The man rakes a hand through his hair, shakes his head, as though it hadn’t crossed his mind he’d meet with any resistance.
‘I’m a friend of Cassie’s, her neighbour. I found her, I found her in the stream. I’ve been at the police station all day, so I couldn’t come any earlier so I just thought … I just thought I’d try and see her now. I haven’t slept for thirty-six hours. I just need to see her.’
They both turn towards the tap, tap of hard shoes running down the ward. He turns back to Alice and I don’t hear what the man says above the crackle of radios and Paula shouting, ‘There, he’s over there!’
Alice faces the man again and I watch as her face folds into a frown, and I know that whatever he’s just said doesn’t make sense to Alice.
‘What are you talking about?’ she asks, but it’s too late. A security man in black uniform is upon him, and it’s clear he’s all out of fight as he holds his hands up in submission.
‘Sorry, sorry, this was a bad idea,’ he says to Alice and he starts to walk away with the security man. Alice’s eyes stay firmly fixed on his back as he leaves and I hear him as he apologises to Paula before the ward doors open again and he’s gone. Alice doesn’t move for a few moments. She’s biting her bottom lip and it’s only then that I notice that Alice isn’t as calm as she appears, that Cassie’s curtain is shaking where Alice holds it, twisted taut around her hand.
6
Cassie
Underneath the hopeful smell of new wood, and the chemical funk of whatever Jack used to stop it rotting, the shed still smells fuggy to Cassie, of rust, lawnmowers and long-forgotten garden tools. Jack started calling it her ‘studio’ but she teased him for being pretentious; it is still, after all, just a shed, with its hollow floor and the whorls in the wood that pop like psychedelic eyes. Cassie thinks April would have approved.
Nicky’s the first person to see the shed since they finished doing it up a couple of days ago. The door creaks on its hinges as Cassie and Nicky step from the sunny March day into the dark folds of Cassie’s current favourite room in the whole of Steeple Cottage.
‘It’s still a work in progress,’ Cassie says, a little shy suddenly, as though she needs her old school friend to know it’s going to get even better. ‘There’s more I want to do.’
‘Oh, Cas!’ Nicky sighs her name, long and airy as she looks around the small rectangular space. Cassie and Jack spent a few days clearing out the shed, stripping back the old wood, patching up areas that had started to rot. Jack said he could only take one day off from work to help, so Cassie did the decorating on her own. She’d laid one of April’s thin Moroccan rugs on the floor, hammered in nails for her painting utensils and carefully unpacked her mum’s and her own painting boxes and canvases. Eventually the sharp smell of oil paints would mask the grimy whiff of engine oil, and the shed would – to Cassie at least – maybe even smell like home.
‘The view’s the best bit,’ Cassie says, a high-pitched excitement back in her voice as she takes Nicky’s hand and leads her to the little window on the far side of the shed. They have to step around April’s old easel that stands proud on its spindly legs in the middle of the shed misshapen by dried globs of paint, the once-bright layers now the colour of mulch.
Nicky drops her long white arm over Cassie’s shoulders and Cassie snakes an arm loosely around her friend’s waist as the two women stand to face the window that frames a view of the Sussex Downs, the curvature of the hills gentle as sleeping giants.
‘It’s amazing, Cas.’
‘I know … I can’t believe I get to paint here every day if I want.’
‘Not just this, but the whole thing, meeting Jack, moving here. All of it.’ Nicky lifts her arm off Cassie’s shoulders and as she turns to face her friend, Cassie notices Nicky’s blue eyes are glossed with emotion, but her thin, lightly freckled lips smile. They’ve talked about it many times before, of course, how meeting Jack eighteen months ago has led to Cassie slowly gluing her broken life back together like fragments of a dropped vase, patched up to create an unexpected but more beautiful design.
‘It’s really cool, Cas.’
Cassie smiles gratefully; Nicky never gives compliments half-heartedly. She wants to find a way to tell her friend the same thing could happen to her without sounding patronising, but before she finds the words, Nicky starts talking again, the sparkle back in her voice.
‘I mean, imagine how different everything would have been if you’d stayed with Robbie, or worse, that weird hip-hop DJ … what was his name again?’
‘Daz.’
‘Yeah, that was it. Daz. God, he was weird.’ Nicky scoffs and, turning back to the view, says, ‘By the way, Beth said it’s true Robbie got some poor teenager pregnant and has left her to raise the kid on her own.’
Cassie thinks – as she always does whenever someone mentions a young, single parent – of her mum, and she feels her joy dampen. She doesn’t want to think about her mum now; she wants Nicky to keep sharing in the delight of ‘Mrs Cassie Jensen’s’ new life. It’s unsettling talking about her old life here, like remembering a long-forgotten unfriendly acquaintance, someone buried in the past.
Cassie finds she can’t stay still, so she turns away as Nicky slouches against the window and starts telling Cassie about Beth’s new boyfriend. Cassie busies herself, picks up her newly washed painting apron – one of Jack’s old shirts – from the floor, and hangs it back on the nail she hammered in yesterday. She flicks some invisible dirt from the white, silky heads of her new paintbrushes. She waits for a pause in Nicky’s story then pulls Nicky’s arm and, pointing at a wooden box on the old table, says, ‘Check these oils out, Charlotte gave them to me. They’re amazing. Look.’ But as Cassie goes to open the box, she can feel Nicky’s attention is pulled elsewhere.
She’s looking at the two canvases Cassie propped up on the ridge that runs along the inside of the shed. The canvases are small, just a foot square; Cassie painted them in a late-night frenzy in Marcus’s cottage on the Isle of Wight, just days after April told her she had stage-four breast cancer.
Nicky pauses in front of them, but doesn’t say anything. Both canvases are covered in violent reds in various shades that rip and swirl across the surface. In the far-right corner there’s an outline of a small figure. She’s facing away from the viewer, her frame just a thin layer of indigo in all the red. In the second canvas, the figure is sitting down. Her hands cradle her chin; her gaze is fixed somewhere outside the canvas, staring at something unknowable to anyone but her. The canvases seem naive, childish to Cassie now, as though her grief was a bit naff. She should have put something more cheery, something springlike, up in here.