The door to Mirrorland.
I look at the door for a long time. There used to be something pinned to its surface. One of El’s paintings: an early effort focused more on colour than form. Blues and yellows and greens. I close my eyes. The Island. Of course, The Island. A rough coastline of rocks and beach, an interior of forest and flatland. A tropical paradise instead of a snowy wonderland, since Mirrorland was our Narnia. Of sorts. Though it had more colour, more ambiguity. More terrors. More fun.
I’m holding my breath. I draw back the bolts. I pull open the door.
It’s the cold I feel first; the cold that I’ve forgotten. When I let my breath go, it fogs white in the dark space ahead of me. My fingers grip the door. There was a treasure map on this side of it. Black roads and green spaces. Long blue water. A volcano. The memory sharpens and then loses focus. I’m procrastinating, I realise – hesitating, even though that thick sense of longing is back, that urgent need to step down into the darkness, to step out of this house and into another world. I felt it just the same the first time Mum showed us this hidden door, this secret space. Fear, deep and brittle and delicious.
I step out of the cupboard, out of the house, and down onto the first wooden tread. I shiver as I look up at the low wooden roof and narrow wooden walls that enclose the staircase. As the creak of that old wood settles and suffocates, I wonder if my nervous excitement is merely the ghost of the child I once was. Creeping down here in the dark, in the night, so many, many times with El, it seems impossible that our sticky, hot hands haven’t left behind some residue on the walls and bannisters; our torches, no shadows of dancing, jagged light; our terrorised giggles and whispered shoosh!es, no echoes.
This time, I only have the light on my phone. It casts an ugly white glow that creates more shadows. The old vertigo – that dizzying terror of always waiting to fall – seizes sudden hold of me, and I find that I can’t move. I close my eyes, breathe slowly until it passes. Because I’m no longer a child. My fantasies can no longer ride roughshod over logic, over reality. There is nothing to be afraid of down here. Two hundred years ago, when Westeryk was still a village and this the largest, grandest house within it, before this door was hidden behind a cupboard, it was nothing more than a convenience, a contrivance. Access to the kitchen was possible only from the back garden or the front door. This pantry, this door, this staircase, and the alleyway beneath are nothing more than a tradesman’s entrance. The rear of the house sits on far lower ground than the front, its rooms elevated ten feet or more above the back garden. This covered steep staircase serves the same ordinary purpose as the scullery stairs: access to ground level.
And yet my light still shakes as I descend, as the staircase’s walls and roof open up into draughty space, and at the bottom of the stairs, I hesitate again. The darkness has more dominion here, my memories more power. Anticipation, sharp and bitter, like lemon juice rubbed into a cut.
I step down onto stone. Down into Mirrorland.
My phone judders frantic light across brick and wood and cobwebs, and I grasp it in both hands. Stop. I’m only in an alleyway. A ten-foot-wide, stone-paved corridor between the exterior southern flank of the house and the boundary wall, sheltered from the weather by a low wooden roof like a medieval hoarding over battlements. Stretching from the now bricked-over door to the front garden in the west and the stone washhouse in the east. The latter sits squat at the end of the alleyway like a sentinel, a gatehouse, blocking the exit into the back garden, save for a small door set into its only exposed side.
I turn through one more circle, my frozen breath spinning a wreath of fog around me. The morning sun is still low enough that it breaks through the cracks in the wooden roof as tiny shafts of bright white. I look up, see the bare bulb hanging down from the hoarding’s ridge board in just the instant I remember it. When I pull on its string, I’m rewarded – incredibly – by immediate and strong light, as if I wasn’t already struggling to believe that time here hasn’t stood stock still, that everything I’m seeing and feeling is only that old ghost and echo of me, of us.
Of a magic place. Because, whatever else, I can’t deny that. This might once have only been a tradesman’s entrance, a means to a supercilious end; it might now be forgotten – only empty, draughty space and stone – but in-between it was something else. Once upon a time, it was rich and full and alive. Gloriously frightening and steadfastly safe. Exciting beyond measure. Hidden. Special. Ours.
I turn back to look at the bricked-up door. The larger part of Mirrorland, stretching along the alleyway from the bottom of the stairs to that door was once Boomtown: a dusty boardwalk of fruit crates and wooden planks six or more feet across, staging a post office and a marshal’s office, furnished with cardboard-box counters and tables, seats of cushions and blankets and pillows. The Three-Fingered-Joe Saloon was in the southwest corner against the boundary wall; in the northwest was a cluster of Lakota Sioux teepees and a training arena delineated by sticks laid end to end in a square.
Later, Boomtown became a prison; the Three-Fingered-Joe Saloon, a rather less exotic Recreational Dayroom; the wooden crates, the doors and walls of Cellblock 5; and us, its prisoners. The Shank. In its heyday, El used to make me sit beside her for hours, fashioning the bloody things out of sharpened toothbrushes and Grandpa’s old razor blades.
I turn east, walk down towards the washhouse, running the palm of my right hand against the rough brick of the boundary wall. On its other side, I know, is another long alleyway and green garden, another cavernous house – a newer Victorian villa with bay windows and painted bricks and bargeboards. The alleyway narrows around a large locked armoire that I remember was once full of games and books. Beside it is a wide blue pram, with three rusted big wheels and a shopping tray, a white faded label in the corner of its mouldy hood: ‘Silver Cross’.
The washhouse door is unlocked; it was always unlocked – hence the padlock and all those rusty chains strung across its other exit into the back garden. The washhouse was the most important part of Mirrorland. Warmer and better built, better felt, once as vital as breathing. And yet less than half an hour ago, I stood outside on the scullery steps and saw only an old stone building with a red-framed window and small slate roof.
I open the door, step up onto floorboards speckled with old paint and dust. They groan and give underfoot, enough to make me want to test each step first. The washhouse smells of mildew and damp, and something sour and green like compost. It has me remembering all sorts of other things I’ve forgotten even before I turn into its biggest space, illuminated by daylight from the window. Boxes and crates are stacked high in every corner; wooden poles are balanced on piles of dirty sheets; there are two free-standing fans, their flexes curled black.
‘My God.’
My voice echoes, hoarse and weak. I fold my arms tightly around myself as I stare at the washhouse walls. Sky blue and ocean green, white puffs of cloud and white frills of wave, the old brushstrokes messy and impatient. I look down at the floorboards, and under all the dust and dirt are the old charcoal lines of the Satisfaction.
Bowsprit. Jib. Forecastle. Foresail. I whisper the words under my breath as I walk over them. Main Deck and Gun Deck, El’s black scrawls of Rum and Water Stores HERE!! Magazine HERE!! I walk from one end of the washhouse to the other: Crew’s Quarters, Cargo Hold, Mainsail, Crow’s Nest, Navigation Room, Captain’s Quarters, Stern. A moss-covered hose is coiled around two taps, its nozzle – still set to spray – lying inside the old butler sink. I look at the Jolly Roger above it, its painted skull and crossbones stretched flat, fixed to the stone with black electrical tape. And then I look across at that little window, a porthole through which we bathed in moonlight and navigated by the stars. Because while Boomtown and the Shank were only for the day, the Satisfaction was mostly for the night.