Festival.’
A cloud crosses Anna’s face then her eyes widen and her expression softens. ‘Oh, it’ll be to do with the fighting Dex got caught up in. I don’t think it’s anything serious.’
‘Gav seemed to think it was.’
Anna sits with this a moment before dismissing it with a wave of her hand. ‘You know how he exaggerates everything. And anyway, he’s not really thinking straight. Poor Dex.’ Observing the look on my face, she goes on, ‘He’s been thinking of leaving Gav for years. He hasn’t done it because he likes the money and now he’s trapped, at least until Gav dies.’ She passes me the joint then, looking away, towards the moon, holds up a finger and begins moving it to and fro as if trying to wipe out the stars. ‘He never told you, did he? I suppose he couldn’t bring himself to, in the circumstances. I think he loves Gav but they lead separate lives.’ Her eyes cut to me. ‘You can’t have him back, you know, once Gav goes. It would never work.’
At the dark edges of the sky, where the moonlight does not penetrate, there are stars visible, intense pinpoints of light bringing proof of life, messages that are old and redundant before we can even read them. Every one of those stars is dead now, little more than a collection of debris or a black hole.
Anna’s hands are in her lap, the fingers of her right hand idly twirling the ring around her left ring finger. ‘You’re so much more real than any of us, Cassie. So much less complicated.’ She looks up. ‘Maybe you think I’m being condescending but I’m really not. When you say things, you mean them. You have no idea how rare that is in the world I come from. I feel safe when I’m with you.’ She signals for the joint, takes a deep inhale and blows out rings across the sky. ‘I suppose that’s what also makes you such a bad liar.’
‘Which means?’
‘I know where you got the money to buy those clothes you’re wearing and it wasn’t a promotion, was it?’ She drops the joint and extinguishes it under her foot. ‘The thing is, everyone’s got a secret they think no one else knows, but most of the time someone else does. I saw what was in your bag that night in Wapping. When it fell open. Funny that Gav loses a wad of cash from his hallway and a wad of cash turns up in your bag.’
‘I didn’t take Gav’s money.’
‘Well, then, maybe all the more reason for not drawing the attention of the cops,’ says Anna, and, hugging her chest, in a breezy tone adds, ‘It’s suddenly got awfully cold. Shall we go in?’
While we’ve been gone, Bo has filled our glasses, Dex has brought out a plate of wonderful cheeses and a box of silky, expensive chocolates and with night staring in from the French windows and the flickering shadows of candles on the thick, enveloping walls of Fossil Cottage it is almost possible to believe, even now, that everything is normal. But our world is anything but normal. Even the word will not hold, as it runs along tracks made wet with wine, heading towards an as yet unnamed catastrophe. The not-normalness. I know then that by going back to what I’d seen, to what we all witnessed, will be to risk not only being cast out but something more, some permanent injury which will be impossible ever to put right. If I could I would stop the train and head off the crash but I do not know how. A family like ours, tied not by blood or birth but by love and secrets, is so much more delicately but also more complicatedly bound, the contract between kin willingly entered into and habitually renewed, but at the same time so exquisitely fragile, so will-o’-the-wispish, that it might at any moment crack and splinter like dropped glass. It’s hard to lose your blood family. I know that to be the case. Something of them remains inside you. But your family of choice can be taken from you in a blink. If that happened to me, what – after the years of emotional investment, of love and shared history – would be left? A going nowhere job and a dingy room in a rented flat overlooking a bus station.
Dex brings out the Scrabble board and for the next hour or two we make our way through another bottle or two of wine and attempt to fill the board with words, too drunk by now to play with any skill.
Game finished, cheese and chocolates polished off, Bo says, ‘So, who’s for a nightcap? There’s some ridiculously pricey cognac somewhere,’ and without waiting for an answer pulls back his chair and makes his way unsteadily towards the kitchen. Then just as suddenly he stops in his tracks and turning to face us with a grin, he says, ‘That bloody word, it’s finally come to me!’ He’d stumbled during our earlier game and lost points. ‘Revenant!’
‘Is that a word?’ Anna says.
‘Don’t you remember, there was a film out a while ago, Leonardo di Caprio doing battle with a man in a bear costume,’ Bo says.
‘I missed that one. What a shame.’
‘Anyway, it means a dead soul who comes back into the world of the living bringing a message. Damn, if only I’d remembered! It would have been millions of points. More than enough to win.’
‘But mate, you didn’t. Remember or win,’ says Dex.
Anna lets out an extravagant yawn. ‘It’s time for my bed.’ And with a flirtatious little wave, she gets up and wafts towards the staircase.
I bump into her a few minutes later in the upstairs hallway. I’m coming out of the loo, and she’s waiting to go in.
‘Goodnight, darling,’ she says, kissing me on the cheek. Everything else goes unsaid. Now I know Anna knows my secret. And I, in turn, know hers. If one of us spills, we both go down. That makes us quits.
A little while later, when one of the candles gutters on the kitchen table, and Dex licks his thumb and stubs out the flame, I read it as a sign to remain in the dark. Stay in the shadows. Don’t try to find out what you don’t want to know.
But still, the feeling of shock and betrayal doesn’t go away. All night in the Urchin room, turning in the bed, the owls outside the window hooting, You did nothing. You did nothing.
At some point, when it’s still dark outside, I get up and take a shower, soothed by the warm water, the steamy atmosphere inside the cubicle through which I can neither see out nor be seen. I’ve become such an expert at cover-up and pretence I’m no longer sure what’s me and what’s a version of me. Am I Cassie 1.0 or Cassie 2.3? Who is left to ask? I am the sole child of dead parents. My only friends in real life are the other members of the Group. I don’t really speak to my flatmates and the only relationship I’ve ever had was with Dex. I sometimes wonder if I have made myself up from fragments of other people’s online avatars. I only ever feel like a proper person when I’m with the Group as we were a few hours ago now, sitting round the table, drinking Bo’s posh wine. It’s then that I’m able to persuade myself that I could really be someone, an actual person and not just a collection of borrowed algorithms and virtual characteristics. Perhaps that makes me sound more complicated than I really am. What I really am is pretty simple, like Anna said. I am unsure. I am both the keeper of secrets and secretly a lost soul.
If the world knew what I had seen, I wondered as the water poured down, what would it ask of me? What would Marika Lapska ask? Would she come out of the world of the dead to speak to me? Would she say that, because I saw what was happening and did not intervene, I owe her? Would she consider me responsible? Do I owe her? If so, what and how much? Enough to risk my career, my friendships, even my liberty?
I am unsure of all of this. The only thing I am sure of now is that for the next four days I am going to be the Cassie who has friends who are real and funny and who give every sign of wanting to be with me. I am going to be the Cassie who belongs.
