Saturday was one of those balmy late September days, the sky a soft blue, and that afternoon Cassie took her coffee up on deck and gazed out over the canal, replaying what she’d heard rising from Green-Eyes’ motionless lips.
Cold, so cold.
It didn’t matter whether he really had ‘spoken’ or whether it was just her subconscious working overtime: either way, the words shed no new light on his final moments since obviously the canal would have been cold. All that mattered was that after months of silence her bond with the dead had been rekindled.
Her gaze drifted across the canal towards the derelict concrete hulk of an old seventies housing estate a little way upstream. A new hoarding had gone up on the canal embankment trumpeting, Canalside Quarter: luxury apartments with waterfront views.
Long marked for demolition, its facade was pitted with broken windows through which ragged curtains flapped like the flags of a beaten army. The developers would make a packet while no doubt offering the fewest ‘affordable’ dwellings they could get away with.
It was the kind of place Archie might live – where both of us might have lived if you hadn’t blown it noted her disapproving internal voice – a thought she pushed away.
Macavity jumped up beside her. Cassie pulled out the packet she’d got at the pharmacy, pressed a torpedo-shaped pill out of the foil, and knocked it back with the last of her coffee. ‘I’ll try anything once,’ she said, shrugging at his sceptical gaze. ‘At least Babcia will be pleased.’
She’d promised to pop over to her gran’s that evening to help defrost her fridge-freezer which was apparently so iced up the door would no longer close properly, although that was no doubt just a thinly veiled excuse to check up on her granddaughter.
*
Cassie was expecting her dad to be at the flat, and was bracing herself for the inevitable Do you remember . . . ? Kath-fest but there was no sign of him.
‘No Callum this eve?’ she asked casually after stepping into the toasty-warm interior with its perennial background hum of cinnamon.
‘Just us girls!’ said Babcia, heading into the kitchen. Cassie’s spirits rose – a feeling that instantly morphed to guilt. ‘And I’ve made your favourite for dinner.’ She opened the oven door to show a baking dish bubbling with melted cheese, releasing a mouth-watering gust of savouriness.
‘Kopytka? Yum.’ The Polish version of gnocchi, baked with lashings of cheese and bacon – the vegan variety obvs – had been her go-to comfort food since her teenage years.
While her grandmother prepped the veg for dinner, Cassie used a bread knife to dislodge the worst of the icebergs in the freezer compartment and by the time they sat down to eat, their conversation was punctuated by the periodic clunk of falling ice as steaming bowls of boiled water hastened the defrosting.
As Cassie tucked into her kopytka, she noticed Babcia smiling at her.
‘You’ve got your appetite back,’ she said approvingly.
After taking a swig of beer, Cassie said, ‘So . . . I am seeing someone at the hospital about stress and stuff.’ Adding hastily, ‘But I don’t want to talk about it.’
Weronika just took Cassie’s hand in hers and gave it a squeeze. ‘This is nice, just the two of us,’ she said. ‘It is good being able to talk to someone who knew your mama, but you know, you’re still the centre of my world.’
‘How is Callum?’ Cassie still didn’t feel comfortable calling him dad.
‘He’s had a bit of a cold, but it hasn’t stopped him looking for work.’ She waved her fork. ‘He would love to see you, but I told him, don’t chase her. It has to go at your pace.’ Her tone was matter of fact, not criticising.
The irony was that Callum had been the most attentive parent when Cassie was small and her handful of early memories were mostly of him rather than her mum – who she now knew had been wrestling with depression and alcohol abuse. Riding on his shoulders in the park, going to see Toy Story at the cinema, playing monsters around the flat . . . So why did it stress her out, spending time with him?
After dinner, she went back to work on the freezer, excavating a solid bag of peas and a heel of bread interred in a wall of ice on the back wall. ‘I’m going to chuck this stuff, Babcia, it’s ancient.’
‘Oh, I never take any notice of the dates they put on everything these days.’ She made a scoffing sound. ‘And it hasn’t killed me yet!’
‘You go and watch the news,’ said Cassie. ‘I’ll make the coffee after I’m done here.’
She used the bread knife to free a styrofoam tray trapped in the ice: a shrink-wrapped chicken breast dated over a year earlier, and something came surging back to her from one of her A-level biology lessons. They’d been discussing microbiology in the context of food hygiene and her teacher Mrs Edwards had explained what happened when you froze and defrosted food.
Cassie felt a shiver so strong it made her back teeth clack together and the bread knife clattered to the floor.