I lurch out of bed, stagger to the bathroom, and make it just in time, my retches loud and humiliating. I stay on my knees for a long while, and then I get up slowly, stagger to the sink. The tap water is warm, metallic, but I glug it down nonetheless, barely stopping to draw breath. When I can avoid it no longer, I look at the mirror.
There’s nothing there. No round clown face painted carefully in El’s acrylics. It was the only warning we ever gave the Tooth Fairy whenever she was on the prowl. A little clown face in the corner of a mirror that we hoped would frighten her back into hiding before we had to resort to painting our faces and putting on our wigs and noses and jumpsuits in the Clown Café. Because everyone – everything – is terrified of something. And for the Tooth Fairy, it wasn’t just Clowns, it was the very idea of them.
I open the mirror, start searching through the cabinet for another diary page. I reach behind some pill bottles, and one teeters and falls, crashing and rattling around the porcelain until I manage to catch hold of it. It feels mostly empty, and I’m already putting it back when I see El’s name.
PROZAC (Fluoxetine) 60mg tabs
ONCE DAILY
WITH OR WITHOUT FOOD
If it were possible to feel any lower, I would. I pick up the neighbouring pill bottle. Diazepam. Prozac and Valium. A folded-up square of paper – the next clue – is sitting in the space where they were. I pick it up, put back the bottles. Look at myself in the mirror. My grey face, limp hair, black-shadowed puffy eyes. I think of Grandpa’s There’s an arsehole on every boat, and if there’s no, it’s prob’ly you.
What the fuck am I doing? But I know. I know how I feel about him. I’ve always known. And I know that even if El was still here, I would feel the same: a hostage to memories – truths – that I’ve spent years trying to ignore. I’m appalled by how easily they’ve come back, as if they’ve only been treading water when I’d imagined them long drowned.
I sit on the toilet lid, open the diary page, catch a glimpse of its very last line, I HATE CAT, and then I let it drop to the floor to nurse my aching head in my hands. She is my sister. And once upon a time, before she decided that she hated me, El loved me. And I loved her. Nothing and no one existed but us. Ross is her husband. I kissed him; he didn’t kiss me. He had every right to look horrified. And if his horror seems worse than his guilt, then that’s probably because I’m an arsehole. A selfish, husband-snogging cow.
A coil of what if? is unravelling in my belly. What if those pills mean she has had some kind of breakdown? Wouldn’t that better explain this bizarre treasure hunt? What if I’m wrong about her being okay? What if she really is in trouble? What if she’s having the same sort of desperate thoughts as Ross? What if she’s already—
I get up too quickly. Strip off my T-shirt and turn on the shower while still dizzy. Let the scalding water beat against my skin and my skull until its steam is all I see and the pain is all I feel.
Only once I’m dry and warm and dressed do I pick up that diary page again and start reading.
November 30th, 1996 = 10+1/2 (IN 1 MONTH!!!)
Cat’s not speaking to me but I don’t care. Its not my fault. Mum says even PIRATES have to have RULES. We’re aloud to give someone the BLACK SPOT if we want. And anyway it was Ross’s idea/fault. He told me it would be fun and it was till Cat started to cry. I tried to stop him. I felt bad so I helped her even tho I’m NOT supposed to. I used our SECRET PIRATE CODE which is only supposed to be used in DIRE EMERGENCYS. I’m not writing it here just incase – I know you want to know it but TOUGH LUCK!!! Only me and Cat know it and thats the way it’s going to stay!! But she didn’t care anyway and she didn’t say thankyou!!! She just CRIED!!!
I think she’s just mad coz Ross said my painting of DAD was BRILLYANT. She’s always jellous and then pretends she isn’t. She’s just mad coz she knows Ross likes me better than her even tho we look the same.
Sometimes I HATE CAT.
I think of that portrait of the pirate Captain Henry taped to the southern boundary wall in Mirrorland. The painstaking hours it took El to paint it, making Mum describe him over and over again. He’d once been respectable, Mum said, had worked for the government for years before he’d had to leave us for a long life at sea.
Did I ever really believe that our father was a pirate king? I know I did. So much of Mirrorland began as Mum’s invention before El and I turned it into something else, something more than alive. We were so proud of him. That’s our dad, El told Ross that first day he swung down through the skylight. He’s called Captain Henry, and one day he’s coming back for us. He’s going to take us to The Island. Our belief was unshakable, unbreakable. Through almost everything, that never changed. We believed it absolutely. Even though we were wrong.
Ours was never a religious home. Grandpa, in particular, was scathing of anyone who showed even the slightest hint of being a holy wullie. Nevertheless, El and I prayed every night on our knees next to our bed. An antidote against the sometimes dark of Mirrorland perhaps. Or an insurance policy. A just-in-case. We were good at those. We would ask God how he was, if he’d had a nice day. And then we’d ask him to bless us and Grandpa and Mum and Dad, later Ross too. We never dared mention the pirates, the Clowns, the Indians, or the cowboys. Different worlds, we considered, were best kept separate.
And then one morning, El woke up and announced, ‘God doesn’t exist. We’re not going to waste time praying to him any more.’ The end of her nose was bright pink. Her eyes flashed in a bad imitation of Mum. ‘You don’t believe in him anyway.’
She was mostly right, but it was hardly the point. If anything, what I liked was the ritual of praying, the kneeling side by side and knowing we were the only ones in the house who did it, night after night, week after week, building up credit. Once upon a time, I derived great pleasure in being virtuous.
And we were deep in Ross and El versus me territory by then. I was mad. Sad. Some nights I’d lie awake in bed for hours trying to come up with something – anything – that El would object to, be horrified by, notice, but I never could.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to do what you say.’
El wasted no time in paying me back. Within the week, she had turned everyone against me. Grandpa by telling him I prayed to a non-existent God; Mum because I’d pissed off Grandpa; everyone else, because everyone else – except perhaps Mouse, who clung to her neutrality like a life raft – had already been on El’s side anyway. Even the Clowns.
I dug in. I’ve always been stubborn if rarely brave. In this instance, it only served to escalate our impasse, until I was formally summoned to a parley on the Satisfaction. The Witch was in the kitchen that day, I suddenly remember. Sitting at the table, while Mum stirred a pot on the stove. The Witch lunged into the hallway as I came down the stairs, her brittle black hair coiled on her head like a snake, a long bony finger pointing at my chest, eyes narrowed in suspicion.
‘What are you doing, you little horror?’ Her glare was icy. She breathed through her nose like a bull.
I ran around the bottom of the bannister and barged through the pantry’s black curtain without answering her. But I crept down to Mirrorland with a heavy heart. Being shouted at by the Witch seemed like a very bad omen indeed.