Paradise Read Free Page A

don’t know how tall he is, what color his hair is. I’m guessing pretty tall, because I’ve already got four inches on Mum. And dark. But I don’t know for sure. There are no photos. No letters. And Mum doesn’t talk about him any more than she talks about Will or her parents. I have no idea who he is. Maybe an artist. Because this must come from somewhere. Like Finn’s guitar hands. These things don’t just happen, and Mum can’t draw. Her birds are like aliens. Blobs with slits for eyes and wings in the wrong places. But I know I’m good. Good enough, anyway.
    And for the first time in a long time I want to know. Because I figure unless I know who he is, I don’t know who I am. Or who I want to be. And that’s when I decide we can go. Because I want to find him. To find me.

HET SITS
at her mother’s dressing table. She is ten. Too young to be wearing the lipstick that coats her mouth and cheeks; thick red grease, like a clown child. Too young for the cloud of Chanel that surrounds her. Too young, too, for the tears that are trickling down her cheeks, taking a layer of soot-black mascara with them, running rivulets to her chin before dripping noiselessly onto the white smocking of her dress.
    You can’t cry in a mirror, she remembers. Can’t cry if you look at yourself. And so she stares hard at her reflection, willing the tears, this feeling, to stop. But Will’s fact is a lie after all. Or she is the exception. A freak. An aberration.
    She blinks away the inky salt of her tears and looks harder. She has her mother’s eyes, her mouth. Just like Will. So why is she so different? She repeats her father’s words silently to herself: “Why can’t you be more like your brother?” But the Het in the mirror doesn’t know either, just shrugs and lets another Elizabeth Arden tear stain her collar.
    Why can’t she be like him? Why can’t she feel like he does? Why can’t she dig for lugworms with Jonty, screaming with laughter as they disappear farther into the waterlogged sand, too quick for the steel of the spade? Why can’t she wake happy that the sun is drenching her bedspread, filling everyone it touches with drunken joy, pulling them to the beach, to the fairground, into café
s and arcades? Everyone except her. Why, instead, does she feel this grayness that not even lipstick can hide? This weight that keeps her inside the cold, quiet granite of the house and pins her to her bed for hours, staring wordlessly at a crack in the plaster.
    Then she hears the creak as her mother’s heels dig into the wide staircase, feels the minute change in air pressure. And Het stops sniffing and silently slips to the floor, crawling under the lace-edged valance of her parents’ bed, where she will stay for two hours, until her father’s anger-soaked baritone chases her out for supper.

FOR A MINUTE I think I’m going to chicken out. When we’re sitting at Paddington, I think,
I could do it.
I could get off the train right now. Go to Cass’s. Or back to the flat.
    Mr. Garroway doesn’t even know we’ve gone yet. Mum doesn’t want to ring. Knows he’ll come around and demand the back rent there and then. Rent we don’t have. Not yet. She says he’ll find out soon enough, when he turns up and all that’s left is an empty flat and a boiler that’s on the blink.
    Before we left, I looked around: at the pencil notches on the kitchen wall marking off the months and years of Finn’s growth in half-inch increments. Day-Glo magnets clinging to the fridge — the
f, i,
and
n
’
s
long missing — spelling out nonsense words now, gobbledygook. A picture of a horse by a seven-year-old me that I glued to the door because we’d run out of tape. Pieces of us.
    “But not us,” Mum says. “None of it. Just ephemera.”
    I looked it up. It’s an insect, a mayfly that only lives for a day or something. But I know what she means. I know why she made us pack the rest up and take bagful after bagful to the charity shop.