracks gleam amber in the afternoon sun, snaking away from her with all the promise of the yellow brick road and Dick Whittington’s streets paved with gold. Like a butterfly unfurling its wings after a chrysalis winter, she spreads her arms and tips her head back, so that the heat and light can fall full on her face
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She’s aware then of a sound behind her; no, not a sound, a presence. She opens her eyes, turns her head to see who’s there, who is watching her. Of course they’re watching. Someone always is
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Then she smiles, for there is not one but two boys – men, even – staring at her. They’re not together but she recognizes both of them. She has seen them before around the theatre or in the student bar maybe. One of them leans against a pillar. His arms are tan and lithe, his hair curling round his ears. The other stands a few metres behind him: a paler, ghost-like version of the same. Thin, ethereal almost. Maybe it’s one of them, she thinks. Maybe he is the one. And she smiles again: a knowing, goading thing. Then turns back to her reverie, to the yellow road of train tracks
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I am Dorothy, she thinks. I am Dorothy and this is my Oz
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JULY 1988

BEA USED
to say that if grief was pie, I’d had a bellyful. A slice for no daddy, or one that wasn’t worth keeping. A slice for the mother who died when I was only three from a cancer that grew quickly, so that in two months she’d gone from dancing barefoot on the lawn to being buried in the earth in the village churchyard, leaving me at her childhood home with a handful of costume jewellery and even fewer memories. Another for the beloved grandparents – my guardians – who followed her into the salt-heavy soil when I was ten, orphaning me into the care of an uncle and aunt whose lives were bound to London. So that I was sent scuttling after Bea to boarding school in Berkshire, and Eden became no more than a holiday home. A fourth slice for the affair that cleaved my almost-family in two and meant that Eden would have to be sold soon to pay for the divorce. Four fat pieces of pie that should have filled me to the brim. And they would have done, but for Bea. Because whenever I was sad, whenever I remembered what I’d lost, Bea would take me by the hand and pull me into her bedroom, or down to the creek, whispering secrets and giggling with possibility.

Until she didn’t; and now she never would again. Her death was the final flourish – the rotten cherry on top.

The funeral is in the village down river from Eden. I know from lines of overheard conversations between the wobble-armed women cutting crusts off sandwiches in the pantry, from the misplaced confidences of Aunt Julia’s sister – Call-Me-Cassie – that my aunt had wanted the funeral near their old house in London, so Bea could lie in the grounds of a grand, show-off church, under a neatly clipped lawn, next to the double-barrelled offspring of Lords or at least hedge-fund managers. But Uncle John has made his one last stand before the decree absolute, and said that Bea’s home was always here no matter what Julia might imagine. And so she is coming to Calenick: to the same unpretentious, practical chapel where we buried my mother and grandparents; the same overgrown graveyard that Bea and I sat in on long, hot Saturdays, sucking Popsicles as we leant on headstones, making up stories about the dead. She will be placed near the same lychgate she kissed Jimmy Fenton under, promising him the world and for ever, and giving him only a feel of her bra strap and a wink on Christmas Eve from the back pew. She came to the graveyard then against Aunt Julia’s wishes, just as she’s doing now. And she will lie among the undistinguished Trelawneys, Penryns, Cardews instead of the Cadogans or Heath-Watsons of Highgate.

The church is full, its narrow, carved-oak pews packed with Bea’s university friends in theatrical hats and wild make-up. The locals are here too, duller in their drab suits and meagre lives, but still clamouring to pay their respects to the girl from the big house. That or pick up gossip. Mrs Polmear from the post office, the Rapsey twins – Joyce and Edna – still living together at the age of fifty-seven, Eddie Maynard from the garage who gave her toffees and bonbons from the pockets of his overall. Dotted among them are the boys who’d been with her, or wanted to: Jimmy, Eddie’s son Luke who worked the petrol pump in stained jeans and an oil-smeared smile, Billy Westcott from the Lugger.

I have a sudden memory of Bea as a child – seven or eight maybe, so I could have been no more than six. We’re sat outside the post office, waiting for Grandpa to collect his pension and the racing results from Mrs Polmear, when Bea is struck by the conviction that the shining fragments of mica in the hot pavement are diamonds. She is going to mine them and then make necklaces for us both. She picks away at them, working methodically, determination in her frown and bitten lip, until she releases them from their tar setting and realizes they are no more than dull shards of glass. As disappointing as this motley crew of almost-rans.

But two boys from the list are missing. Two real jewels.

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
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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
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“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
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“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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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