Jenny Valentine - The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight

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.