Read Online Eden by Joanna Nadin - Free Book Online

explored and charted. I wanted to stand with my back nestled in the curvature of the morning-room wall, held steadfast by its oddness and the surety of history. I wanted to roll my finger on the rounded brown Bakelite of the light switch at my bedroom door – on and off, on and off, my breath rising and falling with each satisfying click. I wanted to lie face-down in the tangled fur of the sheepskin rug on the landing, smelling its lanolin sweetness, absorbing every footfall, every figure that had passed. I wanted to hide inside my grandmother’s wardrobe, our door to Narnia, a mothball-scented dressing-up box of furs and flapper dresses and long-forgotten gowns.
    The house was a story, a book that caught us in time, trapped us like silverfish in a leather-bound volume of Dickens; like the dust that lay thick and heavy on the stone mantels and window sills, that caught in the folds of fabric and blew like tumbleweed across the pantry floor.
    Like the damp that defied a battery of attempts to banish it. That, despite shuttered windows, and air bricks, found its way back in; oozing through every fault and fissure, sending wet fingers along the scullery floor, into the brocaded seams of wing-backed chairs and into the highest shelves and bottom drawers of cupboards, rendering biscuits and breakfast cereals a claggy, stale mass.
    But it was this damp air that fed our fertile imaginations, curious thoughts growing like pin mould on pantry bread. The house became our Neverland – full of strange creatures and terrible monsters and magic, magic everywhere. But now this land of make-believe was being dismantled, piece by rotting piece. That sweet, musty smell – of the past, of a hundred lives and a thousand stories – was replaced by eye-stinging sawdust and the bitter, chemical tang of gloss paint. And the peace that hung over Eden like a sacred shroud was driven out, shooed across the lawns by the high-pitched, angry buzz of electric drills and sanders.
    A week later, I follow it; slip from the back of the wardrobe and, taking an apple, a sandwich and a paperback book, I slide out the back door and into the woods.

    The path to the boathouse is narrow now. Spindly nettles nod and waver a warning towards my bare calves as I pass, and the once well-trodden soil is overgrown. Brambles whip my thighs, thin scratches of red against pale skin. Yet I run on regardless, my plimsolls skimming over clods of earth and the exposed roots of oaks, beeches, and the last of the elms. I fly, second star to the right and straight on until I reach my morning: a wide curve of water that glistens in the early sun – Calenick creek – and next to it, a faded-board boathouse, with a corrugated roof and painted “No Entry” tacked haphazardly, childishly, across the door.
    If Eden was our world, then the boathouse was our playroom: a ready-made gingerbread house in an enchanted forest, picture-book perfect with red-checked curtains, a table and chairs, a camping stove. We would spend all day here, playing at pirates, at Swallows and Amazons, at Charon ferrying the dead across the Styx, taking turns to row our boat – Jorion – across to the Millhouse and back, Tom paying us for the journey in penny chews or strawberry bootlaces. We would swim out to the pontoon, lie on our backs until our skin stung from salt and sunshine, until our throats were hoarse from singing that Robert de Niro was waiting; until, when we pressed against our eyelids, shooting stars danced across the pinkness like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Then, at night, when we dared, we would sleep top to tail in the foldaway camp bed or on the floor, waking with toes in our faces and the world upside-down to a breakfast of biscuits and cherryade.
    And then one summer Bea just stopped coming. At first there was a film she wanted to see at the Lux in Liskeard; an American high school thing of rebellion and leather jackets and boys from the wrong side of the tracks. Then the excuses