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

it doesn’t even exist. And El is doing what she always did – she’s letting me. I think of that pink cardboard box at the hotel, and my heart picks up in a hard and heavy drumbeat that even I can’t ignore. I breathe in, out. Look at that red-and-blue boat. ‘Tell me what happened, El.’

She says nothing until I turn back towards her, meet her gaze.

‘What I told you about my life with Ross was true. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t kill him. I mean, I thought about it …’ She pauses. ‘But if there was even the slightest chance I’d hesitate or fuck it up, what would he do? What would he do to me? What would he do to you?’ She shrugs. ‘I’d given up, I suppose. I just didn’t care any more.’

‘What changed?’

El takes in a long breath. ‘Mouse.’

‘Mouse?’

‘You remember how she always was? Needy.’ She closes her eyes. ‘Vulnerable.’

‘Because of the Witch,’ I say, thinking of her standing in front of the gate onto Westeryk Road, tall and cold like a waxwork. ‘Mum’s twin.’

El looks at me, surprised again. Nods. ‘When Mouse came back into my life, when she just turned up to the house about six months before the Plan, I didn’t recognise her at first. She said the Witch had just died. And so now she was free. Free to come back. I don’t know if she tracked me down to the house, or just expected me to be there. You think our childhoods were bad – the Witch beat Mouse, starved her, hid her away. Her whole life, she made Mouse small until that’s all she was. I used to think I knew what that felt like. But until Ross, I had no idea. Because you and I – through all of it, all of the abuse and the isolation – we had each other. We had Mum. We felt love. We were never alone. So I felt guilty. We were pretty shitty to her too, remember?’

I think of the Witch dragging Mouse along the hallway. No, no! I don’t want to go! The hard, echoless clap of those slaps against her face. The Witch’s smile as we let Mouse go. The way she stood inside that flood of light from the open door: head bowed and trembling like a dog.

‘Ross hated her,’ El says. ‘Hated anyone who might take any part of me away from him. So I let him think that I wanted her gone too – I let him think that she was gone – but I’d still phone her on that second phone. I’d still manage to sneak the odd hour away to meet her while he was at work. And we’d tell each other all about our horrible lives. It didn’t help. In the end, nothing helped. In the end, nothing mattered.’ She closes her eyes. ‘Because I’d just had enough.’

‘You never planned to escape, did you?’ I reach for my anger again, but it’s gone. ‘That last letter wasn’t a lie. You were going to kill yourself. Just like Mum did. That really was the Plan.’

‘I was just so tired, Cat,’ she says with an almost wistful smile. ‘So … sad.’

‘Tell me.’ I look back out at the boat, the pier, the sea.

‘April the third was a beautiful morning.’ Her voice softens, goes faraway. ‘The Forth has its own microclimate, you know. That day, it was like a bright gold corridor between all the dark clouds over the land. Seals followed me out to the shipping lane, gannets were wheeling around the sails and mast like they thought I was a fishing boat. I could see the flat nothing of the North Sea. I was ready.’ She stops. A tear runs into the corner of her lips. ‘But then it all went wrong.’

‘How?’

She swallows. Her smile is anguished. ‘Mouse.’

A familiar dread stirs in my stomach. ‘How—’

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, standing abruptly, disappearing into the apartment. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

She comes back in less than a minute, holding two tumblers in one hand, a plastic bottle filled with red-gold liquid in the other.

‘Bushi rum,’ she says, pouring two big measures, handing one to me. Her hand shakes. ‘Local and lethal.’

I drink. It burns all the way down.

‘She phoned me. When I was on The Redemption. She asked me where I was.’ El’s voice is so quiet, I have to strain to hear her. ‘I told her I was out on the boat, and I tried to sound normal, but she could tell something was up. She said if I didn’t talk to her, meet her, she would go to the house, find Ross. I’d already told her too much. About how he was. About what he’d done to me. I shouldn’t have, I should have known how dangerous that was. Mouse wasn’t always small – you must remember how possessive she could be? How impulsive?’

I think of the marshal’s office. Her hands on her hips. The shine of her teeth, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Do you want me to help you?

‘She thought that I was escaping. Running away again, like we did as kids. She was so angry.’ El shakes her head. ‘The Witch wasn’t the only reason she’d stayed away from us for years. Mouse had been angry with us for a long, long time.’

Please, I don’t want to go! I want to go back to Mirrorland! Her hands reaching out to us as the Witch dragged her through the entrance hall, towards the door. I press my fingers against my eyelids. ‘We took Mirrorland away from her.’

‘And we left her alone.’ El sighs, bows her head. ‘I knew Ross had to be back from London. I worried what would happen, what he might do, what she might do, if she went back to the house without me. I was only about an hour out, less than.’ She takes a long swallow of rum from the bottle. ‘I