He had to have known he couldn’t do it. That the game was supposed to be impossible. But still, he tried. He got down on his hands and knees and searched every corner of the sea for those scattered tacks, collecting them in one hand, picking them up with the other – and only when there was one minute remaining did he start to panic.
‘I can’t do it! I don’t have them all!’
‘There are fifty,’ El said mildly. ‘How many do you have?’
‘We’ll stop the clock,’ I said. ‘While you count.’
He had thirty-two.
‘You better hurry up,’ El said.
When his time was up, and we got ready to sail away without him, he started to cry. ‘Don’t! Please!’
I’d never seen Ross cry before, and seeing it didn’t make me feel remorse, it made me feel powerful. It made me think of hiding in a box and sobbing into a tartan blanket.
‘You can catch us up, stupid,’ El said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
‘NO! You can’t leave me!’
That image is one of my most enduring of Mirrorland. El and I sailing away from a sobbing and inconsolable Ross on his knees in the Caribbean Sea, hands bloody and full of tacks. Calling out to us though we pretended not to hear him. ‘How will I know where you’ve gone?’
The alarm clock says 11:35. When I stretch, everything aches in a warm, lethargic way. Ross is still in bed with me. I can hear his slow breathing, feel the heat of him at my back. When I’m sure that he’s still asleep, I turn around to look at him. He’s lying half on his front, legs splayed under the covers. I’ve never gone to sleep with him before, and it feels strange, intimate, more of a transgression than fucking him did. At least we’re in the Clown Café instead of their bedroom, our bedroom. I look at his thick hair, sticking up in all directions. His broad shoulders and back, his narrow hips, the curve and flat of his flank. And I still want to touch him, I still feel that itchy need to do more. I think the word arsehole, but it’s lost much of its previous power. I do have guilt, and a sizeable chunk of it, but when I poke around it, like the swollen gum around a bad tooth, it gets no bigger, no more painful.
She left him. She doesn’t want him.
‘Hey.’ His voice is muffled, still thick with sleep.
I snatch my hand back from his skin, but otherwise freeze, holding my breath.
He doesn’t turn around, but gropes behind him for my hand. And for a horrible, punishing moment, I wonder if he thinks I’m El.
‘I know it’s you, Cat.’
I sit up. Find myself looking at that framed photo on the bedside table. A young El and Ross grin back at me.
‘Do you regret it?’ I hate that my voice sounds so small. ‘Do you regret what we did?’
He sighs, and then sits up too, turns his head to look at me. ‘No.’
But I realise that he’s looking at that framed photo too. And I can see in his eyes that part of him does. Part of him has to. A big part.
‘I don’t want you to think that I don’t love her,’ he says.
‘I’m her sister’ is just about the only thing I can think of to say. As far as culpability goes, genes probably trump vows.
We both jump at the sudden bell ring from downstairs, its echo winding up towards us. Ross gets up, pulls on a pair of jogging bottoms. I hear him move across the landing, the slap of his bare feet against the mosaic stair tiles. I stare at the bell pull set into the wall next to the dress-up cupboard. Think of all those bells lined up on the board in the kitchen like mismatched knives in a drawer.
I look back at the photo. And I can still hear her voice in the dark. After hours and hours of ugly silence. Hoarse and mean and full of the same gleaming fear as her eyes on the day she gave me the Black Spot. How could you? You’re supposed to be my fucking sister.
*
By 2005, El and I had a bedsit in Gorgie. A predictably awful dump, though we were as grateful for it as shipwrecked sailors are for land. It belonged to the Rosemount, and was ours for exactly twelve months, while we sought alternative accommodation and the means to pay for it. We were both at college on bursaries, working whatever shitty jobs we could find. We still barely spoke, no closer at almost nineteen than we had been at almost eighteen. And I was still lying to her.
The care home was holding a reunion party that May Day bank holiday: a barbecue in its extensive grounds. El threw the invitation in the bin, but I rescued it, arranged to meet Ross at the rear fire exit. We probably thought we were being discreet and clever, but I doubt we actually were for even a minute. Ordinarily, we met at his mother’s house – they’d moved from Westeryk to Fountainbridge by then – and we’d have fast and muffled sex in his small single bed, listening to the murmur of people downstairs. The opportunity that an empty Rosemount presented was too good to waste.
The long, high-ceilinged corridors were deserted. Ross held my hand as he led me along them, while I navigated from the rear in loud whispers. All the room keys hung on numbered hooks in
