I find the diary page taped to the wooden backing.
June 24th, 2005
He’s mine if I want him. He’s NOT hers. That’s the way it was and the way it is. I know why he did it, but that doesn’t help. Every time I think about them together it feels like a bag of rocks sitting on my chest. I’m angry and I’m scared and I can’t stop crying. It’s like thinking about Mirrorland and the Satisfaction and the Clowns and remembering they’re gone now. I can’t ever go back.
But I CAN fix this. I CAN make everything go back to how it was before. Cat’ll hate me but I don’t care. I’ll be glad.
Because He CAN’T have her and She WON’T have him.
When I hear the bell ring I jump, nearly drop the page. I shove it into my pocket instead and go back downstairs.
There’s no one at the door. When I go into the kitchen, I freeze inside its doorway, staring up at the bell board. One pendulum is still swinging, its five-pointed star like a metronome, a hypnotist’s watch. Bedroom 3. I blink, and it isn’t moving at all. Every bell stands silent and still.
I sense movement at the corner of my eye, and I whirl around – dizzy with dread, my nerves on a too-brittle edge. I see the blurry flash of someone outside the window, moving fast and quickly disappearing. I run for the scullery, wrench open the back door, and glimpse another CATRIONA card on the top step before sprinting down the rest of them. I stop on the paving stones, spin left, right. Listen. Nothing but the wind in the apple trees, the distant traffic on the other side of the house. The washhouse door is still chained and padlocked. I look around at the high, ivy-choked walls. There’s no way someone could have climbed over them in the time it’s taken me to get out here.
I turn warily towards the second alleyway on the other side of the house to Mirrorland. Its red door is open. I run the length of the alley and into the front garden, but there’s nobody there. Even the gate has been latched shut.
I think about running into the street, but don’t. Instead, I close and bolt the door, wander back to the garden and its walls. I look up at the house, big and wide and freezing bright. Casting a long shadow. I don’t want to go back inside. I trudge back up the scullery steps only to pick up the envelope and pull shut the back door. Go back down through the orchard, my face turned towards the dappled sun, the rustling breeze. Ross will be able to see me, I realise, if he looks out of the Clown Café’s window. But if he hasn’t already come downstairs to see why I’m running around like a madwoman, then he’s probably still asleep. We’ve both been doing a lot of that. It feels a little like hiding.
Old Fred creaks his welcome. I put the card under my arm and my palms against his rough bark, close my eyes so that I can’t see DIG or our names carved inside a circle, and I think of all the times I sat or lay flat on his lowest branch, squinting up at the sky. How many times he gave me the same safe comfort as the loyal and timid Mouse. The kind of comfort that never needed you to be right or better, but was strong and warm and full of silent, reliable sympathy. When that only reminds me of El’s I’M MOUSE, I step back from Old Fred and stand still for a moment, arms and fingers spread wide, tipping my head up until the sunlight burns warm and red behind my eyelids. On sunny days, El and I would stand like that for what felt like hours, holding hands for balance, laughing and mimicking Mum’s high and reedy Don’t look! Don’t look or you’ll go blind!
But I have to look. I open my eyes, and then I open the envelope. It’s a landscape watercolour of a busy harbour beneath a sunny and cloudless sky. I shiver in the cold. I want to open it even less than all of the others.
HE WILL KILL YOU TOO
I close my eyes. Close the card. Think of the He CAN’T have her and She WON’T have him from today’s diary page. A page that was written one week before our nineteenth birthday. One week before that grubby dull room with a plastic-framed seascape of rocks and sand and waves. One week before El did what she did to fix this. To make everything go back to how it was before.
I was working when Ross called me on July the first. Only my second shift in a bad West End pub called the White Star. And – it turned out – my last. By the time I got to the hospital, much of the initial panic was over. El’s stomach had been pumped empty of paracetamol, and she’d been sedated and rehydrated. Ross stood alongside her bed, gripping the hand that wasn’t bandaged and bloody around a cannula. His hair was wild, the whole of him shook as if he had a chill, even though we both knew by then that she was going to be all right. He’d refused to leave her, to go sit in the grubby dull room on a grubby dull sofa as I had dutifully done. He was hysterical, one of the nurses whispered to me much later on, when the night had arrived and all other visitors had left. She squeezed my hand, pressed the palm of hers against her chest. Oh, to be young and in love again!
It was after he finally left to get some food from the canteen
