Mouse dropped down onto her knees beside me. ‘I’ll help you.’
‘How?’
Her smile was back. Ruby-red and wide. ‘You can be me. And I’ll be you.’
I shook my head, retreated farther behind the booking desk.
‘It’s easy!’ she said, eyes glittering as she stood again, spun around in a circle. ‘Look!’ And I saw that her baggy sack dress had been painted with clumsy red splodges to imitate the roses on the matching pinafores El and I wore. That she’d plaited her short hair into stumpy pigtails tied with string instead of ribbon. I saw, too, that she was excited. My predicament made her happy. And that made me shiver. There was a darkness to everyone and everything in Mirrorland. But Mouse had always been the exception.
She crawled behind the desk on her hands and knees. ‘Go and hide!’
When I didn’t, she loomed even closer.
‘You have to hide!’ I could still see the shine of her teeth, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. ‘It’s easy, Cat! If you’re quiet and small and scared in the dark, no one will ever see you. Go!’
I went. Back on the boardwalk, I could see big laughing shadows against the bricked-over door and the teepees, I could smell sweat and sugar and smoke. I could hear Ross’s laughter again, the joy in it. Frightened tears were running down my face as I ran into the Three-Fingered-Joe Saloon. The bar was an old TV box reinforced with bricks and broken wood covered with a tartan blanket. When I heard El shout my name, I jerked open the lid and climbed inside, crouched down on my knees, and buried my face in the blanket’s scratchy warmth.
The dark was nearly suffocating. Please, please, I thought, squeezing my eyes shut. Please don’t let them find me. Please.
Because what would I do without Mirrorland? Without Ross, Annie, Belle, and Mouse? The pirates, the cowboys, the Indians, and the Clowns? What would I do without Captain Henry? What would I do without El? I would be alone. I would be stuck inside a cold, grey, empty, frightening world.
An hour is an eternity if you spend it hiding in a box waiting for the very worst to happen. When the adrenaline started to wear off, it was replaced with a kind of weary doomed acceptance that returned as quickly to horror when I heard loud footsteps on the saloon’s floor.
Please. Please.
I heard the bony thud of knees. The shuffle of someone moving closer. Opening the lid.
It was El.
‘Please don’t tell,’ I whispered. ‘Please don’t make me leave Mirrorland and never ever come back. Please!’
Her expression was in shadow. ‘You’re crying.’
And I realised that I hadn’t stopped. The realisation made my tears come faster; made the pain bigger, scarier. I gripped her wrist. ‘Please don’t tell!’
‘Stop it!’ El hissed. ‘Let me go.’
‘You’ll say you found me.’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘Yes, you will.’
‘No, I won’t, dummy. You’re my sister. Why would I want you out of Mirrorland?’
So you can have it – and Ross – all to yourself, was what I thought and didn’t dare say.
‘We will not leave each other,’ she whispered. ‘Come on! Say it.’
I swallowed. Let go of her wrist. ‘We will not leave each other.’
She nodded. ‘Never so long as we live.’
Every pirate code was in code. And ours meant Trust me. Trust me and no one else.
‘It’s just fifteen more minutes,’ she said.
And then she closed the lid, leaving me in darkness.
It wasn’t fifteen minutes. Endless leg cramps fed my panic, my claustrophobia, my uncertainty. When the lid was finally opened again, I no longer cared about consequences or banishment or being alone in a cold, grey, empty, frightening world.
I got up on legs that were numb and prickling, the Black Spot still crushed inside my palm. El stood inside the saloon, and everyone else stood behind her. She didn’t look relieved so much as triumphant. ‘You did really great. We’ve all agreed that you’re forgiven.’
I never thought the Black Spot was Ross’s idea. I never blamed him at all. Maybe El’s diary was wrong. Maybe her version of that day is no truer than mine. Because a memory, after all, just like a belief, can still be a lie.
But she was right about me being jealous. Of course she was, because who wouldn’t be? She and Ross conspired to exclude me in the only way children can: with looks and laughs and whispered conversations that ceased whenever I got within earshot. They were both cruel, there’s no denying that. I can still remember that feeling, and far too readily: the heart-breaking agony of being discarded by both of them. The endless worrying about what I had done wrong, what I was doing wrong, and never knowing it was nothing at all. Is that what I’m supposed to be understanding from these email clues, these diary extracts, these unwelcome reminders of our past seeping back in like damp through a badly proofed wall? That Ross was always hers, even in the beginning? Or that she always kept secrets from me – that, pirate code or no, she had never trusted me? Or does she just want me to know that I’m wrong? That something else I believe in doesn’t exist? That she won’t ever be coming back?
*
Ross has gone out. I’m both relieved and worried. And embarrassed. This time he hasn’t left me a note. I sit at the kitchen table, google ‘how to track the original location of an email’, and trawl through the results until I find one that doesn’t make me want to frisbee the laptop across the kitchen. My first attempt turns up Private IP Address – No Info. My second, the address of the Google mail server in Kansas. Two coffees later, I’ve managed to install a mail tracker add-on, but if I want it to trace an address, I need to send El a new email.
After typing ‘EL’ in the subject line followed by ten minutes of staring at the
