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

are the same. I look around at all of the closed doors – Bedrooms 1, 2, 4, and 5 – and remember the names we gave them: the Kakadu Jungle, opposite the Clown Café; the Princess Tower, opposite the Donkshop. My heart, too, remembers to beat a warning close to the mouth of the dark corridor between the Clown Café and the Princess Tower, but I ignore it, turn and walk quickly towards the room at its gloomy end. Bedroom 3. It must have had a name too, but I can’t remember it. When I reach the door, its matte-black panels thick with dust, I realise that I’ve wrapped my arms tight around my torso to avoid touching the narrow corridor walls. I shake them out and take another breath. Jesus, come on. But when I close my fingers over the handle, I hear El shriek in my ear, Don’t go in! We can’t ever go in! and then Mum’s voice – higher, sharper, never inviting opinion or dissent – You ever go in there, and I’ll have both your guts for garters, you hear me?

I do.

I let go, step quickly backwards, unwilling to turn my back on that door until I’m on the landing again, standing inside warm gold light. I’m shuddering hard and long with no idea why. The why itches under my skin; I can feel it, but not enough to want to scratch.

Stop. Just ghosts. That’s all.

I slow my breathing down. Cross over to Bedroom 5, push open its door. Grandpa called it the Donkshop because that was the boat’s engine room; it was its power, its beating heart. The solid oak double bed and wardrobe are there, and the big ugly desk where he would work. I remember the loud hiss of radio static; even with his hearing aids, Grandpa was deaf enough that the whole house knew every single football result by the end of a Saturday afternoon. But the radio is gone. There are no mountains of screws and bolts and springs, mutilated machines and motors. There is no smell of oil and warm metal. The Donkshop’s heart stopped beating a long time ago.

The Princess Tower was Mum’s bedroom. A lump rises in my throat as soon as I open its door, see the small single bed against the wall, the pink pillow and eiderdown, the white dressing table with pink frilly skirt and padded stool. A shiver runs through me, because despite what Ross said, it all feels so real, so unchanged, as if frozen in time for two decades. As if Mum has only just left the room. She let us in here only rarely, I remember, mostly to read to us, and even as a child I was struck by how at odds all those pink and lacy frills were with our stern and decidedly unfrilly mother. How fit instead for a princess.

She was from one of Mum’s favourite bedtime stories: a fairy princess called Iona, because it meant ‘beautiful’, and she was the most beautiful princess in the world. I sit down on the bed, look out of the big window towards Westeryk Road, remember the slow, soothing warmth of Mum’s palm against my hair. One terrible day, the fairy princess was stolen from her mother by an evil hag. The hag cut off her wings and imprisoned her in a tower so high that no one even knew she was there. But the princess was never sad or afraid. Because she knew that one day she would escape. One day, her golden hair would grow long enough that she could tie it to her bedpost and use it as a rope to climb all the way down to the bottom.

But how will she untie her hair? El asked once.

And Mum stopped stroking ours. She’ll cut it off.

There was never a TV in the house. And the only radio – Grandpa’s transistor – was sacrosanct. Our whole lives were about stories. Mum had many rules, but that we should read, that we could learn everything we ever needed to know in life from books, was absolute and never wavered. Some stories, like the Princess Tower, were strange amalgams of those collected in The Arabian Nights or by the Brothers Grimm; some she read from books: the fantasylands of Narnia and Middle Earth, Treasure Island and Neverland; most were entirely homemade tales about pirates and princesses, heroines and monsters. All were terrifying – exciting, cautionary tales for the unwise, the naive, the cowardly, and the foolish.

Snow-white is quiet and gentle. She sits at home, helping with the housework or reading to her mother. Rose-red is wild. She likes to run and laugh and catch butterflies. The tickle of her breath against our skin. You must always hold onto each other’s hand. The slow tightening of her fingers. Rely on no one else. Trust no one else. The pull and twist of our hair until our eyes watered. All you will ever have is each other.

I get up fast, rub the goosebumps on my arms. But I don’t leave. I go to the white-painted cupboard next to the window where Mum used to keep all of our books, pull open its door. Between towering stacks of paperbacks, El stares out at me with her grey-blue eyes, and I stagger backwards against the wall. Her face is pale, ashy. There are new wrinkles around her eyes and her mouth that match mine. The paint is thick and careless as if spread by a knife. The backdrop is a vast mirror; reflections within reflections, her dark, tired face reaching smaller and smaller into infinity. Too many Els to count.

Looking at her has always been like looking in a mirror, of course. Twins run in our family, Mum said, but we were different. Special, rare like owlet-nightjars or California condors. More than one hundred thousand other children have to be born before a mum gets to have children as special as you. She had