Mirror (4 page)

After another ten minutes, Martin managed to drag the mirror out of the kitchen door and tilt it into the back seat of his Mustang. Mrs Harper allowed him to borrow the dustcover to protect it, provided he promised that he would bring it straight back. ‘I promise,’ he told her. ‘I’ll bring it straight back.’

He drove off slowly down Hillside, and Mrs Harper stood on her steps and waved his check. Glancing at her in his rearview mirror, he thought that for somebody who had just let him have a valuable antique at a knockdown price, she looked a little too pleased with herself. She had probably asked him for double what the mirror was actually worth.

Still, he was now the owner of the actual mirror that had graced Boofuls’ fireplace, and maybe that would bring him luck. He hummed ‘Flowers From Tuscaloosa’ as he slowly drove his huge angular purchase back to Franklin Avenue.

Mr Capelli was home early, and he helped Martin to carry the mirror upstairs. Mr Capelli was small and rotund, with a bald head and spectacles that looked as if they had been ground out of two glass bottle-stoppers. ‘I shouldn’t even lift a basket of groceries,’ he grumbled. ‘My doctor’s going to kill me alive.’

‘Mr Capelli, you don’t know how much I appreciate this,’ Martin told him. ‘This mirror used to belong to Boofuls. True. It used to hang over his fireplace, in his sitting room in Bel Air.’

Mr Capelli examined the mirror with his mouth turned down at the corners. ‘This used to belong to Boofuls? This actual mirror?’

‘This actual mirror. In fact, when his grandmother chopped him up, this actual mirror was probably reflecting the whole scene.’

Mr Capelli shuddered. ‘That’s bad, you shouldn’t keep something like this.’

‘It’s a mirror, Mr Capelli, that’s all.’

‘Well, that’s what you say. But in Sicily, you know what my grandmother always used to do? Whenever somebody died, she went around and smashed every mirror in their house, and this was because every time a person looks in a mirror, the mirror takes a little tiny teentsy bit of their soul. So the only way that their whole soul can go to heaven when they die is for somebody to smash all of their mirrors, and let out that little bit that the mirror took away from them when they were alive.’

Martin shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and smiled. ‘What’s the famous Italian sausage?’ he asked.

‘Mortadella,’ said Mr Capelli.

‘No, no, the other one. The big, smooth one.’

‘Baloney.’

‘That’s it!’ said Martin. ‘And I couldn’t agree with you more.’

‘Hey! You don’t talk to me that way,’ snapped Mr Capelli. ‘You want me to make you take this mirror back out again?’

‘All right, I’m sorry,’ said Martin, and laid his hand on Mr Capelli’s shoulder. ‘It’s really going to look great. It’s going to make this apartment look twice the size.’

‘Hmh,’ Mr Capelli retorted. ‘Maybe I should charge you twice the rent.’

Just then, Mr Capelli’s young grandson, Emilio, came out of Mr Capelli’s apartment to see what all the noise was about. He was five years old, with straight black hair and olive skin and huge eyes like a sentimental painting of a sad puppy. As soon as he saw they were carrying a mirror, he made faces at himself in it.

‘That’s a great improvement,’ said Martin as Emilio crossed his eyes and squashed his nose flat with his finger.

‘Hey, that’s my grandson you’re talking about,’ Mr Capelli protested. ‘He’s a good-looking boy.’

‘That’s because he doesn’t take after his grandfather,’ Martin said, grinning.

‘Treble the rent!’ retorted Mr Capelli.

‘Watch yourself, Emilio,’ Martin warned. ‘This mirror’s real heavy. You don’t want to get squished.’

‘I do too want to get squished,’ Emilio told him cheekily.

‘That can be arranged,’ said Martin under his breath.

When Mr Capelli had gone, Martin carefully took down all his Boofuls photographs and cuttings. Then he dragged the mirror noisily up against the wall beside his desk. There were four brass plates at the side of the mirror, two on each side, which had obviously been used to screw the mirror firmly into the chimney breast over Boofuls’ fireplace. Martin rooted around in his desk drawer until he found four two-inch screws and half a dozen wall plugs. Jane had taken his electric drill, but the wall was quite soft, and he was able to gouge out four holes in the plaster with his screwdriver.

It took him nearly an hour to fix up the mirror. But when it was screwed firmly into place, he stood back and admired it and didn’t regret for one moment that he had spent all of his savings on it, even if Mrs Harper had probably screwed him for two or three hundred dollars more than it was actually worth. With its gilded frame and its brilliant glass, it gave his apartment a whole new dimension, adding light and space and airiness.

He poured himself a glass of wine. Then he sat down at his desk. Portrait of a successful young screenwriter feeding a sheet of paper into his typewriter. Portrait of a successful young screenwriter knocking next season’s
A-Team
into shape.

He worked all afternoon. The sun began to steal away, sliding out of the room inch by inch, lighting the building next door, then shining on nothing but the tallest yuccas in the street outside.

BA: I swear – if this fruitcake don’t stop – I’m going to take him apart
.

Hannibal: Come on now, BA, we’re talking comradeship here. Shoulder to shoulder
.

It was well past seven when Martin switched off his typewriter and sat back in his chair. He knew that he was going to have to rewrite the scene in which Hannibal disguises himself as a monk, but apart from that he was just about finished. He was particularly pleased with the moment when Murdock starts juggling pool balls and BA joins in the juggling act in spite of himself. He jotted on his notepad, ‘
Can Mr T juggle? If not, can he be taught? Are there any brilliant black jugglers? There must be! But what if there aren’t? Can some white juggler black his hands up and stand right behind him while he dummies it?
’

He poured himself another glass of wine. Maybe his luck was going to change, after all. Maybe some of Boofuls’ success would radiate out of his mirror and bless Martin’s work. Martin raised his glass to himself and said, ‘
Prost!
’

It was then, in the mirror, that he saw a child’s blue and white ball come bouncing through the open door behind him, and then roll to a stop in the middle of the varnished wood floor.

He stared at it in shock, with that same shrinking-scalp sensation that he had felt this afternoon when he had seen Mrs Harper floating in midair. ‘Emilio?’ he called. ‘Is that you?’

There was no reply. Martin turned around and called, ‘Emilio?’ again.

He got up out of his chair, intending to pick the ball up, but he was only halfway standing when he realized that it wasn’t there anymore.

He frowned, and walked across to the door, and opened it wider. The passageway was empty; the front door was locked. ‘Emilio, what the hell are you playing at?’

He looked in the bedroom. Nobody. He even opened up the closet doors. Just dirty shirts and shorts, waiting to be washed, and a squash racket that needed restringing. He checked the bathroom, then the kitchen. Apart from himself, the apartment was deserted.

‘Hallucination,’ he told himself. ‘Maybe I’m falling apart.’

He returned to the sitting room and picked up his glass of wine. He froze with the glass almost touching his lips.
In the mirror, the blue and white ball was still there, lying on the floor where it had first bounced
.

Martin stared at it and then quickly looked back into the real sitting room. No ball. Yet there it was in the mirror perfectly clear, as plain as milk.

Martin walked carefully across the room. Watching himself in the mirror, he reached down and tried to pick the ball up, but in the real room there was nothing there, and in the mirror room his hand appeared simply to pass right through the ball, as if it had no substance at all.

He scooped at it two or three times and waved his hand from side to side exactly where the ball should have been. Still nothing. But the really odd part about it was that as he watched his hand intently, it seemed as if it were not the ball that was insubstantial, but his own fingers – as if the ball were real and that reflection of himself in the mirror were a ghost.

He went right up close to the mirror and touched its surface. There was nothing unusual about it. It was simply cold glass. But the ball remained there, whether it was a hallucination or a trick of the light, or whatever. He sat in his chair and watched it and it refused to disappear.

After half an hour, he got up and went to the bathroom to shower. The ball was still there when he returned. He finished the wine, watching it all the time. He was going to have a hangover in the morning, but right now he didn’t much care.

‘What the hell
are
you?’ he asked the ball.

He pressed his cheek against the left side of the mirror and tried to peer into his own reflected hallway, to see if it was somehow different.
Looking-Glass House
, he thought to himself, and all those unsettling childhood feelings came back to him. If you could walk through the door in the mirror, would the hallway be the same? Was there another different world in there, not just back to front but disturbingly different?

In his bookshelf, he had a dog-eared copy of
Alice Through the Looking-Glass
which Jane had bought him when they were first dating. He took it out and opened it up and quickly located the half-remembered words.

Alice was looking into the mirror over her sitting room fireplace, wondering about the room she could see on the other side of the glass.

It’s just the same as our drawing-room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair – all but the bit just behind the fire-place. Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit! I want so much to know whether they’ve a fire in the winter: you never can tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room, too – but that may only be pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way: I know that, because I’ve held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold one up in the other room. But now we come to the passage. You can see just a little peep of the passage in Looking-Glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond
.

Martin closed the book. The ball was still there. He stood looking at it for a long time, not moving. Then he went across to his desk and switched off the light, so that the sitting room was completely dark. He paused, and then he switched it back on again. The ball in the mirror hadn’t moved.

‘Shit,’ he said; and for the very first time in his life he felt that something was happening to him which he couldn’t control.

He could have gotten Jane back if he had really wanted to – at least, he believed that he could. He could have been wealthier if he had written all the dumb teleplays that Morris had wanted him to write. But he had been able to make his own decisions about things like that. This ball was something else altogether. A ball that existed only as a reflection in a mirror, and not in reality?

‘Shit,’ he repeated, and switched off the light again and shuffled off to the bedroom. He dropped his red flannel bathrobe and climbed naked onto his futon. He was about to switch off his bedside light when a thought occurred to him. He padded back to the sitting room and closed the door. If there was anything funny about that mirror, he didn’t want it coming out and jumping on him in the middle of the night.

Irrational, yes, but he was tired and a little drunk and it was well past midnight.

He dragged the covers well up to his neck, even though he was too hot, and closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.

He was awakened by what sounded like a child laughing. He lifted his head from the pillow and thought,
Goddamned Emilio, why do kids always have to wake up at the crack of dawn
? But then he heard the laughter again, and it didn’t sound as if it were coming from downstairs at all. It sounded as if it were coming from his own sitting room.

He sat up straight, holding his breath, listening. There it was again. A small boy, laughing out loud; but with a curious echo to his voice, as if he were laughing in a large empty room. Martin checked his clock radio. It wasn’t the crack of dawn at all: it was only 3:17 in the morning.

He switched on his light, wincing at the brightness of it. He found his bathrobe and tugged it on, inside out, so that he had to hold it together instead of tying it. Then he went to the sitting room door and listened.

He listened for almost a minute. Then he asked himself:
What are you afraid of, wimp? It’s your own apartment, your own sitting room, and all you can hear is a child
.

He licked his lips, and then he opened the sitting room door. Immediately, he reached out for the light switch and turned on the main light. Immediately, he looked toward the mirror.

There was nobody there, no boy laughing. Only himself, frowsy and pale, in his inside-out bathrobe. Only the desk and the typewriter and the bookshelf and the pictures of Boofuls.