Paradise Read Free Page B

Not just because of the train. But because all that matters is us: me, her, and Finn. Stuff comes and goes. We are our own world and possessions.
    “What about my chair?” Finn begs.
    Mum looks at the tiny wooden thing, made by his grandpa, his “nonno”— Luka’s dad. Too small for Finn to squeeze into now, so a plush giraffe and Buzz Lightyear lie tangled together on the worn pine, an improbable pair. “There’ll be furniture there,” she says. “Or we can get new stuff.”
    What with?
I think. Mum hasn’t got a job. Hasn’t had one for a year now. And before that they only lasted a few months before she’d start turning up late, or not at all. Or argue and get fired. But I don’t say anything. Because I know what she’s doing. She’s starting again. She wants new things. New people. And so I fit my world into two suitcases. My jeans, the denim soft and faded with two years of washing, but Cass’s name in a heart stubbornly ingrained in black Bic on the knee. My cowboy boots that I begged for for months because Cass had a pair. My paints and sketch pad, every page filled with graphite lines: Finn eating a Cornetto, the ice cream trickling down his chin; Luka sitting at the table, playing guitar. Moments gone. Dead. I push the pad down to the bottom of the blue vinyl. My secret.
    Cass comes over to say good-bye. She’s crying, crocodile tears welling in the corners of her eyes, then slipping over her waterproof mascara, saying how I have to get a mobile because it’s my human right and Mum is abusing me or lying, even, that it’ll radiate my brain but if I don’t, then she’ll e-mail or write, even, like in a film, with proper paper and everything. Then she checks her makeup in the mirror, the gold frame exposed, naked, the notes binned, necklaces hanging in the Salvation Army. Says she has to go because she’s meeting Stella down at Cinderella’s. Then she gets up and hugs me, and fans her eyes, as if she’s willing the tears to stay in. But I know she won’t cry again, because there’s only so much that her Maybelline can take, and because Ash is going to be at Cinderella’s, too. I know this because she’s wearing a crop top, her tan tummy a flash of brown goose bumps between the red check and denim blue.
    And I don’t cry either. Not then. Not when we close the door for the last time and leave the note on Mrs. Hooton’s mat; not on the 36 when we pass Oliver Goldsmith Primary, where Cass and I first met; not when we’re on Vauxhall Bridge and I look down the river at the Eye and the Houses of Parliament and the picture-postcard London.
    But now, sitting in the InterCity on Platform 5, my eyes fill with tears, as my head fills with insects, the mayflies we’re leaving behind. I think of Luka coming back to the flat to find someone else in our place and his stuff in a box in the hallway. Of Finn’s “nonno” and “nonna,” in a flat just a mile from here, Polaroids of Finn and me grinning out from the silver frames that crowd their windowsills like an army of memories. And I’m scared that we will die and disappear; that they won’t care; that we are ephemera, too. And I’m scared we’re not; that we are more than fragile wings and faded photographs; that part of them will be missing forever.
    I hear the shrill note of the conductor’s whistle, the last-minute clatter of bags and feet on the platform before the doors are slammed, and I am suddenly aware I am trapped in this tin carriage, being taken away from my life to a new one I’m not even sure I want. The insects are in my stomach now, and I stand suddenly, nauseous, panicking.
    “Billie?” Mum questions.
    “I need the loo,” I say. I lurch down the aisle, pushing past tutting men in suits, clutching at the backs of seats to steady myself and push me closer to the exit. My cases are at the bottom of the luggage rack. Too heavy to pull out now. Not enough time. They’re just stuff, I say to myself.
    But when I get there,