CECELIA AHERN
Girl in the Mirror
For my Fairy Godmother, Sarah Kelly
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Girl in the Mirror
The Memory Maker
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PS - don’t forget to read Cecelia’s other novels
Copyright
About the Publisher
‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ (Alice)
‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Girl in the Mirror
JULY 1992
‘Grellie, Grellie, I’m here.’ Lila knocked on the door, excitedly. She hopped from one foot to the other and felt her white cotton sock slip from above her knee and tickle her skin as it slithered down to rest in an exhausted heap around her ankle, like a drunken fireman down a pole. She pulled her underwear out from between her cheeks, blew her feathery hair, which was stuck to her wet lips, and rapped again on the door with her now red knuckles.
‘Why do you call her Grellie?’ the little girl beside her finally spoke up. Her voice was tiny beside the gigantic front door. She noticed that and moved closer to Lila for safety. Protection against what she wasn’t sure.
The front garden they had walked through was a jungle; untamed and unkempt, not like Sarah’s garden at all, where their gardener came every two weeks to make sure everything was symmetrical and perfect, and winked at her whenever he saw her at the window. She would marry him if she was old enough. But this garden was different. She felt she’d have gotten lost for ever if she’d stepped off the randomly placed flagstones that led to the front door. The deep-scented wild flowers stretched above her, all nosy to see inside the house as though they were fighting for space. The trees’ branches arched out and contorted in such disturbing angles they made Sarah shudder.
‘Grellie,’ Lila rapped again, impatiently.
‘Stop calling her that,’ Sarah said, nervously then. ‘Why do you keep calling her that?’
Lila finally picked up on her nerves and stopped jittering to look at her curiously. She became defensive, her eyes narrowed. ‘She’s my grandma Ellie. I call her Grellie.’
‘Oh. Well maybe she’s not here. Maybe we should just go.’
Sensing an opportunity to leave, Sarah quickly spun around and prepared to step onto the first mouldy flagstone, but her pulse quickened again when she heard the bolt of the giant door slide back and creak so loud it was as though they’d awakened a sleeping giant from a hundred-year slumber.
‘Grellie!’ Lila yelped excitedly, and Sarah said a silent goodbye to the front gate for now.
Lila was embraced warmly by a grey-haired woman. The front of her hair was pure white and it was pinned back in a bun. She had a cane in her hand, which was behind Lila’s back as she squeezed her. The hug looked warm. Inviting. Sarah’s nerves dissolved a little.
‘Well aren’t you an impatient little thing today?’ Ellie laughed and peeled herself away from her grand daughter. ‘I was down the back of the garden, weeding, I could hear you all the way.’
‘I thought you weren’t here, I thought you’d forgotten,’ Lila said breathlessly.
‘Of course I hadn’t forgotten. How could I forget I’d be meeting your very special friend today. I’ve been excited to meet her all day.’
Sarah smiled, her cheeks pinked.
Ellie’s voice was hard, and she spoke as if something was catching in her throat, something trapped in there.
Sarah couldn’t help herself listening to that trapped something. She cleared her throat.
Ellie looked directly at her. Sarah smiled.
‘This is Sarah,’ Lila said proudly. ‘Sarah, this is Grellie.’
Sarah didn’t know whether to smile or not. She did.
‘Hi.’ Her voice was tiny again.
‘Well hello, Sarah, you’re very welcome. Why don’t you both come in out of the chill and see what I’ve prepared for you.’ She turned and went into the house. Lila disappeared after her, hopping up and down with excitement.
‘Did you make your fairy cakes? With the pink icing? Did you put the marshmallow on the cake? Did you make the cake? Did you make your strawberry jam? I told Sarah you make your own and she didn’t believe me. Did you make some for the scones? Do the scones have fruit? I’d love clotted cream with them if you did.’
Lila gabbered on and on in a giddy hysteria while Sarah stood outside the front door listening to the crash of the waves against the steep cliffs below. It was a beautiful sunny day. It was July and school had just finished for the summer and everyone had been excited. Class had been taken outside and all they’d done was read a story and then had a party on the grass. On the journey to Ellie’s house everybody’s car windows had been open and Sarah had listened to the mix of music and chat drift out the windows and fuse in the sky to confuse the passing birds.
But here was different. Here it felt cold.
Sarah looked at the gate again; she’d left it slightly open. A gap large enough for a ginger cat to creep in. As though sensing her gaze, it stopped, arched its back and looked at her. They both stayed like that for a while.
‘Sarah, where are you?’
Sarah snapped to attention.
‘There you are.’ Lila appeared at the front door. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I was just …’ Tell her, tell her you want to leave.
‘Oh that’s Gingersnap. Grellie!’ Lila shouted at the top of her lungs.
‘I’m not deaf, my dear!’ Ellie called back.
‘Gingersnap is back!’
She heard Grellie call something back but didn’t know what she said but heard the something in her throat.
Sarah cleared hers again.
‘Come on, wait till you see,’ Lila said, eyes bright. She grabbed Sarah’s hand and pulled her inside and they both laughed as Sarah allowed herself to be tugged. The entrance hall was large. Its vastness severed Sarah’s laughter and made her stop suddenly in her tracks and, in turn, stopped Lila. Sarah looked around. There was a fireplace in the hallway. A chandelier. Dusty, a web or two draped from one candelabra to another, which occasionally shimmered when the sunlight hit it. The floorboards were worn, chipped and uneven, and creaked beneath even the lightest tiptoe. It was clear to see what they once looked like from the edges of the room. A polished border. Above the dark wooden fireplace stood two lonely candlesticks devoid of candles. And above them a black sheet was draped over something to reveal only its brass frame.
‘What’s the picture of?’ Sarah asked, uncertainty returning to her.
‘What picture?’ Lila asked confused.
‘The one above the fireplace.’
‘That’s not a picture, it’s a black sheet,’ Lila said, as though Sarah were mad.
‘What’s beneath the sheet?’
Lila grabbed her hand and pulled her again.
‘A mirror. Grellie doesn’t like mirrors. Come on, let me show you around. We can have loads of adventures.’
Lila showed Sarah around the house with excitement, opening doors and announcing the room’s purpose and function and possible adventure before swiftly closing them again and running off with Sarah in tow.
The house was certainly grand, as Lila had promised, the ceilings high, the windows covering floor to ceiling, lots of knick-knacks, lots of hiding places. Lots of dark places. Lila didn’t seem to notice. To her the house was filled with colour, delight, mystery and her memories. But w
here Lila saw light, Sarah saw the shadows, where Lila felt warmth, Sarah felt the chill. Each new room Sarah saw was colder than the previous. Each room had full walls, or sections of the wall, covered in black sheets. They leered at Sarah like the Grim Reaper.
They ran past a door and, unusually, Lila didn’t fling it open.
‘What’s in there?’ Sarah asked.
Lila stopped running. ‘Oh.’ She leaned over the banister and looked downstairs to see if Grellie was near. They could hear her clattering plates in the kitchen. ‘I’m not allowed in there but I’ll show you.’
‘No, it’s okay. I don’t want to go in if you’re not allowed,’ Sarah said, backing away.
‘I’ll show you.’ Lila smiled. ‘It’s no big deal. It’s just a spare room.’
‘Then why aren’t you allowed in?’
Lila just shrugged. ‘I’ve never asked why but I’ve been in here loads of times.’
She reached up and lifted the key off the top of the doorframe where it was hidden, put it in the keyhole and turned. All the time, Sarah’s heart raced and she looked around expecting Ellie to appear beside them at any moment, even though they could hear her downstairs.
‘No, Lila, don’t. I don’t want to get into trouble.’
‘We won’t,’ Lila whispered.
She pushed the door open and Sarah waited for something to jump out at her but it didn’t. Nothing happened. It was a boring room. A double bed, off-white bedding, two bed-side lockers, a fireplace. But what dominated the room was a full-length, free-standing mirror, which was draped completely in black.
Sarah swallowed. It wasn’t the biggest piece in the room but it was imposing, it seemed to take over the room.
‘Let’s go in,’ Lila whispered.
‘No.’ Sarah pulled her back. She tried to hide the terror from her voice and attempted a smile but felt her lips tremble. ‘I want to see all the lovely cakes you were telling me about.’
Lila lit up as though she’d forgotten. She locked the door and they ran downstairs, through what felt like dozens of rooms and ended up in the conservatory. Lila displayed the spread proudly. She hadn’t lied. The table was filled with cakes, biscuits, scones and pies and all homemade if the pots and pans in the sink were anything to go by. Fruits spilled out of bowls and blobs of cream lazily sprawled themselves in containers dotted around the table. Jugs of juices, lemonades, no doubt homemade too.
But around this beautiful vision the garden was fighting to get inside. Trees reached out their branches like arms, twigs like claws, clinging to the side of the glass. The flowers and their pretty, colourful faces looked ghostly, evil almost as they glared in at the food, at Sarah, at all of them, watching, waiting for something to happen. What weeding Ellie had claimed to be doing was beyond Sarah. She couldn’t see how she could step outside of the house without being lost for ever.
‘Well? What do you think?’ Lila asked.
Ellie was standing beside the table, cane in hand, the tip lodged between the crack in the terracotta tiles.
Sarah’s voice was even smaller in this room as she said, ‘I’d like to go home now.’
‘What?’ Lila asked in shock. ‘Why?’
Sarah ignored Lila and looked at Ellie. ‘I’d like to go home now please,’ she said again politely.
‘I’ll call your mother,’ Ellie said calmly, as if expecting this to happen.
‘But why?’ Lila looked from Grellie to Sarah as though there was something they both knew but weren’t sharing with her. ‘Are you sick? Do you not like fairy cakes. You don’t have to eat them.’
‘Come Lila,’ Ellie said gently. ‘Give Sarah some space now. I’d expect you’d like to wait for your mother at the gate?’
The gate. Still open a fraction. She couldn’t wait to get out of there.
She nodded, then remembered her manners. ‘Yes please.’
Lila and Sarah sat beside one another on the wall, kicking their legs, allowing their heels to bang back against the crumbling brickwork. They never spoke. Not until Sarah’s mother’s car was in sight.
‘Thank you for inviting me,’ Sarah said politely, feeling relieved.
‘You didn’t have fun. You were hardly here for very long. I didn’t even get to show you my hiding place in the back garden.’
Sarah shuddered. She hopped off the wall as the car slowed to a stop beside them and she offered Lila a warm hug.
‘See you over the summer?’ Lila asked.
Sarah nodded.
But they didn’t.
Sarah waved at her friend from the passenger seat, careful not to look at the house. It was bad luck, she remembered.
‘What happened, sweetheart, did you have a fight?’ her mother asked.
Sarah shook her head.
‘Do you feel ill?’
She shook her head again.
Her mother reached out and felt her forehead, ‘You don’t feel hot.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Did something happen?’ she asked with more urgency now and Sarah knew she’d have to explain or she’d never stop asking her. She’d even send her father to her room when he got home from work, to ask questions in a roundabout back to front way that was always so obvious to Sarah even though they thought she didn’t know their true intentions.
So she spoke.
‘All the mirrors were covered up with black sheets. Every mirror in every single room. All with black sheets.’
Her mother was silent. Thoughtful.
‘Were they decorating?’
She shook her head. ‘Lila said her grandmother doesn’t like mirrors.’
Her mother was quiet, then full of false perkiness, ‘Well there you go, her grandmother just doesn’t like mirrors. People like different things, Sarah, you’ll learn that as you go through life, it won’t always make sense but that’s the way it is.’
‘Why wouldn’t she like them?’
‘Maybe she just doesn’t like seeing herself, sweetheart. Some people are just like that.’
‘But, Mum, it can’t be the reason.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because her grandmother is blind.’ And she lowered her voice to a whisper even though they were far from the house. ‘She doesn’t have any eyes.’
Lila didn’t know why her Grellie didn’t like mirrors, she just grew up knowing that she didn’t, just like she knew not to put sugar in her father’s tea and like she knew never to make her mother sit in the middle of a row at the cinema or restaurant. She didn’t know why her father didn’t like sweet tea or why her mother suffered a minor form of claustrophobia, she just knew that they did and that was enough information for her.
All Grellie ever said was, ‘It was the price of freedom,’ not that it made any sense to anybody or explained the mystery for anybody. Not only did Lila not know why but she didn’t think it was odd. So the mirrors were covered with black sheeting, so the rooms were darker than most peoples’ rooms. She didn’t mind not knowing why her fatherdidn’t take sugar in his tea or why her mother felt that the walls were closing in around her everytime she sat in the middle of a row. Even though Sarah had left the house in a rush and she subsequently heard rumours at school about her weird blind grandmother who was afraid of mirrors who lived alone in a house on a cliff, she could go the rest of her life not knowing and not caring.
But.
She should have asked.
JULY 2010
‘Stop calling me.’ Lila laughed down her mobile phone. ‘It’s bad luck or something to talk to each other.’
‘It’s bad luck to see each other and that’s a load of crap too,’ Jeremy replied. ‘I just got worried you weren’t going to show up. You weren’t answering your phone.’
‘I wasn’t answering the phone because I knew it was you and it’s bad luck. And of course I’m going to show up, would you stop worrying?’
‘It’s not bad luck and I wasn’t worrying till you didn’t answer the phone.’
They both laughed. r />
‘Hold on, I’m on the road to Grellie’s, I need to concentrate, I’m putting you on speakerphone.’
‘Anyone in the car with you?’
‘Just me and the dress.’
‘Hello, dress, can’t wait for you to be on the hotel bedroom floor tonight.’
Lila laughed. ‘For the amount it cost me I’m never taking it off. I better go, I’m down the Bishop’s Gap.’
‘That’s your business,’ Jeremy joked as everybody always did about the steep terrain en route to Ellie’s property. ‘But one more thing before you go. Take a deep breath first.’
Lila groaned in advance.
‘The hotel manager called. He thinks the ballroom would look more exquisite - his word not mine - if the mirrors were left as they are.’
‘No. I didn’t spend all that money on black fabric to not cover them up. And Grellie’s bedroom - is he planning on uncovering the mirrors in there, too?’
‘No, he’s okay with the bedroom, it’s just the ballroom. He’d like the guests to see the room properly.’
‘It’s my bloody wedding not his.’
Silence. Then.
‘Honey … she won’t even know.’
‘Jeremy.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I can’t believe you even said that.’
‘I know, I take it back. I’m sorry.’
‘Well in that case I’m putting goat’s cheese back on the menu so your mother can be cured of her imaginary allergy to it,’ Lila fumed.
‘Lila. Calm down. I said I’m sorry. I know. I completely understand. I adore Ellie as much as you do. I was just trying to look at a bad situation positively.’
‘There is no bad situation. Call him back and tell him he’s to put the curtains back up or I’m doing it myself.’