Mirrorland

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Iwasn’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 silverblonde – I flinch and press pause, close my eyes.

About the author

Carole Johnstone used to work for the NHS in oncology with terminally ill patients, until she was diagnosed with the incurable condition ulcerative colitis. After a stint living in Cyprus she moved back to her native Scotland and now lives in Argyll. Mirrorland is published by the Borough Press, price £12.99