Eden by Joanna Nadin Page A

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