If This Is Paradise, I Want My Money Back by Claudia Carroll Page A

Carla Bruni.
    For the first time in ages, I’ve got the biggest beam spread across my face. I grab the biro and, honest to God, once I start writing, there’s no stopping me. Under ‘reasons for wishing to partake in the AWE programme’ I write two full pages about how, although my own life didn’t exactly work out the way I’d imagined, now I want to devote myself entirely to helping others. I must sound gushier than a contestant on Miss Universe , and am only short of writing ‘have deep, burning desire to promote world peace’.
    Anyway, I must have done something right, because after Regina reads over my answer she smiles, winks at Dad, and tells me I’m clear to go.
    To a classroom, to be exact. As if things couldn’t get any more bizarre. The old-fashioned type, with wooden floors, and an actual blackboard, and an overwhelming smell of chalk dust. Kind of reminds me of the time myself and Fiona signed up for a night class called ‘Screenwriting for Beginners’ in the local adult education centre. I was all up for it because I thought it would help me in work; Fiona thought it would be a good way to meet fellas. Anyway, we were both disappointed: the course was total rubbish, and the one and only guy in the class happened to be gay. But I digress.
    There’s two other people here: an elderly man with a goatee beard wearing what looks like an ancient Victorian frock coat, and a middle-aged woman, very attractive in a pale, hollow-eyed, Mary Pickford way, with shingled hair and bright red nail-varnish.
    ‘You’re Miss Charlotte, aren’t you?’ says goatee man politely, not even a raised eyebrow about how I just managed to . . . I dunno, beam into, or somehow get landed wherever it is that I am now. Just like in a dream; I haven’t a clue how I physically got from A to B, all I’m sure of is that I’m here now.
    ‘Emm . . . yes, but the thing is . . . emm . . . I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but emm . . . I don’t suppose you know exactly what’s going on here, by any chance?’
    ‘Motoring accident, wasn’t it?’ says shingle-haired woman, mildly curious.
    ‘Emm . . . yeah . . . but . . .’
    ‘Yeah,’ goatee man repeats after me, pondering. Honestly, the more I look at him, the more he’d put you in mind of Gladstone or Disraeli or some other Victorian frock-coated, elder statesman type.
    ‘I could never get used to that abbreviation. A little like “OK”. One hears it so often nowadays, and it never fails to amuse me. Well, I do hope your accident wasn’t too painful, my dear?’
    ‘Ehh . . . no, actually, never even felt a thing, really, it was all over so fast. I think the shock must have numbed me. There was a storm and I was, well, I was . . . I was . . . emm . . . really upset about . . . something. One minute I was trying to overtake a car in front of me, but I didn’t see that there was a truck coming towards me on the opposite side of the road, till it was way too late, then, next thing I was in hospital . . .’
    Funny, though, the little things that, bizarrely, do stick in my mind about the accident. Watching the bonnet of my little car crumple like an accordian in slow motion as the truck struck it full-on. Remembering too late that I forgot to put my seat belt on. Feeling my head crash forward through the windscreen at full force, shattering it as easily as if it were made of icing sugar. Then opening my eyes and seeing the panicked truck driver, standing on the road beside me in the pelting rain, screaming hysterically down his mobile phone for the ambulance to hurry the f*ck up, that this could be a fatality.
    But I’m grand, I thought looking over at him. Just can’t move, that’s all. Then I remember feeling a hot, oozy slime dripping down my face and into my open mouth. It was only when a bit of it dropped on to my tongue that I realized it was blood.
    Then nothing. Blackness. Peace. ‘What was it that happened to you, Charles?’ asks shingle-haired woman in