It was as if the smooth, confident, generous big brother I thought I knew was just a mask, just a shell, and underneath something writhed, something dark and dangerous and afraid. And now I had seen it I could never forget it.
Was Mr Artemis a real person or a hidden message, a code?
Why the hell did Floyd tell me to say it? I wanted to know what he’d been trying to do, what kind of trouble he was getting me to cause. Me, who’d been so careful not to cause any. Me, who’d walked on eggshells and tightropes so I wouldn’t get found out.
I sat on the edge of the bath, watching the taps spew out water, watching the tub slowly fill.
What had happened today with Floyd? Maybe I was wrong about him and Edie was right. Had he lied about Cassiel and Frank? Why would he? For attention maybe. Like those people who confess to crimes they didn’t commit just to watch all the fuss start, just to be at the centre of it. Nobody else trusted him. Why should I?
For a second I went cold all over. Maybe I was at the centre of this. Maybe it was a trap I had fallen straight into. Floyd had sent a message to Frank through me. Mr Artemis was a code that meant I wasn’t him, I wasn’t Cassiel. Floyd probably saw straight through me in the woods today. I wasn’t nearly careful enough with him. Me and my stupid questions.
My heart thudded in my chest. They could all be in this together. Frank and Floyd, and even Helen and Edie. Maybe Edie had been rescuing Floyd today, not me.
Maybe none of them were what they seemed. Maybe that wasn’t just me.
Frank had gone straight downstairs. Who would he call? What would he tell them? I pictured the police car cutting its way through the grey afternoon. I saw its lights flashing blue against the road, against the steep cut of the hillside. I waited for it to pull up outside, for the footsteps on the stairs, sudden and officious, the loud bang on the door. I steeled my wrists against the cold bite of cuffs. I steeled myself for the look on their faces.
It didn’t come.
I turned the taps off. I didn’t get in the bath, I didn’t change out of my clothes, I didn’t even switch the light on. I just sat there in the dark while the water lurked in the bathtub, turning cold, and all the light bled out of the sky.
What if they all knew I wasn’t Cassiel? What if they all knew he was dead? Was I their alibi?
Somebody came upstairs, slow and careful and trying to be quiet. The light snapped on on the landing, cutting through the gaps around the door. I heard an engine start, heard a car back up and drive away.
The footsteps stopped outside the bathroom, their shadow breaking up the clean lines of light. Whoever it was didn’t knock. They just stood there waiting.
I was sitting on the floor with my back against the bath. I pulled my feet towards me, put my chin on my knees.
“Cassiel?” Edie’s voice said, slightly shrill in the cold and dark and quiet. “Are you all right in there?”
“I’m fine.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Sitting. Thinking.”
“Frank’s just left,” she said. “He got a call from work or something.”
“Right.”
“Something urgent in the world of finance,” she said, and I could picture the sarcastic smile on her face. “He said he’d be back really late.”
I didn’t say anything. I sat there in my filthy clothes on the hard floor, staring at the shadows of her feet, wishing she would go away too.
Had Frank really gone? He might be waiting for me out there, standing right behind her. They might be looking each other in the eye right now, he might be watching her lie.
I didn’t trust her. I didn’t trust anyone. I was alone and I was trapped and I was as paranoid as hell.
“Are you going to be long?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want something to eat?”
I didn’t want anything from her, not from any of them. “No.”
“Cass,” she said, leaning her head against the door. I heard the soft sound of her hair, and her voice against it. “Cass, I’m sorry I got cross. You made me angry. I’m really sorry.”
I didn’t answer.
Edie took a step away from the door. “I’ll leave you alone,” she said. “Please come down.”
I didn’t. I sat on the floor in that cold dark room because I didn’t have anywhere else to go, because I didn’t know what else to do. I sat there and I thought about the other times I’d felt like this. I thought about waking up every morning with pictures in my head, of rooms I’ve been in and people I’ve known and things you don’t forget, even if you want to.
I sat there in Cassiel Roadnight’s house and I thought about all the other days and nights that jostled and argued and competed to be the worst ones of my sad and sorry life.
EIGHTEEN
When they took me away and I cried for him, they behaved as if Grandad didn’t exist. They wouldn’t answer my questions about him. They wouldn’t tell me where he was. They acted like they didn’t have a clue what I was on about.
I couldn’t sleep on the end of his bed any more, curled up like a cat by the fire on his soft velvet cushions, blanketed in the voice of the old man, lulled to sleep with words. I had to sleep in a stranger’s house, in a series of strangers’ houses. At the first one I wouldn’t unpack my suitcase. If I did that then I was agreeing, I was OK with it. A lady brought me milk and biscuits on a tray. I didn’t touch them. That night I ran away, back to Grandad’s to see if he was home. They found me and brought me back. I didn’t get milk and biscuits the second time. I ran away thirteen times, from five different places. In the end, I had to sleep in a cold bare dormitory with cold hard sheets and cold hard faces, words as sharp as razors, in beds made out of metal bars like the bars of cages. I had to sleep there night after night, week after week. The months dragged on, and still I couldn’t accept it. Four years, and there wasn’t one moment of relief.
I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t. At first, picked on by the other boys for crying, terrified of everything that was happening, I lay every night exhausted and vigilant on my bunk. I lay to attention, listening for the next attack, planning, as a way to stay sane, what I would do when I got out, where I would run to the moment they realised their mistake and let me go.
Home, back to Grandad, and he’d be waiting, pale and familiar, smelling of whisky, with a book in his hand and yesterday’s wind in his hair. With a soft smile and a square of chocolate and a, “Get on with you. Go out and play.”
I kept Grandad to myself like a secret. I kept away from the others. I stayed hidden and I hoped, when they got bored enough to search, that they wouldn’t find me. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. Rigg and Fitch and Joseph and Connor and Bates and the rest of them, greasy, spitting, pus-speckled and choking on hate. They came and went, they changed faces and were always the same. They called me filthy names and made a game out of trying to hurt me. I told myself they could try as hard as they liked, it wouldn’t work. They couldn’t touch me because I wasn’t really there.
After a while the adults tried to make me talk about Grandad. They put me in a special room, like a treat, with pens and paper and carefully prepared expressions of sympathy and understanding. It made me more uncomfortable than the everyday brutality. They asked me gently and persistently if he hurt me, if he touched me, and where.
Grandad didn’t hurt me. He never would.
I told them that but they didn’t believe me. They twisted reality every way they could to make it fit with their belief that they were right. They contorted it and bent it out of shape. Every week, at the same time, sometimes more than once, in that room with its bright colours and its forced, artificial comfort, they asked me questions and tried to make me talk. I dreaded it. It made me sick.
Sometimes I thought I would wake up. When it was really bad, I convinced myself it wasn’t real, that my life was most likely a nightmare that was more convincing than the others, that was taking longer to end. Tha
t I’d be home soon.
I told myself it would be over soon for nearly two years. I told myself to wait, to be quiet and invisible and patient. I managed to fool myself for that long.
And when it didn’t end, when I faced up to the fact that it wouldn’t, when they told me over and over that I could never go home again, I fought back. I was twelve and I was bigger and I’d taken enough shit from them, and enough beatings from boys like Rigg, who thought that hitting hard enough made them important, made them somebody.
They blamed that on Grandad too. They thought I acted out and spat and kicked and threw and scratched and punched because of him. My frenzied bouts of anger were the scars of my ordeal, the symptoms of my trauma. They were Grandad’s fault, not theirs. They held me down and waited for them to pass. It didn’t cross their minds that I was violently angry because of them. They didn’t think I acted out because I thought they were insane and in total control.
And then, four years after they took me away and locked me up, somewhere short of fifteen hundred sleepless, hate-filled days and nights, I escaped.
It wasn’t like I thought. I didn’t plan it. An opening appeared, a hole in my reality, an unlocked door actually, that’s all it was, and I took full advantage. I slipped through it and was gone.
They didn’t find me. Not yet.
I knew I shouldn’t go to Grandad’s house. That’s where they’d look for me – that was obvious. But I had nowhere else to go. And I wanted more than anything to see him.
Grandad wasn’t there.
It wasn’t his any more. I couldn’t go in. The chocolate curtains weren’t just open, they were gone. The light pouring through the newly painted, impossibly clean bay window would’ve made Grandad cower and whimper and dissolve in his overcoat like a vampire, would’ve made him turn in his grave.
I wondered for the first time if that’s where he was.
It started in my stomach, this feeling that he might be dead, like I’d swallowed stones.
I thought he must be. Otherwise he would have waited. Where would he have gone without me?
I’m used to that feeling now. I carry it all the time. He’s dead and I know it. There’s no way he could have gone on living like that.
But at the time, standing outside his house, it was just beginning. It was just a tiny hole, a pinprick.
I looked in at the white floorboards and angle-poise lamps and showing-off flowers. I looked at the muddy art in gilt frames and I wondered what they’d done with all his books. What happens to a dead old man’s library? Does it go to Oxfam? Does it go to a good home? Does it end up in a skip?
I asked myself these stupid questions so I didn’t wail and tear my clothes and throw myself on to the tarmac. I stayed quiet and still, so I didn’t get noticed and captured and locked up again, even though on the inside I was hollering and banshee-wild at the thought of my loss.
Grandad took me once to the back room of the Holloway Road Oxfam. I thought we were looking for clothes or something, I thought maybe he was going to buy me a suit like his, but all he showed me was a cardboard box full of glasses. Reading glasses, bifocals, lenses thick as bottle tops and thin as ice, big blue frames, little silver ones.
“Think of all the reading they’ve done,” he said. “Think of all the things those glasses have seen.”
It was like a box full of dead old people. We were standing in a room full of their clothes.
“What are we doing here, Grandad?” I said.
It was a history lesson. “It’s what you do,” he said. “It’s what you think and see, not what you have.”
“Is that why you brought me?” I said. “Is that it?”
I was eight, for God’s sake. I just wanted to go and kick a ball around.
He nodded. “So you know nothing’s worth keeping,” he said. “So you remember this is where we all end up.”
“In a jumble sale?”
“Exactly,” Grandad said, with his hand in the hipflask in his pocket and his eyes still on the box of dead people’s failing eyesight. “The Great Jumble Sale in the Sky.”
I stood on the pavement in front of Grandad’s house and I searched the sky for some trace of him. I told myself that four years ago this place was his, this place was ours, and that somewhere those times must still exist, in its unused rooms, behind bricks and under floorboards, in its narrow attic spaces, between layers and layers of paint.
I stood there for less than a minute and then I walked away, because I had to, because somebody might be watching, because I wasn’t ever going back.
Grandad would have been pleased to see that I’d followed his advice to the letter, not owning one thing, not weighed down by one possession except the clothes on my back.
I slept in the park for a few days. I washed in the loos in the playground, the same playground I’d watched through Grandad’s window. I drank from a fountain that didn’t reach my knees. I fed myself from the cafe bins. I stretched out warm in the sun in the day, and curled up wretched with cold at night.
I watched the house sometimes, from a safe distance, when I was sure no one could see me. I watched the lady that lived there. I watched her with her children, in and out, up and down, filling the place up, forcing light and life into its deadest corners. I liked her.
And then one day I saw her in the park. I was sitting on a bench, watching three crows attack an apple. I saw her coming. She stopped right in front of me. I looked at her and then I looked back at the crows. They were throwing the apple around, picking it up with their beaks and slamming it into the ground, like they needed to kill it.
She sat down next to me. I moved up a little bit on the bench for her to sit.
“Hello,” I said, and she smiled and said, “Hello,” back.
“I live across the road from you,” I said.
She frowned and smiled. She looked at me and away from me at the same time.
“Oh,” she said. “Right.”
The sounds of the park carried on around us like nothing was happening. A man ran past with headphones on and bright, brand new trainers. A pigeon bobbed and twitched right by my feet. I jerked at it and it flapped out of the way, half flying, half running.
“I like your house,” I said.
“Oh, thanks,” she smiled. “Me too.”
“What happened to the old man that used to live there?” I said, like it didn’t mean anything, like I was just passing the time of day.
“Mr Hathaway?” she said, and I realised I’d never heard Grandad’s name before, I’d never known it. She shook her head. She pressed her lips together until they were so thin they almost disappeared. She oozed silent disapproval. “He’s in a home somewhere, on the Finchley Road. Redlands something. No, Redfields. Is it?”
“Where?” I said. My voice echoed in the empty cavern of my chest.
“Finchley Road,” she said. “Definitely somewhere up there. Why?”
She looked straight at me when she said it. A kid fell over on the path in front of us and dropped his ice cream. He screamed like the world was about to end. She looked at the kid then and at his mother who rushed to pick him up and soothe him.
I got up to go. I walked away and left her still sitting there, watching the kid, watching his ice cream, muck-flecked and melting into the ground.
I went to find him.
Greenfields. That’s what it was called.
It was fireworks night, the 5th of November. I remember sitting with Grandad in his squalid little room, watching the sky outside lit up and ripped open, hearing the squeals and whizzes and booms through the curtainless black of his windows, listening to my whole life fall apart.
I sneaked in. Nobody saw me. I didn’t ask permission. I found his name on a board. Room 103.
Grandad looked fourteen years older, not four. I couldn’t believe how much he had aged. He was frail and transparent and toothless. He lived in a room with a bed and a sink and no books. They had broken him. They had sent him to his very own versi
on of Hell.
I didn’t understand what either of us had done to deserve this.
I stood at his door, waiting for his addled brain to recognise me. He stank of piss. He had cut himself shaving. The bottom half of his face looked like it had caved in. There was dried food on his mouth and his chin and his tie.
“Chap?” he said. “Is that you?”
I had to help him to his chair. He lost it at the sight of me, he turned to liquid.
“It’s OK, Grandad,” I said, lowering him as gently as I could, whispering into the white wisps of his hair while he wept. “I’m back. It’s OK, I’m here.”
“Where have you been?” he said. “Why did you leave me?”
“I didn’t leave you,” I said. “They took me.”
“Who?”
“You didn’t come back and they took me.”
I asked Grandad what happened. He looked confused.
“It’s been a long time,” he said.
“Four years,” I told him. “It’s been four years. I’m fourteen now.”
“Fourteen?” he said.
“You went out for whisky. What happened to you?”
He thought for a while, and then he told me about the black ice. He said, “Old bones don’t mend very well.” He couldn’t walk properly, I could see that. He was in a lot of pain. I think he passed the time on morphine now, instead of whisky. Part of him wasn’t there.
He could never have looked after himself in that old house. I thought maybe that was why he’d had to move.
“Why didn’t you come and get me?” I said. “Or send for me? I could’ve looked after you.”
He shook his head. “I wasn’t allowed,” he said.
“Why not?”
The whole time I was away, the whole time I was locked up, it never occurred to me that he’d been under the same rules as me, that he’d been punished like I was. I suppose I still thought, until that moment, that Grandad was inviolate, above that. He was my grandad. Who would hurt him?
The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight Page 12
