If she says ‘practical’ one more time in her ridiculous voice, I think I might strangle her. I can’t actually understand why Ross isn’t strangling her.
I open the kitchen door with a little more force than necessary. Ross stands up, pulls both of his hands free of Shona’s.
‘Would you like some tea, Cat?’ she asks, cheeks flushed.
‘No tea,’ I say, but I’m not looking at her, I’m looking at Ross.
I make a long production of making myself coffee instead, and Shona gets ready to leave, with earnest promises to return tomorrow or the next day or whenever Ross needs her to.
‘I’ll see you out,’ I say, with a tight smile.
Inside the entrance hall, I put my hand on the night latch, and before I open the front door, I turn to face her. ‘She’s not dead.’
‘What?’ She has a scattering of light brown freckles across her nose. Her white-blonde hair looks like it would snap in a stiff breeze. She’s like a fucking pixie.
‘She’s not dead,’ I say again, and when I lean closer, my smile, I know, is El’s: wide, cold, mocking. ‘Too bad for you.’
CHAPTER 10
9 April 2018 at 06:56
Inbox
john.smith120594@gmail.com
Re: HE KNOWS
To: Me
CLUE 4. IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES, IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES
Sent from my iPhone
9 April 2018 at 07:02
Inbox
john.smith120594@gmail.com
Re: EL
To: Me
I’M NOT IN TROUBLE. BUT YOU ARE
Sent from my iPhone
I find the diary page inside a battered copy of A Tale of Two Cities, on the shelf below El’s self-portrait. It was her favourite book for a long time: the horror of it, the brutality; Madame Defarge and her knitting needles. She used to laugh at me for loving Anne of Green Gables instead.
October 12th, 1997: 11Y, 3M, 12D
Mum is always making us read or reading to us. She NEVER stops! But at least now they’re not baby stories or Shakespeare (YUKK). Now they’re much more exiting – about wars and spies and murder! We just finished Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption which is a stupid name but the book is the best!!! Its about a guy called Andy Dufrain whose in prison for murder but he didn’t do it and he spends the next 27 YEARS! planning his escape. Its BRILLYANT!!! He has to use this tiny hammer to tunnel thru 4 feet of concrete and then he has to crawl thru a pipe full of SHIT!!! For 500 YARDS!!! IMMENSE/INSANE!!!!!!
The bit at the very end when his freind Red gets let out and he realises Andy has left him money and has set up a new life for him too is even more BRILLYANT! It made me cry which was SOOOOO embarassing but I don’t care cos I LOVE it.
I LOVE MY MUM TOO
I LOVE CAT (sometimes!!! When she’s not being a BITCH!!! Ha)
Mum never wavered in her belief that everything in life could be learned from books. By the time El and I were ten, she’d moved on from reading us fairytales to Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Dickens, Christie. Books piled up in that cupboard in the Princess Tower as we rattled through story after story: The Tempest, The Count of Monte Cristo, Crooked House, Jane Eyre, The Man in the Iron Mask.
By eleven, Mum had progressed to more contemporary novels: The Hobbit, Papillon, Sophie’s Choice, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. She started reading Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption to us during the long, wet autumn of 1997. I can still see her sitting on the pantry’s windowsill, ankles crossed, swinging her feet. Her voice, when she read to us, was never high and hectoring or fearful, it was slow and calm and steady. Less than a week after finishing it, Andy Dufresne had supplanted Madame Defarge, and El had turned Boomtown into the Shank. And less than a year after that, Mum was dead. And Mirrorland was no more.
I screw up the diary page inside my fist, watch the sky above Westeryk Road grow lighter. Today there are no what ifs. No shame or guilt or worry. Today, I’m angry. I offered El an olive branch, I offered her help, and all I got back was another clue, another page of her diary. It’s so childish. Like she’s trying to reboot me, restore old files she imagines are deleted. Does she really think I’ve forgotten our lives in this house? Choosing not to think of something is not the same as forgetting. The past is past. It’s done and gone. I listened when Mum told me to see the good instead of only the bad because I saw how miserable seeing only the bad had made her. Since leaving this house – since running away from it – I’ve lived by that philosophy. And the closer those diary extracts get to September the 4th, 1998, the closer they get to the day – the night – that Mum and Grandpa died, that El and I ran, the more I’m glad I have. It’s taken a lot for me to get to where I am, to shake off the weight of my first life in this house. And I won’t let El manipulate me, for whatever reason, into picking it back up. Or into having to explain the sad and bad story of our childhood to someone else – and definitely not the police.
The tracker. I run back downstairs to the kitchen. Open the laptop, and get the password wrong twice before I can finally access my inbox. ‘Come on.’
I click on the email, tick the small mail-tracker box. ‘Email opened once 1hr 14 mins ago.’ My heart is beating slow and heavy as the page starts to load. ‘Come on.’
And then there it is:
John Smith 1hr 14 mins ago
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