Mirrorland, page 2
I look at 36 Westeryk Road in increments. The metal gate is the same. The squared-off high hedges with patches of yellow and the path bisecting the flat lawn. I don’t need to look up to know that the solemn symmetry of grey ashlar bricks and tall, narrow-paned windows is the same. The two flanking stone walls with white fireclay balusters and red wooden doors leading to alleyways alongside the house.
I falter suddenly and swing around. There’s no one there. But the sense that there had been is strong enough that I step forwards, my heart beating too fast. I look across the road at the red sandstone terrace El and I used to call the Gingerbread Coop. Its narrow houses and neat white lintels and window boxes full of pansies and petunias, so at odds with the looming grey house it has always faced. That sense of being watched – examined – intensifies; the hairs on the back of my neck shiver. Stop it.
I turn back to number 36, open the gate, walk the path, climb the four stone steps, and there is the red metal boot scraper, the red last step, the huge red front door. It’s ajar. I once asked Mum why it wasn’t called the Red House, and she blinked, gave me the stupid girl look that is sometimes all I can remember now when I think of her.
It’s the Mirror House. Just like you and Ellice. Just like Mirrorland.
Perhaps El and I once had the same obdurate symmetry as this house – no perhaps about it, I know we did – but nothing can stay the same forever. I push open the door, step up into the entrance hall. Black and white chequered tiles. Dark oak wainscoting and crimson-red walls. As if to prove me straightaway wrong. I close my eyes, and at once I hear the heavy turn and clunk of a deadlock. A flash of black dark. Run. But when I spin around, the door is still open, still warm with sunlight. Stop it.
I turn the brass handle of the second door, catch a glimpse of my big-eyed reflection inside it before the door opens onto the hallway proper, the curving shadow of the staircase. The old carpet is gone, in its place shiny parquet. The sun pierces the fanlight above the door, and at once I see myself sitting cross-legged inside that spear of light, reading Grandpa’s encyclopaedias, the carpet scratching my skin like pricking pins.
The hallway walls are crowded with familiar mounted plates, small and large, scalloped- and gilt-edged: finches, swallows, robins perching on leafy branches, bare branches, snowy branches. The tall oak telephone table and grandfather clock are exactly where they used to be as well, flanking the drawing room door. And even if that seems too unlikely – too bizarre, almost twenty years later – there they stand sentinel nonetheless. The smell is exactly the same, utterly unchanged: old wood and old age and old memory. My incredulity is tempered with a relief I hadn’t been expecting, and an unease that I had. And when I take a long, deep inhale, something inside me loosens and breaks free. It’s still a little like fear – it’s brittle and has sharp edges. But it’s warm too. Deep like the ocean. It has expectations. Too big a part of me is glad that I’m back here after all. Glad that all is exactly, incredibly, inexplicably the same as it ever was.
I turn into the kitchen as if this still really is my house, and there is Ross, on his hands and knees on the blue and white tiles. He looks up. Blinks. Flinches.
And I’m too busy thinking of all the things I can’t say to him to come up with anything better than ‘I’m flattered. Most folk just say hi.’
*
‘Cat.’ His voice breaks as though my name has two syllables. When he stands up, I realise that there are slivers and chunks of smashed white china scattered all over the tiles between us.
‘Can I help?’
‘I’ll sort it later.’ He steps over the broken china and stops a foot short of me. His smile is as tight as mine feels. ‘How’s LA?’
‘Hot.’
His knuckles are white. ‘How was the journey?’
‘All right. Long.’ I don’t know why I can’t speak. I don’t know why we’re trying to have this ridiculous conversation. Ross looks the same but different, just like the house. His face is pale, the skin beneath his eyes heavier than in those news reports, no longer purple but black. His stubble is dark, his hair messy as if he’s run his fingers through it too many times. Underneath all that he looks older, I suppose, but it hasn’t done him any harm. Not the way El going missing has. There are more wrinkles around those peat-brown, silver-flecked eyes; his face is leaner. I wonder if his smile is still crooked, if his left canine still slightly overlaps his front incisor. Immediately, I look away.
‘They say it’s always hardest coming back,’ he says.
‘Yeah.’
He clears his throat. ‘I mean, travelling west to east.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I know what you mean.’
His T-shirt is wrinkled, his arms are goose-bumped. He steps forwards. Stops again. Rubs his hands against his face.
‘God, how many years has it been?’
‘Twelve?’ I whisper, as though I don’t know, and my throat closes up and my eyes start to burn. Suddenly all of it – El, him, this house – is too much. I’m tired and I’m sad and I’m scared, and most of all I’m so fucking angry – angry that I’ve had to come back here, angry that even one part of me wants to be back here. It’s been less than twenty-four hours, but when I think of my beautiful Pacific Avenue condo now, it has the texture of glossy paper. Just some place I visited a long time ago.
Maybe that’s why I don’t step away from his embrace. Why I let him put his arms around me and pull me so tight against him that I can feel the scratch of his stubble against my neck, the warmth of his breath against my skin, the vibration of his voice – familiar and forgotten. Utterly unchanged.
‘Thank God you’ve come back, Cat.’
*
I try not to look at anything else as we climb the stairs, but it’s impossible. The oak bannister, curving and smooth under my palm, the spill of green and gold light from the stained-glass window onto the mosaic stair tiles. The first-floor landing squeaks underfoot exactly where I’m expecting it to, and I’ve already begun walking towards Bedroom 1 before I catch myself. Ross is standing inside the door opposite, with my suitcase in his hand and an embarrassed half-smile.
‘That’s our room,’ he says.
‘Sorry,’ I say, walking back across the landing too quickly. ‘Of course it is.’ I can’t help wondering what it looks like now. When El and I shared it, the bedspread was golden yellow, the wallpaper a rain-forest explosion of green and brown and gold. At night, we’d close the big wooden shutters over the window and pretend we were Victorian explorers in the Kakadu Jungle in Northern Australia.
I follow Ross into Bedroom 2. The guest room. Familiar neat pine furniture and a tall window looking out onto the back garden. There’s a paint-spattered easel and pallet in one corner, two canvases leaning against the wall. Angry oceans, green and foaming white, under dark and thunderous skies. El could draw and paint before she could read.
‘Is this okay?’ Ross asks.
I recognise the cupboard alongside the wardrobe with a jolt; wonder in the same moment if it’s still full of face paints, orange wigs, multicoloured nylon jumpsuits, and false red noses. But its hinges and seams are painted shut. I look around the room again, at the wallpaper striped white and red and pink, and I start to smile. Of course. I’m in the Clown Café.
‘Cat?’
‘Sorry. Yes, this is fine. Great.’
‘You must find it weird being back here, I guess.’
I can’t quite meet his gaze. I still remember the day he told me they’d bought the house. I was sitting outside a loud and overcrowded bar on Lincoln Boulevard, feeling hungover and ridiculously hot. I’d been in Southern California for a few years by then, but still hadn’t acclimatised to relentlessly sunny. The first thing I felt was shock. Everything else came after the call was over and I was left alone to imagine them curled up in the drawing room in front of the fire and its bottle-green tiles, drinking champagne and talking about the future. Although it wasn’t the last time he called me, it was the last time I answered.
‘I just can’t understand how everything can still be here, after all this time. I mean, other people must have lived here since—’
‘An older couple were here for years. The MacDonalds,’ Ross says. ‘They must have got most of the original furniture in the sale and didn’t change much. When we bought it, we replaced most of what was missing.’
I look at him. ‘Replaced?’
‘Yeah. I mean, they left the big stuff: the kitchen cabinets and table, the range, the chesterfield. The dining room furniture. But most everything else is new. Well, not new – you know what I mean.’ His smile is strained and unhappy, but there’s anger in it too. ‘Felt like every weekend, El wanted to drag me to antique shops or fairs.’
I flinch at her name – I can’t help it – and Ross looks at me carefully, holds my gaze too long.
‘You never asked me why,’ he says. ‘Back then. Why we bought this place.’
I turn away from him. Look towards the window and that painted-over cupboard door.
‘It came up for auction. El saw the notice in the paper.’ He sits heavily down on the bed. ‘I thought it was unhealthy to dwell on the past. I mean … you know what I mean …’
And I do. I was happy here. Mostly. And I’ve been so unhappy since. But I still know it’s true: you can never go back.
‘I got the deposit together, helped her buy it.’ He shrugs. ‘You know what El was like when she wanted something.’
My face heats, my skin prickles. He’s talking about her in the past tense, I realise. I wonder if it’s because he thinks she’s dead, or because she and I don’t have any kind of a present any more.
He clears his throat. Reaches into his pocket. ‘I figured while you were here you’d need these. So that you can come and go when you want.’ He holds out two Yale keys. ‘This is for the hallway door, but I usually leave it unlocked, and this is the night latch for the front door. There’s a deadlock too, but there’s only one key, so I’ll stop locking it.’
I take the keys, squash flat the memory of black dark. Run. ‘Thanks.’
He rocks forwards onto his feet as if yanked by strings. He starts to pace, running his hands through his hair, seizing big fistfuls. ‘God, Cat, I need to be doing something, but I don’t know what. I don’t know what!’
He wheels on one foot and lunges towards me, eyes wide enough that I can see the red threads around each iris. ‘They think she’s dead. They keep skirting around it, saying it without saying it, but it’s obvious that’s what they think. Tomorrow, she’ll have been missing for four days. And how long do you reckon they’ll keep looking before all their muttering about weather and time and resources becomes “I’m very sorry, Doctor MacAuley, but there’s nothing more we can do”?’ He throws up his hands. His T-shirt is stained dark at the armpits. ‘I mean, it’s not just her that’s disappeared, it’s a twenty-foot boat with a twenty-two-foot mast! How can that just vanish? And she was a good sailor,’ he says, still pacing. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first time he’s said all this to someone. ‘She knew I hated it when she went out alone on that bloody boat.’ He drops back down onto the bed, strings cut. ‘I always told her something like this could happen.’
‘I didn’t even know she could sail,’ I say. ‘Never mind owned a boat.’
Moored at Granton Harbour. I suffer an image of us standing at the bowsprit of the Satisfaction instead – laughing, shouting, the hot tropical wind tangling in our hair – and I feel a stab of something between longing and fury.
‘She bought it online a couple of years ago.’ Another flash of anger. ‘Binding contract, non-refundable deposit. She was making good money from commissions, the occasional art show, but not enough. So I had to pay the balance. And she got what she wanted. Before she even knew how to bloody sail the thing. God, I wish I’d never—’ He draws his hands down his face, dragging at his skin. ‘It’s my fault. All of it.’
I sit down next to him, even though I don’t want to. I want to tell him that she’s not dead, but I can’t. He isn’t ready to hear it yet. ‘How can it be your fault?’
He was away: some last-minute psychopharmacology conference in London. An annual requirement for all practicing clinical psychologists. ‘The efficacy of psychoactive therapies versus safe ratios,’ he says. As if that’s important. As if I have a clue what that is. He blames himself for not being here, for not stopping her going out, even though we both know it wouldn’t have made a difference. But that isn’t all of it. There’s something else, I can tell. Something he isn’t saying.
‘By the time I got back, she’d already been missing for at least five hours, probably more, and that storm had come in from nowhere.’
I think of that Day One photo of him caught in the shadows between two round, flat spotlights.
‘Yesterday, they widened the search to the North Sea. All the fishing boats and tankers out there are looking for her too, but …’ He shakes his head, stands up again. ‘I know they’re going to stop looking for her soon. I know they are. The police are coming round tomorrow morning. No one wants me down at the harbour any more, doing fucking nothing but getting in the way.’ He snorts. ‘The wailing widower.’
He seems so angry, so bitterly resigned.
‘You must be knackered. Why don’t you try to get some sleep?’
He immediately starts to protest.
‘I can’t sleep until tonight anyway,’ I say. ‘If anything happens, I’ll wake you up, okay? I promise.’
His shoulders sag. His smile is so wretched, I have to look away from it. I look out instead at the green windy sway of the orchard beyond the window.
‘Okay,’ he says, reaching out to squeeze my hand once. ‘Thank you.’ At the door, he turns briefly back, his smile more like his own. ‘I meant what I said, you know. I’m really glad you’re back.’
I root about in my suitcase until I find one of the vodka miniatures I bought on the flight. Sit down on the bed in the warm space where Ross was, and drink it. On the bedside table, there’s a framed photo of a very young El and Ross grinning next to the floral clock in Princes Street Gardens. His fingers are inside the waistband of her denim shorts; hers are splayed across his stomach. Had I gone by then? Had I already been forgotten? I look at El’s big happy grin, and know the answer.
I turn away, look around at the room again instead. The Clown Café was solely El’s invention: a richly imagined roadside American diner, with walls of red and white and glass tubes of pink neon. An old record player was a jukebox playing fifties Elvis. The pine sideboard was our table; two high stools, our chairs. The bed was a long serving counter, and the cupboard, the john.
I wasn’t keen on Clowns; back then, we both believed absolutely that they were a species entirely separate from people. I felt as much pity for them as queasy mistrust: it seemed to me that they had few opportunities in life other than those allotted to them, and even at eight years old, I could relate to that. El thought travelling with a circus would be just about the best job in the world, of course.
But the Tooth Fairy was afraid of Clowns. And we were afraid of the Tooth Fairy. So we’d hide out here in the Clown Café – our skin itching under face paints and plastic noses, nylon wigs and jumpsuits – drinking coffee and eating fried doughnuts with two Clown veterans called Dicky Grock and Pogo. Dicky Grock was the Clown Café’s cook: mute and sad-faced, an ex-juggler who’d hated the big top and had retired early. And Pogo was small-boned and large-toothed, king of the short gag, with a particular propensity for sneaking up behind you with a bullhorn. I was as terrified of him as I was the Tooth Fairy.
But it was always worth it. The discomfort, the fear, the queasy unease. Because the Clown Café was ours. It was important. It was one of the best hiding places in the world.
I swallow. I haven’t thought about the Clown Café in years. I haven’t thought about us in years. Suddenly desperate to breathe fresh air, I go to the window, pull up hard on the bottom sash. When it doesn’t budge, I look down. There are maybe a dozen long crooked nails hammered into the sill through the window frame. And there’s no reason for that to scare me, but it does. It scares me as much as that split second in LA when I thought El might actually be dead. Or that part of me that’s glad I’m here. In this place where my first life ended and was never ever supposed to restart.
‘Oh, El,’ I whisper, pressing my fingers against the cold glass. ‘What the fuck have you done?’
CHAPTER 3
The house is both too quiet and too loud.
I stand on the landing at the top of the stairs and take a breath. The carpet is gone from here too, but the glass globe that hangs from the ceiling rose and the gold light from Westeryk Road that floods through the open bathroom door straight ahead are the same. I look around at all of the closed doors – Bedrooms 1, 2, 4, and 5 – and remember the names we gave them: the Kakadu Jungle, opposite the Clown Café; the Princess Tower, opposite the Donkshop. My heart, too, remembers to beat a warning close to the mouth of the dark corridor between the Clown Café and the Princess Tower, but I ignore it, turn and walk quickly towards the room at its gloomy end. Bedroom 3. It must have had a name too, but I can’t remember it. When I reach the door, its matte-black panels thick with dust, I realise that I’ve wrapped my arms tight around my torso to avoid touching the narrow corridor walls. I shake them out and take another breath. Jesus, come on. But when I close my fingers over the handle, I hear El shriek in my ear, Don’t go in! We can’t ever go in! and then Mum’s voice – higher, sharper, never inviting opinion or dissent – You ever go in there, and I’ll have both your guts for garters, you hear me?
I do.
I let go, step quickly backwards, unwilling to turn my back on that door until I’m on the landing again, standing inside warm gold light. I’m shuddering hard and long with no idea why. The why itches under my skin; I can feel it, but not enough to want to scratch.
Stop. Just ghosts. That’s all.
I slow my breathing down. Cross over to Bedroom 5, push open its door. Grandpa called it the Donkshop because that was the boat’s engine room; it was its power, its beating heart. The solid oak double bed and wardrobe are there, and the big ugly desk where he would work. I remember the loud hiss of radio static; even with his hearing aids, Grandpa was deaf enough that the whole house knew every single football result by the end of a Saturday afternoon. But the radio is gone. There are no mountains of screws and bolts and springs, mutilated machines and motors. There is no smell of oil and warm metal. The Donkshop’s heart stopped beating a long time ago.
