Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page A

too tired.”
    “I’m not,” he insists predictably. But his eyelids are half closed, his skin pale, ghostlike.
More like me now,
I think.
    “Go on,” she says. “You can leave your teeth tonight. Do them harder in the morning.”
    “Yes!” Finn has scored a cup-winning goal and races off, up the stairs to his new bedroom.
    “Where shall I sleep?” I ask.
    Mum is scraping leftovers onto her plate, doesn’t even look up. “Up the stairs, to the left. Last one along the corridor. My old room,” she adds.
    I pause, confused. “Don’t you want it?”
    She shakes her head, lets her eyes meet mine. “I’ll sleep in the spare room. It’s bigger.”
    “Oh, thanks.” I feign hurt. “Are you coming?”
    “I’ll be up in a bit,” she says. “You go. Really.”
    She’s going to have a smoke. Keeps the packet behind the radio at home, does it late at night out of the kitchen window, when she thinks we’re asleep. But I can smell it on her, tangled in her hair in the morning. Another secret.
    “’Night, then,” I say, and I lean down to kiss her.
    Mum tilts her cheek to my lips, and I feel her breath against my own as she whispers, “’Night, Billie.”
    And I’m not sure what more to say, so I leave her, sitting at the table she sat at sixteen years ago, her head full of something, or nothing, and I climb the wide, galleried staircase. I wonder what I will find at the top: a four-poster with a canopy draping around, a tiny replica pram full of porcelain dolls, a princess’s chamber — or a room full of teenage Mum, posters for bands I’ve seen on
Top of the Pops 2,
a wardrobe packed with rah-rah skirts and batwing tops.
    But it’s neither. It’s just yellow wallpaper, clean and bare, not even a thumbtack hole marking its faint, flowered pattern, and a single wooden bed. The wardrobe and shelves are empty, the windowsill home to nothing more than a scattering of dust.
    At first I think I’ve got it wrong. That I took a wrong turn on the landing and this is the spare room. But I check again, and this is it: left at the top of the stairs, last room along. I don’t get it. I saw Will’s room. Like any day he would walk back in the door and it would be ready for him, nothing moved, nothing thrown away. Yet Mum’s has been scoured clean. As if she’s the one who died. The one they needed to forget.
    But I’m too tired to think for long. Too tired to dig in my bag for a clean T-shirt. Instead, I peel off my sweater and tights and crawl under the crackling white sheets and wool blankets, ready to curl into sleep. But as I draw my legs up, my knee brushes against something. I gasp, and freeze, scared I’ve found a dead cat. Or a live demon.
    But there’s no smell, no sound, no heat.
Whatever it is, it’s nothing,
I think. It is benign. So, slowly, carefully, I reach down and feel the nap of velvet against my fingers. When I pull it out I see it’s not a demon. But it’s not nothing either. It’s a toy. A rabbit. Mum’s rabbit. And I fall asleep with it clutched to my chest.

ELEANOR STANDS
in the doorway, her shoulders hanging, a roll of bin bags in her right hand; the thumb of her left playing with her wedding ring, a thin, pale band of gold, turning it this way and that.
This cannot be right,
she thinks. A lifetime, nineteen years of Het. All of it to be wrapped in black plastic. Discarded like a cracked teapot.
    Eleanor stiffens. He is behind her now. She can smell the alcohol rub from the day’s surgery, hear the labored breathing, a soft rasp she once feared, and now hopes, is something more than just middle age.
    “All of it,” he says.
    She hesitates, trying to find an excuse he will accept, knowing that sentiment will be swatted like a lazy bluebottle. “But it’s such a waste,” she protests finally. “Can’t we at least save it for charity?”
    “She’s gone,” he says. “Dead. You bury the dead.”
    The following day he drives eight black bin bags to the refuse site and lays