Paradise by Joanna Nadin Page B

look that says he knows, too.
    I sit at the corner table. Away from the girl, my back to the counter. It takes me all of thirty seconds to drink the juice and scribble on the postcard. My new address. And our old one. The top-floor flat off the main street, with the broken-down boiler and the glue stains and the F-I-N-N carved into the kitchen table when Mum wasn’t looking. When I left the Internet café I thought I’d be funny, write, “Wish I was there.” But in a few minutes everything has changed. I’ve changed. And instead I write, “Wish you were here.”
    Because I don’t want to go back. Not even if I don’t find my dad. Because I’ve found someone else. And I don’t know his name. But I’m sure of it. That it’s him, and always has been.

THE FIRST
time Het sees him is at the fair.
    It is Easter and she is home from Cambridge to spend two clock-watching, tick-tocking weeks avoiding her father and ignoring her mother, bolting down her dinner so she can spend more time lying on her bed, refusing the pleas to get some fresh air, some exercise.
    But the house is stifling. Her father boiling over some imagined slight on her mother’s part. Will playing American rock so loud the bass notes reverberate through her. Het needs air. So she tells her mother she is going to the fair. Eleanor purses her lips, says isn’t she too old? And besides, Jonty is coming for supper
—
doesn’t she want to see him?
    But Het doesn’t. She wants cotton candy and coconut games and goldfish in bags. She wants to fly. So at six o’clock she pulls her tangle of hair back into a ponytail and picks her old Crombie coat off the peg in the hall.
    “Good God, you’re not going out like that?” Her father stares in disbelief at this child in old man’s clothing.
    But she is going out like that. She bursts out of the door and runs down the hill, breathing in great gulps of briny air, feeling the sting of it on her face, its stickiness in her hair. Not caring that she will pay for this later. When she has to wash the sea from the heavy tweed before rot sets in. And endure the questions from her mother, and silence from him.
    That night she rides rockets and eats a toffee apple, biting through the cracking cherry red to the soft, woody flesh beneath. Then, when she is done, she throws the stick carelessly onto a pile of polystyrene burger boxes and climbs up onto the Tilt-A-Whirl. Ignoring her mother in her head, telling her she’ll be sick, that she always is.
    That’s when she sees him. Leaning over her as he clunks the safety barrier into place. Het looks up at the face just inches from hers and sees something, some trace element, a mineral she knows she needs, that she has been waiting for. She opens her mouth to speak, but instead he kisses her. Right then, before he’s even said a word to her, before he even knows her name, he leans in and pushes his mouth onto her toffee-apple lips. He tastes of cigarettes and peppermint and life.
    “What are you doing?” she says when he pulls away.
    “Something.” He laughs. “Everything.”
    And instead of heavy shame, she feels weightless. And she knows in that instant it is him.

BUT, JUST like that, like a superhero, like a knight, he’s gone. I sit in the café for two mornings straight, clasping a cracked mug of cold tea; scum clinging to its surface, I’ve made it last so long. Behind the counter is a woman, older, hair scraped back in a thin ponytail, gold earrings and necklaces like she’s 50 Cent. The music’s changed, too. Mariah Carey and Beyoncé. Like it’s a different place. I wonder if I made him up.
    I figure I should forget it. Can’t keep waiting. Like a stalker, a sad case.
    Besides, I have to visit my new school, meet the headmaster. Finn has seen his already, Saint Mary’s Primary, full of toilet-roll puppets, and murals of tigers, and guinea pigs in a cage. He wants to start now so he can paint wild animals, hold the guinea pigs, but the headmistress