The Medici Mirror

by Melissa Bailey

  I looked at her face again, trying to place it. ‘Do I know you?’ Instantly I regretted the question. A better one would have been, ‘Do you know me?’

  Strangely, she answered the question I hadn’t asked. ‘Yes, I know you, Johnny. But more importantly right now, do you know who I am?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Not even a glimmer of recognition?’

  I shook my head again but with less certainty this time. As I had thought before, there was something familiar about her.

  ‘Well, you have seen me. But perhaps it was too fleeting a glimpse.’

  Her green eyes flashed and I wondered again if it was them that were familiar.

  But she shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. All I wanted to do now was introduce myself properly. I’m here to help you, Johnny.’

  I looked at her but had no idea what she meant.

  ‘Perhaps that doesn’t really mean anything to you yet?’ She smiled again but shook her head slowly. ‘Never mind. I just wanted you to know that I will be here for you when you need help.’ She cocked her head and looked at me, suddenly concerned. ‘And you will need some help, before too long.’

  I nodded, still not understanding. I had no idea who she was, what she was talking about or what I was doing here. Wherever ‘here’ was. For the first time, I looked around me properly. As I had noticed before I was sitting in an armchair. Now I saw that the woman in front of me was perched on what appeared to be the edge of a bed. Apart from these two items of furniture the room was empty. In the corner, behind me, was a doorway and beyond it I could just make out a hallway disappearing into darkness. I looked around me again, my curiosity suddenly pricked. The yellow velvet of the armchair upon which I sat was dull and faded, the mattress on the bed in front of it was stained and worn. I looked at the walls, their flaking plaster and paint, at the dank earth floor. Then I turned back to the woman still sitting upon the bed. ‘Where am I?’ I asked, already thinking that I knew the answer.

  She shook her head gently and her earlier easiness and humour seemed to have evaporated. ‘It’s really not important.’ But something about her tone inclined me not to believe her.

  ‘What are you doing here, then?’ I was suddenly curious to know why a beautiful young woman would be in this dreary, dark place.

  She looked at me, no doubt sensing my bewilderment. ‘Waiting,’ was all she said.

  ‘Waiting for what?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Well, how long have you been here?’

  She hesitated before speaking. ‘A long time. But it doesn’t matter.’ She gripped her legs and hugged them to her body tightly. ‘For now I simply need you to know that you can trust me. Do you understand?’

  Well, as it happened, I didn’t. In fact, the whole situation felt completely beyond me. I couldn’t get a handle on it. I looked at her again, perched on the edge of the bed, her bare feet poking out from beneath the hemline of her dress. And then, suddenly, it came to me. Of course. I was dreaming. I was stuck somewhere in my own unconscious with my memories of the Contessa, of dark-haired barefoot beauty Ava Gardner. In reality, I was still lying in bed next to Ophelia. Sleeping. This woman wasn’t real at all. This was all unreal. That was why she knew so much more than me. Why she could read my thoughts. I smiled.

  She, however, frowned. ‘It would be a mistake for you to think that. I can read your mind because I’m dead.’

  I stared at her, shaken by her revelation. ‘But I don’t even know who you are. How can I be expected to trust you?’

  The young woman nodded and paused. ‘So then you need to find out about me, Johnny. Find out who I am. And trust might flow from there.’

  ‘But can’t you just tell me about yourself?’

  She laughed. ‘Well, so far you don’t seem to be very receptive to what I’ve got to say. So I think it might be better if you found it out for yourself. And besides, if you think about it, really think about it, Johnny, you know where to look.’

  ‘Then you’re real.’

  She nodded.

  I sighed. ‘So I’m not dreaming.’

  She shook her head. ‘No. Or, at least, not in the way you think.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said uncertainly. I sighed and looked down at her feet once more. I studied her toes and felt a sudden urge to reach out and touch them. Maybe touching her would tell me if she was real or not.

  ‘It won’t,’ she said. ‘It won’t.’

  The candles that were laid out on the floor around us flickered as if a door had been opened somewhere close by and a draught had disturbed them. Instinctively, she looked behind her to the doorway which led out of the room.

  ‘Look, Johnny. I don’t have much time. Like I said before, I’m here to help you. There is danger in your future.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ I paused, suddenly confused again. ‘And why do you want to help me?’

  ‘Let’s just say that there are some similarities in our situations.’ She paused. ‘And I feel for you.’ She smiled at me again then, that beautiful big smile of hers.

  I smiled back. But the gesture felt hollow. The truth was that I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  ‘Start with what you know, Johnny. The rest will follow from there.’ Then the woman stood up. She was tall, her body curvaceous beneath the black dress. ‘I have to go now. But I’ll be seeing you again. In the meantime, I’ll be watching you.’

  Then she turned her back on me and started to walk away.

  ‘Wait,’ I called after her. She continued to move towards the doorway in the far wall. ‘I don’t even know your name.’

  She stopped, turned her head for a second and smiled again. Then she carried on into the darkness and disappeared.

  21

  I OPENED MY eyes. The light of the alarm clock showed six o’clock. So it was morning and I had been asleep a long time. Yet I felt exhausted as if I had only just lost consciousness and was already awake again. I lay still, eyes closed for a while, and then looked at the clock a second time. Just after six. No mistaking it. Another day had come around. I yawned heavily. Ophelia was still asleep on her side, facing me. She was breathing silently, as quiet and unmoving as death. Calm, still slumbers. Something about that thought pricked at my drowsy brain. I looked at her face again and, perhaps sensing that I was looking at her, she opened her deep green eyes.

  My brain was suddenly alert, all my recollections crowding in on me. ‘I had the strangest dream last night,’ I muttered.

  Ophelia yawned by way of response.

  ‘There was a beautiful young woman in it – Pre-Raphaelite features, long flowing hair. I had a very cryptic conversation with her.’ I propped myself up on my right elbow as my narrative got into its stride. ‘She had green eyes.’ Images from the dream cruised through my brain, like a seamless progression of movie stills.

  ‘Really?’ Ophelia’s voice was deadpan as she leaned over to take a drink of water from the glass on the bedside table.

  ‘Hmm. It was odd. She told me things but at the same time didn’t really seem to tell me anything.’

  ‘Sounds like a typical annoying dream scenario.’ She turned onto her back, her hair spreading out over the pillows.

  ‘Just what I was thinking,’ I said, distractedly. ‘One thing she did say was that there was danger ahead and that she wanted to help me.’ I felt a flicker of unease as I thought of the woman in the dark room. ‘She had bare feet,’ I murmured, wondering if that fact was somehow relevant.

  ‘Bare feet?’ said Ophelia and began to laugh. ‘I’d say your subconscious is playing with you again. The movie, Ava Gardner. It’s pretty self-explanatory, wouldn’t you say?’

  I thought about it and nodded.

  Ophelia turned onto her side and faced me intently. ‘I do like the fact, however, that your subconscious operates through a beautiful Alma Tadema type.’ She winked. ‘And what were you doing during her cryptic conversation with you?’

  ‘I wa
s dressed in a Victorian three-piece suit and sitting in an armchair.’ I laughed softly. Saying it out loud made the actuality of the dream sound even more ridiculous.

  ‘Oh. That’s somewhat disappointing, I have to say. I thought it might be a bit racier than that.’ For a moment we were both silent, then she raised the duvet and looked at my naked body beneath. ‘So, did anything else happen in this dream, then?’

  As she continued to look at me I felt myself becoming aroused. I tried to think myself out of it. ‘No, it wasn’t like that at all. I was in a small, dark room. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it was the underground room.’ I frowned, thinking of the furniture: in all respects it had been like that in the factory cellar. ‘And the woman, I just felt that she was looking out for me.’ I frowned again. The dream seemed so much like a dream in the retelling and yet I really hadn’t experienced it that way. ‘There was a tangible quality to it. To the dream, to her.’ I stopped for a second. ‘She did keep telling me she was real. And that I should try to find out about her.’

  ‘I’ll just bet she did!’

  ‘Ah, this is hopeless. You’re hopeless.’

  By now Ophelia had pulled up the duvet and vanished underneath it, her stifled giggles rising to the surface intermittently. In spite of myself, I found that I was smiling. I felt her fingers move down my chest and around my hips. Then she pushed me onto my back.

  ‘You should take this more seriously,’ I said, working my head into the pillows. ‘Maybe there’s something to it.’ As I said this I felt her run the tip of her tongue over my cock, slowly, up and down, and then her lips closed around it. Her mouth felt deep and wet and I became hard immediately. I closed my eyes. My head began to spin. I could only think of the wetness of her mouth enclosing me. I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly and surrendered.

  Afterwards, as I lay in bed, I studied Ophelia as she moved around the room getting ready to leave. I watched her as she picked up her clothes, as she looked at her face in the mirror, as she ran her hands through her dark hair and tied it in a ponytail. I watched her as she stood beside the armchair facing the bed, getting dressed. She pulled her trousers over her feet and up over her pale calves and thighs all the way to her waist, where she pulled absently at the zip. Then she put on a bra, threw on a shirt and buttoned it from the bottom, slowly, to the top. There was something erotic about her movements, vague and yet deliberate, as if she were performing them to thrill me. But there didn’t appear to be anything conscious about them; she seemed entirely unaware that I was watching her. As her hands continued their slow journey upwards, I noticed the dark mole below her left breast and felt the need to reach out and touch it. Just as I was about to lean over to her from the bed, she raised her head and something held me back. She had a strange look on her face, the same look that she had when she gazed into the mirror in the underground room. As if she was staring at somewhere far away in the distance, a place filled with longing, the lines at the corners of her eyes sharp with the effort of looking. As I continued to watch her, her gaze met mine for the briefest of moments. Then she turned away and finished buttoning her shirt. When she raised her face again, a moment later, the look was gone. The woman smiling at me now was the Ophelia that I knew, the one that I recognised. But I could not forget that look.

  An hour or so later, as I walked absent-mindedly towards the coffee shop, I couldn’t get her out of my head. She had looked so different in that moment in the bedroom, so remote, that it almost didn’t appear to be her face at all. She had seemed so far away from me, an insurmountable distance that I would never be able to cover, no matter how long or how hard I tried. And yet this Ophelia that I didn’t recognise was a part of the Ophelia that I did, as much a part – if not more, perhaps – as the Ophelia that I knew. A sudden jolt of anxiety and fear shot through me. What did the look signify? I had no idea. And yet why was I surprised by this? I had met her only a few weeks ago. I was still getting to know her and while I had got a little under her skin that was probably all I had done. Yearning to know someone and actually knowing them were, after all, two very different things. As I trudged along through another grey day, rain spitting down from above, I began to wonder how much I would ever understand her. I mean really, truly understand her. The more I thought about that, growing to know her, the more I thought about whether we ever came to know anybody. Truly. Completely. People we thought we knew, sometimes intimately, could act totally unpredictably and surprise us. At the end of the day, when we tried to know someone, maybe we did no more than scratch the surface of their personality, no matter how long we spent trying to navigate the depths.

  By the time I reached the coffee shop I was beginning to get a headache. A dull throbbing had started up behind my left eye. I ordered a croissant and a coffee and leaned against the counter while I waited, listening to the music pumping out from an old radio next to the espresso machine. I started to hum along. It was ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’ by the Police. My wife loved that band. And she had loved that song. Thinking about her now, I wondered whether, after five years of marriage, I had known her. Really known her. I thought about that for a second and a frighteningly long list formed in my head. I knew that she cried easily and often about many things, and cried a lot if she was reading a Raymond Carver story. I knew the intricacies of her sometimes schizophrenic personality, her irrational anger and that it was better to leave her alone when she was blue. I knew her favourite foods. I knew the pleasure she got from eating foie gras and the guilt that she would feel afterwards. I knew she was a terrible liar but that she also couldn’t be trusted. Yes, there was no doubt, I knew a whole lot of things about her. But how much did I really know her? I had no idea what hid deep down inside, in the recesses of her brain, small and perhaps insignificant, the parts of her that she disclosed to no one, that she scarcely admitted to herself. After all, what did she dream about, alone in the darkness? I really had no idea.

  Lost in this thought, I became only gradually aware of a hand waving in front of my face and pointing to a double espresso in a small paper cup on the counter. A little foam hovered on the top. I raised my eyes and stared straight into the smiling face of the waitress. I smiled back, apologised for being miles away and fumbled in my pocket for cash.

  ‘Everything all right?’ She nodded towards the steaming coffee but her tone seemed to suggest that she was talking about something else.

  I looked at her closely but she just continued to smile her edgeless smile. I nodded and stirred some sugar into the cup while she opened the till and fiddled with the money. While I waited, I felt my head begin to throb in time with the beat from the radio. ‘Every Breath You Take’. It must have been the Police dedication hour or something. In spite of the pounding in my head, I started to sing along under my breath. Now I loved this song. It was right up there for me. Alongside ‘Roxanne’. Finally, the waitress handed me my change.

  ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, pocketing the coins while I looked at her, ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Okay.’ And with a smile she moved down the counter and on to the next customer.

  I stared into the space left by her departure and at my reflection in the mirror on the wall. I watched my mouth moving in time to the music. ‘I’ll be watching you,’ said my lips in the mirror, mouthing the words of the song. I stopped singing and for a moment watched the reflection of me standing in the coffee shop. Several days’ growth of black stubble clung to my chin and in contrast the skin above it was incredibly pale, as if it hadn’t seen the sun for a while. My eyes were ringed with dark circles, my hair was unkempt and even my clothes looked dishevelled, as though they hadn’t seen the touch of an iron for a while. I stared at myself for a little while longer before focusing again on the words of the song. Then I picked up my coffee and headed towards the door, my trainers squeaking softly against the linoleum floor. As I stepped back into the rainy day I thought for the first time since I had woken up about the
words of the green-eyed girl, words that I had forgotten until now.

  I’ll be watching you.

  22

  ‘WHAT ARE YOU doing?’

  Tara’s voice seemed to travel from a long way away before it reached me as I stood, motionless, at the far end of the factory’s ground floor. I turned to look at her advancing form and shrugged my shoulders. I had no idea what I was doing.

  When I arrived at the factory I had been entertaining a vague notion that something there could shed some light on my dream of the woman with the green eyes. On who she was or on something connected to her history. I didn’t know what I thought I could discover; only that I could discover something if perhaps I looked in the right place. Now, as I saw the reality of Tara striding towards me, I realised how ridiculous that notion seemed. I turned back to look at the machine in front of me, pieces of plastic tubing with what looked like metal interiors scattered on a workbench beside it.

  Tara stopped beside me and I sensed her gaze moving over the items before us. She was quiet for a moment or two and then she exclaimed, ‘I’ve just realised what this machine is. Do you know?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It’s for making stilettos.’ She picked up a piece of tubing from the workbench and handed it to me. ‘It makes these, a plastic-encased steel tube.’

  I ran my fingers over the elegantly tapering shell. ‘Now that you’ve said it, I can see it.’

  ‘It’s called a spigot, I think. Ooh, it’s amazing to see these at this stage, before they’re covered in leather. Before they’re beautified.’ And she smiled widely at me. ‘Before these machines were invented, wood was used to make the heels.’

  She took one in each hand and trotted them over the surface of the bench, making a click-click sound.

  ‘But wood simply didn’t have the strength of plastic and steel. So the heels wore down very quickly and beyond a certain height were prone to snap. Four inches, I think, was about the max. Still, there were a lot of beautiful shoes around at this time. Roger Vivier, for example. Have you heard of him?’