Girl in the Mirror: Two Stories

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The gate. Still open a fraction. She couldn’t wait to get out of there.

She nodded, then remembered her manners. ‘Yes please.’

Lila and Sarah sat beside one another on the wall, kicking their legs, allowing their heels to bang back against the crumbling brickwork. They never spoke. Not until Sarah’s mother’s car was in sight.

‘Thank you for inviting me,’ Sarah said politely, feeling relieved.

‘You didn’t have fun. You were hardly here for very long. I didn’t even get to show you my hiding place in the back garden.’

Sarah shuddered. She hopped off the wall as the car slowed to a stop beside them and she offered Lila a warm hug.

‘See you over the summer?’ Lila asked.

Sarah nodded.

But they didn’t.

Sarah waved at her friend from the passenger seat, careful not to look at the house. It was bad luck, she remembered.

‘What happened, sweetheart, did you have a fight?’ her mother asked.

Sarah shook her head.

‘Do you feel ill?’

She shook her head again.

Her mother reached out and felt her forehead, ‘You don’t feel hot.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Did something happen?’ she asked with more urgency now and Sarah knew she’d have to explain or she’d never stop asking her. She’d even send her father to her room when he got home from work, to ask questions in a roundabout back to front way that was always so obvious to Sarah even though they thought she didn’t know their true intentions.

So she spoke.

‘All the mirrors were covered up with black sheets. Every mirror in every single room. All with black sheets.’

Her mother was silent. Thoughtful.

‘Were they decorating?’

She shook her head. ‘Lila said her grandmother doesn’t like mirrors.’

Her mother was quiet, then full of false perkiness, ‘Well there you go, her grandmother just doesn’t like mirrors. People like different things, Sarah, you’ll learn that as you go through life, it won’t always make sense but that’s the way it is.’

‘Why wouldn’t she like them?’

‘Maybe she just doesn’t like seeing herself, sweetheart. Some people are just like that.’

‘But, Mum, it can’t be the reason.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because her grandmother is blind.’ And she lowered her voice to a whisper even though they were far from the house. ‘She doesn’t have any eyes.’

Lila didn’t know why her Grellie didn’t like mirrors, she just grew up knowing that she didn’t, just like she knew not to put sugar in her father’s tea and like she knew never to make her mother sit in the middle of a row at the cinema or restaurant. She didn’t know why her father didn’t like sweet tea or why her mother suffered a minor form of claustrophobia, she just knew that they did and that was enough information for her.

All Grellie ever said was, ‘It was the price of freedom,’ not that it made any sense to anybody or explained the mystery for anybody. Not only did Lila not know why but she didn’t think it was odd. So the mirrors were covered with black sheeting, so the rooms were darker than most peoples’ rooms. She didn’t mind not knowing why her fatherdidn’t take sugar in his tea or why her mother felt that the walls were closing in around her everytime she sat in the middle of a row. Even though Sarah had left the house in a rush and she subsequently heard rumours at school about her weird blind grandmother who was afraid of mirrors who lived alone in a house on a cliff, she could go the rest of her life not knowing and not caring.

But.

She should have asked.

JULY 2010

‘Stop calling me.’ Lila laughed down her mobile phone. ‘It’s bad luck or something to talk to each other.’

‘It’s bad luck to see each other and that’s a load of crap too,’ Jeremy replied. ‘I just got worried you weren’t going to show up. You weren’t answering your phone.’

‘I wasn’t answering the phone because I knew it was you and it’s bad luck. And of course I’m going to show up, would you stop worrying?’

‘It’s not bad luck and I wasn’t worrying till you didn’t answer the phone.’

They both laughed.

‘Hold on, I’m on the road to Grellie’s, I need to concentrate, I’m putting you on speakerphone.’

‘Anyone in the car with you?’

‘Just me and the dress.’

‘Hello, dress, can’t wait for you to be on the hotel bedroom floor tonight.’

Lila laughed. ‘For the amount it cost me I’m never taking it off. I better go, I’m down the Bishop’s Gap.’

‘That’s your business,’ Jeremy joked as everybody always did about the steep terrain en route to Ellie’s property. ‘But one more thing before you go. Take a deep breath first.’

Lila groaned in advance.

‘The hotel manager called. He thinks the ballroom would look more exquisite – his word not mine – if the mirrors were left as they are.’

‘No. I didn’t spend all that money on black fabric to not cover them up. And Grellie’s bedroom – is he planning on uncovering the mirrors in there, too?’

‘No, he’s okay with the bedroom, it’s just the ballroom. He’d like the guests to see the room properly.’

‘It’s my bloody wedding not his.’

Silence. Then.

‘Honey … she won’t even know.’

‘Jeremy.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I can’t believe you even said that.’

‘I know, I take it back. I’m sorry.’

‘Well in that case I’m putting goat’s cheese back on the menu so your mother can be cured of her imaginary allergy to it,’ Lila fumed.

‘Lila. Calm down. I said I’m sorry. I know. I completely understand. I adore Ellie as much as you do. I was just trying to look at a bad situation positively.’

‘There is no bad situation. Call him back and tell him he’s to put the curtains back up or I’m doing it myself.’

‘Okay, I’ll do it. Now calm down and concentrate on that road.’

Lila calmed herself, waited for her blood to stop boiling.

‘Well, two hours from now, you’ll be my wife,’ he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice.

‘Then I can reveal my true colours and stop acting like this perfect saint now that I’ve snared my man,’ she said, then laughed evilly.

He laughed. ‘This is you as a saint?’

She smiled. Looked at herself in her mirror. She looked happy. She was happy. Had never been so happy.

‘I love you, monkey,’ he said.

‘I love you, hippo,’ she said, smiling at herself in the mirror.

She hung up just as Grellie’s house came into view and the excitement rushed through her. She couldn’t think of anybody more appropriate to spend the special morning with and also to accompany her up the aisle.

The front door was open before the engine had stopped and though she couldn’t yet see Grellie through the wild garden, she could sense her excitement too. It drifted out from the black-and-white weather-beaten arch above the door, through the bluebells and nettles, hydrangea and dandelions. It skipped over the cracked, randomly dotted flagstones in the grass and greeted her at the creaking gate, which hung from one hinge.

She carried the dress over her arms as though carrying an exhausted sleeping child home. As soon as she neared Grellie she held the dress out.

Grellie’s hands automatically reached out and felt for the fabric. Her old fingers moved gracefully like a ballet dancer on point, over the silk.

‘It’s ivory,’ Lila whispered, not wanting sound to take away from Grellie’s senses.

Grellie was quiet as her fingers inspected the dress. Lila closed her eyes, listened to the waves crashing below, and the wind’s effect on the overgrowth and if she wasn’t about to marry the man she loved, she almost would have wished for that moment to be frozen in time.