Eden (11 page)

Then the harder things: how she would disappear into her head for hours, sometimes days, living out a fiction she had created for herself – the consumptive Gothic heroine, the heroin-ravaged rock star. She would refuse to speak unless it was in character, unless you acknowledged this make-believe as a reality. She would talk as though to an invisible audience that she carried with her at all times, to witness her every word, her every move, because she had this skewed belief that there was no point doing anything if nobody was there to watch you do it.

“That’s why I have to be in London,” she wrote. “Because it’s life itself, because it bursts with people to watch and be watched by. Eden kills me. It’s like a morgue. I don’t know how you stand it any more.”

Penn shrugs when I tell him this. “Some people need to escape, that’s all. Run away. No matter where they’re from.”

“Like you,” I say. “Coming here.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Did you run away before? To college, I mean. Was that what it was?”

He pauses. “I think we all did,” he says finally.

I imagine Bea and Penn and their friends, all of them fugitives, lost and found in their new world of bars and clubs and theatres and all the thrill of the fair. And for a second, just a second, I feel the ugly green of envy colour me.

But it wasn’t all perfect in London, was it? There was the row. The one that drove her away. The one he wrote about in the letter.

I hated him for it at first. For upsetting her. But now; now I see. He was confused, hurt, his dad was dying. It was understandable – whatever it was. And forgiveable. He needs to know he is forgiven, by someone.

“It’s OK,” I tell him.

“What is?” he asks.

“Whatever happened between you and Bea. I’m not prying. Just … I’m sure she would have forgiven you.”

“Like she forgave you?”

I feel my chest tighten. “Yes, I… It’s complicated.”

“What did you fight over?”

I pause.

“It’s OK, you don’t have to.”

“No. It’s not that.” It’s not. I do want to tell, I just want to find the right words. Words that don’t render me the fool I am— was.

“A boy,” I say at last. “Just a boy.” Then add quickly, “He meant nothing to her. That was why I was angry, I think.”

I’m scared I’ve said the wrong thing, shouldn’t have brought up Tom at all.

But when he speaks, it’s soft, sweet, not bitter. “I was like that,” he says. “Until Bea. She changed everything.”

“You did for her,” I blurt. “She told me. She said you were…” I trail off, embarrassed now.

“I was what?” he asks.

I look down – searching for something: courage, honesty – then meet his eyes. “The One. She said you were The One.”

He looks at me, lets the words sit there for one second, two, three. Then: “We should eat.”

And so we do, carving up bread with a pocket knife as if we are castaways on an island, or smugglers hiding from the king’s men.

Or from Tom.

He works in the mornings, so our hours at the creek are safe from spies, but every afternoon he comes to the house to see what I need: food, drink, company, maybe. I tell him the same list every time: milk, a loaf, more cheese. He never asks why I’m eating so much. Maybe he thinks I’m feeding the mice, or the gulls that wheel above the water hoping for fish and ending up with chip wrappers.

“Are you OK?” he asks.

“Better,” I reply. “Getting better.”

And I am, I’m sure of it. Because of Penn.

I don’t know what Penn does when I’m at Eden. I want to stay, to watch what happens, hidden in the woods – his invisible audience. But I have to play out my charade to Tom, keep Penn from Julia – keep any boy from Julia, for she’d think I was too young or too delicate. And so I do what I have to, day after day. As the sun grows stronger, and the days seem dizzy with light, as time slows, as the armies of ants abandon their long march at midday, and even the flies can manage no more than slow, drunken arcs, I go back to the dark of Eden.

Until one afternoon, my stomach heavy with bread and my head with the shandy I have found in the pantry, I fall asleep.

When I wake it’s late. The sun is high in the sky – it is two now, three even. Time to go.

“Shit.” I stagger to my feet, begin to gather my things, gather the evidence – bottles, a cracker packet, a can. A hand grasps mine, pulls me down again.

“Don’t go.”

“I have to,” I say, snatching up the rest of the rubbish, stuffing it into my bag. “I have to see someone. This – this friend of Julia’s.” It’s not a lie. He is. “If I’m late he’ll come looking for me. And he’ll find you.”

“Just half an hour. We could swim,” he says. “Please?”

And I know I cannot leave. I let my hands drop to my sides, let the bag slip from my shoulder to the floor.

“I knew you would,” he says.

I’ve swum in the creek since I was four; learnt to swim here. I have jumped off the pontoon in black school swimsuits, and gold bikinis; have even once, as a dare, dived in topless. And yet now I can’t take off my T-shirt because I’m embarrassed at what is underneath. Because I’m not her. Because underneath the black cotton triangles and beaded straps, I’m still a child; skinny, etiolated, my breasts barely more than the buds I had aged twelve. While she was a blossoming 32D, full-flowered at fifteen.

I was a freak, I thought, a weirdo. I would look at Alice Cordwainer’s black C-cups spilling brazenly out of her top drawer, while I stuffed back the horror of my white 30A Cross Your Heart behind my knee socks and knickers. And then I would lie, late at night in the dorm, and trade impossible promises for breasts.

“Please God make them grow and I will eat all my cauliflower at supper.”

“Please God make them grow and I will never ever swear again, not even if Bea tells me to.”

“Please God make them grow and I will believe in you for ever.”

But God had other fish to fry – Petra Deeds’ missing periods, Holly Stanton’s fat thighs, Bea’s playing Mary in the school play – and he didn’t hear my pleas, or chose to ignore them.

I take off my shorts but leave my T-shirt on, pull it down over my bikini bottoms.

“Take it off,” he says. “You’ll get soaked.”

“It’s fine,” I say quickly. “I’m just— cold. I’m a bit cold.”

He shrugs. It’s thirty degrees, maybe more. But he doesn’t question me. Just smiles, and then steps backwards, walking to the water’s edge as if he will balance, Jesus-like, on the surface.

But he is flesh and bone, and he sinks, a mere human after all, then rises a few seconds later, laughing as his arms bring with them a tangle of weed, the slick green fronds clinging to his skin and hair.

“Poseidon,” he yells. “I’m Poseidon.”

Not Jesus, then. A god.

“Come on,” shouts the god. “Come in.”

And so I do. I close my eyes, and I jump.

We swim slowly, silently, circling each other at first until he stops and stands in the falling tide, and watches me, waits for me.

I feel his eyes on me as I plough through the water, my arms reaching from breaststroke to crawl. I’m trying to shake the adrenalin that runs through me, tainting my blood, heating it. My feet skim the bottom, sending a swirl of sand up to the surface, so that I don’t see him reach out for me. He pulls me towards him. And then we are both standing, facing each other as if we’re in a ballroom, not the middle of a river. I drop my head, so that he can’t see what I’m thinking, but he brings it up again, raising my chin in his hand, moving it to touch my cheek, my hair.

And then he says it, faltering, but sure. “You … you look like her.”

I feel something shift in me, a giving, and I cannot tell if it is relief, or sorrow.

“I don’t.”

“You do. That day— the first day. I thought it was her. I really thought…”

“Sorry to disappoint,” I say.

“Oh, but you didn’t,” he insists. “You don’t.”

“I miss her,” I say.

“I miss her, too. But—”

“But what?”

“We…” But he trails off. And then we are wrapped in silence, waiting for the next step, the inevitable step.

And I could take it. I could wrap my fingers in his hair, pull his face down towards mine. I could close my eyes, wait for his breath, warm on my wet skin, his lips on mine.

But in the distance the four o’clock ferry sounds its low lament across the bay, and the silence is shattered, the moment gone.

“I have to get back,” I blurt.

And without waiting for an answer, without waiting to see if he follows me, I swim hard and fast back to the boathouse. I haul myself up on the deck, then, still dripping, my shorts and shoes in my hands, I run away.

Away from the possibility.

Away from the what ifs.

What if we kissed?

What if he loved me?

What if I loved him?

I run barefoot, stones digging into my soles, their sharp edges tearing into my skin. I run as if my life, my soul depended on it. Maybe it does. He is – he was – Bea’s. That’s a lifetime of Hail Marys or an eternity in hell, surely. I run without looking back, and without looking where I’m going.

And I run, of course I run, straight into Tom.

I panic, scrabbling for the shoes that I’ve dropped on the ground, as I scrabble for something to say.

“Hot, huh?” I manage, the words sounding like the panting of a dog.

Nothing.

“I— I went swimming.”

“No shit.”

I play a last desperate card. “We could go some time. Together. Maybe.”

But it’s not enough. He laughs, a short, mirthless sound. “Who is he?” he demands.

“Who’s who?” I try, as I go through the moments in my head. Replaying them, trying to work out what he’s seen. How much he’s seen.

“Oh come on, Evie. Don’t treat me like that. I saw you. You and him.”

I feel my fear – of being found out, of Penn having to leave, of losing this— this whatever it is – turn to bitterness and anger. “It’s none of your business. Not any more.”

“What are you saying? That we’re not friends any more? That it would have been my business, if what— if…”

“Say it,” I say. “If you hadn’t kissed her. Just admit it. Jesus.”

“Yes, I kissed her. Because I was drunk and confused and I couldn’t have what I really wanted. All right? Happy now?”

“No,” I snap. “No, I’m not happy. It was the next day, Tom. Like, hours later.”

“I know,” he blurts. Then quieter, “I know,” he repeats.

“We both made a mistake, OK? It was … it was never meant to be. For any of us.”

“You mean that?”

Do I? Ten days ago, a week, it would have been a lie, a big fat lie. But now. I think of Penn, of what he is, and what he might be.

“Yes. We were friends. That’s all.”

“We can still be.”

I look up at him from under a curtain of dripping hair. “If you were my friend, then you’d leave me be.”

He shakes his head. “Fuck’s sake, Evie.”

The word digs into me, biting. Not because I haven’t heard it before – Bea and I practised it, rolled it in our mouths, the delicious forbiddenness of it – but because I have never heard Tom say it. Not once. Not when his gutting knife slipped and he sliced into the top of his finger, his blood coagulating on the scales of a dead bass, mixing with its own. Not when I told him about the divorce. Not when he saw Bea with John Penrice the day after she’d kissed him.

I’ve gone too far, and I need to pull it back in, before it – this row – becomes a thing I cannot control at all.

“Have you told Julia?” I ask.

“No.”

“Don’t,” I say. “Please. It’s— he’s a friend of Bea’s. From uni. His name’s Penn. Will Pennington. We’re just— We talk. About her, OK?”

He pauses, and I wonder if he believes me. If he knows who Penn really was to Bea; if she told Hannah that Christmas when she came over. If she told him.

But if he knows, he doesn’t let on. “How long is he staying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Evie—”

“I don’t.”

“Just be careful,” he says finally.

“I will,” I say. “I am.”

But that night I can’t sleep. In a bid to drive out the damp and dry out the paint, the decorators have switched on the central heating, so that Eden, once my stone-cold sanctuary, has become a suffocating hothouse. With heaving, complaining effort, rusting radiators churn a metallic fug into every room, filling halls and corridors with their groaning and clanking, like a ghost in chains.

I throw the windows wide in desperation, gulp down the night air as if it’s a thirst, this feeling. I count sheep, count stars, count threads on the counterpane. But I can’t keep him out, and the sheep scatter to make room for Penn. My head is full of him, pressing its own internal shutter on an album of snapshots: Penn in close-up, squinting into the sun, CLICK; Penn asleep on the deck, a tidemark of salt tracing a bracelet around his wrist, CLICK; Penn in the water, his hand touching my hair, his lips touching mine—

I stop myself. The camera has lied. That didn’t happen. That can’t happen.

A wave of disgust washes over me. Because he’s not mine to kiss, he’s Bea’s—
was
Bea’s. And it’s not me he wants, it’s her. I’m just a poor facsimile, a hastily drawn copy, like a child’s rendition of the Mona Lisa. You can see who I’m supposed to be, but the lines are wrong, there are details missing, the nose is slightly too big, the smile lopsided. And yet, and yet…

“Tell me what to do, Bea,” I say. “Help me.” But though I say it aloud I know she won’t answer. That this is down to me. Everything is down to me now.

I think back to Tom in the woods. His warning. “Be careful,” he said. And I make a pact with myself. Tomorrow I won’t go to the boathouse. Tomorrow I’ll stay here at Eden. I’ll stay with Bea. I’ll sort out her treasures for her before it’s too late. I’ll put them in a box and seal it tight, so that I can take them with me when I go. Nothing happened between me and Penn. And nothing will happen. It’s fine. I’m fine.

And yet even as I say the words, I see his face again, and I know it’s useless. I’m not saved at all, I think. I’m drowning. And, worse, I chose to jump. I chose this fate.

Or maybe it chose me.

MAY 1988