Chapter 2
Cassie noticed a warm light coming from the sitting room as she closed the front door behind her. Mam didn’t have much time for keeping up with the polished wooden-floor idea. Fads came and went, and you could be sure that one of these days the wall-to-wall carpet and fluffy rugs style would be making a comeback. Especially with the price of heating, as she was wont to declare on occasion.
‘Let’s see how long your minimalist fad lasts! The whole bloody house open from foundation to rafters, and the wind free to whistle from one end to the other, like your auntie Patricia’s house. Let’s just see. And I’ll be sitting here, cosy, with my pouffe and my nicely lined curtains, thank you very much.’
Cassie froze in indecision. One part of her wanted to creep upstairs to the peace of the childhood bedroom she’d moved back into since her homecoming a week before Christmas. The other yearned to trudge through the door and slump down onto the big cushiony sofa that threatened to swallow anyone smaller than Giant Haystacks.
‘Is that you, Cassie?’ Mam called. Without waiting for a reply, she went on, ‘Well, did you have a nice time?’
For Mam, time had stood still – Cassie’s unmarried, childless state probably contributed to that. She pushed open the door to the glow of the figurine table lamps and gas flame set into the wall, Mam’s one concession to modernity.
‘The kettle’s boiled, would you ever refill the pot there, love? I’ve just been watching the most boring film God ever made. I dozed off a bit in the middle, but I don’t think I missed anything. Room .?.?. You know the one. Where they end up in the shed?’
‘God, Mam, that’s a very harrowing film, did it not upset you?’
Mam pondered for a moment. ‘Do you know what struck me about it? Just how much you can make out of a small space with a bit of ingenuity.’
‘Seriously?’
Cassie could feel her irritation levels beginning to rise; undeterred, Mam ploughed on.
‘But d’you see what I’m saying? This isn’t a big room by any standards, at least not in comparison to your auntie Patricia’s, don’t get me started .?.?. but people always comment when they come in here how big it looks.’
Everything that occurred in Mam’s world was ultimately a reflection of her.
‘So, did you think it was good?’
‘Ah, well .?.?. sure, they all got out in the end, didn’t they?’
Cassie was about to declare that she really didn’t think that was the point of the film, when she felt her shoulders sag.
‘Grand, give me the teapot.’
Out in the kitchen, she rummaged through the pine cabinets.
‘Would you like a piece of Christmas cake, Mam?’
‘Ah no, it’ll only keep me awake.’
What was this powerful mixture of frustration and comfort that filled her as she surveyed the kitchen, with its flowery mugs and fake marble counter. The whole space seemed to exert a gravitational pull on her, back to the warm, familiar world from which she couldn’t wait to escape all those years ago.
‘So, they all have babies, have they?’ Mam asked as Cassie walked through with the tea.
‘All except Louise but she’s pregnant after a load of IVF.’
‘God love them, that’s very expensive, but, sure, isn’t he a barrister?’
‘Still, it’s hard on Louise.’
Mam made a sympathetic face.
‘And what did they say to you? Are they all delighted now that you’re back home from London?’
‘Honestly, Mam, time moves on, they’re all very tied up in their own lives.’
‘I suppose they are. They’ve moved on, I suppose.’ Mam stopped herself but the thought reverberated around the room. And you haven’t.
Cassie sipped her tea and scanned the gallery of photos that crowded the walls and mantelpiece. Graduation photos, communion photos, her sister Maxine’s wedding photo from 2003 – she’d worn a dress of ivory sateen with huge ruffled skirt and leg-of-mutton sleeves.
Mam hadn’t held back with her comments after a few gin and tonics: ‘For the love of God, did she have to go down the aisle dressed in a cinema curtain?’ Ownie, her chap, looked surprisingly normal. How is it that men always ended up looking way less weird in retrospect? As chief bridesmaid, Cassie was right there next to Maxine, decked out in a mauve Grecian-style affair and beaming.
Of course, that was a long time ago.
‘You were such a lovely little thing.’ Mam was gazing wistfully at the photo of her daughter in a Kermit-green dress with a Celtic design on it, her hair styled with sausage curls and holding an Irish dancing medal.
Cassie felt a pang in her chest. I was seven. God, in my mother’s eyes I peaked at seven. A part of her wanted to shout, Mam, I’m so sorry for being a disappointment, I’ll make it up to you, I promise , but then the other side hollered back, I don’t owe you anything, my life is my own . Or is it ever? Do we really owe it to our parents to make them happy, make them proud? As Da had said to her in the hospice on one of his last good days, ‘You couldn’t make some people happy if you tried.’
Though he didn’t specify who.
*?*?*
She closed the bedroom door behind her before switching on the light to reveal a candyfloss-pink time capsule: the room she’d left at eighteen-and-a-half and only ever returned to for a week here and there during summers and at Christmas. There really hadn’t been any point in updating it; anything she needed came home in her suitcase. She settled on the bed, propped pillows up against the headboard, wrapped a fleecy rug around herself and gazed around at the photos of the old gang, from their Leaving Cert holiday in Corfu. All real, printed photos from 1999, a time when everything had felt more solid, before the virtual world took over.
There was one of Bryony in her low-rise denim shorts, with Celine in her stripy mini, clowning on the edge of a pier; one of Norah holding a guidebook and pointing at something cultural in the blinding white sun that made everything feel like a dream, while the other girls made faces and Louise waved at the camera. It was a perfect moment, she mused, and we had no idea.
Her old certificate from Mountway drama school was framed on the wall. She thought of her teenage self walking up the steps of the impressive, modern building in Peckham, thinking, Crikey, this is bigger than I expected , and feeling her already anxious heart take off as though someone had jammed their foot on the accelerator of a go-kart.
She closed her eyes and drifted back to that day, in the waiting room, dressed in her black leggings and tunic top that she’d chosen to look like a young actress ready for rehearsal. That couldn’t be wrong, could it? But perched on her plastic chair – sweaty hands clutching her three speeches on paper that was about to come apart at the creases – that wasn’t how she felt at all. Beside her had been a stunningly pretty girl, wearing loose dungarees over a perfect top which Cassie would never have even thought of wearing, let alone been able to find in Dublin. Oh God, being prepared didn’t come close to being up to the mark, you had to be fabulous. The other guy and girl waiting nervously looked admittedly a bit cooler than herself, but at least they weren’t light years ahead. From inside the holy-of-holies somebody could be overheard engaging in a very loud and exuberant audition, culminating in a resonant thump which suggested they’d just leaped off a high piece of furniture, to the evident joy of the adjudicators, who clapped and laughed uproariously. The atmosphere in the waiting room chilled palpably. From somewhere she found the presence of mind to breathe ‘into the diaphragm’. To her relief, the very pretty girl could hardly be heard at all, while the next girl gave an intense, tearful performance which sounded unnervingly good. By the time the thin guy with bleached blond hair went in ahead of her, from somewhere she’d remembered the last thing her drama teacher had told her: ‘Just get out of your own way. Keep it simple.’ Which turned out to be the best advice she’d got from anyone ever, about anything.
‘What have you got for us today?’ said a man with flowing grey hair and half-moon glasses, who looked like he wouldn’t have been out of place conducting an orchestra.
Cassie found she was able to do her best, plus add a bit of magic that she’d spun from who knew where. To her delight she was met with a round of applause at the end. The grey-haired man muttered, ‘Well, that was a pleasant surprise.’
She’d sailed back down the steps of the modern building like a different person. No longer feeling like an impostor. She’d a right to be there. Her black outfit was fine, her Irish accent was fine, her speeches were fine – she’d been herself and it was fine.
Three weeks later the letter had landed on the mat. She’d been so terrified, she’d forced Mam to open it while she’d hidden in the cupboard under the stairs with her fingers in her ears, singing tunelessly until she’d heard Mam’s voice shriek from the kitchen, ‘You got it, Cassie, they’ve accepted you!’
The family had gone out for a Chinese meal to celebrate, and Da had raised a glass of Merlot in jubilation and declared for the whole place to hear, ‘I always knew it, we have a star in the family.’ The whole restaurant had clapped.
‘Do you want a hot-water bottle?’ Mam hollered from the bottom of the stairs, startling Cassie out of her reverie.
‘No, I’m fine, thanks, Mam.’
‘Are you sure now? You’ve an outside wall there.’
Cassie decided to ignore this last comment and let her mind drift back to her first day at Mountway. She’d run straight into the peroxide blond guy and tearful girl who’d been sitting beside her at the audition. They’d all screamed and hugged as though they were long-lost friends.
‘I looked at you and I thought, she looks like a professional,’ confided the guy, Pal. Paldon’s family, it turned out, were originally from Tibet, though he was a London boy, through and through.
Cassie gasped in disbelief at the irony. ‘I thought you sounded bloody brilliant; I was terrified,’ she admitted to Josie, who’d become a firm and loyal friend from that moment onwards. That had been the beginning of four happy years of excitement, sometimes terror, but more than anything the sense of being truly, truly alive.
She’d found an agent – or rather, Bea Benowitz had found her at the graduation show. Bea ran a small agency in an upstairs office on the Holloway Road, but actually that suited Cassie just fine. She preferred a smaller, more homely agency that felt approachable, rather than somewhere very big and high-powered where you were terrified of the receptionist. Bea had been wearing the same Revlon lipstick for thirty-five years and smoked a million cigarettes a day, but Cassie loved her. Whenever she felt low, particularly waking up on a Monday morning, she was reassured by the sound of Bea’s raspy voice down the phone, assuring her that it was ‘All down to timing, darling. Don’t worry, we’ll get you something nice.’ It gave her a sense of security in a world where it was all too easy to feel like you were in freefall. Bea had been as overjoyed as herself when she’d been cast in the panto the following Christmas. She was ‘on her way’, as Bea put it, though she didn’t specify where to. And that’s when she’d met Gavin. That was when her future began.
*?*?*
‘So, it’s definitely over, then? I thought you two were engaged,’ said Mam sadly as they set the table for Sunday lunch.
‘I never said that.’
‘Well, somebody did. And you were together for a long time .?.?.’
‘But we split up in October. Not exactly my choice.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Eric kindly. Eric was Mam’s new friend.
Mam busied herself shifting dishes around to make room for the carrots and Brussels sprouts, deliberately avoiding eye contact. It was not unknown for her to blur the boundaries between wishful thinking and fact, especially where her younger daughter was concerned.
‘I was telling Eric he was some sort of photographer for a while, wasn’t he?’
‘Food.’ Cassie sighed. ‘He was a food photographer for a year, until he got fed up and went back to being a tour manager.’
‘Just food photography, is that a thing?’
‘Of course, how d’you think they do ads and posters and things?’
Mam was obviously bringing this up to raise the tone of the conversation for Eric’s benefit. He was dressed in the sort of outfit that actors used to wear to read bedtime stories on the BBC – flannel shirt with a cravat tucked in – and was very polite, expressing surprise and admiration as each new dish arrived on the table. Mam was clearly delighted. ‘Friend’ was obviously code for ‘boyfriend’.
‘Of course, food photography is essentially the direct descendant of the still-life painting,’ he said. ‘We’ve always been fascinated by food in all its forms. It’s a very deep instinct.’
‘That’s very insightful, Eric,’ said Mam proudly.
Cassie couldn’t have imagined Mam telling Da he was very insightful, or he’d just have guffawed and done his best Carry On impersonation, cracking himself up in the process. Eric was clearly bringing out another side of Mam. It was funny to think old people could change like that. Cassie had always feared she’d be heartbroken to see a new man in Mam’s life, even though he’d been sensitive enough to choose the seat opposite her and leave Da’s big carver at the head of the table empty. In truth there was nothing the least bit objectionable about Eric; it was just that in her absence he seemed to have become part of the family. She’d come home to a world where everybody seemed to know the new rules except her.
‘So, when’re you planning to head back?’ he asked affably. Suddenly, she felt herself the focus of attention again.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘An open return, that must have cost you,’ observed Mam.
‘I don’t have any particular job coming up right now, so I have some flexibility,’ she replied airily. Which obviously meant ‘out of work’.
‘So, what were you doing up to the time you came back?’ enquired Eric, not unkindly.
‘You were on the BBC!’ Mam broke in.
‘I was in an episode of Casualty as a patient. Basically, it works that the more seriously ill you are, the bigger the part. I had an unexplained rash – apparently, the scriptwriters had been planning to make it meningitis but then they decided the character was just allergic to the mould in her council flat. So, that meant I was relegated to the “C” story.’
Eric nodded.
‘But you did have screen time with that lovely doctor with the white hair that’s been in it since the 1980s .?.?.’
‘No, he hasn’t, Mam—’
‘And you were doing some theatre in education work too, weren’t you, love?’
‘Sort of .?.?. I worked at the Tomb Raider Live experience, which was quite fun.’
‘And the big sciencey one.’ Mam seemed to be trying to promote her as the next Carol Vorderman.
‘I was actually subbing for a friend of mine at Slime Planet.’
‘But it’s fantastic, isn’t it, helping to make science an exciting, relatable subject for children. Don’t run yourself down.’
This was all for Eric’s benefit. He nodded sagely. Cassie winced as her memory catapulted her back to the shock of cold green slime cascading down on her head and 500 kids chorusing ‘Slime! Slime! Slime!’ like the mob at the Colosseum.
‘It’s all a business in the end, isn’t it?’ said Eric evenly.
Cassie could’ve hugged him.
*?*?*
Josie looked a bit different on Zoom. Everybody did – you were flat, after all. A two-dimensional image, like you were an astronaut phoning Earth from outer space. It felt a bit like that too.
‘If you change your mind and feel like coming back, you can always crash with me and Pal for a few weeks. I really miss you and I know Pal does too. By the way, a friend of mine is just opening a café in Islington – street food and eclectic interior kind of thing, and I’m sure I could get you a job.’
‘Don’t tempt me, Jos. I can’t explain it, I just feel like I can’t go back.’
‘I understand, if that’s how you feel, sweetie.’
‘Ever since Bea passed .?.?. and Gavin buggered off. It’s like London changed for me. It feels like the end of an era. I miss you and Pal terribly, but I can’t keep floating along day-to-day with no proper plan. I have to try and build something solid before it’s too late and people start feeling sorry for me and referring to me as “you used to be .?.?.”’
Josie looked hard at her.
‘You know, in my family we say every crisis is an opportunity. The universe never closes one door, but it opens another.’
‘I know, Josie, but I just feel like I’m stuck in the hallway and I haven’t the energy to keep trying all the feckin’ doors one after another. I feel like all that time I was buzzing along and holding on to my dreams, real life was happening somewhere else, and I’ve just woken up. Sorry for being a moany Mona. I’d better go.’
‘Wait!’
There was something in her tone that jolted Cassie to attention.
‘Just before you go, I’ve been meaning to tell you but .?.?. Look, I’ve a bit of news.’
‘Ooooh, I’m intrigued.’
There was a pause that felt anything but empty.
‘I’m pregnant.’
Time stopped. Dead.
‘Shit, Jesus, what? How? When? I mean, that’s fabulous.’
Nothing, nothing on earth had prepared her for this.
She registered that Josie was blinking a lot. She could also see in the thumbnail screen that her own face had collapsed and she was looking unnervingly like the Churchill dog. She pulled herself together instantly.
‘That’s .?.?. That’s incredible! Oh my God, Jos, I didn’t even know you guys were trying.’
‘We weren’t, that’s the thing. It just happened.’
Fate had taken a hand, or rather it had taken Josie’s hand and presented her with this most wonderful of gifts. Not Cassie. Not her with Gav in all the years they’d been together. Why was she so floored? Surely, she could’ve realised it was always a possibility.
‘Oh my God, I’m so excited for you. I couldn’t be more excited.’ She was aware of the concern on Josie’s face.
‘I’m sorry, I was going to save it for a better time.’
Normally, they could be savagely, delightfully honest with each other but this was too big, too unknown, too painful for honesty.
‘What? There isn’t a better time. This is the better time. It’s amazing. That’s what it is.’
‘Thanks, Cass, you’re being great about it. I was .?.?. Never mind. I’d better go now. We’re going down to the Duck for Sunday lunch. It’ll be mashed potato and flat water for me. Pal’s so excited, he’s planning to go for the full-on all-you-can-eat buffet to celebrate. With beer. I’m not sure I can watch him.’
Despite her wish to be sensitive, Josie’s joy and excitement bubbled through and for a split second Cassie hated her. Then she laughed.
‘That is so adorable.’
Josie was one year younger than her. Was that what had made all the difference?
‘Bye, darling, you take care of yourself.’
She could hear Josie speaking but the words weren’t going in. ‘No, you take care, sweetie, thrilled for you.’
She clicked ‘End Meeting for All’ and burst into tears.
*?*?*
‘Dog walking?’
After the shock of the phone call with Josie, Cassie had had a good bawl and a shower, and was now standing dressed in a tracksuit, holding a mug of not-particularly-warm coffee from Mam’s 2002 coffee maker.
‘Now, hear me out.’ Mam was on a mission. ‘It’s a gap in the market. That’s the number-one principle of any successful business. See a need, fill a need.’
‘Right now, I need to be left alone. Does that count?’
‘No. Listen to me: Maura’s had her hip done so she’s out of action and your auntie Patricia’s had her bunions done so she’s going to be on that scooter thing for weeks. They can’t all keep relying on neighbours and, God help us, friends. And between ourselves, neither of them’s short of a few bob.’
Cassie opened her mouth to protest then closed it again. It wasn’t actually the worst idea in the world. She wasn’t really qualified to do anything apart from act, or maybe teach – she’d made her peace with that. But dogs needed to be walked, and she had two legs so that was a start.
‘You’ll need a catchy name. Some sort of a play on words. Now, let’s think .?.?. Waggy Walks isn’t bad.’ Mam began a list of excruciating alliterations: ‘Waggy Wanders—’
‘That makes them sound lost.’
‘Pooch Parade.’
‘Too .?.?. up itself.’
After twenty-seven versions, they finally settled on the first one. Mam scanned her phone.
‘There’s a Waggy Walks in Melbourne and one in Solihull, but that’s grand – it’s nowhere near here. Look, I’m not saying you have to do it forever. It’ll just be a nice thing to do until you decide what to do with the rest of your life.’
‘Exactly. What I decide to do, Mam.’ Cassie knew she was being childish and ungracious, but she just couldn’t hold it in.
‘Now, you’re going to want a nice colour scheme for your branding, something that’ll appeal to your clientele.’
‘You mean your clientele.’
Mam gave a martyred sigh.
‘I could be out enjoying myself and instead I’m here on a wet Sunday, helping you to get a business off the ground and the least I could hope for is the remotest bit of gratitude.’
‘Sorry, Mam.’
‘That’s all right. We’ll start afresh.’
In fairness to Mam, she mocked up a template which Cassie had to admit looked passably professional.
‘That’s nice, Mam, thanks.’
‘Right. Time to get started.’