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 that.
When she stopped crying, when she talked, I pretended it was me she was talking to, me she’d been missing all this time, me she was so happy to have found. I pretended she was my sister. That way I didn’t have to feel so bad.
She said, “I’m coming to get you, Cass. Please stay where you are. Please don’t disappear again before I get there.”
“OK.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Oh God. Mum’s not here. I can’t get hold of her. I’m just going to come. I’ll be there. Don’t move!”
“I won’t move,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”
She took a long time to say goodbye. I put the phone down and I forced myself to smile at Ginny.
“Well?” she said, “How was that?”
I didn’t know why she was asking. She’d heard all she needed, hanging around by the photocopier, pretending to be busy, holding herself still so she could listen.
“Good,” I said.
“You didn’t say much,” she said.
“I never do.”
I went to my room and I sat on my bed. The dinner bell sounded and the football on TV started and the showers were free, but I just stayed there.
I should have run away. I should have got out of it while I still could. But I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t get off my bed even. I didn’t leave the room. I didn’t move. Because suddenly I had a sister, and she’d told me not to.
Four hours later, I heard Edie before I saw her. I heard her walking towards my room and my stomach opened up like a canyon. Her shoes clapped gently next to Gordon and Ginny’s wheezy, squeaking steps.
When they came in, she stopped and put her hands up over her mouth. She stood there with Ginny beaming behind her.
I didn’t know what to do with my face.
I could feel a big flashing sign above my head that said THIS IS NOT HIM. I waited for her to notice it. I waited for her to say, “You’re not my brother,” and I thought about what would happen next. Would sirens start wailing? Would I melt like candle wax into a puddle on the floor? How many people would hit me? Where would they put me, once they knew?
And if she thought I was Cassiel? If she fitted me into his place like the wrong piece in a puzzle, what would happen then? I was more scared of that than anything. And I wanted it more than anything too.
I stood there and I waited for her to decide.
She kept her hands over her mouth. Her make-up bled from her eyes on to her skin. I thought about her putting mascara on that morning, before she knew she was going to see her missing brother.
“Say something, Cassiel,” whispered Ginny.
She said it like I was an idiot, like I was four years old. I wanted to hit her.
“Hello, Edie,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.
Edie took a deep breath and she got Ginny and Gordon to leave us on our own. She didn’t speak, she just asked them with her eyes and her hands,
