Like Paradise

Published by: Hammond House Publishing
Awards: Shortlisted Hammond House Literary Prize
Buy the anthology here

This is not how she imagined it at all.

Lying on the rocks, hair flicks tediously into squinting eyes. She loops it behind her ear where it wriggles free, heading seaward, flicking back, slapping at her lids like a persistent fly, sticking to drying lips. 

For God's sake. She pulls her hairband out and tries to wrestle it into a knot, but it snaps and pirouettes away, landing between two rocks. She stands to retrieve it, freeing her sarong which flutters towards the water where it settles, momentarily dry before elephants are swallowed and patterns darken and sink. She abandons the hair tie, leaping forward to retrieve the drowning fabric, dense with seawater, spattering rocks in darkness. She has cut her ankle, sliced it on something in the commotion. Blood disperses above rock-pool commuters. 

Inhaling deeply she snatches up her book and heads towards dry land. 

It is three months since Laura quit her job, said the words to her boss that made him turn pink and then cry, beg for her return. Only a fantasy. He had shrugged, shaken her hand, and she was showing her replacement how to change the beer kegs before the week was out. No big farewell, no drama at all, although she had refused to return her uniform.

Three months since she had stopped paying rent on her flat – that tiny basement box with weeping walls and sighing windows. The scuttling of rats and the smell of their dead, squeaks of their living. One month's rent was all she needed to break the contract. A tanned man in a white polo had bought the flat from her landlord in cash on the second day of viewings. An Exciting Development Opportunity. 

Three months since she had told her friends: jealous of course, so happy for her, we'll miss you hun; gone now. Words of encouragement, Facebook likes, Instagram hearts, you look so good, girl. Kisses and hugs. Then fewer. Fewer hearts, fewer likes, fewer kisses. Did you even see that last photo? Yes, it looked great. But not good enough to 'like'? 

Jealousy then. 

It is three months since her father died and left her his fortune.

A new beginning: just what she had always wanted, what they had all dreamed of. Is that not what they'd been striving for all of these years? To leave? Why they filled out their lottery tickets each week, went to bars that rich men like, called elderly relatives with a clockwork regularity that signposted chilling intent. Nothing. That is what they all desire. Enough of something to let them do nothing. Enough of nothing to do something – take up painting, write that novel, work on that tan, become a star, read the classics, watch the classics, learn a language, teach, do something great, truly great. And that is what she has at last: nothing. 

Greatness awaits.

But for now: nothing. 

She shakes the soaking rag and wrings it between her hands. It will dry quickly in the sun. Limping between rocks, feet tender on jagged lava forms, she straddles the tired rope that demarcates a footpath. Where to now? Nowhere to go, no one to see, no one to please. How freeing, she thinks and feels a brief flutter somewhere in the middle of her chest. She tilts her head to the sky and lets the bubbles rise, filling her cheeks so they part, freeing teeth from ear to ear and as if on cue, the sun peeks out from behind a cloud to drench her in warmth. She is so alive! Why did she not do this before? Why did they all not do this before?

A small chuckle escapes her throat, her diaphragm spasming to a full-bellied laugh. She opens her hands out wide, runs her fingers through delicate sunbeams, spins slightly, lets the wind caress her thighs, her face. She takes a deep, shuddering breath and gulps down lungfuls of pure joy. But then it begins to fade – an inevitable drainage problem that sucks it all back inside of her from the top of her head, down past her torso and out through her toes into the earth beneath her feet. It slithers free and she is cold – a half-thawed chicken breast, poisonous ice crystals at her core. She tries to chase the feeling, tries to get a finger on it but cannot. She can flare it momentarily if she concentrates but it is an exhausted breath on dormant coals. 

Stupid body. It doesn't know how happy it is. 

She longs for the feeling to return.

So what now? she thinks. A photo she'd seen that morning on Instagram: a bare-backed woman, arms spread wide, clifftop, forest below, Freedom written in delicately curled letters across the sky. Free of judgement then. She unloads her bathing suit from her shoulders and frees her pasty-white breasts. The breeze excites her nipples, and the sun's rays breathe warmth into her skin. Memories of her youth: topless bathing on dark Portuguese sands, warm wine, laughing girlfriends. But not in years now, and never so publicly as this; on a footpath where anyone could see!

She feels that warmth rise again, that happiness. She smiles, excites it, makes it welcome, wishes she knew how to make it stay. One day she will know; she is sure.

As she makes her way along the coast, her limp begins to lessen, her sarong drying on bare shoulders, and she casts her eyes over a violent ocean that plunges into rocks and reaches for her with salty spray. She puffs out her chest and walks tall, turns like a sunflower, evening out the warmth across her face. There is no one else around. She has seen hardly anyone since she arrived, few people her age anyway: old couples, ex-pats with tanned leather hides and patriotic beach towels. 

She is on an island, Spanish speaking, sun and sea. A small apartment to herself, bought outright, hilariously cheap when she thinks of her years of renting; views of dark walls, carparks, the doughy buttocks of dressing neighbours. And here: a glimpse of sea, a taste between houses, east-facing, and with enough money left-over to live carefree for another year or two at least. More than enough time to find herself. Space to think, away from the bustle of the city and the flowering wombs of contemporaries. Free from constant reminders of everything she lacks. 

Except they are there – all of them. 

Captured in moments of joy, happy despite her, happy in spite of her. Babies, new homes, every minute of what she is missing so that she is not missing it at all; as if she were still in that dingy apartment, hours after her neighbour's final light had been shut off, peering at those other lives infinitely better than her own. 

But now hers is better, surely – this new life. 

Surely.

This morning she had posted a photo from two days before with the caption Another Day in Paradise: her pedicured feet crossed at the bottom of the frame, the view of the sun rising from her bedroom window. Really, it had been cloudy this morning, night then day, shades of grey with no intervals of drama. The apartment had felt small and dark; the single coffee cup and plate, tragic. She must buy more crockery. She must buy more things. There was an unexpected heatwave back home, a day for winter barbecues, friends gathered, cold beers, smoked meats and rouged cheeks. So Thursday's sunrise it was. No time for reality; never in times of war.

She wraps the sarong, now dry, around her hips and presses her fingers into her breast bone where the skin whitens and springs to pink. She should have brought sunscreen. She dreads the agony of hot nights with burnt skin, the orgasmic relief of a cold shower, sick satisfaction in peeling away dead layers. A memory: sunstroke, delirious in her father's arms, through an abandoned building or carpark maybe, floppy hat, cold bath and stroking hair, pure delirium but his face a constant. The warmth of the memory is cancer at her core. Maybe this is how it starts, she thinks, perhaps this is how it had started for him. A lump in the throat, a heaviness in the stomach – a turgid python – then dizziness, tiredness, thirst, headaches, sleeplessness, diagnosis, regret, death. But she is getting carried away, enough of that. The moment. Living in the moment. Is that not what her audiobooks advise? What is happening in front of you right now?

There are birds: small grey doves that flap their wings and glide on the wind like kites, settling on street lamps and fence posts. There are dark footprints of clouds that slide down mountaintops like passing blight. A blanket of spattered blue holds a single plane, an unbroken contrail that slices the Heavens in two. She wonders where it might be going, what its passengers are escaping. There are wild dogs on the beach, fighting over shade, panting, digging, chasing one another, snouts a natural smile. And then the shout of a small boy up to his elbows in rock-pool, his father bent over him, he looks up as she passes, eyes meeting and then dipping slightly, he taps the boy, and they both stare at her.

Exposed, she grasps her hands over her breasts without thinking, turning away from them. Silly, silly, what does she even care if they see? But it is too late, they can see her shame. The spell is broken. Her cheeks redden, but she hides behind the sun's blush. She waits until they are out of sight and then feeds her arms back through her bathing suit and wraps the sarong tightly around her shoulders. Ashamed. She pictures her father unconscious in the street, his exposed white buttocks a beacon for mothers delivering children to school. Covered eyes. She pulls up his ripped trousers, gagging at the smell, drags him inside with her sister's help. This is the last time, the final straw. He needs help! Shouting over his lifeless body. He knows well enough what he's bloody doing.

She reaches the end of the footpath and so what now? Glancing at her watch, she sees that it isn't even ten o'clock. She finds herself wishing it were later. Late enough to justify a long lunch that could kill at least an hour or so. She had started a painting yesterday – a smudge of blue acrylic on a blank canvas. Self-portrait perhaps. Her dad had always wanted to be a painter, but she had never liked it – the doing or the observing – and so she wonders what made her think that now would be any different. She could read some more perhaps, but her book is boring her. Who decides a classic anyway? Maybe she should pick another – her suitcase is almost full of them – piles of books that she's amassed over the years and has never read because she hasn't had the time. Excuses no longer hold water.

She finds herself staring at her phone, seeking out the shade of a palm so she can see the screen. She wants to speak to someone. Her thumb moves quickly through Jenny, Rachel, Will even. What would she say to them? Yes, it's perfect here; no I'm not trying to make you jealous; well if I had to find fault, I'd say the food is getting a bit tiring, lots of fried things. How's work? Same as always? Well, what could they bitch about now? She finds herself sidestepping her own life to dive into theirs, longing to hear their complaints and moans and secretly wishing that she could chip in with more of her own. Sure, she has her problems, and she could describe to them the overwhelming sadness that solidifies inside of her each morning, mere seconds after she opens her eyes, the grief she can only keep at bay with moments of mindfulness that her phone has to remind her to take; but no, that is not the type of thing they would want to hear. That is not the truth she wants them to know because she has escaped and she is free and they are not. And so she asks them about their days and feeds off their misery and hides behind her own. She calls Jenny but it goes to voicemail. The time difference, of course. She is far away from everything she knows.

She thinks of her final words to her father, her dismissal, her loathing, slammed doors, crying, a decade ago now. She thinks of his shrivelled corpse in the casket, half the man he was, thick makeup clown-like on an almost-bare skull, only human after all. Pathetic. All along perhaps. Does the money atone for his sins? Does it atone for hers? She wishes she had called him in those final years. Maybe it was her own hatred that had metastasised, edgeless after so long but an object of battery nonetheless; an eyeless worm, eating him from the inside out. He had died alone, they had said. It was the smell that caused the neighbours to call the police, they had said. If only she could have felt his suffering somehow, just to have known, she wishes he could have at least given her that. 

She decides to walk down to the port. One of three pueblos on the island with identical white-rendered houses, green shutters, a handful of rarely-open restaurants, an old wooden pier that carves the blood-soaked beach in two where the fishermen haul in their catch. The town from up here is a flock of scared sheep, huddled at the union of two dark mountains, beautiful in its lack of order. Care-free somehow.

The fishermen are hauling the last of their wares up onto the sand as she steps into town. Locals inspect them – yay or nay – haul off great cartons of sea life. She knows most of them by sight already: dark-skinned, big-bellied, none by name. She still doesn't speak the language – yet another of the things she will achieve when she has no distractions but has somehow not found the time or energy to do so yet. For now she likes to hear the meaningless sounds of their voices: guttural rolling R's and lackadaisical L's, dramatic hand gestures, thick-eyebrowed frowns and smiles from the eyes. 

Hola, she says raising a hand as her eyes meet with a captain of indecipherable age: that rotund, European purgatory between youth and death. Hola señora. They haul the last of the buckets onto the sand, throw seawater over the entrails and let the creeping tide deal with the rest. Some of the younger fishermen drag the boats with gnarled rope to moor them to the pier. Then they are off to the bar where they will drink a frosted pint as the sun gears itself up for a midday roasting; they will talk, smoke, laugh. She is free to join them of course, because there is nothing else she has to do. She watches them drag seats from inside to snag the gaps between lengthening shadows. Another day perhaps. She unlocks her phone and flicks through old photos. 

Be in the moment, a voice from somewhere says. Be here now. 

Here now then: cold tears stutter down sunburnt cheeks.