Paradise Read Free

I wonder if I’d be like that. If I’d shrink even further into myself. If I’d wither. Stop breathing. And I add it to my list of excuses.
    “I like London,” I say to Mum. “It’s alive. There’s museums and art galleries and stuff.” Every word practiced, knowing that this has been her argument in the past. Her reason for coming, for staying.
    But not now, not anymore. Mum says London is a bad place to raise a kid. She means Finn. “But what about me?” I say. “You raised me here. What’s so wrong with how I turned out?” But then I think of the time she and Luka came home early one night, and Cass was in their bedroom with Ash Johnson. You’d have thought it was me in there, the way she went off. And I said I’d begged Cass not to. But it’s hard to say no to her. And I remember what Mum said: that Cass was a bad influence, out of control. And what she didn’t say: that maybe I would go the same way. And I think,
Mum one, Billie nil.
    I say, “What about school? I can’t just leave after one term of A levels.”
    But Mum says there’re schools there. And they won’t have to use dog-food tins instead of Pyrex jars in science, won’t have a nursery for all the Year Elevens who’ve had kids.
    I say, “If they’re that good, then they’ll be full.”
    But Mum says she can homeschool until a place comes up.
    And I’m three points down.
    The next morning I try again.
    “You hate the sea,” I say.
    And it’s true. That time in Margate she sat up high on the sand, her back to the stone wall of the promenade, like she was fastened. A shell. Wouldn’t even let the water spread over her toes. Luka had to take me and Finn into the shallows.
    “I did,” she says. “But it’s different now. It’s all different, don’t you see? Don’t you understand?”
    And I nod. Because I want her to think we’re still all right. But I don’t. Understand, I mean. Why she wants it so bad. Why she wants to go back to the place she’s run from for sixteen years. To the people. She’s the one who’s always saying stuff like “It’s not where you come from, Billie, it’s where you’re going that matters” and “You can choose who you want to be. Who do you want to be, Billie?”
    But I don’t know. Who I am. Or who I want to be.
    I slump on my elbows and look at myself in the mirror. See myself in the scratched glass draped with necklaces, surrounded by gig passes and notes from Cass tacked to the chipped gold frame.
Who am I?
I think. Then I cringe at myself, at how lame it sounds. Like one of those self-help books that Mum’s friend Martha reads, or some
High School Musical
shlock. Only it’s not a book or a film. It’s real.
    And, as I stare at my reflection — at my hair, lank and dark, the opposite of Mum’s thick, wild blond; at my pale skimmed-milk skin — I wonder if she’s wrong. If it’s a lie that the past doesn’t matter. Because we’re made up of our past. Of our parents. I think of Finn. And I can see which bits are Mum, the same hair, the same smile, and which are Luka, his brown eyes, his wide hands — guitarist hands, Luka says. But when I look at me, there’s this stranger.
    Then something clicks inside me. This little switch. Or a seed. Like the pink and black of a runner bean, it splits and something grows. A need. And I pull open a drawer and scrabble under the postcards and the Tube tickets and the pink Post-its to find what I’m looking for. A blank piece of paper. And a pencil. And I start to draw. But not all of me. I take away the bits that are Mum, the cat eyes, the too-big lips that she hates, and Luka loves.
    I only draw what I don’t know. My nose, the high forehead, the hair. But when I look at the sketch, at what’s left, it’s like one of those facial composites on
Crimewatch.
Or that kids’ game where you slot different face sections in. Nothing fits. I can’t see him.
    I know nothing about Tom. My dad. Never have. Just that Mum loved him, and he left. I