She passed over the top of the hill, and then down the other side past the church, where there was some respite from the elements. She was nearly home – she lived alone. She turned round suddenly – there. A shape disappeared down a side-street as soon as she turned. She couldn’t tell at this distance whether it was male or female, but it looked small, slight – another supplicant, another idolater. She had once thought that women would be different, somehow, that their eyes on her naked body would be different, that their touch would discover her. But no; it didn’t matter who they were. She was just being followed again, by someone who didn’t even know what it was that they followed.
Angrily she continued to watch, and saw the shape slink to the top of the street, and jerk back. But – were there two of them? The shape seemed multi-formed, two close shadows combining in her sight at this distance, rather than one person. It was hard to tell, for it or they moved jerkily, and maybe it had just been a person and their shadow, merged with distance. But although she wouldn’t admit it, Regina was worried. The pangs her looks had caused had always been solitary, people didn’t want to share her or have her diluted in the sight of another. People had never hunted her in twos, in packs, before... She hurried back to her flat, and felt more than one pair of eyes behind her. She shut the door, quickly.
As she undressed she saw herself in the mirror – she made sure she saw every night. She was unsubstantial – her body, her face flicked between different peoples’ images of desire, of companionship. Never once was she herself. What would she look like if she was?
***
Andy was waiting for her outside the next day, with a bunch of roses.
“Andy,” she said in a tired voice, “Goths aren’t supposed to carry flowers.”
“Well… I… you left so quickly last night, I wondered if I’d, um, upset you…” The red colour of his embarrassment sat uncomfortably with his pallid skin, with his black clothes. He obviously thought that he was making a stupid mistake – she could see her form reflected and distorted in his eyeballs – long curly red hair, cat-like green eyes, a white flowing dress like a B-Movie reject – amazing, Regina thought, looking down at her dirty grey t-shirt, her torn cords. She tried to study her reflection some more in his eyes, because it was fascinating to see herself temporarily stable, without all the shifts and changes that she knew made up her real appearance - but he was uncomfortable, and looked downwards. I wondered if I’d upset you, he had said – that was more than most of them wondered. Most of them wanted her not to be upset, and saw that she wasn’t.
She realised that he’d just said something, that he had in fact invited her out for a date. Something made her accept, although she still realised that his resultant happiness wasn’t due to her at all. As she left him, she felt his gaze on her back. One more pair of eyes…
Why not today? she thought as she walked away. Why not let today be the day on which I finally kill myself?
She took a tortuous route to the university, taking the back streets so as to avoid all the stares, all the sightseers. But she passed a few people, felt them mentally shake themselves from their thoughts and watch her. How many thoughts had she left half-finished in the minds of others – how many theories, poems or just good jokes had she killed off? She passed a blind man, and even he turned his head as if to follow her. When she got to the lecture hall she sat at the back and tried to remain inconspicuous, but someone sat down next to her – Josh. She felt him looking at her, and there was none of the uncertainty of Andy’s gaze; Josh simply saw something that he wanted, and he was calculating how to get it.
“Fancy going to the cinema tonight?” he whispered.
“Can’t,” Regina said. “I’ve got a date with Andy.”
“A restaurant then? I’ll treat you?”
She was amazed by him – at the way he assumed that he could get anything that he wanted. Although he was handsome he was also somehow repellent, as if his avaricious nature had been firmly sketched upon his face. Regina ignored him, and tried to focus on the lecture.
“So do secondary properties exist?” the lecturer was saying. “Do we believe objects actually have colours, that this blackboard would be black even if we weren’t looking at it? Or is there only a sensation of black in each of our minds? And if so how is it caused, and how would we know we were all seeing the same thing?”
There’s no answers here, Regina thought, just more damn stupid questions. She stood up and left the lecture half way through, ignoring the touch of Josh’s hand that tried to stop her.
Best to end it, she thought, as she headed home – she had thought about suicide often, but some vague superstition had stayed her hand before. But what was there to be superstitious about? She was nothing real, just a bunch of ideas in other people’s heads. Even her thoughts didn’t seem her own, they were just lecture-notes and dead quotations.
Andy had been right, as had whichever philosopher he had been cribbing from: there was no point in just thinking ‘I don’t exist’. She headed back towards her flat, up to her bedroom, stood in front of her mirror with a razor blade in her hand. Regina imagined slitting her wrists and nothing bleeding out from her, like cutting into waxwork; but that was silly, she knew that she bled. She would do it looking at herself, keeping that awful shimmering image of herself in her eyes even as her sight dimmed…
But wait. She looked at her reflection. Yes, it was the same, a movement of features and styles that left her blurred and ugly – but wasn’t that a tinge of reoccurring red in her hair? Wasn’t it more prevalent that it ever had been?
Andy, she thought. Struggling to come to life in the awfulness of her reflection was Andy’s version of her. She thought hard about her past – she had never agreed to see people twice, never assumed that after the first-sight she could change in their eyes. But she had uncharacteristically agreed to go on an actual date with Andy. And she had seen, in the reflection of his eyes, how he saw her – had that ever happened before? No, she didn’t think it had – why hadn’t she noticed at the time? How could she have been blind to what it might mean, to see herself through another’s eyes? She had an excited idea, but almost dared not think it. Was it really that simple?
It was hours until the date, but she was suddenly excited, giddy, like a teenager getting ready for her first boyfriend. She washed her hair, washed her body, and although it wouldn’t matter, she dressed in a white summer dress that was the closest thing she had to how Andy had seen her.
Things watched from the windows across the street, silhouetted things, with uneven outlines, their faces without noses or eyes, but mouths that were opened in an expression of worship; betrayed worship, like moths aflame near the candle.
***
She met Andy outside the cinema – it was of course a late night horror screening. She looked at him as she approached – but he had shades on! She needed to see his eyes, to see if she saw what she had seen before. She made a joke about him taking them off, a somewhat nervous joke, and he looked at her oddly for a second.
“Yeah, I’ll take them off inside,” he said. The film was the kind she could have guessed Andy would have liked: postmodern horror, the monsters rendered harmless by a welter of in-jokes and ‘references’ to other, better movies. She felt like she had seen it all before. The monster in the film was supposedly a shape-changer, although the special effects budget had apparently only stretched to two or three shapes. There was no meaning to the film that she could see, even the narrative looked fractured and twisted. She felt like she was sitting in one of her lectures. Andy put his arm around her, and she could feel it shaking because he was still so in awe of her… She felt angry again, and determined to see if she was wasting her time here.
“Let’s go,” she whispered to him, trying to make her voice into a promise. She needed to be outside the cinema to see his eyes again. She rubbed his thigh to make sure he got the message – she felt little desire for Andy, but if he was doing what she suspected he was: s
etting her in place, making her outside form fixed into his image of her, rather than the terrible chimera she saw in the mirror… - if that was so then she would spend the rest of her life pleasing him. She would never let him look away.
Regina and Andy left the cinema. There were tacky mirrored columns outside it, and she saw their reflection in it… He looked as he always did… And she, beside him, was it her imagination? Had the shimmering dimmed, were the flickering forms showing a preference for the redheaded girl in the white dress? She felt excited; for the first time a sexual excitement for this man with his arm around her. She realised that she had never felt this before. She had wanted sex to fill the emptiness within her, wanted it to stop someone besotted taking up too much of her time with wheedling conversation – but she had never just wanted someone before. But now she did, and it was a new feeling, like she hadn’t been quite human before this moment, like she was the mermaid who finally didn’t feel the broken glass and shit against the soles of her feet.
Even amid this happiness, she realised that they were being followed from the cinema. This again was new, her stalkers generally backed off part-suicidal when they saw her with another man; another person even. She made Andy get a taxi, even though it was a nice night and he lived barely fifteen minutes away. But this was a miscalculation, for he lived in the halls of residence where the party had been the other night, and there was no road up to the front door, and so the taxi dropped them off about fifty meters away, at the start of a woody path. It seemed like a set from the film that they had just left – a mock up of a place that would have been scary had you not seen it on a hundred other screens before. Andy paid the taxi driver and he was panting already – the noise of his lust sickened her, for she just felt afraid. She felt followed again, there was something behind her, or something waiting for her in those shadows at the base of each tree. There was no sound of pursuit, nothing except the feeling, and possibly a slight ambiguity on the edges of her vision, like the world was wavering as her reflection did in the mirror. Like things weren’t quite fixed. Just as she was thinking that whoever they were they weren’t going to reveal themselves, something twitched out in front of her, like it had been dragged into her sight; or her sight had been dragged towards it. Her brain wavered, trying to calculate just what it was. But immediately two things were apparent:
It wasn’t human. And Andy couldn’t see it.
Well of course he can’t see it, a detached part of Regina thought. He can only see me as a girl with red hair, not what I really am, so how would his brain be able to make him see this?
This was a roughly humanoid figure about four feet high, with long arms that hung down past its knees, undeveloped, thumbless hands, and a body that seemed to be gossamer, but a dirty, corrupted gossamer, a greyed ghost. Its ‘face’ consisted solely of an oval with a smaller, stretched oval of a scream. But nevertheless she knew that it was looking at her. Maybe not in a physical way, but all its will was directed towards her, just like the blind man’s had been earlier.
She shrugged from Andy’s grip, turned. There was another one of them behind her. It was like a copy of the first, there was no hint at a separate personality. Andy was nervously asking her if anything was wrong but she ignored his sounds. She watched one of the things’ reaction to Andy’s words. There was no change in its posture, or in its frozen and darkling ‘face’; but its dirty radiance seemed to change, and she felt lost suddenly, abandoned. She hadn’t realised how alive, how real their direct and unfocussed attention had made her feel. But now they were looking away, however they looked; they were looking at Andy.
They moved towards him, but he still couldn’t see them. Their movement didn’t seem physical, but it was like your eyes had made a mistake and kept correcting – no they weren’t there, but there; not there but there… They jerked and drifted forward in her sight and made her eyes itch. They were moving towards Andy. She realised that they were going to kill him somehow. And part of her simply said, let them. He doesn’t know you, just some wet-dream of an Irish redhead overlaid over you.
But then she screamed out at the things: “No!” She didn’t know herself either. Why not be his redhead girlfriend, if that was what she could be? Better that than the way she had been drifting from gaze to gaze, fucked and projected on a thousand times.
Andy, and the two watching-things turned at her scream. Andy’s look was comical; their look didn’t change – they were inflexible, somehow, despite the insubstantial nature of their appearance. How could she fight them? They seemed to be growing more substantial even as she stared, thickening out, fixing their bodies into the shapes with which they intended to kill Andy; maybe he would see them at the last second, the way their maws gaped emptily and their hands were growing claws; not growing them, but jerking them into the light of her perceptions.
It came to Regina quickly: she closed her eyes. The watchers didn’t scream; they couldn’t. But she felt them shrivel, like anemones out of water, weakening as their vital element was removed. If there was a corresponding pain within herself, then she ignored it. There were shapes behind her closed eyelids – formless things too black and blurred to really be called shapes, and she refused to focus on them. Andy was shaking her, shouting “Regina! What’s the matter?” but she refused to open her eyes until she was sure the things, the watchers, were gone. When she opened her eyes she saw Andy, and his face was trying to look concerned and critical, but these feelings were collapsing under the weight of his adoration for what he saw. And the moon was behind her, and she saw herself as reflected in his eyes again, saw herself as he saw her and she recognised it as herself: flame-coloured hair like he had claimed, all the way to her shoulders, grey-green eyes, freckles – she hadn’t noticed the freckles before but now she did. It was her, all her in his eyes. The things were gone - she kissed him.
***
The next morning she got up, stretched. Her body felt sore from the night before – her muscles ached from the way she had bent, her back felt sore, her thighs pained. Nevertheless she felt fantastic. She looked in the mirror – of course, there she was: her birth-mark on her thigh, which she had never noticed before yesterday; it looked like a rune of some kind, an ancient marking – it was nothing Andy could ever have made up. It was her. He had brought her into focus but now she was creating her own pieces, adding the finishing touches. Maybe at some point she wouldn’t need him at all? But he was a soft lad at heart, despite the Gothic exterior, and he wanted her to be a girl who loved him. And so she felt herself falling.
***
The next month was bliss for her, or what she imagined bliss to be like. She had to spend as much time as she could with him, and he didn’t object. They talked and she felt him actually talking to her as an individual, as this girl in front of her who he loved and who she was. Her physical appearance was now stable in her mind, she knew what she looked like, and whenever she saw her reflection in Andy’s eyes (this was most common when they made love) then it was confirmed. She skipped most of her lectures now, she didn’t want to be a teacher, none of that mattered. When she did leave the house then people looked at her less, she only drew admiring glances from blokes who liked Andy’s idea of a perfect woman. She knew she was still beautiful, but in a specific way – sometimes her fellow females seemed to radiate their hatred and jealousy of her looks. When they did, she looked back, as if thanking them.
The things still hovered at the edges of her vision, but she just blinked quickly when they started to appear, and didn’t give them chance to form. They weren’t going to harm her Andy. What else was there to call them but ‘things’? When they weren’t visible she couldn’t really remember what they looked like, and wouldn’t have even known if she saw the same thing each time - but she remembered the way that they moved, the lurching motion that offended her eyes…Part of her wondered what they wanted, and why they had taken pains to hide from her before, whereas now they were throwing themselves in front of her to be recogn
ised, but the questions were only academically interesting, not anything that Regina felt could alter her life.
***
Still, she couldn’t be with Andy all of the time, and so she occasionally went to her lectures. And she realised people were hardly looking at her at all anymore. She was just another student. People glanced at her, made opinions, and more often than not looked away, as if she were just a normal person. All except Josh.
He still kept coming to sit next to her.
“You haven’t been here for a while,” he said. Regina shrugged.
“You’ve missed a lot,” he said. “The Rationalists. You can’t understand Kant properly unless you understand the Rationalists, because he reacted against them and the Empiricists…”
“Hmmm,” she said. What did all that matter now – Rationalists, Empiricists: she knew none of them had any answers.
“Maybe you’d like to see my notes to catch up,” Josh said. “Maybe we could go through them together with a bottle of wine?”
“Josh,” she said, “I’m going out with Andy now? Didn’t you know?”
Josh shrugged, as if that fact was of no importance, and she hated the way he did so, for he implied that relationships were unstable, unimportant things. She wondered briefly what would happen if she ever split up with Andy, how long it would take her to regress to how she had been, like a balloon losing its shape…
“Goodbye Josh,” she said, getting up.
“Oh, someone else who thinks Kant’s not good enough,” the lecturer said sarcastically, for she wasn’t the first to leave. In the old days he would have let her go without a word because he had been obsessed with her – now he barely seemed to recognise her. But how come Josh still did?
Outside, one of the ‘things’ was waiting for her: it had been hanging like a discarded puppet, completely still; it only jerked into life when she looked at it, and it moved towards her with its dirty ghost-like body, its distended scream. If I was an Empiricist she thought, then wouldn’t I have to believe that this was real? But she simply chose not to focus upon it, and it disappeared; not instantly, but like shape seen in the clouds that simply mutated out of existence.
The Other Room Page 8