MIRRORLAND
Carole Johnstone
Dedication
For Lorna
Epigraph
‘When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream for ever.’
‘It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying.’
Map
PROLOGUE
The sky was pink. Which was better than red, El said, when we started to get scared again. Grandpa had always told us, Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning. And he used to be one. The wind was cold, getting colder. El’s face was still streaked with tears, and her fingers twitched. I couldn’t stop shaking.
We held hands and followed our noses, until every street of high, crowded tenements and terraces blurred into one looming dark house where the murderers of children lived and lurked and watched. But we saw no one. Heard no one. As if we were in Mirrorland again. Safe and scared. All that changed was the smell of the firth, getting stronger, nearer.
The harbour was grease and oil and metal and salt. Seagulls were waking up, crowing like cockerels. We stopped next to a wooden warehouse, stripped and wet-dark. In front of it, a crane that dangled a hook on the end of rusty chains and a stony slope that soon disappeared underwater.
High tide. The only time to set sail for the high seas.
El gripped my hand tighter as we looked out at all the bobbing round buoys, the long pontoons. We saw yachts, white and smooth with rattling metal masts. And out beyond the estuary, a tanker on the horizon. None were what we wanted. None were why we were there.
I searched through my rucksack until I found Mum’s powder compact. Started to press its pad against El’s cheeks.
‘Your eyes are all red inside,’ I whispered, as she pretended it didn’t hurt.
‘You’re still bleeding,’ she whispered back, hoarser than I was even though I had done more screaming.
‘What are you two lassies doing out at this time of night, eh?’
His torchlight made me blink, but when I could look, he was just like Mum said he’d be: leathery and gap-toothed, a white and bushy beard. An Old Salty Dog.
‘I’m Ellice,’ El said. I felt the points of her nails against my fingers, but her voice was still like the harbour water. ‘And this is my twin sister, Catriona.’
‘Aye?’
He came closer then, and when he staggered, I could smell rum. My heart beat faster. I squared my shoulders. ‘We want to join a pirate ship.’
The light from his torch bounced dizzy white circles that made my eyes squint and water. And then he said a curse word – one of Grandpa’s, but not one of his favourites – and began backing away from us, eyes wide like the Grebo masks of Côte d’Ivoire in Grandpa’s encyclopaedias.
‘Stay right there, all right? Don’t be going nowhere. All right?’
‘But is there a ship due soon?’ El tried to shout, as he disappeared back into the shadow of the warehouse. We heard its door creak open and bang shut, and El turned to me, made a choked sound, let me go. ‘Oh no! Your jumper. We forgot to take off your jumper!’
I suddenly felt something worse than just scared. As if I’d been swimming deep down in the cold and black and someone had reached in and pulled me out, and I couldn’t remember how to breathe again. I dropped my rucksack, pulled off my coat, and even though I hurt all over, even though El’s fingers pinched and scratched, I got my jumper off over my head, and dropped it on the stony ground as if it were crawling with spiders. I could smell it then, sour and warm.
‘What’ll we do with it?’ El said, and her voice wasn’t still or calm any more. ‘He’ll come back. He’ll come back!’
She ran around the warehouse, picked up a broken mooring ring flaked with rust. We tied the jumper’s arms around it in fisherman’s knots, our hands cold, teeth chattering, and then we ran back to the choppy water beyond the harbour, threw it as far in as we could. The splash was loud. By the time we’d run back to the stony slip, we were out of breath, both trying so hard not to cry it sounded like we were choking.
When the wind suddenly turned, pushing us back from the edge, I thought I could smell the blood again: sour and dark. But the briny sea, like the squeeze of El’s hand, was stronger.
‘A wise sailor never leaves port on a Friday,’ I whispered.
El’s fingers started to hurt mine. ‘It’s Saturday now, you idiot.’
But I knew she was just as scared. I knew she was wondering if it was too late to go back. ‘Will we be all right, El?’
We looked out across the firth, past the small green islet of Inchkeith and that faraway tanker. Shivering, still holding hands, close enough to feel each other’s heartbeat as that red sky moved in from the North Sea, spreading like a bruise. El didn’t look at me again until we could see it creeping over the breakwater.
And then she smiled. The wide, terrible smile that I knew she’d wanted to smile even along all those endless empty streets. She didn’t stop, even when we heard the first engine, the first siren. Or when the warehouse door creaked open and slammed shut again.
She smiled, smiled, smiled. ‘We will not leave each other. Say it.’
Footsteps crunching towards us. Another, louder curse. Enough lights to blind us so that we could no longer see the firth at all. Only each other.
‘We will not leave each other,’ I whispered.
She gripped my hand even tighter, and I swallowed, watched her smile get sharper, darker, watched it disappear. ‘Never so long as we live.’
‘You’ll be okay,’ a man who wasn’t the Old Salty Dog said.
And a woman with kind eyes and softer torchlight stepped between us, held out her other hand. ‘Everything will be all right now.’
And that was the day our second life began.
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
I wasn’t there when my sister died.
Ross called me; left close to a dozen voicemail messages before I checked any of them, each one more desperate than the last. And I’m ashamed to say that it was always his voice I heard first – familiar and forgotten, hardly changed at all – rather than his words.
I watch the news reports in Terminal 4 of JFK, during a seven-hour layover that eats away at my sanity until I have to turn on my laptop and look. Sitting on a stool in a noisy, too-bright Shake Shack, ignoring my cheeseburger as I scroll through the first of three reports on the BBC News webpage for Edinburgh, Fife & East. I should probably be just as ashamed that he is what I see first too. Even before the black headline: Fears Grow for Missing Leith Woman.
The first photo is subtitled DAY ONE, 3 APRIL, but it’s already night. Ross is pacing a low stone wall next to the firth, caught between two silver lampposts that cast round, flat light. Though his face is turned away from the camera, no one could mistake his agitation for anything else: his shoulders are high, his hands fists. The photographer has caught the bright spotlights of a returning orange-and-blue lifeboat, and Ross’s face is turned towards both it and the frozen fury of a wave breaking over the end of the pier. There was a storm soon after she went missing, he said in more than one message, as if it were my not knowing that extra terrible detail that had stopped me from replying.