Mirror Games

It is late afternoon and we are walking up the rough, steeply angled driveway to the farmhouse.  Some farm houses are twee but this is utterly functional.  There is a broken down flat bed van outside, rust climbing up its dull red paintwork. The walls of the house are dank, pebble-dashed prefab.  I turn and look at my wife and she raises an eyebrow at me, digs her hands deep into the pockets of her Craghoppers coat and walks closer to me, so that our arms touch and the fabric crackles. 

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I bang on the frosted glass of the door.  I can see a shape moving inside in the darkness.  Around the back of the house a dog barks.  The shape swells in the glass and becomes humanoid and the door opens.

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“Hello, you came!  I’m so pleased.”  The middle aged man has the reddest hair I’ve ever seen, wavy and swept back, he also has a luxuriant ginger moustache and thick lensed black rimmed glasses.  His leathery, reddened skin looks like it’s spent a lot of time outdoors.  I can tell that he drinks a lot.  “Hang on a minute, I’ll just go get something,” he says.

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My wife leans in against me and I feel her warmth against the cold wind.  “Why are we here?”  

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“Let’s find out,” I say, “what’s the worst that can happen?”

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The man returns, wearing a thick green army surplus coat.  He has battered leather hiking boots on and grey woollen socks which he has tucked his dirty jeans into.  He is carrying a parcel.  It looks like a plank, about four foot by one foot, wrapped in brown paper and masking tape.

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“Come on then,” he says.  He is noticeably less buoyant than when he opened the door.   We step aside to make way for him and his parcel as he negotiates the door way and then strides purposefully down the steep driveway to the road.

“I don’t like it,” says my wife.  

“Come on,” I say.

The road is a single track ribbon of concrete winding through the hills.  On each side there are high banks of grass capped with drystone walls, so there is no option but to walk on the surface of the road.  I keep an ear out for traffic.  

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The man has gone ahead, with his mysterious parcel and is huffing up the hill.  Beyond him the sky is starting to deepen in colour, tinted with mauve as the afternoon descends into evening.  The wind is cold.  

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I don’t like not walking next to my wife but on a road like this there is no choice but to go single file.  The twisting road and high banks mean that any car coming around a corner would have no time to react to a couple of pedestrians.  I’ve seen how people drive around here.

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Ahead the man is clambering over a stile that someone has made out of the stones in the wall.  I’ll be glad to be off the road.

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Then I hear a low rumbling and a change of gears.  It sounds larger than a car.  I look at the stile ahead and realise there is no time to make it there, and get over. 

Not enough time for both of us anyway, and my wife is some way behind me, trudging up the hill, probably hot and sweating inside her coat.  I look back and see the top of a articulated lorry weaving through the trees as it careens up the valley.  I head back down the hill towards her.  

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“Come here.” I say and I press her backwards against the grass bank and wall.  She doesn’t resist, instead she puts her arms around me inside my open coat.  I feel her warmth and her bones as we lean back, me a human shield. 

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The truck roars towards us and past us.  It takes a long time for its full length to pass, I feel the wave of noise and air and pressure battering against my back as I take the force of the impact.  My clothes shake.  The straps tying down the canvas on the trailer whip my back, but there is no pain, just a strong vibration.

My wife is crying now, uncontrollably.  I hold her face to mine and feel the wetness of her tears, the coldness of her cheek and the warmth of her breath against my ear.  Her body shakes against mine and I squeeze her to try and stop the shaking by sheer force.

“I’m so sorry.  I’m so sorry,”  she says.  But none of that matters now.

The truck goes over the top of the hill and I see the man waiting there behind the wall.  

“We’ve got to go, come on.” I whisper and kiss her cheek.  I taste the salt of her tears.

Over the stile there is a narrow rough path that cuts up the side of the hill and over towards the town.  The man is walking ahead again, calling back to encourage us.

“Nearly there!” he shouts.  “We’ll get there before it’s properly dark.”

But we don’t.

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The town isn’t what I expect.  It’s more like an alpine town than a English one, with high gabled roofs and shutters on all the windows.  As we wander the empty cobbled streets the shutters are all closing and all is dark apart from the light behind them just visible through the slats.  

“You can tell from the shutters that this is a man’s town,” says the red haired man.  He is walking with us now, looking around nervously.

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My wife is looking around with a puzzled expression on her face.  “I’m sure we were here before weren’t we?  But wasn’t that in Austria?”

Now she mentions it I’m starting to get a weird sense of deja vu myself.  There are posters in the deserted main square that look very familiar, and a closed supermarket that I’m sure we have been in.

“They all look very similar,” says the man.  He stops and puts down his package, rubbing his tired arms.  “Right,” he says, “Here we go.”

He rips off the paper to reveal a full length mirror, with an ornate wooden frame, painted gold.  He lets the discarded brown paper blow away in the wind, it spirals and dances across the square.  My wife watches it in disapproval.

Beyond the narrow streets of the town I can hear trucks driving past.  Almost one every five seconds.

The man steps away from us, angling the mirror out in front of him, holding one end and supporting the weight with his elbow.  He is looking intently into it, moving around and observing the reflection within it.

“There she is!” he says, and starts walking towards a narrow side street.  I look and get a glimpse of a woman in a long white nightdress before she disappears down the street.  The man breaks into a run.  We follow him, running ourselves.

We run down the street and he stops at a junction, again turning, watching in the mirror.  Then he sets off again at a sprint.  Ahead of us we can see the woman walking through the dark empty alleys, always just one corner ahead, always just a glimpse.

The man is frustrated now.  “Every night, every night,” he says.  “Won’t you help me?”

I don’t know how to.

Then we are off again, up some steep steps that remind me of Montmartre, up to another square with rustling trees.  The woman is on the other side of the square and the man runs at her, his mirror tilted, him staring intently into it’s glassy reflection.  

We reach another junction, this one with six different streets spidering away from it and the man stops and places the bottom corner of the mirror on the ground.  We all stop to get our breath, bending down to slow our racing hearts.

I’m worried about my wife.  This is freaking her out, I can tell although she hides it well.  Then the man begins to turn the mirror slowly on it’s axis.

“Tell me if you see her,” he says.

I look into the mirror as it turns, watching the slowly spiralling streets, the darkness and the dim light from the shutters track past. 

Then I give a shout.  “There!”

She is standing, half hidden in a shop doorway.  The man pushes me aside and adjusts the mirror.  The woman is perfectly captured in the mirror.

“I’ve got you” he says.

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I wake up in bed next to my wife.  My stirring wakes her as well.

“Are you alright?” she says

“I had a weird dream,” I say.  

“Me too.  I was in a town chasing this woman with a mirror.”

Outside a truck rumbles past, lighthouse beams tracing across the ceiling.

I lean over and turn on the bedside lamp.

“Ow!” says my wife and hides her face under the duvet.  ‘For fuck’s sake!”

“That was my dream too,” I say.  

“You imagined it.  You’re still half asleep,” she mumbles under the covers.  I feel a pressure in my bladder and swing my legs over the edge of the bed.

“I’m going for a wee,” I say.

I stand up and feel dizzy, I reach out and steady myself against the chest of drawers.  As I do I look up and my eye catches the full length mirror on the wall by the door.

There is a woman stood in the mirror, dressed in a white nightgown.  It’s her.

I let out a loud cry and drop.  It takes a long time for my knees to reach the floor boards.  There is a lot of static in the room.  Another truck roars past, its gears changing.

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When I finally hit the wooden floor pain shoots up my legs.  It’s dark again.  The light is off.  The curtains are open and there is a cold wind blowing through the bedroom.  I clamber to my feet, afraid and disoriented. I look back at the bed and see that it is empty.  And I remember.

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My loss pours back into me, or rather the life pours out of me, leaving me weak and hollow.  There is the smell of stale cigarettes in the room.  I must have been smoking in bed again.  There are empty bottles lying on the floor.  I’m still fully dressed in my suit and tie.  I stagger to the window to close it as another truck goes past, clanking over the manhole cover outside our house.

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I reach up to close the window, my head swimming and painful and I see a shape outside the house.  

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It’s her.  My wife.  In her Craghoppers coat just like on that last day.  She looks up at the window, at me, and then turns away to walk down the road like she did that last day.  Like she did every day.

I turn, my heart splitting in two.  I run across the bedroom, banging my thigh against the end of the bed.  I grab the mirror from the wall and, angling it in front of me, run down the stairs.