Paradise Read Online Free PDF

her to rest in a yellow Dumpster. Her nineteen years worth no more than someone’s shattered mirror and four paint-chipped chairs.
    In Het’s doorway, Eleanor twists her wedding ring. In her right hand she is clutching something else. A soft, velveteen thing, with long ears and a cotton-wool tail. A thing forgotten, or hidden. She hears wheels crunching on gravel, his Jaguar, its soft engine no longer purring a welcome but a warning. Quickly, quietly, Eleanor holds the toy to her face and breathes Het in for the last time, a fusty, child smell. A smell of years of love. Of life. Then she pushes it down beneath the crisp sheets of the single bed, made up now for guests who will never visit. If he finds it, what will she say? That it was a mistake. That she must have missed it in her hurry. That Rose, the housekeeper, must have done it; one of her superstitions.
    But he doesn’t find it. It is another secret, another skeleton. Slipped through a crack for someone to dig up and piece together later.

I WAKE to the sound of rain against glass. Groaning inwardly I pull back thick chintz curtains — the old kind, not the shabby-chic ones I’ve seen in Luka’s Sunday supplements — and look down on a town bathed in gray, impossible to see where the granite terraces end and the mist begins. I know the sea is out there somewhere, beyond all this. Can hear its white noise against the harder drum of raindrops and thrum of traffic. But for now I may as well be back in Peckham, for all the hot sand, sun-bleached dreams I can touch.
    I wonder if it ever stops here, the rain. The house seems steeped in damp: the windowsill ripe with a dark spattering of mold; that earthy smell in the cupboards. It’s cold, too, so that my breath fogs up in a cloud around my face, and when I pee, steam rises from the toilet bowl. I touch the wide, white-painted bathroom radiator. Nothing. The boiler is broken. Or the heating hasn’t clicked on yet. I try to remember last night. Was it like this when we got here? Or were we too distracted with newness to notice? I tread back along the sea-green soft corridor to my room to pull on yesterday’s tights and sweater. Then add a long, moth-eaten cardigan. One of Mum’s castoffs, Luka’s before that. Cass used to laugh at it. Said it looked like a dead man’s clothes, like something out of the Sally Army shop. Mum agreed. Said I should bin it; it was more hole than cardigan. But I defended it. Claimed it was vintage. And I guess it is, in a way. But that’s not why I love it. I pull it tight around me, wrapping myself in its thick, wool softness, and the smell of him and her. That’s what I’m holding on to. Not the thing. But what it means. What inhabits it.
    When I get downstairs, Mum and Finn are up and eating breakfast. I watch as Finn bites into a doughnut, sugar coating his lips, grease and jam oozing down his fingers. The sentinel ketchup bottle has been joined by cartons of milk; pots of honey and lemon curd; a half-empty teacup; a pat of butter, its whiteness already plundered by a gouging knife and traces of something that looks like Marmite.
    We’re the Railway Children,
I think. Finding only empty cupboards, then waking the next day to apple pie that has been missed in the dark of their arrival.
    “Where was it?” I ask.
    Finn makes a face. He answers, still chewing, “Duh. Like, in the shop.”
    I look at Mum. She is wearing a dress, cut low, flakes of croissant decorating her chest.
    “We went out exploring,” she says. “Found Aladdin’s Cave.”
    “It’s actually called that,” Finn adds. “But the man doesn’t look like Aladdin; he looks like Fat Al from the corner shop.”
    “They’ve got everything,” Mum says. “Croissants. Olives. Can you believe it? I never saw an olive until I moved to London, but now they’ve got jars of them.”
    I click.
    “You should have gone to the supermarket,” I say. “I bet it cost a ton.”
    “Oh, lighten up, Billie.” Mum holds