The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight Page 8

  “Oh,” Helen said. She looked at Frank for approval. She looked from Edie to me and she smiled.

  Both men stepped towards her to shake hands. “We phoned earlier,” he said. “We spoke to erm—”

  “You spoke to me,” Frank said. “Sorry everyone, I forgot to mention it.”

  He looked at me and winked. I felt the belt around my chest loosen a notch or two.

  “We heard some reports today, in town,” the man said. “A few sightings. Of your son.”

  He looked at me when he said it. Everyone looked at me.

  They hadn’t come to get me. They weren’t going to take me away.

  Edie raised her eyebrows and smiled. “Freak show,” she mouthed.

  Did Helen mind, they were saying, did any of us mind, if they took a picture, if they did a little piece?

  Frank said, “I think it’s a brilliant idea. I’m really sorry. I just forgot about it in all the excitement. You all right with it, Cass?”

  “Yes,” I said, just waiting for my pulse to slow down. Just hoping for the rigor mortis of pure fear to leave my face. “Yeah, sure.”

  The younger one walked over to me, reached out to shake my hand. “Cassiel.”

  “Hello,” I said. Was I supposed to know him? Didn’t everybody know everybody in a town like this?

  “Welcome back.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “Let’s get one of all of you together.”

  We stood together in front of the table with our glasses raised. I half expected somebody to notice how fake it all was, to say something. I was exhausted from just being afraid all the time, from always looking over my shoulder for the enemy. I was hollowed out.

  “This is great news,” the older one said. “You must all be so happy.”

  “We are,” Frank said. “We’re stunned. We’re over the moon.”

  It all went down in a notebook. Everything he said went down. I thought how funny it was, how ironic, that when something extraordinary happens, when someone tries to say how they feel and really means what they’re saying, it just sounds like garbage. It sounds like jokes pulled out of a cracker, like words picked out of a hat. There’s no way to describe those extremes of joy or sadness. My world has fallen apart. I’m over the moon. This is the best, the worst, the saddest, the happiest day of my life. There are no words.

  The man said, “Did you ever think you’d see Cassiel again?”

  “Absolutely,” Frank said. “We knew he’d come back one day, didn’t we, Mum? We never gave up hope.”

  The camera flashed and clicked and caught us, caught me. I felt wooden. My tongue was tied down, my hands were too heavy, my ears burned hot. The white-blue light made me blink, left itself on my retina, a blind square.

  Frank was calm and impressive. He sounded like the Roadnight family were accepting an award.

  “We want to thank everyone who has supported our campaign to get Cassiel back,” he said. “We want to thank them for all their hard work and for this happy ending.”

  The man from the paper said, “Do you want to say something, Cassiel? Do you want to make a statement?”

  I shook my head. “It’s just nice to be home,” I said.

  Helen was flushed with drink and pills and happiness. She didn’t say a word. She just smiled into the middle distance for the camera.

  Edie was quiet. She took hold of my hand. “You all right?” she said.

  I nodded. I couldn’t speak.

  “It’s all a bit much for you, isn’t it,” she said.

  “Just a bit.”

  “Bloody Frank. Such an actor. Anyone would think you actually liked each other.”

  It was funny, the way she said it, like a joke. I laughed at her. I laughed at all of it.

  I was going to be in the paper. Cassiel was officially, publicly back. I was trying to work out if that meant I had won, if that meant I could relax, just a little.

  Except, what if he saw me?

  What if, wherever he was, he saw what I had taken from him? He might know I was back already. He might not be that far away.

  Frank walked the men to their car, once they had what they wanted. I watched the three of them through the window. Frank shook their hands, he clapped them on the back. He made a joke and they laughed, dutiful and self-conscious.

  I looked at my hands, surprised I couldn’t see through them, concerned by my own surprise. I was worn out from worrying, from being on my guard. I was stretched so thin.

  “Are you staying?” Helen asked Frank when he came back in.

  “Of course. For a couple of days,” he said. “For as long as I can.”

  “That’s great,” she said, tipping her glass while she spoke, letting the last of the champagne slide into her open mouth. “That’s wonderful.”

  “It’s a very special occasion,” Frank said. “Isn’t it, Cassiel.”

  I smiled. “Yes, it is.”

  Edie touched Helen on the shoulder. “You’ve got both your boys home, Mum. How does it feel?”

  Helen didn’t say a word. She didn’t look at anyone. She just nodded, the glass still to her mouth, the tears gathering in her eyes.

  “It feels great,” Frank said for her. “It feels like a new lease of life, doesn’t it, Mum?”

  Another life altogether, Frank. A double life. That’s what it was.

  THIRTEEN

  You couldn’t breathe for all the love in the Roadnight house. I couldn’t breathe.

  It was like trying to survive underwater. I just wasn’t built for it.

  I lived each day, each hour and second under a microscope. The whole time I knew that any minute, any little thing I might say or think or do could set the alarms off, could alert them to the fact they were drowning a total stranger in love.

  Imagine getting something so precious, something you’ve wanted all your life, and then being so afraid of it, you can never enjoy it because you can’t stop worrying it’s going to break. That’s how it was. I didn’t know how to have this thing, this family. I didn’t know how to have it and not destroy it.

  I’d wanted a proper family for so long, a loving home, a place in the world like other people had. Then I got myself one. But it wasn’t mine. And so far it wasn’t what I thought it would be; it didn’t feel like I thought it would feel.

  It was like being on camera, it was like acting in a never-ending play, it was like living in a cage.

  I locked myself away like a secret. I kept myself to myself. I hardly spoke at all. It seemed the best way to stay out of trouble.

  We didn’t go back into town. I didn’t get any new clothes. I was too scared to go anywhere, too anxious to leave, because if I turned my back on any of it, it might disappear.

  The others didn’t seem too surprised. Maybe they thought I was adjusting. Maybe they thought that coming back after such a long absence was bound to be strange, was bound to take time. They took my reclusive, jumpy behaviour in their stride like it was something they were used to. They didn’t push me to get out more, or be around people. They didn’t ask me why I wouldn’t see any of my friends. They were very thoughtful. They were so considerate. I wondered if Cassiel had been like this when he was around. Perhaps I was doing a better impression of him than I realised. Maybe he could be moody and paranoid and fear-struck, just like me.

  Only I could see the difference, hiding out in Cassiel’s body. Only I could see it, trapped inside the truth, watchful and wishing I was free. I’d told this lie and now I was responsible for keeping it, and it was like being chained down, like carrying a dead weight, like being pinned to a wall.

  Sometimes, a look from Helen, something Edie said, Frank’s warm hand on the back of my neck, would leave me trembling with the need to tell them. For a moment I’d want to scream and thrash and kick until they were all gone, until everything was gone.

  A part of me began to long for nothing the same way I used to long for a family. With the same hunger I’d had to be Cassiel, I started to wis
h I was nobody again. I started to wish I was separate, apart and alone, not like everybody else. Sometimes, all I wanted to do was take the lie back, not say it, never to have said it.

  You can never change what’s happened. I knew that.

  But I started to think I could never change what’s meant to happen either.

  I started to think I had no control over what came next, that nothing I could do would make a difference. That no matter how well I hid it, how hard I tried, they’d find out the truth in the end.

  Maybe a part of me wanted them to.

  Look at me. I wanted to free myself from being me, from being Chap, the hunted, so I became Cassiel Roadnight, someone already caught and thrown in prison. Somebody battened and tethered and cornered with love.

  It was suffocating. I was suffocating. Was that what was meant to happen?

  I spent my days balancing on a high wire, on the air-thin blade of a knife, trying not to get noticed, trying not to let everything come tumbling down, sliced in half. And I started to think that there wasn’t any point. That the truth was coming, like a bullet, ready to hit me right between the eyes.

  Grandad would have warned me against it, wishing for a family, wishing for a normal life. According to him, normal was never what it looked like. He said that every family, without exception, had some dark shadow at the centre of it, some terrible secret.

  He said, “Otherwise, life would be too boring and we’d all give up.”

  I asked him what our secret was.

  “Not telling,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a secret for a reason,” he told me, tapping the side of my nose with his long, waxy finger.

  “What’s the reason?” I said.

  “It’s better that way.”

  He should have told me then. That was his chance to do it right and he missed it.

  Still, there was love in Grandad’s house. It just wasn’t something we had to say and display and demonstrate all day long. It wasn’t something I felt trapped inside or guilty for. It was mine, I suppose, that’s why, that’s the difference. And it was quiet.

  Grandad said he loved me only once. That was after we weren’t allowed to know each other any more. That was when I hated him with every atom of energy I could gather. It was the saddest, most infuriating thing I ever heard.

  Just because he didn’t say it before though, doesn’t mean I didn’t know it for a fact, like I knew that water was made of hydrogen and oxygen, like I knew that cats could climb trees.

  Grandad loved me in the books he chose to read to me. In the squares of chocolate he would pull from his jacket pocket, from under the clock, from behind my own ear. In the shine on my shoes, polished like he’d been taught as a boy, with spit and elbow. In the key round my neck that meant I could go wherever I wanted and he’d always trust me to come back.

  In the way he woke me up, always a gentle hand on my head, always a smell of fresh whisky. “Chap, there’s a good boy. The day’s begun.”

  In Cassiel’s room, in Cassiel’s life, I woke up early every morning with one thought in my head, one word.

  Stop.

  I slept badly. I had angry, hunted dreams. Even the slightest noise would wake me, heart pounding, bolt upright, caught; even the sigh of leaves, even my own breathing, rapid and uneven in the dark.

  My heartbeat swished in my ears all day long and drummed on my pillow at night. My hands shook when I splashed my face with water. Sometimes when I looked in the mirror I wasn’t sure if I was me any more. I was fading at the edges. I thought my mind was going. I could feel it go.

  I hadn’t wanted to be me. But being who you are isn’t really a matter of choice. Everybody knows that.

  I was Cassiel Roadnight on the surface, but inside I was the lunatic in the attic, the madman in his cell, wailing and jabbering and scratching and battering the door down to get out.

  I couldn’t go on much longer. I couldn’t do it any more. I told myself it didn’t matter how much I wanted this. It had to stop.

  FOURTEEN

  I left the house while it was still dark, before anyone else was awake. I had to dress as Frank. I looked for my old clothes, the ones I’d arrived in, but someone had thrown them away. I took a scarf and a coat off the peg, a pair of boots. I wouldn’t have lasted very long in the cold without them.

  I walked down the track, through the gates and across the fields, into the open wind, the air almost sharper than I could stand. The light came up around me as I walked. The mountains appeared from behind their bed of clouds, like they were waking up at the same time as me.

  I was alone.

  I walked for more than an hour before I stopped. The further I got from the house, the more I felt like me again, whoever that was.

  I thought about them sleeping in their beds, Frank and Helen and Edie. How hard would it be for them to lose Cassiel a second time?

  No harder than what I was making them do. Not if they knew.

  I didn’t used to think I was a bad person. It didn’t matter how often people told me I was, I didn’t believe them, I knew they were wrong. But then I stole Cassiel’s life and I wasn’t so sure any more. I made all the things they said about me come true, just like that.

  I didn’t see him coming because of the clouded, foggy air that clung to the tops of things, slow to lift. Objects loomed from it suddenly – rocks, trees, people. One person.

  A boy. Tall and lanky and thin and wearing black.

  Maybe I could have avoided him, gone wide or crouched behind a gorse bush, but at the time I thought it was too late. We appeared before each other in the thick morning. That’s how I remember it. We loomed. He saw me. I heard him say Frank’s name, not to me, just quietly, to himself.

  I kept my head down, nodded, tried to get past. I stole a look at him.

  He was my age, tall as me, dark-skinned, Indian maybe, in an old sort of tailcoat and a red scarf and a battered bowler hat. He looked like he’d just run away from the circus, with shining shaggy black hair and huge, bewildered eyes. He was bleached – no, green, like he was going to pass out, or be sick. He looked stricken to see me. He looked terrified.

  “Cass?” he said. His voice cracked.

  I stopped, we both stopped still the moment he said it, like there was nothing else that could be done. Just my luck, to avoid all of Cassiel’s friends and then run into one just when I was leaving.

  He said, “You’re not Frank? Are you… is that Cassiel?”

  I didn’t want to say anything. I tried to walk on.

  “It is,” he said, stopping me, putting his hand on my arm. “You are. You can’t be.”

  “Can’t be what?” I said.

  “You’re dead,” the boy said to me. “Are you dead?”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Why didn’t I know?” He was shocked. His eyes pooled out, black and empty. He was in shock.

  “What?” I said. I thought everyone would know after my visit to town. That’s what Edie said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he said.

  I couldn’t move away from him, from the look on his face, a look of horror and relief, a fight between them.

  “Are you a ghost?” he said to me, quietly, like this was just between us, like we weren’t alone.

  “No. Look. You’ve got your hand on my arm.”

  He snatched it away, and then he put it back, wrapped his hand around my bicep, checking for flesh and bone. The colour in his face was coming back.

  “Shit,” he said. “Fuck.”

  He pushed the hat to the back of his head with one finger, scratched in his hair. He held his hands up in the air like someone was pointing a gun at him, a gun he found more amusing than scary. Everything he did, the way he moved was elegant and hypnotic, like a dance. I don’t think he was doing it on purpose. He just had this thing about him, this strange, graceful thing. I noticed it straight away. It wasn’t something I’d normally notice.

  He stared at me.r />
  “Cassiel Roadnight,” he said, one hand on his forehead, the other out towards me in a question. “Am I seeing things?”

  “Yes you are,” I said.

  “Am I?” he said. “Sorry. Fuck. Are you for real?”

  “What?”

  He closed his eyes and the light went out of his face. “I’m out for a walk,” he said. “Well into another boring day in my lonely miserable life and suddenly…” his eyes opened again, I looked right into them, “… there you are.”

  I waited.

  “You’re haunting me,’ he said.

  “No.”

  “Then you’re back from the dead.”

  “I’m not dead,” I said. “I wasn’t dead.”

  He laughed. “I must’ve got it wrong then.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You must have.”

  “I’m glad,” he said, and then he groaned and looked at the ground, like he was the opposite of glad, put the heels of his hands on to his eyes, pressed hard.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  “That’s it?” he said. “You’ve got to go?”

  I asked him what he’d like me to say.

  “‘Hello, Floyd’ would be a start.”

  Floyd. His name was Floyd.

  “Hello, Floyd.”

  He grabbed me and hugged me, and as quickly as he’d done it, he let go. “Sorry,” he said.

  “That’s all right.”

  He looked into the sky. He raised his hands, palms up, like he was Jesus, like he was asking God a question. Then he pointed at me, like he was asking it about me.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “Not right now.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh right. OK.”

  I smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t know what to say. I just wanted to keep moving.

  He said, “How about now?’

  “What?”

  “Now? Any good?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, when do you want to talk about it, Cassiel?” Floyd said. It burst out of him like a gunshot, caustic, sarcastic.