When Harry gave me the mirror and I paused before I looked at myself, testing myself for hardness, for indifference hardened to near inhumanity, it was Miles I was thinking of. It was two months since I’d seen him and the last time we’d been together he had run his tongue over my lips as he left and smiled, saying, ‘You are quite the sexiest woman I’ve ever known.’ I held up the mirror and saw a twisted, grotesque mask, those same lips sliced and torn, healed in white welts. Strangely, I didn’t cry. I said nothing. I gave Harry back the mirror and lay down.
Perhaps this is something else that Ellen and I have in common — we have both been relieved of the burden of ageing. Both of us can point to a moment in time and say, ‘That’s when I ceased to care about the face I present to the world.’ When Ellen’s husband fell out of a fishing-boat and out of her life, when her womb contracted and stifled her unborn child, she relieved herself of the need, the desire, to be attractive to men because she ceased to care. As I did when I looked in the mirror. I saw Miles at that party in Exeter two and a half years later and he ignored me. I can understand it; I don’t blame him. But I relieved him of the burden of smiling and he should have relieved me of something.
JOHN
Do I ever think of that morning when my mother pulled into a parking space on Gloucester Road? Of course I do. I think of it every day. It’s my first thought every morning. I must be thinking it even before I wake up because when I do the thought is already there waiting for me. I can’t remember exactly what happened; it was too violent an event, too bloody. I was blown apart in seconds; I didn’t have time to run and hide, didn’t have time to negotiate an escape; didn’t even have time to put my hands over my ears, lower my head and protect myself. I was stretching, head thrown back, arms raised, completely vulnerable when concrete collapsed in on itself and the dustcloud began to mushroom. Strange that I always picture myself, Merboy, from a distance. It’s him standing there being watched by his older self, an observer. I see him stretching, see his jaw working, mouth open, tall even then, shifting his hips a little from side to side in a yawning shimmy, and I see him being hurled forward into the razor-sharp edges of the car, his face hitting first, splitting open, as he throws out his arms and embraces a red-hot exhaust pipe. I know it’s time that has swept me away from him, time that’s put that distance between us, time that has made me an observer. But I can’t forget him, can’t forget Merboy, because every morning when I wake up I am reminded by the silence around and inside me of his face turning red.