I turn warily towards the second alleyway on the other side of the house to Mirrorland. Its red door is open. I run the length of the alley and into the front garden, but there’s nobody there. Even the gate has been latched shut.
I think about running into the street, but don’t. Instead, I close and bolt the door, wander back to the garden and its walls. I look up at the house, big and wide and freezing bright. Casting a long shadow. I don’t want to go back inside. I trudge back up the scullery steps only to pick up the envelope and pull shut the back door. Go back down through the orchard, my face turned towards the dappled sun, the rustling breeze. Ross will be able to see me, I realise, if he looks out of the Clown Café’s window. But if he hasn’t already come downstairs to see why I’m running around like a madwoman, then he’s probably still asleep. We’ve both been doing a lot of that. It feels a little like hiding.
Old Fred creaks his welcome. I put the card under my arm and my palms against his rough bark, close my eyes so that I can’t see DIG or our names carved inside a circle, and I think of all the times I sat or lay flat on his lowest branch, squinting up at the sky. How many times he gave me the same safe comfort as the loyal and timid Mouse. The kind of comfort that never needed you to be right or better, but was strong and warm and full of silent, reliable sympathy. When that only reminds me of El’s I’M MOUSE, I step back from Old Fred and stand still for a moment, arms and fingers spread wide, tipping my head up until the sunlight burns warm and red behind my eyelids. On sunny days, El and I would stand like that for what felt like hours, holding hands for balance, laughing and mimicking Mum’s high and reedy Don’t look! Don’t look or you’ll go blind!
But I have to look. I open my eyes, and then I open the envelope. It’s a landscape watercolour of a busy harbour beneath a sunny and cloudless sky. I shiver in the cold. I want to open it even less than all of the others.
HE WILL KILL YOU TOO
I close my eyes. Close the card. Think of the He CAN’T have her and She WON’T have him from today’s diary page. A page that was written one week before our nineteenth birthday. One week before that grubby dull room with a plastic-framed seascape of rocks and sand and waves. One week before El did what she did to fix this. To make everything go back to how it was before.
I was working when Ross called me on July the first. Only my second shift in a bad West End pub called the White Star. And – it turned out – my last. By the time I got to the hospital, much of the initial panic was over. El’s stomach had been pumped empty of paracetamol, and she’d been sedated and rehydrated. Ross stood alongside her bed, gripping the hand that wasn’t bandaged and bloody around a cannula. His hair was wild, the whole of him shook as if he had a chill, even though we both knew by then that she was going to be all right. He’d refused to leave her, to go sit in the grubby dull room on a grubby dull sofa as I had dutifully done. He was hysterical, one of the nurses whispered to me much later on, when the night had arrived and all other visitors had left. She squeezed my hand, pressed the palm of hers against her chest. Oh, to be young and in love again!
It was after he finally left to get some food from the canteen that El had opened her eyes and found mine, smiled that smile – so full of joy and hate. I win.
The day before El was discharged from the hospital, Ross met me at the Royal Botanic Gardens again. It was raining, and we stood under a big willow tree next to the wrought-iron gates. He held my hand as I cried, as I begged him. Don’t. Please. He cupped my face in his hands, tried to catch my tears with his thumbs, his eyes nearly black with grief. She left me a note, Cat. She said we’d broken her heart. She said she couldn’t live with us or without me.
Why do you have to be with her? I wanted to scream. Why does it have to be her?
But he just went on looking at me with his sad eyes and his stupid, knee-jerk shame. I love you both, he said, and that was when I knew that El had won – no matter how wretched he looked or how much he cried – guilt had finally managed to prise us apart. I’d lost him for good.
El has to be watching us. She has to be sending the cards. To get rid of me. But why? Because until she vanished, she was rid of me. All of it: the cards and clues and diary pages have only made me hate her more and him less. And I can admit to myself now that when I read LEAVE, the first thing I thought was No. And the second was Come back and make me. Because I should have fought back the first time. I should never have given up, run away, tried to forget. She’s had my life for years. She’s stolen it. While I’ve been what? A reflection in a mirror. A shadow on the ground, dark and flat and impermanent. Inconsequential.
The wind picks up, urges me back towards the house, and it’s as I turn that I hear the shed door. It’s not quite flush with its frame and makes a dull quick thud with every gust. Without knowing why, I go towards it, push it open. It takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dark inside. When they do, all I see are dusty, empty crates, some old newspapers and bags of compost. And then, a flash of bright blue.
I venture in reluctantly, picking my way through all the detritus. The blue is crammed right at the back of the shed, folded into an untidy cube. I lean down to touch it, and it feels like the same kind of material as the blow-up mattress El and I used to have in the bedsit. Something stirs in my mind then, some bad conclusion that my subconscious has reached before the rest of me. I should leave this where it is. Whatever it is.
Instead, I haul it out from under all the rest of the crap, and hard enough that I nearly lose my balance. I try to straighten it out, pull it into whatever shape it’s supposed to be. It’s big, maybe as tall as I am. There’s a large oval gap at its centre, and inside it I find a carbon-fibre paddle folded into four pieces. The word Gumotex is printed along the length of the largest. And that’s when I know for sure.
It’s El’s inflatable kayak.
CHAPTER 14
I have a terrible dream. El and I are running – and hard – the force of our sprint shudders up our legs, jars our knees and hips. Fear is a solid beating thing. Pushing down on our shoulders, snatching the breath out of our mouths.
Behind us is the Tooth Fairy, her heavy fast tread thundering over floorboards as we run into the Clown Café. Dicky Grock looks frightened instead of sad, his lips pressed thin as he ushers us inside the dress-up cupboard. Even Pogo looks worried, though his wide red smile remains frozen in place.
We crouch down in the dark. The Clowns close the cupboard door, the seams of their cloth feet scratching across the floor as they run to hide under the bed. Inside, we breathe stale cold air, hold on to each other hard enough to hurt. I can hear boots, heavy and erratic. I can smell blood.
The cupboard handle starts to rattle, to turn and turn, and then the cupboard is gone, the Clown Café is gone, and El and I are standing on the shoreline of a beach, the sea washing over our feet, the black silhouette of a pirate ship on the horizon. Bluebeard is standing over Grandpa on the sand, holding a long, curved hook in one hand, a longer stovepipe in the other. Grandpa has half a head. Dinnae worry, lassie. He laughs. Ah’m feelin’ nae pain.