The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight
Jenny Valentine
Two boys. One identity. He can change his life if he says yes…An explosive new mystery from the award-winning author Jenny Valentine, The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight is the story of a boy who assumes the identity of a missing teenager and in-so-doing unearths a series of shattering family secrets – and the truth about who he really is.With all the classic hallmarks of a Jenny novel – a fantastically strong, sensitive and memorable first person narration; themes of loss and betrayal, family secrets and personal identity; truly quality writing that is 'literary' but never inaccessbile or pretentious, this is the thrilling new novel from the author of Finding Violet Park.
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_e6ba5fe2-890c-55ca-a827-13cb05b5c36b)
HarperCollins Children’s Books An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2010
Text copyright © Jenny Valentine 2010
Jenny Valentine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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Source ISBN: 9780007283613
Ebook Edition © August 2013 ISBN: 780007489305
Version: 2015–04–01
DEDICATION (#ulink_1ef5fb72-490c-5de8-a8aa-172fc1080b4c)
For Maikki Ranger, my accidental twin.
CONTENTS
COVER (#u0ac9906d-6e02-50cf-adc1-2a7e34c517a4)
TITLE PAGE (#u5c1ec131-09bd-5f12-81f4-c29050ad16b8)
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_96b36ab2-c3d9-51a2-8cc4-4d6d607c945f)
DEDICATION (#ulink_15f2d9d4-91c2-528f-9390-6f4df1bdeb52)
ONE (#ulink_3c81ef59-1eea-59fa-8b61-c65c2409729d)
TWO (#ulink_62e5c098-5ff9-5810-ab56-fbfba232c8fc)
THREE (#ulink_cf67ecd8-5e07-503c-b3d7-34de72c91711)
FOUR (#ulink_9cc1b632-d960-54b2-809e-e05bc11107c1)
FIVE (#ulink_cf14bfba-2651-5868-8f75-c739d13b516d)
SIX (#ulink_17634960-11f7-51d8-a7d0-62296de0cffb)
SEVEN (#ulink_c14f67e7-e5bf-5fb4-bed7-a5fa839b3cdb)
EIGHT (#ulink_dfc42157-8524-5f72-9b4f-53af61ad46c8)
NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
KEEP READING (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
BOOKS BY JENNY VALENTINE (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE (#ulink_66ad7515-d19c-5d96-892e-387dd6c2051a)
I didn’t choose to be him. I didn’t pick Cassiel Roadnight out of a line-up of possible people who looked just like me. I just let it happen. I just wanted it to be true. That’s all I did wrong, at the beginning.
I was in a hostel, a stop-off for impossible kids in east London somewhere. I’d been there a couple of days, walked in off the streets half-starved, because I had to. They were still trying to get hold of me. They were still trying to find out who I was.
I wasn’t going to tell them.
It was a tired place run by tired people. It smelled of cigarettes and floor polish and soup. They gave me old clothes, washed thin and mended and almost the right size. They asked me lots of questions in return for two meals and a dry place to sleep.
I tried to be grateful, but I didn’t speak to them.
They locked me in a storeroom for fighting. Hot and airless, four pale walls, a shut and rusted filing cabinet, a shelf piled with papers, a stack of chairs.
The boy I fought with was hurt. That’s why I was locked up really, for winning. You’re not allowed to do that. I don’t remember his name. I don’t remember what the fight was about even.
I was in there for over two hours. I wanted to wreck it. I watched myself doing it, somewhere in my head.
I heard one of them coming, saw the wavering, moss-coloured shape of her through the mottled glass of the door. I banged on it hard. She stopped and turned and took a quick breath of her disappointed air.
Her voice was small and jumpy. “What do you want?” she said.
“I want you to let me out.”
“I can’t do that.”
I put my head against the cold skin of the wall. “Please help me,” I said.
“Are you hurt?” she said. “Are you bleeding?”
“I’m thirsty.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You can’t deprive me of water.”
“I’ll go and ask,” she said, and through the glass she warped and gathered and was gone.
I counted to four hundred and thirty-eight.
When she came back, she had someone else with her. They unlocked the door and swooped in with a plastic cup half-filled with water. I drank it down in one. It wasn’t enough.
The man had a hooked nose and loose, curly hair. I’d seen him before, but not her. He sounded like keys jangling.
He said, “Have you finished fighting?”
I shrugged. “Probably not.”
I didn’t like the way the woman was looking at me. I stared back so she would stop, but she didn’t. Between us there was just the blood in my ears, pounding and pumping, and the look on her face.
She kept her eyes on me while she spoke to the man, and when she left the room. “Hang on a minute, would you? I’ll be right back.”
The man sat in one of the chairs, shifting, trying hard to look relaxed. He leaned towards me and his black eyes blinked, quick and vigilant, like a bird’s. I wondered if he minded being alone with me. I wondered if he was afraid.
“Why won’t you tell us your name?” he said.
I pretended he wasn’t there. I pretended he wasn’t talking.
“I’m Gordon,” he said. “And the lady’s name is Ginny.”
“Well done,” I said. “Good for you.”
“And you are?” he said.
I looked at my shoes, somebody else’s shoes, black and lumpy and scuffed. I wondered how many nobodies had worn them. I felt the fabric of someone else’s shirt against my skin, nobody else’s trousers. How was I supposed to know?
I smiled. “I’m nobody,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “Everyone is somebody.”
It was amazing really, how he could be so sure of that.
It was the 5th of November when I found out I wasn’t who I thought I was. I remember the exact moment. I didn’t know myself any more. I asked a man for the time so I could commit it to memory. He looked at his watch and told me it was twenty-five past seven. Then he just went back to his newspaper.
I said, “Do you know me? Do you know who I am?” I knew he wouldn’t, but I needed him so badly to say, “Yes.”
I could tell he wasn’t concentrating on his reading any more. He just had his eyes on the words while he waited for me to go away. He was scared.
The Ginny woman came back with something in her hand, a piece of paper. “Can I have a word?” she said.
Gordon got up and they left me in the room on my own again. I could hear them on the other side of the door. They were whispering, but I could still hear.
She said, “I only saw it this morning. Pure coincidence.”
“Bloody hell.”
“He’s been gone nearly two years.”
“Well. I. Never.”
“Do you think it’s him?”
“Look at it. It’s got to be.”
The door handle moved. I shut my eyes and tried to be ready. I tried to stop time. When they came back in they were altered, careful, like I was a bomb that might go off, a sleeping tiger, a priceless vase about to fall.
I thought they’d found me. I wondered how far I would get if I just ran.
Ginny’s hand hovered over mine, without touching. Gordon tried to smile. I was terrified. Was this it?
“Cassiel?” she said.
I looked straight at her. I didn’t know what was going on. “What?”
“Cassiel Roadnight?” she asked.
My name is not Cassiel Roadnight. It never has been. My name is Chap. That’s what Grandad used to call me. I always thought it was a good name. I always thought it suited me.
“Who, me?” I said.
Gordon gave me the piece of paper. It was a printout, a picture of a boy with the word MISSING across his forehead.
A picture of me.
“Oh my God,” I said, and I took in a breath and I held it.
It was old. I was about fourteen maybe, something like that. Brown hair, not long and not short. Blue eyes, same shape, same lights and colours. My face exactly – my nose, my mouth, my chin.
I wondered if it was the last photo anyone had taken of me and I wondered who took it.
I wondered why I was smiling. I didn’t smile when I was fourteen. What did I have to smile about?
“Oh my God,” I said again.
They misunderstood me. Ginny let her hand touch mine and she squeezed. Gordon blew the air from his mouth with puffed cheeks, like a deflating ball. I kept my eyes on the picture.
There was something wrong with it.
Here are some things I know for sure about my face. I see them every time I look in the mirror. I know they are there without even having to look.
One. I have two scars. The first runs from my earlobe to my cheekbone, thin and raised and shiny, like one of the mends on my shirt. A dog bit me when I was five. It hurt like hell.
The second is beneath my left eye, a red mark, a swelling under my fingers, a diamond-shaped hole made by a boy with rings on every finger. I remember his face and I remember the sharp, weighted sound of those rings landing. His name was Rigg.
Two. I have three piercings in my left ear and two in my right. I did them myself with a needle and salt water and a cork. I breathed in deep and they didn’t even bleed. There’s nothing in them any more, no studs or rings or whatever. I took them out, but the holes are still there. My ears look like pincushions.
Three. My teeth are bad. One at the front is broken and three back ones are going to come out, even though they’re supposed to last me a lifetime. My teeth are terrible.
In the picture there were no scars on my face, no piercings. I had perfect teeth. I was happy and well fed and wholesome.
In other words, it wasn’t me.
I tried to tell them. I looked up from the picture and I said, “No.”
“Cassiel,” Gordon said. He crossed his legs. His trousers and his mouth made a shushing noise.
I shook my head. “Not me.”
“Come on,” Ginny said again, her hand still on mine.
I wanted to swat it off. I didn’t answer her.
“Whatever trouble you’re in, Cassiel,” she said, “whatever reason you had for running away, we can help you.”
“No, you can’t,” I said. They were too close to me. I didn’t like it.
“We’re here to help,” she said.
“Help someone else,” I said. “Help someone who wants it. I’m not him.”
“Who are you then?” Gordon asked.
Good question.
I stared at him. I smiled my angriest smile.
“What are the odds,” Gordon said to Ginny, like I wasn’t there, “of there being two identical missing boys?”
“Billions to one,” Ginny said, like that settled it.
“I don’t care what the odds are,” I said. “It’s not me.”
“So what’s your name then?”
Maybe this is it, I thought, just a trick to get me to tell them my name. I wasn’t falling for it. They weren’t going to find me. I’d managed to keep away from them for this long.
“It’s not Cassiel,” I said. “No way it’s that.”
They glanced at each other.
“Have another look,” Gordon said, and Ginny said, “Take your time.”
They didn’t believe me. They wanted to be right, I could tell that. They were going to insist on it. It doesn’t matter what you say to people like that. When they have made up their minds they stop listening.
I breathed in hard and I tried not to think. I looked at the boy in the picture. I thought how incredible it was to have a double like that, somewhere out in the world, to look exactly like a total stranger. I looked at Cassiel Roadnight’s happy, flawless, fearless face. And the thought occurred to me then, that I could be him, if I wanted. It crept in. I could see it coming and I tried so hard not to notice it.
I could be.
And if I were Cassiel Roadnight, the thought said, I wouldn’t have to be me any more, whoever that was.
You won’t exist, it said. You could wipe yourself off the face of the earth in a second. You could vanish into thin air, right in front of your pursuers.
I gave that thought my full attention. What did I have to lose?
There were people looking for Cassiel Roadnight, but they were people who cared. He had a family and friends. He had loved ones. He had a life I could step right into.
And what did I have?
Nobody. Nothing, except the fear of being found. The people looking for me just wanted to pull me apart.
I always wanted to be someone else. Doesn’t everyone?
“OK,” I said to the thought, so quietly I almost didn’t say it at all.
“What?” Gordon said.
They looked at each other and then back at me. It was like they’d been holding everything in. Suddenly there was this noise in the room of them breathing.
“OK,” I said.
“Good,” said Ginny, and Gordon said, “Your name is Cassiel Roadnight?”
“Yes,” I told him. “My name is Cassiel Roadnight,” and I watched the smile spread and stick to his face.
I lied. That’s what I did wrong.
It didn’t feel like much. Everybody lies once in a while. And just in case it counts in my defence, I wished it was the truth, I really did.
TWO (#ulink_883026c2-f4a1-50b8-b234-0c6f1a9a1d96)
Ginny let me look myself up on the computer. She wasn’t supposed to. Using the office equipment was against house rules. But then again so was running, or having a knife that actually cut things, or eating a peanut.
“Just for a minute,” she said, and she watched over my shoulder. I could smell her breath. I could hear her swallow.
I turned to look at her. “Do you want to leave me alone?”
There’s no way she was allowed to do that. I watched her blink three times.
“Of course, Cassiel,” she said, like she worked for me or something, like this was a hotel and I was paying to be there. “I’ll be just down the hall.”
God, having a name was something. Try being nobody and asking for your space.
Cassiel Roadnight had his own missing person’s profile. He came from a small town where everybody knew him, where everybody knew each other. He went missing on fireworks night when the place was full of strangers, packed with people all come to see the procession and the dancing and the costumes and the fireworks and the Wicker Man. It happened every year. A celebration in the town, called Hay on Fire. It was a clever time to disappear.
It was the 5th of November. I looked at that date on the screen for a long time. Cassiel Roadnight hadn’t been seen since then. Nor had I.
The profile said he was wearing jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt. His face was painted silver and gold for the procession, and over his ordinary clothes he wore a black cape and a mask that covered his eyes and nose. There were photos. It was strange to see a picture of him hours or even minutes before he was gone. It was even stranger to see my own eyes looking out from behind that mask.
His disappearance was ‘completely out of character’, which means they didn’t see it coming. He didn’t leave a note, and he didn’t tell anybody he was going.
His family said they would never give up hope of seeing him again.
They said, “Cass, we miss you and think about you every day. There is no problem that we can’t solve together. Just let us know that you are OK. And please come home.”
I would have liked a message like that. It would have meant a lot to me, people never giving up hope.
There were other photos of him too, not just the firework ones. I sat in the empty office and I looked at them all: Cassiel with an ice cream, Cassiel in the football team, Cassiel with a panting dog, Cassiel on a windswept beach. It was like looking at myself with a life I couldn’t dream up, the life I wished I’d had. I knew I hadn’t been there, I knew it wasn’t true, but I willed myself to start hearing the drums in that procession, to start smelling the mud and sweat of the football pitch, to taste the strawberry pink of that ice cream, the salt and sand on my skin. I willed myself to start believing those pictures were pictures of me.
If you haven’t eaten for a few days you have to be very careful to take little bites, or the food you’ve been wishing for and dreaming about day and night can make you worse than sick. Trust me, I know. That’s why I knew not to wish for a family. I knew it was a terrible idea.
But wishing is addictive.
Cassiel Roadnight’s life slipped into my head right then and stayed there. I couldn’t make it go away. I thought about his mum and dad, about what they might look like, about how their faces would change when they saw me. I thought about his brothers and sisters, how many of them there might be, how old they were. I thought about his cosy little town and the gap he’d left by leaving. I thought about his friends. I imagined how happy they’d be when he came home.
I kidded myself that they needed me as much as I needed them. I kidded myself I could end all their suffering just by showing up.
I thought about the kind of house Cassiel lived in, about his room and how it would feel when it was mine. I thought about breakfast at the table in the kitchen, pancakes and bad jokes and orange juice and the yellow sun on our faces. I thought about going to school and having friends and being normal.
I wished for what Cassiel Roadnight had. I wished with every single breath.
I didn’t think about the knife-edge being him would force me to live on. I failed to see it. I refused to look down.
I stared at his face on the computer screen and I dared myself to try it. Either I was going to make my wish come true, or I had to go right now and tell Gordon and Ginny the truth. I could become him or I had to become me. That was my choice.
I picture it often, me walking down the corridor towards them, pretending to choose. I replay the scene in my head because it was the time just before there was no going back, the last seconds I was no one, not me and not Cassiel Roadnight yet, not quite.
My shoes squeak on the polished floor, my hands feel hot and swollen and clammy, and I think I am undecided. I think I don’t know what I’m going to do.
Undecided seems like a magical place to me now, a place before action and consequence.
Undecided is what I wish for.
I knocked on the door. Gordon and Ginny were making phone calls. They’d been talking to the police and missing persons and social services. They were all coffee and triumph and activity. My lie had snowballed into fact already while my back was turned.
“Cassiel, my man,” Gordon said, wheeling his chair away from his desk. “How’re you doing?”
It was embarrassing, him talking like that. I knew it and he knew it. I looked at him and he looked away.
“It’s Cass,” I said. “That’s what people call me.”
I didn’t know I was going to say it, but when it came out it sounded right. I liked the feeling of him in my voice. I was tall and I looked down on Gordon in his chair. I had a family and friends and somewhere to be. I was somebody. The fugitive I’d been had finally disappeared.
Nobody could get me now.
“Sorry,” he said, clearing his throat. “Cass. What can we do for you?”
I said I’d finished on the computer.
“Good lad,” he said, straightening himself. “Find what you were looking for?”
I shrugged. (Yes Yes Yes. I’d found everything I ever wanted.)
I said, “What happens next?”
Ginny said that they were arranging for my family to be told. She said, “Someone will let them know as soon as possible. Then we can sort out getting you home.”
Home.
I didn’t know what to look at. This kind of hunger burst open in my gut, this cool empty space. I licked my lips and I felt a sudden fine sheen of sweat rise in my hair and under my arms.
Gordon said, “It won’t be long now.”
I heard what he said and I didn’t hear it at the same time. I think I nodded.
Home. Was it that easy?
Ginny said, “You do want to go home, don’t you, Cassiel? Is that what you want to do?”
“Yes,” I said. “I want it more than anything in the world.”
I thought she might laugh. The whole world could have burst out laughing right then and I wouldn’t have been surprised. Who was I to want anything?
“Well, good,” Ginny said, “Of course you do.”
Gordon sat back in his chair with his hands behind his head, and because the conversation seemed to be over I left the room. I put one foot in front of the other and when I got out I leaned against the wall and shut my eyes and made my heart slow down just by asking it to.
I was him.
And with each step I took as Cassiel Roadnight, with each new slowing heartbeat, I replaced something I wanted to forget about having been me.
THREE (#ulink_3b2418de-97b5-516d-9454-e4f1ccdacb3c)
My grandad’s place was a big house that backed on to the park. I don’t remember anything before that. I’ve tried. Through the window I could see the playground, kids moving all over it like ants on a dropped lolly.
Being in that house was like going back in time. It was quiet and dark and book-lined and mostly brown, full of clocks ticking, real clocks counting the days away in every room. The curtains were always closed, like outside didn’t matter. Grandad thought the best thing a person could spend his day doing was reading in the dark. I don’t think it ever crossed his mind that not everybody wanted to do it.
After the accident, people kept saying it was no place for a child, the health visitors and social workers and neighbours and noseyeffingparkers, as Grandad would’ve called them.
They didn’t ask me. It didn’t matter what I thought.
There were thirteen rooms in that house. I counted them. Grandad only lived in one.
I thought he must have used them once, must have needed them for something, like a wife and kids or dogs or lodgers or whatever it was he had before he had me. He never talked about it, even if I asked him. He acted like there wasn’t anything to remember before there was him and me. He called it The Time Before, and that’s all he’d say about it.
Grandad was happiest just to sit and read and sleep and drink in the front room, the one with the big bay window you couldn’t ever see out of. Sometimes he got up and shuffled out to the loo or the kitchen or to get the mail off the doormat, but not all that often. Sometimes he ventured out to the shop on the corner and shuffled back again, bottles clinking, whiskers glinting, hair gone wild.
We had our bed in the front room by the fire, and his chair, and his books and his bottles. It was warm in there, not like the rest of the house, which was so cold your face felt it first, as soon as you went out there, then your fingers and the tip of your nose died just a little. Those were my places: the weed-run garden, the other twelve rooms and the arctic upstairs, lifeless like a museum or a film set; a perfect timepiece, fallen into quiet and fascinating ruin.
In the stifling warmth of the front room I’d run my hands over the wallpaper that felt like flattened rope. The pattern of the curtains looked like radioactive chocolates in a box. That’s what I always thought when I looked at them. Chocolates of the future. Chocolates you should never ever eat. I couldn’t imagine Grandad choosing those curtains. I often wondered who did.
I slept in there with Grandad every night. I made a nest of cushions at the end of the bed. He sat in his sagging leather chair and read to me, with the bottle on the table at his side so he wouldn’t have to stop for it. He read me H.G. Wells and John Wyndham. He read me C.S. Lewis and Charles Dickens and Tolkien and Huckleberry Finn. Every night he read until I was asleep on my cushions or he was asleep in his chair. That’s how we said goodnight, by disappearing in the middle of a sentence.
And that’s how I learned everything I know, with the clocks’ soft ticking and the heating click-click of the gas fire and the raised nap of velvet against my cheek and the smell of whisky and the sound of Grandad’s voice reading.
How could that not be a place for a child?
How could they say that?
What did they know?
FOUR (#ulink_894dfb79-cd3f-5d42-a6de-a647ba88ca11)
The next day I got a phone call.
Ginny came running down the corridor to find me. I was picking at a hole in my jeans. I was waiting. I was trying to take time apart minute by minute, second by second. It wasn’t working.
Ginny had sweat across her upper lip. It glistened. “Cassiel,” she said. “It’s for you. It’s your sister.”
I walked behind her, back the way she had come. When we got to the office I looked at the receiver for a moment before I picked it up. Ginny flapped with her hands and mouthed at me to talk.
“Hello?” I said.
“Cass?”
He had a sister.
I could tell how hard she was shaking by her voice. I wanted to make her stop.
I looked at Ginny. She was still flapping. I turned my back on her.
“Cass. It’s Edie.”
“Hello, Edie.”
She made a little sound, not a whole word really, and then she said, “Is that you?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s me.”
Then I sat in the office with my eyes closed and I listened to this Edie girl I’d never met crying because I was alive. I’d imagined people jumping around, beside themselves with joy and relief, not sobbing miles away on the end of the phone. I didn’t think it would be like that.
When she stopped crying, when she talked, I pretended it was me she was talking to, me she’d been missing all this time, me she was so happy to have found. I pretended she was my sister. That way I didn’t have to feel so bad.
She said, “I’m coming to get you, Cass. Please stay where you are. Please don’t disappear again before I get there.”
“OK.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Oh God. Mum’s not here. I can’t get hold of her. I’m just going to come. I’ll be there. Don’t move!”
“I won’t move,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”
She took a long time to say goodbye. I put the phone down and I forced myself to smile at Ginny.
“Well?” she said, “How was that?”
I didn’t know why she was asking. She’d heard all she needed, hanging around by the photocopier, pretending to be busy, holding herself still so she could listen.
“Good,” I said.
“You didn’t say much,” she said.
“I never do.”
I went to my room and I sat on my bed. The dinner bell sounded and the football on TV started and the showers were free, but I just stayed there.
I should have run away. I should have got out of it while I still could. But I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t get off my bed even. I didn’t leave the room. I didn’t move. Because suddenly I had a sister, and she’d told me not to.
Four hours later, I heard Edie before I saw her. I heard her walking towards my room and my stomach opened up like a canyon. Her shoes clapped gently next to Gordon and Ginny’s wheezy, squeaking steps.
When they came in, she stopped and put her hands up over her mouth. She stood there with Ginny beaming behind her.
I didn’t know what to do with my face.
I could feel a big flashing sign above my head that said THIS IS NOT HIM. I waited for her to notice it. I waited for her to say, “You’re not my brother,” and I thought about what would happen next. Would sirens start wailing? Would I melt like candle wax into a puddle on the floor? How many people would hit me? Where would they put me, once they knew?
And if she thought I was Cassiel? If she fitted me into his place like the wrong piece in a puzzle, what would happen then? I was more scared of that than anything. And I wanted it more than anything too.
I stood there and I waited for her to decide.
She kept her hands over her mouth. Her make-up bled from her eyes on to her skin. I thought about her putting mascara on that morning, before she knew she was going to see her missing brother.
“Say something, Cassiel,” whispered Ginny.
She said it like I was an idiot, like I was four years old. I wanted to hit her.
“Hello, Edie,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.
Edie took a deep breath and she got Ginny and Gordon to leave us on our own. She didn’t speak, she just asked them with her eyes and her hands, and they said yes.
And then I was alone with her. And suddenly I knew that anything I did, just one tiny thing, a word, a look, a gesture, could blow this open, could scream the house down that I wasn’t him. I was a cell under the microscope. She was the all-seeing eye. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I stood dead still and I watched her.
She wasn’t what I’d been expecting. She was a lot smaller than me and her hair was long and dark. Long dark hair and blue eyes overflowing with water and light, a smile so full of sadness it made me feel grateful to have seen it, like a rare flower.
“Talk to me,” she said.
I had to clear my throat. My voice was shrunken, hiding. “What about?”
She shrugged and her eyes ran and she didn’t say anything, not for a bit. She just looked at me. The asking and relief on her face made me flinch. It was like staring at the sun.
After a while she looked at the floor and said, “I don’t believe it. I can’t take this in.”
I breathed out. I just watched her. I didn’t know what else to do.
“It’s really you?” she said.
I nodded. My tongue felt swollen and dry in my mouth. I needed a drink of water.
“Say something,” she said. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”
Because I’m scared to. Because you don’t know me. Because I’ll say the wrong thing.
“It’s good to see you,” I said.
“Good?” she said. “Good? Two years, Cass. You have to do better than good.”
“Sorry.”
“I drove so fast,” she said. “I kept thinking I was going to crash. I thought I was going to turn the car over, but I couldn’t slow down.”
“Where have you been?” she said. “Why didn’t you call? What the hell happened to you?”
My lips were stuck together. Somebody had sewn my mouth shut.
“You’ve changed so much,” she said.
I felt the dusting of stubble over my chin. I rubbed my fingers across my cheeks, through my overgrown hair. I ran my tongue over my bad teeth.
“You too,” I said. Could I say that? Was that wrong?
“You are so tall.”
“Am I?”
“Why did you leave?” she said suddenly, and the skin of her voice broke, the anguish welling up underneath. “Why did you do that?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I thought you were dead,” she said. “People said you were dead.”
“I’m not dead.”
She nodded again and her face caved in, and she cried, proper crying, all water and snot. She couldn’t catch her breath. She stood on the other side of the room and she looked at me like she wanted me to make it better. I didn’t know what to do. I waited for her to stop, but she crossed the room and walked right into me. She cried all over my shirt.
While she did it I shut my eyes and breathed slowly.
I had a sister and she was perfect and she cared that I was there.
I think it was the closest to happy I’d ever been. And I knew I was going to Hell for it.
I know it still. If there’s a Hell, that’s where I’ll go.
FIVE (#ulink_deae2ab8-24e9-5664-b182-63904035cc83)
Now and again I persuaded Grandad that we needed to go out – to the city farm maybe, or the market, or along the canal. He never saw the point. I think after years of hiding in the dust-yellow insides of his books, real life was like roping lead weights to his feet and jumping into cold water; just not something he felt like doing.
He didn’t mind me going out on my own. He said it was a good idea.
He said, “The namby-pamby children of today have no knowledge of danger and no sense of direction.”
He said, “When I was your age I was out for days at a time with nothing but a compass and a piece of string.”
He said he very much doubted I’d get lost or stolen, or fall down a manhole.
He was right. I didn’t.
Still, sometimes I persuaded him to get dressed and come with me, just because I liked him being there, just because he needed the fresh air. His skin was lightless, and thin like paper. His hair was like a burnt cloud. I told him if he didn’t get out in the sunshine once in a while he might turn into a page from one of his mildewed books, and the slightest gust of wind would blow him to nothing. I sort of believed it.
Out on my own I was quick and agile. I could walk on walls and weave through crowds and duck under bridges and squeeze into tiny spaces and jump over gates. Grandad wasn’t so good at walking. He tripped over a lot and staggered sometimes, and forgot where he was going. Once he fell into the canal. Not fell exactly – he was too close to the edge and he walked right into it, like it was what he’d been meaning to do all along. He was wearing a big sheepskin coat and it got all heavy with water and he couldn’t get up again. It wasn’t deep, it wasn’t dangerous. It was funny. He stood there with the filthy water up to his chest, soaking into his coat, changing the colour of it from sand to black.
“Come on in,” he said to me. “The water’s lovely.”
“No thanks, Grandad,” I said.
He winked at me. “This reminds me,” he said, trying to heave himself up off the bottom, “of my childhood holidays on the French Riviera.”
I think the coat weighed more than he did. He took it off in the end and waded out in his thin suit, like a wet dog. The coat lay there on the water, like a man face down with his arms stretched out on either side, looking for something on the canal floor, quietly drowning. We had to rescue it with a stick.
“I never liked this coat,” Grandad said as we walked back the way we’d come, carrying it between us like a body, straight back to the house. His teeth banged together when he talked, like an old skeleton. Water ran off him like a wet tent. His shoes were ruined. There were leaves in his hair, leaves and rat shit.
We laughed and laughed.
I didn’t know Grandad was drunk then. It never occurred to me. I don’t think I knew what drunk was. When you’re a kid you fall over and bang into things all the time. I didn’t realise you were supposed to grow out of it.
I wouldn’t have minded anyway. If you ask me, Grandad drunk wasn’t any worse than Grandad sober. Not when you love a person that much. Not when a person is all you’ve got.
I only saw Grandad cry one time and he hadn’t been drinking. He hadn’t been allowed to. It was after the accident, when I went to see him, just that once.
He was so pale, so almost lifeless I thought he was disappearing.
He tried to talk to me. He tried to tell me the truth, and his tears kept getting in the way of the words. Great racking sobs tore through his voice.
I didn’t hold him like I held Edie. I was too shocked.
I should have held him like I held her. I should have done it, but I didn’t.
SIX (#ulink_6f32a420-875e-5adc-a8f2-f8f39f05dc70)
Suddenly I was free to leave. Edie signed some papers to say she was responsible for me. She showed Gordon her driver’s licence to prove she was over eighteen, and who she said she was, Cassiel’s big sister and all that.
She came with me to get my things. I’d packed them in my rucksack and it was waiting on my bed.
There wasn’t much. A torch without batteries, a knife and fork I lifted from the canteen, a tennis ball, a pencil, a kingfisher feather, an empty wallet, an old notebook, some postcards, a pair of jeans, two ancient tops and a sweatshirt I’d found on some railings.
I found my rucksack in a skip, years ago. There was a slash down one side and one of the straps was broken so it got dumped. All I did was tape it up and tie a knot in it and it worked fine. It’s amazing what you can find, if you’re looking. Perfectly good things get thrown away all the time, perfectly good things and perfectly good people.
“Is that yours?’ she said.
I nodded.
“What have you got?’
“Not much.”
She reached out and took it before I could stop her. I watched her unzip it. All I could think was there might be something in there with my name on, something just waiting to give me away, but there wasn’t. My stuff looked like it had just washed up there, in the torn black inside. It looked like stuff the sea had spat out.
“I don’t recognise any of this,” she said.
I shrugged. “I guess not.”
She picked out the tiny, blue-streaked feather. “Can I have it?” she said.
“OK.”
“It’s funny,” she said, brushing the fine tip of it with her fingers.
“What is?”
“That you’ve been missing and a thing like this has been with you all this time.”
We walked outside to her car, an old silver Peugeot with a dent in its flank and one almost flat tyre. There were plastic flowers hanging from her rear-view mirror, a load of old newspapers on the back shelf. They swelled like sails and snapped shut when we opened and closed the doors.
I wondered how Cassiel Roadnight got into a car. I wondered if the way I did it might give me away.
Gordon and Ginny and a few of the boys stood in the front yard, waiting for us to go so they could get on with whatever happened next. Nobody knew what to say.
“Good luck.” Gordon had his head half though the open car window. I thought about winding it shut with his face still in it. I thought about just driving away.
“Thank you so much,” Edie said. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
Ginny said to me, “Let us know how you’re getting on.” But she didn’t mean it and she knew I wouldn’t.
“OK,” Edie said, looking at her feet and then at me, starting the car, pulling it round in reverse. “Let’s go.”
We turned on to the road, and the house and everyone in it were suddenly gone, as if they never existed. I thought for a second that maybe I’d been safer there, maybe I’d been better off. For a second I wished she’d just take me back and leave me. Now, rather than later. Now, before everyone got hurt too much.
The car was small and messy and crowded. A fallen-over basket had spilled its stuff on the floor and a big blue bag took up most of the room at my feet. There were clothes all over the back seat. The dashboard was covered in flyers and scraps of paper and parking tickets. It stank of incense. I was sitting on something. I reached underneath myself and pulled it out – a piece of old knitted blanket, just a scrap, grey with dirt and dotted with holes. I’d have guessed she used it to clean the windscreen, if the windscreen had ever been cleaned. I was about to drop it. It was the look on Edie’s face that stopped me. Instead I held it in my hand for a minute, pushed my fingers through its loops and swirls.
Edie watched me.
Was this how hard it was to be someone else? Did I have to be this vigilant? How long was I going to last, when even a scrap of filth might turn out to be something special?
Edie straightened in her chair, took a deep breath, smiled at the road.
“I thought you might have missed it,” she said. “I know you’re too old for it and everything. I just thought it would make you smile.”
“Thanks,” I said. I smiled, on cue. It felt like my face was splitting open. I put the rag in my rucksack.
It was good being in a place without lockers and filing cabinets and industrial cleaning fluid and a place for everything. I watched Edie’s hands on the steering wheel. She had a gold ring on the little finger of her right hand, a silver one on the middle of her left. The veins were raised and faintly blue beneath her skin, thin fine bones rippling with each small movement. It was hot in the car, hot and dry. The air blew in through the heaters and leeched the moisture from my eyes and my mouth. While she drove, Edie looked straight ahead and in her mirrors and at her shoulder and over at me.
“I’m going to drive slowly on the way home,” she said. “I’m not going to crash or turn the car over.”
“OK,” I said. And inside, I heard a part of me wishing that she would.
For a long time we didn’t say anything. The quiet in the car was full of us not knowing what to say.
I thought about where we were going and what it would be like and who was there waiting. I thought about how the hell I was ever going to get away with it. Every time I thought about it my body opened out like it was hollow, like forgetting something vital, like knowing you’re in trouble, like waking up to nothing but regret.
“We’re very quiet,” she said, “for people with two years of stories to tell.”
I liked it, being quiet. I couldn’t make a mistake if I was quiet.
“There’s no rush, is there?” I said.
“I suppose not,” she said. “I suppose we never talked that much before.”
She changed gear and it didn’t go in right and the car grated and squealed until she got it.
“I missed you, Cass,” she said.
What was I supposed to say to that? I looked at my feet. I looked out of the window. She was still missing him. She hadn’t stopped, poor thing. She just didn’t know it.
“I dreamt about you,” she said.
What would he have said to that? Thank you? Sorry?
“In my head you were the same as when you left,” she said. “I expected you to look the same.” She almost smiled. “It’s been two years. It’s stupid.”
We drove past a pub called The Homecoming. It looked warm inside, and noisy. I thought myself out of the car and into the pub, taking people’s drinks when their backs were turned. I saw myself through the windows.
“I wonder if Mum and Frank have got my messages,” she said. “I couldn’t get hold of them.”
I didn’t know who these people were. I didn’t have the slightest idea of what to say.
“They might not know yet,” she said. “How weird is that?”
I could see her searching my eyes for something that wasn’t there. I blinked and so did she.
“God, Cassiel,’ she said. “I can’t believe it’s you.”
I knew exactly what she meant, even if she didn’t.
SEVEN (#ulink_513a49bd-1161-5365-9a0f-0deb4db4dfe3)
Think of the perfect cottage, right at the end of a lane that lifts and drops through woodland, and runs high along the ridges of fields. A white picket fence, a covered porch grown thick with quince and scented roses, a garden alive with birdsong and the quiet constant thrum of a stream.
I am not making this up. I didn’t dream it or read about it. This place exists. It’s where Edie took me.
Home.
I pretended to fall asleep in the seat next to her, so I wouldn’t have to worry about what to say. I let my eyes give in and close and I stayed at the small centre of myself, listening. I listened to the engine and the tick of the indicator and to Edie breathing. I listened to the air outside the windows and the rush-rush of other cars and the music she put on and turned down low so it wouldn’t wake me.
I listened when she answered her phone. It rang once.
A woman’s voice, high and thin and tinny, said, “Is it him?”
“It’s him,” Edie said, and I knew she was looking at me while she said it. “It’s Cass.”
“Oh my God,” said the woman. “I don’t believe it.”
“He’s right next to me.”
“How is he? What’s he like? Is he OK?”
“Asleep,” Edie said. “Perfect. Tall.”
“Shall I talk to him?”
Edie nudged me. I shifted in my seat and stretched. She nudged me again, harder. I opened my eyes and looked at the moving sweep of buildings and lamp posts and trees. None of them knew the terrible lie I’d started, none of them cared.
Edie held out the phone to me like a question. I shrank from it. I shook my head. She held it out again, harder. She put it in my hand.
“It’s Mum.”
“Hello?” I said.
Breathing rattled out of Edie’s phone, shallow and ragged. It made me think of a long-distance runner, of a sick dog.
She didn’t say anything.
“Hello?”
“Who’s that?” she said. “Is it you?”
She heard the lie in my voice. A mother would. She would know straight away. I spoke away from the mouthpiece so I’d be harder to hear. “Yes, it’s me.”
Then the weeping, just like with Edie. The strange small noise and the empty feeling of listening to it. I looked at Edie. I gave her back the phone.
“Mum,” she said. “It’s over. He’s coming home.”
Nothing. More sobbing. I thought I heard her say, “Are you sure?”
“Got to go. We’ll be there in a couple of hours.”
Edie let the phone drop into her lap. “You OK?” she said.
I tried to keep my eyes on the running grey of the road ahead. I liked the way I had to keep them moving just to stay looking at the same place.
“I’m fine,” I said.
I wanted to find out where we were going. I wanted to ask how long it would take, but I couldn’t. I was supposed to know.
“What are you thinking about?” she said.
I hate that question. If you’re thinking about it, it’s private. If you wanted someone else to know, you’d speak.
“Home,” I said.
She straightened in her seat, looped a strand of hair behind her ear. “I have to tell you something,” she said.
“What?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“OK.”
She looked over at me. She spoke too fast. “Please don’t be cross. Please don’t mind. Frank bought us a house. We moved.”
It took me a minute to work a few things out.
I didn’t mind. For me this was good news. For me it was a gift.
Edie was holding herself away from me, waiting for a reaction. I couldn’t tell if it was me that made her nervous, or her brother; the person she didn’t know or the one she did.
Cassiel was missing. Weren’t his family supposed to wait for him? Weren’t his loved ones supposed to be right there when he made it home? I pictured him making the journey, knocking on the door to a houseful of strangers, doubly abandoned. Cassiel would mind.
“That’s harsh,” I said. I shook my head.
“It wasn’t up to me,” she said, not looking at me, keeping her eyes on her mirrors, keeping her face towards the road.
“Whose idea was it?”
I listened to myself sounding bothered. I marvelled at my own hypocrisy.
Edie spoke too fast. “Frank found it,” she said. “He thought it was the best thing for Mum, you know. Give her something else to think about.”
“Right.”
“It was her dream house. Remember the one we always used to walk past on our way up to the common? It was up for sale and Frank’s been doing really well and…”
“That was nice of him,” I said.
Who the hell was Frank? A rich uncle? Their dad? Their mum’s boyfriend?
“Yes,” Edie said, smiling. “It was.”
She put her hand on mine and we drove along like that for a while, with me looking at our hands and her looking at the road.
“I thought you’d be angry,” she said.
“Do you want me to be?”
“No,” she said. “God, no. I just thought you would be, that’s all. You’ve every right.”
It made me smile, the idea that I was entitled to anything.
“It’s done,” I said. “I don’t see the point.”
I shut my eyes again and for a while I slept for real. I was looking at my face in the mirror. I was wondering how the hell I’d ended up looking like I did.
It was the killing of the engine that woke me again, the lack of sound, and then the slam of Edie’s door. I opened my eyes, alone on a dirt track surrounded by nothing but green. It was getting dark. It was unreal, like waking from one dream into another. I’d never been in that much space before. The wind blew across the land and straight at me like now I was there it had something to aim for. I could hear it singing through and over and under the car. For less than a second I wondered if Edie had left me here, if she’d worked it out and abandoned me. And then I heard the creak of a gate and she was back, striding through the sheer emptiness, opening and closing the door, bringing a little piece of the gale and the smell of cold grass in with her.
“Welcome home, Cass,” she said.
The car stumbled through the open gate, slicing through wet mud and tractor marks. Edie got out to shut it again behind us. The green plain narrowed into a tree-lined path, and then there it was. Cassiel’s mother’s dream house. There was a light on downstairs and it spilled out warm and yellow into the air. Edie beeped the horn twice and the front door flung open. It wasn’t until the porch light snapped on that I saw her properly, thin and dark and windblown, an older version of Edie, just as fragile-looking, just as small. She put her hands to her mouth the same as Edie did when she first saw me. Then she was jumping and waving, her shouts vanishing into the wind. She ran at the car. I watched her close in on us like a tornado, like water. There was no escaping her.
Edie stared at me. “What’s wrong?” she said. “You look like you’re going to be sick.”
“Nothing.”
“You’re scared. What are you scared of?”
I didn’t have time to answer. Cassiel’s mother was on us, on me. She wrenched open the door with both hands. The wind grabbed my hair and filled my ears, and she tried to pull me straight out by my arms and throw herself on me at the same time.
I heard Edie get out of the car on the other side, free and unnoticed, like she was invisible, like she wasn’t there. I saw myself suddenly from the outside, in this wind-racked, mud-filled place, pretending to be this woman’s son. I couldn’t breathe.
Wouldn’t she know? Wouldn’t she know as soon as she touched me?
Cassiel’s mother had bangles that clanked and rang, and her nails were bitten so hard, so far down I couldn’t look at them. I tried to get out of the car with her still clinging to me. I tried to stand up.
“My boy,” she said, and then she pulled me into the crook of her neck, my forehead on her shoulder, my back bent over like a scythe. Her clothes smelled of the warm inside, of dog and log fires and cooking, of cigarette smoke. I felt her breathing, thin and weak, like she was worn out from years of doing the same. She laughed into my hair and tightened her thin arms across my back. Her breath smelled of flowers and ash.
I stored it in a quiet and empty place in my mind. So this was what a mum felt like.
Cassiel’s mother drew back to look at me. Her eyes were wild and triumphant, and at the dark centre of them there was something like fear. I tried not to let her see how scared I was. I listened to the countdown in my head that ended with her disappointed scream.
It didn’t come. I got to zero and she hadn’t let go.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” she said, shaking her head, the threat of tears drowning her voice. “I never thought I’d see you.”
She grabbed my shirt, my mended charity-shop shirt, like she thought her hand might go straight through it. “You’re real.” She whispered it.
“Yes.”
“You came back.”
“Yes.”
I don’t know how long we stood there for, in that wet, freezing air. She rocked, like she was holding a baby, but it was me holding her up, I think. Edie had gone in. A dog came out on to the porch, sniffed the air, stretched its back legs and went in again. My car door was still open and the light was on inside. I worried briefly about the battery. The trees thrashed wildly at the house, like they knew there was something to be angry about, like they knew what wrong was being committed there. I glared at them and they thrashed wildly at me too.
When the phone rang inside the house, Cassiel’s mother jumped, like she’d been sleeping, like she’d been miles away.
“That’ll be Frank,” she said, and she wiped her eyes and smoothed her hair back, like whoever Frank was he’d be able to see her. “Let’s go in,” she said. “Let’s talk to Frank.”
She took my hand to walk with me, but when I pulled back to get my bag and shut the car door, she didn’t wait. She let go and went ahead to the house, and left me there for a moment in the wind and the dark alone.
Inside the house was warm and smelled of cinnamon and onions and wood smoke. Underneath the wood smoke there was something cloying and rotten, like dustbins, like decay.
It was horribly bright. I felt the light fall on each line and hollow of my face that was different to Cassiel’s. I felt my face change, looming and hideous in its strangeness. I saw my reflection in the mirror. I was me, not him. Wasn’t it obvious?
Edie and her mother weren’t looking, not really. They can’t have been. But they might at any moment. I stood still and waited for that moment to come.
I looked around me at the kitchen, dark and low-ceilinged with a black slate floor and blood-red cupboards, an old range pumping out heat, a long, scrubbed table down the middle. There was a sofa against the wall, torn and scruffy, with old velvet cushions that for a sharp second made me think of Grandad.
The dog was in his basket in the corner. He didn’t get up. He lifted his eyes, wagged his tail at us lazily, thump-thump-thump on the floor. He was a wiry mongrel of a thing, old and coarse and greying. I scratched his neck, read the name Sergeant on his collar. He rolled over and exposed the bald pink of his tummy, the upside-down spread of his smile.
Cassiel’s mother was flushed from the cold air, her knuckles bone-white where she gripped the phone.
“Is that Frank?” I said.
Edie nodded. “He just got our messages.”
Cassiel’s mother held the phone out to me. “Cass,” she said. “Come and speak to Frank. Let your big brother hear your voice.”
I took the phone out of her hand and she stroked the side of my face. I looked her in the eye. I waited for her to notice.
“Hello, Frank,” I said, and I stood still and obedient while she stroked me.
Frank was smoking. I could hear the wet suck of him pulling on a cigarette, the thickened taking in of breath. He laughed, and in my mind I saw his mouth and all the smoke pouring from it.
“Cass,” he said. “You’re home.” His voice was low and warm.
“Yes,” I said.
He sounded calm and confident. I liked the sound of him. “I can’t wait to see you,” he said.
“Me too.”
“I’m coming straight home.”
“When. Tonight?”
“In the morning.”
“OK. Good. Thanks.”
Would it be him that saw it? Would he look at his brother and see the liar underneath?
“It’s a miracle, Cass,” Frank said, his mouth close to the phone, his lips brushing against the mouthpiece as he spoke so the sound of him grazed my ears.
“Not really,” I said.
“No, believe me,” Frank was saying. “You are a miracle.”
Cassiel’s mother was holding her hand out for the phone. “Mum wants you,” I said.
“No. Tell Helen I’ve got to go,” he said. “Tell her I’ll see her tomorrow.”
“OK.”
“And Cass,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Welcome home.”
He put the phone down. I listened for a moment to the empty line.
I had a big brother now too.
Helen. Cassiel’s mum’s name was Helen. Was that what Cassiel called her? Or did he call her Mum? She was standing so close to me. She could have counted my eyelashes from where she was standing. She didn’t seem to notice my scars, the old holes in my ears, the thousand other differences there must be. Didn’t she see me?
“He’s gone,” I said.
The focus of her eyes slipped a little, but she kept them on me. I watched them go. I watched them loosen and fade and come back, her pupils lost in clouded, muddied blue, her gaze slack. Cassiel’s mother was high. She didn’t see me at all.
Edie was watching me. I wondered if she saw the shock on my face. I wondered if I was supposed to know.
Helen sat down at the table, smiled at nothing, started rolling a cigarette.
Edie picked my bag up and opened the door on to a dark hallway. “Are you coming?” she asked me.
“Where?” Helen said.
“I was going to give him a tour. He doesn’t know where anything is.”
They spoke about Cassiel, even though I was standing right in front of them. I supposed that’s just what they were used to, Cassiel getting talked about, Cassiel not being there. I supposed it was fitting, in a way.
Edie looked at me. “Do you want to?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”
In the dark hallway she opened a door on to the stairs. She held my bag in her hand, low by the strap, and dropped it on the bottom step. The banisters were wood, painted a pale bluish grey. The steps were dusty, dancing with fluff and crumbs, dots of paper and scraps of tobacco.
“Did you like the kitchen?” she said.
“It’s nice,” I said. “Pretty.”
She smiled. Her teeth and the whites of her eyes were like stone in the dark. “Not words I’m used to hearing you say.”
Did I have to be that careful? Did the words pretty and nice betray me? I was trying to be a good boy. I was trying to be like him, that’s all.
“What’s in here?” I said, walking through a space on my right. It was a little room with boots and coats and a load of boxes.
“Not much,” Edie said, turning away, opening a door opposite. “This one’s the sitting room.”
There was a big low fireplace and a glass chandelier, three battered armchairs and a thick rug on the floor. It was cold.
“We hardly ever go in here,” Edie said. “It’s nicer in the kitchen.”
She took me upstairs. She pulled the door to the stairway shut behind us. Her voice echoed between the narrow walls. “Why did you look so surprised?” she said.
“When?”
“When you looked at Mum.”
I tried to think.
“Do you think she’s worse?” Edie said.
I shrugged. “Hard to say.”
“She gets them off the internet now,” Edie said.
“What?”
“Valium. Diazepam. God knows. The doctor wouldn’t give her enough any more. He was telling her to stop.”
“Maybe she should.”
Edie looked hard at me for a second. “You never thought that before,” she said.
Damn. “Didn’t I?”
She took the last bend in the stairs. “What did you call them? Mummy managers.”
I tried to smile. “Oh, yeah.”
“Keep her half tuned out, so she doesn’t care what you’re up to. Ring a bell?”
It was even colder up there and our feet were loud on the wooden floor.
“You and Frank both,” she said. “You’re as bad as each other.”
Cassiel’s room was the third door on the right, after Frank’s room and the bathroom. Across the hallway were Helen’s and Edie’s.
Edie went into Cassiel’s room before me, strolled right in like it was no big deal. Dust swarmed in the light from the ceiling. I thought about breathing it in. I thought about it swarming like that inside my nose and mouth and throat and lungs.
I stopped in the doorway like the air itself was pushing me away. It wasn’t my room. It wasn’t my stuff to touch.
“What?” Edie said.
I looked past her. “Nothing.”
“Is it different?” she said. “I tried to make it look exactly the same.”
I said, “I’m just looking.”
The dust swarmed harder and faster around me when I walked in, like it was angry. Here was his mother holding me tight, here was his sister asking me in. But even the dust in Cassiel’s room knew I wasn’t him.
“It’s tidier,” she said. “You can’t miss that.”
I looked at his stuff. I moved around the room, picking things up, touching them, opening drawers. A mirror with an apple printed on it, a skin drum, a picture of two banjo players in a small metal frame. A book about mask-making, a folder of drawings, a skateboard. A stack of postcards, a laptop, a poster for a film I’d never heard of. Clothes, washed and ironed and folded and waiting for someone to wear them for two whole years. They were way too small for me. They’d never fit him now.
I thought about Cassiel watching me from somewhere, from a daydream, from a park bench, from a checkout, from Heaven or Hell or the plain cold grave, wherever he might be.
I wondered how much he would hate me for what I was doing.
I wondered when he was coming to get me back.
“Does it feel weird?” she said.
“A bit,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve got this running commentary in my head. My little brother’s home.”
She sounded like an announcer at a railway station. “My little brother is home and in his room.”
No, he’s not, the commentary in my head said. No, he isn’t.
“Do you like it?” she said. “Do you like your room?”
I didn’t answer. She didn’t notice.
“It’s bigger than the old one, isn’t it? Do you like the colour? It’s called Lamp Room Grey or something. Mum said it was boring. I think it’s cool.”
I smiled.
“You hate it,” she said.
“I don’t.”
Helen came upstairs and knocked on the open door. Edie took her eyes off me for a moment to look at her.
“You are so tall,” Helen said.
“Am I?”
“I forgot you’d be two years older.” She leaned on the doorframe. She crossed her arms around herself and she watched me.
“I said the same thing,” Edie said. “It’s like you grew in five minutes.”
Helen nodded. “It’s a lot to take in.”
When she blinked, she blinked slowly, like her eyes would have been happy staying closed.
“Where have you been, Cassiel?”
“What happened? Tell us what happened.”
They spoke at the same time, almost. They were nothing but questions. I couldn’t answer them. My disguise was paper-thin. I didn’t know who Cassiel Roadnight was or what he’d say. If I spoke I’d eat away at it, I’d just show myself lurking underneath, the rotten core.
“Not now,” I said.
“When?” Edie said.
“Leave it, love,” said Helen.
It was quiet, tense, like a stand-off. I could hear us all breathing. I thought about how big Cassiel’s breaths were, how many times a minute his heart beat.
“Are you hungry?” Helen said.
I should be. I don’t think I’d eaten since Edie called. But I wasn’t. My stomach was like a closed fist. There was too much to think about. Too much could go wrong.
Cassiel would be. He would be relaxed and hungry and tired. Cassiel was home.
“I think so,” I said.
“Good. Let’s eat.”
They left the room ahead of me and I listened to them go along the landing and down the stairs. I stopped in the doorway and looked back into his room. The dust was still frenzied in the light from the bulb. I switched it off.
It disappeared, just like that.
EIGHT (#ulink_41fd951e-cec5-5593-af40-9107ec85cbe8)
I never ate meat in my life before I was Cassiel Roadnight. Not once.
According to Grandad, being a vegetarian wasn’t just about health or cruelty or money or flavour, it was also about manners. He said that stealing milk and eggs and honey was enough of a liberty without hacking off someone’s leg and then drowning it in gravy. He had a point.
He taught me how to cook. He trusted me with all the sharp knives and all the boiling water I could get my hands on. We ate rice and beans and vegetables. We ate a lot of curry. We ate like kings.
That’s what Grandad used to say.
After the accident, when I wasn’t allowed to see Grandad any more, they tried to make me eat meat. They put withered, puckered, stinking things on my plate and told me if I didn’t eat them there’d be trouble. They said they were good for me.
They didn’t know the first thing about what was good for me.
I told them that. I screamed it in their faces. I said I didn’t eat meat. I said I wanted my Grandad. I threw the food at them. I threw it at the walls and the windows and their faces. I threw it anywhere it wanted to land. I didn’t eat their meat. I didn’t do it.
I’d rather have starved.
Cassiel’s favourite food was meatballs. Helen put a plateful down in front of me and it was clear from the look on her face that meatballs were something I was supposed to get all excited and nostalgic about.
“Meatballs,” I said. “Thanks.”
Edie said, “How many times have we talked about this, Mum? Cass sitting here having supper, just like this.”
Helen shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Hundreds.”
I cut a piece off a meatball, dripping in sauce. I tried to make my face right. I tried to smile and not grimace, tried to close my eyes in delight not panic, tried to swallow not gag. They watched me like hawks.
“Delicious,” I said, still chewing. They tasted like salt and shit and gristle.
“As good as you remember?”
“Better.”
I got through two. I drank a lot of water. I broke them down into fractions of themselves, sixteen more to go, fourteen more, eight, one. In my head I said sorry to Grandad, and to the lamb or the pig or the mixture of creatures I was eating. I put my knife and fork together with four of them still swimming on my plate.
“What’s wrong?” said Helen.
“That’s not like you,” said Edie.
I said, “I haven’t eaten like this in a while. My stomach isn’t quite up to it.”
I allowed Cassiel, wherever he was, to chalk up a point against me. I told myself it didn’t matter. I reminded myself I didn’t have a choice.
So I wasn’t a vegetarian any more. I wasn’t me any more either.
When you’re running, when you’re moving from place to place, day after day, it’s hard to watch yourself eat. You steal. You pick through the bins and try not to realise it’s you. You try not to think about what you’re doing. You learn where the shops dump their rubbish, what night’s the best night. You rely on what other people waste.
Finish your food? No, don’t, because somebody watching from outside might want it.
After meatballs there was ice cream. I let it melt in my mouth and it slipped, rich and over-sweet, down my throat. I did it without thinking.
“Why d’you always eat it like that?” Edie said. “It’s gross.”
Funny to have such a thing in common with Cassiel – the way we ate ice cream.
“Have you been in London? Or Bristol? Or Manchester? Or where?” Edie said.
“He’s tired,” Helen said, putting her cool hand on my forehead.
“Have you been living rough?” Edie said. “On the streets?”
What would the answer to that be? It was pretty likely. If you run away from home when you’re fourteen, you don’t usually end up in the penthouse suite.
“Now and then,” I said.
Helen shook her head. “And being on the streets was better than being here?” She looked at Edie and then at me. “I don’t understand.”
“Nor do I,” Edie said, “When you put it like that.”
My stomach was giddy with rich and strange food. I listened to their spoon scrapes, their soft slurps and swallows.
“Why did you go off?” Edie said.
I looked at her food, only at her food. I said, “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I don’t believe you,” Edie said.
I kept my voice soft. I kept it level. “You don’t have to.”
“What was so awful?” Helen said. “What was so bad that you had to go?”
I didn’t say anything.
Edie said, “You shouldn’t have punished us all like that.”
“Frank said you were in trouble,” Helen said. “He was worried about you.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t call,” Edie said. “I’ll never understand why you let us all think you were dead.”
Was it OK to say sorry? Would Cassiel say sorry for that? I wanted to say it.
Edie couldn’t stop. “You didn’t think about what it would do to us,” she said. “It didn’t cross your mind.”
“You don’t know that,” Helen said.
“Yes I do, Mum. I know him better than you. I’m right, aren’t I, Cassiel?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I am,” she said. “And you do know. And I will never forgive you.”
“You said on the missing persons thing that you’d never give up,” I told her. “You didn’t say you’d never forgive.”
I worried instantly that I shouldn’t have spoken. In the silence that followed I thought I’d done something wrong.
“You didn’t make it easy,” Edie said.
Helen started to clear the plates. I got up to help her.
“Sit down,” I said, my hand on her shoulder. “I’ll do this.”
“Nice try,” Edie said. “Walk out for a couple of years and then tiptoe back in, all soft and sweet and helpful, like that’s going to fool anybody.”
I stacked the bowls as quietly as I could.
“Who the hell are you pretending to be, Cassiel Roadnight?” she said.
“Leave him,” Helen said. “That’s enough.”
“I’m sorry, Edie,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mum.”
Edie growled.
Helen looked at me and I smiled. “Your eyes have changed colour,” she said. She was surprised to hear herself say it.
I didn’t move. Edie pushed the ice cream away from her and leaned towards me. “They haven’t,” Edie said.
“They have,” said Helen. “They’re different. How’s that possible?”
Because I’m not him. Because I’m a grotesque copy. Because I’m a cuckoo in the nest.
“It’s not possible,” said Edie. “That’s the point.”
“Look at me,” Helen said.
I didn’t want to. I didn’t want her to see me. “I am.”
“Your eyes used to be blue,” she said.
“They are blue.”
“They’ve changed,” Helen said. “They’re not the same blue. They’re darker.”
I waited for them both to notice. I waited for the horror to dawn on their faces. I knew his mother would see.
“Yeah, right,” Edie said under her breath. “And you can count how many fingers I’m holding up.”
“What?” Helen said.
“You’re not remembering them right,” Edie said. “That’s all it is.”
“I am,” Helen said. “I know my son’s eyes.”
Tears welled up suddenly in hers. I hated to see his mother so ruined and so upset and so completely right. It hurt. And it was my fault.
“Do you think I don’t know my own son?” she said, to neither of us.
I put my arms around her. I said, “It’s OK, Mum,” even though it wasn’t, even though if she knew the truth she would scream the house down if I tried to touch her.
“I’ve got to go to bed,” she said. “I’m suddenly so tired.”
Edie said, “Tranquillisers will do that.”
“Don’t, Edie,” I said, without thinking.
It stunned her. It stopped her dead. I knew what the look on her face meant. I knew what she was thinking. Cassiel wouldn’t have said that.
Helen took my hand and looked at it like she’d never seen it before. She kept hold of it until I moved away, until she had to let go.
She kissed me on the cheek, delicate and cool.
“Night, Cassiel, Night, Edie,” she said when she was halfway up the stairs. “Sleep well.”
I tried to look everywhere but at Edie. I washed up and wiped the table and made a big deal of finding out where everything went and putting it away.
She watched me the whole time. I could feel her watching. I watched myself through her. I became aware of every little movement, every little sound, like the next thing I did would give me away.
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