The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight

by Jenny Valentine

  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

  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

  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.

&nb
sp; 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

  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 wa
s too shocked.

  I should have held him like I held her. I should have done it, but I didn’t.

  SIX

  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.