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“You’re lying to me, aren’t you?” She said her voice ecstatic with rage. “You little thief. Stupid child. You are lying to me about my mother’s death. You think you can take over my life just like that. Take it from me. My money, my clothes, my mother. Maybe you want my grief too, is that it!”

I hated her. I hated her so much I wanted to cry from the sheer tension, the pressure of it. How was I going to bear, or to expel, that much rage? I threatened to lacerate me like a burning garment, as if Medea’s dress had been wrapped not around me but within me, within my burning flesh.

“She didn’t want you there, I said. She was quite satisfied with me. She thought I was…”

I stopped, but it was too late. A flicker of disturbance ran across her forehead, reminding me of Dr Park. Then something else entered her eyes. For all my microscopic observation of her face over the years, for all my close study of its every contraction, retraction and passing mood, I’d never seen this particular look. I think in that moment she finally understood what was happening. She understood that she had bred a mirror-image, a creature who was her, but who could also turn on her. The look on her face, I think, was horror: the horror of recognition. My creatrix faced me and understood that she made a monster.

“What do you want?” she said. ”What do you want from me?”

She was asking her Golem if it was going to kill her. She was asking the Image if it was going to emerge from where it had lived, from under the watery surface, and attack.

We faced each other very directly. We gave each other perhaps the most serious, most exposed look we’d ever exchanged. She was still the Mirror, I the reflection. But I had lied and that give me dimension. The Echo had said something of its own and now it couldn’t be contained. I could feel the certainty rising; the Mirror had to be smashed. No matter what followed after, no matter who lived or died.

For a long time we stood absolutely still, locked into each other’s gaze as by a spell. Then I raised my and hit. I was trying to shatter the Mirror’s reflecting surface; but my first met the hard bone of her instead. The impact reverberated horribly; I almost screamed with pain. We wrestled blindly, with an awful intimacy, body meeting body, body meeting itself. I put my hands on her throat, my fingers tightened round the delicate flesh. Her face was close to mine and we confronted each other straight on, a line of pure violence joining us now as love once did. Her reflecting features contorted, love and hate twisting into each other, and twisting her face.

“Who are you?” she said, her voice nothing more than a deep breath. “What are you?”

“You, I answered on the same wave of air. “I am you.”

“Just don’t forget you came second, “ she whispered. “And you will always be second, even when I’m dead. Even if you kill me.”

I tightened my grip. Our eyes were so close that they had merged mingled in the same miasma of fear and violence. She put her hands on my shoulders to push me back. Then she crumpled. She gave up the fight. I could feel it, the instantaneous decision in her body to stop resisting. To resign. She wasn’t going to put her fingers round my throat. She couldn’t do it, she was still the creatrix and I her creation. Her child. She slid to the floor. I let go.

I knelt beside her, not sure what I’d done. She was limp and seemingly unconscious, but breathing. She’d fainted. I lay down beside her, like a cub beside a wolf mother and once again perhaps knowing that this was the last time I’d do it- I contemplated her face. I perused it as if I were reading the complex geography, the rich matter of the world.

This passage is about the fight between Iris and her mother Liz. It takes place after Iris’s visit to her grandparents. At the end of this visit the grandmother, Edith, had an accident and died few later. In her last minutes alive Iris held her hands. Edith was senile and thought it was Liz, because they look exactly like each other. So she was happy when she died with her loved daughter around.

After this, Iris goes home to tell her mother the news. They have a big argument and both want to hurt the other. So Iris lies and says that her visit had been perfect and her grandparents had accepted her. And that her grandmother was glad to have Iris around and never asked for Liz till the end. But Liz doesn’t believe it: “You can’t lie to yourself”!

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