Authors: Joanna Nadin
The song is over, its three-minute perfection fading to static. Seamus holds himself in its comforting hum until the talking and walking and eating and evacuating that continues around him in a ceaseless, mindless cycle in this house of cards penetrates the paper-thin walls of his room. He hears Brigid singing tunelessly along to a song in her head, by some vacuous pop star that she has fallen hopelessly, irrevocably in love with, until next week. Hears the rhythmic thud, thud of his half sister Siobhan jumping rope in her room. Hears the bang, bang, bang of Deirdre banging her broom handle on the ceiling in retort. Hears the shuddering stop of his da’s Transit van outside. This van, with its slipping clutch, choking exhaust, and back full of valves and ballcocks and plastic piping, is promised to him one day; a day his da can proudly add “& son” to the decal “Gillespie” on the back and sides
.
A day that they both secretly, silently, know will never come
.
The van door clunks shut, and a few seconds later the front door slams in echo. And then the sounds of the house alter to accommodate this incomer. The skipping and singing come to a faltering halt to be replaced by the rattle of the chip pan and the clatter of frozen fishfingers onto the grill tray. Then the TV is flicked on, the petty arguments start and Seamus drops the needle back on the record and lets Morrissey and Marr drown out the disappointment of this flock-papered, broken-biscuit, so-called life
.
JULY 1988
THE PILLS
ran out three days ago. The last satisfying, slow descent into a place devoid of sharp feelings, where hard edges are blurry, soft as cotton wool, where I am comfortably numb. Now, as I lie awake on my bed in the room Bea and I shared, I see everything. I hear everything.
Eden is almost empty. Like a rat from a sinking ship Uncle John fled to the city after the funeral. Someone called Harry had phoned with an emergency, and they couldn’t do without him. And now there is only Aunt Julia, Call-Me-Cassie, and me.
And Bea.
I hear her. I see her everywhere. The thud of a hardback book slipping from her hand onto the faded cabbage-rose carpet. Her soft breathing when I would wake early on summer mornings, roused by the crack of sunlight across my pillow, while she, shaded, slept on past breakfast. Her leg dangling from beneath a tangled sheet, fishing for cooler air, the toenails a chipped scarlet stolen from Aunt Julia’s dresser, matching my own. Always matching. Matching pirouetting ballerina pillowcases, matching custard-yellow candlewick covers, matching mule slippers we begged for from Dingles in Plymouth, that flick-flacked so satisfyingly on the flagstone floors.
“Paper dolls” they used to call us: cut from the same tall, pale sheet. Our legs measured exactly twenty-nine inches, as if mine had defied their two-year disadvantage and determinedly grown to equal hers. Our noses were freckled in the same spattering pattern, though she had thirty-seven, and I forty-three. Our hair bobbed to our chins in an identical shade of brown. Somehow the few genes we shared through my mother and her father had conspired to make up for our lack of siblings and blueprinted instead into cousins.
My grandfather said I was a loner as a child. But I wasn’t, not really. I was just in a sort of limbo, a without-Bea time, when I got on with the long business of waiting for Aunt Julia to bring her back here for the holidays so that the world could start turning again. Even at school I preferred to play my own private hopscotch rather than join in the noisy games of tag or stuck-in-the-mud or kick-the-can. For why would I want to chase and be chased by girls who weren’t as brilliant, or bright, or beautiful as Bea? No, I would wait until Bea returned and then I would teach her all I had learned – to catch pollack from the harbour wall, to body surf the waves that crashed onto the gritty sand of the cove. And she in turn would teach me to plait my hair, paint kohl on my eyelids, to French kiss my pillow in practice for the real thing.
Until one day she didn’t.
I feel a surge of nausea as the truth I have dampened down is now borne by butterflies, bright, glistening into the air: I didn’t lose Bea in the fire. Nor even last summer when she kissed Tom, and then left for college in London. The truth is she had already slipped away from me.
It started when she was fifteen years old and I just fourteen. She’d been to stay with a school friend – Kate Flint, “Flinty”, who had a perm and a parrot called Longjohn, and whom I loathed and admired in equal measure. When Bea returned, eight days, ten hours and seventeen minutes later, she was laden with three things: a copy of
Lace
, ten plastic bangles that clattered annoyingly up and down her arms whenever she moved, and the faded purple of a bruise just above her right shoulder.
At first I felt delight, that she and Flinty had fought like children, that their tight-knit affair was unravelling. “Oh, Evie, it’s not a bruise,” she laughed. “It’s a hickey.”
She told me about him. His name was Miles, the best friend of the brother of Flinty’s friend Ruby Woo. He was a whole year older, and a whole twenty pages of the
Teen Guide to Relationships
more experienced. She whispered the words across the four-foot-wide strip of carpet and discarded socks and battered books that separated our beds. Yet that night it felt as wide as the Atlantic. Because, while I lapped up the story like sweet sugar slush, it left a bitter aftertaste on my tongue, for I knew she’d said it all before. That Flinty had heard it first in fuller, more lurid detail, had giggled with her over the practised way he undid her bra, gasped that he’d asked her to touch his “thing”, clapped her hands together at their ill-thought-out promise to duck school and meet under the clock at Waterloo on the first Friday in October.
And so it began. The paper-thin sliver of air between us became a gaping chasm that widened on a weekly basis: The time she had her ear pierced twice in the back-street salon in Plymouth while I lay shivering in bed with unseasonal flu. The time she “forgot” we’d said we’d paint the boathouse door cherry red, like Madonna’s lips, and I came down to the creek to see a half-finished mess of pea green and Bea inside with a boatbuilder’s boy called Cal. The time she didn’t come for the holidays at all. Went to Switzerland to spend two weeks in a chalet with Greta Johansson and her two brothers, and a ski instructor called Nils.
And the things we shared – our skinny, boy-thin bodies, our wide lips, our pale-as-milk skin – disappeared, disguised under so many layers of ra-ra skirts and Maybelline mascara and a lipstick named Twilight Teaser. Until her things – her new make-up, her new clothes, her new self – became too much for our childish room with its twin wooden beds and yellow spreads and circus-themed wallpaper. And so Aunt Julia moved her to the attic, to an ivory tower and canopied double bed, where she could whisper under the covers with the endless stream of schoolfriends – the Hatties and Letties and Charlie-not-Charlottes who were driven down for the sea air, and the swimming, and the novelty of village boys. While I was left behind with her childish toys; her rejects.
I stare at Bea’s old bed and the menagerie of stuffed animals that still colonizes it – three grey rabbits with pale silk ears, a worn plush monkey, a real-fur koala with a hard plastic nose and scratchy toes. They stare glassily back at me like a malevolent zoo. I shiver, with cold, or something else, sadness maybe. I can’t stay here, here with the circus on the walls and the zoo on the bed and the No Bea. I slip out of bed and pad along the landing, my bare feet instinctively avoiding the boards that creak or crack under pressure; a path mapped fastidiously by Bea and me years ago to avoid capture by pirates or monsters, or worse, Aunt Julia.
At the end of the landing, I turn, and start the steep, narrow climb to the attic. The door is shut, has been shut since Bea’s last visit home from college last year. I feel the ridges of the beehived handle rough in my palm, then turn it slowly, and push.
There is no phantom, no brush of gossamer shroud against me, only a gasp of stale air, as if the room has been holding its breath. But as it exhales I feel my own lungs stopper up. There’s no need to turn on the light; the moon shows me all I need to see: The mirror, obscured now by only a thin curtain of beads and ribbons, those that were not taken to London. Knickers still spilling out of the drawer, a froth of lace and coloured silk. Make-up spilling across the dresser top, nail polish dripping onto the floor, great gobs of blood red on the pale carpet. The unmistakeable cloying note of her bottle of White Musk. And a book – a battered board-covered edition of
Peter Pan
.
We never stopped loving that story. We played for hours at being Peter and Wendy, Hook and the tick-tocking crocodile, the insolent Tinkerbell. Yet we both knew that really we were the Lost Boys, raised by Eden, and by an array of Wendys – the housekeepers my grandfather employed; my infant school teacher Mrs Penrice; Hannah – Tom’s mother, and my own mother’s friend.
I put my hand on the dresser to steady myself and feel it knock something to the floor. When I stoop to retrieve it I see it is an unopened letter addressed to Bea. I don’t recognize the writing, our address mapped out in a deep, blue-black ink, the loops extravagant yet exact. I check the postmark: Hampshire. Hampshire, I think, Hampshire. I know someone who lives there. I dig into my head, poke fingers into dark recesses. And that’s when I see it: the date. This isn’t an old letter. This letter was sent the day that Bea died.
I sit on the edge of her princess-and-the-pea bed, the envelope crackling in my hand. I wrestle with myself for pointless seconds before the need to read the letter beats any reason not to and I slide a finger under the flap and open it in one clean, swift rip.
Cobham House
Wick Lane
Tetlow
Hampshire
6th July 1988
Bea
I’m so sorry. I’m a fool. I’ve always known that. Only you – beautiful trusting you – didn’t see it, or maybe you just refused to, chose to overlook it. But I know you can’t overlook this, and I don’t want you to. I deserve to be punished. But I want – hope – that I can persuade you I deserve forgiveness too. What happened – that was the old Penn. The one I was before I met you and you changed my world, and changed me. I got scared I was losing you, that’s all
.
But Bea, I can’t lose you. You haven’t just changed my world, you ARE my world. And I want to be yours again. I want to be everything to you and do everything with you. I’m glad you’ve gone home, in an odd way. Because now I’ll get to go there too. I want to see Eden while I still can. I want to meet Evie. Is she like you? I hope so. There should be more people like you – a thousand Beas. But you will always be the original. The most-Bea of all
.
I’m writing nonsense now, aren’t I? Oh, Bea, I have to talk to you. I called but no one’s answering the phone. Call me when you get this and I’ll explain and I’ll beg and I’ll apologize and you can make me suffer all you want as long as you agree to see me. And then I’ll come. As soon as I can, I promise, I’ll come
.
I love you
Penn xxx
I read it only once. Once is enough to know how much he loved her, and she loved him. And I feel a strange satisfaction, a relief even, that she told him about me.
But it’s not that which makes my heart suspend its frantic rhythm for a single beat. It’s that Bea was coming home, to Eden.
I feel the grief mixed with the guilt come over me slowly. If I’d written back to her, if I’d told her I forgive her, would she have come sooner? Would she still be alive? Or would she see through the lie it was?
A tremor at first, distant and deep, then with only this faintest of warnings it washes through me, over me like a tidal wave. I am helpless before it and begin to sob, great heaving racks that judder through my body. I cry until the salt stings my cheeks, until snot tangles in my hair, until I cannot breathe, cannot see, cannot weep any more. And then, in her bed, I fall into a black, dreamless sleep.
AUGUST 1987
PENN HANGS
over the side of his too-small bed in this too-big house in Hampshire. Lets the blood fill his head until he can hear it singing in his ears, until it drowns out the noise and the nausea. He opens his eyes and sees a used condom, a flaccid thing like a shed snakeskin. Was there a girl here? Is there a girl here? He reaches with one leg, sweeps it delicately across the sheets. Nothing
.
But there was. Yes, he can see her now. Or parts of her: slivers of her skin, dark against his own; the blue-black gloss of her hair, like the wing of a starling; the scar on her thigh, a red, angry worm. Though he can’t recall her name or her face with any precision
.
He hauls himself up then, reaches for the Zippo and the remains of a spliff sat fatly among the ashes on the bedside table
.
He’s still smoking when the door opens and his father appears, stone-faced and sweating in his immaculate suit and old school tie
.
“I suppose they all do it, smoke this – this stuff, do they?” he says finally. “These new friends of yours. These
theatre
people.” He spits the word out as if it is poison
.
Penn sighs, stubs it out, shrugs. “No.”
The room fills with a silence heavier than smoke. It will suffocate them both if someone does not speak soon
.
It is his father who gives in first, as it always is. “You’re wasting your time,” he says, for the fourth time that summer. “I offered you that job at the Commons. Low wages I know, for now. But think where it would lead.”
Penn stares at the ceiling, half listens as his father lists the golden opportunities he is throwing away, snubbing, as if they were no more than a paper round or a Saturday job at the butcher’s: the glittering people he will meet, the glittering career he could have, the chance of a seat of his own someday. He gets louder, more desperate with each offering, until he dissolves into a fit of rattling coughing
.