“Cassiel, my man,” Gordon said, wheeling his chair away from his desk. “How’re you doing?”
It was embarrassing, him talking like that. I knew it and he knew it. I looked at him and he looked away.
“It’s Cass,” I said. “That’s what people call me.”
I didn’t know I was going to say it, but when it came out it sounded right. I liked the feeling of him in my voice. I was tall and I looked down on Gordon in his chair. I had a family and friends and somewhere to be. I was somebody. The fugitive I’d been had finally disappeared.
Nobody could get me now.
“Sorry,” he said, clearing his throat. “Cass. What can we do for you?”
I said I’d finished on the computer.
“Good lad,” he said, straightening himself. “Find what you were looking for?”
I shrugged. (Yes Yes Yes. I’d found everything I ever wanted.)
I said, “What happens next?”
Ginny said that they were arranging for my family to be told. She said, “Someone will let them know as soon as possible. Then we can sort out getting you home.”
Home.
I didn’t know what to look at. This kind of hunger burst open in my gut, this cool empty space. I licked my lips and I felt a sudden fine sheen of sweat rise in my hair and under my arms.
Gordon said, “It won’t be long now.”
I heard what he said and I didn’t hear it at the same time. I think I nodded.
Home. Was it that easy?
Ginny said, “You do want to go home, don’t you, Cassiel? Is that what you want to do?”
“Yes,” I said. “I want it more than anything in the world.”
I thought she might laugh. The whole world could have burst out laughing right then and I wouldn’t have been surprised. Who was I to want anything?
“Well, good,” Ginny said, “Of course you do.”
Gordon sat back in his chair with his hands behind his head, and because the conversation seemed to be over I left the room. I put one foot in front of the other and when I got out I leaned against the wall and shut my eyes and made my heart slow down just by asking it to.
I was him.
And with each step I took as Cassiel Roadnight, with each new slowing heartbeat, I replaced something I wanted to forget about having been me.
My grandad’s place was a big house that backed on to the park. I don’t remember anything before that. I’ve tried. Through the window I could see the playground, kids moving all over it like ants on a dropped lolly.
Being in that house was like going back in time. It was quiet and dark and book-lined and mostly brown, full of clocks ticking, real clocks counting the days away in every room. The curtains were always closed, like outside didn’t matter. Grandad thought the best thing a person could spend his day doing was reading in the dark. I don’t think it ever crossed his mind that not everybody wanted to do it.
After the accident, people kept saying it was no place for a child, the health visitors and social workers and neighbours and noseyeffingparkers, as Grandad would’ve called them.
They didn’t ask me. It didn’t matter what I thought.
There were thirteen rooms in that house. I counted them. Grandad only lived in one.
I thought he must have used them once, must have needed them for something, like a wife and kids or dogs or lodgers or whatever it was he had before he had me. He never talked about it, even if I asked him. He acted like there wasn’t anything to remember before there was him and me. He called it The Time Before, and that’s all he’d say about it.
Grandad was happiest just to sit and read and sleep and drink in the front room, the one with the big bay window you couldn’t ever see out of. Sometimes he got up and shuffled out to the loo or the kitchen or to get the mail off the doormat, but not all that often. Sometimes he ventured out to the shop on the corner and shuffled back again, bottles clinking, whiskers glinting, hair gone wild.
We had our bed in the front room by the fire, and his chair, and his books and his bottles. It was warm in there, not like the rest of the house, which was so cold your face felt it first, as soon as you went out there, then your fingers and the tip of your nose died just a little. Those were my places: the weed-run garden, the other twelve rooms and the arctic upstairs, lifeless like a museum or a film set; a perfect timepiece, fallen into quiet and fascinating ruin.
In the stifling warmth of the front room I’d run my hands over the wallpaper that felt like flattened rope. The pattern of the curtains looked like radioactive chocolates in a box. That’s what I always thought when I looked at them. Chocolates of the future. Chocolates you should never ever eat. I couldn’t imagine Grandad choosing those curtains. I often wondered who did.
I slept in there with Grandad every night. I made a nest of cushions at the end of the bed. He sat in his sagging leather chair and read to me, with the bottle on the table at his side so he wouldn’t have to stop for it. He read me H.G. Wells and John Wyndham. He read me C.S. Lewis and Charles Dickens and Tolkien and Huckleberry Finn. Every night he read until I was asleep on my cushions or he was asleep in his chair. That’s how we said goodnight, by disappearing in the middle of a sentence.
And that’s how I learned everything I know, with the clocks’ soft ticking and the heating click-click of the gas fire and the raised nap of velvet against my cheek and the smell of whisky and the sound of Grandad’s voice reading.
How could that not be a place for a child?
How could they say that?
What did they know?
The next day I got a phone call.
Ginny came running down the corridor to find me. I was picking at a hole in my jeans. I was waiting. I was trying to take time apart minute by minute, second by second. It wasn’t working.
Ginny had sweat across her upper lip. It glistened. “Cassiel,” she said. “It’s for you. It’s your sister.”
I walked behind her, back the way she had come. When we got to the office I looked at the receiver for a moment before I picked it up. Ginny flapped with her hands and mouthed at me to talk.
“Hello?” I said.
“Cass?”
He had a sister.
I could tell how hard she was shaking by her voice. I wanted to make her stop.
I looked at Ginny. She was still flapping. I turned my back on her.
“Cass. It’s Edie.”
“Hello, Edie.”
She made a little sound, not a whole word really, and then she said, “Is that you?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s me.”
Then I sat in the office with my eyes closed and I listened to this Edie girl I’d never met crying because I was alive. I’d imagined people jumping around, beside themselves with joy and relief, not sobbing miles away on the end of the phone. I didn’t think it would be like