Blank Tape

A Mirror, Mirror fanfiction

~1992~

Nicholas doesn't care much for television.

This is a fact about himself which is surprising considering he was once a boy who adored films – long, long ago. He used to write detailed letters to his mother – he who could usually only manage a few lines before getting impatient and delegating his task to his sailor nannies or Gilliard (to be fair, it wasn't always laziness, sometimes his arm or wrist joint really did hurt him too much to proceed) – about every cinematograph they showed at Stavka, telling her how very interesting he found them.

But, oddly, most days – except to catch up on the news (and even then, he doesn't really care, it's simple habit) – he leaves the only television he owns switched off.

He'd much rather hear the ticking of the clocks he keeps in the shop making the walls – even those in his back apartment – vibrate, then quake enough to rattle the Russian tea-glasses on his tray beside the samovar, when the hour chimes in.

Daytime game shows lost their charm after about two days of owning his first colour television.

The black-and-white one he had before that got a smidgen more usage than his current model – he watched the queen's coronation (it felt like duty somehow – she is his cousin, after all) and the moon landing, of course, a month before his 65th birthday.

(The truth is, he wasn't really paying much attention to the latter event for its own sake, exciting as it was, too busy recalling Jo's rapt face back in 1919 when she told him they'd been to the moon in her time. How badly he had wanted to go through the mirror into her world – his future – back then! It still seemed dreadfully unfair the mirror repulsed him with a thousand pinpricks, barring him from her shortcut, forcing to remain forever on the slow path, out of tandem with hers.)

Soap operas were interesting for about two weeks, but after roughly a dozen instalments, one or two missed now and again when he overslept or forgot what time his stories were on, Nicholas found he couldn't care less about what happened to any of the characters – they behaved so stupidly, they brought most of their problems on themselves. And, call him a post-Edwardian prude, but he thought the numbskulls might have fared far better if they spent more time in their own beds at night and not in everyone else's. He was Russian, they practically invented melodrama; except, what the dull-minded writers and producers put on the air these days wasn't that so much as just pure rubbish through and through.

He resisted purchasing a VCR for ages. Then, thinking better of it, gave in and bought one, assuming it might be more relaxing to select a film of his choosing to enjoy at the end of the day with a biscuit and a glass of warm milk than some nonsensical programme being broadcast to the dullest of the masses.

He rented a few tapes from a local shop, and almost immediately regretted the decision.

Perhaps he should have known better than to include a certain film starring Yul Brynner in his selection, but he'd been curious. Was that so wrong?

Irregardless, he paid the price.

By the time it got to the teary reunion between Ingrid Bergman and Helen Hayes, he was shaking his head and fumbling for the eject button. Not for the reason one might suspect. The scene didn't make him sentimental. In fact, he was trying not to laugh. He couldn't imagine Grandma Minnie – his own godmother as well as his grandmother – simpering and sobbing in such a degrading manner.

The woman he remembered had had a backbone of iron.

He'd read somewhere Bergman asked Anna Anderson's permission to do the film. She ought to have asked him – it was his sister's character she was really bastardising.

The VCR's primary function for a while became to collect dust.

On a whim, Nicholas took up the notion he might as well keep one of those blank tapes – the kind you could buy along with a bag of sweets or a cold drink after a visit to the chemist – waiting inside, on the off-chance something worth preserving ever came on television.

He got a tape and popped it in sometime in 1990, and for over two years never had the slightest inclination to record anything onto it.

Then, one blustery evening, he happened to catch a rebroadcast of the news – it wasn't local, the station was based across the Tasman, in Sydney.

Sometimes he did like to hear about the weather over there – Jo lived in Sydney, and he appreciated being able to – somewhat accurately – envision what sort of day she was having. Sunny afternoons, she probably played outside – riding bikes, climbing trees, skinning her knees. Stormy days, he imagined her moping about the house and annoying her parents before resignedly settling into a corner with a box of Textas to draw or colour something.

For a split second, because he – as always – was just thinking about her, he almost failed to realise he was seeing her face in real time.

Proper recognition dawned just in time for him to hit record.

A local reporter out on the street, covering some utterly uninteresting human-interest story, and a small group of schoolchildren – eleven-year-olds – walking by and spying the rolling cameras, waving and pulling faces...

One of these was Jo.

Nicholas smiled when she stuck out her tongue right before her mother – Catherine Tiegan – appeared behind her and dragged her away. Her high-pitched child voice was faintly audible going, "But Mum!" in the background as she was hauled off.

In the three or four months since he recorded it, Nicholas has just about worn out the tape – and the VCR to boot – rewatching a half-obscured, grainy image of a girl whose face he hasn't seen in three quarters of a century.

Watching her wave at the camera feels as if she's waving to him from across time but simply doesn't know it.

The image of her getting dragged off screen by an admittedly very long-suffering and tired-looking Catherine flickers up and down now, in colour and then out of it, as he rewinds it for what must be the thousandth time.

"Patience," the old man murmurs as the tape whirs; "it won't be long now. Only three years more."

But whether he's talking to the little girl pulling faces on the news in Sydney, or else to himself, even he isn't entirely certain...