Christine Hummel - The Mirror's Tale

A novel

The Mirror's Tale

Chris Hummel

Published by: epubli GmbH, Berlin, www.epubli.de

Copyright: © 2013 by Christine M. Hummel

ISBN 978-3-8442-2279-1

Jacket design by Jürg and Chris Hummel.

Typeset and layout by Jürg Hummel

With thanks to Jürg, Sophie, Jeff, Renate and Rudolf for their help and support.

And here I was thinking I was clever! I really thought I was street-wise, that I was easily bright enough to suss out what was going on... Was this to prove a humbling experience?

- Ney, my friend; much, much more than that.

Oh, shit, not morning, please, not bloody morning. Don’t let it be. It can’t be. Not really. Not already - not again! But of course it was. It always bloody was.

From that you can no doubt tell that I had woken that day feeling seriously grumpy - not an unusual occurrence, in fact a more and more common one as I was forced to wearily drag myself to work on dirty, unreliable, public transport day after day after day, the one and a half hours it took to get to the school where I had worked for 13 years. Thirteen bloody years! Unlucky for some, I thought - ‘Gone in the boom-boom of a humdrum’, I said to myself, attempting to jolly myself along. Trying, as always to be the cheerful dyed-in-the-wool archetypal teacher that I clearly wasn’t.

Habitually Pink Floyd reared up to annoy me…‘All-in-all you‘re just another brick...’ kept running through my head, endlessly. How corny can you get! An ‘earworm’ if ever there was one - the German expression for songs that ‘get on your brain’. More than that, this one had got on my wick and was becoming my theme tune. I seriously hated it but it wouldn’t budge.

This was the ‘me’ that lived through that cheerful, jokey English way of being - not who I actually was at all. I hated that too, but it was a survival strategy given the environment that I had to work in, the people I had to work with. I knew the script and practised it religiously though often wearily. If I opened my mouth to say what I really thought, how I really felt… God, it didn’t bear thinking about!… So I didn’t.

The previous day before it all kicked off had been a holiday, as it was some important saint‘s day and I worked at a Catholic school. ‘Thank you God for that!’ After all there had to be some kind of compensation for working in an establishment that felt like wearing a right shoe on a left foot, or vice versa. I guess I had just got used to the pain. How I had enjoyed that free day, cocooning myself at home, listening to the radio and being sumptuously lazy. Relaxing in the armchair, curled up with a mug of good coffee, rather than the instant muck we got in the staff room at school, even the smell of which really turned my stomach. It gave me wonderful expansive pleasure, this freedom to do what I liked and with no hurry involved.

Happily ingesting the programmes from ‘Start the Week’ to ‘Woman’s Hour’ (What an old-fashioned title that was, it always struck me), I had come across one item where a cheery middle-aged woman was talking about how freeing it was to be 50 and thereby becoming, to all intents and purposes ‘invisible’. I could see her sensible, scrubbed, ‘no nonsense’ face in my mind’s eye, short, frumpy, pudding-basin haircut - the sort of woman who had always disapproved of me; always instantly disliked me. Boy, had I had some run-ins with that sort of woman in my time.

She, this old bat on the radio, had found that, as far as the general population was concerned, women were no longer of any interest once they had passed their childbearing years, and were therefore apparently no longer sexually attractive. Whilst she found this liberating, it seemed to me to be profoundly sad, and harked back to the days when women were considered nothing more than breeding machines… but…. it certainly struck a chord. It niggled on and on. Had I passed my sell-by date?

I kept returning to it.

As you might guess, anyone who works with teenagers will have experienced the sensation of being part of the furniture, to be used when needed, to be sat on when tired, to be slashed at when angry, but to be otherwise ignored. However, I had somehow thought this was confined to that age group, their problem in fact, and that once past pubescence, normal service would be resumed.

Now I knew I was wrong. It seemed, it continued.

I looked in the mirror that morning. Horror! My God. Who the hell is she, that despicable, faded looking thing that even I wouldn’t be in the least bit interested in knowing. My skin suddenly looked yellow-grey, repellent.

I felt sick. I dragged myself away and went to dress. These clothes had seemed original, exciting, even statement-making, when I had worn them before; now they looked like they were from the wardrobe of that much maligned archetypal creature, the spinster librarian - or, even worse, the hand-knitted art teacher, which I hoped I wasn’t. I questioned my perceptions but they wouldn‘t shift. I now knew that I had been deluding myself. This, it seemed, was ‘truth’.

Fifty and alone; my marriage had failed in a slow, dwindling, fading kind of way, after our only daughter had decidedly taken herself out of the picture by moving to Australia. How could she? The cow. I was still fighting the anger.

There really was nothing else to say between us after that, my husband and I, so we had parted to make the pain of the realization of the ‘before’ and ‘after’, less obvious. Many of the friends we had had together also retreated silently to abet the quietness of the split; so as not to disturb the dust. And my daughter? She might as well have been on another planet.

When had I last heard from her? I wasn’t even sure…

Hey ho. Sandwiches made.

Time to go. It was raining, of course. Grab an umbrella. Take the local train to the bigger station in town. As I travelled no-one looked at me. They didn‘t bump into me but they showed no sign of noticing my existence. I dug my nails hard into my arm.

No-one acknowledged my presence. I realised this was not a new occurrence. Over the years it had become more and more the case. Was I guilty of treating the folk who were even older than I was the same way? Yes, I guessed I was. Perhaps the older you got the less you counted. What a thought! What a bloody thought! Shit.

My anger rose as I ruminated on this all too relevant issue.

Baby on Board. Yes. – Middle aged person on board? Old age pensioner on board? Never! There was a certain damning logic to it. Obviously it was O.K. to drive dangerously in the presence of these less important beings. ‘At what precise age did one become viable road-rage fodder?’ I wondered.

I tried to change the subject, think of ideas for the classes I had to teach that day. I was good at original ideas – or was I? Maybe I just thought I was… The self-doubt was seeping insidiously into all areas of my being.

Getting out at the end of the first leg of my journey, I felt old, dowdy and of no significance to anyone or anything. I walked heavily over from the first train and stepped onto the down-escalator to change platforms, my usual morning pattern. The station was overrun with people dashing to work, intent on their own goals, thinking their own thoughts, worrying over their own problems, or re-living the joys of the previous evening – simply inaccessible.

I looked at the faces as I went down underground, stepping gingerly onto the escalator. Today I was vulnerable. It was a day when things would easily go wrong When things would fall, unexplained from my fingers, my nose would run when I had no hanky, there would turn out to be no black paper left in the draw for the project I had planned for the most difficult class etc. etc. The list of annoyances and incidences of bad luck were endless and this was a form of superstition that I had come firmly to believe in. As the day began, so it would continue. Complicated patterns would emerge like, things start well then turn bad, or, no matter how bad it looks nothing drastic will occur etc. etc.