Spirit (38 page)

She found the telephone lying on the floor, chipped but still working, and dialled down to the super's office. He seemed to take an age to answer. He was either asleep, or watching TV with the volume turned up so loudly that he couldn't hear. Then she heard the bathroom door bang. She covered the phone receiver with her hand and listened hard. She heard it again, but this time it was softly closed, as if somebody were using the handle.

She put down the phone and walked back into the hallway and along to the bathroom. The door was closed but the light was shining from underneath it. She wiped her nose and her eyes with the back of her hand and stood outside the door wondering what to do.

‘Who's there?' she called, nervously. ‘If there's anybody there, you'd better come out. I've called the police and they'll be here at any minute.'

There was a long silence, an eternity. Biting her lip, she stepped towards the door and clasped the handle. It was ice-cold, so cold that it almost burned her. But she was determined to find out who had wrecked her apartment. She would damn well kill them if she had the chance. She was just about to open the door when she heard high-pitched laughing, somewhere behind her. A child's laugh: a little girl's laugh. She turned around in time to glimpse a white dress and a bare white foot disappearing into her bedroom.

‘Hey!' she snapped. ‘Hey, you! I want a word with you!'

She ran back along the corridor, kicking off her shoes. She reached the bedroom door and slammed it open so violently that it juddered on its hinges.

The room was even colder than the rest of the apartment. It could have been outside, on a sub-zero day, with the wind blowing off the snow. It was light, too, even though the lamps weren't switched on. The whole room was illuminated by a blue, chilly fluorescence which crawled up the drapes and across the radiators and around the edges of the furniture.

A little girl in a white dress was standing on the opposite side of the room, in front of the long mirror. She had her back turned. She was standing quite still, staring at herself, although Margo couldn't see the reflection of her face.

‘What have you done to my apartment?' Margo demanded, her voice quaking. ‘What the hell have you done to my apartment? Are you crazy? Are you some kind of lunatic?'

The little girl said nothing. Margo took two sharp steps towards her, but then abruptly stopped. She suddenly realized that the girl was swaying very slightly from side to side, and the reason she was swaying was because her feet were more than two clear inches off the floor.

Margo stared at her, not knowing what to do, not knowing what to say.

‘Cat got your tongue?' asked the little girl, in a curiously muffled voice.

Margo opened and closed her mouth. Then she managed to say. ‘What are you? What are you doing here? What do you want?'

‘I never come to nice people,' said the little girl.

‘What are you talking about? I don't understand you. You're floating. How can you float?'

‘Anyone can float,' said the little girl. ‘It's just a question of desire.'

Margo said, ‘I'm going to call the police.'

‘What for?' asked the little girl. ‘I'll be gone by then, and who will ever believe you?'

‘I want to know why you're here,' Margo demanded.

‘Don't you ever say “please”? You never say “please” to my sister, do you? You never say it to anybody.'

Margo took a gritty little breath. ‘Please tell me why you're here,' she said. ‘Please tell me why you've torn my whole damned apartment to pieces. Please tell me why I shouldn't take hold of you and wring your scrawny little neck!'

‘Now, now, Margo, that will never do,' the little girl replied. ‘You must beg me to tell you, and say “pretty please”.'

Although the girl was still floating and swaying, Margo was regaining her confidence. It was some kind of damn stupid trick, that was all. And the little girl, for all of her insolence, was only a little girl. She took the three remaining steps toward her and seized hold of her bare skinny arm. It was intensely cold, much colder than she had expected, but she held on tight and tried to tug the little girl around, so that she could look her in the face.

‘Look at me!' she screamed. ‘You damn well look at me!'

Instantly, the little girl turned her face away. Margo tried to grab her hair, but the little girl twisted her head around and pulled it free.

‘Look at me! Look at me, you little bitch!'

The girl struggled to tug her arm free, digging her elbow painfully into Margo's ribs. But Margo gripped both of her arms now, and forced her to look towards the mirror, so that she could at least see a reflection of her face. When she looked, however, the surface of the mirror was obscured with fronds and leaf-patterns of frost, and all Margo could see was a blur.

Margo tried again to look at the girl's face directly, but again the girl twisted her head away, and whirled her hair so that it covered her like a bedraggled white veil.

‘You bitch!' Margo raved. ‘You vicious little bitch!'

She gripped the girl around her neck, dragged her nearer the mirror, and rubbed furiously at its frost-flowers with her sleeve. At first she succeeded in clearing nothing more than a few semi-circular scratches, but she rubbed and rubbed until she had cleared a hole in the frost the size of a breakfast-plate. All the time the girl kept struggling and twisting, but even though Margo was disgusted by the coldness of her skin and the ice-cold crustiness of her dress, she clung round her neck and refused to let go.

‘You don't want to see me, Margo!' the little girl choked. ‘You don't want to see me, I promise you!'

‘Let me be the judge of that!' Margo panted.

‘Not in the mirror, Margo!' the little girl gasped, trying to pry Margo's fingers away from her neck. ‘The mirror is the puzzle! The mirror is the reason! The mirror is the answer!'

But the more she protested and fought, the more determined Margo became. She seized the girl's shoulders and thrust her face towards the patch she had cleared in the frost, and said, triumphantly, ‘
There
!'

And froze. And released the little girl; and lowered her arms; and stared.

There was a face in the mirror, but it was not the face of a little girl at all. It was a white, deathly face with eyes like black stones, a face which appeared to have white snakes growing from it. It was exquisite and terrible at the same time, and it stared back at Margo through the hole in the frost like some appalling creature staring cruelly and longingly into the world of humans.

The little girl slowly spun away, around and around, so that her white dressed twirled. Yet still the terrible face stared at Margo through the porthole of frost, and it seemed to be saying.
I shall know you now, by sight. I shall know who you are. You will never be rid of me. Every lime you rub a circle in a misty window, I
shall be staring in at you. Every time you take out your powder-compact on a winter's day and look in its mirror, there I shall be. You are mine, now. You belong to me, for ever
.

Margo turned and stared at the little girl in panic, but the little girl did nothing but giggle and rush out of the room.

Margo looked back at the mirror. She saw the face for one split-instant more, and then the mirror shattered like a bomb, catching her in a vicious blizzard of broken glass. Shards of mirror flew into her face and into her eyes. More shards sliced through her clothing and cut her shoulders, and her arms and her thighs and her breasts. She had opened her mouth to scream, and her lips and tongue were porcupined with scores of tiny triangular pieces of mirror.

Blinded, bloody, shocked, she stood where she was for almost a minute. Then she collapsed onto her knees, even though her knees were filled with fragments of glass, too, and when she knelt they were driven into her flesh even further. She couldn't speak, she couldn't move. She tried to reach up to tug some of the glass out of her tongue, but there were splinters in her fingers, too, and all she succeeded in doing was cutting her mouth even more.

And she was so cold. She was so miserably cold. She was freezing and shaking and she wanted her father so badly that she couldn't bear it. She couldn't even cry because her eyes were filled with glass.

She heard a dreary wind blowing, like the wind across a black winter landscape. She even thought she could feel snow, falling wet and cold against her skin, but that might have been blood. She heard a young girl laughing, eerie and high and chillingly self-delighted.

Raymond was leaning close to Laura. ‘How about some more champagne?' he asked her, lifting the bottle out of the ice-bucket. The bottom of the bottle was wet and it dripped onto her ankle.

‘Ahh!' she screamed, and then she burst out laughing again.

Raymond topped up her glass, and poured just a little into his own. ‘You know something,' he said, ‘Hollywood is crowded with hopefuls, and that's all they'll ever be, hopefuls. Hoping isn't enough. You have to have something beyond hope. You have to be totally convinced that everybody wants you . . . that everybody wants to look at your face, that everybody wants to look at your body, that everybody wants to possess you.'

‘And how about you, Raymond?' said Laura, wiping the tears of laughter away from her eyes. ‘Do you want to possess me?'

Raymond cocked the little finger of his left hand and gently touched the tip of her nose. ‘You're a very special woman, Laura. One in a million-million. What man wouldn't?'

He looked into her eyes for a long, long time. Then he turned to Chester and said, ‘How about something to eat? I've been sitting in meetings all day. I'm feeling hungry.'

‘Cold roast chicken, and maybe some salad?'

‘Sure, why not?'

Chester called for his manservant, a small dour Mexican with a flat face and beady black eyes like a gingerbread man. ‘Hernandez will fix you something,' he told Raymond. ‘You want to talk finance?'

‘All in good time,' Raymond replied. ‘Let me satisfy my appetites first.'

‘So what do you actually
do
, Raymond?' Laura asked him.

Raymond started to wind her curls around his finger. He was so close to her that she could smell the cigarettes and alcohol on his breath, as well as another smell, flat and strong and quite unpleasant.

‘I'm a clever guy, that's all. People want to make movies, I help them to make movies. People want to do anything, maybe stage a boxing bout, maybe put on a show – I help them to do it.
I find people who have money and don't know what to do with it, and I put them in contact with people who know what to do with it but don't have any. Also, I dedicate my life to enjoying myself. That's a high thing on my list. Tell me, what's the use of being alive if you don't enjoy yourself?'

‘No point at all,' smiled Laura. She leaned her face nearer and nearer to him, until their noses were almost touching. ‘Tell me,' she said, ‘have you been eating garlic?'

For an instant, Raymond's eyes turned as hard as nailheads. His mouth turned to a slit. But Laura fell back onto the sofa, laughing again, and Raymond uneasily softened, and rubbed the palm of his hand against his thigh. ‘Sure,' he said, as if he could only just choke the words out. ‘
Totani e patate in tegame alla Genovese
. Why – you want to make something of it?'

He let out a harsh, repetitive laugh, and Chester joined in, but then abruptly stopped as if he had forgotten what he was doing right there in mid-laugh.

‘Squid and potatoes,' Raymond explained. He drank a mouthful of champagne and swished it around his mouth. ‘It has to have garlic, otherwise it tastes like squid and potatoes.'

He laughed again, and repeated himself. Otherwise it tastes like squid and potatoes, hanh?' Chester was obviously relieved when Hernandez appeared with a large napkin-draped tray, with pieces of cold chicken and a green salad. Hernandez mixed a little dressing from small tear-shaped bottles of oil and vinegar, and then left.

Raymond voraciously ate chicken and stared into Laura's eyes while Chester wandered around the room with his glass of champagne, lighting and relighting his cigar. There was some kind of sleazy jazz playing on the gramophone, quite softly but suggestively.

‘Shouldn't I start thinking about a press agent?' asked Laura.

Raymond tore at a leg-muscle with his teeth. One thing at a
time. But I know plenty. I can introduce you. First of all, you have to start dressing good. Change your wardrobe. Change your hair. Get your face made over.'

‘That's going to cost something, isn't it?' asked Laura, although she couldn't suppress her feelings of excitement and flattery and sheer fantastic luck.

Raymond didn't take his eyes off her. ‘I can fix all that. Now you're a star, you have to start looking like a star, right?' He swallowed and sniffed, although he still had a greasy shred of chicken hanging from the side of his lip.

Laura reached out to pick the chicken off. He instantly gripped her wrist so hard that it hurt her. Then he clapped his hand to his mouth and wiped the chicken off himself. ‘Never do that,' he said.

‘Don't be so fierce!' Laura retorted. ‘I was only being friendly.'

‘You're trying to suggest I eat like a pig, is that it? First of all I smell of garlic, then I eat like a pig?'

Laura pulled her hand away. ‘You're too sensitive, Raymond.' But then she gave him a coy, lopsided smile. ‘Still, I like sensitive men. Especially sensitive men who give me entire new wardrobes.'

Raymond picked up a napkin from the tray and vigorously towelled his mouth. Then he tilted himself over to Laura and kissed her cheek. ‘You like furs?' he asked her. ‘Which do you like the best? Fox, mink, what?'

Laura was bright-eyed. ‘You mean it? A fur?'

Raymond nodded. ‘Full-length mink, that's what you need. Every star who is worthy of the name has to have a full-length mink. And maybe a fox-fur jacket, too, what do you think? And we have to think of jewellery. Diamonds, especially, because they glitter so good when the press takes your picture.'