I keep dreaming about the other girl.
She is looking down into the water, and I’m looking up at her through the silvered surface. She is wearing a white slip that reflects the moon. She reaches for me and I reach for her. The water between our hands churns and froths and splits apart, and I wake drenched in sweat the sheets twisted between my legs and wrapped around me tightly, my hair stuck to my face and around my neck. The walls glow blue, the green numbers on my alarm clock say five thirteen. Tomorrow is my sixteenth birthday. Friday, May 1st, the start of Summer.
I can’t get back to sleep, so I drag myself from bed and dress. I open the door of my bedroom silently, so as not to wake Dad, and go downstairs to the kitchen. The other girl is there. She watches while I sit and eat bowl after bowl of Shreddies. She doesn’t say anything. She’s waiting, too. The sun comes up and the windows blur with bright white light.
“Morning darling,” Dad says, as he comes in. “Big day tomorrow.” He kisses me on the top of my head. Like a little girl.
Something freezes when he touches me, but I don’t let him see. The other girl makes a face. His breath stinks of sleep. His eyes have wrinkly pouches under them and his chin is covered with rough grey stubble, his skin pale and powdery, a touch of purple under the surface, like a bruise. I smile into the air without catching his eye, go back to staring into space. The other girl hovers nearby.
I was four when mum died.
Dad told me she’d gone away.
He said if I looked carefully, I might see her in the big mirror in our living room, around the edge of the frame. The mirror takes up most of one wall. It’s as tall as the ceiling and the frame is painted white, over wood carved with an embossed design of vines and leaves. We would play a game of looking away from the mirror, then turning quickly to see if we could catch a glimpse of her. Dad would say I’d just missed her but she’d been looking at me and smiling. He told me she still loved me, even though dead people can’t love anything.
I spent hours looking into the mirror. The room in the mirror house looked the same as ours, but brighter, better, more quiet, more alone. If I could explore the rooms, beyond the one that I could see, that the other house would be huge. Once I walked through the mirror sitting-room door, that house would go on forever.
Dad loves everything I do. He loves me. He tells me I’m all he has, I’m so good, so smart, so kind, the best person he’s ever known. He wants to know that I’m ok, where I am, what I’ve been doing. He needs to work twice as hard, he says, because there’s only one of him.
I was eight when he told me what really happened.
Mum died because they tried to have another baby.
She got pregnant, but the baby went somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go, and got stuck and grew there. It wasn’t even really a baby yet, Dad said, just a lump of cells growing in the wrong place. Mum went to hospital because if the not-baby grew where it was, it could kill her. Dad stayed home to look after me. She kissed me goodbye, Dad said, but I don’t remember. The next day the hospital phoned to say something had gone wrong, and Mum was dead.
After that, the other girl came, and now she’s always near, just out of sight. She looks like me.
She says it was my fault Mum died, that I’m not good, no matter what Dad says, that it should have been me who died. She be something wrong with me, or Mum and Dad wouldn’t have tried to have another baby.
I try to make up for what I’ve done, but the other girl says nothing I do could ever be enough, she says I might as well do bad things because I’m bad already.
I used to dream about the other girl only sometimes, but now it’s every night.
She’s the only one who knows me, that understands, she’s the only one who tells me the truth. Dad lied to me, about the most important thing. When I get back from school, Dad is working in his office. He’s sort of a writer. He wrote a bestselling novel once, before I was born, but now he can’t finish anything. He says it’s hard to keep going when you know your best work is behind you.
The house has to be completely silent when he works. Sometimes, something, somewhere makes a ticking sound, and he goes from room to room looking, until he finds the thing and takes out the battery, or unwinds it, or wraps it in a towel and puts it in the fridge.
In Dad’s office there’s a drawer where he keeps Mum’s things. Her wedding dress, her jewellery, her letters to him and his to her, photographs, more letters.
They met when Mum was sixteen and Dad was thirty, on the set of the film of Dad’s only book, The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Mum was the lead actress. She wore a beautiful dress, the bodice covered in seed-pearls; she got married in that dress. They were together for two years before they had me and everything went wrong.
I do my homework, then I sit on the bed in my room, and listen to music on my Walkman and try not to think of anything. The other girl is quiet, watching, waiting for tonight.
Dad calls me down for dinner and we have macaroni cheese. The other girl can’t sit still but I force myself to eat.
“Big day tomorrow,” Dad says, again. He said that already this morning.
“Yes,” I say. It’s like we’re in a recording.
The other girl laughs somewhere behind me. “It’s like you’re in a recording,” she says.
If I’m not careful, soon she’ll start screaming.
“Sorry Dad” I say, “I was miles away”
“I didn’t say anything,” he says.
After dinner, Dad asks me how my day was and I tell him about each class and what we did. He always wants detail, he says detail is important. I’m good at everything except art. Mrs Anders is creepy and smells weird, like drains, or something died. When I’m in art class the other girl is always screeching and making me do things. She moves my hand so my pictures don’t look right. There are faces in the fruit of my still lives, hands trapped inside the blue glass vase, my windows are like eyes. Nothing is what it is. Last week she made me put drawing pins on Melissa Stevens’s chair, and craft-knife blades in Andrew McAnish’s coat pockets. We all got kept behind while Andrew and Melissa went to the nurse, but no-one knew it was me. His hands dripped and he had to hold them away from his new coat. The other girl thought it was hilarious.
I try to tell my Dad the truth, the normal, good parts. Everything except about the other girl and what she said and made me do.
My teachers think I’m a model student. That’s what my report card said, She’s a model student. Which made me think of something plastic, like a doll. Something not alive. I come top or nearly top in all my subjects. Dad says as a scholar I put him in the shade.
Dad and I clear the table and do the dishes and wipe down the kitchen surfaces. When we’re done he stands there staring at me with tears in his eyes.
“You’re getting so big,” he says.
“I don’t want to lose you,” he says.
“You look just like her,” he says.
I don’t say anything.
The other girl yawns theatrically. “Can we go now, please?” she says.
I lie in my bed with the lights off and wait for Dad to go to bed. I watch the light fade in the sky through the sloping window in the roof. I listen to him moving round the house, checking all the windows and doors and locking them. He says he always wants to be sure that nothing comes in, that I am safe, but I think he wants to stop me getting out.
The clunking sound of double locking the front door, his heavy tread going past my room and up the stairs. The lights click off in the hall. The door of his room shuts, the muffled click of his room light going off.
The sun slips down around the edge of the world.
“He’s asleep,” the other girl says. “Let’s go.”
In the hall no lights are on. We glide downstairs to my dad’s study and open the drawer and I take out my mum’s dress and take it into the living room where the big mirror is.
“Put it on,” the other girl says, her voice tense.
The dress is pale and fringed with lace, not exactly white, the pinky-white you find inside a shell, the skirt is soft and gauzy and hangs in pleated folds, the bodice is hard almost like armour, inlaid with tiny pearls. It’s heavier than it looks.
I put the dress on. I have to suck in my rib-cage in. When I let my breath go the dress squeezes my breasts, my sides, holds me like a fist, my heart beats against the bodice.
I stand in front of the mirror and look into the other girl’s eyes.
I’m in the other house.
On the other side of the mirror in the real sitting room, the other girl is dancing. She’s wearing the same dress as me. We both are full of joy. The carpet feels electric under my bare feet.
I open the door of the other sitting room and I run into the corridor, up stairs, under flickering lights, left, right, right, left, right. I don’t care where I go. The other house extends forever and I run until I’m tired. I meet no-one. I have to speak to no-one. No-one watches me or asks me to tell them what I’ve done or wants anything from me. I’m alone.
When I was wee my dad used to pick me up and put me over his shoulder, and carry me up the stairs to bed when I got too tired and fell asleep on the couch. I remember the rough tweed of his jacket against my cheek, his skin, which smelt of imperial leather soap. He uses those bars of soap so carefully that the rectangular red sticker stays on them right to the end, until there is eventually just a red sticker with a sliver of soap attached, and then just a sticker. He used to go to parties sometimes and take me with him, and I’d fall asleep on the coats, and listen to the sound of adult voices in the other room. I remember the smell of stale cigarette smoke, the murmur of adult voices. He doesn’t do that now.
When I get back the other girl is slumped in the sofa watching cartoons, chocolate ice-cream smeared across her face. When she sees me she stands, and comes to the mirror.
I look into her eyes.
In the real room, I take off the dress.
One day I won’t go back.
Ewan is a Glasgow-based theatre-maker, writer and teacher. He writes plays, poetry and fiction. Recent plays include The Bacchae, and Achilles, both nominated for the Scottish Theatre Award.
Photo by Vitaliy Shevchenko on Unsplash
