There was an old skylight set into the washhouse’s slate roof. Black with dead leaves and dirt. The garden walls were too high to climb, and we knew exactly what Grandpa would say – worse, what Mum would say – if they caught us playing with a boy, so from the very start Ross was our secret, and we were his. The only time we ever visited Mirrorland during the day was on Saturday afternoons, while Mum hoovered and cleaned the house and Grandpa shut himself in the Donkshop, football results reverberating throughout the house. Ross would climb down onto the washhouse roof from his bedroom window, jimmy open the skylight, and then drop down into Mirrorland.
The first time he did, I could barely look at him. I remember that my hands were clammy when he blinked at us both with those peat-brown eyes, when he grinned his crooked grin. ‘You look the same.’
El didn’t suffer from the same chronic shyness as me. Within minutes, Ross knew our age, shoe size, likes and dislikes; that we were Mirror Twins: rare, special, two in one hundred thousand. And it’s true that I was jealous then. Jealous of her confidence. Jealous that she got more of his attention.
We spent most of that first day with the cowboys. Saturday afternoons were for fighting or target practice. Mum said we had to be able to protect ourselves from the bad men and outlaws that hid behind doors and inside shadows. El was always a far better shot than me, and I was relieved when practice ended early so that we could help Ross make his own slingshot out of twigs and rubber bands.
Afterwards, I slunk off to hide inside the biggest teepee, a precarious frame of old scaffolding poles under a sheet. Chief Red Cloud, sitting cross-legged in breechcloths and feather warbonnet, barely spared me a glance. The Lakota Sioux taught us how to make war clubs and tomahawks out of gardening tools and feathers, or how to defend ourselves with blocks and strikes, holds and rolls. But never on days when they’d seen us hanging out with cowboys.
I said hello, sat down, pretended I wasn’t hiding. Across from the chief, Belle reclined on cushions like an Arabian princess, rubies and long silver blades glinting in her hair. She smiled and winked at me. Of everyone in Mirrorland, Belle was who I longed to be the most: beautiful and wild, impossibly cool. Beside her, Annie snorted. She could never care less about any predicament of mine. I wonder now if she was some kind of extension of our absolute belief that all adult women were like Mum: stern, angry, often frightening. Annie had two Irish pistols, a long, jagged scar from temple to ear, and more courage than any other pirate on the Satisfaction. Standing tall in her high buckled boots, alligator-skin belt, and cowhide jacket with buttons made from whalebone, it was impossible not to be afraid of her. And she knew it. She grinned at me and lunged close. ‘You’re a grand wee coward, so you are.’
Mouse nudged my elbow, gave me a tremulous smile. She’d tied a piece of rope tight around the waist of her black sack dress, had drawn clumsy white chalk lines to match the stripes of the gingham dresses El and I wore. Mouse always tried to look like us and act like us, but she was too submissive, too skinny, her hair hacked short and dark like all the other deckhands. She smeared her skin white with clown face paint, stained her cheeks and lips rosy red like Belle’s. A manifestation of our fears and uncertainties, we could tell her all our secrets, our terrors, and watch her absorb them like a sponge. And then we could punish her for them: ignoring her, mocking her, making her walk the plank or take a bullet in Boomtown. Mirrorland made our imaginations fierce and mostly unforgiving. And Mouse was by far our favourite piñata. But that day, she sat quietly beside me in Chief Red Cloud’s teepee, patting my hand like Grandpa, eyes big and blue and full of the best kind of sympathy. ‘It’ll be okay, Cat. I love you.’
When Ross poked his head and shoulders through the entrance, I stopped breathing. ‘Cool teepee,’ he said. ‘How did you build it?’
And better than his obvious certainty that I had built it was the realisation that he’d come to me, he was talking to me, in that moment he was ignoring everyone else but me. Of course, he hadn’t been in Mirrorland long enough to know or see any of its characters yet, but he could see El over his shoulder in Boomtown, he could hear the impatient stamp of her feet.
El was still mad when Ross swung back up through the skylight a few hours later.
‘Cat’s afraid of heights, you know.’ She smirked. ‘Sometimes she can’t even go down stairs.’
‘Shut up!’ I cried.
But he only smiled at both of us. ‘I’ll come back next Saturday,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell your mum about me. She’ll ruin it.’
I fold up the second diary page, push it inside my pocket with the other. My back aches and my feet are numb. I’ve no idea what time it is, but I know it’s been hours since Ross went upstairs to sleep and somehow I’m still here, sitting at the kitchen table, staring into old memories. Why does she want me to do that? What does she want me to remember? Is that even the point of this at all? I have no idea why this treasure hunt is so different than those of our childhood. Why she’s emailing me clues that lead to shoeboxes full of junk or the hidden pages of a diary she wrote more than twenty years ago. While she’s disappeared to God knows where.
Control has to be the most of it. El’s need for control has always been as necessary to her – as vital – as oxygen. That can’t have changed. She’s emailing me clues instead of leaving them with the diary pages, because she wants to be in control of when I look. What I find. That makes perfect sense. Even if nothing else does. But it doesn’t mean I have to play along.
I open my laptop. Click reply before I can think myself out of it.
Who is this? My sister is missing. If you don’t tell me who you are NOW, I’m going to the police.
The beep of an answer comes so quickly, it makes me jump.
DON’T
This time, I reply with no hesitation at all. What do you want?
I KNOW THINGS. THINGS YOU’VE MADE YOURSELF FORGET
THINGS HE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW
DON’T TELL THE POLICE. DON’T TELL ANYONE
YOU’RE IN DANGER
I CAN HELP YOU
Fuck off, El. I know it’s you. You need to stop. You need to come back. Stop it. And come back.
She doesn’t reply. I sit at the kitchen table for a long time, no longer numb and stiff, but hot and angry. Until I hear a sound in the hallway. I get up and move slowly to the door, open it as if I expect to see something crouched and waiting to pounce on the other side.
The hallway is empty. The stained-glass window is black dark. There’s a light on: a Victorian oil lamp on the old telephone table that casts a red milky glow across the parquet. The house clanks and clunks and groans as if it’s a sleeping machine, as if the walls are breathing in and out, in and out.
I catch sight of my face in the mirror over the telephone table, the glass speckled with age and curled dark at its corners; my face clown-white and pulled ugly by shadows. Another noise makes me freeze. It’s low and keening, trapped like the howl of wind inside a narrow space. And it’s coming from the drawing room.
I tiptoe across the parquet. Turn the handle and open the door. It gives a ludicrously loud creak, but Ross doesn’t even look up. He’s sitting on the rug in front of the fire, turning the pages of a photograph album. Their wedding album. The wedding I wasn’t invited to.