is no problem that we can’t solve together. Just let us know that you are OK. And please come home.”
I would have liked a message like that. It would have meant a lot to me, people never giving up hope.
There were other photos of him too, not just the firework ones. I sat in the empty office and I looked at them all: Cassiel with an ice cream, Cassiel in the football team, Cassiel with a panting dog, Cassiel on a windswept beach. It was like looking at myself with a life I couldn’t dream up, the life I wished I’d had. I knew I hadn’t been there, I knew it wasn’t true, but I willed myself to start hearing the drums in that procession, to start smelling the mud and sweat of the football pitch, to taste the strawberry pink of that ice cream, the salt and sand on my skin. I willed myself to start believing those pictures were pictures of me.
If you haven’t eaten for a few days you have to be very careful to take little bites, or the food you’ve been wishing for and dreaming about day and night can make you worse than sick. Trust me, I know. That’s why I knew not to wish for a family. I knew it was a terrible idea.
But wishing is addictive.
Cassiel Roadnight’s life slipped into my head right then and stayed there. I couldn’t make it go away. I thought about his mum and dad, about what they might look like, about how their faces would change when they saw me. I thought about his brothers and sisters, how many of them there might be, how old they were. I thought about his cosy little town and the gap he’d left by leaving. I thought about his friends. I imagined how happy they’d be when he came home.
I kidded myself that they needed me as much as I needed them. I kidded myself I could end all their suffering just by showing up.
I thought about the kind of house Cassiel lived in, about his room and how it would feel when it was mine. I thought about breakfast at the table in the kitchen, pancakes and bad jokes and orange juice and the yellow sun on our faces. I thought about going to school and having friends and being normal.
I wished for what Cassiel Roadnight had. I wished with every single breath.
I didn’t think about the knife-edge being him would force me to live on. I failed to see it. I refused to look down.
I stared at his face on the computer screen and I dared myself to try it. Either I was going to make my wish come true, or I had to go right now and tell Gordon and Ginny the truth. I could become him or I had to become me. That was my choice.
I picture it often, me walking down the corridor towards them, pretending to choose. I replay the scene in my head because it was the time just before there was no going back, the last seconds I was no one, not me and not Cassiel Roadnight yet, not quite.
My shoes squeak on the polished floor, my hands feel hot and swollen and clammy, and I think I am undecided. I think I don’t know what I’m going to do.
Undecided seems like a magical place to me now, a place before action and consequence.
Undecided is what I wish for.
I knocked on the door. Gordon and Ginny were making phone calls. They’d been talking to the police and missing persons and social services. They were all coffee and triumph and activity. My lie had snowballed into fact already while my back was turned.
“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,
