Mirrorland by Carole Johnstone (best ereader manga .TXT) 📗

impossible. The oak bannister, curving and smooth under my palm, the spill of green and gold light from the stained-glass window onto the mosaic stair tiles. The first-floor landing squeaks underfoot exactly where I’m expecting it to, and I’ve already begun walking towards Bedroom 1 before I catch myself. Ross is standing inside the door opposite, with my suitcase in his hand and an embarrassed half-smile.

‘That’s our room,’ he says.

‘Sorry,’ I say, walking back across the landing too quickly. ‘Of course it is.’ I can’t help wondering what it looks like now. When El and I shared it, the bedspread was golden yellow, the wallpaper a rain-forest explosion of green and brown and gold. At night, we’d close the big wooden shutters over the window and pretend we were Victorian explorers in the Kakadu Jungle in Northern Australia.

I follow Ross into Bedroom 2. The guest room. Familiar neat pine furniture and a tall window looking out onto the back garden. There’s a paint-spattered easel and pallet in one corner, two canvases leaning against the wall. Angry oceans, green and foaming white, under dark and thunderous skies. El could draw and paint before she could read.

‘Is this okay?’ Ross asks.

I recognise the cupboard alongside the wardrobe with a jolt; wonder in the same moment if it’s still full of face paints, orange wigs, multicoloured nylon jumpsuits, and false red noses. But its hinges and seams are painted shut. I look around the room again, at the wallpaper striped white and red and pink, and I start to smile. Of course. I’m in the Clown Café.

‘Cat?’

‘Sorry. Yes, this is fine. Great.’

‘You must find it weird being back here, I guess.’

I can’t quite meet his gaze. I still remember the day he told me they’d bought the house. I was sitting outside a loud and overcrowded bar on Lincoln Boulevard, feeling hungover and ridiculously hot. I’d been in Southern California for a few years by then, but still hadn’t acclimatised to relentlessly sunny. The first thing I felt was shock. Everything else came after the call was over and I was left alone to imagine them curled up in the drawing room in front of the fire and its bottle-green tiles, drinking champagne and talking about the future. Although it wasn’t the last time he called me, it was the last time I answered.

‘I just can’t understand how everything can still be here, after all this time. I mean, other people must have lived here since—’

‘An older couple were here for years. The MacDonalds,’ Ross says. ‘They must have got most of the original furniture in the sale and didn’t change much. When we bought it, we replaced most of what was missing.’

I look at him. ‘Replaced?’

‘Yeah. I mean, they left the big stuff: the kitchen cabinets and table, the range, the chesterfield. The dining room furniture. But most everything else is new. Well, not new – you know what I mean.’ His smile is strained and unhappy, but there’s anger in it too. ‘Felt like every weekend, El wanted to drag me to antique shops or fairs.’

I flinch at her name – I can’t help it – and Ross looks at me carefully, holds my gaze too long.

‘You never asked me why,’ he says. ‘Back then. Why we bought this place.’

I turn away from him. Look towards the window and that painted-over cupboard door.

‘It came up for auction. El saw the notice in the paper.’ He sits heavily down on the bed. ‘I thought it was unhealthy to dwell on the past. I mean … you know what I mean …’

And I do. I was happy here. Mostly. And I’ve been so unhappy since. But I still know it’s true: you can never go back.

‘I got the deposit together, helped her buy it.’ He shrugs. ‘You know what El was like when she wanted something.’

My face heats, my skin prickles. He’s talking about her in the past tense, I realise. I wonder if it’s because he thinks she’s dead, or because she and I don’t have any kind of a present any more.

He clears his throat. Reaches into his pocket. ‘I figured while you were here you’d need these. So that you can come and go when you want.’ He holds out two Yale keys. ‘This is for the hallway door, but I usually leave it unlocked, and this is the night latch for the front door. There’s a deadlock too, but there’s only one key, so I’ll stop locking it.’

I take the keys, squash flat the memory of black dark. Run. ‘Thanks.’

He rocks forwards onto his feet as if yanked by strings. He starts to pace, running his hands through his hair, seizing big fistfuls. ‘God, Cat, I need to be doing something, but I don’t know what. I don’t know what!’

He wheels on one foot and lunges towards me, eyes wide enough that I can see the red threads around each iris. ‘They think she’s dead. They keep skirting around it, saying it without saying it, but it’s obvious that’s what they think. Tomorrow, she’ll have been missing for four days. And how long do you reckon they’ll keep looking before all their muttering about weather and time and resources becomes “I’m very sorry, Doctor MacAuley, but there’s nothing more we can do”?’ He throws up his hands. His T-shirt is stained dark at the armpits. ‘I mean, it’s not just her that’s disappeared, it’s a twenty-foot boat with a twenty-two-foot mast! How can that just vanish? And she was a good sailor,’ he says, still pacing. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first time he’s said all this to someone. ‘She knew I hated it when she went out alone on that bloody boat.’ He drops back down onto the bed, strings cut. ‘I always told her something like this could happen.’

‘I didn’t even know she could sail,’ I say. ‘Never mind owned a boat.’

Moored at Granton Harbour. I suffer an image of us standing at the bowsprit of