Frankie Styne & the Silver Man Read Free

Ever since he had used Frank and ever since she had refused to notice—not that he had actually told her how much it irritated him, because doing that might involve explaining why. How, for instance, a black and white photograph, framed in silver, used to stand on a small cabinet next to his mother’s double bed. It showed a fair-skinned man whose face looked smooth and lean beneath his military cap, whose broad shoulders reached firmly out of the frame. A six-foot man with features often described as ‘chiselled’ and eyes which could be no other colour but ice-blue. There would never, ever, be another like him, Frank’s dead mother had often proclaimed: not on this earth. The photograph was gone, but sometimes a print of it appeared behind Frank’s eyes—and soon after would follow the rest of the room: the pattern of roses on the walls, the thick maroon carpet, the white candlewick bedspread, the single light hanging from the dead centre of the room.
    A humpback clock ticked quietly. A dressing table was set in the window bay. It had two drawers either side and a space between for his mother’s knees, if she ever had time, between him and her book-keeping job at the garage, to sit at the stool. The dressing table blocked the netted light and made the room uncomfortably dark, but still its mirrors — one huge expanse of glass, arched at the top, with two smaller panels, hinged, on either side—absorbed enough light to shine. It was the only mirror in the house and in it Frank, then John, had seen himself for the first time, one afternoon long before he went to school. He had pushed open her bedroom door, which stuck slightly on the carpet and made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a sigh, and walked carefully across, avoiding the mirror’s eye until he was right in front of it.
    There were the lace mats, the cut-glass jar containing face powder and a smell, and the white china dish made to look like a basket, containing two crumpled hairnets. There were the lipsticks in scratched gold holders, the hairbrush, an atomiser of perfume, and the cake mascara with its clogged brush—all finely coated in pinkish powder-dust, all standing there in the silence and looking just like themselves. Behind was a hugeness of wallpaper, like some kind of patterned sky. Between the table and the wallpaper sky was him: a thick-necked child, with a large crimson birthmark spreading across his right cheek and dipping into the socket of his eye. Like a magnet, it affected everything else: the eyes seemed to be different sizes, the brows to be at cross purposes; the forehead hung; his lips, just licked, reminded him of worms. Frank, then John, gripped the edge of the dressing table. There he was, his mother’s own and only. He wanted to believe that it was some kind of mistake. But everything else was copied perfectly.
    Of course, the ugly duckling became a swan. But the ugly sisters envied and were punished twice over; he had seen it on the stage. Mirrors on the wall always told the truth.
    He turned away from the mirror, realising the worst thing of all: that this discovery could not be kept secret, because everyone else already knew. She already knew. As he pushed her bedroom door softly to, it was this that made him want to cry—and remembering it could, too—and once started it would lead on to more as well, one memory dragging out the next like a conjuror’s handkerchiefs.
    Katie Rumbold wasn’t the kind of person to do something without knowing why. ‘But why, John, why?’ she would ask, all smiles. Just thinking about explaining it all he could feel the past’s sharp edges pressing cruelly at the tolerableness of the present . . . No. He couldn’t. He just signed his letters Frank, and hoped that one day she would notice. He set her letter flat on the table next to his cup.
    Dear John,
    I’m writing with some very good news—do you