Cassie’s been in hiding for more than a week now, ever since Sandra was admitted for observation. They say observation – she knows what they mean. She knows she won’t get out without Johnny’s say-so. He loves her, but it got too bad.

Her therapist, Michael, tries to encourage her in “creative cognitive behaviours” – painting and music, and easy little comprehension games. She’s not stupid; she knows what he’s doing, trying to entice Cassie out. She paints nothing but letters and numbers and matrices – boring stuff, grown-up stuff. She paints a word-square made up of the letters RDPS. Regressive Dissociative Personality Syndrome. She tears it up, then sketches a rough diagram of a double-helix, with RDPS standing in for the usual bases, G, A, T, C. She’s not fucking stupid.

Dr. Kim drops by to see how she’s doing. He clocks the DNA diagram, and sighs.

“Very good, Sandra,” he says wearily. Dr. Kim is the consultant. He has met Cassie before, in the first diagnostic session. He knows who’s who. Sandra smiles at him; she’d thought he must be Asian when she first heard the name, but he’s not; he has red hair and brown eyes; an unusual combination. He doesn’t smile back. It’s not Sandra he wants to see.

†††

Sandra wakes up rolling down a hill, bouncing over and over in a breathless, headlong tumble. She puts out her arms to stop herself and the speeding earth flings them away, hurting her. She starts to shriek, and then she hits level ground, and slowly she stops. She lies on her back on the ragged grass of the clinic lawn, staring up at the spinning blue sky. She feels people’s feet thumping on the ground as they run up to her. Dr. Kim and Michael.

“Cassie,” they say, looking concerned and shocked, “Cassie, are you OK?” She grins up at them and shakes her head.

“Sorry boys,” she says, “it’s me.”

In the infirmary she hits up the young nurse who’s treating her sprained wrist for some more frass. She can feel she’s been clean for a few days at least – maybe even a week. The nurse looks across at Dr. Kim for confirmation. Dr. Kim nods his head. The nurse is handsome, maybe twenty, tanned and dark haired. Spanish? Italian? She smiles in thanks, but he just looks scared.

When she first got the diagnosis she’d taken as much frass as she could – you can’t overdose, of course, but she’d vaguely hoped that somewhere down the line it might kill her a bit quicker. It isn’t good for your liver or your heart, for a start. But then Sandra remembered that Cassie didn’t have a frass habit, and that eventually Cassie would be here a lot more.

“One day,” Dr. Kim had said, “when she’s grown-up, she’ll come to stay.”

“And that will be the end of Sandra,” said Sandra.

“No,” said Dr. Kim kindly, “that will just be the beginning.”

Johnny hasn’t come to visit. She wants to see Johnny.

“Where’s Johnny?” she asks Michael as he escorts her back to the bedroom. “Isn’t he supposed to come and see me every week?” Michael looks shifty and she knows something’s up. She stands at the threshold of her cold blue bedroom and refuses to cross.

“I want to see my husband,” she says. “Why isn’t he here? Has something happened to him?”

Michael shakes his head in relief. “No, of course not. He came yesterday. You both had a great time.” He smiles encouragingly. “I can show you the tapes if you like.”

“Yesterday?” she says in disbelief. “But that wasn’t me! That was Cassie! What about my visit?”

“Once a week is all we can allow,” says Michael. “Otherwise it can interfere with the therapy.”

†††

Things start to go missing. Things start to appear. Child’s drawings scattered around the room: she crumples them up and bins them. Chunks of her memory, days gone, like when she was drinking. She takes more frass. Frass is good for recall. It’s not good for her dreams, though, or her paranoia. She thinks about how Johnny had always wanted kids. She never had. She was afraid.

“Some traumatic event in early childhood,” said Dr. Kim, “which made you as you are – you don’t know what it is and neither, I’m afraid, do we – but that’s what Cassie is. A second chance. She is you before that event, as far as we can tell.”

“She’s what I would have been?” says Sandra. She tries to think back to when she was five or six, but it’s too long ago. Nothing comes. Like when Cassie’s in control – there’s no mist, no darkness, no uncertainty. There’s just nothing.

“She will become what you would have been,” says Dr. Kim, like it’s the most wonderful thing in the world, like he’s congratulating her.

Sandra makes sure she’s in charge the next time Johnny visits. The frass means she hardly sleeps; she’s on guard for Cassie. The wardens have given Cassie little things – toys and games and trinkets. If Sandra throws them out the cleaner puts them back, so she hides them away in the back of the clothes cupboard. Cassie always finds them anyway.

Sandra prepares herself for Johnny’s coming; she waxes and moisturises and puts on her nice underwear. She wears the dress that he likes. Make-up and perfume. She misses him so much. When she dreams, it’s of sex and cities. Clubs, alleyways, bars. Noise and darkness. The men are not always Johnny. Often, they’re the men from the clinic. The wardens, the doctors. Dr. Kim, Michael, the Spanish nurse. They put their arms around her from behind. She identifies them by smell.

“Hey there,” she says as he walks in. She’s reclined on the bed, smiling, waiting for him. It’s uncomfortable, but sexy; her skirt falls down one thigh to reveal the top of her stocking. The expression on Johnny’s face is shocked. He stands with his mouth open, looking scared. She sits up angrily, her bra-less breasts falling forward in her dress.

“What’s the matter,” she says, “getting some on the outside?” The paranoia again. She hates what the frass does to her. But it’s amazing for sex.

He shakes his head. “No, of course not! It’s just … I thought –”

Now she understands. “You thought you were going to see Cassie.”

“No … I just thought –” He’s lying. And he’s hiding something, too. She gets up and moves towards him on her spike heels.

“Come on baby,” she coos, “I’m so frustrated. It’s been weeks.”

She strokes his face and he flinches. He flinches.

“What did you tell him?” she demands of Dr. Kim. Dr. Kim is fiddling with a paperweight and pacing the room. Sandra is sitting down, arms folded, like a protester. She can sit there all day. What else has she got to do?

“He came to me,” says Dr. Kim eventually, “with some concerns. About – marital relations. Whether it’s right.”

“Right?” she echoes. “This isn’t a convent, last I looked. Is it right to make my husband afraid to have sex with me, Dr. Kim?”

He stands in front of her, apologetic, looking down.

“You know that legally, now, you are his ward. That, legally, we can’t say that at any time you are Sandra rather than Cassie. Because Cassie has a mental age – because Cassie is five years old – well, you see our dilemma.”

Sandra laughs, a short, dangerous bark.

“So wait … if I sleep with my husband, you’re saying it would be – what, child abuse?”

“Statutory rape.”

“I’m thirty-five fucking years old. And I do mean fucking.”

“Cassie can’t give informed consent.”

“I’m not Cassie.” Sandra can’t believe it. She’s furious, nervous, confused, playing with her nails, picking at them, tick-tick-tick. Dr. Kim looks down at the sound.

“Cassie does that,” he says.

She feels tears well behind her eyelids and walks out of the room, slamming the door, blindly.

Back in her room she rips off her sexy dress and lies naked on the blue bedcover. She looks down at her splayed breasts and thighs. What does Cassie think is happening? How does Cassie live inside this body? When Cassie is sixteen, Sandra’s body will be forty-six. What kind of a second chance is that?

†††

When she comes round it’s in the canteen, at lunch. On her tray is a mess of alphabet spaghetti and potato shapes, a child’s portion, cold and unfinished. Cassie has been playing with her food. No wonder Sandra’s losing weight. She stands up and walks unsteadily back to her room. Her muscles ache unfamiliarly; Cassie has been running, playing, like Sandra used to when she was little. She remembers running for the sheer joy of it, rolling down hot green hills.

Her room is a tip, a child’s tip. Clothes and toys everywhere, pictures tacked to the walls. A week’s worth, at least. Dr. Kim must be making progress. Sandra starts to tidy, to take the paintings down. It’s like being the mother of a child she never sees. Two of the pictures are side by side at the end of the bed. Each is of a stick figure in a dress, one tall, one small. CASSIE, says one. SANDRA, says the other. They are the wrong way round. Sandra throws them away.

She opens her book – The Secret History – and finds biro scribbles all over it. Cassie has drawn stick pictures on the flypapers and gone through the first chapter crossing out all the words she doesn’t know. Sandra looks up at her bookshelf. London Fields is gone. Naked Lunch is gone. The Story of O – naturally – has been confiscated.

“We have to think of Cassie,” she imagines Dr. Kim saying.

She curls up on her side and slides her arm under the pillow. Something crackles. She pulls it out; it is a picture of flowers in bold poster-paint colours on flipchart paper. The paint is already cracked and flaking.

A DRAWIG FOR SANDRA, it says at the top. Then, in small, careful letters which must have taken a long time: I know I can’t meet you but you are there. I hope you like floers. These are pink. I like pink. Love Cassie.

She tears it up.

†††

The next time it’s much later. There is no calendar in Sandra’s room, but the light outside has changed. The trees are pink with blossom, the grass bright green. Her body has changed, too; she is skinnier, more muscular. There’s no frass in her anywhere. Sandra remembers what it feels like to be clean. She did two years, once, long ago. Every square inch of the walls is covered with paintings, pictures layered over other pictures; some photographs too. A shiny printout image of herself and Johnny, arms around one another’s shoulders, grinning. She doesn’t remember it being taken. She wasn’t there.

She wonders what will be different next time she wakes. How old will she be?

On the bedside table there is one more painting, weighed down with the alarm cube. Sandra picks it up. It’s better than the last one. The figures have proper faces, the bodies are better proportioned. Cassie’s improving. She’s growing up fast. Two figures, in dresses, almost the same height now, but still noticeably different. Cassie and Sandra. They are holding hands.

Sandra puts it carefully back under the cube and sits down on the bed. She brushes her hair and puts it up neatly. She puts on the white nightie that’s folded on top of the pillow and tucks herself in as she might tuck in the child she never had. She closes her eyes and waits for sleep.

-----------------------------------------

Katy Darby’s work has appeared in Stand and The New Writer, and online at www.pulp.net, www.decongested.com and www.carvezine.com. She has an MA in Creative Writing from UEA, where she received the David Higham Award, and now lives in London, where she co-runs a short story reading night called Liars’ League
(www.liarsleague.com).

‘Cassie’s Room’ © Katy Darby, 2007. Cover illustration by Hugo Dalton (www.hugodalton.com). LITRO is published in association with Ocean Media (www.oceanmediauk.com) every other Friday and distributed for free near to London Underground stations, and in bookshops, bars and elsewhere around the UK and beyond. To get in touch please email litro.fiction@gmail.com or visit www.litro.co.uk.