Eden (9 page)

Penn takes her to meet him, at the Commons, for he still goes to work, despite this thing that grows like mould inside him. They walk hand in hand behind him down the green-carpeted corridors for tea on the terrace above the grey-brown waters of the Thames
.

“So what do your parents do?” his father asks her
.

“My father’s a midget strongman in the circus,” she deadpans
.
“And my mother was a charwoman.”

Penn kicks her under the table and she fails to stifle a laugh
.

But the old man smiles, lets himself be the butt of the joke and Penn squeezes her hand and she knows she’s done the right thing. She is proud and pleased that being Bea is the right thing
.

Later she tells Penn of the river at home, the creek, how different its greenness, its wooded banks are to this vast muddy thing called the Thames. She tells him she’ll take him there one day, to Eden
.

“You can meet everyone,” she promises. “There’s this old woman at the Post Office – Mrs Polmear – she’s like a walking gossip column. And the Rapsey twins – Joyce and Edna. Can you imagine still living with your sister when you’re in your fifties?”

Penn shrugs and Bea remembers with shame that, like her, he is an only child. But unlike her, he doesn’t have an Evie
.

“You’ll like her,” she says. “She’s like me.”

“Is she strange, then?” he laughs and pulls her to him
.

“Yes, very,” she laughs
.

“Does she look like you?” He traces his finger down her collarbone, pushes his hand into her bra to feel her breast
.

“A bit,” she breathes
.

“Does she kiss like you?”

But Bea doesn’t answer, for his mouth is on hers, his hands are on her. Evie is forgotten, drowned out in the surge of their desperation, their need and the swell of The Smiths on his new CD player singing, “There is a Light”
.

By Easter she’s given up her room in halls and moved the flyblown mirror into the house on Telegraph Hill, her beaded dresses hung about the walls like bright butterflies pinned and mounted on paper
.

And James watches it all, a spectator at a vital match as Penn and Bea’s lives take centre stage, and his own is pushed further into the wings. Bea misses lunches with him, leaves notes pinned to the board to tell him she can’t run lines because she’s going to the country for the weekend
.

“You’re disappearing,” he tells her
.
“He’s taking you all for himself.”

But she laughs it off. “He doesn’t own me. He doesn’t tell me what to do.”

No one tells Bea what to do, least of all him. So he tries another tactic
.

“I miss you,” he admits. “I miss how we used to be.”

“I miss you too,” she says. “We’ll see each other, I promise. It’s just … it’s hard right now, with his dad and everything. He needs me.”

I
need you, he thinks. And as he looks into her eyes, he knows she needs him too. He just has to wait
.

AUGUST 1988

WHEN I
open my eyes he hasn’t flown away on his feathered wings. Yet I’ve moved: I’m out on the deck now. He must have carried me here for air, and light.

I can see him more clearly now. There’s no halo, of course not. Just a tangled mop of hair. And in place of an angel’s robe he’s wearing a faded T-shirt and tight black jeans. He’s not an angel. Yet he’s not from this world either, or he’d be in deck shoes and chinos like the weekenders, or work clothes like the village boys.

I sit up, my head dizzy from the fall, from the fright. “Penn,” I say. “You’re Penn.”

He frowns. “Who are you?”

“Evangeline,” I say. “Evie.”

“Not Bea,” he says. “God, of course not.” He looks away then, as if he’s fighting back tears, or anger, or disappointment.

“No.” I am nobody. I am the not-Bea, the wannaBea. The never-will-Bea.

But yet, to him, I am somebody. Somebody he has heard of, at least.

“Her cousin,” he says, remembering.

I nod, my own face frowning now.

“You weren’t at her funeral,” I say.

“I—”

“Your father,” I blurt. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… He – he died?” I say pointlessly.

“Y–yes. He died. I couldn’t come then. I’m— I’m so sorry. I—”

“It’s OK,” I interrupt quickly.

His accent is rootless. Not the braying drawl I imagined it would be.

“You came now,” I say. Like he said he would in his letter. He came anyway.

“Yes, I— I hitched.”

“She hitched all the time,” I say. “To Calenick. To Plymouth even.”

But he’ll know this. He won’t want to hear it now and be reminded of her. I fall silent again.

“What? What is it?”

“Nothing,” I say. I hug my arms around my legs. It is hot, yet I am shivering, my skin dappled with goosebumps. “She’s gone,” I say. “Aunt Julia – Bea’s mum, I mean. If that’s who you came to see,” I add.

“It’s not who I came to see.”

Then who? Why come? To see Eden? To see
me
? I push the last thought away as I feel my face redden. He was Bea’s. I peek a sideways glance at him – at this last piece of her, and then I realize why he’s here. He doesn’t want Eden or me. He wants to see Bea. Or rather traces of her, particles of her. He wants to piece them together so he can know all of her, remember everything.

Just as I do.

He reaches a hand out to me. I take it; let him pull me up. “I’m sorry I scared you,” he says. And he smiles. And I see what Bea saw. That he has strength and grace and beauty. And secrets. Bea loved secrets.

I let his hand drop then, awkward again, shove mine into my pocket. “Me too,” I reply. Because I know that for a split second, in the shadow of the boathouse, with his body blocking the sun, he thought I was her. He thought I was a kind of resurrection, a ghost, a double.

“I should go,” he says. “This was a mistake. I—”

And I feel another sudden lurch of fear at the loss of him so quickly. “Stay,” I say, the word pushing past my lips, blurting out before I can trap it under my tongue.

“What?”

“I mean it,” I say. “Stay. For a bit. If you want.”

“I want,” he replies.

And I feel the heaviness seep out of me, I am light as air, as gossamer. “You can sleep here in the boathouse,” I say, words falling over themselves now. “We used to. And there’s running water. A stove, look. And I can get you stuff. Food and things. From the house.”

He nods as he watches me whirl around him. I am dancing with determination, and desperation and delight. But then he catches me, stops me mid-turn.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he says. “About me, I mean.”

“But why?”

“I— I just don’t want them talking… I mean I don’t want to talk to other people. My father— I shouldn’t even be here. If I’m going to stay, let’s keep it a secret. Just … just between you and me.”

I feel heat in my face again. He wants to talk to me. He wants to know me. And in that second I understand. We can make it better for each other. I am all that is left of her for him and he is all that is left of her for me. We both feel guilty. We both argued with her.

“I won’t tell,” I say. “Promise. Wait here. I won’t be long.”

And I am flying again, up the path to Eden. And I feel it, I feel how I used to feel with Bea at the beginning of summer. On the brink of something; an adventure.

An awfully big adventure.

MAY 1988

THE CROWD
heaves in one violent surge to the stage, and James and Bea are carried on the wave, their cheers lost in the sound of fiddles and a drunken drum roll
.

He saved weeks for this gig – two tickets to the Pogues at the Town and Country Club. His grant money set aside in an old tobacco tin, he’s been living instead on baked beans and end-of-night chips blagged from Nihal downstairs; spent his evenings soaking up the free heat of the library to avoid putting another 50p in the meter
.

It was worth it though, because now he’s here, with her, in the crush of bodies, and the smell of sweat, smoke and cheap alcohol
.

She pulls him to her and they reel to the sound of
“Sally MacLennane”. Their arms linked, he spins her around. She is a bright star in orbit and he is at the centre of her universe. This is all he wants, all he’s ever wanted. And it is here and it is now. Thanks to his tickets, and her guilt
.

The crowd washes stagewards and another jigging couple – a pair of beery Belfast boys – knocks into them, pushing her into his arms and crushing her against his chest. He looks down in panic, but she is laughing, intoxicated by the raw thrill of it, and delight rises again in him too
.

“It’s you and me against the world,” he shouts
.

“We’re Bonnie and Clyde,” she laughs, “Superman and Lois Lane.”

And he
is
Superman. He feels it inside him tonight; mercurial, unstoppable. He pulls her face to his and kisses her hard, pushing his fire into her
.

But she jerks her head away. “Just don’t… Don’t spoil it. OK?”

“I’m sorry. I thought—”

“Dance with me,” she pleads. “I want to dance.”

And she does. He watches as she spins on the arm of a stranger, his bright star disappearing into the crowd, out of his orbit
.

Bea is still spinning as she gets into bed beside Penn three hours later, giddy with the thrill of beer and dancing, and … James. She pushes the thought from her mind, along with the vestige of the girl she used to be. That girl – the one who just wanted to be wanted, who let all the boys kiss her just for the satisfaction of knowing that for those few minutes she was the centre of their world – is gone, has to be. For now she has everything she has wanted: this new life, this new love, real love. She won’t ruin it
.

She curls her still-clothed body round Penn’s sleeping form, feels him stir and waken
.

“Bea?” he asks
.

“Yes,” she murmurs. “It’s me.”

It’s me and you. We are Bonnie and Clyde, she thinks. Not me and James. Me and you
.

AUGUST 1988

THE CREEK
is an ever-moving thing, bringing endless possibility on its slow, brown tide. In the winter it’s swollen with rains and snow, taking with it a wash of china clay from the docks upriver. In the summer, the surge of seawater carries tin cans and crisp packets, the chewed balsa wood of lolly sticks; detritus from other lives. More than once it has borne a body, bloated and blue, its swollen limbs catching on the banks.

But today it has brought something else. Someone else. He is flotsam washed up by the water – not a Coke can or the torn, faded wrapper of a Cornetto, but real treasure; a pirate’s chest, a message in a bottle. A piece of Bea. He has been sent to me. And so I must do all I can to keep him. So I pack anything and everything, guessing at what he likes and what he’ll need: a fruit cake from the larder; plastic bottles to collect water from the holy well; new batteries for the cassette player; a toothbrush and paste; a copy of
The Tempest
, its margins a scrawl of O-level notes and doodles of sea creatures; a tin of humbugs, striped like bees; half a bottle of French brandy kept in the larder for Crêpes Suzette, its dark amber diluted by the tea Bea added to hide her late night swigs; my sleeping bag, still fusty with the grass and dust of last summer. I pack for a single sleepover and for a month of Sundays. There’s so much I want to give him. By the time I get to the back door, I’m laden with goods, like a packhorse. I have had to leave behind a box of chocolates tied up in a scarlet ribbon, a jar of preserved peaches, a book of poems, its illustrations edged in gilt. No matter. I can come back for them later. There will be tomorrow. Please let there be tomorrow.

I stumble down the step, like a smuggler carrying contraband, and a heavy secret. The sleeping bag knocks against my thigh and the mints rattle inside their tin, like a hive of sweet insects. I am so lost in the story of it all that I have forgotten to listen out for the tick-tock of the crocodile.

“Woah!”

I yelp in shock and feel the worn rubber of my shoe slip on the gravel. Then two hands grasp my arms as I pitch forward. I don’t have to look up to know who it is. I can feel it in the callouses of his fingers, in the surety of his grip: Tom.

“I’m fine.” I shrug his arms away and right the pack on my bag.

“Are you running away?” he asks.

“Yes,” I lie. To Neverland, I think.

“Can I come?”

I panic, blurt out a staccato “No”. Then I panic again at this betrayal of my secret – Penn’s secret. “I— I’m just going to the creek. On my own.” I add. “I need to be alone.”

He nods, understanding. “Well, I’m glad you’re out.”

I change the subject. “I thought you’d gone to Liskeard.”

“I did,” he smiles. “But the market’s over,” he says. “It’s gone one.”

“Really?” Have I been at the house for over an hour? I feel panic rise in me, a swarming in my fingers and toes willing me to move, to run.

“Why? What’s the hurry?”

“Nothing,” I say quickly. “Just, time flies and all that.”

“When you’re having fun?”

I stare at him, incredulous. “This isn’t about ‘fun’. This is so far from fun.”

This is about something else, something more. It’s about death, and life – keeping Bea alive. Penn has memories of Bea I must dig out, gather up like cowrie shells or sea glass. For my own are clouded with time and dust now, and distorted by cruel words and selfishness. Whereas Penn’s, Penn’s will be clean, true, new. He can tell me new thoughts, new hopes, new fears. He can explain why she was coming, and why she never arrived. Maybe, maybe.

“I— I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” His hand covers his mouth as if to keep him from saying anything else.