The Houdini Effect (5 page)

time to check them before our tea got
cold.

Harry said, innocently
(?), ‘Isn’t it funny that ever since we moved here we’ve been
living with someone else’s mirrors?’ (He could equally have said
‘drapes’ or ‘wood panelling’, but he didn’t. He said
‘mirrors’.)

His words had the effect of an
earthquake.

Sorry, sorry, that’s way too dramatic a
comparison. I don’t mean an earthquake where things rattle and
roll, topple over, crash down and break. No, I mean the type of
tremor that for most of its life runs nearly silently through a
fault line, the sort you notice only as a ripple or as a vibration
through your bones, the sort that signals the start, possibly, of
something bigger, something a lot more serious. Nothing bad is
going to happen, it says, not right now but later, well, it
will.

So what happened then was an infinitesimal
(a

very, very, very small) shift in the
tectonic plates, so to speak. If you looked closely a hairline
crack

appeared that wasn’t there before. A
mind-crack that could never be sealed again. Eventually the only
thing it could do was open wider. That’s the effect Harry’s
question had on me, even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time.

(DEEP THOUGHT WARNING #3) The fault line was
in me. Or I was the fault line itself.

When the first still-picture appeared in the
mirror, I remembered exactly what Harry had said.

Long live the weeds and the wilderness

On the Saturday before the holidays began
Mum and I were inspecting the flower borders along the side of the
house. I say flower borders but, in reality, they were weed
borders. Not a flower plant in sight, not that I could tell the
difference between proper plants and weeds. Mum had a much keener
eye than mine when it came to things organic.

She poked around in the sandy soil and said,
‘Here be flowers.’

(As well as studying law
at uni Mum had done a couple of English Literature papers. Doing
these had produced two spin-offs. The first was that she sometimes
spoke English in a strange, archaic way, which I quite liked, being
that way inclined myself. I blame my obsessive love of reading,
writing and language, verbal as well as written - in other
words,
words
- on
some kind of a recessive family gene or evolutionary quirk. I
haven’t met anyone else my age quite like me except Rach, maybe,
but she’s eccentric in a different sort of way. More about her
soon. But hey, we’re all

different! The second was
that, when she was

around, Mum was able to offer me some quite
useful writing and reading tips.)

‘
Where be flowers?’ I
asked.

‘
Underneath all this lot,’
said Mum.

‘
Hmm.’

‘
Hmm indeed,’ Mum said. I
liked the way she sometimes used words but, right then, I didn’t
like the tone of her voice. It was a voice that had switched to
code. Her ‘hmm’ really suggested ‘work’. Translated literally it
meant ‘weeding work.’

‘
Don’t look at me,’ I said,
quickly.

‘
If we all pitched in,’
said Mum, more wistfully than expectantly, ‘we could soon turn this
border into something lovely for the start of the
summer.’

‘
We?’ I asked. ‘You mean
us, excluding yourself. You never have time for anything other than
lawyering these days. You’re probably thinking about one of your
clients right now.’

‘
Things
are
busy,’ she agreed, evading a direct answer. ‘So many people
need legal help in the run-up to Christmas.’

‘
Christmas is nearly
three
months
away,’ I said.

‘
It seems to get earlier
every year,’ Mum replied.

‘
Anyway,’ I said, ‘I have
too much homework right now to spend time gardening.’

Mum raised a doubting eyebrow. I noticed. I
am very observant. A writer needs to be.

‘
It’s true,’ I told her.
‘We have to begin a biography project these holidays.’

‘
A biography?’

‘
Uh huh. That’s school life
for you these days, Mum. We students don’t have things as easy
as

you did in the good old days.’ (Mum snorted.
You

can see from whom I got my ironic/sarcastic
streak.) I elaborated. ‘We have to write about a person we admire
or want to emulate or just someone who’s done good deeds, who’s
interesting, a bit different.’

‘
Well,’ she said, ‘That’s a
wide open field to choose from.’

‘
And there's the rub,’ I
said. ‘The choice is too big. They can be living or dead. Where do
I start? And the wretched thing has to be finished pretty much
before we go back.’

‘
I see,’ said Mum. ‘There’s
absolutely no doubt then that you’ll be far too busy for a little
spot of light gardening.’

‘
Yes,
that’s right,’ I said. Unlike Harry, I do recognize irony and
sarcasm when it comes my way but, just like Harry, I can let it
‘pass me by as the idle wind which I respect not’. (A line
from
Julius Caesar
by Mr William Shakespeare. We did it in Year
9.)

‘
How long does this
biography have to be?’ Mum asked.

‘
How long is a piece of
string?’ I replied.

‘
So, why aren’t you working
on it right now?’ she asked cutting, as all mothers do, to the
chase.

‘
Because I’m talking to
you,’ I said. ‘Walking the borders.’

‘
Well,
don’t let me hold you up,’ said Mum. ‘I shall just have to cope
with the ‘weeds and the wilderness’ on my own.’
(
Long live the weeds and the
wilderness
. In case you don’t know - I
didn’t until Mum told me - these words were written by a poet
called Gerard Manley Hopkins. Mum said

they come from a poem of his called
‘Inversnaid’,

which is the name of a town in Scotland.
From

what Mr Hopkins wrote I
don’t imagine he was much of a gardener . . . but what lovely
words. I will have to delve more deeply into his poems when I get
the time.)

‘
I’m sure you’ll make a
great job of it,’ I said, ‘if you ever start.’

‘
Hmm,’ said Mum again. And
then, true to form and although it was a Saturday, she suddenly
remembered she had to write up some reports and disappeared to the
office she shares with two other community-law lawyers on the far
side of town.

I could write about her, I supposed, or
about Dad. But probably they’d never let me and would I really want
to anyway? Did I admire them enough to want to emulate them? Had
they done enough good deeds? Were they interesting?

Hmm. Tricksy.

A possible subject for a biography

When I happened to mention
my biography project to Harry (don’t ask me why I brought it up, I
don’t remember, maybe at the time I was just desperate for
something to say) he suggested - guess who? -
Harry Houdini
.

‘
Somehow, I don’t think
so,’ I said.

‘
Why not? He’d be perfect.
Interesting. Famous. Different.

‘
Not different enough,’ I
said to Harry. ‘Who doesn’t already know about Mr H
Houdini?’

Harry gave me one of his superior glances. I
hadn’t seen it since the séance so he must finally have gotten over
his disappointment of not having

retained the upper hand then. ‘Bet you don’t
know

half there is to know about him,’ he said.
‘Not

even a third. Not even a
quarter. Not even a smidgen. I bet you don’t know
anything
. You only think
you do.’

‘
Boring,’ I said in reply.
‘And full of tautologies.’

Nevertheless Harry lent me
(wonders will never cease) his favourite and precious (to him) book
about Houdini. I put it on my dressing table where it lay unread,
slowly gathering a fine layer of dust.

Not exactly barbeque weather

As you now know before we
- before Dad, that is - bought this house, an elderly, grumpy man
lived here, alone (although, as I soon discovered, he hadn’t always
lived alone). His name was Laurence Harvey Laurison.

If Laurence Harvey
Laurison had had a social media page during his later years he
probably wouldn’t have had many, if any, friends who liked him. His
was a rather sad tale, something along the lines of a weepy novel
or a television soap.

Before he became grumpy (or ‘a sod’ as our
next door neighbour Barry called him) he was married to a lady
called Iris. According to Barry, Laurie always called Iris ‘The
Missus’. (I’m sure Laurie didn’t say these words with capital
letters but that’s how I visualized them.)

Laurie’s parents had built the villa
originally and then, after Laurie got married, he and Iris moved in
with his olds (I could never imagine doing that. Well, I could, but
I didn’t want to. Any potential partner of mine would take one
look

at the mess and walk out on me) and, after
they

died, Laurie and The Missus stayed on.

The house was like a car with only two
owners except by the time Dad bought it, it had millions of miles
on the clock and the engine had more or less dropped out.

We didn’t know any of this until we got
talking to the neighbours, Barry and May, who came round for a
visit only a week or so after we’d moved in. Dad had invited them
even though, according to him, they were a rather unusual,
argumentative pair. He’d encountered them when he’d been at the
house by himself renovating Harry’s and my rooms.

Dad had fired up the barbeque specially. It
wasn’t the sizzling season yet but Dad doesn’t need much of an
excuse to grill and char. The day had started off frosty and fine
and had ended with a rare-for-this-time-of-year nor’westerly wind
blowing in across our back garden. To cut short the risk of more
purple prose, the evening was very mild for late August.

Comparing them with Mum and Dad, Barry and
May were an older couple (although not old), early to mid-fifties I
guessed. They seemed an unlikely combo. Straightaway I wondered how
compatible they were. May was taller than Barry. That was the first
thing I observed. I’ve read that men generally don’t like their
partners or girlfriends to be taller than them. (Troy is taller
than me. I know that’s superficial, like my collection of
lipsticks, but still . . .) The second, less superficial, thing I
noticed was that Barry was the talker. He was the matey one. I
guessed that’s why Dad had invited him and May over in the first
place. Deep down, Dad likes

to pretend he’s a bit of a bloke’s bloke
even

though he drives an antiquated Skoda and
doesn’t

wear a proper builder’s apron.

Being garrulous (means talkative, especially
about things that don’t matter and using too many words) isn’t
necessarily something that works against compatibility (oh shit,
but if it does, does that mean I’m never going to be compatible
with anyone?), it’s just that May seemed (at first) to be the
complete opposite of her husband. She kept in the background, like
painted-over wallpaper.

At the start, she said
hardly anything at all. She didn’t look totally depressed but I
didn’t think she looked tremendously happy either. I wondered if
she and Barry had already been together far longer than they should
have been. I looked at Mum in case she was thinking the same
thing.

Interestingly, Mum didn’t look as if May had
come as a complete surprise to her. That in turn made me suspect
that Dad had forewarned her at a time when Harry and I hadn’t been
in earshot.

Sometimes I’d had a similar notion about Mum
and Dad’s marriage, especially when I considered the separate sort
of lives they led these days, not to mention Mum’s implied threat
that Dad would have to go it alone if he kept on buying more
houses. I have to say though, that in comparison with M and B, my
parents positively glowed with togetherness. There was still a
spark between them. With Barry and May the fizz seemed to have
completely fizzled out, always assuming it had been there in the
first place.

It crossed my mind to wonder if Harry had
noticed any of this. He’s not the subtlest of human beings. There
are some things he just doesn’t seem

to be aware of, such as the coded, silent
messages

people give out. Not that I’m boasting
about

myself, honestly, I’m just being
truthful.

When I was younger, Mum
used to say I was a ‘sensitive’ person. ‘Thin-skinned’ Dad
sometimes called me when I had one of my childish tantrums. (Those
tantrum days are long gone. Now I’m patient and long-suffering, as
you can tell from my encounters with Harry.) Then, I didn’t like
being called sensitive, or thin-skinned. Nowadays I take it as a
compliment rather than an insult. I under-stand a person has to be
sensitive in order to be a writer and by sensitive I mean
perceptive, empathetic and aware. Besides, in my opinion sensitive
people aren’t necessarily thin-skinned at all. I’ve read that
writers, in particular, have to be thick-skinned in order to
survive all the criticism they get.

Laurie and Iris

Both Harry and I had wanted to invite some
of our friends to the barbeque. As well as inviting Em and Rach I’d
been nervously considering inviting Troy, too, but Mum ruined that
notion.