Maura Dooley, Mirror, from Sound Barrier: Poems 1982-2002 (Bloodaxe Books, 2002). Reproduced with permission of Bloodaxe Books.

       www.bloodaxebooks.com

      Charlotte Philby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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      Source ISBN: 9780008365219

      Ebook Edition © 2020 ISBN: 9780008365196

      Version: 2021-02-25

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       Dedication

       For Jesse

       Epigraph

       ‘The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men’

      Henry David Thoreau

      Mirror

       In my mother’s house

       is the friendly mirror,

       the only glass in which I look

       and think I see myself,

       think, yes, that’s what

       I think I’m like,

       that’s who I am. The only

       glass in which I look and smile.

       Just as this baby smiles

       at the baby who always

       smiles at her, the one in

       her mother’s arms, the mother

       who looks like me, who

       smiles at herself in her

       mother’s mirror, the friendly

       mirror in her mother’s house.

       But if I move to one side

       we vanish, the woman I thought

       was me, the baby making friends

       with herself, we move to one side

       and the mirror holds no future, no past,

       in its liquid frame, only the corner

       of an open window, a bee visiting

       the