‘I’m going to get another drink, do you want one?’ Leah asked.
Cassie didn’t, she was already jittery from too much caffeine, but she said, ‘Yeah, thanks’, in order to be polite. She stood in the middle of the room, not wanting to impose herself on Leah’s space. Leah put her bag down on the table and took off her jacket, hanging it neatly on the back of one of the chairs. ‘Is it okay if I use your loo?’ Cassie asked.
There was a fraction of a hesitation. ‘Yeah. Just let me check it first?’ Leah disappeared.
While she was gone, Cassie studied the flat, looking for clues. There weren’t any. The room was as devoid of personality as it was possible to be; it could have been a room in a hotel, a cheap but well-run one, but that in itself was a revelation. The toilet flushed and Cassie composed herself, trying her best to look relaxed. She waited and waited some more, then she heard Leah emerge. ‘It’s free,’ she shouted. As Cassie headed for the bathroom, she saw Leah reaching for some mugs in the kitchen. A dish beside the kettle looked, for a second or two, to be piled high with the curled-up bodies of hairless baby mice. Cassie’s stomach turned over. Used teabags. She was a hysterical idiot.
The bathroom was small, with the expected bathtub, loo and sink. All in pale, stained green, but scrubbed and wiped meticulously clean. The tarnished taps were shining. The towel was folded and hung up. It was immaculate. Leah’s toiletries were lined up along the rim of the bath and her make-up on the shelf above the sink: cheap, own-brand shampoo and deodorant, supermarket-brand moisturiser, foundation, mascara and eyeliner. Each bottle drip-free, the lids screwed back on properly, the eyebrow-pencil sharp and recapped. Cassie thought about her own make-up, tossed into toilet bags, in the bottom of her many handbags and spread around the house. She was careless with her stuff. She threw make-up away all the time, being too lazy to squeeze a tube or sharpen a pencil.
She peed quickly and washed her hands, taking care to refold the towel and put it back precisely in the middle of the storage heater, just as she’d found it. She heard Leah cough as she passed the bathroom door. Before Cassie unlocked the door, she balanced her bag on the lip of the sink. The primer was in the bottom, still boxed, unused, bought on a whim and forgotten about until now. It was good-quality, expensive. Cassie wiped the box on her sleeve and placed it carefully on the shelf, in between Leah’s moisturiser and her foundation. They had very different skin tones, but maybe that wouldn’t matter. She took a breath to calm her jangly nerves and opened the door.
Leah was in the lounge, a folder on her lap. Two mugs were set on the low table. Cassie went and sat beside her. The atmosphere seemed okay. ‘Thanks.’ She drew one of the mugs towards her, but didn’t take a drink.
Leah put the folder on the table and unsnapped the elastic straps holding the cover shut. ‘I ain’t got a lot.’ She lifted out a sheaf of official-looking paperwork and letters, taking care to turn over the top document so that Cassie couldn’t read it. ‘She wasn’t one for taking photos – at least not of us.’ She passed three photos to Cassie.
Again Cassie experienced a weird sensation when she looked at them: a strong gust of – nothing. Though her brain registered that what Leah was showing her was evidence of her past, her heart or her soul, or whatever it was that registered feeling, didn’t react. They might as well have been exhibits under glass in a museum. The photos showed a woman holding a baby, then a little girl holding a baby, then the same little girl, slightly older this time, with a toddler sitting next to her. They were blandly anonymous, they could have been anyone, though she knew what she was looking at was her – no, their – shared past. And yet she felt zilch. The pictures stirred nothing in the silt of Cassie’s memories. Absolutely nothing. The only emotion that did eventually creep into her was embarrassment. She could sense Leah studying her reaction, waiting for her to say something.
‘Thank you for showing them to me,’ she said politely, stuffily, as she passed them back. Leah looked at each photo individually, keeping her own emotions to herself, before putting them back carefully into the file with the stack of papers. Cassie wondered what all the forms and official-looking paperwork related to – Leah’s life after Jane, she assumed; it was a substantial wodge of documentation.
Leah pushed the file aside. Well, that hadn’t gone as planned! She coughed and her chest hurt. She blamed it on her cold, but the pain wasn’t just physical. The photos had had no impact on Cassidie at all. They’d reached another impasse, blocked off from each other by their different connection to the past. She had another spasm of coughing. This time the silence in the aftermath was uncomfortable.
‘Leah, do you really not know what happened to her?’ Cassie asked.
‘No.’ Leah sounded resolute, despite her wheezing.
‘You never tried to find out?’
‘No. I don’t want to know. There’s no point.’ After a pause she added, ‘She wasn’t any good.’
‘But doesn’t the not-knowing mess with your head?’
‘No.’ Her mother wasn’t the one who was messing with her head. ‘Besides. It’s easy enough to guess.’
‘But—’
Leah interrupted her. ‘There is no but!’ She coughed again. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re gonna get out of trying to find her.’
Cassie tried to answer Leah honestly. ‘To start with, I suppose it was just curiosity. I felt bad that I hadn’t bothered to find out about her. I accepted what I got told…about everything.’ Leah made a noise at this, but Cassie ploughed on, not wanting to think about the scale of the deceit perpetrated by her parents, which she still couldn’t compute or comprehend. ‘Getting to know you has filled in some of the blanks, but not all of them.’
‘So what else do you wanna know?’ Leah picked up her mug. On seeing a trail of tiny tea splashes on the table, she pulled down her sleeve and carefully wiped away the stains.
‘Well…’ Cassie didn’t know what to ask. ‘Just – more. I can remember hardly anything, not clearly anyway.’
Leah drank another mouthful. ‘Lucky you.’
Cassie felt defeated. It was pointless; asking was doing nothing but damage. All she was learning was that life was unfair and messy, that beneath the surface lurked all sorts of snares and dangers, and that people lied – even the people you loved, and who claimed to love you. And with Leah, there was always that edge. Her words were rationed, doled out as and when she saw fit. Who knew whether what she was telling her was even true. Leah’s motives still eluded Cassie. The truth no longer seemed attainable to her. She wasn’t even sure it was desirable any more. She gave up. She slumped back against the sofa and stared out of the window at the clear blue sky.
Leah felt compelled to fill the ensuing silence. It wasn’t only her awareness that there was a trade going on – that she had to give, in order to get – but there was also a part of her that wanted to talk, wanted to reopen the old wounds, with the one person who had been there at the beginning: Cassidie. She started to speak slowly, revisiting, for the first time in years, the unpolished, jagged-edged ‘facts’ that were her ‘legend’. Every looked-after child had one, an official biography that was stapled to them the moment they entered the care system. It was a label that endured throughout childhood into adolescence, and beyond. Every time you were handed on, the same sorry tale was told, with new details inked in: the educational difficulties, the attachment issues, the socialisation problems, the anger concerns. An accumulation of facts and failures that indelibly marked you as a ‘reject’.
And it had all started with their useless fucking mother.
Leah took a shallow, wheezy breath and began near the end. ‘She was being cuckooed.’
‘What?’
Leah put her mug down and leant back against the sofa, aligning herself with her sister. ‘It was the drugs in the end, that’s why they took us off her. Before that, when it was just the three of us, we just about got by. She was still crap at the basics: shopping, washing, paying bills, norma
l stuff like that. Clueless when she was sober, worse than clueless when she was off her face.’
Cassie winced at Leah’s choice of words, their direct brutality, but Leah refused to censor herself. Some cold, hard truth was what Cassidie needed.
‘We were hungry a lot of the time, and it was always friggin’ cold, but she didn’t batter us, she wasn’t a shouter, never had much of a temper on her. That was her problem. No spine. There wasn’t any fight in her. She couldn’t be arsed most of the time.’
Cassie could see that Leah was actually allowing herself to remember. She prompted her, nervously. ‘You said she was a cuckoo?’
‘No. I said she was being cuckooed. It’s when they move in, start selling out of some sad sack’s house or flat.’
‘Who?’
‘Dealers.’ Leah coughed again. ‘I guess it started with someone she was buying off. One day there was some bloke in the front room in a hoodie with a load of mobile phones. After that, we weren’t allowed downstairs when he was there. Pretty soon he was there all the time…him, then his “mates”. Loads of people started rocking up to the house, cars coming and going at all hours. The lights never went off downstairs. Fights, shouting. She let ’em, cos she had gear on tap.’
‘What about us?’ Cassie asked.
‘What about us?’ Leah shrugged. ‘She forgot about us.’
‘How could she?’
Leah shifted round to look fully at Cassie. ‘You’ve never known someone who’s addicted, ’ave you?’ Leah had, she’d known plenty; enough to make her swear blind that it would never be her. No one had been impressed by that promise, but she had stuck to it. She was clean, and she always had been. Maybe she had learnt something from her useless, spineless mother.
‘No,’ Cassie conceded.
‘Addicts don’t care about anything, apart from their next fix.’
‘But we were so little. It must have been awful, and dangerous. I was only two.’
Leah wiped her nose again. And she’d only been seven, but no one cared too much about that – not at the time, or later. No one factored that into why she might not have the best table manners, or use the right words, or have a nice, calm, affectionate nature. No one fucking bothered to wonder how a two-year-old had survived in that pit of a house, with a derelict mother and a fug of big, foul-mouthed, mean-tempered lowlifes. Nobody appreciated that it was a fucking miracle of cunning and hard graft and sleepless nights that that two-year-old had been fed and kept fairly clean, and had a few toys and a bed, and a potty, and no broken bones. Leah’s breathing was shallow and fast. Remembering hurt. She’d done too much of it. Or perhaps she’d done just enough, judging by the distress on Cassidie’s face.
Tentatively Cassie reached out and touched Leah’s arm, gently. It was a fragile, unfamiliar gift.
Leah didn’t know what to do with it – so she rejected it. She roused herself. ‘Sorry, I feel proper crap. I think I need to crash.’ She’d said and done more than enough for one day and she was knackered.
Cassie took the hint, she stood up. ‘Of course. Are you sure there’s nothing I can get you?’ Without meaning to, she glanced at the bare kitchen, wondering what Leah had inside her cupboards. ‘I can run down to the shop and pick up some things for you, if you want me to.’
Leah stood up slowly. ‘Nah, it’s okay. I’ll go later.’ As Cassie turned to leave Leah said, ‘But if you could sub me a bit of cash, that’d be good. They’ve told me I can’t go into work with a cold. They don’t want to run the risk of the residents catching it. It can finish ’em off, so I’m gonna be short this week, and my rent’s due.’
Cassie felt stupid. ‘Oh, of course.’ She fumbled in her bag, found her purse and pulled out a twenty. The awareness that she was standing there with a full wallet brought with it a sudden crashing embarrassment. For a split second she hesitated, unsure how much to hand over, but in the same instant she knew, with absolute certainty, that no amount of money would ever be enough. She handed over the twenty, then a tenner and then two fivers, until her purse was empty.
Leah took the cash with a muted ‘Cheers’.
On the landing they said their awkward goodbyes, Cassie still struggling with her new-found concern for Leah; and Leah…well, she was just glad to have Cassidie out of her flat, and enough cash in her hand to keep Naz happy – for the time being.
Chapter 38
IT WAS Saturday morning, a lovely, high-blue-sky kind of day. Erin looked out of her bedroom window and felt restless, wanting to go out, but not knowing where, or with who. As she stood, stranded in the middle of her room, she heard the grate of the garage door. A minute later her dad emerged, wheeling his bike, clad from head to toe in skin-tight racing Lycra. He paused, with his expensive fourteen-gear bike balanced against his hip, put on his helmet, then climbed aboard. He clipped his feet into his cleats, then wobbled his way carefully past the cars, down the drive and out of sight. Erin listened and tried to locate her mum and Cassie in the house, but all was quiet. It was a pity Elmo hadn’t been allowed back; he’d been good company, but apparently he’d messed something up in Cassie’s room, so that made him ‘canine non gratis’. The incident seemed to have put an end to any discussion about them getting a dog.
Erin padded barefoot across the landing and began to head downstairs. Five steps down, she was startled to see Cassie standing in the hall, near the dresser, seemingly doing nothing. Erin was about to say ‘Hi’, but the realisation that Cassie was doing something stopped her. Cassie was holding a wallet in her hands. Tom always dumped his wallet and his keys in the ugly ceramic bowl on the dresser when he came into the house, to save him losing them, all the time. Erin stood perfectly still and watched her sister, a bad feeling rising inside her. Cassie was passing the wallet from one hand to the other, back and forth, back and forth, as if weighing it. Erin willed her to put it back in the bowl. She didn’t. After a few seconds of juggling, Cassie paused, flipped the wallet open and, without hesitating, took a wad of notes from one of the compartments. Then, to Erin’s shock, she stood and counted the cash out onto the dresser. It was such a shameless thing to do. Cassie paused, as if thinking for a second, then took a proportion of the notes, folded them over and shoved them into the pocket of her jeans; the rest she slotted back into the wallet, which she closed and tossed back into the bowl. She checked her reflection in the mirror, then walked off, into the kitchen.
Erin was appalled. She sat down on the step.
The seconds ticked by, but her predicament did not improve.
It was a mixture of inbred morals and concern for Cassie that made her eventually get up, walk down the stairs and follow her sister into the kitchen. Cassie was over by the back door, eating cereal and staring out at the garden. She turned as Erin walked in, but the smile that had been about to form faded away when she saw Erin’s expression. ‘What?’
Erin decided it was best to get it over with. ‘I saw you take it.’
Cassie put her bowl down. Her face set. She looked defiant rather than repentant. ‘Leave it, Erin.’
Erin couldn’t. ‘But—’
Cassie cut her off. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you, so stay out of it.’
Erin was as shocked by Cassie’s attitude as she was by the theft. ‘But stealing? From Dad? Why?’
‘Erin, just leave it.’
Erin moved towards Cassie. ‘If you need money, I’ll lend you some. I’ve got some cash in my room – more in my account. You can take whatever you need, but please, put what you took from Dad’s wallet back.’
Cassie made as if to walk past her sister. ‘No, Erin. I’m not going to do that. I don’t want your money. I want his!’
‘But why?’
‘Because he’s got a debt to pay,’ Cassie said.
Erin felt confused, but also absolutely certain that what she’d just witnessed was wrong. ‘Dad owes you money?’
‘Not me.’ Cassie seemed intent on leaving. As she leant across the counter to grab her jacket
, Erin’s eyes were drawn to the outline of the roll of cash in her back pocket.
‘What’re you talking about?’ Erin followed Cassie out into the hall.
‘Erin, for the last time. It’s got nothing to do with you!’ Cassie headed for the door.
Erin panicked. ‘I’ll tell him! When he gets back.’
Cassie spun round. ‘No, you won’t!’
‘I will – if you don’t tell me why you took it.’ The girls glared at each other.
‘You do that, Erin, and I’ll never speak to you again.’ Cassie knew it was an empty threat, but she wasn’t in the mood for Erin’s naïve sense of right and wrong.
But Erin was so sick of it all that she responded, honestly, without thinking about what was coming out of her mouth. ‘Then it won’t be any different from how it is now, will it? You’ve been ignoring me for weeks.’
Cassie threw her jacket down on the stairs and walked into the front room. Erin followed her, a knot of trepidation in her stomach. They faced each other, adversaries, not allies. Cassie looked at Erin with such a weird expression, a fierce mix of anger and pity, that Erin was forced to look down. She felt as if it was it her who’d done something wrong. Staring, abashed, at the chipped polish on her toenails, she waited for Cassie to explain.
It was a stilted story, which contained more accusation than confession. Erin was shocked at how far things had gone with Leah. Cassie had been living a whole other life under all their noses, without any of them realising. Erin had thought that she knew her sister; she obviously didn’t. That hurt, deeply. She felt stupid for having so readily believed Cassie’s claims that she’d had no further contact with the mystery woman in Oldham – that it had all died a death. Erin had assumed that Cassie’s unpredictable moods were being caused by the frustration of failing to find her birth mum, not by the excitement of meeting her real sister. She swallowed that one down silently, painfully. Cassie actually used the words without hesitation. She kept on talking, spitting out harsh phrases, seemingly indifferent to Erin’s rising panic.
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