Paradise Read Online Free Page A

“Just like on holiday.”
    But, even with our suitcases, and the tang of sea in the air, I don’t feel like I’m on holiday. This isn’t the newness of Margate, or Majorca. This is something else: older, deeper. And if I feel it, having never been here before, except as a tiny seed inside her, then Mum must feel it, too.
    I lean into her in the back of the cab, feel her arm snake around me, the other already holding Finn, pulling him down into his seat as he strains to find the sand and the sea and the donkeys.
    “What do you think?” she asks.
    I look out at night-shuttered shops and arcades, neon signs with bulbs missing, so that Tenpenny Falls appears as though it cut its price to a penny; El Dorado is in an illegible scrawl, and I think of Magic City. Cass and Ash playing the slots and drinking cheap lager from brown paper bags.
    “Like Peckham,” I say. “But wetter.”
    The rain drums against the roof of the taxi, sweeping over the windshield in a sudden, blinding arc as we turn out of the town center and begin to climb a steep hill.
    “It’s not always this bad,” the cabbie says. The first words he’s spoken, save for the “Where to?” at the station and the grunt as he heaved six suitcases into the boot of his rusting Ford Mondeo.
    “Oh, I know,” says Mum. “I grew up here.”
    The cabbie snorts. Meaning what? That she doesn’t talk or look like she grew up here. That we’re outsiders. That we’ll never fit in. Thoughts that will prick me, prod at me again and again in the weeks and months ahead. But right now I bat the accusing fingers away. Because the cab has stopped. We’re here.
    Cliff House towers over us, important. Solid granite walls, stained glass in the door, dark now, but in my head I see it backlit with the warmth of a chandelier. It isn’t a palace. Not really. There are no turrets, no arrow slots for windows. But, even in the rain and half-light, it’s a fairy tale. So far from the flat in Peckham that I have to choke back a laugh. Because how can I have grown up there, and Mum here? How can she have given up all this for so little? But even as I ask I know the answer. Because I was what mattered. Not five bedrooms, and two floors, and a garden the size of a park. Because they would have been empty without me there. And they didn’t want me there. Until now.
    Mum shakes me from my imagined palace. “Have you got the key?” she asks frantically, the contents of her purse tinkling onto the black-and-white tiles of the path as she upends it in the search.
    For a second I panic. That I have forgotten it. That it is sitting laughing to itself on the scratched kitchen table in Peckham. But then I remember slipping it into the pocket of my black dress, its weight pulling the fabric, threatening to pull the stitches away from the seam. I push my hand inside, and it is there, the metal pressing against my hip bone.
    “Here,” I say, and I hold it out to her.
    “No, you do it,” Mum replies, still picking up the cab change from the floor, precious coins that she knows we need, though she’ll spend them without thought.
    “Let me,” begs Finn. “I’ll do it.”
    “No,” says Mum. “It’s Billie’s, remember.”
    “’S’OK.” I shrug. And it is. Because I don’t want to do it. In case it doesn’t fit. Or it is the Ark of the Covenant, or Pandora’s box, letting out something wonderful and terrible all at once.
    But none of this happens. The key fits, and instead of shrieking, I hear the satisfying clunk as the frame releases its grip on the door and it swings heavily, silently open.
    Finn looks up for a light switch and finds one, a brown Bakelite circle, a relic from another age. He pulls it down with a sharp click.
    “Wow,” he says. And for once I am caught up in his fever. Because, even though the floor is strewn with mail, this isn’t the bare concrete of the flat hallway. This floor is crisscrossed in wooden parquet, like one of those Magic Eye paintings,