Take me! Mum screams far behind us. Take me instead! But we know he won’t.
And when the sun disappears in a loud and echoing thud, and we’re swallowed up by the dark – thick and cold and full of horrors – we start to scream too.
And I wake up in the Clown Café, my hand clamped hard over my mouth. Ross still sleeping beside me.
*
14 April 2018 at 12:01
Inbox
Re: HE KNOWS
To: Me
CLUE 7. EVERY BAD WITCH NEEDS A GOOD THRONE
Sent from my iPhone
*
I’ve looked under nearly every one of the chairs in the Throne Room before I remember that the only place I ever saw the Witch was the kitchen. And whenever she sat down, it was in Grandpa’s chair at the head of the table.
I find two pages wedged inside the wooden frame of its seat.
4 August 1993 = 7+a wee bit!
THE WITCH was here tooday. AGAIN. Cat and Me hate her. She is nasty she pinchies and sometimes she spits on us. Cat and me are always thinking up ways to KILL HER – like drowning her in the bath coz witchs cant stand water or skwishing her like the WICKED WITCH OF THE EAST. Mouse says shes to scayerd but shes always scayerd she is USELESS!!! Me and Cat arnt scayerd of a nasty ugly old witch.
March 29th, 1997 = 10Y, 9M, 29D
THE WITCH was here again. She hates us and I don’t know why. I don’t know why she comes if she hates us. She should be called THE BITCH instead. Witches better watch out Grandpa says or they’ll cut themselves on their own tongues.
I can still see her face: sharp grey features pulled in tight together as though something behind her mouth and nose were yanking hard on a string. Narrow eyes, like the evil Madame Defarge, staring at me as if I’m just about the worst thing anyone should have to look at. Something else hides just behind that image and the memory of You’re a disgusting wee bitch! hissed thin into my cringing ear, but I can’t reach it, can’t grab hold of it.
El and I always channelled our fears through Mouse. It made us feel better. And braver. We would sit her down on the boardwalk or the deck of the Satisfaction, and list all the ways we could do away with the Witch – drowning her, poisoning her tea, creeping up behind her with a Sioux war club or Pogo’s bullhorn. But she can’t get into Mirrorland anyway, El would say, with rare kindness. Because it belongs to us.
I’m blindsided by the clear and sudden memory of Mum and the Witch standing inside the scullery doorway; the anger, the animosity so thick between them that I flattened myself against the kitchen door, stared transfixed through the crack between its hinges.
‘Give me it back. It belongs to me.’
I saw the necklace when the Witch leaned down to Mum; its oval locket swung, catching the sun against its gold. ‘And now it belongs to me.’
I shrunk from that voice, but Mum didn’t. The woman who cringed and fretted over all the bad things in the world; who made us pack emergency rations in backpacks hidden under our beds and subjected us to years of lessons and drills and grim fairy tales because there wasn’t a thing that she wasn’t afraid of, her life filled to the brim with certain doom, stepped up so close to the taller, bigger Witch that they were almost nose to nose. Mum’s smile was as cold as black ice. ‘You always want what I have.’
The Witch curled the necklace into her fist, thrust both inside the pocket of her long black dress. ‘And sometimes, I get it.’
*
I stand in the middle of the kitchen for too many long moments, another slow headache pulsing hard behind my eyes. I don’t even know if the Witch existed, I realise. If that conversation even ever happened. It’s getting harder and harder, now that more memories are returning – the bad as well as the good – to prise apart what was real and what wasn’t. Perhaps everyone’s childhood memories are the same: part truth, part fantasy. But this house and our mother and her stories turned our imagination into a melting pot, a forge. A cauldron. And, I’m beginning to realise, I can trust nothing that came out of it.
I’m suddenly furious. I start opening and rifling through every single cupboard and drawer. I don’t expect to find any more pages, not really, but like in the Clown Café, just the act of looking makes me feel more in control, helps penetrate this weird fog of inertia that seems to have taken hold of me and won’t let go. El is manipulating me for her own inexplicable ends, just like she always has, and I can do nothing about it. Nothing but this.
The drawer under the worktop is still the paperwork drawer: I shove aside dozens of bank statements and utility bills, until I notice an envelope addressed to Ross from a solicitor in Leith Walk postmarked two days ago. I pick it up, take out the papers inside. The first is a document entitled THE PRESUMPTION OF DEATH (SCOTLAND) ACT 1977; INFORMATION GUIDE. And underneath, FORM G1 OF INITIAL WRIT. After SHERIFFDOM OF, Ross has written EDINBURGH AT 27 CHAMBERS STREET. PURSUER, ROSS MACAULEY AGAINST ELLICE MACAULEY DEFENDER. The only thing he hasn’t done is sign it.
I’m still staring at it when I realise that Ross is standing inside the kitchen doorway. His face is white, but his jaw is set.
‘I had to, Cat. The police advised me to contact a solicitor, and he told me it could take months to process or even get anywhere near the courts. It’s just in—’
‘The police?’ I say, when I’m certain I can say anything. ‘Or Shona Murray?’
‘For God’s sake!’ he explodes, and it looks like a relief. ‘She’s the family liaison officer! It’s her
