My Name Was Eden, page 10
“What’s wrong with you?”
“What do you mean? Nothing’s wrong with me.”
“They’re hardly boys?” he parrots. “It sounded like you were taking the piss.”
“Seriously? You said exactly the same thing to me, when I said about going for a girls’ day out.” I slide Eden’s uneaten cake into the bin.
“You said it to Mum, though. And Eden’s been—what?”
“Shh! She’ll hear us.”
“No she won’t, she’s gone upstairs. She went to get some old art stuff for Eden.”
I turn back, rinse the cake crumbs from my hand. Outside, the sun is a broken yolk, leaking across the darkening sky. I’m about to tell James that it seemed as if she was doing it on purpose, dragging out those photos and repeating Eden’s name over and over again—was she trying to wind her up?—when we hear the thud. It’s dull, thick, like a racquet hitting rubber.
And again.
Then a sharp, pained scream.
David gets there first. Anna is lying at the foot of the stairs, moaning softly, her legs splayed out behind at an alarming angle. Her loose cotton dress has ridden up her thighs, and there are things I should not see: a mole, a scoop of buttock, covered only by a thin layer of pink fabric. I lean forward to pull her dress down as David barks at James to get the phone and that’s when I notice the trickle of clear liquid, glistening from one nostril.
“Can you hear me, Anna?” I ask. “Anna? Talk to me.”
Her eyes are vacant. Around me, there’s a flurry as James searches for the phone and David shouts instructions: “Tell them to hurry up! Tell them it’s an emergency.”
David kneels down beside me. “She’s breathing,” I tell him. He starts muttering about her leg, about how it was a bloody accident waiting to happen. “Come on,” he says. “Come on, Anna, I know you want some young paramedic to give you the kiss of life . . .”
I look up. Eden is standing at the top of the stairs, one hand gripping the banister.
Watching.
18
I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s stuck there in my mind like a clod of mud on the sole of my shoe: the image of Eden staring down at her grandmother’s broken body, completely impassive. Eden wouldn’t do that. Eden would have run down the stairs, full of theater, getting in the way, screeching and crying. Even in the car, on the way home, she gazed out of the window and asked vaguely if we’d have time to stop off for a coffee. “No,” I snapped. “We won’t.”
We’re in the bedroom now. “Eden hasn’t said much,” James says, holding one hand over his flaccid penis as he steps out of his boxer shorts. I can’t wait to fall into bed—it’s been a long day—but there’s that other question, the one that keeps blackening my thoughts, the drop of ink in my glass of water. Did she push Anna?
Nobody else was there. Anna doesn’t remember what happened.
Of course she didn’t. “I expect she’s in shock.”
David called from the hospital an hour ago in distress, telling us that Anna had come round in the ambulance but was confused, asking if he had the suitcases. He wondered if she thought they were going to be late for the flight to Texas, a holiday they took last year and—by all accounts—thoroughly enjoyed. “She’s having you on,” James told David, turning to humor, as he always did with his dad when things were painful. “You know Mum. It’s her way of hinting that she wants another holiday.” Then he hung up and stared at the wall for a few minutes until I went to him and pulled him close.
“Don’t you think? Don’t you think Eden might be in shock?”
“I don’t know,” James says. “I honestly don’t know.”
After I’ve got changed for bed, I go to give Eden a kiss good night. She’s sitting on top of her bedcovers, coloring in a picture. At first, I think it’s one of the pages from the Mindfulness Coloring book I bought her for Christmas but, as I get closer, I can see that she’s penciled them herself, a row of concentric circles, shaded in various hues of blue with a small stick person at the center.
“What’s that?”
“Just a drawing. Do you like it?”
Since her accident, Eden’s been asking that a lot. Do you like it? Coveting my approval. It’s not something she ever seemed to care about before. I shuffle along the bed until our arms are touching. “It’s really good. It’s nice to see you doing . . . this.”
Eden puts her arms out so that she can study the picture objectively, then pushes it under the bed and climbs under the covers. I tuck her in, like I did when she was small.
“I’m sorry you had to see Granny’s fall tonight. But I don’t want you to worry, she’ll be fine.”
“I know. Dad told me. Mum?”
“Yes?” Her face is inscrutable in the half-light coming through from the landing.
“Are you scared?”
“I was, a bit. But I’m not now she’s in the right place.” I pat her leg, relieved. “And I don’t want you to be, either.”
Eden lifts herself up slightly, on her elbows. She makes a sound like a scoff, although it could be a sniff. “I don’t mean that. I mean: are you scared of me?”
“No. Of course not. Why would you ask me that?”
I wait. She doesn’t reply.
“How do you feel about what happened with Granny? It must have been a horrible shock. It was a shock for us.”
“She wouldn’t listen to me,” she says. “I told her I didn’t want to see the pictures of Eden.”
“I . . . well. Granny . . .” I’m at a loss for words. The right words. I kiss her instead. “Good night, love.”
“Good night, Mum.”
On Monday, I phone Dr. Oke for advice, only to be told by her secretary that she’s on leave for the week. “Can someone else help?” There’s a note of desperation in my voice. “I’ve been told my daughter will get a follow-up appointment next month, but she really needs to be seen sooner than that.”
The secretary sighs. “I’m sorry, the diary is completely booked up. If we get a cancellation, I’ll give you a call.”
I hang up, and phone the GP. I’m waiting on hold for forty-five minutes, only to be told by a bored-sounding receptionist that all the appointments have gone; I need to call back at 8:00 a.m.
“Fuck.” I slam down the phone. I am not a violent person, but I want to push my fist through the window, feel the sharp stab of pain, see the blood trickling like syrup down my arm. I imagine there would be help then; for me, at least. Tablets, talking therapies—Steri-Strips for the broken mind. Grateful. I must remember to be grateful. Eden is here; Eden is alive. And yet, something is wrong. Something is very wrong.
Perfection never lasts. And I wonder, were things really all that perfect anyway? Wasn’t it always simply a delusion?
The school have promised to keep an eye on Eden. Maybe I’m reading too much into all this and she’s just scared and confused. Weren’t we all, as teenagers? She didn’t push Anna down the stairs. She did not.
I pour myself a glass of orange juice and take it through the patio doors into the back garden. There was rain last night, breaking the stranglehold of humidity that’s constricted us for weeks, and now there’s a renewed tautness to the grass, an electric brightness in the dahlia and iris flowers, which are clustered like festival revelers along the side of the fence. But there’s also a stink, sour, like decay, being carried on the breeze from the farm.
I take my orange juice back inside. Bluey has started to squawk in sharp, insistent tones that could shatter glass. It reminds me of Eden as a baby, when she would experiment with her voice, usually in the middle of my weekly shop. I’d put my finger to my lips, urge her to shush, but of course she had no idea what that meant. I tried distracting her by reeling off the names of items on the shelves nearby as though they were the most fascinating things in the world: “Apples, Eden, look. Milk. Pasta. Can you say pasta?” It never made any difference. It was as though she could sense my discomfort, and the more people tutted and stared, the louder she would shriek.
Funny, how memories creep up on you like that.
“Hey.” Bex leans in for a kiss. “My God, you’re having a shit time of it, aren’t you? Never rains but hails bullets. Is James’s mum okay?”
We’re in Sacred Grounds, a coffee shop in a refurbished church, something that probably would have been considered sacrilege years ago. I lace my fingers around my cappuccino and feel the pew rock as I set my bag down on the stone floor. “No. She’s in a coma. She came round briefly in the ambulance but became unresponsive after that. They’ve got her in the ICU.”
“Jeez.” Bex blows on her coffee. “And you had to resuscitate her?”
“No, not quite.” A blonde woman wrestles a pushchair past me with one hand, while trying to hold her baby son against her chest with the other. I shuffle my pew forward. “But it was horrible. Especially so soon after . . .” I drop my spoon into the coffee and watch the chocolate twist into a frothy brown universe. “Well. You know.”
“Is James up there with her today?”
“Oh no, he’s got work. Always bloody work. I’d go, but . . . uh, even the thought of being back in a hospital gives me a mini panic attack.” I take a sip of my drink to try and burn away the image of Eden at the top of the stairs, staring down at us all.
“Do you want me to take her for that sleepover then, give you and James a chance to get some space? Sounds like you need it. Hopefully, the girls will have sorted things out by then.”
“Thanks.” Nothing bad will happen. She did not push Anna. “Thank God they’ve got each other. Eden seems . . . I don’t know, vulnerable at the moment. I’ve just booked her in with a private therapist, as the GP said the waiting list was over six months. Six months! Did I tell you she cut her hair?”
“She told Charlie.” Bex looks over her shoulder at the baby, who is now examining a biscuit in his high chair, and her face melts into an expression of adoration. “Wasn’t it easier when they were that age? Charlie was a stroppy cow when I tried to talk to her about being a good friend and not dropping everything for Alex. She said I should focus on my own relationships, instead of telling her how to run hers. She’s a teenager now, you see. She knows everything.”
I laugh. The baby sees me and laughs too, a tipped-back, gummy gurgle.
“At least you only have the one,” Bex says, and starts reminding me how her two boys—currently installed in preschool—get through food and clothes faster than she can feed and wash them. “At least Charlie’s stopped complaining about them stealing her stuff. Remember the rows about that?”
I’m not listening. The baby is lunging in his high chair, back and forward, back and forward. At least you only have the one. And then, in the corner of my eye, I see something crawling around the edge of the window. It scuttles to the plastic rim, pauses, then flies away.
“You okay?” Bex asks. “What? What’s up?”
The pew clatters out behind me.
“What are you doing?” Bex hisses.
The woman stops talking to her friend as she drags a wet wipe around the corner of her baby’s mouth. They’re both looking at me as if I’ve grown a second head. The fly is on the opposite wall, I see now, resting against a framed picture of a sunflower.
I snap back into myself, into the present. “Can we get out of here? I need to get some air.”
19
Charlie
You ever feel totally off your head and don’t know why? Yeah, well, that’s kind of what it’s like for me right now. Mum’s being a total bitch, moaning about everything. I have to be nice to Eden. I have to be nice to my brothers. I have to pull my weight more around the house, even though Brogan and Lucas do literally nothing. Neither does Matt. He just gets home from work and says to Mum “Oh, is that the kettle I can smell?” and, like a total idiot, she smiles and puts it on for him, even though he’s totally capable of doing it himself. If I said that, she’d tell me to get to my room for being rude.
I put my bag on the seat next to me as Eden climbs on the bus. She puts a hand on each headrest as she moves up the bus toward me, and—oh my God—her hair is much shorter than it looked in the WhatsApp picture she sent. It makes her look totally different. The long bit at the top is pulled back into a tight ponytail, and she hasn’t bothered to spray or clip the short bits underneath, so they’re sticking out at different angles, like that weird feather montage Mrs. Sadullah got us to do in year five. There are dark brown puddles under her eyes like she hasn’t slept at all and, for a minute, I think about her gran and everything that’s happened, and I feel a bit sorry for her. But then I remember Mum shouting about how I should think of someone other than myself for a change, and how I’m not allowed to see Alex anymore because Eden has a problem with him, and, just like that, I’m in a piss again. It’s obvious she’s doing all this for attention.
“Hey.”
She moves my bag off the seat onto the floor, without even asking what the problem is. “Do you like my hair?”
I stare at her. We’ve been friends forever, and I can’t believe she doesn’t get it, that she’s not reading me right now. “Yeah,” I say, in a sarcastic tone, then turn to stare out of the window. I want her to ask me what’s wrong, so that I can tell her how pissed off I am. How I wish she’d listened to me when I said I wanted to be friends in a different way, so that I could breathe. And then she does.
“Why are you being like this?”
“Seriously? Like, you don’t know that your mum talked to my mum about what Alex said?” I fold my arms. “It was only a joke. I’m not allowed to see him outside of school now, thanks to you.”
“He’s not a nice person, Charlie. And we’re best friends. No matter what.”
“I’m sorry about what happened to your gran and everything, but . . . God, you really need to grow up.”
Eden tries to talk about the time when we helped that woman cross the road and it turned out she wasn’t blind at all. Then she starts on about other things: the swimming lesson when we were like eight or something and some kid did a poo in the pool that was bobbing about like a dirty stick in the water, the school trip when it never stopped raining, the time we made shit perfume out of flower petals and thought we were going to make a fortune. Eventually, when I don’t bother answering, she shuts up. And I do feel guilty—I’m not a total cow. We have so much history together.
Too much, perhaps. More than I’ve got with anyone else.
At lunchtime, Olivia calls me over. It’s noisy in the dining hall. I’m with Alice—I’ve been trying to avoid Eden, successfully so far—and I ask her to grab me some chips while I go and see what Olivia wants. She’s Alex’s older sister in year eleven, and she’s sitting randomly at a table with two friends, the ones that look like they could stab you with their eyes and then suck out your soul with the black rings around them. “Alright?” I ask, even though I have no idea what she wants. A part of me is bricking it that Mum might have said something to their mum, or to Mr. Barton. Or that Alex wants to break up with me. Maybe he does, and he’s getting his sister to do it for him.
“Just thought I’d say hello to my future sister-in-law,” she says. One of the soul-suckers looks up from her phone and laughs. “You alright?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to sit with us?”
“No, it’s just—” I cast an eye over to where Alice is queueing up for chips. “I would, but she’s put our coats on a table, and Alex is supposed to be coming to join us in a minute . . .”
“There he is now. Goldenballs,” she says, looking over to where Alex has just burst through the door to the dinner hall with his “squad,” as he likes to call them. “He likes you. Been going for runs, working out. Never did any of that shit before. First time I’ve seen him smile properly since Dad walked out.”
“Really? I know how that feels.” I swallow hard. My voice sounds babyish. “I like him, too. A lot.”
“Yeah?” She looks me up and down. “You’re alright, you are.”
I virtually skip over to Alex. Sister-in-law. He likes you. Alice brings the chips over as Alex and his mates sling their bags to the floor and then drag the chairs across the lino with a screech. Alex leans over and picks up one of my chips, and within seconds the others are doing the same—let’s have one, pinch a chip, fucking hot—until I have to pull the polystyrene carton away, joking that they’re worse than pigeons. When Alice eventually says she has to go and pick up her butterfly project from the Art Department, Kyle goes with her and I’m left with the rest of the boys. I’m desperate to spend some time alone with Alex. We normally take a walk over the field and have a kiss before the bell goes, but he’s still dicking about with Josh and Jamie, putting his finger in my ketchup and wiping it on their faces. They’re doing the same with what’s left of Alice’s sauce, and I don’t like it—he doesn’t act like that when we’re alone together.
I’m about to pick up the cartons and put them in the bin, hoping that Alex will get the message and follow me, but then Jamie starts laughing at something over my shoulder. Josh turns around and joins in with the sniggering too. “What the fuck is that?”
I twist around in my chair. Shit. It’s Eden. Her hair is jutting out at all angles, like a rug that’s been vacuumed against the pile. She stops halfway to our table, and looks uncertainly at me.
“Someone’s got mange,” Alex cheers, then drops his smile when I glare at him. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean that. Cheer up. Here, have a chip.”
He takes a chip and throws it at Eden. It hits the side of her head. There’s this weird moment where she pulls it from her hair and throws it back at him, but doesn’t laugh like she normally would, like I would, even if she’s totally cringing inside. I stand up. “Alex—”
