Passionflower
Episode 15 | Still There
Speed was of the essence, the emergency dentist said, and he and his assistant were working as quickly as possible to reimplant the four teeth before it became too late to save them. The object Paul had retrieved from the shower floor was Cassandra’s left central incisor; the EMTs had fished her left lateral incisor from the trap; and their lower counterparts stayed in her jaw but were left hanging by threads.
Pumped full of gas and air, she was nonchalant about the retractor stretching her lips open and the dental surgeon’s tools invading her mouth. Through the fog, she remained vaguely conscious of Verity sitting in a far corner of the room: her emergency contact, a seething ball of energy.
The procedure over, the reinserted teeth splinted to their adjacent neighbours for the next few weeks, a nurse helped Cassandra to the dimly lit recovery room where she could recline and recover from effects of the laughing gas. Numb from injections, she barely felt the soreness and swelling in her left cheek, or the cold pack she was holding to it. Miraculously, neither her jaw, nor her cheekbone, nor her orbital rim had been fractured.
’So now what?’ Verity said tightly, skating over to her side on a rolling chair and clasping her hand. Cassandra felt too groggy to properly process the question, much less form an answer.
‘Is that…rhetorical?’ she mumbled.
‘Not really,’ replied Verity. ‘I don’t know. Just…what now? What do you need? Where do you want to spend the rest of the day?’
‘Dunno.’ She turned her head tentatively to the right, to the left, noticing that her neck too felt painful. ‘I don’t want to see him.’
‘Fat chance of that in any case,’ Verity snorted.
Cassandra didn’t at first understand what she meant, but Verity soon fixed that with a torrent of words, delivered staccato.
The domestic violence protection notice was good for two days. A protection order was likely to follow, giving Cassandra nearly a month of freedom to figure out what to do. Paul wouldn’t be able to contact her or come home.
‘The police were going to stay with him while he collected some things,’ Verity said. ‘So you can be there, be at your mum’s, be wherever you like. I’d have you with me, but Flush can’t stay, the building won’t allow it.’ She stroked Cassandra’s hair back from her forehead, her eyes encircling the wounds on her friend’s face. ‘Look at the state of you,’ she murmured. ‘That fucking prick. Your eye’s all purple. I think it’ll probably go black. Oh babes. I don’t understand. I literally just saw you. What happened?’
Cassandra’s mind whirled. All she could think was that Paul would be furious. She couldn’t imagine him obeying a protection order to stay away from his own house, the house he’d grown up in, no matter how official the prohibition. She couldn’t fathom 24 hours without Paul’s monitoring her every move and being constantly in touch, much less 28 days.
‘Where’s he going to go?’ she wondered.
‘My god, who cares where the bastard goes?’ Verity exclaimed, her volume spiking before she course-corrected and dialled it down again. She was clearly working hard to contain herself. ‘He can set up shop in a cardboard box under a bridge for all I care. The main thing is that you feel safe, wherever you are. Stay with me, if you want. Take the dog to your mother’s.’
‘No, no,’ Cassandra said, feeling again the discomfort in her neck as she shook her head side to side. ‘I want to be home. I want to be in the studio.’
For a moment she thought the connection had dropped, but then her mother spoke. ‘You usually call with the video,’ she said. ‘How bad is it?’
Cassandra touched her fingertips to her face. ‘It’s swollen, that’s all. Some discolouration. A black eye.’
Verity had come home with her, cleaned the bathroom, called the locksmith to come and instal manual door locks to override the smart ones. Cassandra knew she should try and prevent Paul from watching her comings and goings on the video doorbell, but the account linked to it was in his name, not hers, and even though it was also her address, the security company wouldn’t even speak to her about the account. Surely, Paul would be keeping tabs via his phone. Verity had spent the greater part of an hour on the phone with police and then the doorbell company, getting Paul’s access temporarily frozen because of the protection notice.
Only later that day, when the adrenaline had dropped, did either woman realise the simpler solution that had always been available: with a Phillips-head screwdriver, they could have simply taken the doorbell down.
Without the doorbell, though, Cassandra might be caught unawares if Paul showed up. She wrestled with the dilemma. Paul keeping track of her was bad, but her keeping track of him was good, and both capabilities were bound up in the same device. In the end, Verity made her promise to wear the panic pendant the police had issued her with.
But at the point Verity started eyeing up Paul’s things, proposing bonfires in the garden, Cassandra said she needed time alone to talk to her mother.
‘I remember the last time you were here, after Olivia, how long you stayed,’ her mother said. ‘And all those flowers he sent.’
‘He does tend to do that.’
Flush, who’d been glued to her side ever since she reached home, put her front two paws on Cassandra’s waist, fixing two limpid, concerned eyes on her mistress’ face as though she could spot the difference. Then again, perhaps she was only wordlessly inquiring about where Paul had gone. Cassandra scratched the spaniel’s head. Leaving the house by the back door, she walked out into the garden. The weather had turned unseasonably warm and humid, and passion flowers were already blooming on the climbing vines by the door of the studio.
A passion flower, by David Clode on Unsplash
‘What brought this on? What happened?’ her mother asked.
Cassandra scanned the room. At first, everything appeared to be in order. But then she spotted one of her small notebooks, one she used for writing and scrap paper rather than sketching, was lying open beneath the big monitor. A rectangular fragment was torn from the lower right corner of one of its pages.
‘I’m not sure, exactly. He was really upset with me.’
She had never, to her recollection, ripped anything from that notebook. She touched the screen, and there it was: a new notification, one she hadn’t seen. It had arrived shortly after she’d hung up the call that morning, perhaps shortly after she’d entered the shower, thinking herself alone. Although she’d discovered how to toggle the ProtonSpeak and ProtonMail notifications off, she hadn’t gone far enough: she had clearly not consistently remembered to do it.
A psychologist like Eleanor would probably say that a part of her wanted to be found out. After all, she’d forgotten on her phone as well, that very morning. The ProtonSpeak logo pulsed there, like a heartbeat.
8:15 a.m. Voice message. Alex.
‘I think he felt…threatened,’ she said faintly.
‘Threatened?’ her mother said. ‘Considering the situation, I don’t think he’s the one that ought to feel threatened. My poor darling.’
Pulling a soft pencil from the drawer, Cassandra tilted it at a 45-degree angle and began shading the next sheet of notebook paper. Her heart was pumping so hard that it produced little spikes of pain in her injured neck and cheek. Immediately the words appeared, so indented that they must have been scrawled with utter fury.
Proton speak ALEX
Wearily, Cassandra toggled off all notifications from all apps, including ProtonSpeak. She shuffled to the loveseat and dropped heavily into it, resting the good side of her face on its arm.
‘When I met Paul, after all that horrible business with Andrew, I thought he was so steady,’ she said. Like Daddy. Like I would be safe with him no matter what. But then…’
She paused. The gas and air were supposed to have worn off long ago, the nurse had given her pure oxygen afterwards to clear it from her system, but her head still felt fuzzy.
‘But then what?’ her mother asked.
‘But then...I think he was more…Mum, I think you might understand.’
‘I might understand?’ Her tone turned from concern to confusion.
‘I thought he was like Daddy, but I think perhaps he’s more like someone you knew before Daddy.’
Her mother was silent for a long time.
‘Judith and Bill’s boy brought all the boxes down from the loft,’ she said. ‘I could see you’d probably had a bit of a foray into one of them. I’m surprised you didn’t say anything at the time.’
‘I was embarrassed to admit I’d delved into it. I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.’
‘Well. Of course, it doesn’t feel nice, and I wish you hadn’t. I didn’t even remember those things were there. But you must understand, darling. I was young, and I didn’t behave terribly well. I’d made a commitment to Frank that I didn’t keep, and I was a bit foolish while he was away, and I found myself in…a situation.’
‘A situation,’ Cassandra repeated, slowly.
‘Yes, a situation.’ Her mother sounded so uncomfortable that it was clear to her daughter what, or who, that situation might be. She herself had apparently been the catalyst for her parents’ marriage. ‘Frank was terribly angry, but he was right to be upset with me,’ her mother went on. ‘He certainly wasn’t…he wasn’t like…he never would have done something like this. So, no, sweetheart. I don’t think Paul is anything like Frank. Or Daddy, for that matter. Martin was a good man. But darling. What on earth could have provoked him?’
Provoked him.
Cassandra faltered. Had she provoked him? For all his possessiveness, for all his paranoia about Jack or any other man Cassandra had ever been friendly with, she had never given Paul any real cause for jealousy. She had never done anything wrong. Now, although she wasn’t certain how to define it, maybe she had. He had something on her.
She was infatuated with Alex.
She could try to explain Alex to Paul, to pretend he was something else, like she’d tried to pretend to Verity, but it would never work. Paul would never trust her again unless she was, from henceforth, one hundred percent devoted, responsive, present, as if all of her belonged to him. If she stayed with Paul, whatever Alex might be to her, she would have to let Alex go.
Suddenly she was consumed by a desire to change the subject.
‘Mum, I’m so sorry to have to ask this,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where he is, but whatever is happening, he’s probably furious. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. But if he cuts me off, is it at all possible that I could borrow some money?’
‘It’s been a few weeks,’ Eleanor remarked. ‘I’ve been wondering how you are. And I’m not used to seeing you this way.’
Although she had hovered for some time on the cusp of being fully truthful with Eleanor about the nature of her marriage, Cassandra had not wanted the marks on her face to reveal it for her. She had barely gone out since the incident, had seen almost no one except for Verity. She assumed Paul was spending his days at the office, but where he passed his nights, she had no idea – Richard’s, his aunt’s, a hotel? Soon, very soon, the protection order would expire, and as her bruises had faded, so too had her initial certainty that she must leave him, even that she could leave him. How could she survive without him?
Now, instead of going to Eleanor’s physical office, she was logging on from the older computer in the guest bedroom, its memory issues causing the occasional slight pixelation, barely there but noticeable. She didn’t want to turn on the computer in the studio. It would be full of notifications from Alex, messages that she wouldn’t be able to resist responding to. Flying or sinking into Alex’s virtual arms would be the death knell for her and Paul, and how could she rely on a man she barely knew to pick up the pieces? He ungrounded her too easily, made it too difficult for her to think clearly. Until she was surer of what to do, she’d stay away.
Her therapist sat close to the screen, her face filling nearly all of it, but around the margins Cassandra could spot the familiar landmarks in her therapist’s consulting room: the leather chair in which Eleanor usually sat, the velvet-upholstered comfortable sofa that was Cassandra’s place.
‘Finding the privacy to talk isn’t an issue right now, so I can be in the house,’ Cassandra said. ‘And I haven’t felt comfortable going out much in public. I don’t know if you can see.’
‘I can just about see,’ Eleanor said. ‘Your face has a bruise.’
‘I really screwed up,’ Cassandra said, her voice shaking. ‘I was in a mess. Everything changed when Olivia died, and I started speaking to another man. Only speaking. I was careless. Paul saw a notification about a message. I can’t imagine how devastated he must have been.’
She could barely stand to look at the screen. Eleanor was so much closer on the big screen than she’d ever been her consulting room, and her eye contact was so unwavering that it was almost painful. Slight variations in the colour of her irises were clearly visible. Too self-conscious to meet so intense a gaze, Cassandra spilled out most of her confession to a cobweb in the upper corner of the bedroom. When she looked back, she thought she could see tears in Eleanor’s eyes.
‘After you said I really screwed up, it was hard not to interrupt you,’ Eleanor said. ‘I so much wanted to say, let me stop you right there. Whatever you might have done, whomever you have been speaking with, Paul doing that to you is not acceptable. It is not acceptable, and it is not your fault.’
It was not the first time her therapist had said something like this, not the first time she’d had cause to remind her of something so fundamentally obvious that Cassandra would not have hesitated to say it to any other woman going through the same things as herself. Welling up herself, she nodded mutely.
‘Are you safe for now? What’s happening?’ Eleanor asked.
Cassandra wiped at her eyes. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m safe. I’m home. The locks are changed — or added to, at least. It happened about a fortnight ago. There are two weeks — or 16 days, maybe — left on the protection order. I don’t…I don’t even know where he is. I don’t know if he’s okay.’
Eleanor nodded. ‘You’re concerned for him.’
Cassandra nodded, her lip trembling. ‘Of course. I can’t help it. I mean…knowing him, whatever the court said, it’s a little odd that he hasn’t been in touch through anyone else, and that he hasn’t…done anything. Like blocked any of the bank or credit card accounts. I have access to all of them.’
Her therapist’s brow furrowed, and she spoke slowly. ‘Can I just check my understanding? Paul’s not having violated the protection order, and not having cut you off financially, increases your concern that he might be…not all right?…Not himself?’
Cassandra contemplated this. She shrugged, nodded, bit her lip.
‘Well, I’m concerned for you,’ Eleanor said. ‘And this is an important opportunity to reflect on your situation, your options. On what will support your thriving in the future. That’s partly what the protection order is for, to give you this chance.’
Before this last incident, Cassandra had been thriving for the first time in years. Whether it was the fire put into her by Liv’s death, the creative outlet of painting, or her connection with Alex, she couldn’t tell. She couldn’t separate these things. She only knew that this new trajectory had felt glorious, alive, had pulled her along into what had felt like a brighter future.
All this she told Eleanor.
‘What do you imagine will happen to that trajectory,’ Eleanor said, ‘if and when you allow Paul to return?’
It had not occurred to Cassandra that it was in her power to keep Paul from coming back. She had imagined the protection order would simply lapse after 28 days, that he’d walk through the door when that date arrived, like a tax deadline or the morning of an execution.
‘Those are interesting choices of metaphor,’ Eleanor said. ‘But it is your decision. If you do reconcile, what will need to change about the relationship to enable you to thrive?’
Cassandra searched within and found no answer.
‘In any case, this is a tender time,’ said Eleanor. ‘You’ve been in this relationship dynamic, this pattern, for many years. You’ve been hurt, emotionally and physically. You’re grieving. In this kind of moment, it may be hard for you to make clear-headed decisions. It’s an opportunity, but it’s also a time to take care.’
Cassandra caught sight of herself in the mirror on the dresser to her left. The contusions on her cheek and under her eye had been red and purple, then black and blue, then green. Soon, the marks would be subtle enough to concealed with skilful application of makeup. In a few days, she would visit the dentist to see if the supporting splints could be safely removed, if the teeth had started to take root again.
Very shortly, she would look to the whole world as if nothing had ever happened.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A time to take care. You’re right. I won’t do anything hasty.’
She hoped the splints could go as soon as possible. She was always aware of them, little lines of stainless steel glued to the backs of her teeth, upper and lower, constantly palpable to the tip of her tongue. Almost every contact with them sparked a memory, scenes illuminating suddenly as though in a flashbulb and going dark again. Drops from the shower head pelting down. A curl of blood in the water on the floor. His touch on her forearm. His mouth forming the same words over and over. I’m sorry.
She could not remember the strike itself. But when the splints were removed, she thought, the incident could be one step closer to forgotten, or forgotten enough to be able to feel something like normal.
She counted down the days until the end of the protection order by crossing them off on a wall calendar in her studio. She’d done that as a child, waiting for Christmas, but this felt different. She used a black marker instead of red and green.
She took check-in calls from Victim Support and the woman at social services, said that no, he hadn’t been in contact, and that no, she wasn’t sure yet what she was going to do or whether she needed help finding a lawyer. Yes, she felt reasonably safe most of the time. She’d felt safe sleeping in the house until Flush made a racket in the kitchen one night, knocking over an upturned bowl covering some leftovers. Convinced that Paul had made his way in through a window, she’d locked herself in the bedroom and called both Verity and the police, who found only a dog with a bellyful of meatloaf.
After that she slept in the studio, the door secured with an old-style bolt and a new-style surveillance camera.
Alex felt close when she was in the studio, as close as the computer on the worktop, but her thoughts continually circled back to what her therapist had said at the end of the session. She wrote the words on a piece of paper and taped it to the screen.
A time to take care.
When Eleanor spoke about how difficult it was to make clear-headed decisions right now, she had said nothing about Alex, the ‘another man’ Cassandra had referred to so glancingly. Perhaps she had been talking more about the prospect of Paul’s return. But Cassandra suspected that Eleanor was warning her about Alex, too, and if she’d known more, she might have been even more minded to do so. In short order he’d been a preoccupation, then a fixation, then someone to depend upon. And after everything she’d been through, if she were really committed to changing the course of her life, shouldn’t she be captaining the ship herself?
She bought a new phone, organised a new number, and locked the old handset in a drawer. At the Apple store, the Genius Bar technician asked her if she wanted to restore the new phone from a backup, but Verity had coached her on this. She needed to set it up as a new phone for safety reasons, she said, so that she couldn’t be tracked.
The technician was young and perky, in her 20s perhaps. Her eyes flickered over Cassandra’s face, took in the yellowish-brown hues that marked the last stage of healing on her face, and lay a hand on her forearm. ‘You need a new Apple ID, honey,’ she said. ‘I got you.’
She saw no reason to change the computer in the studio. Paul hadn’t been able to access it, she strongly suspected; he had only seen the notification from Alex. Before he came home, if he came home, she’d erase everything and start fresh, logging in with her new ID. If she and Paul reconciled, she’d figure out what to tell him, how to negotiate keeping the computer where it was. Eleanor could help them. Together, maybe she and Eleanor could convince Paul that she needed her own space, her own life. Convince him that he could trust her again.
Nothing was clear. Nothing made any sense. Realising that talking too much with either Verity or her mother only confused her more, she distanced herself. Often she only took the calls because she knew Verity would rapidly appear at her doorstep if she didn’t, but she kept the conversations as short as she could.
Sometimes she spoke out loud to Olivia, who listened even better in death than she had in life, and who left her more space to think than Verity.
Even so, Cassandra couldn’t work out what she feared more: life with Paul, life without Paul, or a world without Alex. She’d spoken to neither man since the day her teeth were knocked out of her head. The absence of Paul was surreal and oddly relaxing; the absence of Alex was an ache.
It had been three weeks.
‘You asked what thriving looks like,’ she said to Eleanor in her next session. ‘Can I answer that question without reference to being with Paul, or not being with Paul?’
She was trying to become more proficient at this, at untethering herself from the men in her life when she was contemplating what she wanted to do.
‘You know you don’t have to ask permission to do that,’ Eleanor admonished her lightly.
The idea of applying for a residency somewhere far away had been Alex’s, but in the weeks since he mentioned it Cassandra had tried to claim it as her own. She couldn’t count how many times over the years Verity had sent her articles and given her books about men’s ongoing dominance of women, but in the quiet house without Paul, she had started to read them, and to look up more.
Whether it was the trauma of her recent circumstances, or the long fallow period and the insecurity it had bred, it was hard for her to come up with a completely novel idea for a proposal. But maybe there was a certain logic in mounting a redo of her old exhibition.
‘What Verity’s always said about pandemics and lockdowns setting women back is true, really,’ she told Eleanor. ‘They’ve lost rooms of their own and space and power.’
‘You know something about how that feels,’ Eleanor said, and she was right, although under duress Cassandra had relinquished those things a far longer time ago. ‘Keep talking.’
‘About what?’
‘Imagine a gallery,’ Eleanor encouraged her. ‘With your work in it. With you in it. Can you describe it to me?’
Cassandra dropped her head back onto the sofa cushions and closed her eyes. At first her imagination delivered nothing, only blankness, but then there was a dawning, a gradually brightening.
Like an AI-generated vision of the future, a poster on the hoardings surrounding a building still under construction, she saw herself seated at an easel in a large, light-filled space, a giant screen in front of her. On the screen was Olivia, far away but alive and laughing and talking in her darkroom, and Cassandra wished this were somehow possible, for Liv to model for her again from whatever distant plane she now occupied. She didn’t yet know who else to paint. She opened her slightly damp eyes and described the scene to Eleanor.
‘Something happens in your whole body when you speak like this,’ her therapist said, and Cassandra felt it. But she also felt the steepness of the climb before her; she had painted nothing further since that morning in the shower. Thoughts of Alex distracted her from starting on the work, from taking ownership of his idea. Overlooked by the screen’s flat, dead blackness, the time to take care note a bright-yellow rectangle in its centre, she drowsed on the wine-stained loveseat, looked out the window, or even paged through The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel, poring over old illustrations of strange tentacled creatures living at the bottom of the sea. She wondered how many of the species were still alive.
But early one morning, with four days remaining on the calendar, Cassandra forgot herself. Before the morning in the shower, she would have been on her bicycle talking to Alex by now - in June the sun was rising ridiculously early, easily early enough to speak to Alex when it was only 11 pm his time. But she had not ridden in weeks. That day, uncurling from the too-short loveseat, hovering between sleep and wakefulness, she was pricked by an anxiety that she might have missed an appointment with Eleanor. Sitting up and stretching, she yawned and said, ‘Hey Clio.’
‘I’m here,’ said Clio, and the screen lit up.
Because she had turned them off, there were no notifications apparent, but the illumination of the computer was enough to produce a leap in her heart, a Pavlovian response. For a moment she couldn’t remember why she’d called upon her virtual assistant at all. In any case, Clio in the studio, linked to her old Apple ID, would know nothing of an appointment with Eleanor in the house. The temptation was too strong to resist.
‘Clio,’ Cassandra said, ‘toggle on ProtonSpeak and ProtonMail notifications.’
‘I’ve done that for you now, Cassandra,’ said Clio.
She had thought that notifications might start scrolling across the screen, an unfurling laundry list of questions from Alex, but nothing happened. If he had tried to get in touch, the evidence was tucked away in the well-hidden folder.
Despite the early hour, she was already too hot. Sunshine had streamed through the roof lights all the previous day, and Cassandra did not dare to open the studio’s windows or doors, lest Paul creep in the garden gate and surprise her. Flush’s tongue lolled out the side of her mouth, and she scraped at the door. Cassandra let the dog into the garden, promising to take her for a longer walk later, and shoved a mug under the spout of the flash wi-fi connected coffee machine Paul had bought for her after one of their fights.
'Clio, start coffee, please, a cappuccino,’ she said, her relationship with the assistant rekindled as quickly as it had lapsed. She wondered whether Clio remembered calling the police, if she hung onto things like that, whether she was somehow wondering how Cassandra was doing, in her own artificially intelligent way.
But the assistant said nothing about it, perhaps too busy communicating telepathically to her coffee-making colleague. Beans ground, milk frothed, and steam rose from the machine while Cassandra paced the length of the big window in the studio.
She felt oddly vital this morning, despite the heat. Her hair hung in damp curls around her shoulders. Impatiently she pulled the elastic from her wrist, twisting her hair first into a ponytail and then into a messy bun. She rolled up her sleeves, thinking she might paint today. When the coffee machine pinged, she grabbed at her cappuccino so precipitously that she sloshed it over the edge, and she seized a muslin in her other hand.
As she knelt on the floor to mop up the liquid, Clio piped up again.
‘Alex is calling on ProtonSpeak,’ she chirped.
Cassandra froze. In her absence, her weeks of silence, had he been trying to ring her every day? The thought made her warmer still. The carefully differentiated compartments of her recent life were collapsing. She had never dared to talk with Alex in the studio only on her bicycle, safely far from home. Peering at the screen, she saw the ProtonSpeak icon looked different there, flanked by two symbols: a phone and a camera.
In the next episode, Cassandra starts to wonder how far she’s willing to go to find her freedom.Don’t miss out! Click the button to subscribe, restack this post, and/or tell a fiction-loving friend about Still There. The more the merrier as the story unfolds.
About the Author
Known for her nonfiction work such as All the Ghosts in the Machine and Reset, Elaine Kasket is now exploring the boundaries between memory, technology, and human connection through fiction with Still There. This serialised novel is being released exclusively on Substack, with new instalments dropping every Tuesday and Friday. Join the journey from the beginning and subscribe to make sure you don't miss a single episode.
