Double (13 page)

He didn’t answer me.

“Why didn’t you just say you were my grandad, and come and get me?”

Grandad looked at me then, and a little of the man I’d known peered out from his frightened, waterlogged eyes.

“Why did you leave me there?” I said. “What did I do?”

“Chap,” he said. “I can’t lie to you anymore.”

“Lie about what?”

“I’m not your grandad,” he said.

I thought I would choke. He might as well have put his cold, gnarled hands tight around my throat and squeezed.

If he wasn’t my grandad, then who was he? And who was I?

“Don’t say that,” I told him. “Don’t say that to me. That’s what
they
said, and I didn’t listen. I didn’t listen to them, Grandad.”

He shook his head at me. “You have to listen,” Grandad said. “And I have to tell you. I owe you that much. It’s the truth.”

I
’ve always been on my own,” said Grandad. “I lived with my parents, in that house, all my life, and then when they died I carried on living there by myself.”

I listened to him while the fireworks screamed and burst outside, and I watched him, this old man who was everything to me, who was all I’d ever had in the world and who was trying to tell me different.

“I never had a wife or children,” he said. “I never had a friend, really. I had colleagues at work, conversations. One or two people used to nod and say hello to me in the library. I’d look forward to that.” He smiled. “It used to be the highlight of my day.”

He was shy, that’s what he was trying to say. He was a certified, fully qualified, totally reluctant loner. Not just a bit awkward at a party. Crippled with shyness. Grandad didn’t go out after work, not ever. He rushed home from school to see his mother, as if he were still a child, not a teacher. She was his best friend and the only person he could talk to. Their talks were fluent and easy. Perhaps she wanted him all to herself, so she never taught him how to be around people; she only taught him how to be around her. That’s what Grandad thought after she left him. He was forty-six when she died, forty-six and friendless and a virgin, someone else’s cruel and lonely joke.

School was hard without her waiting for him when he got home. Teaching was hard. His health unraveled. The children seemed increasingly bored and unruly, and even the other teachers laughed slyly at his hair and his waistcoats, at his awkward, stilted ways. He left before they asked him to leave.

His father, who didn’t talk much, and who had always made it clear he’d never liked him, retreated to a room at the top of the house and hardly came down. And then one day even he was gone.

“Why are you telling me this?” I said. I remember my voice sounded raw and alarmingly vicious in that little room.

He didn’t answer. I think once he’d started, he couldn’t stop. He just kept on.

After his dad died, Grandad tried for a little while to be out in the world, but nobody noticed. How do you make your first-ever friend when you’re fifty-three, and your own voice makes you nervous, and you’re losing your hair, and everything you think and say and do belongs to another century, belongs to another time altogether? How do you stop and talk when nobody else is stopping, when everyone else has things to do and places to be? No one has the time to be pleasant to a strange old man who dresses like a funeral director and speaks like Charles Dickens. Everyone is far too busy for that.

He had money to live on and books to read. He discovered good whiskey. He locked himself away, too scared to do anything else, too old to start learning. He must have been the loneliest man in London. I picture him now, on his own desert island, right in the middle of a whole sea of people. He couldn’t get off it because he just didn’t know how.

“And then one night,” he said, glancing at me, “after I’d been alone in my house for a very long time, somebody knocked on my door.”

He was making sure I was still with him, still listening. Where else would I be? What else would I be doing? I couldn’t move, apart from anything else. I didn’t have anywhere to go.

“A young woman and a little lad,” he said, kick-starting my dread. “A girl and a boy.”

Their voices were loud in the empty quiet of his house. There hadn’t been voices in there for years. Grandad couldn’t cope with the sound of her, the boy’s high wailing. He put his hands over his ears.

“I’m in trouble,” she said, even louder. “I’m in deep shit. Let me in. Let us in,
please
.”

The boy was soot-black and filthy. The girl’s hair was burned. He could smell it. He stood at the door, paralyzed by shyness and indecision.

She made his mind up for him. She pushed past him, dragging the little boy by the wrist, and they cowered in his hallway, cowered from the outside, from the rain and the sirens and the acrid fire smell that Grandad was only just beginning to notice, that he was only now aware of.

“I think I just burned a house down,” she said, not to him, not to anyone, just into the air in the hall. He shut the door behind them.

“Don’t tell,” the girl said, starting to shiver. “Don’t tell anyone, or I will come back and cut you while you’re sleeping.”

Grandad said the only thing he could think of, the thing he was supposed to, the thing he’d been practicing to a shut and guestless door for twenty years.

“Hello,” he said. “Do come in, and make yourselves at home.”

So they did.

He didn’t have a TV. He didn’t listen to the radio or buy a newspaper or join in in any way with what was going on outside his house. The girl complained about it. She said it was the most boring, half-dead dump she’d ever been in.

She was lucky. She would slap anyone who said it, and she’d have every right to, but it was true. Because if Grandad had known what was going on, if he had known that a girl and a two-year-old boy were missing, feared dead, in a fire in a council-run care home three streets away, things might have been very different.

The girl wasn’t very good company. She set up camp in a room on the top floor, just like Grandad’s father, and she wouldn’t tell him her name.

“No questions,” she said, “or I’m gone.” And he didn’t want her to go, so he didn’t ask any.

She ate his food and drank his tea and smoked the cigarettes he bought for her. He assumed she was the boy’s mother, because they had arrived together and because the boy wailed if he was ever far from her side. She was young, but she was old enough and she knew enough, she’d seen enough. Even Grandad could tell that, by the flint in her eyes, by the spark in them when she told the boy to leave her alone, to go and play in traffic, when she locked her door against his wheedling, and banished him downstairs.

“I remember the first time you came to my room,” Grandad said, and I couldn’t look at him. “You liked the fire and the clocks. You touched all the books on the shelf. You climbed up in an armchair and sat down and smiled.”

The anger began at the edges, at the ends of my fingers and toes. I thought it was just the cold. I remember underneath all the hurt and confusion, this rational voice in my head saying,
It’s cold in here. Stamp your feet. Rub your hands together. Listen.

Grandad went on talking. He said I was plump and shining underneath the soot. He said I was resiliently cheerful and curious and self-contained. He said, “I think you knew more about life than I did when you were only two.”

“Who was I?” I asked him, the cold spreading to my limbs, the rage spreading. “Who am I?”

“You’re Chap,” he said. “You were always just the little chap to me.”

“What did
she
call me?” I said. “What did my mother call me?”

Grandad shook his head. “She called you Damiel,” he said. “She called you a lot of things. But she wasn’t your mother.”

I was like Alice falling down the black hole, not knowing when it would end. I could feel myself falling.

The girl disappeared, apparently. She left with £100 of Grandad’s money, found in a biscuit tin in the kitchen. She said she was going. She at least told him that. He found that he was disappointed—no, devastated, even. He realized that the few weeks and months they’d been messing up his house and taking advantage of him had been among the happiest in his life. She was on her way out the door when he realized it, her face set like concrete, her hair washed and combed and shining.

“What about the boy, the little chap?” he said. “Where’s your son? Can’t I say good-bye?”

“Keep him,” the girl said. “He’s not my son. He’s nobody’s son, as far as I can tell. That’s why he attached himself to me.”

I didn’t cry when she was gone. Grandad gave me a bath and put me to bed and read me a book and sat up all night watching me sleep. I was as good as gold. I was the same the next night, he said, and the next, and all the ones after that.

“You were never any trouble,” he said. “You brought me nothing but joy.”

“You should have told someone,” I said, the fury settling now on my chest.

“You slept like an angel,” he said. “You woke up smiling. I made you hot milk, and you drank it and twirled your hair and smiled at me with your pink apple cheeks.”

I couldn’t look at him. I stared out the window at the littered black sky.

“I loved you,” he said. “I taught you to read. I taught you to cook. I taught you how to be free and independent and confident, the opposite of me.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t speak to him.

“Chap,” he said. “I love you.”

It erupted then, the anger, it poured itself out into the room like lava.

“Who’s Chap?” I said, and the catch in my voice was bitter, caustic.

“You are.”

“Or Damiel? Is that who I am?”

“Yes.”

“Or nobody?”

“Not nobody.”

“NOBODY!” I yelled. “NOBODY and NOTHING!”

“Chap,” he said, “Don’t—”

I don’t remember what I said to Grandad, not exactly, not word for word. I was blind with it. I was thrown into this void, and there was only him to scream at, only him to hate. I let him have it, I know that much. I said he’d taken my life from me. I said he’d stolen everything.

“Where’s my family?” I said. “Where have you hidden them? Who am I?”

I said I was nobody because of him, thanks to him, a lonely, bitter, selfish,
sick
old man.

“I hate you,” I said, inches from his face, while he cowered in his chair, defenseless, remorseful, and defeated. I saw my spit land on his cheek. I saw the fear in his eyes, the fear that I would hit him, the half-hope that I might. I hated him with everything I had. I told him so. And then I walked out of his sad and filthy little cell and took the stairs three at a time and went out into the fireworks, into the night. I never saw Grandad again.

It was twenty-five past seven. I asked the man. I was nobody. That’s when it began.

F
rank came back in the middle of the night. I lay on my bed, on top of the covers, exhausted and fully awake. I heard him. He drove slowly into the yard with his lights off. He killed the engine and sat in his car. There was a long quiet space between the engine cutting and the sound of the car door opening and closing. He tried to shut it without making too much noise.

Was he being considerate, trying not to wake us? Or was he slipping in unnoticed, and coming back to get me?

He came inside with quiet care. The keys jangled slightly in the lock, the bolt scraped a little when he turned it. I heard the dog’s tail hitting against something while it wagged. I heard Frank’s voice, and I heard the dog groan with friendly disappointment. Frank took his shoes off and placed them neatly at the bottom of the stairs. I could picture him doing it.

I lay there rigid with fear, tuned to the slightest movement, the smallest noise. His feet whispered on the steps and along the hall and stopped outside my door. I’d wedged it shut with a chair. I’d barricaded myself in.

The water was still in the bath, stone cold and dead still. Frank’s clothes were still on the floor. I hadn’t left the bathroom until Edie and Helen gave up on me. I didn’t leave it until I knew they were both asleep.

I think Frank and I both heard each other on either side of that door. I think each of us knew the other one was listening.

I’m not sure how long he stood there. Time stopped. I couldn’t rely on time anymore. He sighed softly and went into his room, shut the door. I heard him barricade himself in too; I heard the definite click of the key in the lock.

I stayed awake all night. I wondered if he slept.

In the morning, before any of them were up, I took Edie’s phone from the kitchen table and called Floyd.

It was pretty early. I knew I’d wake him.

“Who is this?” he said.

“It’s Cassiel.”

“No it isn’t. No you aren’t. Who is this?”

I thought he couldn’t hear me properly. I went outside for a better signal.

“Why did you tell me to say that to Frank?” I said. “What did it mean?”

I could hear him moving, sitting up in bed. “How did he take it?” he said. “What did he do?”

“He didn’t like it. It scared him. He changed. It scared me. What’s going on, Floyd?”

“Meet me,” he said. “Meet me down at the warren again.”

I asked him if I could trust him.

“No,” he said. “You can’t. You can’t trust anyone.”

I looked at my reflection in the wet, clouded kitchen windows, blew the air out from my cheeks.

“Are you coming?” he said.

“I’ll be there in an hour,” I said. “I’m walking there now.”

“Look over your shoulder,” Floyd told me. “Keep an eye out for Frank on the way down.”

“Why?”

“You’re not safe anymore,” he said. “That’s why.”

Floyd was waiting for me. There was nobody else but us. The Wicker Man had grown. His legs and belly were stretched out on the grass, like he was lying down, the two-thirds of him that existed.

“We’ll stay out here,” Floyd said, “in the open, so we can see who’s coming.”

“Are you serious?” I said, but I knew he was.

I flicked a stone into the river. It skipped six times and then bubbled under. The water was fast and angry and loud.

“What’s going on, Floyd?” I said.

“You know,” he said.

“Why did you tell me to say that to Frank? Why am I suddenly in danger?”

Floyd picked up a handful of stones and let them drop. “You might be,” he said, “and you might not.”

“What’s all this about?” I asked him.

“You’re not Cassiel,” he said.

The last stone dropped from his hand with a
clap
. All I could hear was the water and the wind in the trees and the sound of Floyd, waiting.

“What?” I said.

“I know you’re not Cassiel,” he said, looking right at me. “And I know that Frank knows it too.”

I didn’t argue. I didn’t bother. Floyd was utterly certain, I could tell that, and he was right. I dropped to a crouch at the river’s edge, one hand on my head, one hand in the cold wet. I didn’t say anything.

“You look so like him,” he said. “It’s extraordinary, really.”

“What happens next?” I said.

His eyes and his voice were hard like set clay. “I want to know some things.”

“Like what?”

“Like are you really not him?” he said. “Is it really not you?”

“It’s not me,” I said, and then I laughed at the sound of it.

“Then who are you?”

I told Floyd that it didn’t matter. I told him I wasn’t anyone. I felt that old familiar hollow where that knowledge should be. I felt the lack of my own family just as keenly as ever.

“It does matter,” he said.

“Doesn’t mean I can change it,” I said. “I’m nobody. That’s just a fact.”

He didn’t have an answer to that.

“Why would you do such a thing?” Floyd said. “Why would you pretend to be Cassiel?” I ignored the question. He asked it again. “Why would you do that?”

I waited a minute before I answered. I just enjoyed the gurgle of water on stones and the noise of birds and the open space. I enjoyed Floyd standing next to me, like we were just two friends out for a walk.

“It just happened,” I said. “I didn’t know how to stop it.”

Floyd shook his head slowly, the look on his face half smiling, half stricken. “How does something like that just
happen
?” he said.

I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to stay and I wanted to run at the same time.

“You are so like him,” he said.

“Sorry.”

“You’re so like him, I can still almost believe you
are
him,” he said.

“Well, I’m not,” I said. “I’m not him. I just wished I was.”

“Why?” Floyd said, and he could barely keep the disgust out of his voice. “Why would you want to be someone else? Why would you steal from someone like that?”

I thought about that moment in the hostel, stuck in a storeroom, looking at Cassiel Roadnight’s face and seeing my own.

“Because he was handed to me on a plate,” I said. “Because I am nobody and I have nobody. Because there was really nothing to lose.”

Floyd said, “I look at you and I still see him, even though I know.”

“Don’t look at me, then,” I said. “I’m sorry for what I did, but I can’t help what I look like.”

He didn’t stop looking. I was like a really good forgery, I suppose, and Floyd was an expert, studying me for differences, for tiny things that were left out.

I asked him how he knew.

Floyd looked away then. He said, “I didn’t know straight away. But when I did, it was obvious, really. You’re very different.”

“How?”

“Cassiel was never my friend, for a start,” Floyd said. “I was a joke to him. The only time he ever asked me for anything was at Hay on Fire, the night he . . .”

“And that’s how you knew?”

“You didn’t know anything,” he said. “You asked so many questions.”

“True.”

He shrugged and smiled. “And weirdly, you’re nicer than he was. You’re just different.”

“You just said we were the same.”

“If you’re not looking, you are. I was really looking.”

“Isn’t everybody else?”

“People don’t look,” Floyd said. “They see. It’s different.”

“How?”

“People see what they expect to see, what they need to. Edie and Helen see what they need.”

“And you?”

Floyd shrugged. “I suppose I’m one of the few who didn’t need Cassiel to come back. So I could look at you.”

“And Frank?”

“Frank knows you aren’t his brother. Frank always knew.”

I thought about Frank, how he had welcomed me in. I felt again his brotherly hug, his warmth and excitement and affection. Could they really have been pretense? Was he really that good a liar? That cold and controlled and heartless?

“How can you be so sure?” I said.

“Because Frank killed him,” Floyd said. “Frank killed Cassiel.”

“You said that,” I told him. “And nobody believed you.”

“But you do,” Floyd said. “I think you do.”

I asked him why, if Frank knew who I was (or who I wasn’t), he hadn’t said anything. Why hadn’t he chased me from the house or given me to the police or hung me out to dry?

“Why was he so nice to me?” I said.

“You’re not thinking,” Floyd said.

I said I was too tired to think.

“Frank’s never going to give you away,” Floyd said.

“Why not?”

“He needs you, if you think about it. Frank needs you more than anyone else does.”

If Floyd was right, and Frank had killed Cassiel, then I was his alibi. As long as I was there being his brother, I was proof that his brother was still alive.

It was obvious, if you were looking for it. And it was chilling. I had walked into a trap of my own making.

If Floyd was right, Cassiel was dead and I was living with his killer. If Cassiel was dead, then Frank and I both had a terrible secret, and we needed each other to keep it.

But how could Floyd be so sure?

“Tell me who you are,” he said again.

“Nobody.”

“How are you nobody? What does that mean?”

“I woke up one day and I was on my own, and nothing I knew was true,” I said. “Not even my own name. That’s what that means.”

“What’s your name?”

I shrugged. “I don’t have one.”

“What do people call you, apart from Cassiel Roadnight?”

“My grandad called me Chap,” I said.

“Chap.”

“Yep. But it’s not my name. And he wasn’t my grandad. We weren’t related.”

“Chap what?”

“Chap nothing.”

“Where do you live, Chap Nothing?”

I looked at him. “Why do you want to know? Are you going to send me back there?”

“Where are your mum and dad?” he said.

“I don’t have a mum and dad,” I said. “I don’t have anyone. I live wherever I want.”

“Did you run away?” he said.

“Nobody’s looking for me, if that’s what you’re getting at,” I said. “Nobody’s missing me. I didn’t run away. I got lost. I don’t exist.”

“Yes, you do,” Floyd said. “You’re sitting right here. I can see you.”

“Well, you’re the only one who can.”

I asked him why he was so sure Cassiel was dead. I asked him why he was so certain Frank had killed him, when even the police hadn’t listened, when the whole town thought it was crazy.

“I wasn’t sure until this morning,” Floyd said. “I knew, but I wasn’t sure until you called.”

I asked him what had happened, what had changed.

“Mr. Artemis,” Floyd said.

“Who is that?” I said. “Who’s Mr. Artemis anyway? Is it a code? That’s what I thought it was.”

Frank shook his head. “It’s not a code,” he said. “It’s the darkest part of Frank’s dark secret.”

“So tell me what it is. And how do you know it?”

Floyd laughed quietly to himself.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

“Frank has got to be shitting himself right now.”

“Tell me why, exactly.”

“Only Cassiel knew the truth about Mr. Artemis. Only Cassiel and Frank. Nobody else in the world knew, and that’s why Frank had to kill him.”

“You know about him.”

“Only because of what Cassiel gave me the night he vanished. Only because I worked it out.”

“I don’t get it.”

“To Frank,” Floyd said, “you’re either Cassiel back from the dead, or you’re his perfect watertight alibi, and you just sprang a huge leak. Either way, Frank is scared shitless. He’s back to square one.”

I thought about Frank’s face, about the horror I’d seen on it, the glimpse of another person beneath, chaotic, lunatic, evil.

“What about Edie?” I said. “And Helen?”

Floyd shook his head. “They don’t know anything,” he said. “I’d bet my life on that.”

“Or mine,” I said, a little sharp. “Mine seems to be the one you’re betting with.”

A man and a dog opened the gate from the footpath to the warren. It creaked on its hinges and groaned shut. It wasn’t that close, the sound was very small. We looked up and ducked at the same time.

“Is it Frank?” I said.

“Can’t tell from here.”

I thought about how empty this place was. How easily Frank could come and kill us both and walk away without a witness, without anyone seeing except the grass and the trees and the river. The grass and the trees and the river had never seemed more callous to me, had never seemed more useless.

All this time I’d been worried about Frank seeing through me, about Cassiel showing up. I needn’t have. I was safe in Cassiel’s place, the perfect piece in Frank’s puzzle. I was home free and I didn’t even know it.

And Mr. Artemis had ruined everything. Floyd had made me ruin it.

I wanted to be angry with him, but I couldn’t. Wasn’t what I had done so much worse?

“It’s not Frank,” he said, still looking. “It’s not his dog, and I think that guy’s got gray hair.”

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me about Mr. Artemis. Tell me how you can prove Frank is a killer, and then tell me what we are supposed to do about it.”

He was quiet for a bit. We sat with our backs to the water, scanning the common.

Then Floyd said he wasn’t stupid. He said maybe he looked it. He was willing to concede that. He said, “People see what they want to see, remember?”

“You don’t look stupid,” I said. “You look odd.”

“Odd is stupid out here,” he said. “It’s a pretty straightforward place.”

I didn’t know why he was saying all that. I didn’t see how it was relevant.

I asked Floyd why Frank hadn’t come after him. I said, “How come he didn’t get to you when you accused him? If he killed Cassiel just for knowing, how come you’re not dead for going to the police? What makes you so safe?”

Floyd shrugged. “Frank destroyed the evidence,” he said, still watching the man and his dog. “I’m sure the first thing he did was chuck all of Cassiel’s stuff on the fire. He thinks there’s nothing left to condemn him.”

“True.”

“And he thought I was too stupid to bother with, like everyone else does.”

“Right,” I said. “You’re alive because you’re stupid.”

“That’s my point,” he said. “I’m not stupid. I made copies.”