Paradise by Joanna Nadin Page A

Billie? Too cluttered.”
    I want to tell her it’s mine, really. That I should get to decide. But I can see something in her. Not wine this time. Nothing she’s taken. But something that’s missing. She’s going. Slipping under. I can feel it.
    So instead, I nod my answer. But she’s not even looking. She’s gone, to find a man who will take away all this junk, this treasure. This ephemera. Take away the lives of others so she can start living again.
    The dealer comes later that afternoon. Kenneth Shovel: Call-Me-Ken. He has dandruff on the collar of his brown nylon suit. He says it’s not worth that much anymore, silver. Just what he can get for scrap. But he’ll give her two hundred pounds for the trophies and one of the paintings. A watercolor of the beach by no one I’ve ever heard of. Mum drops the worthless locket in a charity bag and takes the crisp notes like she’s been handed two hundred thousand. And Call-Me-Ken drives off in his white van, a smile like Simon Cowell’s and the bargain of the century.
    “We should celebrate,” Mum says.
    I watch as Finn counts the notes, recounts, assessing our fortune. Two hundred pounds. It’s nothing. Not really. A few weeks’ shopping. Or a few days’.
    “We could save some,” I suggest. “In case.”
    “In case what?” Mum is fidgeting.
    “I don’t know.” Don’t want to say it: Because you don’t have a job. Because benefits never pay all the bills.
    “Well, then.” Mum has won. “What shall we do? The world is our oyster.”
    “I’m hungry,” says Finn.
    “Dinner. Perfect,” says Mum, kissing him on the top of his head. “My boy genius.”
    Then she turns to me, waiting for the chorus of disapproval. But I can’t. Can’t tip the fine balance.
    “We could get fish and chips,” I say.
    But it’s no good. Mum doesn’t want fish and chips. She wants liver-colored leatherette and napkins in glasses and steak and ice cream sundaes. She wants the Excelsior.
    “We’re rich,” she says, and laughs. “Millionaires.”
    “Are we really?” asks Finn, his chin shiny and bright with chocolate sauce and hundreds and thousands.
    “No,” I should say. “We’re not. Not really. We’re broke. With a drafty house that will leak money like it leaks heat.”
    But I’m high on ice cream. On hope. Like Mum. So I lie for her.
    “Almost,” I say.
    And even though dinner costs more than fifty pounds. Even though Mum spends another tenner on the way home buying more wine. Even though Finn is sick in the night, an ice-cream stream of indulgence flushed away. For that moment, reflected in Mum’s eyes, we are. We are almost millionaires.

TOM IS
everything Jonty isn’t. Not just his height, his build: tall and lean rather than rugby solid. But the way he is with her. The way he holds her, the way he talks to her like she matters, like she’s all that matters. Not like Jonty’s braying monologues. Where Het gets the feeling he’s just enjoying the sound of his own voice. Tom listens, too. Listens to her tell him about college. About how she doesn’t fit. Never has.
    Het hears Will’s voice, reasoning with her: “He’s just not one of us, Het.” And he isn’t. But he’s not what Will thinks he is either. One of them. A no-good Gypsy. Not like Jimmy, with a girlfriend and a kid and a string of women. Tom belongs to nobody. Like her.
    He takes her out to dinner. To the Excelsior. He heads for a booth at the back, but she pulls him to the window, where they can see, and be seen. The seat is the color of blood. Leather, or vinyl probably, her bare legs sticking to the surface, sweaty with excitement and the heat of July.
    She can barely finish her steak, chewing each mouthful until it is nothing but gristle, her mouth too dry to swallow. But he orders dessert anyway, if only to show he can. The waiter brings a sundae.
An absurd thing,
she thinks. A show-off dessert. He feeds her from a long silver spoon, cream and a cherry, a taste of sugar and