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Thirty-three years ago ...
It happens on a beach.
A little girl is splashing in the shallows. Falling over, getting up again. Squealing. A woman in a sundress watches from under a hat, while a woman in a swimsuit plays with the toddler.
Suddenly a big wave comes from nowhere and pulls the child away from the shore. It tumbles her over and over and she waves her little arms and legs at the sky.
The woman in the swimsuit laughs. “You’re a mermaid.”
But the other woman is screaming. “What are you doing? She’s drowning.”
“It’s just a wave. It’s saying hello.”
The woman in the sundress rushes into the water and pulls the child back from the grasp of the sea. “Look at her, she’s crying. She’s coughing up sand.”
“That’s what happens at the beach.”
“She could have drowned.”
“The gods called her Selkie because she’s a mermaid.”
“You and your stupid fairytales. She isn’t safe with you. She isn’t safe.”
I’m falling off a cliff towards the rocks and the sea, when these words ring in my ears.
Someone is trying to kill you.
They reverberate like a call to prayer. Clear. Insistent. Almost musical.
The meaning rattles me to consciousness and I sit up with a start. But as I wait in the semi-dark for the words to repeat themselves, there’s only an aching silence. As if they never happened. Except their shape has left a shadow on the wall of my mind and my body has started to tremble.
I reach for my bathrobe and wrap myself against the sudden chill, wishing I wasn’t alone. It’s a familiar feeling. All by myself in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Without a life raft.
Unless Wanda crept back after midnight, but across the room her bed lies untouched. No telltale lump under the covers. And no whirring of her blender from the kitchen. She’s stayed out all night again. It usually makes her the perfect flatmate.
Of course I’ve had bad dreams before. Often the same one. I’m trapped underwater, tangled in something so my arms don’t work, and wake up to find it’s only the sheets. But never anything like this.
Because it wasn’t just a dream. It was a message. Seeping into my brain. Someone. Is. Trying. To. Kill. You. As graphic as stumbling across a gravestone in a churchyard inscribed with my name and today’s date.
For the first time I notice the quality of the silence. Complete. The bedside clock isn’t ticking. The water pipes aren’t clunking. Even the whispering sea is absent. I pull the robe a little closer and focus on the steady movement of my chest. I’m not dead yet.
And the message makes no sense. Who would want to kill me? After only three months I’m still a stranger here, and there aren’t many murders in this part of the world. It’s why people come to Hawaii. To play it sunny and safe. And anyway, I’m not the kind of woman to inspire that kind of violence. Although my ex would disagree. Andrew still can’t believe I’ve swapped opposite corners of the ring for opposite sides of the globe.
Where did the message come from? The remnants of the dream? But it sounded like...a disembodied voice. With that thought an invisible presence seems to fill the space.
Something...spoke to me.
My eyes scan the walls and dozens of eyes stare back. Wanda’s artworks, fashioned from dead fish. In garish colours with painted lips. They might ooze an excess of character but they don’t speak. Although with Wanda’s gift for hocus-pocus it wouldn’t surprise me.
Any other possible culprits? A naked shop dummy sits on a chair at the end of Wanda’s bed, her plastic legs akimbo. Doris. For the first few weeks I kept jumping out of my skin every time I caught sight of her. Wanda has dressed her in a Hula skirt and peppered her torso with nails, like a woman in a Dali painting. She drapes her with anything from net bags to headbands to leis. Today Doris is wearing a straw hat even though she doesn’t have a head. No head, no voice, right?
The room is a tribute to Wanda’s eye for other people’s trash, and my few belongings barely make an impression on the menagerie. A large Buddha head with four faces forever contemplating his split personality. Two fairies shadow-dancing on an art-deco tray. A parrot made from nuts and bolts poised on his own perch. In childhood these creatures might have spoken to me, but my stepmother, Stella, banished imaginary friends long ago.
On the ledge above my bed my Shona sculpture is just a head and shoulders. I brought her with me when I took off from Sydney with two business suits and not much else. A chunk of black and silver rock from Zimbabwe, her profile is as enigmatic as ever. And as silent. But she’s no whisperer. If Shona had a warning for me she’d come right out with it, face to face.
The presence is still here. A kind of touchless stroking against my bare skin. Seductive but unnerving. It’s making me as rigid as Doris but my eyes keep darting back to the slash of early-morning light spilling through the bathroom doorway. Is it coming from there?
When I was a child I used to feel things like this, invisible things. Stella made me stand in the bathroom until they were gone. I’m still a bit afraid of bathrooms, their cold unwelcoming surfaces gleaming my wild-eyed stare back at me. So it’s all I can do to get off the bed and tiptoe towards the doorway.
There are no doors to hide an intruder. And no shower curtain over the bath. When I start hyperventilating about Janet Leigh in Psycho, I tell myself to get a grip. No-one would bother breaking in here. The address might be Waikiki, but that’s where the glamour ends.
The sun through the window bathes me in light and I scan the empty bathroom with relief. Only my imagination playing tricks. But that’s when I see it. In the mirror at the end of the bath.
A face.
It’s a woman, just her face, but I’m sure she’s naked and reclining in the tub. She’s looking straight at me as if she’s been waiting, her eyes so piercing they latch onto mine and won’t release me, even when I try to pull away. For a long breathless moment our gazes are locked together and I’m lost in the depths of an emotion I can’t name. Then she lets go and the recoil spins me towards a window full of light. Now I’m blinking at the bath. Empty. Still empty. And when I spin back to the mirror she’s gone.
It takes me a few seconds to come to my senses because it feels like I’ve been doused by some unbearable sorrow. Then I’m back in my body, splashing my face at the basin, stumbling back to the bedroom and flopping on the bed.
The bedside clock begins to tick, its rhythmic beat counting the seconds like a metronome. The hands are showing six. They haven’t moved since the message woke me – surely at least five minutes ago. And the sun doesn’t rise this early, not in February. Does that mean the last five minutes didn’t happen?
It doesn’t matter how early it is, I’m phoning Wanda. She’s the one who put that stupid mirror there. After a dream, she insisted that the bath needed to see the sky.
“How can it see?” I asked as she propped the mirror with great ceremony against the wall at the end of the bath. “Bathtubs...don’t have eyes.”
“We’re talking spiritual eyes. Put yourself in her place, staring at a blank wall all day. Soul-destroying. Like being paralysed. But if we put this mirror opposite the window, see? The sky’s reflected and she’s reconnecting.”
“Reconnecting with what?”
“Her wild nature.”
There’s a lot of that kind of talk around here. Wanda thinks everything’s got a spirit, every rock and insect, even our old ball-and-claw bath.
“Let’s ask her for hotter showers,” I said. Just one of the reasons this flat is cheap.
“Out of her control. She’s the vessel, that’s why she’s female. She receives. Contains. Transforms. The mirror’s special too. It reflects female energy.”
Its silver frame is curved like a woman. Narrow at the waist, wide at the bust and hips.
“But we’ll notice a difference in other ways,” Wanda said. “After a bath, we’ll be radiant.”
It all seemed like a bit of fun. I’ve been waiting for Wanda to give the bath a name and paint its toenails red. But now because of that mirror I’ve looked into the eyes of...a woman who wasn’t there.
Confusion drives me outside onto the walkway where dawn is breaking and the air is fresh. As my fingers fumble with the phone, it feels good to inhale. If Wanda’s in bed with her new man it can’t be helped.
No answer. I leave an agitated message and start pacing.
I’ve got to get dressed and go to the office but that means going back inside. I close my eyes and try to calm my breathing but the woman’s face appears. This time it’s just the memory, her gaze caught in freeze-frame, and one of Stella’s phrases gallops up the long tunnel from childhood: “It’ll cause you trouble, your imagination. Just like your mother. If you can’t touch it, it’s a figment, and figments can carry you away.” My stepmother has a way of creeping up on me, just like she did when I was a child. I might have left her on the other side of the world but she’s still living inside my head.
My phone rings. “Sorry I couldn’t pick up, Selkie. Up to my armpits in mullet.” Wanda’s at the docks judging by the hubbub. “Hang on.”
Now she’s talking to someone and a man is laughing. One of her fishermen, no doubt.
They give them to her – dead fish – because she’s an art student. (Her long legs and short shorts have nothing to do with it.) She presses the corpses into squares of soft resin, adding shells to make borders. When the moulds harden she paints them and sells them at the markets as Art.
“OK. They’re in the cooler getting acquainted. Something must be up if you’re calling this early.”
“It’s that mirror.” My voice is croaky. “The one at the end of the bath.”
“You didn’t break it, did you?” Pause. “Oh my God, you saw something.”
“A face. I saw a face. A woman...who wasn’t there.”
Spoken out loud it sounds delusional but Wanda is taking it seriously. “OK, keep breathing. Let’s eliminate the temporal. It wasn’t...your own face.”
“I do know what I look like, Wanda. Even in the mornings. And I wasn’t peering into the mirror. I was standing in the doorway, looking at it from the side.”
“So it could have been at the window. That’s the angle. Sometimes kids climb up trying to get a look at one of us under the shower.”
It’s the first I’ve heard of it, but it wasn’t a kid. “It was definitely a woman. And she wasn’t at the window, she was in the bath. Until she wasn’t.”
“OK.” She thinks for a moment. “What do you want me to do, call in an exorcist?”
“Hell, no. Just move the bloody thing.” Into a dumpster on the other side of the island.
“You can move it. Turn the mirror to the wall and it loses its power.”
“No way. And I’m stuck outside in my bathrobe. How am I going to get to work?”
“If she disappeared she’s gone for now. It’s safe to take a shower.”
“I’m not going near that bath.”
“OK. Go into the bedroom and throw on some clothes. You can do that. And meet me in an hour. At your office.”
Holding my breath, I open the front door and rush inside, but the air feels clear as if the presence is long gone. I toss off my bathrobe and pull on my red suit and heels. Hair and makeup would mean looking in another mirror so I throw a few things into my tote bag and slam the front door. Not quite my usual transformation to corporate warrior.
On the concrete walkway that connects each flat it’s obvious how the boys can climb on each other’s shoulders and peer through our bathroom window. A 1960s’ design flaw. And thanks to Wanda, the bloody mirror propped opposite has been giving them an eyeful. Our shower doesn’t get hot enough to steam up their phone lenses so we’re probably circulating in cyberspace. But right now I don’t care.
It’s three floors down to Koa Avenue, past rails groaning under towels and surfboards. When I reach the pavement I break into a run, scattering the sprinkling of early birds – beach babes and students and tourists. At the corner it’s a right into Kaiulani Avenue, then at Kuhio I cross to the bus stop where I finally begin to feel normal.
This is where I wait every morning, beside the bag lady who lives in the bus shelter. She’s hard to miss in her tent-sized muu-muu, her flabby feet resting on a large checked bag. According to Wanda she’s a kahuna named Coral, available for roadside prognostications. She’s usually asleep when I’m here but today her eyes fly open and she gives me a shaka salute and a knowing nod. It’s the first time she’s greeted me and suddenly I wouldn’t put it past her to teleport herself into our mirror. Just because she can. I start to back away until I realise she’s too enormous to fit in our bath. And way too ugly – and happy – to be the woman I saw.
***
The bus arrives, but as soon as I’m gazing out the window the morning’s events come rushing back. Someone is trying to kill you. A frisson of fear prickles my skin. The woman was warning me, calling out from the bathroom mirror. But who is she? And what does she know about me?
I get off the bus and walk past concrete towers and groomed gardens. This city’s struggle to tame paradise always seems a bit naive – against the rugged hills on one side and the raging sea on the other. But today the sight of all this concrete and glass feels almost reassuring. Then I’m turning into Merchant Street and the canvas sign on my building comes into view. Space to Let. Another message.
My office is up three flights on the top floor.
It’s two steps from the door to my desk and I’ve just put the kettle on when Wanda’s tall figure appears in the corridor. She comes in and throws her backpack on the floor.
“Can’t stay long. My fishy friends are still down at the pier and they’ve got an appointment with the freezer.”
“Thanks for meeting me. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”
“Yeah.” She looks me over. “You didn’t even comb your hair.”
“Couldn’t look in a mirror.” Still can’t. “Do I look...deranged?”
“More like you weren’t sure who you woke up with this morning and left in a hurry by the fire escape.”
“I wish.”
When I offer her a teabag, she pulls a plastic bag out of her pocket and drops some herbs into one of the mugs. I pour the boiling water, then with our respective brews we sit down – me on the desk, Wanda on the only chair.
She blows on her mug and gets straight to the point. “OK. This face, did you recognise it?”
That stops me. Did the woman seem familiar? I’m not sure. But surely I’d never forget those eyes. “It’s your mirror.”
“True. A present from my grandmother. Tutu. Just before she died. Real silver. I’ve had it for a while but something must have stirred it up.”
“Stirred up...what?”
“I don’t know, but Tutu was a kahuna. That’s where I get my Hawaiian blood, from her. She saw things. In her mind. And in the mirror.”
“Things?”
“You know. The future. Predictions. Visions.” She stops. “Now you’ve seen one.”
“I saw a face, that’s all. A face that...stared at me.” But the hairs on my neck are standing up.
“OK, don’t call her a vision, but she was something, right? Something unreal. What did she look like?”
“I don’t know, I was looking at her eyes. Not young, not old. But her eyes...They were wild, Wanda. As if she was angry. Or lonely. No, something worse.” Betrayed? “Whatever it was it was breaking her heart.”
“Did she speak?”
The message. Did I really hear it? “Why would she...speak to me?”
“Well, the mirror was Tutu’s, right? So the woman might be one of my ancestors, an ancestor with something on her mind. Because if she was staring you down she wasn’t just passing through.”
Bloody hell. “Passing through what?”
“The crack between worlds. Mirrors can do that, act like a window. Then you would have seen...the back of her head, a flash of white, even a footprint on the inside of the glass. But this dame wasn’t going anywhere, so she wanted to communicate something. Are you sure she didn’t shoot something into your mind? It sounds like she wanted to.”
No, I’m not sure. “Like what? What would it look like?”
“I’ve never got one, but Tutu said messages from the other side are...always truthful. And they’ve got an atmosphere about them. Loud and clear. And you can’t ignore them even if you want to.”
“So if she sent me a message...I’d know.”
“Yeah, that’s about it. You’d know.”
She waits but I say nothing.
“Are you freaking out, Selkie?”
“What do you think? A face in the mirror, not my face. Ancestors and footprints and messages. I’ve almost got used to Doris. And your fish, the way their eyes follow me round the room like Rembrandts, but this... This is spooky. Things like this don’t happen in Sydney.”
“That’s probably why you left. Your soul was after a roller-coaster ride.”
“Roller-coasters make me throw up.”
She laughs. “So you’re getting more than you bargained for.” Then she takes pity on me. “Look, I’ll move it when I get home, OK?”
“Thank you.”
She finishes her mug and goes, but that doesn’t feel like the end of it. Far from it. What happens now?
I keep a jar of fortune cookies on my desk, just in case of emergencies. It was a fortune cookie that gave me the courage to finally walk out on Andrew. There is no way to both stay and go, it said. I went. It’s as near as I get to soothsaying because their guidance suits my style. Enigmatic. They don’t tell you what to do, they propose a cryptic clue and invite you to make your own decision.
My hand’s still shaking as I choose one that’s squashed against the side. Seems appropriate. I crack it open and unfurl the tiny paper strip.
To find the right answer, ask the right question.
At first I’m disappointed. It feels like any other riddle. But then the words begin to make sense. I scribble down the possibilities, but in the end there are really only two.
Who is the woman?
What does she want?
I write them in big letters. Then photograph them with my phone. These are the questions that need answers. But how do I do that?
It takes a bit more introspection, but an answer finally comes. The only answer possible.
Investigate.
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