“You’re going to offer to take the dog out in a minute.”
I looked at Sergeant. I clicked my fingers and opened the door. He got up slowly, eased himself to standing.
“God, you bloody are,” she said.
I smiled at her, kept my breathing even, kept my voice calm. “I haven’t done it for two years,” I said. “I thought it might be my turn.”
Outside the wind had dropped and it was black, thick with stars. I heaved in lungfuls of the cold, wet air. I breathed like I’d been underwater too long. Sergeant sniffed around in the grass, caught the scent of something, followed it off.
My first night as Cassiel Roadnight. My first day. I’d almost survived it.
The dog followed the scent straight back inside. It was the scent of his basket probably. Edie came to the door. Some of the anger had gone out of her. She smiled.
“Come in, little brother,” she said. “It’s freezing out there.”
I did what I was told. I thought it was best.
We turned the lights off in the kitchen and closed all the doors. We tried to be quiet on the stairs.
“Goodnight, Edie,” I said when I got to Cassiel’s door.
“Night,” she said.
I almost had it shut. I was almost alone. I’d almost done it. I had this sensation of holding my breath for the longest time, of being about to exhale.
“Cass?” she said.
“What?”
I couldn’t see her face. It was too dark.
“I’m glad you’re home,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“Even if you are being weird.”
NINE
I couldn’t sleep. I’d never been more awake in my life. I sat on Cassiel Roadnight’s bed, on my bed, like I’d sat on the bed in that hostel the night before, waiting for Edie to come. I sat completely still, but my mind would not stop moving.
This was what I had wanted. A place to call mine again, a room of my own. A family, a mum and a sister who knew me and loved me and were right there, next door, across the hall. A brother, on his way to welcome me home.
I heard Edie turning the pages of a book, heard the flick of her light going out. I heard the sigh of Helen’s sheets as she turned over in bed.
Poor Helen, so broken and feeble. Had I done this to her? Had Cassiel? And Edie, who looked as delicate as her mother, but was made of something different, something I could already see inside, something more like steel.
I was afraid of breaking them. And just as scared of them breaking me.
It was quiet outside. The wind had gone and the lack of sound was something thick and real, a silence I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard before. There’s always noise in the city at night. It’s rarely quiet and it’s always light. You get used to it, sleeping in the never-dark, sleeping while a plastic bag crackles like a flag in the branches of a tree above you, while lorries sigh and judder, while voices rise and fall and glasses smash and sirens rush to someone else’s tragedy, somewhere else. The noise and the light are like blankets that protect you from the silence and the black.
There were no blankets here. I turned off Cassiel’s light for a minute and plunged myself into total dark. I tried to hear something in all that quiet. I lost my bearings. It was like disappearing. It was absolute nothing, the lip of a bottomless void. At last, somewhere on the hill, I heard the bleat of a sheep. I was grateful to it in that moment, for reminding me that I was still there.
I put on the light, as low as it would go, and I looked around. There had to be clues in here. There had to be secrets. I started to take Cassiel’s room apart, drawer by drawer, page by page, inch by inch, soundlessly, looking for the real him, looking for the little things I needed to know and do and say, looking for who to be in the morning when the others woke up, when Frank came home. I crept like a burglar in my brand new room.
I didn’t find much. I didn’t find nearly enough.
Cassiel’s laptop was empty. It was wiped clean. His drawers were full of socks and pants and T-shirts, all too folded, all too small. There was nothing written in his books, nothing hidden in his wardrobe.
A jacket on a hanger held one piece of A4 paper, folded three times. There was nothing written on it.
Hardly a hoard, hardly the ripe and helpless harvest my plague of locusts had been expecting. Cassiel’s room was like a stage set. It was unnatural. Edie had tried to recreate it when they moved. She’d made something that looked like his room from the outside, but there was nothing of him in it, nothing of him left. She’d made a fake. She’d made something like me.
Is that what would happen? They’d search me for traces of him and find nothing? They’d take me apart and see that I was empty?
What had they done with all Cassiel’s stuff? Fourteen-year-old boys didn’t have rooms this empty. They had crap and junk and clutter. They had a thousand pieces of screwed-up paper with things drawn on them, things written. They had key chains and notebooks and harmonicas and chewing gum and deodorant and binoculars and music. They had secrets, for God’s sake. Where were Cassiel’s secrets?
I gave up at two in the morning. I turned the light off and sat on his bed in the dark, waiting for the numbers on the clock to change, watching the seconds flash by.
What would I do tomorrow? Keep it all locked in. Stay quiet. Tread carefully along the blade, one foot in front of the other.
How long would it be before they saw me?
Three knocks on the door snapped the silence into three loud pieces.
“Who is it?” I said.
There was no answer, but the handle turned. The door opened. It was darker out there than it was in here. I hadn’t thought that was possible.
“Hello?”
It was Helen. She came in like a quiet ghost, in pale pyjamas and a crumpled white robe. Her face was gaunt in the grey dark, all hollows and shadows.
“I can’t sleep,” she said.
“Me neither.”
“I can never sleep.”
Her eyes glinted. What light there was stuck to the whites of her eyes and her white clothes. She looked at me strangely, like you’d look at a person who didn’t know you were watching. She drank me in.
“Do you want something?” she said. “A hot drink?”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”
To be on my own, that’s what I wanted. To be off guard. I should have got into bed. I should have pretended to be asleep.
She had something in her arms. “I’ve been looking at these,” she said, and she passed me a pile of books, heavy and thick, sliding across each other as I tried to hold on to them.
“What are they?”
I turned the light on. We both put our hands up to shield our eyes.
Photo albums.
“My God,” I said. “Thank you.”
She stood by the bed, timid, shifting. “Can I sit down?’ she said.
“Course.”
“You might not want to look at them,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I do.”
We sat on the end of the bed without saying anything, without looking at each other. I held the books on my lap. There were eight of them. I felt their spines and edges with my fingers.
Helen put her hand on mine. “Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“I knew you’d come back.”
“Oh,” I said. Just, “Oh.”
I didn’t look at her. I looked into the dark landing. I wondered if Edie was asleep or if she was lying awake, listening, watching the light from my room draw round her door. I didn’t want her to be awake. I didn’t want her to come in here as well and start talking.
Helen saw where I was looking. “She’s angry with you,” she said. “She’s got the strength for it.”
“I know.”
“She’ll get over it.”
“Maybe.”
As long as she doesn’t find out.
She looked at her hands. She held them out straight in fron
t of her, fingers outstretched. She frowned. “I think I want to forget it,” she said. “I don’t think I ever want to talk about it again.”
“Good,” I said. “Then we won’t.”
“Yes, we will,” she said. “You know we will.”
When Helen left the room I took off my jeans and sat up in bed with the books. Each one was carefully labelled with names and dates and places. I put them in order of time.
There weren’t any baby pictures. The first book started when he was about three.
A little boy with fat knees and sturdy shoes. A little boy with his thumb in his mouth and big, questioning eyes. A little boy clutching a blanket.
It was the scrap I’d sat on in Edie’s car. Bigger, cleaner, white and not grey, not yet. In the picture I had it tucked under my arm, wrapped around my hand. I recognised its whorls and swirls. I got it out of my bag and put it next to me, on my pillow. Cassiel’s blanket.
I went through the whole eight books. I looked and learned, grabbing hold of each image, turning every little caption into memory, into armour. And when I had finished I started with the first book again.
I fell asleep some time after four. I felt the books slide off the bed but I couldn’t wake up enough to care, to hear them land.
TEN
In the morning, when I opened my eyes in his room, heard the birds arguing and the clanking sounds of the house warming up, I knew where I was. I knew it instantly, like I was meant to be there.
I went straight to the window, to the incredible, changeable view, the shadows of clouds rolling over grassland, the shifting colours of the mountains, the blue-grey bowl of the sky. I could have stayed there all day, just watching it. I didn’t want to do anything else.
I listened to Edie and Helen waking up, little scuffles and stretches, like rats behind a wall, like mice in their cages.
I wanted to keep away from them. I wanted to stay in bed, so they’d know that Cassiel was asleep upstairs, so they could be happy and I wouldn’t have to come out and ruin it by being me.
At about eleven, Edie opened my door. I was still in bed. “Morning,” she said.
“Yes.”
She was pale and string-bean thin. She blew her hair out of her eyes and it moved above her as if it had a life of its own.
“Sorry,” she said.
“What for?”
“I’d planned not to be all angry and weird.”
“It’s OK,” I said.
“Did you sleep well?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Liar,” she said, looking at the vague disorder of the room, the sprawled photo albums.
She came in and let the door bang shut. I didn’t want her in here and I didn’t want her to go either. I was terrified of making a mistake. I pulled the sheet up over my chest. I propped myself on one elbow. Edie picked up an album open to pages of a long-gone Christmas.
“I was awake for ages,” I said.
“Did Mum give you these?”
I nodded, yawned, rubbed at my eyes. I didn’t have a toothbrush. I wanted a bath.
“She spends hours looking at these things,” she said.
“I did last night,” I said. “They’re good. They’re lovely.”
She frowned at me. “See? You’ve changed. You’ve been saying the strangest things. They’re lovely?”
“Sorry.”
“Again,” she said, but she was smiling. She turned the pages slowly, settled herself on the floor next to the bed. I could see her profile, down to the top of her mouth. That’s all I could see.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Do you remember that guy?”
“Hans,” I said. I read the caption, that’s all.
“The Dutch lodger that Mum took pity on.”
“Yes. Nice shirt.”
She laughed. “Do you remember that hideous windmill he gave us? With the music and the flashing lights?”
“What did it play?” I said.
“‘Waltzing Matilda’? No, can’t be, I don’t remember.”
“‘A Mouse Lived in a Windmill’,” I said.
It was just a guess.
“Yes! That was it. Was it?”
She turned a few more pages. I heard the slick of them coming unstuck from one another. I shut my eyes.
“Are you getting up anytime soon?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“What are you afraid of,” she said. “Daylight?”
No. I’m afraid of you. I’m afraid of myself, of whatever it is I’m going to do or say to make it all go wrong. I’m desperately trying to avoid that moment and walking straight towards it, all at the same time.
“I’m just tired,” I said.
She got up. She poked me in the side. She touched my cheek with her fingers and I tried not to pull away. I tried not to lean into her either, not to put the whole weight of my head in her hand.
She drew along the line of my scar with one finger. She traced the dog bite from my cheekbone to my ear.
“How did you get that?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t remember you getting it,” she said. “I don’t remember it being there.”
I wanted to put my hand out and push hers away. “Well, it is,” I said.
“Maybe there’s photographic evidence,” she said, picking up each album in turn, scanning the dates. “Maybe if we just get the right book, we can find out.”
I got up, took the albums away from her, stacked them neatly on the desk. I felt self-conscious, standing there in just my pants. I didn’t want her to see me, see the ways I might be different from her brother.
Edie watched my face. “And who punched you?” she said. “Who hit you right there, under your eye?”
“That,” I said, “was just some thug.”
“Why’d he hit you?” She reached up to touch the mark his diamond had made. I moved away from her hand.
“Because I can be really annoying sometimes.”
Edie rubbed her cold hand against my arm. “Mmmm,” she said. “My sympathies are with him.”
“Get off,” I said. “Stop wiping your hands on me.”
She flinched when I said it. She stepped back, fast and defensive and it occurred to me for the first time that she was scared of him. I wondered if Cassiel had ever hit her.
She went to the desk and picked up another album, a more recent one, from the year before Cassiel disappeared.
“Did you have a lot of fights out there?” she said. “Did you annoy a lot of people?”
For a second I saw myself being restrained. I felt the weight of an adult male’s body against my knees, cutting off the circulation in my legs. I felt the yank of my arms, high behind my back. I heard the rasping, adrenalin-rich voice, telling me over and over again to calm down, to breathe right, to stop screaming. I felt my own, helpless, ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-old’s rage. I swallowed.
“I pissed a few people off,” I said.
Edie opened another album to show me. I looked at her and Cassiel standing on a hill somewhere, dressed up, warm and bright against the snow.
“I did miss you,” she said. “God knows why.”
I didn’t want her to be so nice. I didn’t want her to be so tender and funny and full of love and hurt and broken trust. It was too early in the morning. I couldn’t think why I was here, doing this to her. Why was I doing this?
She held up a finger. “I didn’t miss you lying or shouting or stealing or sneaking around. I didn’t miss you being stupid and arrogant and pig-headed and cruel. I didn’t miss your crap music or your total obsession with the remote control,” she said. “But I did miss you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s nice.”
“I know.”
She blew me a kiss and got up. “Do you want pancakes? I’m in the mood for cooking again.”
“Are you in the mood for eating?” I said. “You’re like a stick.”
“Ha ha,” she said. “Very original. Pancakes?”
“Pancakes and orange juice and sunshine and bad jokes,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s what I thought of when I thought about home.”
“You thought about home?” she said.
“Of course I did. All the time.”
“Well, I don’t know where you got that idea from,” she said, out of the door by then, closing it on her smile.
I got out of bed when I smelled the pancakes. Pancakes and cigarette smoke. I could hear Helen’s voice, the soft rhythm of it carrying from downstairs. I went into the bathroom and splashed my face. I used somebody else’s toothbrush. I leaned on the sink, put my face close to the mirror. My hair needed cutting. I could do with a shave. The shadows round my eyes were dark and swollen. I looked like crap.
Did I look anything like Cassiel Roadnight this morning? All I could see when I looked in the mirror was me.
Would Helen take one look at me and know, in the cold light of day?
Would it be Frank who’d see right through me, as soon as he got here?
Was today the day it ended? Was it soon? Was it now?
They both smiled when I came downstairs. They both stopped what they were doing to look at me and smile.
“Morning,” I said.
“God, look at you,” said Helen.
I wiped my hands down my crumpled shirt, my filthy jeans. “All my clothes are too small.”
“I’m sure they are. You’re a giant.” Her smile died and she turned away.
Edie said, “You need a bath.”
“That would be good.”
“You can wear some of Frank’s clothes, can’t he, Mum?” She laughed. “I’d love to see you in those.”
She handed me a plate with six little pancakes on it, spooned some more mixture into the pan. “Here. Syrup and lemon on the table.”
Helen just smoked and watched me. The ashtray was full of butts already. Her mouth worked hard, trying to hold itself around her cigarette, trying not to spread and wither and cry.
“You OK?” I said, because I knew she wasn’t, because I thought I should say something and not just ignore it.
Her voice was quiet and wistful and without hope. She said, “Where’s my boy?”
My whole body went cold. I stopped chewing and looked at her.
The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight Page 5