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darker_london2014-09-14 09:12 pm
runrachelrun.insanejournal.com) wrote in darker_london2014-09-14 09:12 pm
Entry tags:
Keys (Rachel, Cai)
Rachel woke as the front door of the car slammed shut, screaming in shock which made Dom, who was not expecting to be screamed up when climbing into his own car, start screaming too.
“Whoa whoa whoa,” Dom tried to be a calm and collected adult as Rachel scrambled for the door. “It’s okay, it’s okay, Rachel? Rachel, look at me.” Rachel stopped with her hand on the handle, panting. He didn’t look angry but adrenaline was thumping through her body and she wanted to get out and run. “You okay? You’re okay.”
“I’m sorry! I’ll go I am so so sorry I didn’t mean to-”
“Hey! Hey, calm yourself, chica, you’re all right,” he said, sounding enough like Cai when he told her she was alright that she almost believed him. Her hand was still trembling on the doorhandle, though. “What’re you doing in here, hey? You needed a place to sleep?”
Rachel nodded dumbly and Dom frowned in concern. He had a very good face for frowning, and Rachel suddenly knew why Cai hated upsetting him. “You know you can knock on our front door,” Dom said, kind, even though he was frowning. Rachel bit her lips together and watched him, confused at the clash of expression and voice. The sudden panic was subsiding, the numb creeping back.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his expression softening a bit. “Problems at home?”
“Sort of,” Rachel said faintly.
“You been kicked out?”
Rachel shook her head. “Just needed some space.”
“Did you have a fight?”
She shook her head again. “Not really.”
He frowned at her, deeper, like the furrows in his forehead could expose all her lies. Rachel swallowed and forced a smile. “I’m okay, honest.” His frown didn’t let off, and she couldn’t stand it and looked away.
“You want some breakfast?” he asked, as she was considering running again. If she left really really fast and avoided Cai’s house for the rest of her life would he forget that he’d ever seen her? But then he mentioned food, and she couldn’t help herself, and nodded.
“Well, no-one else is home, or I’d send you in for some of Nonnie’s pancakes. I have to get to a doctor’s appointment, but we can get something on the way, if you don’t mind keeping an old man company. Can’t get McDonalds though, bad for the ticker,” he thumped his fist over his heart. “What do you say?”
Rachel weighed up her options. She could go home, which was unappealing and probably wouldn’t result in breakfast (the thought of toast depressed her). She could pretend to go home but head toward the hospital instead, although Danny wouldn’t be out of surgery for hours and she’d have to wait around and… think about it, which was even more depressing than toast and would mean she had to both skip breakfast, and walk to hospital. All these options sounded awful. “I’ll come with you,” she said.
“That’s right,” Dom said, leaning over to unlock the passenger door. “You want to ride up front?”
Rachel smiled thinly (he wouldn’t try and grope her, would he? Cai’s grandfather?) and slid out of the back seat, hopping into the front. She bought her bag of secret weapons with her, tucked between her feet.
“Let’s see what Cai’s left me in the radio today…” Dom said, and Rachel couldn’t tell if his long-suffering tone was a joke or not. He turned the keys and flicked the tape into the player. Cai was consistently making him mixed tapes, or rather, taping different collections of songs onto the same old tape. The car was able to hook MP3 players into the tape deck, but Dom didn’t like them.
Rachel burst out laughing as Anaconda blared from the radio, and Dom gave another long suffering sigh. “That tape is wearing as thin as my patience for that kid,” he muttered. Rachel figured he mustn’t mind, or he wouldn’t put up with it, right? Dom turned in his seat and winked at her, and she smiled at him. Her laugh had surprised her, and her smile followed on from that.
It was just surreal. She was sitting in a car listening to oh my god look at her butt with a man she barely knew after spending the night in his car and he was being kind to her and Rachel didn’t think she was dreaming, because she never remembered her dreams, but she didn’t think that it was actually happening, either.
Eventually Dom turned the music off so he could listen to the news, which was how Rachel found out it was eleven o’clock. Her night in the car had been her longest uninterrupted sleep in a long time. Maybe since Imogene’s house? Surely not. “Where do you stand on this referendum?” he asked her, drawing a blank look from Rachel.
“I don’t know what that is…” she admitted, quietly and ashamed. Referendum – referee? Sports? Which sport?
“You kids,” Dom said, and started to explain in detail what the Scottish referendum was all about. Rachel didn’t take a lot of it in, but it was kind of nice just listening. He did have a good voice for talking, it wasn’t a London accent, Rachel kind of thought it might have been somewhere she lived for a while. Not St Ives, not after the river, but when she was a kid. Rachel couldn’t remember.
Well it didn’t matter where he was from, she felt safe here. Plus he made jokes, and chuckled at how clever he was even though Rachel had no idea what he was on about.
When the news was over he put Cai’s tape back in, and Rachel was feeling easy enough to tell him all about Danny. He was the easiest thing for her to talk about, and it was kind of neat having an adult she didn’t know very well listen like he was actually interested. A bit like Liz, but a man. She didn’t touch on the hospital stuff, because that was… that was hard but she told him all about the times she’d climbed in Danny’s window and all about going to the movies together and meeting between classes and how kind he was, and how wonderful, and how she loved him so so very much.
After that (they had half a dozen bakery bags between them, fresh filled rolls for the healthy side of things plus custard squares, gingerbread men and donuts because Dom thought Rachel looked too hungry for his comfort) Dom told her all about the first time he saw Nonnie, simply standing in line to buy text books at the university bookshop, how she’d caught his eye, dropped her gaze to the pile of text books he was carrying, and gave him a smile of recognition and approval.
He looked like Cai, Rachel thought. When he talked about Nonnie, Dom looked like Cai. Maybe it made him look younger or maybe she’d seen a similar look in Cai or maybe she was just getting used to his face. She could see what Cai would look like when he was older; Cai would make an excellent old man. Rachel smiled as she thought about it, a world of the future with old Cai in it. She couldn’t see herself lasting that long – this didn’t feel like a depressing thought, just a matter of fact… Rachel didn’t do the future so well. She couldn’t picture herself any older than she was now. It was the same with Danny… he could only ever be young, to her. But Zoe… she could imagine her at maybe forty? How old did you have to be before you could be Prime Minister? Rachel could see Zoe being Prime Minister.
“I stole Cai’s keys,” Rachel admitted, very suddenly and – to Dom – seemingly out of nowhere. He’d been talking about something, but he should have seen in boiling up inside her. He turned to her now, took his eyes off the road just for a moment before they were back.
Rachel kept her eyes on the mirror in the sunshade. Looking into the eyes of a thief. A sorry thief. She expected Dom would start yelling at her, or kick her out of the car, or lock all the doors and speed up and take her to prison.
But she’d said it because she had hope, because he was like old Cai, because she needed someone to listen; or she said it for masochistic reasons, because she knew adults couldn’t be trusted and wanted to prove to herself that this one wouldn’t look after her either, once she proved she was a screw up.
“Why?” asked Dom.
“I don’t know,” Rachel whispered. “I wanted them…?”
Dom processed silently for a moment. “You may have wanted them, Rachel, but what if Cai really needed them?”
“I know,” Rachel said quietly, shame creeping through her. “I mean I don’t know… what would have happened… to Cai… I’m sorry.”
Dom took a long breath in and exhaled out his nose like he was telling himself to be patient. “Are you going to give them back?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “He’ll hate me.”
Dom said “Hmm, we’ll see,” but he said without any threat, and Rachel felt for the first time that maybe she’d crawled into the car for a reason.
She waited in the car while Dom went to his appointment, because she couldn’t bear to wait in the waiting room. To many hospitals, too much waiting, too many doctors. Rachel put the front seat back and put her feet on the dashboard and turned Cai’s tape up and listened to more (Anaconda had been Cai’s lets-shock-Dom song and after that the music changed to songs that were more Cai’s usual taste, a bit more acoustic, a few rock ballads, a couple of songs that, if Cai was actually here, he’d be encouraging her to sing along to at the top of her lungs. “Your voice is awesome, Rachel,” he’d told her on one of their drives around the city. “You should do an open mic night sometime.”)
She didn’t sing while she waited, though. She couldn’t summon the effort. Instead she thought about stealing the tape because it made her feel as safe as his keys had.
But she didn’t. She was strong. It didn’t feel like strength though, she felt pathetic that this was the battle she was having with herself.
She didn’t feel strong as she knocked on the door of Cai’s woodshed, either, after Dom’s appointment. She felt pathetic and sad, and guilty as she saw Cai’s face light up when he saw it was her. Without saying anything she held out her hand and dropped the keyring into his.
“Oh sweet!” Cai said, grinning. “Where did I leave them?”
She felt even worse that his first thought was that she’d found them. “I took them,” she said, her stomach clenched and cramping.
Cai’s eyebrows jumped up. “Eh?”
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I wasn’t thinking, at all. I just saw them on the table at Danny’s and picked them up and they were so beautiful and yours and I just took them I don’t know why – It wasn’t because you deserved it, you don’t – I just…” she reached her hand out toward the keys again, trying to demonstrate how she’d felt like they’d called to her, compelled her to do it. Trying to show through her body language how strong the desire had been.
Cai was frowning in confusion, and he sat down on the long bench and dropped the keys onto the workbench behind him. “What’s going on, Rachel?”
“I don’t know!” Rachel claimed, throwing herself down on the bench beside him. “I’m just shit, I just…” she trailed off.
“What do you mean you didn’t take them because I deserved it? Do you take stuff from people who do?” He hadn’t forgotten why she’d been kicked out of Imogene’s house, after all.
Rachel squeezed her eyes shut. “Sometimes I take stuff from Dad when I’m mad at him,” she said. “I don’t… I wouldn’t steal things from you guys, or from people I don’t know, I just… it’s usually because I’m angry.”
“Well,” said Cai. “I guess there’ve been a lot of reasons to be angry, lately.”
“I’m not angry at you,” Rachel insisted. “I just… I don’t know…” She couldn’t explain it, or – she didn’t want to explain it. It was something like I want to be you. I want to have your life. But that sounded mad. I want things to be easy. Everything is easy for you. She didn’t know how taking his keys might help her get this easier life, that bit didn’t make sense, but that’s where her compulsion had been coming from.
“Here,” Cai said, picking up the keys and with a twist of his hand he removed one of the conglomerate of keyrings from the whole. It was the little wooden disk, with two keys hanging off it. “That’s the woodshed key, that’s the front door.”
She stared at him as he dropped the keys into her hand, but closed her fingers around them instinctively. “Why?”
“Uh, because Dom called me from the doctors and said you’d spent the night in the car, and that’s bullshit, Rachel,” Cai said. “Also because the woodshed is the greatest and all of you guys should have a key. Why don’t you want my woodshed key? Rude, Rachel, real rude. Except, if you have a choice, please don’t sneak into the woodshed and sleep here when you could be in the house, okay?”
Rachel stared at him with her mouth slightly open. “You don’t get mad at anyone, do you?”
“Are you kidding? Did you see me try to take on my dad? No, Rach, I don’t get mad at my friends who steal my keys so they can break in and sleep in my car. I just wish you’d come inside, okay?”
Rachel smiled thinly.
“Why didn’t you?”
She shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“Next time, front door, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good, good. Now, why weren’t you at home last night? Your dad?”
She shrugged again.
“Did he say anything? Do anything?”
“No…” Rachel looked down at the keys, running her thumb across the smooth wood. “I just felt like a walk.”
Cai sighed through his nose in the exact same way as Dom had done. “Quite a walk, from your house to mine,” he commented.
Rachel smiled a little. “Zoe ran seventeen miles to my house that time,” she said.
“Yeah, you know what? Zoe is dumb,” Cai said. Rachel smiled a little more and bumped her shoulder against his. Cai slung an arm around her. “You’re both dummies.”
“I know,” said Rachel.
“Thanks for my keys back, Rachel.” Cai said. Rachel closed her eyes, and lay her head against his shoulder.
Things weren't easy, and Rachel did not think things would ever be easy, but Cai wasn't mad at her, and Dom hadn't taken her to prison, and that was a whole lot more than she'd thought to hope for.
“Whoa whoa whoa,” Dom tried to be a calm and collected adult as Rachel scrambled for the door. “It’s okay, it’s okay, Rachel? Rachel, look at me.” Rachel stopped with her hand on the handle, panting. He didn’t look angry but adrenaline was thumping through her body and she wanted to get out and run. “You okay? You’re okay.”
“I’m sorry! I’ll go I am so so sorry I didn’t mean to-”
“Hey! Hey, calm yourself, chica, you’re all right,” he said, sounding enough like Cai when he told her she was alright that she almost believed him. Her hand was still trembling on the doorhandle, though. “What’re you doing in here, hey? You needed a place to sleep?”
Rachel nodded dumbly and Dom frowned in concern. He had a very good face for frowning, and Rachel suddenly knew why Cai hated upsetting him. “You know you can knock on our front door,” Dom said, kind, even though he was frowning. Rachel bit her lips together and watched him, confused at the clash of expression and voice. The sudden panic was subsiding, the numb creeping back.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his expression softening a bit. “Problems at home?”
“Sort of,” Rachel said faintly.
“You been kicked out?”
Rachel shook her head. “Just needed some space.”
“Did you have a fight?”
She shook her head again. “Not really.”
He frowned at her, deeper, like the furrows in his forehead could expose all her lies. Rachel swallowed and forced a smile. “I’m okay, honest.” His frown didn’t let off, and she couldn’t stand it and looked away.
“You want some breakfast?” he asked, as she was considering running again. If she left really really fast and avoided Cai’s house for the rest of her life would he forget that he’d ever seen her? But then he mentioned food, and she couldn’t help herself, and nodded.
“Well, no-one else is home, or I’d send you in for some of Nonnie’s pancakes. I have to get to a doctor’s appointment, but we can get something on the way, if you don’t mind keeping an old man company. Can’t get McDonalds though, bad for the ticker,” he thumped his fist over his heart. “What do you say?”
Rachel weighed up her options. She could go home, which was unappealing and probably wouldn’t result in breakfast (the thought of toast depressed her). She could pretend to go home but head toward the hospital instead, although Danny wouldn’t be out of surgery for hours and she’d have to wait around and… think about it, which was even more depressing than toast and would mean she had to both skip breakfast, and walk to hospital. All these options sounded awful. “I’ll come with you,” she said.
“That’s right,” Dom said, leaning over to unlock the passenger door. “You want to ride up front?”
Rachel smiled thinly (he wouldn’t try and grope her, would he? Cai’s grandfather?) and slid out of the back seat, hopping into the front. She bought her bag of secret weapons with her, tucked between her feet.
“Let’s see what Cai’s left me in the radio today…” Dom said, and Rachel couldn’t tell if his long-suffering tone was a joke or not. He turned the keys and flicked the tape into the player. Cai was consistently making him mixed tapes, or rather, taping different collections of songs onto the same old tape. The car was able to hook MP3 players into the tape deck, but Dom didn’t like them.
Rachel burst out laughing as Anaconda blared from the radio, and Dom gave another long suffering sigh. “That tape is wearing as thin as my patience for that kid,” he muttered. Rachel figured he mustn’t mind, or he wouldn’t put up with it, right? Dom turned in his seat and winked at her, and she smiled at him. Her laugh had surprised her, and her smile followed on from that.
It was just surreal. She was sitting in a car listening to oh my god look at her butt with a man she barely knew after spending the night in his car and he was being kind to her and Rachel didn’t think she was dreaming, because she never remembered her dreams, but she didn’t think that it was actually happening, either.
Eventually Dom turned the music off so he could listen to the news, which was how Rachel found out it was eleven o’clock. Her night in the car had been her longest uninterrupted sleep in a long time. Maybe since Imogene’s house? Surely not. “Where do you stand on this referendum?” he asked her, drawing a blank look from Rachel.
“I don’t know what that is…” she admitted, quietly and ashamed. Referendum – referee? Sports? Which sport?
“You kids,” Dom said, and started to explain in detail what the Scottish referendum was all about. Rachel didn’t take a lot of it in, but it was kind of nice just listening. He did have a good voice for talking, it wasn’t a London accent, Rachel kind of thought it might have been somewhere she lived for a while. Not St Ives, not after the river, but when she was a kid. Rachel couldn’t remember.
Well it didn’t matter where he was from, she felt safe here. Plus he made jokes, and chuckled at how clever he was even though Rachel had no idea what he was on about.
When the news was over he put Cai’s tape back in, and Rachel was feeling easy enough to tell him all about Danny. He was the easiest thing for her to talk about, and it was kind of neat having an adult she didn’t know very well listen like he was actually interested. A bit like Liz, but a man. She didn’t touch on the hospital stuff, because that was… that was hard but she told him all about the times she’d climbed in Danny’s window and all about going to the movies together and meeting between classes and how kind he was, and how wonderful, and how she loved him so so very much.
After that (they had half a dozen bakery bags between them, fresh filled rolls for the healthy side of things plus custard squares, gingerbread men and donuts because Dom thought Rachel looked too hungry for his comfort) Dom told her all about the first time he saw Nonnie, simply standing in line to buy text books at the university bookshop, how she’d caught his eye, dropped her gaze to the pile of text books he was carrying, and gave him a smile of recognition and approval.
He looked like Cai, Rachel thought. When he talked about Nonnie, Dom looked like Cai. Maybe it made him look younger or maybe she’d seen a similar look in Cai or maybe she was just getting used to his face. She could see what Cai would look like when he was older; Cai would make an excellent old man. Rachel smiled as she thought about it, a world of the future with old Cai in it. She couldn’t see herself lasting that long – this didn’t feel like a depressing thought, just a matter of fact… Rachel didn’t do the future so well. She couldn’t picture herself any older than she was now. It was the same with Danny… he could only ever be young, to her. But Zoe… she could imagine her at maybe forty? How old did you have to be before you could be Prime Minister? Rachel could see Zoe being Prime Minister.
“I stole Cai’s keys,” Rachel admitted, very suddenly and – to Dom – seemingly out of nowhere. He’d been talking about something, but he should have seen in boiling up inside her. He turned to her now, took his eyes off the road just for a moment before they were back.
Rachel kept her eyes on the mirror in the sunshade. Looking into the eyes of a thief. A sorry thief. She expected Dom would start yelling at her, or kick her out of the car, or lock all the doors and speed up and take her to prison.
But she’d said it because she had hope, because he was like old Cai, because she needed someone to listen; or she said it for masochistic reasons, because she knew adults couldn’t be trusted and wanted to prove to herself that this one wouldn’t look after her either, once she proved she was a screw up.
“Why?” asked Dom.
“I don’t know,” Rachel whispered. “I wanted them…?”
Dom processed silently for a moment. “You may have wanted them, Rachel, but what if Cai really needed them?”
“I know,” Rachel said quietly, shame creeping through her. “I mean I don’t know… what would have happened… to Cai… I’m sorry.”
Dom took a long breath in and exhaled out his nose like he was telling himself to be patient. “Are you going to give them back?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “He’ll hate me.”
Dom said “Hmm, we’ll see,” but he said without any threat, and Rachel felt for the first time that maybe she’d crawled into the car for a reason.
She waited in the car while Dom went to his appointment, because she couldn’t bear to wait in the waiting room. To many hospitals, too much waiting, too many doctors. Rachel put the front seat back and put her feet on the dashboard and turned Cai’s tape up and listened to more (Anaconda had been Cai’s lets-shock-Dom song and after that the music changed to songs that were more Cai’s usual taste, a bit more acoustic, a few rock ballads, a couple of songs that, if Cai was actually here, he’d be encouraging her to sing along to at the top of her lungs. “Your voice is awesome, Rachel,” he’d told her on one of their drives around the city. “You should do an open mic night sometime.”)
She didn’t sing while she waited, though. She couldn’t summon the effort. Instead she thought about stealing the tape because it made her feel as safe as his keys had.
But she didn’t. She was strong. It didn’t feel like strength though, she felt pathetic that this was the battle she was having with herself.
She didn’t feel strong as she knocked on the door of Cai’s woodshed, either, after Dom’s appointment. She felt pathetic and sad, and guilty as she saw Cai’s face light up when he saw it was her. Without saying anything she held out her hand and dropped the keyring into his.
“Oh sweet!” Cai said, grinning. “Where did I leave them?”
She felt even worse that his first thought was that she’d found them. “I took them,” she said, her stomach clenched and cramping.
Cai’s eyebrows jumped up. “Eh?”
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I wasn’t thinking, at all. I just saw them on the table at Danny’s and picked them up and they were so beautiful and yours and I just took them I don’t know why – It wasn’t because you deserved it, you don’t – I just…” she reached her hand out toward the keys again, trying to demonstrate how she’d felt like they’d called to her, compelled her to do it. Trying to show through her body language how strong the desire had been.
Cai was frowning in confusion, and he sat down on the long bench and dropped the keys onto the workbench behind him. “What’s going on, Rachel?”
“I don’t know!” Rachel claimed, throwing herself down on the bench beside him. “I’m just shit, I just…” she trailed off.
“What do you mean you didn’t take them because I deserved it? Do you take stuff from people who do?” He hadn’t forgotten why she’d been kicked out of Imogene’s house, after all.
Rachel squeezed her eyes shut. “Sometimes I take stuff from Dad when I’m mad at him,” she said. “I don’t… I wouldn’t steal things from you guys, or from people I don’t know, I just… it’s usually because I’m angry.”
“Well,” said Cai. “I guess there’ve been a lot of reasons to be angry, lately.”
“I’m not angry at you,” Rachel insisted. “I just… I don’t know…” She couldn’t explain it, or – she didn’t want to explain it. It was something like I want to be you. I want to have your life. But that sounded mad. I want things to be easy. Everything is easy for you. She didn’t know how taking his keys might help her get this easier life, that bit didn’t make sense, but that’s where her compulsion had been coming from.
“Here,” Cai said, picking up the keys and with a twist of his hand he removed one of the conglomerate of keyrings from the whole. It was the little wooden disk, with two keys hanging off it. “That’s the woodshed key, that’s the front door.”
She stared at him as he dropped the keys into her hand, but closed her fingers around them instinctively. “Why?”
“Uh, because Dom called me from the doctors and said you’d spent the night in the car, and that’s bullshit, Rachel,” Cai said. “Also because the woodshed is the greatest and all of you guys should have a key. Why don’t you want my woodshed key? Rude, Rachel, real rude. Except, if you have a choice, please don’t sneak into the woodshed and sleep here when you could be in the house, okay?”
Rachel stared at him with her mouth slightly open. “You don’t get mad at anyone, do you?”
“Are you kidding? Did you see me try to take on my dad? No, Rach, I don’t get mad at my friends who steal my keys so they can break in and sleep in my car. I just wish you’d come inside, okay?”
Rachel smiled thinly.
“Why didn’t you?”
She shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“Next time, front door, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good, good. Now, why weren’t you at home last night? Your dad?”
She shrugged again.
“Did he say anything? Do anything?”
“No…” Rachel looked down at the keys, running her thumb across the smooth wood. “I just felt like a walk.”
Cai sighed through his nose in the exact same way as Dom had done. “Quite a walk, from your house to mine,” he commented.
Rachel smiled a little. “Zoe ran seventeen miles to my house that time,” she said.
“Yeah, you know what? Zoe is dumb,” Cai said. Rachel smiled a little more and bumped her shoulder against his. Cai slung an arm around her. “You’re both dummies.”
“I know,” said Rachel.
“Thanks for my keys back, Rachel.” Cai said. Rachel closed her eyes, and lay her head against his shoulder.
Things weren't easy, and Rachel did not think things would ever be easy, but Cai wasn't mad at her, and Dom hadn't taken her to prison, and that was a whole lot more than she'd thought to hope for.