‘Ross, no. Stop.’ I cringe from him, batting his hands away, and I’ve time enough to wonder if this was what it was like for El. If this is what happened when she tried to leave him too. Until I remember what happened to her instead.
‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ He reaches out again, catches my hands and squeezes them tight inside his, tight enough that my bones crack. ‘I won’t ever hurt you.’ I wonder if he knows he’s nodding his head.
I can’t stop struggling, but he’s too strong and I’m too weak. He holds both of my wrists one-handed; the other he moves up along my shoulder, my collarbone, softly enough to make me shudder. There’s another kind of shining madness in his eyes now. A war between taking what he really wants and settling for what he’s always had instead. His hand slides up the side of my neck, his fingers tracing the skin under my ear, tighter, then tighter still, his thumb suddenly pressing down hard enough against my windpipe that I let out too much air in a gasp. And that madness shines brighter.
When I came to, Grandpa was choking El again. Her eyes were rolled back, her face was purple, her fingers blindly grasped at the air. I staggered towards them, but it was too hard. I couldn’t save her. I wasn’t enough. That was it. That was all.
‘I won’t hurt you. I won’t hurt you,’ Ross mutters in a horrifyingly reassuring voice, the veins in his neck getting fat with the exertion of choking me tighter. I slide down the wall, rough and cold against my back.
‘I didn’t kill her,’ he says. In that same calm voice, sweat dripping off his nose. ‘I didn’t.’
But he did. Just like he’s going to kill me.
My head feels heavy, full. El’s liquid gasps are mine. My sight begins to shrink and curl black around its edges.
And then El grips hold of my hand. Hard enough to hurt, to punish. Deadlight, she says. Screams. Deadlight.
I lurched across the deck, scrabbling for purchase as if we really were pitching and rolling against a Caribbean storm. I ignored Grandpa’s desperate grunts of exertion, made myself look only at the stern. The lantern. Hanging on a rusty hook over the hull. Grandpa turned to see me lift it high up over my head. His frown was startled, then almost tender. A wink. A grin. Put it doon, lassie.
I almost did. And so automatically I hardly registered I was doing it, until I saw Mum crawling along the deck towards us, blood running into her eyes. Her hoarse, rasping cries as Grandpa turned dismissively back to the job in hand: Leave them alone! They’re just children!
I open my eyes. No. Tell the fucking truth.
Leave them alone! They’re your children!
Ross makes a sound like a sob in the back of his throat, and I feel his fingers loosen around my neck, feel the air rushing back into my lungs. But it doesn’t matter. I know he won’t stop. One way or another. He won’t ever ever stop.
As I scramble backwards, grab on to the lantern hook to pull myself back to my feet, I hear all of the bells at once. High and discordant, low and long – loud enough to tremble eardrums and shake stone.
Your children. That horrifying truth of what we were. Not cowboys or Indians or Clowns or pirates. Or prisoners. Our grandfather’s children.
My fingers shook against the lantern; its hinges squeaked. I looked down at El’s lifeless body. The back of Grandpa’s head, his hunched and working shoulders.
And I bring the lantern – my deadlight – down on top of Ross’s skull. Just as hard as I brought it down on Grandpa’s. With the same black fury and icy horror. Again and again, until all the strength left in me has run out through my fingers. Until the sound is no longer hard and short and white, but soft and long and copper-dark.
*
It takes me a long time to climb the stairs out of Mirrorland, but once I have, I find that I can’t leave. Instead, I sit down on the top step, lean against the door. I think about phoning Rafiq, but don’t. I look down into the shadows of the Shank, the turn of the corner east towards the Satisfaction.
Mum didn’t speak again for a long while. She was angry. Then, I imagined, at us; now, I imagine, at herself. At how badly her plan had gone awry. She looked at Grandpa for a long while too before dropping down to her knees. At first, I thought to touch him, to wail, to mourn, but instead, she pushed him onto his side like he was a sack of potatoes. When she let him go, a gasp of air pushed out of him, and either I or El shrieked.
‘He’s dead,’ Mum said. And then she stood, knees cracking. Looked around at our painted walls and the long cells of the Shank with a pained kind of anger. ‘We can’t leave him here. Help me get him up the stairs.’
It took at least half an hour. By the time we managed to drag him into the kitchen, exhaustion had burned away our shock.
‘Go upstairs,’ Mum said. ‘Get together what’s left of your clothes, your books. And then go back down to Mirrorland, lock it all in the armoire with everything else.’
She’d already had us pack and store most of our meagre belongings in the armoire weeks before she first told us about THE PLAN. Just another game. Another
