and slapping at his thighs.
She slapped his face. ‘What’d you do?’
He didn’t quite stop laughing. ‘Come on. I’ll show you!’
And then she was in the Maze, rushed from white-hot mirror to mirror, seeing her lipstick all red fire a thousand times repeated on down a burning silver cavern where strange hysterical women much like herself followed a quick-moving, smiling man. ‘Come on!’ he cried. And they broke free into a dust-smelling tiny room.
‘Ralph!’ she said.
They both stood on the threshold of the little room where the Dwarf had come every night for a year. They both stood where the Dwarf had stood each night, before opening his eyes to see the miraculous image in front of him.
Aimee shuffled slowly, one hand out, into the dim room.
The mirror had been changed.
This new mirror made even tall people little and dark and twisted smaller as you moved forward.
And Aimee stood before it thinking and thinking that if it made big people small, standing here, God, what would it do to a dwarf, a tiny dwarf, a dark dwarf, a startled and lonely dwarf?
She turned and almost fell. Ralph stood looking at her. ‘Ralph,’ she said. ‘God, why did you do it?’
‘Aimee, come back!’
She ran out through the mirrors, crying. Staring with blurred eyes, it was hard to find the way, but she found it. She stood blinking at the empty pier, started to run one way, then another, then still another, then stopped. Ralph came up behind her, talking, but it was like a voice heard behind a wall late at night, remote and foreign.
‘Don’t talk to me,’ she said.
Someone came running up the pier. It was Mr Kelly from the shooting gallery. ‘Hey, any you see a little guy just now? Little stiff swiped a pistol from my place, loaded, run off before I’d get a hand on him! You help me find him?’
And Kelly was gone, sprinting, turning his head to search between all the canvas sheds, on away under the hot blue and red and yellow strung bulbs.
Aimee rocked back and forth and took a step.
‘Aimee, where you going?’
She looked at Ralph as if they had just turned a corner, strangers passing, and bumped into each other. ‘I guess,’ she said, ‘I’m going to help search.’
‘You won’t be able to do nothing.’
‘I got to try anyway. Oh God, Ralph, this is all my fault! I shouldn’t have phoned Billie Fine! I shouldn’t’ve ordered a mirror and got you so mad you did this! It’s me should’ve gone to Mr Big, not a crazy thing like I bought! I’m going to find him if it’s the last thing I ever do in my life.’
Swinging about slowly, her cheeks wet, she saw the quivery mirrors that stood in front of the Maze, Ralph’s reflection was in one of them. She could not take her eyes away from the image; it held her in a cool and trembling fascination, with her mouth open.
‘Aimee, what’s wrong? What’re you—’
He sensed where she was looking and twisted about to see what was going on. His eyes widened.
He scowled at the blazing mirror.
A horrid, ugly little man, two feet high, with a pale, squashed face under an ancient straw hat, scowled back at him. Ralph stood there glaring at himself, his hands at his sides.
Aimee walked slowly and then began to walk fast and then began to run. She ran down the empty pier and the wind blew warm and it blew large drops of hot rain out of the sky on her all the time she was running.
We were far out at the tip of Ireland, in Galway, where the weather strikes from its bleak quarters in the Atlantic with sheets of rain and gusts of cold and still more sheets of rain. You go to bed sad and wake in the middle of the night thinking you heard someone cry, thinking you yourself were weeping, and feel your face and find it dry. Then you look at the window and turn over, sadder still, and fumble about for your dripping sleep and try to get it back on.
We were out, as I said, in Galway, which is gray stone with green beards on it, a rock town, and the sea coming in and the rain falling down; and we had been there a month solid working with our film director on a script which was, with immense irony, to be shot in the warm yellow sun of Mexico sometime in January. The pages of the script were full of fiery bulls and hot tropical flowers and burning eyes, and I typed it with chopped-off frozen fingers in my gray hotel room where the food was criminal’s gruel and the weather a beast at the window.
On the thirty-first night, a knock at the door, at seven. The door opened, my film director stepped nervously in.
‘Let’s get the hell out and find some wild life in Ireland and forget this damn rain,’ he said, all in a rush.
‘What rain?’ I said, sucking my fingers to get the ice out. ‘The concussion here under the roof is so steady I’m shellshocked and have quite forgot the stuff’s coming down!’
‘Four weeks here and you’re talking Irish,’ said the director.
‘Hand me my clay pipe,’ I said. And we ran from the room.
‘Where?’ said I.
‘Heber Finn’s pub,’ said he.
And we blew along the stony street in the dark that rocked gently as a boat on the black flood because of the tilty-dancing streetlights above which made the shadows tear and fly, uneasy.
Then, sweating rain, faces pearled, we struck through the pub doors, and it was warm as a sheepfold because there were the townsmen pressed in a great compost heap at the bar and Heber Finn yelling jokes and foaming up drinks.
‘Heber Finn,’ cried the director, ‘we’re here for a wild night!’
‘A wild night we’ll make it,’ said Heber Finn, and in a moment a slug of poteen was burning lace patterns in our stomachs, to let new light in.
I exhaled fire. ‘That’s a start,’ I said.
We had another and listened to the rollicking jests and the jokes that were less than half clean, or so we guessed, for the brogue made it difficult, and the whiskey poured on the brogue and thus combined made it double-difficult. But we knew when to laugh, because when a joke was finished the men hit their knees and then hit us. They’d give their limbs a great smack and then bang us on the arm or thump us in the chest.
As our breath exploded, we’d shape the explosion to hilarity and squeeze our eyes tight. Tears ran down our cheeks not from joy but from the exquisite torture of the drink scalding our throats. Thus pressed like shy flowers in a huge warm-moldy book, the director and I lingered on, waiting for some vast event.
At last my director’s patience thinned. ‘Heber Finn,’ he called across the seethe, ‘it’s been wild so far, all right, but we want it wilder, I mean, the biggest night Ireland ever saw!’
Whereupon Heber Finn whipped off his apron, shrugged his meat-cleaver shoulders into a tweed coat, jumped up in the air, slid down inside his raincoat, slung on his beardy cap, and thrust us at the door.
‘Nail everything down till I get back,’ he advised his crew. ‘I’m taking these gents to the damnedest evening ever. Little do they know what waits for them out there.’
He opened the door and pointed. The wind threw half a ton of ice water on him. Taking this as no more than an additional spur to rhetoric, Heber Finn, not wiping his face, added in a roar, ‘Out with you! On! Here we go!’
‘Do you think we should?’ I said,