‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’ Paula bustles onto the ward. I imagine her shaking her head at the disturbed tray, and hear the wheels whine as she rolls it back to its place near Cassie.
She tends to the other patient before coming to me last. She dabs my eyes with saline and finally lifts my head up. My eyes leap on Cassie. She’s still there; she’s still alive. But she doesn’t look serene any more. Her facial muscles aren’t relaxed; they’re twisted, her mouth round, petrified in a noiseless scream and the truth hits me, clean as though I’d cut myself on the sharpness of the realisation, that even here, Cassie and her baby aren’t safe.
9
Cassie
‘Must be left here,’ Cassie says, squinting down at the mess of lines on the map and looking up quickly, and down again, trying to spot some correlation between the bushy little lane they’re bouncing down in Jonny’s van and the capillary-like lines on the map that is spread out across her legs, her bare feet resting on the glove compartment in front of her. She feels Jonny turn to look at her, before he turns back to the road, still smiling.
‘What are you smiling about?’ she asks.
Jonny’s smile broadens behind his sunglasses as he says, ‘You’ve got absolutely no idea where we are, do you? There is no left here.’
Cassie drops her head again, frowning down at the map as if it lied to her.
‘Jesus!’ she exclaims. ‘Why call it Brighton when it’s clearly the arse end of nowhere?’
‘Good point, although I’m not sure the “Arse End Food and Drink Festival” would draw huge crowds.’
Cassie laughs. The boxes of jam slide in the back as Jonny swings the van, a sharp right down another small lane, hedgerows swaying with May flowers.
‘All of these lanes look identical,’ Cassie complains.
‘Let’s just go with our gut, can’t be far away,’ Jonny says as Cassie leans back on the headrest and turns to look at Jonny. He’s in his denim cut-offs again. He threw his flip-flops in the back of the van before he started driving barefoot; even those flimsy things were too restrictive for him. His arms are already a burnt-caramel colour, the hair on them as light as spiders’ webs, a slightly darker patch of hair pokes up from the front of his faded T-shirt.
The world goes lightly with Jonny. He says it’s because he spent too long in a suit, rushing through his life like it was something he had to endure. Now, it’s as though he’s come to an agreement with the world; I accept you if you accept me. Jonny says people always over-complicated everything. Cassie thinks of Jack. He hadn’t slept well again last night; he was out of bed and hunched over his spreadsheets just like the last few nights, the glow from his computer screen highlighting his face sickly and anaemic. He says issues at work are too complicated to explain, so he just turns back to his computer, and doesn’t even try. She hasn’t seen him like this before; his stress has a grandeur, an importance that Cassie doesn’t know how to penetrate.
She talked to Jonny about it, on a ‘research trip’ to a chilli farm. Jonny had pulled his sunglasses off his face, nestled the arms behind his ears and looked straight at Cassie as he’d said, ‘Well, it seems to me you have a choice, Cas. You can either confront him and say you need to work together to change things.’
‘Or?’
‘Or you accept that this is a part of him for now and bring him a whisky when he can’t sleep.’
Jonny makes everything sound so simple. Problem is, though, that somewhere in the journey between leaving Jonny and going home to Jack, Jonny’s quiet logic seemed to twist and tangle, like a thin chain necklace, so even when she had used Jonny’s words to explain to Jack how she felt, she’d sounded facile, childish. Jack had just frowned at her, rubbed his temples and turned back to his spreadsheets, and she’d apologised for bringing it up and had left him to his work. It wasn’t like that with Jonny, though; he seemed to understand without her having to explain.
‘Ah ha!’ Jonny sits up in the driver’s seat. ‘Do you see what I see?’
Ahead of them, there’s the small Lego-like block of the racecourse building, and a plastic sign telling them they had, finally, arrived at BRIGHTON FOOD AND DRINK FESTIVAL.
Cassie picks up the map from her legs, exposing her thighs, and without bothering to concertina the map back into its folds, she throws it into the back, knowing Jonny won’t care, and he grins as she throws her arms into the air, victorious, and says, ‘We made it! Arse End Festival!’
They pull into a small field to find a space to park. There aren’t any close to the entrance so they have to drive further into the car park. Cassie spots a familiar pink scarf and silvery bob. She tells Jonny to slow down as she sees Charlotte walking across the car park towards the festival entrance.
‘Charlotte!’ Cassie calls out of the window. ‘You’re here early!’
Charlotte looks around her, uncertain whether she did just hear her name or not, before she sees Cassie waving from the van. Charlotte holds the tablecloth she’s sewn for Cassie a little tighter as she walks towards them.
‘Oh, hi, Cas,’ she says, her eyes glancing over her daughter-in-law’s bare legs, her feet still resting on the dashboard. ‘I got a lift with Maggie – you know, the hairdresser? She’s helping on a cake stall. Here, I’ve got your tablecloth.’ She raises the red-and-blue striped cloth she finished seaming last night. Cassie slowly lowers her legs.
‘Charlotte, you’re amazing,’ Cassie says, lifting her bottom to tug her denim skirt back over her legs. She feels a shock, warmth, as Jonny’s eyes flick down to her thighs again and bounce straight back up to meet Charlotte’s gaze.
Jonny leans forward in his seat, hands on the steering wheel, past Cassie and calls out brightly, ‘Hi, Charlotte, we’ll just park up and be right with you.’
Charlotte nods and takes a step back. As she watches the van pull forward, her thumbnail flicks against the fabric in her arms, and she feels the skin on her eyelid start to pulse, an old tic. It hasn’t done that in years, and she feels a familiar queasiness in her lower stomach as she watches the van bounce across the field. She knows what it means immediately; she’s worried for her son.
Jonny hauls most of the boxes inside to the two trestle tables in the far corner of the main vestibule, while Cassie registers with the organisers and starts setting out her display. They know their roles now; this is the fourth event for Farm Jams, and Jonny’s been by Cassie’s side helping for each one. Cassie’s careful to balance some of her newer, bolder inventions like chilli chocolate spread and elderflower preserve with old favourites like raspberry jam and apricot. She positions the hand-labelled pots on the table in their kiln jars like tiny, sweet soldiers.