his tears kept getting in the way of the words. Great racking sobs tore through his voice.
I didn’t hold him like I held Edie. I was too shocked.
I should have held him like I held her. I should have done it, but I didn’t.
Suddenly I was free to leave. Edie signed some papers to say she was responsible for me. She showed Gordon her driver’s licence to prove she was over eighteen, and who she said she was, Cassiel’s big sister and all that.
She came with me to get my things. I’d packed them in my rucksack and it was waiting on my bed.
There wasn’t much. A torch without batteries, a knife and fork I lifted from the canteen, a tennis ball, a pencil, a kingfisher feather, an empty wallet, an old notebook, some postcards, a pair of jeans, two ancient tops and a sweatshirt I’d found on some railings.
I found my rucksack in a skip, years ago. There was a slash down one side and one of the straps was broken so it got dumped. All I did was tape it up and tie a knot in it and it worked fine. It’s amazing what you can find, if you’re looking. Perfectly good things get thrown away all the time, perfectly good things and perfectly good people.
“Is that yours?’ she said.
I nodded.
“What have you got?’
“Not much.”
She reached out and took it before I could stop her. I watched her unzip it. All I could think was there might be something in there with my name on, something just waiting to give me away, but there wasn’t. My stuff looked like it had just washed up there, in the torn black inside. It looked like stuff the sea had spat out.
“I don’t recognise any of this,” she said.
I shrugged. “I guess not.”
She picked out the tiny, blue-streaked feather. “Can I have it?” she said.
“OK.”
“It’s funny,” she said, brushing the fine tip of it with her fingers.
“What is?”
“That you’ve been missing and a thing like this has been with you all this time.”
We walked outside to her car, an old silver Peugeot with a dent in its flank and one almost flat tyre. There were plastic flowers hanging from her rear-view mirror, a load of old newspapers on the back shelf. They swelled like sails and snapped shut when we opened and closed the doors.
I wondered how Cassiel Roadnight got into a car. I wondered if the way I did it might give me away.
Gordon and Ginny and a few of the boys stood in the front yard, waiting for us to go so they could get on with whatever happened next. Nobody knew what to say.
“Good luck.” Gordon had his head half though the open car window. I thought about winding it shut with his face still in it. I thought about just driving away.
“Thank you so much,” Edie said. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
Ginny said to me, “Let us know how you’re getting on.” But she didn’t mean it and she knew I wouldn’t.
“OK,” Edie said, looking at her feet and then at me, starting the car, pulling it round in reverse. “Let’s go.”
We turned on to the road, and the house and everyone in it were suddenly gone, as if they never existed. I thought for a second that maybe I’d been safer there, maybe I’d been better off. For a second I wished she’d just take me back and leave me. Now, rather than later. Now, before everyone got hurt too much.
The car was small and messy and crowded. A fallen-over basket had spilled its stuff on the floor and a big blue bag took up most of the room at my feet. There were clothes all over the back seat. The dashboard was covered in flyers and scraps of paper and parking tickets. It stank of incense. I was sitting on something. I reached underneath myself and pulled it out – a piece of old knitted blanket, just a scrap, grey with dirt and dotted with holes. I’d have guessed she used it to clean the windscreen, if the windscreen had ever been cleaned. I was about to drop it. It was the look on Edie’s face that stopped me. Instead I held it in my hand for a minute, pushed my fingers through its loops and swirls.
Edie watched me.
Was this how hard it was to be someone else? Did I have to be this vigilant? How long was I going to last, when even a scrap of filth might turn out to be something special?
Edie straightened in her chair, took a deep breath, smiled at the road.
“I thought you might have missed it,” she said. “I know you’re too old for it and everything. I just thought it would make you smile.”
“Thanks,” I said. I smiled, on cue. It felt like my face was splitting open. I put the rag in my rucksack.
It was good being in a place without lockers and filing cabinets and industrial cleaning fluid and a place for everything. I watched Edie’s hands on the steering wheel. She had a gold ring on the little finger of her right hand, a silver one on the middle of her left. The veins were raised and faintly blue beneath her skin, thin fine bones rippling with each small movement. It was hot in the car, hot and dry. The air blew in through the heaters and leeched the moisture from my eyes and my mouth. While she drove, Edie looked straight ahead and in her mirrors and at her shoulder and over at me.
“I’m going to drive slowly on the way home,” she said. “I’m not going to crash or turn the car over.”
“OK,” I said. And inside, I heard a part of me wishing that she would.
For a long time we didn’t say anything. The quiet in the car was full of us not knowing what to say.
I thought about where we were going and what it would be like and who was there waiting. I thought about how the hell I was ever going to get away with it. Every time I thought about it my body opened out like it was hollow, like forgetting something vital, like knowing you’re in trouble, like waking up to nothing but regret.
“We’re very quiet,” she said, “for people with two years of stories to tell.”
I liked it, being quiet. I couldn’t make a mistake if I was quiet.
“There’s no rush, is there?” I said.
“I suppose not,” she said. “I suppose we never talked that much before.”
She changed gear and it didn’t go in right and the car grated and squealed until she got it.
“I missed you, Cass,” she said.
What was I supposed to say to that? I looked at my feet. I looked out of the window. She was still missing him. She hadn’t stopped, poor thing. She just didn’t know it.
“I dreamt about you,” she said.
What
