He comes close to her, places his hands on her two arms and turns her around. The personal touch surprises her.
‘Your mirror is over there,’ he says, pointing.
She sees her mirror in the corner of the room. He has done exactly what he said he’d do, he brought it back to life. It has been sanded and varnished and she can see it as it was, in her parents’ bedroom, by the wardrobe, Daddy’s shoes lined up beside it, Mummy’s hair curlers plugged into the wall on the ground.
She walks over to it and stands before it, seeing his reflection as he stands behind her. She looks at her reflection. She takes herself in, examines herself.
‘You fixed it already,’ she says with a smile. She’s back. It’s her again. She looks rejuvenated, as though she’s had a facial or invested in a new expensive moisturizer, which she hasn’t. It was the mirror all along, she knew it. ‘I thought I was here to choose a pane, you tricked me!’ she laughs.
‘You’re happy?’ he asks, his eyes sparkling as the light of dozens of mirrors bounce light around the room and make him look like he’s glowing.
‘Yes, it’s perfect,’ she says, examining it again.
She sees a red dot on the glass and reaches out to touch it. Her hand hits the pane, no dot to be felt. Confused, she spins around to look at him in the flesh. ‘What kind of mirror did you use?’
‘Look at it again,’ he says, a strange look on his face.
It feels like a trick. She slowly turns and faces the mirror again. Examines the frame, the glass, everything but her face really, because he’s behind her and she’s self-conscious and fluttering inside. The red dot is still on the glass and she wonders if it’s a test, though she has already reached out to touch it and it’s not physically there.
‘Have you ever heard of a thing called simultaneous contrast?’
She shakes her head.
‘It’s a painting term.’
‘You paint, too?’
‘Just as a hobby. It’s a term for when certain colours look different to our eye when placed next to each other. The colours aren’t altered, it’s just our perception.’
He allows this to sink in.
‘Turn around and look at yourself again,’ he says gently.
She slowly turns around and really takes herself in this time. Her eyes scan over her older face, her fuller cheeks, the wrinkles around her eyes, her fuller stomach. She pulls her blouse away from her waist self-consciously and as she’s doing so she sees the red dot again. Instead of reaching out to the glass, she looks down at her body and finds the sticker on her arm. ‘How did that get there?’ she asks, peeling it off.
He’s grinning.
‘You stuck it there,’ she says, remembering her surprise at his touch when he spun her around. He’d used that opportunity to place the red sticker on her arm.
‘The mirror test. All of us mirror artists do it,’ he says, joking.
‘The first time I saw the sticker, I thought it was on the mirror,’ she says, figuring his test out. ‘The second time I realized it was on me.’
He nods.
‘It’s not the mirror, it’s me,’ she repeats, and the message hits home. ‘It wasn’t the mirror that was broken, it was me all this time.’
He nods again. ‘Though I wouldn’t say you were broken. It’s all about perception. I didn’t want to touch the mirror. It’s perfect as it is.’
She turns around and faces the mirror. Studies her face, her body. She’s older. She’s aged more this year than she feels she has in five years, but this is her now. She’s changing, she’s ageing, more beautiful in some ways, other ways it’s harder to take.
‘Well?’ he asks. ‘You still want to replace it?’
‘No. It’s perfect, thank you,’ she says.
It was all because of the work presentation. She hated presentations, always had since she was at school and the two idiots at the back of her classroom would hiss ‘sssss’ at her flaming red face. They hurled abuse at everybody but she was an easy target – her face would burn up, blazing red, as soon as she heard the sound of her own voice and felt the layers-peeling power of eyes on her.
With age, the flaming redness had lessened, but her nerves channelled themselves through her body and manifested as a severe knee tremble. She wasn’t sure which was worse. The red face that didn’t affect her speech or the knee quiver that caused her entire body to vibrate, shuddering as if she was out in the cold, despite her sweaty armpits. Her skirts would shake so that she resembled a cartoon character; she could almost hear the bone-clattering sound, like a bag of bones being shaken. She’d have to hide her hands too, or close her fingers to make fists. It was worse if she had to hold paper because the paper never lied. Always best to place the sheet on the table, hands closed to fists, or wrapped around a pen. Sit if possible, trousers preferable to skirts, and best to wear pants with narrowly tailored legs because the less loose fabric there was to tremble, the better; how-ever the waist needed to be loose to aid deep breathing. Better to be as casual as possible, coffee or tea to be drunk in a take-out cup to avoid cup and saucer rattling in trembling hands.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t know her stuff. She damn well did. She strode around her apartment as if giving a TED Talk. In her apartment she was the most competent, inspiring deliverer of quarterly sales figures that the world had ever seen. She was Sheryl Sandberg giving her TED Talk, she was Michelle Obama saying anything, she was a woman warrior spilling facts and figures, so self-assured in her own home, at night, alone.
The presentation was going fine, perhaps not as inspiring and earth-shattering as the rehearsal the previous night, with fewer insightful glimpses into her personal life and absolutely no humour, unlike the comedic ad-libbing she’d busted out to her ghost audience. It was definitely safer and more to the point, as perfect as she could hope for, apart from her annoying repetition of the phrase ‘per se’, which she had never used in her life regarding anything, but there it was now, a part of almost every sentence. She was already looking ahead to drinks later with her friends where they would giggle over her critical yet hilarious self-roasting. They’d toast to ‘Per Se!’ and spend the night using it in every sentence, creating a challenge perhaps, even a drinking game.
‘Excuse me, Mr Bartender,’ she imagined a friend leaning across the bar, with an arched eyebrow. ‘Could I get another Cosmo, per se?’
And they would all dissolve in laughter.
But she had gotten too far ahead of herself in her thoughts, she had gotten too cocky. All had been going well in her presentation until she’d disappeared into a daydream and taken her eye off the ball. She’d left the moment. She was surrounded by her dozen-strong team, those relieved to have finished their part of the presentation, others eager to have their moment in the light, when the door opened and in walked Jasper Godfries. The CEO. The new CEO who’d never sat in a sales meeting before in his life. Her heartbeat hastened. Cue knee tremble, cue shaking fingers. Hot skin, short breath. Her entire body, suddenly in flight mode.
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Jasper announces