this open, could scream the house down that I wasn’t him. I was a cell under the microscope. She was the all-seeing eye. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I stood dead still and I watched her.
She wasn’t what I’d been expecting. She was a lot smaller than me and her hair was long and dark. Long dark hair and blue eyes overflowing with water and light, a smile so full of sadness it made me feel grateful to have seen it, like a rare flower.
“Talk to me,” she said.
I had to clear my throat. My voice was shrunken, hiding. “What about?”
She shrugged and her eyes ran and she didn’t say anything, not for a bit. She just looked at me. The asking and relief on her face made me flinch. It was like staring at the sun.
After a while she looked at the floor and said, “I don’t believe it. I can’t take this in.”
I breathed out. I just watched her. I didn’t know what else to do.
“It’s really you?” she said.
I nodded. My tongue felt swollen and dry in my mouth. I needed a drink of water.
“Say something,” she said. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”
Because I’m scared to. Because you don’t know me. Because I’ll say the wrong thing.
“It’s good to see you,” I said.
“Good?” she said. “Good? Two years, Cass. You have to do better than good.”
“Sorry.”
“I drove so fast,” she said. “I kept thinking I was going to crash. I thought I was going to turn the car over, but I couldn’t slow down.”
“Where have you been?” she said. “Why didn’t you call? What the hell happened to you?”
My lips were stuck together. Somebody had sewn my mouth shut.
“You’ve changed so much,” she said.
I felt the dusting of stubble over my chin. I rubbed my fingers across my cheeks, through my overgrown hair. I ran my tongue over my bad teeth.
“You too,” I said. Could I say that? Was that wrong?
“You are so tall.”
“Am I?”
“Why did you leave?” she said suddenly, and the skin of her voice broke, the anguish welling up underneath. “Why did you do that?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I thought you were dead,” she said. “People said you were dead.”
“I’m not dead.”
She nodded again and her face caved in, and she cried, proper crying, all water and snot. She couldn’t catch her breath. She stood on the other side of the room and she looked at me like she wanted me to make it better. I didn’t know what to do. I waited for her to stop, but she crossed the room and walked right into me. She cried all over my shirt.
While she did it I shut my eyes and breathed slowly.
I had a sister and she was perfect and she cared that I was there.
I think it was the closest to happy I’d ever been. And I knew I was going to Hell for it.
I know it still. If there’s a Hell, that’s where I’ll go.
Now and again I persuaded Grandad that we needed to go out – to the city farm maybe, or the market, or along the canal. He never saw the point. I think after years of hiding in the dust-yellow insides of his books, real life was like roping lead weights to his feet and jumping into cold water; just not something he felt like doing.
He didn’t mind me going out on my own. He said it was a good idea.
He said, “The namby-pamby children of today have no knowledge of danger and no sense of direction.”
He said, “When I was your age I was out for days at a time with nothing but a compass and a piece of string.”
He said he very much doubted I’d get lost or stolen, or fall down a manhole.
He was right. I didn’t.
Still, sometimes I persuaded him to get dressed and come with me, just because I liked him being there, just because he needed the fresh air. His skin was lightless, and thin like paper. His hair was like a burnt cloud. I told him if he didn’t get out in the sunshine once in a while he might turn into a page from one of his mildewed books, and the slightest gust of wind would blow him to nothing. I sort of believed it.
Out on my own I was quick and agile. I could walk on walls and weave through crowds and duck under bridges and squeeze into tiny spaces and jump over gates. Grandad wasn’t so good at walking. He tripped over a lot and staggered sometimes, and forgot where he was going. Once he fell into the canal. Not fell exactly – he was too close to the edge and he walked right into it, like it was what he’d been meaning to do all along. He was wearing a big sheepskin coat and it got all heavy with water and he couldn’t get up again. It wasn’t deep, it wasn’t dangerous. It was funny. He stood there with the filthy water up to his chest, soaking into his coat, changing the colour of it from sand to black.
“Come on in,” he said to me. “The water’s lovely.”
“No thanks, Grandad,” I said.
He winked at me. “This reminds me,” he said, trying to heave himself up off the bottom, “of my childhood holidays on the French Riviera.”
I think the coat weighed more than he did. He took it off in the end and waded out in his thin suit, like a wet dog. The coat lay there on the water, like a man face down with his arms stretched out on either side, looking for something on the canal floor, quietly drowning. We had to rescue it with a stick.
“I never liked this coat,” Grandad said as we walked back the way we’d come, carrying it between us like a body, straight back to the house. His teeth banged together when he talked, like an old skeleton. Water ran off him like a wet tent. His shoes were ruined. There were leaves in his hair, leaves and rat shit.
We laughed and laughed.
I didn’t know Grandad was drunk then. It never occurred to me. I don’t think I knew what drunk was. When you’re a kid you fall over and bang into things all the time. I didn’t realise you were supposed to grow out of it.
I wouldn’t have minded anyway. If you ask me, Grandad drunk wasn’t any worse than Grandad sober. Not when you love a person that much. Not when a person is all you’ve got.
I only saw Grandad cry one time and he hadn’t been drinking. He hadn’t been allowed to. It was after the accident, when I went to see him, just that once.
He was
