The Mirror World of Melody Black

by Gavin Extence

  I decided to interpret this offer as sincere, despite abundant facial evidence to the contrary. ‘Yes. Thank you. That would be very kind.’

  She looked at me, without comment, for several seconds. Then there might have been the briefest flicker of a smile. But more likely it was a hallucination. ‘Very well. I’d hate for this morning to be a complete waste of time.’

  When she returned with the cafetière, I had already started drafting copy in my head.

  We’re sitting in the high-ceilinged airy kitchen of a Highbury town house. Miranda Frost, 52 [check detail], is dressed in a cashmere cardigan and pleated skirt. When she speaks, her voice carries the brisk precision for which her poetry is famous. She makes a lousy cup of coffee and is much more of a bitch than you’d imagine.

  ‘Mmm, caffeine. Thank you, Miranda. May I call you Miranda?’

  ‘You now have thirty-three minutes, Miss Williams. It’s your time to spend as you will, but I suggest that we dispense with the pleasantries and press on.’

  I smiled through clenched teeth. ‘Yes, let’s. Just bear with me a second.’

  The rain had permeated the outer layer of my shoulder bag and soaked through to the back page of my notebook; where once had been questions, now dwelt an unnavigable sea of blue ink. I decided to stall first and improvise second. ‘Forgive me. Do you mind if I start slightly off track?’

  She sipped her coffee. ‘I’d expect no less.’

  ‘Okay . . . Well, you’re a notoriously private person.’

  ‘Is that a question or a statement?’

  ‘It’s a statement.’

  ‘And an oxymoron.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps. But they sometimes have their place.’

  ‘In Shakespeare, Miss Williams. Not in competent journalism.’

  ‘Right. Well, I suppose that’s not a million miles away from the point I’m trying to make. You rarely give interviews. Your last, I believe, was in 2010, for The Culture Show.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘So, er, I guess the question I’m asking – just for personal curiosity, really – is why now? Actually, scrap that. Not why now. Why me? I mean, I’m not exactly The Culture Show.’

  Bumbling and disjointed as this was, it was nevertheless the first thing I’d said that seemed in any way to please Miranda Frost. That flicker of a smile was back.

  ‘It was your name, Abigail. Nothing more. Your name amused me, so I chose not to delete your email. I assume you must be aware of your literary forebear? Salem? The Crucible’s central harlot?’

  ‘Oh, right. Yes. Ever since I was about fifteen. We read that play in school. You have a good memory for names.’

  ‘Only in fiction, as a rule.’

  ‘It passes most people by.’

  ‘As it did your parents, presumably?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, my mum reads a little, but not widely. And my dad despises culture in all its forms; he’s in advertising. I can’t imagine he ever took my mother to the theatre.’

  ‘Ah, “took”. Past tense. They’re separated?’

  ‘Divorced.’ I was aware, of course, that Miranda Frost had somehow inverted the interview, that it was her asking the questions. But at least she was starting to warm up a little. I decided I had nothing to lose and ploughed ahead. ‘My dad left us for his secretary. It was the most appalling cliché. Now he’s hooked up with a French perfume model, four years older than me.’

  ‘A perfume model? How does one model perfume?’

  ‘A model who’s in a perfume ad. Marie Martin. Séduction. She’s all over the Tube, if you’re interested.’

  ‘I wouldn’t take the Tube if you held a gun to my head. How old were you when he left?’

  ‘Fourteen.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Forty-five.’

  ‘Ah. A lethal age. My husband left me when I was forty-four. When I was thirty-four, he used to recite Yeats to me. You’ve read Yeats?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘How many loved your moments of glad grace,

  And loved your beauty with love false or true;

  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

  And loved the sorrows of your changing face . . .’

  ‘Lying fuck.’

  ‘Yeats?’

  ‘My ex-husband. But yes – Yeats too, I’m sure. You know how men are. Or if you don’t, give it time. They all think with their willies, to a greater or lesser extent.’

  ‘Right. Their willies . . .’

  Miranda Frost shrugged. ‘It’s the word I prefer these days. Men can call them their cocks or pricks or schlongs or love muscles, or whatever ridiculous metaphor they choose, but we don’t have to go along with it. Men hold their willies in far too high an esteem.’

  I nodded. It was a difficult analysis to dispute.

  ‘Thank God lesbianism isn’t simply a lifestyle choice, as the fundamentalists would have us believe. It would be the end of the human race.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you a few questions now? You know, about your poetry?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you ought to.’

  ‘Great.’ I took a sip of coffee, then cleared my throat. ‘So, your latest collection has been released to huge critical acclaim. Do the reviews still matter to you, after so many years?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I waited.

  Miranda Frost gave me a look that would wither a vase of sunflowers. ‘What, you want more?’

  ‘It would help.’

  Miranda Frost’s eyes continued to bore into me for what seemed like another minute. ‘It feels good when people praise your work, bad when they don’t. What more is there to say? You could ask a schoolchild a similar question and get the same response.’

  ‘Right . . . So, er, does writing still give you the same thrill it did thirty years ago?’

  ‘Tell me, Miss Williams: are all the questions going to be this conventional? I’ve answered their like a dozen times; it’s all on the internet, I’m sure. Don’t you think your readers might like something different?’

  ‘Sorry. I did have some good questions but’ – I showed her my notebook – ‘they dissolved.’

  ‘So I see. Still, you were doing well enough a few moments ago. We were having a reasonably stimulating conversation. I’m sure you can spin it into a couple of thousand words.’

  ‘I’m selling it to the Observer as an exclusive interview,’ I pointed out. ‘Not an essay on men and their willies.’

  ‘Very well. So ask me something interesting. Ask me something I’m not expecting.’

  ‘Okay.’ I glanced once more at my saturated notebook, then set it down on the table. I thought for a few moments. ‘How well do you know your neighbours?’ I asked. Miranda Frost exhaled with infinite disdain. ‘Would you care, for example, if one of them died?’

  ‘I don’t have any neighbours, Miss Williams. I live in a cottage miles from anywhere. I find the isolation suits me.’

  ‘My neighbour died last night,’ I blurted. ‘I found the body.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘My neighbour died. I found his body.’

  There was no doubting the smile now. For the first time since I’d arrived, Miranda Frost looked unequivocally intrigued.

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  3

  SOMETHING DIFFERENT

  When I got home, I made myself a fresh pot of coffee and listened back to the calamity that was my exclusive interview with Miranda Frost. So far as I could tell there was nothing salvageable. Nothing. Should I email again, ask for a follow-up? Even if it were likely, there didn’t seem much point. Who cared about the witch behind the words? It was the words that mattered. Still, I knew that I had to turn in something. By my standards, this was a lucrative piece of work. I couldn’t afford to let it slip away.

  I toiled on my laptop for three hours straight, trying to come up with a clever angle, something postmodern. Deconstructing Miranda: a non-interview with the woman who hates interviews. It was a t
errible idea that grew more terrible with every unnecessary word I pumped in, like a blood-bloated mosquito ready to pop.

  I changed tack. Meander Frost: psychoanalysing what the poet won’t tell us.

  This, of course, was even worse.

  I emailed Jess at the Observer to tell her that the write-up was coming along, but might take a couple of days longer than anticipated – due to the death of someone close to me. Even as I was typing, I didn’t know how to feel about this not-quite-a-lie. On the one hand, it was devious and emotionally manipulative; on the other, it was just the kind of creative thinking I’d need if I was to transform this Miranda Frost interview into something printable.

  By then it was late afternoon, and it was my turn to make dinner, so I went to the shop and bought eggs, bread and a salad in a bag – destined to become an overcooked omelette and accompaniments. For my late lunch, I had two more cigarettes and a bar of chocolate, then returned to my laptop with renewed determination. The next thing I knew, I was being interviewed for a PR job in Canary Wharf. The interview took place on the 101st floor and, due to a lack of foresight with the laundry, I’d had to borrow an ill-fitting trouser suit from my sister; under this, for reasons less clear, I was naked as a new-born.

  I awoke twenty minutes before Beck got home, feeling slow and stupid.

  I served dinner with a strong bottle of Rioja and an abject apology, because it felt like a dinner that needed both. Beck put on a brave face, but I knew that if this meal lived long in the memory, it would be for all the wrong reasons. He deserved better, really, after a nine-hour office day bookended by two grimy Tube rides, even though he always insisted that he liked his job and found the underground much more bearable than I did.

  Beck worked for a digital consultancy on the South Bank, a couple of stones’ throws from Waterloo. It was the kind of cool tech company that modelled itself on Google. They posted job adverts that included phrases like We work hard, we play hard. The office had a games room with pool and ping-pong tables, and beanbags and a beer fridge – and a tacit understanding that no one should open the beer fridge before 6 p.m. (unless it was a Friday or summer). And, so far as I could tell, the workspace was almost entirely devoid of interior walls. According to the company’s mission statement, this was to nurture an atmosphere conducive to creativity, collaboration and cross-pollination. But if you wanted any privacy, then I supposed your options were limited to the toilets or the stationery cupboard. The toilets, to my knowledge, were not open-plan. Even so, thinking too much about life in an office – any office – filled me with a profound sense of dread. I’d temped all over central London between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four and still felt like I was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.

  ‘So how was she?’ Beck asked, as we continued to run through the edited highlights of our respective days. By this point, the uninspiring omelette had been eaten, the last of the salad was wilting in its bag, more wine had been poured, and the living area smelled strongly of cooking oil. Anything fried, in our flat, tended to linger.

  I’d already told him about the hellish commute; now we were on to the woman at the end of the line, whom I conjured in a few sharp sentences. ‘Imagine the lovechild of Miss Havisham and Hannibal Lecter,’ I concluded, ‘played by Bette Davis with a hangover.’

  ‘Pithy. I like it. Except for the image of Hannibal Lecter having sex. No one needs that in their head.’

  ‘I came up with it between Euston Square and Great Portland Street. It’s one of the many ideas I’m not going to be able to use.’

  ‘No – obviously not.’

  ‘I’ll have to make something up. Honestly, you should hear the recording. It’s like picking through a train wreck.’

  ‘Hmm. That actually sounds pretty interesting.’

  ‘It is interesting. Probably more interesting than whatever bullshit I end up writing. But that’s not the point. It’s still unusable.’

  ‘Maybe a second opinion would help?’

  I thought about and quickly dismissed this suggestion. I didn’t really want Beck to listen to the recording. Not all of it. I changed the subject.

  ‘Listen: have you ever heard of something called the Monkeysphere?’

  Beck looked at me like I’d started speaking in tongues.

  ‘How about Caborn’s number? They’re essentially the same thing, but one has a catchier name. It’s sciencey,’ I added. ‘I thought you might have heard of it.’

  ‘I haven’t,’ Beck assured me.

  ‘Right. Well, it’s basically a theory of primate societies. Professor Caborn is an evolutionary psychologist. He spent a lot of time examining monkey brains and discovered a correlation between the size of the brain and the size of the monkey’s social sphere. So baboons tend to form cliques of, say, thirty, and chimps fifty, and so on. Are you following so far?’

  ‘Yes: the brainier the monkey, the more monkey friends it has. Is this going somewhere?’

  ‘Yes. Be patient.’ I took a deep glug from my wine glass. ‘So Caborn’s number is a theoretical limit. It’s the number of social relationships a monkey can cope with, as determined by the size of its brain. Or, put differently, it’s the maximum number of monkeys that can live together before their society becomes unstable and fragments.’

  Beck looked at me for several seconds. ‘I’m confused. What does this have to do with Miranda Frost?’

  ‘Nothing. This is a new topic, or a tangent, at least. I should have made that clearer. Anyway, just let me finish. Caborn’s number applies to humans, too. Actually, I think it refers specifically to humans; the monkeys are just context. You see, Professor Caborn drew a graph with different primate brain sizes on one axis and the average size of their social groups on the other. And from this he was able to extrapolate the maximum size a human society should be – or can be – before it starts to break into pieces. Turns out it’s about one hundred and fifty. Humans can maintain up to one hundred and fifty meaningful social relationships, but no more. After that . . . I don’t know. Our brains overheat or something. They haven’t evolved to cope with very large populations.’

  ‘Our brains overheat?’

  ‘Okay, I’m paraphrasing. Trust me, this is credible science, backed up by a mass of supporting evidence. So, for example, guess the average clan size in a traditional hunter-gatherer society?’

  ‘Er, one hundred and fifty?’

  ‘Bingo! Same story for pre-industrial villages. And guess what the Amish do if their communities grow to more than one hundred and fifty.’

  ‘They start to strangle each other?’

  ‘No need. Their communities split into two at this point – invariably. Because the Amish have figured out that below the one fifty threshold, society is essentially stable and self-regulating. Everyone knows and is emotionally connected to everyone else, so there’s a natural drive towards cooperation, reciprocal generosity, trustworthiness – stuff like that. It’s only when the population creeps past Caborn’s number that things start to go wrong, people begin to feel a little more anonymous in the group, less mutually dependent. Morals take a small but noticeable dip. Basically, people lose their capacity to care about everyone else in the community, so the social glue starts to fail.’

  ‘Okay, that’s all very interesting . . . And where has this sudden interest in evolutionary psychology come from?’

  I shrugged. ‘I was reading about it last night, when I had the insomnia. I just kind of stumbled on it online and it seemed weirdly pertinent. You know, because of Simon.’

  ‘Simon?’ Beck let the name hang in the air a few moments. ‘This is to do with Simon?’

  ‘Right. Because we knew next to nothing about him. He wasn’t really a person to us, not in any meaningful sense – just a face we passed on the stairs every so often. We lived yards apart but never interacted, and his death was just a weird blip in our day. It had no emotional significance whatsoever.’

  Beck grimaced, the way people do when you s
ay something true but unacceptable. And this made me smile a little.

  ‘Not in our Monkeysphere,’ I concluded.

  I couldn’t sleep again that night.

  By twelve thirty, I was back at the computer, alone, banging my head against the brick wall that was the Miranda Frost recording. There was simply no point of entry. Anything vaguely relevant disintegrated within a couple of sentences; contrarily, anything that struck me as interesting – anything worth writing about – was irrelevant, had no place in a broadsheet interview.

  I wondered if the problem was focus. I couldn’t seem to grip anything in my mind for more than a few seconds. My thoughts kept jumping, like a scratched CD. And all the while, Miranda and I kept twittering in the background, our voices muted and tinny. There was a strange interior logic to what we were saying, a back-and-forth, tennis-match rhythm, but no wider sense of meaning, or even reality.

  I thought again about the speed in the freezer, and again decided not to. It might have helped me concentrate, but, just as easily, I could have found myself staring at the wall and grinding my jaw until sunrise. Instead, I drank a pint of water, opened the window as far as it would go, and lit another cigarette.

  The wind was picking up. Its sound combined with that of the fizzling rain to create a sweeping curtain of white noise. I perched on the edge of the window sill, stuck my head out and let the dirty city air buffet my face. Then, without thinking too much about what I was doing, I returned to my laptop and started transcribing the interview.

  I played the recording from the beginning and I wrote out each sentence in turn, one after another, changing or omitting not a single word; and the more I typed, the clearer everything seemed.

  After a couple of hours, I’d almost reached my two thousand words, and all that was left was my account of discovering Simon’s corpse. At this point, I went back through the dialogue and added some expositional gloss here and there. Then I returned to the top of the document and added a long but satisfying title: Something Different: Miranda Frost interviews Abigail Williams, literary harlot (words Abigail Williams; invective Miranda Frost).