The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight. Jenny Valentine
it.
Out on my own I was quick and agile. I could walk on walls and weave through crowds and duck under bridges and squeeze into tiny spaces and jump over gates. Grandad wasn’t so good at walking. He tripped over a lot and staggered sometimes, and forgot where he was going. Once he fell into the canal. Not fell exactly – he was too close to the edge and he walked right into it, like it was what he’d been meaning to do all along. He was wearing a big sheepskin coat and it got all heavy with water and he couldn’t get up again. It wasn’t deep, it wasn’t dangerous. It was funny. He stood there with the filthy water up to his chest, soaking into his coat, changing the colour of it from sand to black.
“Come on in,” he said to me. “The water’s lovely.”
“No thanks, Grandad,” I said.
He winked at me. “This reminds me,” he said, trying to heave himself up off the bottom, “of my childhood holidays on the French Riviera.”
I think the coat weighed more than he did. He took it off in the end and waded out in his thin suit, like a wet dog. The coat lay there on the water, like a man face down with his arms stretched out on either side, looking for something on the canal floor, quietly drowning. We had to rescue it with a stick.
“I never liked this coat,” Grandad said as we walked back the way we’d come, carrying it between us like a body, straight back to the house. His teeth banged together when he talked, like an old skeleton. Water ran off him like a wet tent. His shoes were ruined. There were leaves in his hair, leaves and rat shit.
We laughed and laughed.
I didn’t know Grandad was drunk then. It never occurred to me. I don’t think I knew what drunk was. When you’re a kid you fall over and bang into things all the time. I didn’t realise you were supposed to grow out of it.
I wouldn’t have minded anyway. If you ask me, Grandad drunk wasn’t any worse than Grandad sober. Not when you love a person that much. Not when a person is all you’ve got.
I only saw Grandad cry one time and he hadn’t been drinking. He hadn’t been allowed to. It was after the accident, when I went to see him, just that once.
He was so pale, so almost lifeless I thought he was disappearing.
He tried to talk to me. He tried to tell me the truth, and his tears kept getting in the way of the words. Great racking sobs tore through his voice.
I didn’t hold him like I held Edie. I was too shocked.
I should have held him like I held her. I should have done it, but I didn’t.
Suddenly I was free to leave. Edie signed some papers to say she was responsible for me. She showed Gordon her driver’s licence to prove she was over eighteen, and who she said she was, Cassiel’s big sister and all that.
She came with me to get my things. I’d packed them in my rucksack and it was waiting on my bed.
There wasn’t much. A torch without batteries, a knife and fork I lifted from the canteen, a tennis ball, a pencil, a kingfisher feather, an empty wallet, an old notebook, some postcards, a pair of jeans, two ancient tops and a sweatshirt I’d found on some railings.
I found my rucksack in a skip, years ago. There was a slash down one side and one of the straps was broken so it got dumped. All I did was tape it up and tie a knot in it and it worked fine. It’s amazing what you can find, if you’re looking. Perfectly good things get thrown away all the time, perfectly good things and perfectly good people.
“Is that yours?’ she said.
I nodded.
“What have you got?’
“Not much.”
She reached out and took it before I could stop her. I watched her unzip it. All I could think was there might be something in there with my name on, something just waiting to give me away, but there wasn’t. My stuff looked like it had just washed up there, in the torn black inside. It looked like stuff the sea had spat out.
“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