Page 23 of Cassian is Getting Out

He chose a wide satin bow in deep raspberry for the older one. Six-year-olds wanted to feel grown-up and the colour was dramatic without being babyish. The four-year-old got a smaller bow in buttercup yellow with white polka dots. The colour felt cheerful, and he thought it would make a little girl smile every time she caught her reflection.

Ruari held them up side by side. “Perfect. I’ll get them posted Monday.”

“Where are they?” Cassian asked, as the stallholder wrapped the bows in tissue paper. He was already picturing a farmhouse in the Scottish Highlands, or a village in the Cotswolds, somewhere far-flung and romantic that would explain why Ruari didn’t mention them often.

“Sevenoaks,” Ruari said. He took the wrapped parcel and tucked it into the bag with the figs. “My sister’s there. Just down the train line.”

Cassian’s mouth closed around the question that wanted to come out of it: if they’re just forty minutes away, why are you posting presents instead of delivering them yourself?

Ruari paid the stallholder, turned towards the crowd, and Cassian followed.

The afternoon turned into early evening, and Ruari kept talking.

This was the remarkable thing about him that Cassian hadn’t expected and couldn’t quite believe. People listened to Cassian constantly. They asked him questions, with tilted heads and concerned pauses. How are you settling in? Are you sleeping? Have you spoken to your solicitor this week?

The Huxleys were brilliant at it, and Dr Carlisle was paid to do exactly that. Even Felix, who would sooner eat his own arm than express genuine concern, had sent him a WhatsApp message at midnight last Tuesday that read are you dead followed by if so RIP I suppose, when Cassian went too quiet for too long.

But nobody told Cassian about themselves.

He’d noticed it with Hamish, who could ask seventeen follow-up questions in a row and volunteer not one fact about his own life that Cassian hadn’t had to prise out of him. Lysander was better, but Lysander’s stories were curated, with the parts that might frighten him tucked out of view.

Ruari told him about Villa, his voice climbing until strangers glanced over at him.

He’d grown up in Bordesley Green, in a council house so small that his parents had slept in the living room so Ruari and his sisters could have the bedrooms. He’d trialled for Villa’s academy at nine after a PE teacher had seen him play at a school tournament and made a phone call. He’d signed his first professional contract at seventeen, the same week his mum had her kitchen redone, paid for in cash with part of the signing bonus.

“She rang me from the new kitchen,” Ruari said, stepping around a bin bag that had escaped its stall. “Half six in the morning. Crying. The new worktops I’d had put in were granite, and she’d never had a granite worktop, and she said she was scared to put a mug down on it in case she scratched it. She taught me every fucking thing I know about baking on a Formica counter that was older than I was. I told her to put the mug down. It’s granite, and it’s literally the hardest thing in the house apart from my head.”

“Did she scratch it?”

“’Course she did. Second month in.” Ruari grinned. “She scratched it with a cast-iron skillet, and she rang me again, all sorry about it. I told her I’d buy her another one if she managed to crack it, and she spent the next fortnight trying.”

The market stalls were closing up around them. Stallholders collapsed their awnings and stacked crates while the crowd thinned. Cassian barely noticed. He was busy learning that Ruari had once scored a hat-trick against Tottenham while running a thirty-nine-degree temperature, that his first car was a second-hand Vauxhall Corsa he’d bought before his professional contract went through since he hadn’t trusted the deal to stick, and that his sister’s eldest daughter had been born on the same day he’d torn the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee in a match against Wolves.

“Worst and best day,” Ruari said without going into it any more than that.

Cassian wanted to climb inside Ruari’s stories and live in them the way he lived inside Dalton Academy and Uptown Omegas, except these were real, which made them infinitely better.

He stored Ruari’s stories away with his good words, filed next to effervescent and archipelago.

Yet he wanted even more.

Chapter Ten

By the time they reached Proving Ground, the streetlamps on Portobello Road had come on and the shop was dark behind its locked door. Ruari let them in talking faster than Cassian’s ears could follow.

“—the thing about chocolate cupcakes, Cass, is that everyone thinks they’re simple, and they are, but they’re simple the way a penalty kick is simple. They’re actually the hardest thing to get right. There’s nowhere to hide if you’ve—” He flicked the lights on. “Fuck, where did I put the cocoa? I reorganised the dry stores at half four this morning and now I can’t find anything. Doesn’t matter. I’ll find it. Sit down. No — don’t sit down. Put this on.”

An apron hit Cassian in the chest before he’d crossed the threshold.

Cassian held the apron up. The neck strap hung to his navel, and the hem brushed his shins when he tied it on.

“Gorgeous,” Ruari said, already yanking mixing bowls from the shelf above the prep station. He pulled down three, stacked them, unstacked them, then pulled down a fourth for no reason Cassian could see. “Right. Cupcakes. I’m teaching you how to make cupcakes. I’ve been thinking about this all day. I had the idea at the spice stall, when you sneezed into the sumac, and I thought: he should know how to make something. Everyone should know how to make one thing from scratch. Yours is going to be chocolate cupcakes.”

Cassian watched him move. Ruari had been going all day and hadn’t wound down an inch. Flour landed on the counter. Sugar followed, then cocoa powder, which Ruari located on a shelf labelled BAKING MISC — WEEKEND TRIALS, surrounded by six other bags of cocoa in varying states of use.

“I may have over-ordered cocoa,” Ruari said, not slowing. “Raf pointed it out. I told him you can never have too much cocoa in a bakery. Right. Eggs. Butter. Milk.” Each ingredient hit the counter at speed. “That’s your army, Cass. That’s everyone who’s going to be fighting for you tonight.”

Cassian looked at the counter. There was far more of everything than a single batch of cupcakes could require. The butter alone could have supplied a small French restaurant for a week.