The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight

by Jenny Valentine

  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

  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.r />
  “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 wa
s 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.