Jenny Valentine - The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight

“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.

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? ”