I put in the coins.
For a moment nothing happened and I thought the photo booth might be broken. But then a red light glowed somewhere behind the glass, deep inside the machine. A devil eye, winking at me. The light went out and there was a flash accompanied by a soft, popping sound that went right through my head.
The first picture had caught me unawares. I was just sitting there with my mouth half-open. Before the machine flashed again, I quickly adjusted the stool and twisted my features into the most stupid face I could make. The red eye blinked, followed by the flash. That one would be for the fridge. For the third picture, I whipped the black curtain across, leaned back, and smiled. The picture was for my father and I wanted it to be good. The fourth picture was a complete disaster. I was pulling back the curtain, adjusting the stool, and trying to think of something to do when the flash went off and I realized I’d taken a picture of my left shoulder with my face—annoyed and surprised—peering over the top.
That was it. Those were the four pictures I took.
I went outside the photo booth and stood there on my own, waiting for the pictures to develop. Three minutes according to the notice on the side. Nobody came anywhere near and once again I wondered why they had put the machine so far from the station entrance. Farther up the platform, the station clock ticked to 10:47. The second hand was so big that I could actually see it moving, sliding over the Roman numerals. Doors slammed on the other side of a train. There was the blast of a whistle. The 10:45 to Glasgow shuddered out of the station, a couple of minutes late.
The three minutes took an age to pass. Time always slows down when you’re waiting for something. I watched the second hand of the clock make two more complete circles. Another train, without any carriages, chugged backward along a line on the far side of the station. And meanwhile the photo booth did . . . nothing. Maybe there were wheels turning inside, chemicals splashing, spools of paper unfolding. But from where I was standing it just looked dead.
Then, with no warning at all, there was a whir and a strip of white paper was spat out of a slot in the side. My photographs. I waited until a fan had blown the paper dry, then pried it out of its metal cage. Being careful not to get my fingers on the pictures themselves, I turned them over in my hand.
Four pictures.
The first. Me looking stupid.
The second. Me out of focus.
The fourth. Me from behind.
But the third picture, in the middle of the strip, wasn’t a picture of me at all.
It was a picture of a man, and one of the ugliest men I had ever seen. Just looking at him, holding him in my hand, sent a shiver all the way up my arm and around the back of my neck. The man had a yellow face. There was something terribly wrong with his skin, which seemed to be crumpled up around his neck and chin, like an old paper bag. He had blue eyes, but they had sunk back, hiding in the dark shadows of his eye sockets. His hair was gray and stringy, hanging lifelessly over his forehead. The skin here was damaged, too, as if someone had drawn a map on it and then rubbed it out, leaving just faint traces. The man was leaning back against the black curtain and maybe he was smiling. His lips were certainly stretched in something like a smile, but there was no humor there at all. He was staring at me, staring up from the palm of my hand. And I would have said his face was filled with raw horror.
I almost crumpled up the photographs then and there. There was something so shocking about the man that I couldn’t bear to look at him. I tried to look at the three images of myself, but each time my eyes were drawn down or up, so that they settled only on him. I closed my fingers, bending them over his face, trying to blot him out. But it was too late. Even when I wasn’t looking at him, I could still see him. I could still feel him looking at me.
But who was he and how had he gotten there? I walked away from the machine, glad to be going back to where there were people, away from that deserted end of the platform. Obviously the photo booth had been broken. It must have muddled up my photographs with those of whoever had visited it just before me. At least, that’s what I tried to tell myself.
My uncle Peter was waiting for me at the bench. He seemed relieved to see me.
“I thought we were going to miss the train,” he said. He ground out the Gauloise he’d been smoking. He was as bad as my father when it came to cigarettes. High-tar French. Not just damaging your health. Destroying it.
“So let’s see them,” Aunt Anne said. She was a pretty, rather nervous woman who always managed to sound enthusiastic about everything. “How did they come out?”
“The machine was broken,” I said.
“The camera probably cracked when it saw your face.” Peter gave one of his throaty laughs. “Let’s see . . .”
I held out the strip of film. They took it.
“Who’s this?” Anne tried to sound cheerful, but I could see that the man with the yellow face had disturbed her. I wasn’t surprised. He’d disturbed me.
“He wasn’t there,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t see him. All the photographs were of me—but when they were developed, he was there.”
“It must have been broken,” Peter said. “This must be the last person who was in there.”
Which was exactly what I had thought. Only now I wasn’t so sure. Because it had occurred to me that if there was something wrong with the machine and everyone was getting photographs of someone else, then surely the man with the yellow face would have appeared at the very top of the row: one photograph of him followed by three of me. Then whoever went in next would get one picture of me followed by three of them. And so on.
And there was something else.
Now that I thought about it, the man was sitting in exactly the same position that I’d taken inside the photo booth. I’d pulled the black curtain across for the third photograph and there it was now. I’d been leaning back and so was he. It was almost as if the man had somehow gotten into the machine and sat in a deliberate parody of me. And maybe there was something in that smile of his that was mocking and ugly. It was as if he were trying to tell me something. But I didn’t want to know.
“I think he’s a ghost,” I said.
“A ghost?” Peter laughed again. He had an annoying laugh. It was loud and jagged, like machine-gun fire. “A ghost in a platform photo booth?”
“Peter . . . !” Anne was disapproving. She was worried about me. She’d been worried about me since the start of the divorce.
“I feel I know him,” I said. “I can’t explain it. But I’ve seen him somewhere before.”
“Where?” Anne asked.
“I don’t know.”
“In a nightmare?” Peter suggested. “His face does look a bit of a nightmare.”
I looked at the picture again even though I didn’t want to. It was true. He did look familiar. But at the same time I knew that despite what I’d just said, it was a face I’d never seen before.
“The train now arriving at Platform One . . .”
It was the train announcer’s voice again, and sure enough there was our train, looking huge and somehow menacing as it slid around the curve of the track. And it was at that very moment, as I reached out to take the photographs, that I had the idea that I shouldn’t get on the train because the man with the yellow face was going to be on it, that somehow he was dangerous to me, and that the machine had sent me his picture to warn me.
My uncle and aunt gathered up our weekend bags.
“Why don’t we wait?” I said.
“What?” My uncle was already halfway through the door.
“Can’t we stay a little longer? In York? We could take the train this afternoon . . .”
“We’ve got to get back,” my aunt said. As always, hers was the voice of reason. “Your mother ’s going to be waiting for us at the station, and anyway, we’ve got reserved seats.”
“Come on!” Uncle Peter was caught between the platform and the train, and with people milling around us, trying to get in, this obviously wasn’
t the best time or place for an argument.
Even now I wonder why I allowed myself to be pushed, or persuaded, into the train. I could have turned around and run away. I could have sat on the platform and refused to move. Maybe if it had been my mother and father there, I would have done that, but then, of course, if my mother and father had only managed to stay together in the first place, none of it would have happened. Do I blame them? Yes. Sometimes I do.
I found myself on the train before I knew it. We had seats quite near the front and that also played a part in what happened. While Uncle Peter stowed the cases up on the rack and Aunt Anne fished in her shopping bag for magazines, drinks, and sandwiches, I took the seat next to the window, miserable and afraid without knowing why.
The man with the yellow face. Who was he? A psychopath perhaps, released from a mental hospital, traveling to London with a knife in his raincoat pocket. Or a terrorist with a bomb, one of those suicide bombers you read about in the Middle East. Or a child killer. Or some sort of monster . . .
I was so certain I was going to meet him that I barely even noticed as the train jerked forward and began to move out of the station. The photographs were still clasped in my hand and I kept on looking from the yellow face to the other passengers in the carriage, expecting at any moment to see him coming toward me.
“What’s the matter with you?” my uncle asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I was expecting to. I said nothing.
“Is it that photograph?” Anne asked. “Really, Simon, I don’t know why it’s upset you so much.”
And then the ticket collector came. Not a yellow face at all but a black one, smiling. Everything was normal. We were on a train heading for London and I had allowed myself to get flustered about nothing. I took the strip of photographs and bent it so that the yellow face disappeared behind the folds. When I got back to London, I’d cut it out. When I got back to London.
But I didn’t get back to London. Not for a long, long time.
I didn’t even know anything was wrong until it had happened. We were traveling fast, whizzing through green fields and clumps of woodland when I felt a slight lurch, as if invisible arms had reached down and pulled me out of my seat. That was all there was at first, a sort of mechanical hiccup. But then I had the strange sensation that the train was flying. It was like a plane at the end of the runway, the front of the train separating from the ground. It could only have lasted a couple of seconds, but in my memory those seconds seem to stretch out forever. I remember my uncle’s head turning, the question forming itself on his face. And my aunt, perhaps realizing what was happening before we did, opening her mouth to scream. I remember the other passengers; I carry snapshots of them in my head. A mother with two small daughters, both with ribbons in their hair. A man with a mustache, his pen hovering over the Times crossword. A boy of about my own age, listening to a Walkman. The train was almost full. There was hardly an empty seat in sight.
And then the smash of the impact, the world spinning upside down, windows shattering, coats and suitcases tumbling down, sheets of paper whipping into my face, thousands of tiny fragments of glass swarming into me, the deafening scream of tearing metal, the sparks and the smoke and the flames leaping up, cold air rushing in, and then the horrible rolling and shuddering that was like the very worst sort of amusement-park ride, only this time the terror wasn’t going to stop, this time it was all for real.
Silence.
They always say there’s silence after an accident and they’re right. I was on my back with something pressing down on me. I could only see out of one eye. Something dripped onto my face. Blood.
Then the screams began.
It turned out that some kids—maniacs—had dropped a concrete pile off a bridge outside Grantham. The train hit it and derailed. Nine people were killed in the crash and a further twenty-nine were seriously injured. I was one of the worst of them. I don’t remember anything more of what happened, which is just as well, as my car caught fire and I was badly burned before my uncle managed to drag me to safety. He was hardly hurt in the accident, apart from a few cuts and bruises. Aunt Anne broke her arm.
I spent many weeks in the hospital and I don’t remember much of that either. All in all, it was six months before I was better, but “better” in my case was never what I had been before.
This all happened thirty years ago.
And now?
I suppose I can’t complain. After all, I wasn’t killed, and despite my injuries, I enjoy my life. But the injuries are still there. The plastic surgeons did what they could, but I’d suffered third-degree burns over much of my body and there wasn’t a whole lot they could do. My hair grew back, but it’s always been gray and rather lifeless. My eyes are sunken. And then there’s my skin.
I sit here looking in the mirror.
And the man with the yellow face looks back.
The Monkey’s Ear
The story began, as so many stories do, in the souk—or covered market—of Marrakesh. It has been said that there are as many stories in the souk as there are products, and if you have ever lost yourself in the dozens of covered walkways jammed on all sides with the hundreds of shops and little stalls groaning under the weight of thousands of objects from trinkets and spice bottles to carpets and coffee beans, you will realize that this must add up to more stories than could be told in a hundred and one nights or even a hundred and one years.
The Beckers had come to Morocco on vacation and had found themselves in the souk of Marrakesh only because they had accepted a free tour to go there. All the hotels offered free tours. The idea, of course, was to get the tourists to spend their money once they get to the market. But it wasn’t going to work this time . . . not with the Beckers.
“It’s too hot here,” Brenda Becker was complaining. “And all these flies! We shouldn’t have come! I said I didn’t want to come. And anyway it’s not as if there’s anything to buy. All this foreign muck . . .” She swatted at a fly buzzing around her plump, rather sunburned face. “Why can’t we just find a branch of Marks and Spencer?” she moaned.
Her husband, Brian Becker, gritted his teeth and followed behind her. It seemed to him that he was always one step behind her, like Prince Philip and the frigging Queen. It was certainly true that she ruled over everything he did. That was why he enjoyed his job so much—he worked as a traffic cop. First of all, it got him away from her. But also it meant that, at least when he was out in the street, he was in charge.
A salesman in torn jeans and a grubby T-shirt came up to him, showing off a string of beads. Brian waved a tired hand. “Go away!” he shouted. “Buzz off, Bozo!” He stopped and wiped the sweat off his forehead where it had dripped through what was left of his hair. Brian Becker was a small, weedy man with a thin face and slightly orange skin. He had lost his hair before he was twenty, and even now he was embarrassed by the sight of his head, bald and speckled like an egg. That was another good thing about being a traffic cop. He liked the uniform. It made him feel smart, particularly the cap, which disguised his baldness. He often wore the cap at home, in bed and even in the bath. But dressed as he was now, in shorts that were much too wide for his spindly legs and a brilliant shirt festooned with flowers (Brenda had chosen it for him before they left), he looked simply ridiculous.
A twelve-year-old boy, walking just beside Brian, completed the family. This was Bart Becker, their only child. Bart had been fortunate in that he had inherited neither his father’s looks nor his mother’s excessive weight. He was slim, with a pale face and fair hair that rose over his forehead rather like his favorite comic-book hero, Tintin. He was the only one of the three who was enjoying his time in the souk. The jumble of colors, the rich smells, and the shouts of the traders woven in with the distant wail of pipes and drums all seemed mysterious and exciting to him. Perhaps the main difference between Bart and his parents was that from a very early age he had enjoyed reading books. He loved stories and to him life was a co
nstant adventure. To his parents it was simply something they had to get through.
“We’re lost!” Brenda exclaimed. “This is all your fault, Brian. I want to go back to the hotel.”
“All right! All right!” Brian licked his lips and looked around him. The trouble was that here, in the middle of the souk, every passageway looked much like the next one and he had long ago lost any sense of direction. “It’s that way,” he said, pointing.
“We just came from there!”
“Did we?”
“You’re an idiot, Brian. My mother always said it and I should have listened to her. We’re lost and we’re never going to get out of this wretched place.”
“All right! All right!” Brian was forever repeating the same two words. “I’ll ask someone.”
There was a shop to one side selling antique daggers and pieces of jewelry. As Brenda had already pointed out—several times—everything in the souk was probably fake. Most of it was no more antique than her own artificial hip. But this stall was different. The knives looked somehow a little more deadly and the jewels glowed just a little more brightly. And there was something else. The very building itself, dark and crooked, seemed older than the rest of the souk, as if it had been there first and the rest of the market had slowly grown around it.
They went in. As they passed through the door all the sounds of the souk were abruptly shut off. They found themselves standing on a thick carpet in a cave-like room with the smell of sweet mint tea hanging in the air.
“There’s nobody here!” Brenda exclaimed.
“Look at this! This is wicked!” Bart had found a long, curving sword. The hilt was encrusted with dark green stones and the blade was stained with what could have been dried blood.
“Don’t touch it, Bart!” Brenda snapped. “It’s dirty.”
“And we’ll have to pay for it if you break it,” Brian added.
A curtain hanging over the door rippled and a young boy appeared. He must have been about the same age as Bart, but he was shorter, with very dark skin, black hair, and a round, slightly feminine face. He would have been handsome but for the fact that one of his eyes had a large sty, forcing it into a squint, and this made him look almost sinister.
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