Please, I think, when I hear the front door, the hallway door, the murmur of voices. Please, when Ross shouts my name from the bottom of the stairs – uncertain and thin – and instead of answering, I open the white cupboard and look at El’s self-portrait, press the pads of my fingers against the angry brushstrokes of her skin. Please, when I go out onto the landing and grab hold of the bannister, feel the world list and lurch. When I stop just short of the bottom, look down into the hallway at all those solemn, grim faces and the bell board inside the kitchen doorway: the curled black springs, the shiny bells, the star-shaped pendulums.
Please.
Rafiq clears her throat, looks at us both in turn. ‘I’m sorry, Ross. Catriona.’ She drops her head, her gaze. ‘It’s definitely her. It’s definitely El.’
And that terrible day on Yellowcraigs doesn’t hurt more than anything else after all.
I end up in Mirrorland. When I can see again, I’m on my knees on the stern deck of the Satisfaction, clutching the ship’s lantern to my chest as I look out at the impatient white puffs of cloud and white frills of wave and Blackbeard, dark and stark and getting closer.
I don’t cry, I can’t cry, but every few minutes my whole body seizes with a kind of retching paralysis, where I can’t breathe, can’t see, can’t think. In the lulls between, I cough and rock and choke down ragged breath after breath, but as swiftly as I start to recover it comes again.
I stumble from the Satisfaction, and up into the long empty alleyway. Stop halfway along the boundary wall, and think of El’s Captain Henry Morgan, forever improved and never finished. Our seventeenth-century pirate king father.
It’s not real. It’s not real.
When I feel another seizure coming, I drop back onto my knees. What comfort I think I’ll find in it, I don’t know, but I start whispering, ‘We will not leave each other. Never so long as we live.’ Over and over again.
I hear a noise, see a shadow, feel my windpipe closing down tight to admit only thin sips of breath. I feel a rush of cold air, a shiver of dread. A line of white in the dark, throwing monstrous shadows against the walls. Deadlights. The echo of RUN! The high, long screaming panic of it, and then I’m scrambling to my feet too late, bolting away from the lurch and loom of a shadow that’s no longer a shadow.
‘Cat! Christ. Stop!’
Ross drops to his knees alongside me, grapples for a better hold of my flailing arms and legs. And I fight way past the point of needing or wanting to, because he’s El’s husband; he’s belonged to her and she to him since he first dropped down from that skylight into Mirrorland – and somehow, that hasn’t ever mattered to me until now. Somehow, I’ve managed to believe it isn’t even true.
‘Oh, God, please. Please. Leave me alone. Please!’ While I grab hold of him hard enough to hurt us both, hang on to him like he’s the only rock in a murderous black sea.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 19
17 April 2018 at 05:50
Inbox
john.smith120594@gmail.com
Re: HE KNOWS
To: Me
CLUE 10. BEHIND THE BERLIN WALL
Sent from my iPhone
I’m in the Clown Café. Bluebeard and Blackbeard are here. They’ll drag us out of the cupboard and carry us to Bedroom 3, and hang us on hooks until we’re dead. And as we die, we’ll scream in the dark like the sea, like dying pirates on a deck full of blood. And they’ll throw our bodies to the sharks.
I’m in Mirrorland, sitting cross-legged on the gun deck of the Satisfaction, looking across at El. We’re wearing matching tartan dresses over starchy white shirts. If it wasn’t for Ross balancing on his haunches between us, it would be like we were both looking into a mirror. Like one of us wasn’t really there. In his hand is a single sheet of paper covered in red and black pen. THE PLAN.
We’re in this together, okay? Ross says. The three of us. Together.
And Annie winks solemnly at me from behind the ship’s wheel. Sometimes you have to be brave. Even when you’re a grand wee coward.
I’m in the kitchen, sitting at the table. Scrambled eggs on toast and porridge that’s too hot to eat. A bird is trapped inside the old chimney flue. I can hear it scratching and flapping. My hand is shaking. I miss my mouth and Mum’s goes thin. Don’t slitter, Catriona. Grandpa sits with his bad leg up on the spare chair, throws back his head to laugh, but his hands tremble, and worse than mine. He looks at El next to the door, her fingers on its handle. Ye’re bein’ a stander, lassie. Sit the shit doon. And El looks at me. Her smile is terrible. I pretend I can’t see it. Can I have some tea?
The pantry’s black velveteen curtain was the Berlin Wall. El was always Alec Leamas, the heroic spy who came in from the cold, while I’d always be on the other side with the Clowns – the cruel George Smiley and his Circus – leading Alec to his doom. I find the diary page pushed inside the curtain’s hem.
September 4th, 1998
Today at breakfast everyone pretended everything was Normal. Even me really I suppose, even tho it’s not, even tho I’m just about as scared as I’ve ever been my Whole Life.
And Mum and Grandpa and Cat were all like pass me the salt and pour me some tea and hurry up it’s time for school. And I’m like how can you be Normal? Didn’t you Hear? Didn’t you See? Aren’t you Scared?
HE’LL COME BACK.
But I didn’t say any of that either so maybe we were all thinking it in our heads and none of us could say it out loud. In case He did. Come Back I mean.
So after breakfast I pulled Cat behind the Berlin Wall and I put my hand over her mouth and I whispered in her ear ‘IT HAS TO BE TONIGHT’!!
Because It Does. No matter what she says. No matter how scared we are. It’s THE PLAN. It’s what we agreed.
I’m behind the curtain in the pantry, struggling to breathe through El’s clammy hand and the dusty dark. The ghosts whisper and thump around us. It has to be tonight.
No, I think. NO.
Yes, says El. I feel her smile under my fingers as if we’ve swapped places – I’ve become her and she’s become me. And when I let her go and pull back the curtain, every wall in the hallway and kitchen is painted ugly wet crimson. I hear an owl hoot: high and long. I hear boots, I hear RUN! I hear rings. The noise is deafening. The wooden board shudders, every one of its bells shaking left and right, star-shaped pendulums flashing in the gloom, the dark. I see the moon.
Wake up! El screams in my voice. Our voice. Wake the fuck up.
I fall off the stool onto the pantry floor. My arms and legs feel too heavy. My stomach is empty, queasy. My head aches, aches, aches. Is this what grief feels like? Or guilt? Is this what it feels like when half of you is gone? When half of you is dead?
I pick up my phone, press reply. The screen stays blurry no matter how many times I blink.
Answer me. Meet me. Explain. Or leave me the fuck alone.
Ross is standing by the kitchen window, looking out at a back garden distorted by rain. It pounds against the roof and the flue cap, the guttering. He turns around when he hears me. Last night, I insisted that we both sleep alone, and spent the entirety of it longing for his breath on my neck and his arm across my belly and his legs tangled between mine. Today, I can’t even look at him.