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

a book with complicated diagrams, curled up foetuses holding hands inside the womb. The egg that made us split late, more than a week after fertilisation, and that meant we were more than just two halves of the same whole. We were Mirror Twins. Mum would dress us in identical clothes: childish homemade pinafores and white, high-necked blouses; gingham dresses that reached long past our knees. She would sit us on her pink stool, stare with bright eyes at our reflections inside the dressing table mirror as she twisted our long blonde hair into pigtails.

A few days later and you would have been fused together into someone else, like sand and limestone into glass.

The idea had frightened me. As if we had only narrowly escaped becoming a monster.

I stare at El’s self-portrait. She’s angry – seething – I can see the hate in her eyes, the press of her lips over teeth that I know are gritted. But under all that anger there is fear. I still know her enough to see that. I wonder who put it there. And why she felt the need to paint it. I look down at my wrists, reluctantly remember the bite of her fingers. Deep enough to leave red marks that would later bloom purple and yellow.

I hate you. Go. All I want is for you to be gone. The snarl in her voice, the cold victory in her eyes. To never have to think about you again.

I close the cupboard door, lean hard against it, my head throbbing. How can I tell Ross that she’s not dead? How can I explain? Because even back then when she’d hurt me so badly, I knew what she said wasn’t true; I knew her enough to see the hurt under all that rage. I felt it. In too many ways we were like sand and limestone. When we were six, El fell out of Old Fred. I was in bed with the flu, my head and chest full with the hot suffocation of it, my mind with the worry of wondering if you could die from it, but I still felt her screams as if they’d come from my own throat. I still felt the stomach-twisting terror of falling through the branches, the shock of hitting the ground, the agony that burned up through my ankle and into my knee. Grandpa said it was just a sprain, and sure enough within a week El was more recovered than I was. She brought me hot lemon water and handfuls of daisies from the garden so that we could make chains while I lay in bed, still wheezy and feverish. The first time she was allowed to visit, her eyes went round and wide when I told her how much it had hurt when she fell.

I got dizzy, she said. My chest and head filled up and I couldn’t breathe. That’s why I fell.

Afterwards, she was always trying to prove what I considered already proven. It became like a game to her: she’d think nothing of throwing herself out of trees or down stairs, not if she could share the pain, the fear, the danger with me. Her arms and legs were constantly covered in scratches and bruised pinches. It didn’t matter how much I begged, how much my life began to feel like walking through a minefield on someone else’s legs. How paralysed I became by all heights – that dizzying terror of always waiting to fall – a vertigo that left me only when I left this house. El would just laugh, deep and long, and she’d hug me tight until that hurt too.

On April the 3rd, I slept until ten because I’d stayed up late to finish an overdue think piece for a lifestyle magazine: ‘Ten Body Language Signals That Could Mean He’s Cheating’. After a breakfast of coffee, I walked along Venice Beach’s boardwalk, wandering among the stalls and tourists and Bob Marley flags; the skaters, performers, psychics, and artists. When the day got too hot, I sat on a bench in the shade of palm trees, and I watched all that life pass me by instead, breathed it in as if I were part of it. Wondered idly which nightclub I would go to later, what outfit I would wear, whose hands would touch me.

I walked back to the condo around five, slept for an hour, showered, put on a little black dress and too-high heels. I missed the step down onto the balcony, nearly dropped my opened bottle of wine. It slipped wet and cold between my fingers, and it was just about the fastest my heart had beaten all day. I sat on the balcony, rubbed my toe, drank my wine, and watched the sun go down over the horizon, spilling red across the Pacific. I felt nothing. Same as any other day. Same as any other night. And I’ve felt nothing since. No terror, no shock, no agony. No excited flutter in my belly, no foreign, fathomless fear. Nothing has been ripped from me, nothing has ended. Everything is exactly the same. El is not lying somewhere in the dark and in pain. And she’s not dead. I would have felt it. I would have known it. No matter how estranged we are. I’d know it.

*

I go into the kitchen. Better to get all of it over with at once. Mum’s old Kitchener range – vast and ugly and cast-iron black – looks like it’s still in use: there’s a kettle on its hotplate and a pile of ash in the coal grate. I can see the curls at the nape of Mum’s neck, the slumped slope of her shoulders as she stirs and tuts, the tight knot of apron around her waist, the scuffed heels of her shoes. Condensation growing downwards from the top of the window, hiding the back garden. Bleach and lavender, sharp scotch broth and the sweet lemon cakes we sometimes baked after school. The