Shadows on the Mirror

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Go on, Miss Fortune. A familiar enough ritual, surely.’

  The defensive power, poor though it had been, was gone. So was the power to form any words at all. How to say, yes, undressing was a familiar enough ritual, but not for this, not like this. Whatever I have done, with whoever it was, for money or for love, for simple pleasure or for a gamble, was done to please with at least an element of affection. Not like this. I am an entirely honest animal in my way; I have never cheated. Please do not make me do this. I am ashamed of everything beneath the shell of clothes – who could be otherwise in the presence of one whose sole purpose was to steal everything, perhaps even life, but certainly dignity first? I have always kept that, she thought wildly. I have always kept a little dignity and made sure others did the same. They could always have mine in return for their own. I am not as bad as he suspects, but he would not understand. I had better do as he says, and he may, just may, leave me alone. She undid the buttons on her blouse.

  He sat in the chair pulled from the living room, next to the mirror, fingering the stone head on the table next to it, smiling, tapping his fingers.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  She snapped in fury. ‘What do you want me to do? Would you prefer I did this to music, like a cabaret act? There are far better ones in the West End.’

  Insolent bravado. She watched the jaw tighten and the grimace of a smile faded.

  ‘No, just undress. As I told you. And,’ he added, ‘watch yourself, here, as you undress.’ He moved sideways slightly, so that she could see herself in the mirror. For the first time, she turned her eyes to him in a plea.

  ‘Please . . . I can’t do that.’

  ‘You can. You shall. Watch yourself in the glass. And I shall watch you watching.’

  She began to cry, a motionless sobbing. Sarah loathed the mirror, hated for years the reflection of that unproductive flesh, whatever the pleasures it had given and received. Conventional clothes, a conventional house, a daytime conventional life, dropping to the floor. First the blouse, revealing tanned shoulders, then the skirt, then the slip. Left in bra and knickers, she hesitated again, saw his face and went on. Unhooked the flimsy piece of cotton last, felt her bosom fall free. Stood upright, resisting an impulse to fold her arms across her chest in memory of that last remnant of pride. She had not always hated this almost-perfect body, but despised it now. Impossible to look into the mirror. She turned her head aside, and waited, the slow trickle of enormous tears on her face the only movement of soundless desperation.

  Charles stood up and approached her, twisted her face roughly towards his own, and kissed her mouth. Then moved to stand beside her, so that she was forced to face the mirror while, slowly, he ran his hands down the sides of her body, across the flat stomach, brushed his palms against her nipples. He stroked the cleft of her buttocks, and, bending, touched the bush of her pubic hair. She was shivering uncontrollably.

  ‘I was right,’ he said. ‘I knew you would be like this, perfect, but perfectly flawed. Look at yourself, what do you see?’ He continued to stroke the captive body, and she did not answer. Nakedness made her completely vulnerable, but her silence angered him. When she finally spoke, the repetitious weariness of her answer angered him more.

  ‘Whatever you want, Charles. Just finish whatever you came to do. Whatever you want.’

  The body behind her own stiffened, the hands ceased their rhythmic stroke, and placed themselves, disembodied, in the mirror, around her neck.

  ‘Do you think it is as simple as that? I wanted you to want me, but how could any man want you now? Put myself inside you, diseased as you are . . . I am so tired of women like you. No, I want you to look at yourself, see, for once, how putrid, how ugly . . .’

  She felt all that for different reasons, wanted to scream denial at the words, twisted out of his arms and ran for the door, escaping the nearly gentle touch for a brief second. He caught her hair, pulled her back, ignoring the futile scream, and with effortless ease dragged her to the mirror, then with the same ease slammed her head against the glass. Her forehead struck the cold surface with a resounding crack. In the dizziness and pain which followed, she heard the deafening sound of the glass breaking as the mirror shattered in a crunching, groaning impact. Pulled upright, she saw through scarcely focused eyes no image of herself or him, but a web of cracks. Still keeping hold of her with one hand, Charles tore the mirror from the wall and threw it on the floor of the hall. It bounced, the shards of glass split in twinkling, sharp confusion while the oval frame rolled sideways to rest crooked against the wall. Charles pushed Sarah up against the frame of the door, again twisting her face into his.

  ‘Rape, little Fortune? Do you think I wanted only that, something simple, a mere favour? Did want, do want, but only if you were to be another wife, like my own, but not like my own, perfectly pure and good. As I have always wanted, never found.’

  He pulled her to the floor, suddenly tender. She, naked; he, fully-clothed and stroking the huge swelling on her forehead, his fingers lingering on the blood oozing from the contusion at her hairline. ‘Ah, poor Sarah, sit with me . . .’

  Mad, hopelessly mad. In a fog of pain, slumped against the wall, her eyes catching the strewn glass glimmering in the light, she knew he was mad. Hysterical laughter rose in her throat. Madder than his impulses surely, this desire to laugh and stuff her fist in her mouth.

  ‘You know what I did to my wife? No, that’s not right, what she did to me, betrayed me, laughed at me. Made me hurt her. I cut her face with my best glass, and then her hands. I didn’t mean to cut her hands; hands are blameless, but she tried to cover her face, so I cut them away.’

  The voice of him was almost a whine, Sarah’s emerged as a rasp.

  ‘Did you kill her?’

  ‘What? No, of course not.’ There was a mild, aggrieved surprise at the question. ‘I only marked her. To stop her doing that again. I wouldn’t ever have killed her; I only punished her. She did the rest.’

  ‘She was your wife. I am no such thing. I owe you nothing.’

  ‘But you are my wife, and you owed me better. You must be punished too, like all the others: you have made men mad.’

  He knelt beside her. Then pulled her crouching form away from the door and pushed her to the floor. Sarah cried out briefly as the pieces of glass pierced the skin of her back and shoulders. Impervious, Charles knelt astride, pinning her arms wide for maximum contact with the glass, stopping the mewing sounds of her mouth with his own. Despite the piercing pain, she struggled, feeling the splinters cutting feathery stabs the more she moved, until it was unbearable and the struggles negligible.

  ‘The passion of pain,’ murmured Charles, unhurried, unhurt. ‘Whenever I punished my wife, I made love to her. But not to you, Porphyria, not to you.’

  Her arms had grown numb and she was aware of the floor sticky with blood. When he released his hold, she neither cried nor moved, watched him pick up the largest shard of the old pockmarked glass she had once loved, and draw it down her arm in a thin red trace. Across her belly, scratching rather than cutting, cat tormenting mouse. One long line up her torso, between her breasts, moving to her throat. Then she screamed and screamed, struck back, twisting and turning, feeling the broken glass cracking beneath her. Charles slipped; the triangular shard dug deep into her shoulder with the weight of his hand, and she kicked, struggled, clawed bloody hands into his eyes as he slumped towards her.

  If I can push him on to the glass, let him feel this, let him risk his own perfection, stop him being sheltered by my pain, surely it will hurt him through cotton clothes. He will not risk scars . . . Charles was grunting with effort, off-balance, nearly falling, holding her wrists to drag them from his face, slowly winning, his expression contorted with fury. One hand was cut from the shard he held. There was a blinding curtain of pain, like glare through a windscreen multiplied by dirt, blood in her eyes and hair running freely from a dozen cuts. She was sinking, drowning in weakness, clawing at him
with her back arched away from the vicious glass, losing second by second, warm, slippery, but growing colder and colder. He released one hand; she felt it turning her face to the ground, pressing her cheek towards the splintered glass, playing with her resistance.

  I shall die here, she thought. I am going to die. Melodramatic to acknowledge it, unreal to have to imagine at the same time that she who had not wanted to live, did not want to die cut to ribbons without even a blow struck, not even a minor triumph on her own behalf, a death from someone she had never injured, no real ending . . . I did not live for this. Her tensed muscles bleeding slower, while the desire to fight suddenly intensified in inverse proportion to the means for trying, a kind of passive indignation mounting slowly.

  Then the sudden power of sheer fury, a launching of faded strength as she struck back, kicked, clawed, tried to scream, and felt the impact of his surprise. At the same time, into the midst of them both, there erupted a howling snarling animal, a flurry of red hair, teeth, claws. A mess of three rolling bodies instead of two, and abruptly what had felt like silence was full of sound. The tearing of Charles’s cotton sweatshirt, a roar of pain from him, her mouth full of red hair, the dog’s and her own, as she rolled away across the glass. Dog was a moving target; Charles could not grasp the writhing shape, but shrieked like a child as he struggled, shifting forward on his knees towards the glass, beating the jaws away with his fist until the teeth took hold for a second time and sank into his wrist. Sarah rolled free, tried to stand, and watched in horror as Charles raised one large hand holding the same shard and chopped repeatedly at the dog’s neck. The animal dropped away whimpering, then leapt towards him again, ignoring the glass in the fist, pathetic in wilful ignorance. Sarah could not bear to watch, flung herself at Charles, hanging on to the raised arm with the full force of her weight, knocking him sideways. He slipped, thumped against the wall, twisted out of her grasp and stumbled towards the door, pushing her away in a last violent shove which sent her reeling. She fell and lay still against the supine form of the dog, both of them panting. Below the stairs, she heard a confusion of noise, waited in hope for the sound of the front door slamming, and slid into numbness.

  Not my kind of bravery, but I must do as driven by this devil, I who have no trace of violence in me. Through the open door of the flat, from the darkness into the light, Malcolm saw the glitter of glass, smelt blood, heard Dog howl in pain, before the man in black cannoned through him and down the stairs. Malcolm hesitated for a second, looked forward and back, shouted after the flying figure, and by instinct followed. By the time he reached the front door, he could see the figure beginning to move across the park in a slow trot. In a last practical gesture, Malcolm felt for the keys around his neck, thought fleetingly of the carnage behind him, and ran after the man, better-trained feet tearing at the grass, running as swift as an arrow towards the dark figure which turned and saw him, ran on with lithe speed. Malcolm leapt into the air, caught at the retreating back and crashed the two of them to the ground, rolling in the damp green, with the man’s hands beating against his face. One of them was stronger: the blood on the exposed skin was like drying soap, tacky and slimy, difficult to hold or pin to the ground, while the muscles beneath were as hard as steel. In the struggling, panting darkness, Malcolm heard his own voice, furious and low: What have you done, what have you done? Questioning with his own repeated blows which struck that other body into slow submission. He knelt astride, only ceasing his own savage punching long after the end of resistance, aware then of the silence outside their own tortured breathing. In the distance, he heard a police siren, knew it was not for them. Without questioning why, he had realised this to be a private battle, no concern of any other. Sirens were second nature, part of his daily business, they carried his living to his door, but he knew he was beyond their authority, and so was the man who groaned beneath his weight.

  In his stirring, and in the sharp movement of the head on the ground, Malcolm dimly recognised his adversary, but before the knowledge of that, was ashamed of his own force, regretted the blows struck beyond those which had been necessary, and in the midst of the dying anger felt guilt and shame. I am no better than any other thug who strikes again and again in mindless fury. Remembered the greater needs inside the building a hundred yards away, still silent, saw there was little he could do with this prisoner bar continue to strike him, stood away, and looked down. Charles turned on his stomach, pulled himself on to his knees, and stood upright slowly himself.

  ‘I know you,’ said Malcolm. ‘You can wait for your arrest, or leave. I’ll find you. I know you.’

  The face near his own was smeared and swollen, but even in this transformed state twisted itself into a kind of smile before broken words emerged with breathless deliberation.

  ‘She wouldn’t like it, I promise you. Your Porphyria wouldn’t like it. Too much to hide . . .’ The voice trailed, but as the figure limped away, Malcolm thought he heard the sound of strange laughter. A childish giggle, sad and gleeful, only ashamed of defeat.

  Silence. Moist silence. Spittle running down her chin, and a slow, ponderous drip, drip, drip from the shoulder now leaning against the door. Sarah looked at her feet. Red. Her own blood, Dog’s blood, falling to the carpet like a weeping tap. A warm snout pushing against her thigh, urgent whimpering sounds like her own, a tongue making a half-hearted licking against her skin. She put out a sticky hand to the silken head in an automatic stroking, feeling comfort flow into her from the softness of the touch. She moved to stroke the dog’s neck, felt the matted fur, sensed the blood, the serious wound. Her mind cleared into urgency: there was someone to rescue, the least she owed, and she tried to stand, like a shameless drunk, looking fixedly at the animal with red streaming down one flank, resisted the temptation to stay still, moving as fast as her limbs would allow.

  Skirting the glass clumsily, she stumbled into the bathroom and wrenched two towels from the rail. One she wrapped around herself, dabbed Dog’s wound with the other, then tied it round the animal’s neck to staunch the flow. Then fell heavily against the door, holding the makeshift collar, waiting for the return of strength.

  Into the circle of light, there swam a face of dim familiarity. Who was that? Difficult to tell. The fat man, the thin jogger, some woman’s lover. Memory dimmed by blood, but the face was calm and competent, eyes she trusted. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘please . . .’ The recognition was slow but mutual. There was something in the way she lay curved and naked like a vulnerable foetus which reminded him of another, bolder Sarah Fortune. ‘Help us, please . . .’

  ‘Shh. Of course I’ll help, don’t worry . . .’

  ‘Is he coming back?’

  ‘Of course not, keep still . . .’

  ‘No policemen, please. Don’t do that whatever you do, please.’

  ‘Shh,’ he said again. ‘Anything you say. Doctor though, and a vet . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ she said wearily. ‘Look after that stupid, brave dog.’ There was a grim attempt to smile. ‘And a vet will do for me too.’

  He lifted her into his arms, carried her into the bedroom, noticing the network of cuts, the great gash in the shoulder, the contusion swollen beyond recognition on her forehead. Pain stung her awake as he laid her gently on one side to avoid the fragments of glass which clung to the towelling and the skin. Dear God, how would he explain what had happened, how she and a dog had launched themselves out of a window, some incredible story like that would have to do. The slim body shuddered with relief. ‘I’m sorry,’ she was muttering. ‘Sorry . . . Look after the dog. I never meant any of this.’ Shaking slightly, a sign of life, even shocked life. Malcolm pulled the duvet round her, then looked at the cut on Dog’s neck, a slice to the bone, frighteningly deep, but bleeding less, laid her on her side too, binding the towel tighter. He went to the telephone, listening in the silence to the slight noises of the two wounded. As he dialled, he could hear the muted sounds of Sarah’s crying, and even when speaking his appeal for
official help, could not resist the single wish, recognised as bizarre as it sprang into his mind through a haze of anxiety, that she would not ask him to leave if ever this was over, not ever, not at all.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘Fuck you, Malcolm. Surely you can get her to talk? What kind of bloody lawyer are you? You’re a retarded idiot. Born with a brain, can’t effing use it. You tell me she’s told you she was carved up by Charles Tysall, and his bloody wife’s just been washed up with the tide. All this, and then that, currently marked “No Crime”, it makes me sick. If she could talk, we’d at least have a bloody angle to weaken him on the death of his wife, but all we’ve got is a bloody ancient corpse that can’t talk, and one healing body who won’t talk, won’t put on paper what she’s said to you. Bloody women. Most of them I know talk all the time. Do something for God’s sake. At least get her to promise she’ll sign the sheet when she’s better.’

  A week after the event, Malcolm regretted repeating to Ryan the greater part of what she had told him. She had said as much as she could, and there was more, of a different kind, to come. She had talked when she sat in a hospital bed, receiving a pint of blood through one tube, saline through another, but she had only talked to Malcolm on condition that he repeated to the doctors, who were far from convinced, the story of falling through a window. Now she would not talk anymore, except to him, and would not make any kind of statement identifying her attacker.

  In the scepticism born of years of criminal practice, Malcolm could see why. Even five years before, in the days when he had still believed in the ultimate power of law, he would have been the gentle inquisitor, looking for the conviction of an evil man, probing, persuading, warning that truth will out, you may as well comply. In those days he would have said to the reluctant witness, Miss Fortune, you must take an oath and speak, for the sake of catching a breaker of the law who may well hurt another. You must write first, and then speak. Here, take my pen. When Malcolm thought of those he had met in the bowels of the court, refusing to give evidence, until his large and gentle insistence had made them, he blanched. He knew in his heart of hearts that he had persuaded people to believe they would not be hurt in consequence of words said on oath, and that he had never had to see or follow up the beating which would ensue from the friends of the pimp subsequently convicted, or the bruising of the girlfriend of the thief betrayed by her words. This was different, but more or less the same. These days he could see how many were outside the law by sheer influence, could see there were times when it was not worth ruining the life and the trust of one disturbed victim to bring an offender to book. Not even if the offender was Charles Tysall, and not even if other lives hung in the balance. It would make the rickety game of justice one of a life for a life. Especially now.