Paradise Lodge Read Online Free PDF

through primary school seemed to evaporate every morning—either as I had my first cigarette of the day in bed, or on the nauseating bus ride.
    The teachers were mostly too busy with the day-to-day to single me out for practical help. My exceptionally nice tutor, Mr Mayne, was exasperated by my seeming lack of ambition. He did his best to encourage me but was busy in the extreme with a handful of tricky tutees—who needed him just to get through the alphabet—and I imagine he looked at me and thought, ‘Lizzie Vogel will be all right in the long run,’ which was a huge compliment (if that was actually what he thought).
    My mother and Mr Holt were too busy—driving vans and running a laundry depot, trying to make ends meet with a new infant and trying to launch a pine-stripping venture—to notice I was struggling. My sister was gearing up to leave home for university. An anglepoise lamp and a striped cotton rug in a Habitat carrier waited in the hall for her departure and acted as a daily reminder that she’d soon be gone. In the meantime, she worked odd hours in Woolworth’s and hung around with a girl from Mauritius called Varsha. And had no idea what I was doing. Or not doing.
    My sister’s smoking ban in our shared bedroom had ruined our relationship. She made the far-fetched claim that I was poisoning the air and giving not only myself deadly diseases, stunting my growth and dulling my skin and brain, I was inflicting all that on her too—as she slept. This had driven her to make a permanent bed in the living room and take away all her records except one. ‘The Killing of Georgie (Part I and II )’ by Rod Stewart. Which she couldn’t bear to listen to because
(a)
it was sad (Georgie gets killed by a New Jersey gang) and
(b)
she couldn’t stand the image it conjured of Rod prancing around in a white suit. I loved Rod in his white suit and was glad when she gave me the record but then listened to it so often I stopped liking it too.
    All in all, I was ready for a new place to be, to start again and be wanted and needed. If I wasn’t going to be fussed over by doting parents or singled out by an intuitive teacher—who saw something unique in me—urging me to go for Oxbridge, I’d settle for doing the minimum at school—attending just often enough to get through and not have my mother arrested by Mrs Hargraves, the truant lady. I’d pop in for science and maths and when I needed to attend, and at other times I’d help old ladies fasten their corsets and thread their embroidery needles and I’d earn enough money to buy an ongoing supply of John Player tipped in the blue pack with a matching lighter, a bottle of Paco Rabanne, and seven pairs of new knickers in pastel colours with the days of the week printed on them—like a woman in an Edna O’Brien.
    I thought all this through as I walked and skipped home in the nurse’s dress. These were my reasons for wanting the job. Not as exciting as Miranda’s but more complex than wanting nice shampoo.
    Approaching my house, I straightened my cap and hoiked up my Pop Sox and made an entrance through the back door. My mother was playing a Clementi sonata on the piano while Danny chewed a crust in his Babygro. I wanted her to look round so I coughed. She turned and saw me in my uniform and burst into tears.
    It wasn’t that she was sad (or angry or happy). She was
moved
and she told me not to get changed until she’d found her camera, which she never did. But I had to not get changed until Mr Holt got home, and when he did he smiled and said something about Florence Nightingale and hoping I wasn’t going to start skiving off school again.
    It was strange being at school the following Monday. Being treated like a child again after having been treated like a twenty-year-old at Paradise Lodge—having seen an ancient, naked lady with a bedsore, who might die any minute,