The small man was now so close that I shouldn’t have been able to see him. He should have been out of my line of sight, obscured by the angle of the window, but he came straight on.
‘Not supposed to,’ said Tina. ‘Wake him up.’
Not supposed to what? The man was now too close to fit comfortably in the mirrors. He was squashed. He put out a white hand and gripped the edge of the frame.
He said something unintelligible.
I didn’t think this was a part of the experiment. This was something else, getting involved. This was an outside complication.
The small man pulled himself free of the mirrors, climbing out of them as though he was stepping through an open window. He didn’t look quite human. There was something about the set of his features. He shouted something at me, but it was only a noise and there was no sense in it. I stood up. Tina was standing against the back wall, and Betts was standing in front of her.
There was a sound of breaking glass. Silvered shards flew past me. I watched the small man scamper through the door, grinning nastily at us and emitting sounds that, although unintelligible, sounded anything but pleasant. He ran out of sight and we listened as the sounds of his footsteps – slightly scratchy, because of his long toenails – faded into nothingness. Betts chewed his fingers, shaking. Tina was white. There were only the three of us, standing in a closed room with a few mirrors, some of them broken.
IV
That’s why I don’t like mirrors. I don’t trust them. The small man might have been something I imagined, if Tina and Betts hadn’t seen him too. He might have come from the mountains, or the mist, and not the mirror at all. I didn’t care. It was mirrors that I became afraid of, and many years later Dermot had somehow picked up on that.
In the toilet of the club, Dermot let me off the hook.
‘More drinks,’ he said. ‘You need more drinks and less mirrors. Check out the decor in this place. Fucking wild. It’s like a Bronx alleyway down here. It’s like a working men’s club. They still have working men round here? Not that sort of city any more, is it. None of them are. Come on then.’
He led me back to the bar. ‘Now, drinks. What are we having?’
Pints and chasers, he decided. He saw a machine in a dark corner.
‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘Bargain. That’s a Joust. Where have they been keeping that then? There are kids in here younger than that machine.’
He called the barman over and exchanged notes for coins.
‘I used to be good at this,’ he said, leading the way to the machine. ‘You’re a programmer, right? That’s what you said you did. Can you program things like this?’
‘I do business stuff,’ I said. ‘Databases.’
‘Fucking wild, that must be a riot. Well take the controls then, you’re that guy over there. That’s a life you’ve lost, put the fucking drinks down and pay attention.’
He was staring through the screen. I was reminded of the man who’d turned up from nowhere and ruined that experiment, but Dermot looked nothing like him. He didn’t feel like him, either. Dermot was merely cheerfully unbalanced, not alien.
He was a lot better at Joust than I was. I was in the low hand-eye co-ordination stage of drunkenness and I couldn’t focus properly.
‘Oi, watch that one. That fucking one,’ he’d say as I missed the bad guys completely. ‘You always this hopeless?’
I had to keep paying for extra lives just to keep up with him. His score was absurd, pinball-table high with half a yard of trailing zeroes. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking two drinks and he was still beating me.
‘King of video games, that’s me. Can’t play pool, can’t play darts, but give me one of these things and that’s me sorted.’
Finally he lost the last of his lives, and entered his name in the high-score table.
‘Right then. That’s that done. Now, let’s get ourselves something to eat, I’m fucking starving. They still have curries in Birmingham don’t they? Fucking must do. Cheers then boss,’ he said to the bouncers on the way out. They watched us make our way along Broad Street.
We couldn’t get a curry, because it was only four in the afternoon and nowhere was open. In the end we got lukewarm burgers at New Street station while I waited for a train that went my way. Commuters went the long way around us. The station concourse felt like a toilet, all grimy white tiles and headachy echoes. Dermot helped me onto the train when it turned up. The last I saw of him he was running along the platform, following the train as it pulled out, only stopping where the platform sloped down into the sooty Birmingham undergrowth alongside the tracks.
I
Of course, that wasn’t the last I saw of him. One Saturday a few weeks later I was at home filling in job applications. That wasn’t the most fun you could have on a Saturday, even in Dudley, but it was something I needed to do. I’d passed my training courses and I had gained new qualifications and I thought that my salary should reflect all that. I was working for a small software house with offices on the Merry Hill site. They thought that my salary was good enough, or at least as good as it was going to get.
This is why I was filling in job applications. I had qualifications and experience. I should have been able to get into a higher wage band. Perhaps I’d be able to afford to move out of Dudley.
I don’t know many people in Dudley. I got a flat there because it was cheap and there seemed to be a lot of programming jobs in the West Midlands, which had just caught on to the idea that making chains and nails wasn’t going to bring in much wealth. It was close enough to Birmingham to commute. I had a theory that local industry was going to renew itself, but it didn’t. It just got older and more tired. It managed to let go of thirteenth-century jobs – making nails and chains – but never managed to make the leap past the industrial revolution.
As I said, I don’t know many people in Dudley. I had friends in other places. I still saw Tina. She’d moved into a cottage in Bewdley, along with her husband Roger. I liked him, although I didn’t know him well. She’d kept her maiden name, which helped me to pretend that she was still single and therefore available. I’d go and see them once or twice a week and we’d have a meal or go to a pub.
I’d rather have been in a pub just then. The job application forms were giving me a bad time. I couldn’t see why they asked so many extraneous questions. Each form was the size of a first novel, too thick to skim through in case you missed anything but too thin to pay full whack for. They all wanted the answers hand-written so that they could get someone to analyse your script and make sure that you weren’t a rapist or a bed-wetter. They wanted to know what other interests you had. I only had other interests. I had no interest at all in filling in forms.
My attention was wandering. I had sworn an oath to myself not to switch my PC on and start playing games instead of doing anything useful.
I turned the PC on. Handwriting was something that had been left behind in the days of chain-making. I would have a quick game of something and then get back to work. I could cope with that. I had self-discipline. I also had writer’s cramp.
I had a shareware game called Wolfenstein 3D. In it, you played a prisoner in a Nazi castle. It was in 3D, as the name suggested. You looked down the barrel of a gun and walked around, and you killed everything that moved. If you sent off fifteen dollars, you’d get more of the game. I didn’t have any dollars. In Dudley they used pounds, or bartering.
I