Mirrorland, page 11
EL
Location: Lothian, Scotland
City: Edinburgh
iPhone 7 secs, 1 view
I press the palm of my left hand against my cheek. My face is burning. Here. She’s still here. I don’t know what I expected. The Outer Hebrides? The Bahamas? But she’s here. El is still here.
*
The graveyard is old, perched high on a bitterly cold hill. Ross and I have to pick our way through haphazard rows of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century graves: huge drunken stones chiselled into skulls and angels, vast grey slabs on stony stilts dressed in white and yellow lichen. The newer graves are far more modest and close together; most house only interred ashes.
It takes Ross a while to remember where the plot is, but when he does, I feel suddenly nervous. For a moment, I stand as still as the wind will allow, looking down at the black headstone, its ornate gold writing, so much like those cards left on the hessian mat. I wonder who put it there, who paid for it. Ignore the shiver that skates between my shoulder blades.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF
ROBERT JOHN FINLAY
AGED 72 YEARS
AND HIS DAUGHTER
NANCY FINLAY
AGED 36 YEARS
WHO BOTH DIED 4th SEPTEMBER 1998
GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN
‘You know they’re called lairs?’
‘What?’
‘The graves.’ Ross nods down at the grass, mouth a grim line. I wonder if he regrets agreeing to bring me here. ‘Pretty appropriate.’
I turn towards him. ‘Why did you always hate him so much?’
He gives me a sharp, almost suspicious look. And then he shakes his head, looks down at the neighbouring gravestones instead. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
I think it does is on the tip of my tongue. But Grandpa was always grumpy bordering on mean, I can’t pretend he wasn’t. A flash of Mum standing at the kitchen table, dishing out stew as she described in a careful monotone the cleaning job she’d seen in the paper. Grandpa looking up from his plate. Ye’re better aff doin’ whit ye’re good at, hen. Giving us a nod and a wink that made him look no less pissed off. Lookin’ efter the hoose and these fine wee lassies, eh? And so, of course, she had. Grandpa never got the sharp end of her tongue. He never had to run around the house fleeing from imaginary fires or intruders or apocalypses.
I’m bending down to put the white roses that I picked from the garden into the grave vase when I realise it’s already full. Pink gerberas. Mum’s favourite. Strangely, I find this even more disconcerting than the fact that they’re no more than a few days old.
‘Who left them?’
Ross looks down. Shrugs.
‘Don’t you think that’s weird? That someone would leave fresh flowers at their grave? I mean, who?’ Even though I suspect I know exactly who.
I’m rewarded only with another unconcerned shrug. Ross seems different today. Lighter. Perhaps because he’s finally given up on trying to carry both hope and grief around in the same bag and has plumped for the latter. I don’t entirely blame him, and I still don’t think for a moment that Vik is right about him, but his unwavering grief both irritates and unnerves me. As if he’d rather suffer it than entertain even the possibility that El has left him voluntarily. As if he’d rather believe she was dead. It’s a nasty thought, I suppose, a snide one. That probably has more than a little to do with the memory of that stark look of horror on his face. And the long-fallowed fields that El’s diary extracts are ploughing through, churning up sour dirt.
‘I saw spare vases by the main gates,’ he says. ‘I’ll go get one.’
As I watch him march away, I try to ignore my resentment, my regret. We haven’t spoken about the kiss, haven’t even mentioned it, but we can barely look each other in the eye, and our uneasy truce is just that: uneasy. Untrustworthy. I look down at the grave and I think about that I LOVE CAT, and perhaps inevitably, I think about the Rosemount.
I’ve never had the same difficulty remembering our second life as I do our first. My chest aches when I think of the Rosemount Care Home, a Victorian mansion that had once been a Catholic orphanage. The kind of cold, high-ceilinged, gargoyled monstrosity that makes you think about lunatic asylums and mass graves in the cellar. The carers were nice enough, not kind exactly, but sympathetic to our plight inasmuch as they could be. No one in the Rosemount was ever of any real use to us, because we didn’t allow them to be. We were twelve-year-old runaways and that was it, that was all we had sworn to tell anyone. Including that Old Salty Dog who found us at dawn, waiting patiently at the harbourside for our pirate ship to arrive. It was probably the one promise we ever made to each other that we actually kept.
I cried more, but I suffered less, I can see that now. El stayed angry, defiant. Untouchable. She withdrew from everything and everyone, until I was the only one who kept trying to make her stop. Her elaborate plans for our future were furious, impervious: as soon as we turned eighteen we would leave Edinburgh and move abroad. She would be a portrait artist and I’d be a novelist, and we wouldn’t need anyone. She had to have seen the lie in it, the fantasy. Because when we were alone in our room, she would talk incessantly, obsessively, only about Mirrorland and everything, everyone, in it as if they were what was real, what was important, what was unchanged. I miss them, she would say, over and over again like a mantra, like a wish while clicking ruby-red heels. I understood why, even then. Lies and secrets are hard, but pretending you don’t care is harder. And I had a bad secret of my own back then. It wasn’t Mum or Grandpa that I missed the most. It was Ross.
I hear him come back. His expression is still hard. Unreadable. ‘You okay?’
I nod, and he hunkers down to put the roses in the vase. When he stands up again, the atmosphere between us pulls thinner, even more tense. I want so badly to tell him about the tracker, but that would mean explaining the emails, why I haven’t told him about the emails or the hidden diary pages, and everything between us still feels too raw, too fragile, too much like this. I don’t have the courage.
I remember sitting next to him on a crate in the Three-Fingered-Joe Saloon. El had temporarily defected to the Indians, and was planning a surprise attack on Boomtown, and we were pretending not to be waiting for it. It must have been autumn or winter; the air was cold enough to fog the space between us. It had to have been close to the end of Boomtown and the beginning of the Shank too, because it’s one of my last memories of the saloon.
Ross had been quiet, almost pensive, until finally he turned to me, his gaze sharp, unblinking. ‘Tell me about The Island.’
And I smiled. Glad that he was talking to me. Glad that he wanted something from me. Even though I knew it was only because El wasn’t there to ask.
‘It’s called Santa Catalina, and it’s in the Caribbean, and it’s amazing. It’s got beaches and lagoons and mangroves and palm trees. Captain Henry’s going to take us there because it’s his favourite place in the world. He built a fort there and a huge house, and the islanders have named streets and villages and even a big rock after him because they love him so much.’
And Ross gave me that same sharp dark look. ‘Why doesn’t he come back and do it, then? Your dad. Why doesn’t he take you there?’
‘I don’t know.’ I stopped smiling. I stopped feeling glad. ‘Mum says he will come back. One day.’
His eyes became even fiercer than before, the silver flecks inside them flashing, and I was suddenly afraid of him, of his anger, of what he was going to say. His lips turned thin. Mean. ‘Don’t believe her. People lie, Cat. They lie all the time.’
Perhaps that memory gives me courage, because I turn towards him now, put out my hand to stop him walking away.
‘Are you going to tell me why you’re pissed off with me?’
‘I’m not pissed off with you.’ But he presses the heels of his palms against his eyelids.
‘I would have told you about the second card, Ross. There just wasn’t any time before—’
‘You need to be honest with me, Cat. You need to tell me everything. We need to present a united front to the police, okay?’ He grabs hold of my hand; his is icy cold. ‘I told you that Rafiq isn’t taking the investigation seriously.’
I don’t think that’s true, but then again, I don’t think that a lot of things Ross believes are true. I look down at our hands. ‘Okay. I will. I’m sorry.’
He exhales, long and low. Lets go of my fingers.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘The other night—’
‘Was a mistake,’ he says quickly, looking away.
I nod. Ignore that old melancholic ache.
‘We were both tired, upset. That’s all it was.’ A smile. ‘That and Laphroaig.’
I try a smile of my own. It’s probably as convincing.
‘I didn’t …’ He clears his throat. ‘Cat. I want you to know that when I kissed you back it wasn’t because I thought … it wasn’t because you reminded me of El, or, you know, because I was imagining that you were El.’ He looks at me. ‘I don’t want you to think that.’
‘I don’t,’ I say. Because that, I have to allow him. Ross always saw us as separate. As different. He was one of the very few who ever did. That should make me feel better, but it doesn’t.
*
We return to the house. And as soon as we reach the entrance hall, that oppressive weight drops back down onto our shoulders, goading us, cowing us, pushing us apart.
When I pick the envelope up, turn the CATRIONA away to open it, Ross leans against a crimson-red wall, a muscle working inside his cheek.
‘What does it say?’
I look down at the HE WILL HURT YOU TOO in vivid red. Look up at the raw bruised skin around Ross’s eyes.
I close the card, close the hallway door. ‘Just more of the same.’
‘Yeah,’ he says, turning away from me and towards the darkness of the hallway.
And I think of my nineteenth birthday. When El’s fixed plans for the future – our future – were already supposed to have been well underway. And instead, I spent it inside a grubby dull waiting room with grubbier sofas and a plastic-framed seascape of rocks and sand and waves. And I said goodbye to it inside the stark white bright of a hospital side room. Looking at El looking at me. Swaddled in too-tight sheets, that bloodstained bandage pulling at the cannula in the back of her hand. Smiling that smile I’ve never been able to forget: tired and trembling, but filled with so much joy. So much hate. The croak of her voice, the laughter in it.
I win.
CHAPTER 11
10 April 2018 at 15:36
Inbox
john.smith120594@gmail.com
Re: HE KNOWS
To: Me
CLUE 5. WHERE THE CLOWNS HIDE
Sent from my iPhone
*
I get down on my knees on the Clown Café floor and lift up the bed’s valance, wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark. I can see only one thing. Square and black. A terrible suspicion has me lunging for it, pulling it out into the light. I hear Mum’s voice – high and furious – turning the rucksack upside down, scattering powder packs, tins of food, and a plastic bottle onto the bedroom floor. These are off! This is empty! For God’s sake, Catriona, why are you so useless? This is important! Will you never just do as you’re bloody told, you stupid girl? But it’s not a black canvas rucksack. It’s a lantern. Foggy windows of glass and sharp metal edges. An old candle burned to the bottom of its wick. A rusty hook. It’s almost exactly the same as the lantern that hung from the stern of the Satisfaction. That still hangs from the stern of the Satisfaction. A lantern that three days ago made me shudder hard enough to make my bones crack. Taped to this one’s metal frame is another diary page.
February 16th, 2004
Cat doesn’t get it. She doesn’t even try to get it. It’s like she doesn’t want to. She’s an idiot. She thinks if she pretends something hasn’t happened then it hasn’t happened. But if you forget something, you might forget Everything. And that’s just dumb. That’s what makes you an idiot. Sometimes I hate her for it. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have a sister at all. Sometimes I wish she would just disappear.
I don’t want to think about the El in the Rosemount any more. I don’t want to think about El any more. I hate that I can hear her voice: her snide and mocking scorn. I hate that she can still reach me, hurt me. Make me feel shame so big it’s as if I’m the one disappearing.
I shove both the page and the lantern back under the bed, and begin tearing around the Clown Café like a woman possessed, opening drawers and cupboards, looking under ornaments and books. There are only so many rooms in this house, and El’s treasure hunts were endless: often, there could be three or more clues hidden in every room. She always hated it when I did this – when I found clues out of sequence – but I am sick of blindly dancing to her tune. I pull hard on the dress-up cupboard door. When it won’t budge, I pull harder. It opens with a sticky protest. There are no face paints, wigs, or jumpsuits. It’s completely empty apart from the small square of paper on its only shelf.
I feel suddenly afraid. The hair on the back of my neck stands up stiff, like a long bony hand is inches away from falling heavy onto my shoulder.
August 10th, 1998
Something’s coming. Something’s nearly here.
Sometimes I’m so scared I forget how to breathe. I forget that I can.
The bells scare me all the time. It’s what comes after the bells really I know but it’s the bells I think about the most. Sometimes I think I hear them when I don’t. Sometimes I dream them and wake up with my hand on the door handle to run. Or shaking Cat hard enough to make her teeth chatter. Sometimes I wake up downstairs and those times scare me the most. What if one night the DEADLIGHTS find me before I wake up? Once I woke up on the main deck of the Satisfaction. The wind was too loud and the port tacking sails were flapping like sheets hanging out to dry in the garden. And I know it was because I was trying to look for Dad. Because why does he never come back when HE always does? When ALL the bad ones always do? More often now. All the time.
I drop the page, slam the door shut, run to the bed, and pick up my laptop.
What do you want??? Please, El, just tell me what’s going on.
The reply is immediate. I’M NOT EL. EL IS DEAD.
And still I can’t resist. Even though I know – I know – that resisting is the only sane response left to me.
Then who the fuck are you?
This time, she makes me wait for maybe a minute.
I’M MOUSE.
*
‘Let’s go out,’ Ross says. ‘I’m sick to death of staring at these four walls.’
And I can’t say no, because I don’t want to. I want to go just about anywhere as long as it’s not here.
I take a long time getting ready. Too long. I put on one of my few expensive dresses, short and black, trimmed with blue silk thread. I pin up my hair, loose and high. I paint my nails the same red as my lips. And when I look in the mirror, I see El before I see me. And then convince myself I don’t.
At the top of the stairs, I’m suddenly paralysed by an awful sense of foreboding. It makes me want to run back to the Clown Café and stay there. Fingers push against my spine, my shoulder blades. Stop being afraid of falling. Or you’ll always be too afraid to fly.
‘You ready?’ Ross calls from the kitchen. And I grip hold of the bannister, heart thundering, until the vertigo, that old terrible urge to let go, to fall, vanishes to the same dark place as Mum’s furious voice.
*
The restaurant is along a narrow close off Leith Street, its cobbles lit only by old Victorian lanterns. Ross puts his hand on the small of my back as he opens the door. Inside, it’s busy without being noisy; low-beamed and cosy, with red-and-white chequered tablecloths and chocolate-dark walls.
A fat bearded man waves, makes his way over to us.
‘Ross!’ he says. ‘It’s awfy good to see ye, my friend.’
While he shakes Ross’s hand, I’m treated to a scrutiny as uncertain as it is unsubtle.
‘I heard there was still no news,’ he says, still looking at me, and the penny drops. He thinks I’m El, but at the same time he knows I’m not.
‘No, not yet,’ Ross says. ‘Sorry, this is, em … Cat, El’s twin sister. Cat, this is Michele. He also owns Favoloso in the Old Town.’
Michele shakes his head. ‘Aye, it’s a terrible thing … a terrible thing.’ His gaze slides back to me. ‘It’s uncanny, hen, how much ye look like her.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ross says again. ‘I know we haven’t booked or anything, but I wondered …’
‘Aye, of course, no worries. Come wi’ me.’
We weave around tables until we reach the rear of the restaurant. I can hear the muted clatter and chatter of the kitchen. Michele ushers us towards a corner booth. ‘I’m afraid it’s a wee bit, em …’
It is a wee bit em. The booth chairs are high, and two long-stem candles flicker at each side of the table, a single red rose in a vase between them. There are no other tables anywhere near it. Clearly this is the designated special romantic occasion corner.
‘It’s fine,’ Ross says. ‘Thanks.’
I take off my coat, and when Ross looks at me, I try not to enjoy the brief flare in his eyes.
He clears his throat, sits down. ‘You look great.’
We order some antipasti and a Frascati that Michele recommends. His departure precipitates what seems like an endless procession of waiters to our table. It’s around about the fifth – a teenage boy bearing a second basket of bread – that I realise this is just more scrutiny. I feel like a freak show curiosity.
‘How many times have you and El come here?’
Ross stops pretending to be oblivious, rubs a hand over his face. ‘I’m sorry, Cat. I didn’t think this would be weird, not even when I got here, you know? I’m really, really sorry. D’you want to go?’
‘No. It’s fine.’ Even though it isn’t. But it’s the situation that I’m really angry with, not him. It’s El. The whole Mouse thing isn’t just annoying, it’s snide. Because she’d always really been my friend, not El’s. The Mouse to my Cat. My creation. Her existence meant that I couldn’t ever be at the very bottom of the pecking order; meant, too, that I could always be guaranteed kind company, a sympathetic hearing. And now El’s hijacked even that. So why the hell should Ross and I feel like a sideshow? Why should we feel guilty? We haven’t done anything wrong.
Location: Lothian, Scotland
City: Edinburgh
iPhone 7 secs, 1 view
I press the palm of my left hand against my cheek. My face is burning. Here. She’s still here. I don’t know what I expected. The Outer Hebrides? The Bahamas? But she’s here. El is still here.
*
The graveyard is old, perched high on a bitterly cold hill. Ross and I have to pick our way through haphazard rows of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century graves: huge drunken stones chiselled into skulls and angels, vast grey slabs on stony stilts dressed in white and yellow lichen. The newer graves are far more modest and close together; most house only interred ashes.
It takes Ross a while to remember where the plot is, but when he does, I feel suddenly nervous. For a moment, I stand as still as the wind will allow, looking down at the black headstone, its ornate gold writing, so much like those cards left on the hessian mat. I wonder who put it there, who paid for it. Ignore the shiver that skates between my shoulder blades.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF
ROBERT JOHN FINLAY
AGED 72 YEARS
AND HIS DAUGHTER
NANCY FINLAY
AGED 36 YEARS
WHO BOTH DIED 4th SEPTEMBER 1998
GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN
‘You know they’re called lairs?’
‘What?’
‘The graves.’ Ross nods down at the grass, mouth a grim line. I wonder if he regrets agreeing to bring me here. ‘Pretty appropriate.’
I turn towards him. ‘Why did you always hate him so much?’
He gives me a sharp, almost suspicious look. And then he shakes his head, looks down at the neighbouring gravestones instead. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
I think it does is on the tip of my tongue. But Grandpa was always grumpy bordering on mean, I can’t pretend he wasn’t. A flash of Mum standing at the kitchen table, dishing out stew as she described in a careful monotone the cleaning job she’d seen in the paper. Grandpa looking up from his plate. Ye’re better aff doin’ whit ye’re good at, hen. Giving us a nod and a wink that made him look no less pissed off. Lookin’ efter the hoose and these fine wee lassies, eh? And so, of course, she had. Grandpa never got the sharp end of her tongue. He never had to run around the house fleeing from imaginary fires or intruders or apocalypses.
I’m bending down to put the white roses that I picked from the garden into the grave vase when I realise it’s already full. Pink gerberas. Mum’s favourite. Strangely, I find this even more disconcerting than the fact that they’re no more than a few days old.
‘Who left them?’
Ross looks down. Shrugs.
‘Don’t you think that’s weird? That someone would leave fresh flowers at their grave? I mean, who?’ Even though I suspect I know exactly who.
I’m rewarded only with another unconcerned shrug. Ross seems different today. Lighter. Perhaps because he’s finally given up on trying to carry both hope and grief around in the same bag and has plumped for the latter. I don’t entirely blame him, and I still don’t think for a moment that Vik is right about him, but his unwavering grief both irritates and unnerves me. As if he’d rather suffer it than entertain even the possibility that El has left him voluntarily. As if he’d rather believe she was dead. It’s a nasty thought, I suppose, a snide one. That probably has more than a little to do with the memory of that stark look of horror on his face. And the long-fallowed fields that El’s diary extracts are ploughing through, churning up sour dirt.
‘I saw spare vases by the main gates,’ he says. ‘I’ll go get one.’
As I watch him march away, I try to ignore my resentment, my regret. We haven’t spoken about the kiss, haven’t even mentioned it, but we can barely look each other in the eye, and our uneasy truce is just that: uneasy. Untrustworthy. I look down at the grave and I think about that I LOVE CAT, and perhaps inevitably, I think about the Rosemount.
I’ve never had the same difficulty remembering our second life as I do our first. My chest aches when I think of the Rosemount Care Home, a Victorian mansion that had once been a Catholic orphanage. The kind of cold, high-ceilinged, gargoyled monstrosity that makes you think about lunatic asylums and mass graves in the cellar. The carers were nice enough, not kind exactly, but sympathetic to our plight inasmuch as they could be. No one in the Rosemount was ever of any real use to us, because we didn’t allow them to be. We were twelve-year-old runaways and that was it, that was all we had sworn to tell anyone. Including that Old Salty Dog who found us at dawn, waiting patiently at the harbourside for our pirate ship to arrive. It was probably the one promise we ever made to each other that we actually kept.
I cried more, but I suffered less, I can see that now. El stayed angry, defiant. Untouchable. She withdrew from everything and everyone, until I was the only one who kept trying to make her stop. Her elaborate plans for our future were furious, impervious: as soon as we turned eighteen we would leave Edinburgh and move abroad. She would be a portrait artist and I’d be a novelist, and we wouldn’t need anyone. She had to have seen the lie in it, the fantasy. Because when we were alone in our room, she would talk incessantly, obsessively, only about Mirrorland and everything, everyone, in it as if they were what was real, what was important, what was unchanged. I miss them, she would say, over and over again like a mantra, like a wish while clicking ruby-red heels. I understood why, even then. Lies and secrets are hard, but pretending you don’t care is harder. And I had a bad secret of my own back then. It wasn’t Mum or Grandpa that I missed the most. It was Ross.
I hear him come back. His expression is still hard. Unreadable. ‘You okay?’
I nod, and he hunkers down to put the roses in the vase. When he stands up again, the atmosphere between us pulls thinner, even more tense. I want so badly to tell him about the tracker, but that would mean explaining the emails, why I haven’t told him about the emails or the hidden diary pages, and everything between us still feels too raw, too fragile, too much like this. I don’t have the courage.
I remember sitting next to him on a crate in the Three-Fingered-Joe Saloon. El had temporarily defected to the Indians, and was planning a surprise attack on Boomtown, and we were pretending not to be waiting for it. It must have been autumn or winter; the air was cold enough to fog the space between us. It had to have been close to the end of Boomtown and the beginning of the Shank too, because it’s one of my last memories of the saloon.
Ross had been quiet, almost pensive, until finally he turned to me, his gaze sharp, unblinking. ‘Tell me about The Island.’
And I smiled. Glad that he was talking to me. Glad that he wanted something from me. Even though I knew it was only because El wasn’t there to ask.
‘It’s called Santa Catalina, and it’s in the Caribbean, and it’s amazing. It’s got beaches and lagoons and mangroves and palm trees. Captain Henry’s going to take us there because it’s his favourite place in the world. He built a fort there and a huge house, and the islanders have named streets and villages and even a big rock after him because they love him so much.’
And Ross gave me that same sharp dark look. ‘Why doesn’t he come back and do it, then? Your dad. Why doesn’t he take you there?’
‘I don’t know.’ I stopped smiling. I stopped feeling glad. ‘Mum says he will come back. One day.’
His eyes became even fiercer than before, the silver flecks inside them flashing, and I was suddenly afraid of him, of his anger, of what he was going to say. His lips turned thin. Mean. ‘Don’t believe her. People lie, Cat. They lie all the time.’
Perhaps that memory gives me courage, because I turn towards him now, put out my hand to stop him walking away.
‘Are you going to tell me why you’re pissed off with me?’
‘I’m not pissed off with you.’ But he presses the heels of his palms against his eyelids.
‘I would have told you about the second card, Ross. There just wasn’t any time before—’
‘You need to be honest with me, Cat. You need to tell me everything. We need to present a united front to the police, okay?’ He grabs hold of my hand; his is icy cold. ‘I told you that Rafiq isn’t taking the investigation seriously.’
I don’t think that’s true, but then again, I don’t think that a lot of things Ross believes are true. I look down at our hands. ‘Okay. I will. I’m sorry.’
He exhales, long and low. Lets go of my fingers.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘The other night—’
‘Was a mistake,’ he says quickly, looking away.
I nod. Ignore that old melancholic ache.
‘We were both tired, upset. That’s all it was.’ A smile. ‘That and Laphroaig.’
I try a smile of my own. It’s probably as convincing.
‘I didn’t …’ He clears his throat. ‘Cat. I want you to know that when I kissed you back it wasn’t because I thought … it wasn’t because you reminded me of El, or, you know, because I was imagining that you were El.’ He looks at me. ‘I don’t want you to think that.’
‘I don’t,’ I say. Because that, I have to allow him. Ross always saw us as separate. As different. He was one of the very few who ever did. That should make me feel better, but it doesn’t.
*
We return to the house. And as soon as we reach the entrance hall, that oppressive weight drops back down onto our shoulders, goading us, cowing us, pushing us apart.
When I pick the envelope up, turn the CATRIONA away to open it, Ross leans against a crimson-red wall, a muscle working inside his cheek.
‘What does it say?’
I look down at the HE WILL HURT YOU TOO in vivid red. Look up at the raw bruised skin around Ross’s eyes.
I close the card, close the hallway door. ‘Just more of the same.’
‘Yeah,’ he says, turning away from me and towards the darkness of the hallway.
And I think of my nineteenth birthday. When El’s fixed plans for the future – our future – were already supposed to have been well underway. And instead, I spent it inside a grubby dull waiting room with grubbier sofas and a plastic-framed seascape of rocks and sand and waves. And I said goodbye to it inside the stark white bright of a hospital side room. Looking at El looking at me. Swaddled in too-tight sheets, that bloodstained bandage pulling at the cannula in the back of her hand. Smiling that smile I’ve never been able to forget: tired and trembling, but filled with so much joy. So much hate. The croak of her voice, the laughter in it.
I win.
CHAPTER 11
10 April 2018 at 15:36
Inbox
john.smith120594@gmail.com
Re: HE KNOWS
To: Me
CLUE 5. WHERE THE CLOWNS HIDE
Sent from my iPhone
*
I get down on my knees on the Clown Café floor and lift up the bed’s valance, wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark. I can see only one thing. Square and black. A terrible suspicion has me lunging for it, pulling it out into the light. I hear Mum’s voice – high and furious – turning the rucksack upside down, scattering powder packs, tins of food, and a plastic bottle onto the bedroom floor. These are off! This is empty! For God’s sake, Catriona, why are you so useless? This is important! Will you never just do as you’re bloody told, you stupid girl? But it’s not a black canvas rucksack. It’s a lantern. Foggy windows of glass and sharp metal edges. An old candle burned to the bottom of its wick. A rusty hook. It’s almost exactly the same as the lantern that hung from the stern of the Satisfaction. That still hangs from the stern of the Satisfaction. A lantern that three days ago made me shudder hard enough to make my bones crack. Taped to this one’s metal frame is another diary page.
February 16th, 2004
Cat doesn’t get it. She doesn’t even try to get it. It’s like she doesn’t want to. She’s an idiot. She thinks if she pretends something hasn’t happened then it hasn’t happened. But if you forget something, you might forget Everything. And that’s just dumb. That’s what makes you an idiot. Sometimes I hate her for it. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have a sister at all. Sometimes I wish she would just disappear.
I don’t want to think about the El in the Rosemount any more. I don’t want to think about El any more. I hate that I can hear her voice: her snide and mocking scorn. I hate that she can still reach me, hurt me. Make me feel shame so big it’s as if I’m the one disappearing.
I shove both the page and the lantern back under the bed, and begin tearing around the Clown Café like a woman possessed, opening drawers and cupboards, looking under ornaments and books. There are only so many rooms in this house, and El’s treasure hunts were endless: often, there could be three or more clues hidden in every room. She always hated it when I did this – when I found clues out of sequence – but I am sick of blindly dancing to her tune. I pull hard on the dress-up cupboard door. When it won’t budge, I pull harder. It opens with a sticky protest. There are no face paints, wigs, or jumpsuits. It’s completely empty apart from the small square of paper on its only shelf.
I feel suddenly afraid. The hair on the back of my neck stands up stiff, like a long bony hand is inches away from falling heavy onto my shoulder.
August 10th, 1998
Something’s coming. Something’s nearly here.
Sometimes I’m so scared I forget how to breathe. I forget that I can.
The bells scare me all the time. It’s what comes after the bells really I know but it’s the bells I think about the most. Sometimes I think I hear them when I don’t. Sometimes I dream them and wake up with my hand on the door handle to run. Or shaking Cat hard enough to make her teeth chatter. Sometimes I wake up downstairs and those times scare me the most. What if one night the DEADLIGHTS find me before I wake up? Once I woke up on the main deck of the Satisfaction. The wind was too loud and the port tacking sails were flapping like sheets hanging out to dry in the garden. And I know it was because I was trying to look for Dad. Because why does he never come back when HE always does? When ALL the bad ones always do? More often now. All the time.
I drop the page, slam the door shut, run to the bed, and pick up my laptop.
What do you want??? Please, El, just tell me what’s going on.
The reply is immediate. I’M NOT EL. EL IS DEAD.
And still I can’t resist. Even though I know – I know – that resisting is the only sane response left to me.
Then who the fuck are you?
This time, she makes me wait for maybe a minute.
I’M MOUSE.
*
‘Let’s go out,’ Ross says. ‘I’m sick to death of staring at these four walls.’
And I can’t say no, because I don’t want to. I want to go just about anywhere as long as it’s not here.
I take a long time getting ready. Too long. I put on one of my few expensive dresses, short and black, trimmed with blue silk thread. I pin up my hair, loose and high. I paint my nails the same red as my lips. And when I look in the mirror, I see El before I see me. And then convince myself I don’t.
At the top of the stairs, I’m suddenly paralysed by an awful sense of foreboding. It makes me want to run back to the Clown Café and stay there. Fingers push against my spine, my shoulder blades. Stop being afraid of falling. Or you’ll always be too afraid to fly.
‘You ready?’ Ross calls from the kitchen. And I grip hold of the bannister, heart thundering, until the vertigo, that old terrible urge to let go, to fall, vanishes to the same dark place as Mum’s furious voice.
*
The restaurant is along a narrow close off Leith Street, its cobbles lit only by old Victorian lanterns. Ross puts his hand on the small of my back as he opens the door. Inside, it’s busy without being noisy; low-beamed and cosy, with red-and-white chequered tablecloths and chocolate-dark walls.
A fat bearded man waves, makes his way over to us.
‘Ross!’ he says. ‘It’s awfy good to see ye, my friend.’
While he shakes Ross’s hand, I’m treated to a scrutiny as uncertain as it is unsubtle.
‘I heard there was still no news,’ he says, still looking at me, and the penny drops. He thinks I’m El, but at the same time he knows I’m not.
‘No, not yet,’ Ross says. ‘Sorry, this is, em … Cat, El’s twin sister. Cat, this is Michele. He also owns Favoloso in the Old Town.’
Michele shakes his head. ‘Aye, it’s a terrible thing … a terrible thing.’ His gaze slides back to me. ‘It’s uncanny, hen, how much ye look like her.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ross says again. ‘I know we haven’t booked or anything, but I wondered …’
‘Aye, of course, no worries. Come wi’ me.’
We weave around tables until we reach the rear of the restaurant. I can hear the muted clatter and chatter of the kitchen. Michele ushers us towards a corner booth. ‘I’m afraid it’s a wee bit, em …’
It is a wee bit em. The booth chairs are high, and two long-stem candles flicker at each side of the table, a single red rose in a vase between them. There are no other tables anywhere near it. Clearly this is the designated special romantic occasion corner.
‘It’s fine,’ Ross says. ‘Thanks.’
I take off my coat, and when Ross looks at me, I try not to enjoy the brief flare in his eyes.
He clears his throat, sits down. ‘You look great.’
We order some antipasti and a Frascati that Michele recommends. His departure precipitates what seems like an endless procession of waiters to our table. It’s around about the fifth – a teenage boy bearing a second basket of bread – that I realise this is just more scrutiny. I feel like a freak show curiosity.
‘How many times have you and El come here?’
Ross stops pretending to be oblivious, rubs a hand over his face. ‘I’m sorry, Cat. I didn’t think this would be weird, not even when I got here, you know? I’m really, really sorry. D’you want to go?’
‘No. It’s fine.’ Even though it isn’t. But it’s the situation that I’m really angry with, not him. It’s El. The whole Mouse thing isn’t just annoying, it’s snide. Because she’d always really been my friend, not El’s. The Mouse to my Cat. My creation. Her existence meant that I couldn’t ever be at the very bottom of the pecking order; meant, too, that I could always be guaranteed kind company, a sympathetic hearing. And now El’s hijacked even that. So why the hell should Ross and I feel like a sideshow? Why should we feel guilty? We haven’t done anything wrong.
