Cecelia Ahern - Girl in the Mirror

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 where 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.