‘I’m sorry,’ she says, standing abruptly, disappearing into the apartment. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
She comes back in less than a minute, holding two tumblers in one hand, a plastic bottle filled with red-gold liquid in the other.
‘Bushi rum,’ she says, pouring two big measures, handing one to me. Her hand shakes. ‘Local and lethal.’
I drink. It burns all the way down.
‘She phoned me. When I was on The Redemption. She asked me where I was.’ El’s voice is so quiet, I have to strain to hear her. ‘I told her I was out on the boat, and I tried to sound normal, but she could tell something was up. She said if I didn’t talk to her, meet her, she would go to the house, find Ross. I’d already told her too much. About how he was. About what he’d done to me. I shouldn’t have, I should have known how dangerous that was. Mouse wasn’t always small – you must remember how possessive she could be? How impulsive?’
I think of the marshal’s office. Her hands on her hips. The shine of her teeth, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Do you want me to help you?
‘She thought that I was escaping. Running away again, like we did as kids. She was so angry.’ El shakes her head. ‘The Witch wasn’t the only reason she’d stayed away from us for years. Mouse had been angry with us for a long, long time.’
Please, I don’t want to go! I want to go back to Mirrorland! Her hands reaching out to us as the Witch dragged her through the entrance hall, towards the door. I press my fingers against my eyelids. ‘We took Mirrorland away from her.’
‘And we left her alone.’ El sighs, bows her head. ‘I knew Ross had to be back from London. I worried what would happen, what he might do, what she might do, if she went back to the house without me. I was only about an hour out, less than.’ She takes a long swallow of rum from the bottle. ‘I couldn’t abandon her again. No matter what it cost me.’ She looks at me. ‘So. I picked her up from Fisherrow.’
A dreadful certainty beats hard inside my chest now, and I find that I can’t speak.
El lets me off the hook again, takes my hands and gives me a small smile. ‘I told her all of it. All of the Plan: Ross, the pills, the boat. I don’t know why. Maybe because, deep down, I wanted someone to stop me. And I was glad she’d forced my hand. I think the moment I answered that phone, I ran right out of courage.’ Her smile is terrible. ‘I scuttled myself.’
When I still say nothing, El squeezes my hands harder.
‘Even after I told her, I was shaky, panicky. I guess I was still coming down from adrenaline, cortisol, I don’t know, whatever it is your body thinks you need when you’re about to kill yourself.’ She shivers. ‘But I promised her it was over. That I wouldn’t do it, that I’d go back to Ross. I talked and talked at her like she was our cabin girl again. Our skivvy. Our comfort blanket. Like she wasn’t a person. A person who had suffered. A person who only ever wanted to belong, to be needed. To help.’ El shivers again. ‘I didn’t stop. Not until I was done. Not until I’d taken as much comfort and sympathy as she had to give. And then I left her alone in the cuddy. While I went back up top, kept sailing for a bit longer, until I felt ready to go back to the harbour.’ She closes her eyes. ‘I was relieved. That’s the ugly truth of it. Of me. I was relieved. I’d tried. I’d failed. And now I could go back home.
‘It was too quiet when I went back down about an hour later. I knew something was wrong. Mouse was lying on her back on the seats. And she was … she was just grey. She was this awful grey. And I just knew. Even before I saw the bag on the floor. The diazepam and the fluoxetine, Ross’s fucking pills. My suicide kit. I tried bringing her back, but she was already going cold.’ She shakes her head, and when she looks at me again, it’s with that familiar mix of sorrow and defiance. ‘I saw it then. My chance. I could sail back to Granton, face Ross – all the questions and consequences of Mouse being dead, of me being on the boat when I’d begged him to come back from London. Or I really could escape. Him. All of it. Everything at once.’
I think of that body on a stretcher. The white of its skin, the black of the closing stitches at the ends of its collarbone. Its terrible face.
El’s fingers tremble against mine as she swallows hard. ‘I decided to substitute Mouse for me.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ I say. It’s a lie. I want to get up, I want to run. I don’t want to listen. But El won’t let go of my hands, my wrists. ‘I don’t—’
‘There always had to be a body,’ she says, and she’s actively pushing me down now, as if she knows if she lets up for a moment, I’ll escape. ‘If one wasn’t found, I knew Ross would never give up, he’d never stop looking. And maybe he’d never be found guilty. It was why I’d decided I had to kill myself. But as soon as I realised I didn’t have to die, I didn’t want to. I could go back to the house, replace the drain plug and hole saw in Bluebeard’s Room with the real ones, so that the forensics would match without any margin of doubt. I could get my Survival Pack. And I could escape. Really escape.’ She looks at me, suddenly fierce. ‘But I didn’t want it to happen like that. I didn’t want her to die.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I say again, now twisting my wrists so hard, so frantically, that a bone cracks loud enough to make both of us wince. But El doesn’t let go. Instead, she only moves closer until we’re inches apart; until I have no option but to meet her hard gaze.
‘Yes, you do. And you have to face that this time, Cat. You have to know the truth and believe it. Accept it. Even if you don’t want to.’ She lets me go. ‘You have to say it.’
I breathe in. Out. Think of that body on the stretcher again. That DNA isolation test on Rafiq’s phone. ‘She’s our sister.’ I stare down at the purple crescent-shaped welts on my skin. ‘Mouse is our identical sister.’
El takes my face in her hands, smooths cool fingers against my brow, my temples. There are tears in her eyes, but she’s smiling. Nodding. ‘Do you remember how special we were?’ she says. ‘More than one hundred thousand other children had to be born before a mum got to have children as special as us?’
I nod. Close my eyes.
‘The odds of giving birth to Mirror Twins are about one in twelve hundred births. For a fraternal twin like Mum, the odds drop to one in seventy.’ El lets out a long breath. ‘It’s not that rare at all.’
I think of Mouse curled up into a ball behind a lashed-down barrel in the bow of the Satisfaction, her chalk-white face streaked with tears. And my selfish, stupid belief that the envy in her eyes was only to make me feel better – to let me know that I was worth something to someone. Even if that someone wasn’t real. I wish I was like you.
‘The Witch told Mouse just before she died.’ El’s face is so pale. ‘That we were identical triplets. That her grandpa was her father, and our mother was her mother.’
‘But how?’ I think of Mouse’s raw pale skin and cropped dark hair, her bony smallness. I can still feel my denial like a palpable lump under my skin. ‘She didn’t even look like us. She was—’
‘Mouse said the Witch cut off her hair, dyed it black, barely fed her. And remember how often she’d plaster herself in our clown face paints? To try to look like us. Like Belle. To stop looking like herself.’ The glance that El gives me is almost angry, even though tears track down her cheeks. ‘We never saw it because we believed what we were told to believe. Just like we always did. But maybe Mum wanted us to know that we were so much more special than we thought, than she’d told us we were, and so she mixed the truth with fantasy. Just like she always did.’