Mirrorland by Carole Johnstone (books for 6 year olds to read themselves txt) 📕

‘A wise sailor never leaves port on a Friday,’ I whispered.

El’s fingers started to hurt mine. ‘It’s Saturday now, you idiot.’

But I knew she was just as scared. I knew she was wondering if it was too late to go back. ‘Will we be all right, El?’

We looked out across the firth, past the small green islet of Inchkeith and that faraway tanker. Shivering, still holding hands, close enough to feel each other’s heartbeat as that red sky moved in from the North Sea, spreading like a bruise. El didn’t look at me again until we could see it creeping over the breakwater.

And then she smiled. The wide, terrible smile that I knew she’d wanted to smile even along all those endless empty streets. She didn’t stop, even when we heard the first engine, the first siren. Or when the warehouse door creaked open and slammed shut again.

She smiled, smiled, smiled. ‘We will not leave each other. Say it.’

Footsteps crunching towards us. Another, louder curse. Enough lights to blind us so that we could no longer see the firth at all. Only each other.

‘We will not leave each other,’ I whispered.

She gripped my hand even tighter, and I swallowed, watched her smile get sharper, darker, watched it disappear. ‘Never so long as we live.’

‘You’ll be okay,’ a man who wasn’t the Old Salty Dog said.

And a woman with kind eyes and softer torchlight stepped between us, held out her other hand. ‘Everything will be all right now.’

*

And that was the day our second life began.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

I wasn’t there when my sister died.

Ross called me; left close to a dozen voicemail messages before I checked any of them, each one more desperate than the last. And I’m ashamed to say that it was always his voice I heard first – familiar and forgotten, hardly changed at all – rather than his words.

I watch the news reports in Terminal 4 of JFK, during a seven-hour layover that eats away at my sanity until I have to turn on my laptop and look. Sitting on a stool in a noisy, too-bright Shake Shack, ignoring my cheeseburger as I scroll through the first of three reports on the BBC News webpage for Edinburgh, Fife & East. I should probably be just as ashamed that he is what I see first too. Even before the black headline: Fears Grow for Missing Leith Woman.

The first photo is subtitled DAY ONE, 3 APRIL, but it’s already night. Ross is pacing a low stone wall next to the firth, caught between two silver lampposts that cast round, flat light. Though his face is turned away from the camera, no one could mistake his agitation for anything else: his shoulders are high, his hands fists. The photographer has caught the bright spotlights of a returning orange-and-blue lifeboat, and Ross’s face is turned towards both it and the frozen fury of a wave breaking over the end of the pier. There was a storm soon after she went missing, he said in more than one message, as if it were my not knowing that extra terrible detail that had stopped me from replying.

It takes nearly two glasses of Merlot in a darker, more subdued bar, well out of earshot of Shake Shack, before I’m able to play the first video. DAY TWO, 4 APRIL. And even then, when El’s photo flashes up on the screen – laughing, head thrown back in what she always called her ‘Like a Fucking Virgin’ pose, her silk blouse transparent, hair bobbed and silver-blonde – I flinch and press pause, close my eyes. Run self-conscious fingers through my tangled, too-long hair. I finish the wine, order a third, and the waiter who brings it to me stares so long and hard at my laptop screen, I wonder if he’s having a stroke. Before I realise, of course. Amazing what you forget; facts of life that were once as natural as breathing. He thinks he’s looking at a picture of me. Below the words: IS ELLICE MACAULEY ALIVE OR DEAD?

I pluck the buds out of my ears. ‘My twin sister.’

‘Sorry, ma’am,’ he says with a megawatt smile, managing to sound like he’s never been sorry a day in his life. The constant smiling and ma’aming wears me out, makes me feel irrationally furious. That this is the only thing about America that I won’t miss makes me feel more tired, more pissed off. I think of my condo on Pacific Avenue. The hot crazy circus of the boardwalk and Muscle Beach. The hot crazy nights of dancing in basement clubs where the walls run with sweat. The cool turquoise calm of the ocean. An ocean that I love.

I take another big swallow of wine, put my earbuds back in, press play. The photo of El cuts to a reporter: young and earnest, probably still in her twenties, her hair whipping viciously around her head.

‘On the morning of April the third, Leith resident, Ellice MacAuley, thirty-one, sailed from this yacht club in Granton Harbour on the Firth of Forth, and has not been seen or heard from since.’

I start as the camera zooms out from the yacht club to show the distant rail and road bridges at Queensferry in the west, before panning back east towards the outcrops of Earlsferry and North Berwick. Between them, the grey firth and the low rolling hills of Kinghorn and Burntisland on the opposite shore. Then back to the harbour, its bobbing round buoys and long pontoons and white sailboats with rattling masts. A low stone slope into the water. A different crane. No warehouse.

How could I not have realised before that it’s the same harbour – a place I haven’t thought about in decades, and yet there it is, almost unchanged. A shiver cricks my neck. A dread that I don’t want to examine any more than anything else that’s gone through my mind since