I open my laptop. Click reply before I can think myself out of it.
Who is this? My sister is missing. If you don’t tell me who you are NOW, I’m going to the police.
The beep of an answer comes so quickly, it makes me jump.
DON’T
This time, I reply with no hesitation at all. What do you want?
I KNOW THINGS. THINGS YOU’VE MADE YOURSELF FORGET
THINGS HE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW
DON’T TELL THE POLICE. DON’T TELL ANYONE
YOU’RE IN DANGER
I CAN HELP YOU
Fuck off, El. I know it’s you. You need to stop. You need to come back. Stop it. And come back.
She doesn’t reply. I sit at the kitchen table for a long time, no longer numb and stiff, but hot and angry. Until I hear a sound in the hallway. I get up and move slowly to the door, open it as if I expect to see something crouched and waiting to pounce on the other side.
The hallway is empty. The stained-glass window is black dark. There’s a light on: a Victorian oil lamp on the old telephone table that casts a red milky glow across the parquet. The house clanks and clunks and groans as if it’s a sleeping machine, as if the walls are breathing in and out, in and out.
I catch sight of my face in the mirror over the telephone table, the glass speckled with age and curled dark at its corners; my face clown-white and pulled ugly by shadows. Another noise makes me freeze. It’s low and keening, trapped like the howl of wind inside a narrow space. And it’s coming from the drawing room.
I tiptoe across the parquet. Turn the handle and open the door. It gives a ludicrously loud creak, but Ross doesn’t even look up. He’s sitting on the rug in front of the fire, turning the pages of a photograph album. Their wedding album. The wedding I wasn’t invited to.
The room is warm, lit golden by two large Tiffany lamps. I remember Grandpa used to always bring home a real Fraser fir from Craigie’s Farm every year, and for the whole of December it would sit in the front corner between fireplace and window, glittering and twinkling and shedding its needles, making the whole room smell like a winter forest. Every Christmas Eve, El and I would listen to the grandfather clock ticking ponderously down to midnight, excitedly watching the four crystal glasses full of sherry that sat waiting on the turquoise tiles of the Poirot.
Ross finally looks up at me. His face is wet, eyes red. There’s an empty whisky tumbler next to his knee, a half-full bottle. He holds it out to me. I take it and retreat a few feet, sit on the old leather recliner. The whisky is pretty disgusting, something muddy brown and far too strong, but the burn is familiar, and the warm buzz reward enough.
Ross looks down at an enlarged glossy print of him and El standing in front of a grand sandstone building with Greek columns. He’s wearing what must be the MacAuley tartan, and El is painfully stylish in a short white satin dress and red heels, her hair wound up high but loose. It’s obviously raining and windy; Ross is battling to one-handedly hold a large golf umbrella over both of their heads, and they’re leaning together, El’s hand on his waistcoat, his around her waist, laughing so hard it’s like I can hear them. It’s a beautiful picture, and when Ross goes to turn the page over, his fingers are shaking. I don’t go to him. I can’t. But something in me – warm and familiar and unwanted – hurts for him. Not the pain I felt when he told me about El going missing – fast and hot and fleeting – but deep down, like an ache. Melancholy, old. Indulgent. Like rediscovering the door to Mirrorland. And all I want is for it to go away.
Ross makes another of those terrible sounds, and then he starts to cry, great ragged sobs that make my own throat hurt, my own eyes sting. When he finally looks at me, I nearly flinch from the desperation in his eyes. ‘Christ, Cat. What am I going to do without her?’
I’m suddenly furious with El. Not pissed off, not angry, not resentful. Violently furious. I KNOW THINGS. THINGS HE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW. Because who else can she mean but Ross? Who else can she expect me to think she means but Ross?
‘I just don’t …’ He’s still crying hard, wiping his cheeks with the heels of his hands. ‘I’m just so scared, Cat. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to go on without her. I don’t know if I can go on with—’
‘Hey. Don’t talk like that. Don’t ever, ever talk like that, okay?’
I abruptly remember another Saturday inside Chief Red Cloud’s teepee, a couple of years after the first. The two of us sitting cross-legged, close enough to touch. A game of hide-and-seek maybe, or a rare occasion when El was speaking to neither one of us.
Ross was scowling. ‘I hate her.’
‘Who?’
‘My mum.’
‘Why?’ I tried to hide my excitement; the growing certainty that what he was telling me, what he was about to tell me, was something that he’d never told El.
He tried to shrug, bowed his head. ‘She hates me. And she hates my dad.’
‘Why?’
Ross was quiet for a long time, and then I heard him swallow. ‘One day after he went to work, she packed two bags and told me we had to leave. We moved here. I
