Snowdrop Part 2
Episode 7 | Still There
Her initials were on one of the pearls, ‘CC’ for Cassandra Cecilia, white letters set against a dusky-purple background, but her circle was greyed out. Someone was speaking, their circle shimmering. 'I've only just found out,' said a woman's voice. ‘The Royal College of Art announced the memorial, but I didn't see it until now. I’m gutted I wasn’t there.’
Fiona, the speaker's circle was labelled. Her avatar sported a wave of purple-tinted hair and the kind of glamorous-yet-quirky look that had dominated amongst mourners at the wake. Cassandra had stumbled into a group of grievers, gathered in a chantry where visitors to Olivia's Memor.I.Am could come to sing her praises in real time. She'd never encountered a room like this in any other Memor.I.Am, but perhaps she'd never explored far enough to discover one. She wished it had been clearer that ‘Us’ was shorthand for ‘Those of Us Who Knew Her’ or ‘Let’s Us Have a Chat About Olivia Right Now.’
Chat GPT’s envisioning of the Memor-I-Am ‘antechamber’
She only had a moment to eavesdrop on the chatter of the room before it was suddenly muted. ‘Welcome,' issued a soft voice from another circle, labelled VA, which was floating free like a bubble near the top of the screen. A gold thread appeared, connecting VA and CC, and within the other circle an elderly woman appeared, white-haired but with a strangely unlined face, radiating a reassuring smile.
'Welcome, CC,’ she said, her lips moving ever so slightly out of sync with the words. ‘I'm Irina, the VA-cilitator for this Memor.I.Am antechamber of remembrance and comfort.'
‘Hello,’ Cassandra mumbled miserably, having simultaneously realised that Irina was a chatbot and that, even so, she felt obliged to continue the conversation.
'This is a place to remember Olivia Noble in the presence of others, to care for those others, and to be cared for yourself,’ Irina continued. ‘Please, spend as much time in the antechamber as you would like, but remember the standard guidelines of kindness, respect, and tolerance. I will protect the experience and safety of all guests by ambiently monitoring all interactions in the room for problematic content. If you have any concerns, click or tap my circle, or say “Irina” at any time. Do you have any questions that I can answer for you now?'
'Thank you, Irina,’ said Cassandra. ‘I ended up here by accident, so I'm not sure whether I'll be staying.'
'Please, spend as much time in this room as you would like,' repeated the chatbot. 'Because of the nature of a Memor-I-Am, we prefer that visitors announce their departures clearly rather than simply disappearing. After you have said your goodbyes, you can click or tap the door icon to depart. If you need support in exiting gracefully, I can VA-cilitate that for you. I’m happy to help you make your excuses, should you need to.'
Apparently, ‘VA-cilitate’ was a word now, and she filed it away in her mind as a word she would forevermore refuse to use, alongside ‘PCPs.’ Again, she thought about leaving, but was unable to get over what felt like an unjustified self-consciousness. Irina looked a little like Cassandra’s own grandmother, and Granny would have thought it rude to leave now. Would it be the worst thing in the world to stay for a while, to talk? To stop avoiding, like her mother had said? Almost every conversation Cassandra had had after her speech at the wake had been about the portrait, to her embarrassment. Had she had one conversation about her real, actual, now-dead best friend? The memory of this absence mortified her, called out for redress.
‘Would you like to be returned to the room?’ Irina said, breaking into her thoughts.
'I'll stay for now. Thank you,’ Cassandra said. ‘Just one question before we…is there, mm, video…here? In here? I don’t want to accidentally turn on my video.’
‘Video is not enabled in the antechamber,’ Irina explained. ‘Following current international data-protection guidelines, we safeguard visitors’ privacy here by limiting video interaction in publicly accessible sections of the…’
‘Oh, oh!’ Cassandra’s continuing, not-yet-assuaged anxiety pushed her to talk over the chatbot. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. Olivia’s picture, in the middle? It won’t – she can’t – is there anything interactive here? With her, I mean? I think I’d be uncomfortable. I don’t want to be surprised.’
There was a micro-hesitation, as though the programme needed a moment to sift through Cassandra’s incoherence to locate her question. ‘I believe you’re asking if interactive griefbots are enabled on this Memor-I-Am,’ Irina said, her lips again slightly out of sync with the words. ‘Is that right?’
‘That’s right,’ Cassandra confirmed.
‘There is no griefbot for Olivia Noble enabled on this or any other section of the Memor-I-Am. Does this help?’
‘Thank you,’ said Cassandra, and exhaled.
‘You’re welcome,’ said Irina. ‘If you wish to be connected to grief resources at any time, or if you are experiencing emotions that might make you a risk to your own safety or that of others, the icon flashing now will link you to an immediate assessment and appropriate referral.'
As she spoke an icon blinked in the lower right-hand corner, raindrops falling like tears on a wide-spread umbrella. Get help, the text below it read, and Cassandra wondered if she’d need it. ‘As you are returned to the room, your microphone will remain live,’ Irina said, and the thread of connection between them disappeared.
Things had changed while Irina was briefing Cassandra. Purple-haired Fiona had disappeared, as had another of the circles, leaving two others besides herself, and Irina hovering silently in the corner of the screen.
‘How’s it going, CC. So sorry I can't stay and speak to you,' said a woman called Raven, the periphery of her circle shimmering gently around an avatar of a goth-styled woman with jet-black hair and an alabaster face. ‘It’s morning here in Melbourne, and I’m due at work.'
'Oh, don't worry,' Cassandra said. 'I understand.'
She didn’t understand, didn’t understand what she was doing there, didn’t understand what on earth she was going to say.
'I hate to leave anyone hanging, but AJ's here,' said Raven. 'I have to go, catch you later!' Her circle popped like a soap bubble and was gone, leaving AJ and CC alone except for Irina, their ambiently listening chaperone.
The pause would have been no less awkward had the two of them been standing in front of one another. Cassandra had no idea what kind of 'them' she was dealing with. AJ could be any sex, any gender, anywhere in the world. Suddenly feeling unbearably uncomfortable, Cassandra twitched the mousepad to move her cursor over the door icon, but then AJ's circle shimmered.
'Two hydrogen atoms walk into a bar.’
He had a North American accent. His voice was middle register deep, the baritone in a choir, maybe sitting somewhere between the tenor and the bass.
'Sorry?' she said.
'Two hydrogen atoms walk into a bar,' he said, again.
'Ookaaaaay,’ she replied.
Opening with a joke meant he wouldn't have minded her laughing, but still she stifled a rising giggle. A risky move, being humorous from the start in a place like this. What sort of person would do that? Cassandra found that she wanted to know, and she that she wanted to know what the two hydrogen atoms did after entering the drinking establishment.
'The first hydrogen atom says, "I think I've lost an electron,"' AJ continued. 'The other one says, "Are you sure?"' And then the first one says, "I'm positive."'
There was a pause.
'I don't get it,’ she said.
'I'm sorry. I'm being stupid. Geeky joke. Don't you think this looks like an atom?'
'What looks like an atom?'
'This looks like an atom,’ he said. ‘Or a diagram of one. See, our circles are the electrons, and we're orbiting around the positively charged proton. Which is her. Olivia.'
Cassandra's attention flickered to the image in the middle. 'I was rubbish at science,’ she said. ‘I thought we looked like a pearl necklace.'
He laughed. 'I think that the model of an atom is the only thing I remember from science. It was never my thing either. I'm sorry if that was inappropriate.’
‘Who can tell what’s appropriate in a situation like this?’ she said. ‘I didn't even mean to come in here. I just clicked on 'Us' and I surfaced here. I didn't realise what it was.'
'The same thing happened to me!' he said. 'Did you know her?'
'Well, yes. Of course I knew her,’ she said. ‘What else would I be doing here?'
AJ hesitated, then shimmered again. 'I'm so sorry,’ he said. ‘Was she a good friend of yours?'
‘One of my best friends. Are you saying that you didn't know her?'
‘Oh, man. I’m sorry. I'm embarrassed now,’ he said. ‘I'm so sorry for your loss. I admired her, but I never met her. I knew her by reputation. Professional reputation. I'm a photographer. I only came onto the site to see what happened to her. To pay my respects, I guess.'
'Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘Please. No judgement. I'm just surprised how many people have been visiting, how many people have written something. I've been avoiding it.'
'It must be hard,’ he said. ‘I can understand if you don't want to talk to me. But I'm here to listen, if you want.'
'Maybe. I've been doing a load of thinking but not much talking. And they say it's good, don't they? To talk.'
'That's what they say,' he replied.
They lapsed into silence. She was bathed in the light from the monitor in the dark room. She listened out for her mum. If she came down the hallway, if she were outside the door, the floorboards would creak. She wondered why she was feeling naughty, like her mother would tell her off; after all, it was she that had pressured her to go on the Memor.I.Am in the first place. Cassandra wasn’t quite sure what she was worried about.
‘I’m Alex,’ he said.
'Oh! I assumed you were "AJ". I mean, AJ is a common nickname in America, right? Oh sorry, sorry. If you're American.' Cassandra had inadvertently annoyed enough Canadians in her time to always ask, even if she felt certain.
He laughed. 'Don't worry, you're safe. Yes, I'm American. Would I be assuming too much to call you "CC"?'
'I'm Cassandra,' she said. ‘CC is my first and middle initials. No one calls me that. People call me Cassie sometimes. But I don't like being called Cassie.’
'Cassandra. What an unusual name. Is it common in...okay, I'm going to ask rather than assume.'
'I'm in England,’ she said.
'Wait,' Alex said. 'Cassandra. As in Cassandra Parsons?'
'Um…I…I…’ she stammered, astonished.
'Sorry, it’s an unfamiliar name and I just remembered where I saw it. Are you the artist? Did you paint the picture on the landing page?'
She chastised herself for having thought, for a fleeting moment, that somehow, he also knew her by professional reputation.
'Oh. Good noticing. Yes, as it happens. I did do that. But it was a long time ago, another life. I’m surprised her husband wanted to put it up there.’
‘What? Don’t be so modest. That painting is amazing,’ he said. ‘I was blown away. Photos tend to get my juices flowing more than paintings, but that portrait is really something. I’d love to see it in the flesh, but the caption says "private collection".’
'Oh, well, that…that makes it sound more glamorous than it is,' Cassandra said. 'Up until recently it was in storage in my studio. Again, don’t read that as particularly impressive. It’s not really a studio, not anymore, really. It’s next to the potting shed in my back garden. Liv’s husband has got the picture for the moment.’
‘Total travesty,' Alex said. 'It should be in a museum, where people can see it every day. For a modern painting, it has a timeless quality. And anyone who didn't know her would feel like they did, looking at it.’
‘Oh,’ she breathed, pressing a palm to the place in her stomach that had started to flip. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Say what you’ve been working on recently,’ he said.
‘I’m…retired,’ she replied, with a rueful chuckle, and the feeling she’d been experiencing for weeks, a swelling and pricking that somehow resulted in no tears, rose up in her eyes again. She wondered what was wrong with her.
‘You should not be retired,’ he said, with astonishment, and she found she could not answer this. ‘Okay, okay,’ he went on, after a pause. ‘I’ll change the subject. The Rolleiflex.
‘The what?’
‘The old camera around her neck, in the portrait. I love that Rolleiflex, with the viewfinder on the top. Have you heard of Vivian Maier? She was one of the greatest street photographers who ever lived, although no one realised it at the time. Her work was discovered only after her death. One of her favourite cameras was the Rolleiflex, which let her capture her subjects in their natural state, free of self-consciousness because they weren't aware they were being photographed.'
Cassandra laughed. 'Are you reading from something?’ she asked. ‘You sound like a walking encyclopaedia.’ In this bizarre room, where she was supposed to be mourning her friend, she was laughing.
'"Walking encyclopaedia! My grandmother said that. I don't think I've ever seen an encyclopaedia! But yes, sorry, I'm a lecturer, a photography lecturer. I guess I sounded like it for a minute there. There isn't enough money in shooting photographs these days. You earn a living by convincing your students to help you prop up a dying art.’
He was chipper, matter of fact, without any ire or resentment. Cassandra remembered how she’d barely dared to send Liv a smartphone photograph of the Christmas cactus in bloom, when her friend had so despised the technology that had put a camera in everyone's hand, all the time.
Everything is so hard now, Olivia had said. Everything's saturated. You have to be so good all the time to keep getting the work, even when your name is out there. A(I)RT is taking over. I'm so tired. Maybe I'm past it.
'Olivia struggled, latterly,' Cassandra mused. 'I don't think teaching would have been her thing. She'd do digital, but she was a traditionalist at heart. Old fashioned.'
'I liked that about her,’ Alex said. ‘About her work. They use that term – A(I)RT, you know, like ‘art’ with an I. I’d fight to the death to keep that shit from taking over. Sorry. I probably shouldn’t swear on here.’
He talked just like Olivia, at least, how she talked before she’d lost the will to fight. Cassandra didn't want to log off, didn’t want to disconnect from the conversation with Alex, but the tsunami of sadness that had just washed over her made her feel heavy and fatigued, not up for chatting. She made her excuses to Alex. She had a lot of work to do. She’d planned an early walk tomorrow. Bed was calling.
'Of course, you should go,’ he said. ‘Damn, it's late there. I think I'm five hours earlier, at least. I'm sorry. Before you go, though, I want to see more of your work. Would you give me the link to your site?'
'Oh...no. I mean, I would, if I had one,’ she said. ‘I don't have one. You don’t have to tell me. Unheard-of level of ridiculousness. The thing is...'
What could she say? The thing is, I have nothing to put on it. The thing is, having a website would only broadcast to the world that I had one big chance at success and then never did anything else after. The thing is, I'm a big fat failure.
'The thing is, I'm a little old fashioned that way,’ she said. ‘Like Olivia. And horrible at self-promotion. Don't bother looking me up, you won't find much.'
‘What about socials?' he asked.
'Ah, you're going to think I’m a freak, but I'm anti-socials. Not antisocial. Just anti-socials. I mean, I had them – I guess they’re still there. I don't remember any of the passwords. I’ve never deactivated them. Or did I? I don’t know. My hu…mm, hm, I don’t like putting myself out there, really.’
There were a few beats of silence, and Cassandra nipped at the side of her finger again, all her nails made ragged by packing up the cottage. He probably thought she was a real pill, a phrase her own grandmother would have used. But Alex, when he spoke again, sounded as though he were anxious about what she thought of him, too.
'I’ve put my foot in my mouth,’ he said. ‘I keep on forgetting where we are, what we're doing here. She was one of your best friends, and here I am chasing you about socials and websites. I'm so sorry. I'm insensitive.'
'No! You're not, you're not. I'm sorry that I'm so rubbish. But thank you so much for what you've said about my work. I appreciate the compliment. Thank you.'
'No, thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. I hope we can speak again sometime. I'm so sorry about your friend. She was a great artist. And so are you. Do not be retired.'
'Goodnight,’ Cassandra said.
She clicked the door icon and flashed back to the landing page. Olivia stared at her impishly, with her down-turned chin and her up-turned gaze. The giant lens of the Rolleiflex ogled her, unblinking, like the eye of a giant squid.
I see you.
‘I’m not doing anything,’ Cassandra said, startling herself with her own voice. This happened sometimes when she was tired, a Tourette’s-like tic of speaking an internal thought aloud.
She put the computer to sleep, and the monitor went abruptly dark, dropping a black curtain in front of her friend’s brightness. She lived in there now, on thousands of people’s screens, fragments of her personality scattered around the world like the giant shattered mirror in the fairy tale about the Snow Queen.
The thought was strange — the kind of image that visited Cassandra when she was on the threshold of sleep. She rubbed her eyes, stood stiffly, and felt her way to the door and down the hallway, finally crawling under the duvet in her room. The comforting, familiar scent of her mother’s laundry detergent, a formula apparently unchanged for decades, surrounded her. Curling into a foetal position, she closed her eyes and slept until morning.
She was in desperate need of fresh air and movement when she rose early. Her first waking decision was daring: she would go out without her phone. She wanted to be alone with the countryside, with no surprises or intrusions, no monitoring or tracking. She craved invisibility, if only for a few hours, whatever the consequences. She had to think.
Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash
Her father’s maps were still there, the local ones at the top. Paul had once given him a smartphone for Christmas with an Ordnance Survey map app on it, but her father took more pleasure in the well-worn folds of the maps, in their level of detail, their technical nature. Always trust a map over a machine, he said.
Pocketing the map, Cassandra sat and stared out of the kitchen window, pressing her knees together and jittering her heels up and down on the balls of her feet. As soon as it was light enough for her to pick out the bird feeders and trees in the garden, she plunged out of the house into the dawn, striking out on her route and swinging her father’s walking poles.
Harting Hill on the South Downs, by Richard Reed
The snowdrops clustered near the path, delicate white bells dangling from drooping stems. Her mother had made up stories about them when Cassandra was little. The idea that the flower fairies used the blossoms as skirts for their winter balls had inspired her to pick up her crayons and draw the party. She took no account of the seasons, so the fairies could use any flower for their outfits, no matter when they bloomed. Her mother was beside herself with excitement, saying ‘Look, Martin, we’ve got an artist!’
After that, on side tables where only newspapers and bowls of peanuts had sat before, stacks of art books appeared. Tins of coloured pencils and pads of paper were suddenly in every room. And at weekends her mother sometimes took her to Monk’s House, where the garden bloomed and Virginia Woolf had a room of her own to write her books. Her mother told her that if people wanted to do creative things, they needed a creative space.
Sometimes they visited the studio at Charleston, too, the house where the author’s less famous sister painted pretty pictures of lilies and peonies. Portraits of friends and lovers hung on the walls there, accompanied by a sign with a tantalising description.
These artists, philosophers and writers lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles.
As a child she didn’t know what it meant. She figured it out as a teenager, weighed these people against her own parents and her parents' friends, was titillated that such flexible, uncommon arrangements existed. Perhaps London had retained more of the bohemian spirit than Sussex. Perhaps one day she would go there and see.
Charleston House had the studio and the most interesting paintings, but it was the white weather-boarded Monk’s House Cassandra loved the best. It was in the garden there that she had first decided that she too would have a little studio amongst the flowers when she grew up.
Cottage in the garden of Monk’s House, by Zoe Power, from beautifulsimplicity.co.uk
The conservatory attached to the house was full of cacti. She couldn’t remember for sure, but she reckoned there must have been a Christmas cactus there too.
Her mother had been right, and the walk was not entirely pleasant: Cassandra was freezing when she arrived. She wended her way around the house into a nearly deserted garden. The snowdrops were as spectacular as such a modest plant can be, carpeting the ground like their namesake, but she'd had her fill of them by then and went in search of the memorial busts of the people who’d lived there.
The writer’s husband had come home one day and found the letter. Maybe his wife had floated for a while, like Ophelia on the surface of the river with her hair spread out on the water around her. Maybe the rocks she’d filled her pockets with had done their job too swiftly for that. If Paul came home one day to find a letter on the kitchen countertop, saying that Cassandra was never coming back, she wondered what he’d do, what he’d say. Jesus fuck, probably. And as he tried to process the words on the page, where would she be?
On the base of Virginia’s bust was an inscription: Death is the enemy. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding.
A few months shy of 40, Cassandra Parsons Wood met the sculpted, hooded eyes of woman who had written a goodbye note and gone out of the garden gate. She thought of Olivia and Jack, of her mother and father, and of Cassandra and Paul. Alex’s voice sounded in her memory, you should not be retired. But what could she do? She barely remembered what it was like to create. Sitting in a sea of nodding snowdrops, and for the first time since Olivia’s death, she cried.
Virginia Woolf’s memorial bust in the garden at Monks House
In episode 8, Cassandra returns to London. Will she tell her husband about her experience on the Memor-I-Am? Or would that be a rather terrible idea?
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About the Author
Elaine Kasket ventures into new territory with Still There, her first novel. Known for her nonfiction work, she's now exploring the boundaries between memory, technology, and human connection through fiction. This serialised novel is being released exclusively on Substack, with new installments dropping every Tuesday and Friday. Join the journey from the beginning, and subscribe to make sure you don't miss a single episode.
