4 Cassie
He woke and washed and dressed and shoved today’s books into his school bag. He looped the ready-knotted tie over his head and tightened it, leaving his top button undone. He pulled on the purple blazer that was too small for him because he grew out of things so quickly that he was reluctant to ask his mother for another one quite yet. He went through to the kitchen and chucked Josh under the chin, then regretted it immediately as his brother had been trying to eat Weetabix and had spread it all over his face and also, Danny saw, over Oma’s beautifully clean floor. She had been scrubbing the tiles again in the night. He washed the gunk off his hand and then wiped the floor. He made himself coffee and toast and glanced at his mother who was sitting at the table, checking through some notes.
In the five minutes or so that it took Danny to feed himself, the three of them didn’t exchange a single word. Mornings were like that sometimes. It wasn’t an uncomfortable thing, just how they worked.
He went down the narrow stairs to the door, and soon was out into another misty spring morning.
The usual group heading for school was a short distance down the main driveway. Danny would catch them up soon. No reason to hurry.
Hope Springs was based in a ramshackle old school, Wishbourne Hall. David, HoST’s founder, had actually been the headmaster of the school at the time it closed. When the last pupil had left, he had managed to convince the owners to turn the place into an educational trust and so the old school buildings had been converted into houses and flats and accommodation for visitors, and the grounds had been turned over to assorted experiments in sustainable living. They had solar panels on all the roofs and a reedbed garden to process the sewage. HoST had actually been thriving for several years, but their accounts were in such a mess that they hadn’t quite realised it until Danny’s mother had come along and sorted them out.
This place had welcomed them, the people unquestioning and friendly. Nobody here judged them, not that they knew there was anything to judge. It had been such a change, after struggling on for three years in a north London estate where everyone knew exactly what Danny’s father had done, and seemed to think that anyone associated with him must be nearly as bad in some way.
The towering lime trees that lined the drive were breaking into leaf, and at their feet a scattering of bluebells were just starting to bloom. Birds sang, butterflies danced through the misty sunlight.
All that stuff was supposed to be uplifting, Danny knew.
But his mind was stuck on the journal, now sitting in its brown paper wrapping in the bag slung from his shoulder.
His father’s dark secrets. His father’s darkest thoughts.
He wanted to be rid of it.
He wanted to read it.
He wanted to run through the village to the bridge, pull the parcel from his bag and sling it into the brook.
By the time he reached the gates, Danny was only a short distance behind the others.
“Hey, Danny,” said David’s son Rick. Shorter than Danny by a head, they all called him Little Rick, although once they were at school they had to remember to call him Mr Sullivan, or just “Sir”.
“Hi, Rick,” said Danny, nodding and fiddling awkwardly with the strap on his shoulder.
There were three others in the group. Tim was red-haired and spectacled and nearly as tall as Danny, although he was only Year 8. His older brother Will, who everyone called Won’t, was blond and chubby and shorter. Each claimed to be the spitting image of his father. And there was Jade, who was in the Lower Sixth, and was golden-haired and beautiful and made Danny’s skin burn every time she talked to him.
The group rounded the bend by the Wishbourne Inn, lost in a Monday morning gloom only broken by Tim and Won’t arguing about the weekend’s football results. Naturally enough, they supported different teams.
“So where were you and Oma Schmidt on Saturday, then?” asked Rick, smoothing his black pony-tail and squinting at Danny in the morning light. “Out all day, not back ’til late.” He pronounced Oma Schmidt rapidly, all as one word: omaschmidt. It sounded funny, and wound Oma up, at which Danny couldn’t help but laugh sometimes.
He shrugged now. “Just out for the day,” he said. “Back to London. Visiting.” No one needed to know any more than that. Just visiting.
They crossed the bridge over the brook and turned right onto the lane across the fields to Grafton-on-Severn.
A short distance ahead of them was another small group – girls from the other side of the village.
“So what’s your sign then, Danny?” asked Won’t, in a silly high voice.
“This,” said Danny, raising his middle finger.
One of the girls was Cassie Lomax, and last week, one lunch break, she had asked Danny what his star sign was. “I... I don’t know,” he had lied, not aware that Won’t and some of the others were listening.
She had narrowed her too-wide eyes, and then said, “Virgo, I reckon.” Wrong. He was Libra, although it was all nonsense. “You not going to ask what I am?” she had said, and then laughed when he shook his head.
Now she looked back along the track, just briefly. Her wild, dark hair made her look like she hadn’t brushed it in weeks, although she was always fussing over it so he knew that wasn’t true. She was skinny and frighteningly clever and ... He was watching her, he realised.
She glanced back again, and he looked down, away. He adjusted the strap of his bag and remembered the parcel. Lunchtime seemed so far away, and he was going to have to carry this thing around school with him all morning.
He was tempted to slip away right then, and go straight to the post office but, friendly as Little Rick was, he wouldn’t turn a blind eye to Danny bunking off.
When he looked up again, the girls had merged with the other groups on the road into Severnside Community School.
“Have a good day, Danny,” said Little Rick.
“Have a good day, sir,” said Danny, and they went in through the front gates.
~
“You have posted it?” said Oma.
Danny had the sense that she had been waiting all day to ask him this. She had been in the grounds of Hope Springs when he returned from school, fussing with some pots on the track by the lake.
He nodded, and couldn’t help but smile at her satisfied look.
“That is good,” she said.
“What’s so good about it?” said Danny. The only good thing, as far as he was concerned, was that the diary was no longer in the flat. The weight of its dark contents had lifted.
“It puts things right,” said Oma. “Is truth.”
But it was too late to change things, thought Danny, although he knew better than to upset his grandmother. It was far too late to change anything.
“All I want,” she said now, “is to bring the family together. You think that bad? You want me to give up that hope that I have? You tell me to stop, I stop. You tell me to go, I go.”
She did this sometimes. They all did: Oma, Danny, his father. They could switch, just like that, from happy to sad, from calm to angry. One moment she had been buzzing like the bees in Little Rick’s hives, and now she was upset, as if she realised how futile it was to hope for a happy family ever again.
“Of course we don’t want you to stop, or go anywhere. What would we do without you?” He kicked at a stone on the path, awkward, knowing that she had trapped him into saying things. Go on, tell me you love me!
She was smiling now.
“I only keep going because my family needs me. So tell me, Daniel Schmidt: you want things how they were?”
Danny nodded. If only... “Yes, I’d love things to be how they were.”
They walked back towards their flat in the main school building. Luke, one of the founding members of the Trust, was bent over in the undergrowth, hauling at the ground elder. When they passed him Oma nudged him in the backside. Instantly, she bounded off like a ten year-old.
Danny looked at Luke, sprawled in the weeds, and then at Oma’s retreating figure, and then he was after her. Around the corner of the old chapel, they stopped, gasping for air, giggling like little children. “Is funny, ja? He stick his fat ass in the air like that – what does he expect?”
~
Tuesday afternoon, Danny trailed out of the school gates, loosening his tie. He headed up Morses Lane, and then turned right onto the track that followed Carrant Brook back over the fields to Wishbourne.
A woodpigeon flew across the track and up into the willows that lined the brook to his left, then immediately it changed its mind and flew off again.
He walked to one side of the track, avoiding the puddles in the ruts left by the wheels of farm vehicles.
Cassie Lomax was ahead of him. Alone, just as he, too, was alone.
They weren’t completely on their own, of course. There were groups ahead of Cassie on the track, and Danny could hear voices from behind. They seemed very distant though.
She was dangling her bag so that it almost dragged along the ground at her side, the long straps bunched up in her right hand. Her bare calves flashed pale in the afternoon sunlight as she walked.
Danny kept looking down, looking away from her, as if someone somewhere might be watching him.
Watching him watching her.
He felt his heart thumping and he made himself breathe more slowly, more calmly. At lunchtime he’d seen her with Kate Jordan and Jo Lee, talking and laughing. He hadn’t heard what they were talking about. He hadn’t wanted to get too near, in case they thought he was weird.
Halfway along the track, Cassie paused and glanced back over her shoulder. She’d seen him now, he was sure. She was going to wait for him. Probably ask him something stupid about his star sign or whatever. Or ask him why he’d been watching her at lunchtime, even though he was certain she hadn’t noticed him.
When he looked back up, she was still walking. She wasn’t going to wait for him after all. Wasn’t going to ask him something stupid.
He realised that he was disappointed. He felt very alone at the moment. But he was relieved, too.
He watched her. The way that she walked. The way she dangled her bag.
She looked back again. She was smiling.
Was she playing games with him? Winding him up?
At the end of the track she turned right, away from Hope Springs, and so did Danny.
He was keeping his distance, and the kink in the road by the old railway line took her from his sight for a time. Long enough for him to wonder what on earth he was doing and then to squash that thought like an ant. He came round the high walls of the garden of Forge Cottage and she was there, ahead of him. Closer now: either she had slowed or he had quickened his pace when he had lost sight of her.
She looked up, not quite back at him, and turned down Swiss Lane. She must live in one of the wooden chalet-houses, he thought. Someone had once said they were so badly built that no-one could ever get a mortgage on them. That’s what they meant by “the other side” of Wishbourne: the council houses and chalets.
He came to the top of the lane, lost in thought.
“Are you following me or what?”
He gasped, as she emerged from a gap in the hedge. He stood and stared at her. There must be a convincing answer, other than “yes”, but he couldn’t think of it right now.
“I say hello. Comprendez vous? Anyone at home up there?”
She was standing with her hands on her hips, leaning forward, head jutting.
“I ... um ... “
“Joking. That’s what I’m doing: getting a rise.” She patted him on the arm, like an adult humouring a child. “I ask what you’re doing and you’re like...” She let her jaw drop and pulled a goofy expression.
“So what brings you to the posh side of the village?”
“I ... the shop.” He gestured with his head as he spoke, nodding in the direction of the village store.
“And I thought it was me.”
He stared.
She laughed. “Me going to the shop, I mean. We could go together, hey? Make an outing of it.”
He walked with her, wondering what she was up to, what game she was playing. Why was she treating him like this? Pretending to find him interesting when he said barely a word. Smiling and laughing and chattering away.
In anybody else it would be a character flaw to be so suspicious of everyone, but for Danny it was natural. It was how he survived. He didn’t trust anyone else, and he didn’t trust himself. He was always on his guard. It got him through.
“Last of the great talkers, are you?”
“Not much to talk about.”
“Nobody sees the world through your dark handsome eyes. Nobody knows all the things that you know. What’s in your head, chatterbox? Everyone’s got something to talk about. I’m like, listen to me! Maybe I’m the odd one: I have a thought and I have to share it. I talk less, you talk more, how about that? So what’s in your head, big boy?”
“Nothing.” He shook his head. They had stopped by the shop front, while Cassie prattled on. “There’s nothing special in my head. I’m just ordinary. Same as everyone else.”
She looked at him, eyes wide, smirking. “Oh how dull,” she said, and turned, and went into the shop, leaving the door to swing shut against him as he followed.
A short time later, back at the top of Swiss Lane, she turned to him and said, “I’m sorry if I surprised you, waiting in the hedge like that. Don’t mind me. I’m mad, me.”
She didn’t know what mad was, Danny thought. She didn’t even begin to know.