A/N: I'll say this now. There isn't going to be a happy ending to this fic, and there will be character death.

Disclaimer: I do not own Digimon.

Chapter Two

She was right, it was a good shop. It made the other fashion shops look tame, formulaic. The minute you walked in there was this strange, purplish light cocooning you from above, with bright, white light beams searching out the racks of clothes. There were all these colours and feathers and silky things and sparkles everywhere, really female. To the left of the door there was a long black sofa, that made me want to grab Mimi and stretch out on it. The music was something I didn't know, like New Age stuff with a sting in its tail, and there was this sharp, exciting smell being pumped into the air from somewhere.

"See?" breathed Mimi, like someone on the threshold of a temple. "Isn't it fabulous?"

The she was off amongst the racks of clothes, a beagle on the scent and I followed. The shop seemed to go back and back, two whole floors of it, joined by curving staircases with little light bulbs like a catwalk. Whoever designed it had style, I can tell you that.

There were loads of level and platforms and spaces, with the racks and shelves making up different shapes in each. And everywhere you looked there were these classy dummies, with long, long legs and blind, beautiful faces, images of what the shoppers could be, maybe, if they'd buy the same clothes. I followed Mimi up and down and in and out, my eyes never leaving her. I watched as she held tops and skirts and dresses up against herself in front of a mirror, then in front of me and got a hundred per cent positive response from both. I stood behind her while she flicked through racks of shirts and rows of nail varnish and I breathed it all in like perfume.

She was-I don't know-shining. It was like she'd really come alive, in that shop. She didn't take any notice of me, but I was allowed to be there, to follow her, to watch her. She was my passport to this world, and she was queen in it too. It just about blew me away.

After a long, long time Mimi selected a couple of dresses off two different racks and headed over to where a white neon sign flashed Changing Room in huge, jagged letters. She disappeared through the certains, and I waited outside, until she reappeared, like a conjurer's assistant, and pirouetted for me.

"Brilliant." I croaked, soon as I could speak. "Knock out."

"I'm not sure. Hang on, and I'll show you the other one."

Soon she was there again, in a different dress, looking fabulous. "I don't know, Meems." I said

"Mimi." She said

"Sorry. I don't know, they're both-they're stunning. You look as good as one of those dummies."

As soon as that was out of my mouth I regretted it, because it didn't exactly sound flattering, but Mimi glowed as though I'd paid her the best compliment in the world.

"Come on-which dress?" She smiled.

"I like the front on that one," I said. I did too. It was the lowest.

"Yeah. But this colour-I think I like the other's better on me."

"Get both."

"I can't afford both. I really can't afford one. But I'm going to get the other one. I think. I'll just try it on one more time."

Fifteen more minutes of waiting and complimenting, and I was trailing Mimi to the cash point, where this icily-perfect woman took her credit card and put the dress into a slick little carrier with real rope handles. As soon as she'd got the bag in her hands, Mimi acted like someone who'd had a shot of something exciting. She danced through the shop in front of me, then announced, "I want to get my face made over."
"What?"

"A makeover. I want to try that new tawny look."

Now I've seen women undergoing make-up counter humiliation before-they get perched on a stool while some sneering sadist with rigid hair spats on foundation and tells them their eye shadow's all wrong. "You sure you want to?" I asked, but she'd already headed off.

The make up section was serious stuff. It was screened off, and they had these reclining chairs, like dentists' chairs, that they got you to lie on while they did you over. They welcomed Mimi almost wordlessly, as though there was no need to discuss what needed to be done. I watched as they cleaned off her perfect face and resurrected it again, all glowing with clever gold bits on the eyes. I was beginning to run out of compliments by this time, but Mimi hardly noticed. She pranced off and stopped in front of this little stage thing where three dummies were arranged in unlikely but kind of erotic positions. Then she said, "Spot the difference," stepped up beside them, and posed alongside.

OK, she wasn't quite as thin and long as them, no human could be, but she blended in all right. There was some kind of smoke machine at the back sending out this vague blue mist, and it wrapped round all four of them, and they looked so lovely, so lifeless… It gave me the creeps a bit, if you really want to know.

I called out that we should go get a drink and something to eat, there was a long pause, then she stepped forward and got down off the little stage. Then we went to a café and while I was eating and she was playing around with a cappuccino, she announced she was feeling tired and wanted to go home.

"What about tonight?" I said. We could go to that new club on the high street"

She looked unsure, and I added: "You could wear your new dress…"

We met at ten thirty, and she was wearing her new dress, and she still had on the make-up they'd done for her, and she looked amazing.

It was a good night, except-except I should have been happier than I was, being in a new club with my arm around someone who looked as good as she did. She just wasn't shining, like she had done in the shop. She seemed-drained, somehow, tired and I wasn't getting through to her. She hardly ever looked at me, and only half-listened to the stuff I tried to talk about.

I began to wonder if she really liked me.

I began to wonder why she'd agreed to go out with me in the first place.

We did some dancing, and then we stopped and I got her pinned up against one of the mirrored walls.

"So how come you said yes to me, Mimi?" I asked.

"Said yes?" She repeated.

"Said you'd come out with me?"

In answer she laid both hands flat on my chest and lifted her face up to mine. You don't carry on talking when a girl does that. At the end of the second long kiss, I opened my eyes and saw that hers were wide, staring behind her.

Looking at our reflections in the mirrored wall.

So, it was set. Our relationship, I mean-what passed for our relationship. We didn't spend much time together in college, because we were doing completely different courses and because Mimi never seemed to want lunch. But we'd meet in the evening sometimes, and we'd spend every Saturday together.

"You're mad," was my friend, Tai's reaction. "Every week?"

"Yep."

"All day?"

"Just about."

"You in love with her or something?"

"No," I said and I realized I wasn't. "It's just…you've seen her."

"Yeah," he replied. "She's a knockout. But come on. All that girly stuff-every Saturday?"

Tai had a sister. He wouldn't understand if I told him that I got totally turned on looking at Mimi look at clothes in shops.

And if that sounds sad, too bad-it's true.

Shops were where she was most exciting, and she was always wilder after she'd brought something. I'm not going to spell it out, but it was like she wouldn't stop me doing anything.

Of course there's only so much you can do on a bench in a shopping precinct.

After maybe six weeks of shopping every Saturday, I suggested to her we went somewhere else. Just for a change. Swimming. Bowling. Or take my motorbike out to someplace rural and get lunch in a pub.

She looked at me as though I'd lost it.

"Maybe next week," she said. "I need to get shoes this week."

Next week never arrived, of course. There was always some article of clothing she needed. And I begun to get…bored isn't the right word. I was uneasy. What had been a thrill was becoming a chill. I still liked to watch her, but it made me feel…I don't know. Like I was watching someone in the troes of addiction.

I still hadn't got through to her, either. We had almost no good conversation together, and we never had a laugh. And she'd cry off in the evening time after time, say she was exhausted. I had these thoughts about dumping her, but then I'd look at her and I'd see the jealous faces of the other guys as we walked along the road together, hand in hand, and I'd think-not yet. Give it a bit longer.

Then something happened in one of my classes. We were reading some Edgar Allen Poe, the nineteenth-century master of horror. Florid, swallowed-the-dictionary stuff, but pretty gripping too. One story particularly got to me. It was about an artist who was painting a portrait of his new wife up in a turret somewhere, making her sit for hours and hours. She drooped and faded, but he was too much of a sod to notice. All the time, the protrait was getting better and better, more life like, and the girl was getting more ill. Then he finishes it, and he's really pleased with it. "This is indeed Life itself!"he says. Then he turns to his wife, and-you've guessed it-she's dead.

I didn't know at first why that story made me think of Mimi, but it did, and I couldn't get it out of my mind. And then I worked out the connection when I was home alone a couple of nights later after quite a few beers.

Mimi was the painting, and the wife. She was both.

All her make-up, the clothes, the show-that was like the portrait. And all the other sides to Mimi were just…dying. If they'd been there in the first place.

I sat there and thought, and made up my mind that I had to dump her.

Soon.

Then that Saturday something amazing happened, something that turned my decision on its head. We met as usual outside some café and she said: "All I need to get today is a new top. I thought purple, to go with those white trousers I got last week. And then-d' you fancy coming round to my place? Only I've got it to myself." And she fixed me with a slightly scary cinnamon stare.

"Sure," I said, while everything inside me started pumping fit to explode. "Great."

All my thoughts about dumping her fled. I told her I'd see her in Harum, because I wanted to drop into the newsagents and pick up the new Superbikes, and then I went straight to the chemist instead and got myself equipped. She must mean it, I told myself, she must really mean it-otherwise why make the point that she'd got the place to herself? I had this little niggly goody-goody thought that it wasn't exactly showing character to sleep with a girl the exact same week you'd decided to dump her, but I trod it underfoot. Maybe this is what we need for our relationship, I said to myself. Maybe Mimi's the sort who just finds conversation hard, who finds conversing with others hard.

She must really like me after all, or she wouldn't have asked me back, would she, and made such a big deal about having the place to herself. Maybe this'll be the turning point. And then I stopped any more analysing-if I'm honest, and more thinking. Apart from thoughts that involved Mimi letting me take off all her carefully-chosen designer clothes one after another and dumping them on the bed.

Her apartment was really normal. I don't quite know what I was expecting-something like the cover of House Beautiful, maybe, all jugs of white lilies and fat white sofas. But it wasn't. It was ordinary and tidy, and a bit chintzy, and the only really squirmy thing was all the photos of Mimi everywhere. Most homes have a few photos-I myself had just threatened my dad with violence if he didn't remove a particularly nasty one of me with too much hair and no teeth-but this was seriously over the top. Lining the hall, in the kitchen, on top of the telly-everywhere.

"Want to see my room?" Mimi asked.

That was more like it. I followed along behind her, walking past about a hundred more photos of her face, to the end of the corridor, where she pushed open a door.

"After you," she said. I walked in-and jumped backwards like a rat out of a trap, crashing into Mimi. I nearly passed out in fright, I swear. There was this girl, behind the door, kind of reaching out towards me, and staring…

"Idiot," Mimi smirked. "That's Tandy. And she can't hurt you."

It was only one of the stupid dummies from Harum, wasn't it. I laughed out loud, but I felt really spooked. My heart was thumping and my mouth had gone all dry. I tried to turn it into a big joke-I got hold of its hard, plastic hand and shook it, and said, "Hi, Tandy. Thanks for scaring the life out of me."

"Give her a kiss, too," Mimi giggled.

Oh God, I thought, but I craned up and landed a smacker on its nasty col mouth.

"How d'you get hold of it, Mimi?" I asked. "Her, I mean."

"They have a big bin, behind Harum, and they chuck bits of the dummies out sometimes. A leg, or an arm-I got her head and torso at the same time, and the rest I just kind of collected. And put her together."

Gruesome, I thought. "Great," I muttered. "I've got other bits too. Look." And she pointed over to some shelves at the far side of her room, and there, lined up like some waxworks horror film, were three hands, two arms and a disembodied head.

The head was particularly disturbing.

"That's Kathy," Mimi said, fondly. "She's my make-up double. I try out faces on her, and then I use them on myself."

This was getting creepier by the minute. The hands all had different coloured nail varnishes on.

"You try stuff on them as well?" I asked.

Mimi shrugged. "Sometimes."

"So…Tandy…she's like your big…Barbie?" I went on. "Life in plastic-it's fantastic?"

"I try out my outfits on her," she answered, rather coldly. "Colour combinations, stuff like that."

"Why don't you just try them out on yourself?"

Mimi didn't answer. Turning her back on me, she walked into the middle of the room. Clothes covered every surface; hanging from the picture rail, piled on the chair. Shop carrier-bags crammed with new gear were stacked against the walls. The wardrobe door was open, overflowing with dresses. Mimi pulled a feather boa from a hook, went up to Tandy, wrapped it round her neck, and started crooning to her.

"You're beautiful," she was murmuring. "Don't listen to him. You're beautiful."

As the start to a seduction scene, this was not going well. I felt in the way, like I was intruding on the two of them. And her over-stuffed room gave me the heebies. I felt about as turned on as a cold kipper. Just the thought of trying to make out with those two dead, perfect dummy faces watching me was too much.

Pull yourself together, I nagged myself. How often does a girl ask you to her room?

"Come on Mimi," I said. "We haven't come here to play dollies." And I got hold of her, all kind of he-man, and pulled her onto the bed, and started kissing her.

But I stayed like a cold kipper. Every time I shut my eyes I'd think of that weird dummy, and the way it stared, and kind of clawed its hands out towards me, and every time I opened my eyes, I'd-well, I'd see it, wouldn't I. And the severed head, as well. So I'd shut my eyes again and land my mouth on Mimi's and I felt like…I felt like I was kissing the dummy. Talk about an anti-aphrodisiac. I got as far as undoing the top two buttons on Mimi's shirt and then it was like I flipped. I jumped up, made some muttered excuse about a migraine kicking in, and legged it down the corridor at the speed of light.

"I'll see you, Mimi," I called back, at the front door. "I'll phone."