Double (16 page)

C
assiel’s body had burned up to almost nothing in the Wicker Man. Nobody had seen Frank pack the Wicker Man with extra wood and wool and fiber, with chemical-soaked towels to explode and boost the temperature to make it hot enough to rob a body of its flesh before the fire died. Nobody’d seen him climb up the ladder, Cassiel slung over his shoulder, drugged and wrapped in sackcloth. It was a good Wicker Man that year, that’s what everybody said. It was especially dramatic.

Frank had stayed behind afterward to help clear up. He’d done it before. It wasn’t anything special. The hole was already dug for all the hot ashes. Frank scooped what was left of the Wicker Man and his brother inside it. My brother. Mine and Frank’s and Edie’s.

No one noticed Cassiel was missing until the morning. By the time Helen raised the alarm and Frank led the search, all concern and brotherly love, Cassiel was tidied away, his computer was wiped. All trace of him was gone.

Except what he had given to Floyd.

And nobody believed Floyd. Not the first time.

He called the police on Edie’s phone. I stood over Frank with a rock in my hand just in case he woke up before they got there. I wasn’t afraid to hit him again. I wasn’t shy of doing it. I wanted to.

Edie shook. Her eyes were glassy.

“Why are you here?” I said.

She looked straight through me. She didn’t answer.

Floyd took his costume off and laid it on the ground. It flapped feebly in the wind, a defeated dragon.

“Why is Edie here?” I said. “Why did you drag her into this?”

“I didn’t,” Floyd said.

“What?”

“Believe it or not,
she
came to
me
.”

He didn’t have time to explain. A police car crossing the common and stopping by the river wasn’t so unusual, not on a night like this. The police were everywhere. We gave them Edie’s phone. They wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. She told them what she had seen and heard, what she had recorded. They picked Frank up like a dead weight and put him in the car. He groaned a little, and the sound of him waking up made me realize how afraid I’d been, made me see how close I’d come to dying, how close Cassiel had come to dying twice.

Floyd drove us home in Edie’s car. She still couldn’t stop shaking.

“Helen’s asleep,” I said. “Frank gave her extra medicine.” And as soon as I said it, Edie’s panic broke, like the quick white crashing of a wave. It spilled out all over the car, stealing the oxygen.

Her voice was rushed and broken. “I can’t do this,” she said.

She opened her door and tried to get out while the car was still moving. She was outside in the dark as soon as we stopped, all in white and white-faced, like a ghost. Floyd got out. I stayed where I was. I thought if I tried to go near her, she might run away. I watched through my window. Her hands were fists at her side, her mouth a black hole, the muscles in her neck straining.

“I can’t do this,” she shouted. “Oh God!”

I didn’t know what to do. I bent down and put my head in my hands. She was my sister, and she wasn’t my sister anymore. I had everything and nothing at the same time.

“Edie,” said Floyd, his voice low and steady. It moved toward her in the dark just like he did.

She turned away from him, stepped farther from the car. She almost disappeared into the darkness. She held on to herself and rocked.

“Who is he?” she moaned.

Floyd looked at me through the window. “He’s your brother.”

When I’d told him that night that I was Cassiel’s twin, Floyd had smiled quickly and bent double and covered his eyes. Then he’d hugged me. He said he was happy and sorry at the same time. He said “Why?” and “How?” and we knew we had plenty of time to talk about everything, later.

I waited. I waited for what Edie would say.

“What’s our grandmother’s name?” she said to me through the glass. She was shouting.

“What?”

“What was our first dog called? What’s my favorite color? When’s Mum’s birthday?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What film do we always watch at Christmas?”

“Edie—”

“Shut up!” she said. “Get out of my car.”

I got out and faced her across the grimy wet-stained silver of the roof. Floyd looked at me. The black hadn’t come off his face. It was smeared and half wiped. His face was disappearing into the dark, like he was vanishing.

“Who are you?” she said.

“Why did you help me, Edie?” I asked.

She looked at the black sky and at Floyd. She wouldn’t look at me.

“Why were you there?” I said.

“I thought he was going to kill you,” she said.

“Who? Frank?”

She nodded.

“So did I,” I said.

“Why did you think that?” I asked. “What happened?”

She still wouldn’t look at me. She said, “The night you hid in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out. The night he went off and came back in the middle of the night.”

“What about it?”

“He was raging,” she said. “He was mad with it, like he used to be. I hadn’t seen him like that in ages. You were scared. I knew you were. I knew something was wrong.”

I breathed out.

“So you went to Floyd?”

Edie nodded. “Only this morning. I just wanted to ask him something.”

She looked at me then for the first time. Looked at me, not at Cassiel. I could feel the difference, like a gap in the air.

“You’re not him,” Edie said quietly, and every single fear in me reared up and howled when she said it.

I didn’t say anything.

“You’re not Cassiel,” she said.

It was so simple, so clear and definite.

“No,” I said, “I’m not him.”

“Cassiel’s dead,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And who are you?”

“I’m his brother. And I’m yours. I didn’t know it until yesterday.”

“Who told you?” she said. “Who told you that?”

“Helen,” I said. “She told me. She told Cassiel.”

We didn’t stop looking at each other. Neither of us looked away. Edie’s eyes went hollow. I watched it happen. I watched her remove herself from me, retreat down a corridor of locked doors. She wasn’t looking at her brother anymore.

She opened her mouth to scream, to curse me, to remind me of my place in the world.

I didn’t wait to hear it. You don’t stand there and take it when someone damns you for all eternity, even if you deserve it. You try and dodge their words, though you know they’re coming straight for you, like a bullet, like a smart missile.

You run.

I
t was Floyd that came and found me. I hoped he would. I didn’t have the strength to run anymore. I went back to the warren, picked through the dying crowd and the sea of litter, to the little wood, and I curled up in the mud bowl he’d taken me to. I curled up in the cold, and at some point I slept.

He woke me up gently, with a hand on my shoulder. His face and clothes were clean, but he still looked as if he’d just come from the circus. He still looked like a clown.

“Chap,” he said. “Damiel. Wake up. Time to go home.”

He took me up to the house. He took me up on the back of his bike. It was hard going, up the hills. I got off and walked most of the way.

“She wanted to help,” he said. “When I told her, Edie wanted to help. Remember that.”

On the way up I thought about Grandad. I thought about what I would say if he was still alive. I thought about saying sorry. I wanted to tell him I still loved him, even if he couldn’t hear. I wished I could make my peace with him, just like I wanted Edie and Helen to make theirs with me, their impostor, their fake, their thief and liar, their brother and son.

We all take things that don’t belong to us, I thought, and I told Grandad, wherever he was, even though I knew he couldn’t hear. We all want what we haven’t got.

Frank’s car was in the yard. It was the first thing I saw. The sight of it stopped me dead.

Floyd put his hand on my arm, just like he did that first day on the hill to see if I was living or a ghost, when I was both.

“It’s okay,” he said. “He isn’t here.”

There was a police car too. There were police in the kitchen when Floyd and I walked in. Edie was still in her costume. She’d been crying, and her eyes were as red as the faded fake blood on her dress. She looked at me and didn’t look away.

“Hi,” I said.

Helen was sitting at the table, smoking a cigarette. A policewoman was holding her hand.

She stood up. Helen stood up. Her nails were bitten to the quick, and her bangles rang just like the first time I saw her, just like when Cassiel came home. She was shaking, but she stood up and walked toward me.

“Damiel?” she said, in the smallest, softest voice—a smile almost on her lips, her eyes sadder and angrier than I could bear, the tears in her eyes pulling at the tears in mine. My mother.

“Damiel?” she said, and Edie was crying again too. “Is that you?”

“Yes, Mum,” I said. “Yes. I think it’s me.”