If This Is Paradise, I Want My Money Back Read Online Free PDF

to . . . whatever this place is, the glaring whiteness that’s all around us starts to dim a bit; slowly, barely perceptibly, things begin to come into focus as my poor, bewildered brain takes in our surroundings. I’m not even a hundred per cent certain where I’ll find myself, either. Maybe, I dunno, standing outside pearly gates with a bearded Saint Peter keeping guard like a bouncer at a nightclub, checking the VIP list to see if I’m on it? Or maybe it’ll be a giant concourse with escalators to all floors, like in a shopping centre, except that some of them will lead up to heaven, while others will go down to the lower depths, where it’s all smoky, with flames shooting out and little red-horned devils with spears running around the place cackling.
    And a plaque outside saying, ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.’
    Tell you what I didn’t expect. To find myself in a sort of . . . well . . . old folks’ home, really. Minus the smell of wee and boiled cabbage, that is. I’m not kidding, as my eyes gradually adjust to the light and I get up and stagger around the place, it’s like Dad and I are in some sort of day-care room. He stays sitting on a sofa at the very back, eyes watching me protectively, while the afternoon racing from Cheltenham blares away on the TV. There’s about four or five people here, all glued to the screen, and nobody gives me as much as a second glance. I’m slowly wandering around, totally confused, desperately trying to make eye contact with someone, but they’re all too engrossed in the race, and every now and then one of them goes, ‘Come on, Northern Dancer!’
    Plus, apart from Dad, there is no one here under the age of about eighty.
    I stumble back to Dad and slump on to the sofa beside him, numb.
    ‘Did you think it would be fluffy clouds and angels, pet?’ he asks gently, correctly reading my thoughts. ‘Just remember that this is purely temporary, that’s all. You came to us . . . well, let’s just say you came to us before your time.’
    ‘And I’m . . . I’m just here till they . . . like, assess me?’
    ‘Which, as I say, is nothing for you to worry about.’
    ‘And . . . well . . . when will that happen?’
    He doesn’t answer immediately, just looks at me keenly.
    ‘All in good time.’
    ‘But suppose they send me away from you? I mean, you’ve got to belong up in heaven, you never did anything wrong in your entire life. But I did plenty of wrong things and . . . well, suppose they separate us? Suppose you’re sent back up above, and I’m flung down below to fry out the rest of eternity in hell?’
    He smiles at my blind panic, and at the teary wobble in my voice, which, oddly, comforts me.
    ‘It doesn’t work like that, pet. Don’t you trust your old dad?’
    ‘’Course I do.’ I sob weakly. God, I must sound like I’m about five.
    ‘Then come and sit down here beside me. We have an awful lot to catch up on, pet.’
    I’m not sure how much time passes; it’s bizarre, everything really does seem to stand still here, wherever we are. All I know is that it’s ages later, and Dad and I are still together, totally engrossed in each other’s company, with me a bit calmer now, but still clinging to his hand, terrified I’m going to lose him all over again. And I can’t, just can’t. I am not going through that unbearable pain for a second time. I just feel so safe and minded here, with him beside me. Like as long as he’s here, wherever we are, I never have to worry ever again.
    For as long as I’m here, that is.
    The more we talk, the more gobsmacked I get. It’s incredible. There’s absolutely nothing that Dad doesn’t know about any of our lives since he died, and that was, like, nearly ten years ago. I was eighteen, and I remember thinking that the void he left in my life would never be filled, and that I’d never meet a man who could hold a candle to him. Correct on both counts; it never was and I never did. Wherever we are, you’d