She was so intensely present that he could have thought there was no mirror, just her young woman’s face balanced on the doubly paralyzed hands. More and worse than shock made his arms tremble, but he was unable to drop the mirror. In a moment Dorothy’s forehead ceased thudding against the glass and shrank into it as though she was being hauled backwards. The ankle-length white dress she wore—the kind of garment in which he imagined she’d been buried—" bulging vigorously in several places. He knew why before a dwarf’s head poked up through the collar, ripping the fabric, to fasten on Dorothy’s mouth. His outline made it clear that he’d shinnied up by holding onto her breasts. Her left sleeve tore, revealing the squarish foot of a dwarf who was inverted somewhere under the dress. Then she was borne away into darkness so complete she oughtn’t to be visible, even for Lionel’s benefit. He saw a confusion of feet scurrying beneath the hem. One pair vanished up the dress, and her body set about jerking in the rhythm of the dwarf who had clambered her back.
The worst thing was that Lionel recognized it all. It had lived in his mind for however many years, too deep for thought and so yet more powerful, and now Dorothy had become the puppet of his fantasy. He supposed that to be at his mercy the dwarfs were dead too. He didn’t know if he was desperate to repudiate the spectacle or release the participants as he flung the mirror away from him.
It was toppling over the windowsill when he tried to snatch it back. He saw Dorothy’s face plummeting out of reach as though he’d doubled her helplessness. As he craned over the sill, the button at the waist of his pyjamas snapped its thread. The mirror struck the roof of his Mini, which responded like a bass drum. One marble finger split off and skittered across the dent the impact had produced. The mirror tottered on the metal roof, and Lionel dashed out of the room.
He was scrabbling at the front-door latch while he clutched his trousers shut when he heard the mirror slide off the car and shatter. The chill of the concrete seized his bare feet like a premonition of how cold they would end up. The marble hands had been smashed into elegant slivers surrounded by fragments of glass, but the oval that had contained the mirror was intact. He hardly knew why he stooped to collect the glass in it. When his trousers sagged around his ankles he had no means of holding them up. Not until lights blazed between curtains above him did he realize that several of Carol’s guests were gazing down at him.
* * *
In the morning Carol said very little to him beyond “I’m sorry you’re leaving, but I won’t have anyone in my house going behind my back.”
This reminded him of his last glimpse of Dorothy, and he had to repress a hysterical laugh. He bumped his suitcase all the way downstairs in the hope that would bring Helen out of her room, but to no avail. “Shall I just go up and say goodbye?” he almost pleaded.
“Madam isn’t receiving visitors at the moment.”
He couldn’t tell if that was Helen’s decision or her mother’s. He lugged the suitcase to the Mini and dumped it in the boot. “You’re sure you don’t mind if I take the mirror,” he said.
“If you want to try and mend it, be my guest. I’ve never had any use for it,” Carol said, doling him a token wave to speed him on his way before she shut herself in the house.
As the Mini backed onto the street he muttered “Here you go, old bones,” crouching his lanky frame lower so that the dent in the roof didn’t touch his scalp. On the seat beside him shards of glass stirred in the marble frame, but he could see nothing other than the underside of the roof in even the largest piece of mirror. He scarcely knew why he was taking the mirror with him; could it somehow help him gain control of the depths of his mind and let Dorothy go? The boarding-house swung away behind him, and he wondered what the people in it might be thinking about him—worse, what they might be storing up about him unexamined in their minds. For the first time in all his years he dreaded living after death.
The Retrospective (2002)
Trent had no idea how long he was unable to think for rage. The guard kept out of sight while she announced the unscheduled stop, and didn’t reappear until the trainload of passengers had crowded onto the narrow platform. As the train dragged itself away into a tunnel simulated by elderly trees and the low March afternoon sky that was plastered with layers of darkness, she poked her head out of the rearmost window to announce that the next train should be due in an hour. The resentful mutters of the crowd only aggravated Trent’s frustration. He needed a leisurely evening and, if he could manage it for a change, a night’s sleep in preparation for a working breakfast. If he’d known the journey would be broken, he could have reread his paperwork instead of contemplating scenery he couldn’t even remember. No doubt the next train would already be laden with commuters - he doubted it would give him space to work. His skull was beginning to feel shrivelled and hollow when it occurred to him that if he caught a later train he would both ensure himself a seat and have time to drop in on his parents. When had he last been home to see them? All at once he felt so guilty that he preferred not to look anyone in the face as he excused his slow way to the ticket office.
It was closed - a board lent it the appearance of a frame divested of a photograph - but flanked by a timetable. Stoneby to London, Stoneby to London . . . There were trains on the hour, like the striking of a clock. He emerged from the short wooden passage into the somewhat less gloomy street, only to falter. Where was the sweet shop whose window used to exhibit dozens of glass-stoppered jars full of colours he could taste? Where was the toyshop fronted by a headlong model train that had never stopped for the travellers paralysed on the platform? What had happened to the bakery displaying tiered white cakes elaborate as Gothic steeples, and the bridal shop next door, where the headless figures in their pale dresses had made him think of Anne Boleyn? Now the street was overrun with the same fast-food eateries and immature clothes shops that surrounded him whenever he left his present apartment, and he couldn’t recall how much change he’d seen on his last visit, whenever that had been. He felt suddenly so desperate to be somewhere more like home that he almost didn’t wait for twin green men to pipe up and usher him across the road.
The short cut was still there, in a sense. Instead of separating the toyshop from the wedding dresses, it squeezed between a window occupied by a regiment of boots and a hamburger outlet dogged by plastic cartons. Once he was in the alley the clamour of traffic relented, but the narrow passage through featureless discoloured concrete made him feel walled in by the unfamiliar. Then the concrete gave way to russet bricks and released him into a street he knew.
At least, it conformed to his memory until he looked closer. The building opposite, which had begun life as a music hall, had ceased to be a cinema. A pair of letters clung to the whitish border of the rusty iron marquee, two letters N so insecure they were on the way to being Zs. He was striving to remember if the cinema had been shut last time he’d seen it when he noticed that the boards on either side of the lobby contained posters too small for the frames. The neighbouring buildings were boarded up. As he crossed the deserted street, the posters grew legible. MEMORIES OF STONEBY, the amateurish printing said.
The two wide steps beneath the marquee were cracked and chipped and stained. The glass of the ticket booth in the middle of the marble door was too blackened to see through. Behind the booth the doors into the auditorium stood ajar. Uncertain what the gap was showing him, he ventured to peer in.
At first the dimness yielded up no more than a strip of carpet framed by floorboards just as grubby, and then he thought someone absolutely motionless was watching him from the dark. The watcher was roped off from him - the several indistinct figures were. He assumed they represented elements of local history: there was certainly something familiar about them. That impression, and the blurred faces with their dully glinting eyes, might have transfixed him if he hadn’t remembered that he was supposed to be seeing his parents. He left the echo of his footsteps dwindling in the lobby and hurried around the side of the museum.
Where the alley crossed another he turned left along the rear of the building. In the high wall to his right a series of solid wooden gates led to back yards, the third of which belonged to his old house. As a child he’d used the gate as a short cut to the cinema, clutching a coin in his fist, which had smelled of metal whenever he’d raised it to his face in the crowded restless dark. His parents had never bolted the gate until he was home again, but now the only effect of his trying the latch was to rouse a clatter of claws and the snarling of a neighbour’s dog that sounded either muzzled or gagged with food, and so he made for the street his old house faced.
The sunless sky was bringing on a twilight murky as an unlit room. He could have taken the street for an aisle between two blocks of dimness so lacking in features they might have been identical. Presumably any children who lived in the terrace were home from school by now, though he couldn’t see the flicker of a single television in the windows draped with dusk, while the breadwinners had yet to return. Trent picked his way over the broken upheaved slabs of the pavement, supporting himself on the roof of a lone parked car until it shifted rustily under his hand, to his parents’ front gate.
The small plot of a garden was a mass of weeds that had spilled across the short path. He couldn’t feel it underfoot as he tramped to the door, which was the colour of the oncoming dark. He was fumbling in his pocket and then with the catches of his briefcase when he realised he would hardly have brought his old keys with him. He rang the doorbell, or at least pressed the askew pallid button that set off a muffled rattle somewhere in the house.
For the duration of more breaths than he could recall taking, there was no response. He was about to revive the noise, though he found it somehow distressing, when he heard footsteps shuffling down the hall. Their slowness made it sound as long as it had seemed in his childhood, so that he had the odd notion that whoever opened the door would tower over him.
It was his mother, and smaller than ever - wrinkled and whitish as a figure composed of dough that had been left to collect dust, a wad of it on top of and behind her head. She wore a tweed coat over a garment he took to be a nightdress, which exposed only her prominent ankles above a pair of unmatched slippers. Her head wavered upwards as the corners of her lips did. Once all these had steadied she murmured ‘Is it you, Nigel? Are you back again?’
‘I thought it was past time I was.’
‘It’s always too long.’ She shuffled in a tight circle to present her stooped back to him before calling ‘Guess who it is, Walter.’
‘Hess looking for a place to hide,’ Trent’s father responded from some depth of the house.
‘No, not old red-nosed Rudolph. Someone a bit younger and a bit more English.’
‘The Queen come to tea.’
‘He’ll never change, will he?’ Trent’s mother muttered and raised what was left of her voice. ‘It’s the boy. It’s Nigel.’
‘About time. Let’s see what he’s managed to make of himself.’
She made a gesture like a desultory grab at something in the air above her left shoulder, apparently to beckon Trent along the hall. ‘Be quick with the door, there’s a good boy. We don’t want the chill roosting in our old bones.’
As soon as the door shut behind him he couldn’t distinguish whether the stairs that narrowed the hall by half were carpeted only with dimness. He trudged after his mother past a door that seemed barely sketched on the crawling murk and, more immediately than he expected, another. His mother opened a third, beyond which was the kitchen, he recalled rather than saw. It smelled of damp he hoped was mostly tea. By straining his senses he was just able to discern his father seated in some of the dark. ‘Shall we have the light on?’ Trent suggested.
‘Can’t you see? Thought you were supposed to be the young one round here.’ After a pause his father said ‘Come back for bunny, have you?’
Trent couldn’t recall ever having owned a rabbit, toy or otherwise, yet the question seemed capable of reviving some aspect of his childhood. He was feeling surrounded by entirely too much darkness when his mother said ‘Now, Walter, don’t be teasing’ and clicked the switch.
The naked dusty bulb seemed to draw the contents of the room inwards - the blackened stove and stained metal sink, the venerable shelves and cabinets and cupboards Trent’s father had built, the glossy pallid walls. The old man was sunk in an armchair, the least appropriate of an assortment of seats surrounding the round table decorated with crumbs and unwashed plates. His pear-shaped variously reddish face appeared to have been given over to producing fat to merge with the rest of him. He used both shaky inflated hands to close the lapels of his faded dressing gown over his pendulous chest cobwebbed with grey hairs. ‘You’ve got your light,’ he said, ‘so take your place.’
Lowering himself onto a chair that had once been straight, Trent lost sight of the entrance to the alley - of the impression that it was the only aspect of the yard the window managed to illuminate. ‘Will I make you some tea?’ his mother said.
She wasn’t asking him to predict the future, he reassured himself. ‘So long as you’re both having some as well.’
‘Not much else to do these days.’
‘It won’t be that bad really, will it?’ Trent said, forcing a guilty laugh. ‘Aren’t you still seeing . . .’
‘What are we seeing?’ his father prompted with some force.
‘Your friends,’ Trent said, having discovered that he couldn’t recall a single name. ‘They can’t all have moved away.’
‘Nobody moves any longer.’
Trent didn’t know whether to take that as a veiled rebuke. ‘So what have you two been doing with yourselves lately?’
‘Late’s the word.’
‘Nigel’s here now,’ Trent’s mother said, perhaps relevantly, over the descending hollow drum-roll of the kettle she was filling from the tap.
More time than was reasonable seemed to have passed since he’d entered the house. He was restraining himself from glancing even surreptitiously at his watch when his father quivered an impatient hand at him. ‘So what are you up to now?’
‘He means your work.’
‘Same as always.’
Trent hoped that would suffice until he was able to reclaim his memory from the darkness that had gathered in his skull, but his parents’ stares were as blank as his mind. ‘And what’s that?’ his mother said.
He felt as though her forgetfulness had seized him. Desperate to be reminded what his briefcase contained, he nevertheless used reaching for it as a chance to glimpse his watch. The next train was due in less than half an hour. As Trent scrabbled at the catches of the briefcase, his father said ‘New buildings, isn’t it? That’s what you put up.’
‘Plan,’ Trent said, clutching the briefcase on his lap. ‘I draw them.’
‘Of course you do,’ said his mother. ‘That’s what you always wanted.’
It was partly so as not to feel minimised that Trent declared ‘I wouldn’t want to be responsible for some of the changes in town.’
‘Then don’t be.’
‘You won’t see much else changing round here,’ Trent’s mother said.
‘Didn’t anyone object?’
‘You have to let the world move on,’ she said. ‘Leave it to the young ones.’
Trent wasn’t sure if he was included in that or only wanted to be. ‘How long have we had a museum?’
His father’s eyes grew so blank Trent could have fancied they weren’t in use. ‘Since I remember.’
‘No, that’s not right,’ Trent objected as gently as his nerves permitted. ‘It was a cinema and before that a theatre. You took me to a show there once.’
‘Did we?’ A glint surfaced in his mother’s eyes. ‘We used to like shows, didn’t we, Walter? Shows and dancing. Didn’t we go on all night sometimes and they wondered where we’d got to?’
Her husband shook his head once slowly, whether to enliven memories or deny their existence Trent couldn’
t tell. ‘The show you took me to,’ he insisted, ‘I remember someone dancing with a stick. And there was a lady comedian, or maybe not a lady but dressed up.’
Perhaps it was the strain of excavating the recollection that made it seem both lurid and encased in darkness - the outsize figure prancing sluggishly about the stage and turning towards him a sly greasy smile as crimson as a wound, the ponderous slap on the boards of feet that sounded unshod, the onslaughts of laughter that followed comments Trent found so incomprehensible he feared they were about him, the shadow that kept swelling on whatever backdrop the performer had, an effect suggesting that the figure was about to grow yet more gigantic. Surely some or preferably most of that was a childhood nightmare rather than a memory. ‘Was there some tea?’ Trent blurted.
At first it seemed his mother’s eyes were past seeing through their own blankness. ‘In the show, do you mean?’
‘Here.’ When that fell short of her he said more urgently ‘Now.’
‘Why, you should have reminded me,’ she protested and stood up. How long had she been seated opposite him? He was so anxious to remember that he didn’t immediately grasp what she was doing. ‘Mother, don’t,’ he nearly screamed, flinging himself off his chair.
‘No rush. It isn’t anything like ready.’ She took her hand out of the kettle on the stove - he wasn’t sure if he glimpsed steam trailing from her fingers as she replaced the lid. ‘We haven’t got much longer, have we?’ she said. ‘We mustn’t keep you from your duties.’
‘You won’t do that again, will you?’
‘What’s that, son?’
He was dismayed to think she might already have forgotten. ‘You won’t put yourself in danger.’
‘There’s nothing we’d call that round here,’ his father said.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 140
