‘Hey, it’s okay,’ Ross said, pushing up onto his elbows. ‘I like it when you look.’
I liked it when he looked. Even as a boy, he’d had this way of making me feel like the most important person in the world. And when he stopped looking, the least.
‘I feel guilty,’ I said, and then instantly cursed myself for it.
‘What for?’
But he knew what for. For lying to El when I never had before. About anything. For not telling her that Ross and I had been secretly texting for months. Or that sometimes I couldn’t sleep for thinking about him, for wanting him for myself. For being glad – ecstatic – that she was sick enough that I could sneak out to see him on my own and she probably wouldn’t even notice.
‘She doesn’t talk to you,’ Ross said. ‘She doesn’t talk to anyone.’ And there was a hardness in his voice that I revelled in.
‘She can’t help it,’ I said magnanimously, trying not to notice that his hand was creeping closer to mine. ‘It’s because she’s stuck in the past. All she ever wants to talk about is Mirrorland, or Mum and Grandpa, and I don’t. I want to live right now.’ I looked at him, at the intensity in his eyes, as if I were telling him the secrets of the universe, and suddenly I felt cripplingly shy, awkward. I stared down at the sun-bleached grass instead.
‘Cat.’
‘I think that makes me a bitch.’
‘Cat.’
He made me look at him in the best kind of way: by leaning close enough that I could smell his deodorant, his skin; by taking my face in his hands and turning it towards his.
‘You’re not a bitch.’
And I knew it was going to happen then. Even before he leaned closer, dropped his gaze to my mouth, smoothed the hair from my cheeks. Before he made a sound, something low and inarticulate that flushed my face hot again, that turned my heartbeat into a drumbeat, and my insides heavy.
She doesn’t want him any more was what I kept telling myself. She doesn’t want anyone any more. And what I meant was She doesn’t want me.
Then his lips met mine, his breath, his teeth, his tongue, and I stopped thinking about El altogether. My first kiss.
The taxi turns into Westeryk Road, and I turn to look at Ross. He’s already looking at me. And I wonder if telepathy might not be exclusive to twins after all, because I’m pretty sure he’s thinking about exactly the same things I am.
But as soon as the taxi drives off and we step up to the red door and close it behind us, the atmosphere between us changes. We go into the drawing room, loiter close to the door. Ross doesn’t even take off his coat. This is what normal really is for us. Waiting with the gloom and ghosts and heavy silences.
‘D’you want a drink?’ Ross’s question sounds oddly sullen, but I nod because I do. Maybe even more than I want to salvage our evening.
He mixes two vodka tonics at the Poirot. I watch him until I start to annoy myself, wander over to the window instead. Marie’s house is in darkness. The road is empty, silent. I wonder if someone is watching us right now, and I step back, draw the big curtains shut.
Ross gives me my drink, and then hunkers down in front of the fire to light it, starts piling it with logs until the room is Christmas-warm and golden again. When he stands up, he turns to me with a better smile.
‘Tell me how you’ve been.’
‘What?’
‘I haven’t asked. Not once since you got back, and I should have. So,’ he sits down on the recliner, ‘how have you been? What’s your life in LA like?’ He pauses. ‘Are you happy?’
He looks far too handsome in the flickering firelight. Even his unshaven jaw and the dark shadows under his eyes only make him look more appealing. I think of him angrily referring to himself as the wailing widower. I wonder if he knows that there are whole YouTube pages dedicated to him.
‘LA’s good for me,’ I say, because I feel like I have to say something. ‘It doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Or even a lot of the big stuff.’ I swallow a too-large mouthful of vodka tonic, because I want to tell him the truth. I want to tell him that sometimes I’m so unhappy it’s like I can’t breathe. El has a boat, a house, a vocation – a talent. Friends. A husband. I have a job I hate, writing ridiculous articles about spinach lattes, cheating spouses, and spiritual fucking Wi-Fi. And I date men I couldn’t care less about; men who mostly act like they couldn’t care less about me. I party too much. I drink too much. I spend too many hours sitting on the balcony of a condo I don’t own – now, don’t even rent – looking out at a vast blue sea and a vast blue sky, knowing that I’d rather be anywhere else and pretending I don’t. I’m not living. I’m waiting. For something, anything, to happen. And worst of all, I’ve started to wonder whether this – all of this – is it.
I set down my drink. ‘I’m sorry, I need to go to the loo.’
In the bathroom, I run the cold tap, splash water against my face. I look at myself in the mirror. I expect to look terrible, but I don’t. I look vital, alive. I look like El.
What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?
I’m pissed – somewhere quite far along from pleasantly so. I feel blurry and spaced out. But I know exactly what I’m doing. What I’m going to do.
We kept on seeing each other behind El’s back. For months. We pretended she wouldn’t care, knowing she would. Maybe we were trying to punish her for her wholesale rejection of us. I can see now that she was ill – depressed or worse – but even so, that isn’t enough to dull the hurt, the anger. My excuses became less and less convincing, her withdrawal more and more acute. And I still didn’t care. I wanted to hold on to everything she didn’t.
‘You fall in?’ Ross yells from what sounds like the bottom of the stairs.
‘I’ll be right there,’ I shout back.
I look down at my dress. Think of my irrational jealousy towards Shona. My wide, mocking smile – She’s not dead. Too bad for you. And then I start pulling the pins out of my hair, shaking it loose. I don’t need to be El to stop being me.
‘You okay?’ Ross says, when I go back into the drawing room.
‘I’m okay.’ I almost can’t bear to look at him, at his frown, his eyes, the flicker of firelight between us. So ridiculous to feel like this, to still feel like this.
He stands up. ‘Are you sure? You—’
‘Do you miss Mirrorland?’
He looks neither surprised nor pissed off at the question. Smiles all the way to his eyes. ‘I had the best times of my life there. I was sorry when it was gone.’
‘Have you been down there? After you bought the house?’
He nods. ‘It was pretty sad. The MacDonalds must have found the door in the pantry cupboard. They’d mostly cleared the alleyway up to the front garden, and pretty much left the washhouse to rot.’ He pauses. ‘I papered over the door; going down there upset El too much.’
I change tack, as much to banish the returned furrow between his brows as to avoid telling him that I pulled that paper down. ‘God, do you remember the Satisfaction’s raids on the Spanish Main?’
‘Much pillaging.’ His smile is so bittersweetly familiar. ‘That was my fault. I was a bit of a klepto.’
‘Your Treasure Trophies.’
‘Jesus, my Treasure Trophies. What a knob. You know, Mum found a whole load of the shit from our treasure chest in my wardrobe a few years after you’d gone. Including a complete set of Victorian sterling silver cutlery. Didn’t ask me a thing about them. Just charity-shopped the lot.’
I go towards him, and he stops smiling. His eyes widen as I get closer, and I take a breath, will myself to be brave, to keep going.