The Houdini Effect (7 page)

anything to do with renovations. ‘Basically
its structure is sound. All it needs is a bit of TLC.’

If stripping most of the weatherboards on
the south side of the house, a complete repaint, replacing bowed
window frames and cracked and rotten window sills (one of the
hardest things, believe me), etc, etc, was the same as TLC, well
then, yes, I suppose that was 'all' the house needed.

Tender Loving Care.

Yeah, I thought to myself, is that what old
Laurie didn’t get after Iris died? Is that what May was missing out
on, too? (What a lot of downers! I told you the story was getting
heavier.)

‘
What are you going to do
once it’s finished?’ said Barry clearly preferring, like Dad, to
focus on matters practical and financial. ‘Sell it for a good
profit and move on? Do up another house?’

‘
Well . . .’ began Dad, the
old enthusiasm (also known as the old madness) bubbling hotly to
the surface.

‘
No way!’ Mum and I said
together.

‘
This is
definitely the last one,’ added Mum. ‘This is it.
Finito
.’

I think she majorly surprised Barry by
having the last word.

After they had gone, Dad said, ‘Was I right
or was I not? They’re a rum pair, aren’t they?’

‘
I discern many hidden
depths,’ said Mum. ‘At loggerheads with one another,
definitely.’

‘
You and he got on all
right,’ I accused Dad.

Then Dad surprised me. He’s capable of
surprise once in a blue moon. (Blue Moon = two full moons in a
single month. In other words, rather rare.) He scratched the
balding crown of his

head and said, ‘Superficially, yes. But
there’s something skew-whiff about that man. I can’t put

my finger on it but he’s not my cup of tea.
Bit of a cold fish, that’s what I thought the first time I met
him.’

‘
Maybe
he’s
superficial,’ I suggested.

‘
Hmm,’ said Dad. ‘Maybe.
Anyway, it’s May I feel sorry for. I took Barry off into the garden
so you three could have a quiet chat together. Poor woman. I
suspect she doesn’t have many friends to talk to.’

‘
You know something?’ said
Mum. ‘You also have hidden depths.’

‘
Some of Athens’ famous
sensitivity must have rubbed off on me,’ Dad joked.

I have to say it, not only did Dad surprise
me that evening, he impressed me, too.

Random thoughts about old age, rest homes
and other stuff too depressing for a teenager like me to be
thinking about but something I do occasionally anyway because

THAT'S THE WAY I
AM

(And, as I said earlier, you could have
skipped all this but you’re still reading so it’s your own fault
that you have to share the depressing bits with me.)

So this house, our house now, had once been
the home of Laurence Harvey Laurison.

Grumpy Old Sod or, Poor Old Thing?

Which to choose?

Or were both pithy descriptions true and
accurate?

Before May and Barry left that night I found
out two other things. One I’ll tell you now; the

other, soon.

Just as they were going out the door May
volunteered to me, again in that hushed voice of hers, that she had
written to Lawrence – Laurie – a couple of times and that he had
replied, just the once, in very wavery and uncertain handwriting.
His letter was short, mainly small talk, she said. Reading between
the lines (yeah, tell me about it!) he sounded well enough
physically and mentally - which surprised May considering that
she’d wondered if he had gone slightly loopy with his talk of Iris
breaking a mysterious promise - but very unhappy emotionally, which
didn’t surprise May at all. The rest home he’d gone to was just a
big house he told her. It didn’t mean anything to him especially
not without The Missus.

When she mentioned that, I immediately felt
guilty that Dad had bought the house, which had been Laurie and
Iris’ home for so many years. I remembered Dad telling us excitedly
what a cheap price he’d paid for it. ‘A steal,’ Dad had said. That
made it all the worse.

I pictured Laurie in his
rest home, not restful at all, squished up in the folds of one of
those enormous faux-leather (faux = fake. Sounds impressive,
doesn’t it? Like carapace) recliner chairs you see lined up in the
front bay window of so many rest homes, Stately Havens being one
such example.

(DEEP THOUGHT WARNING # 5) The writer in me
has often noticed that these chairs almost always face inwards,
away from the light, so the

old folks don’t see the world passing by.
Although, to be fair, maybe it’s their choice to face that way.

Maybe they don’t want to
see the world passing by because it reminds them that they aren’t
considered to be much a part of the world anymore and the only
passing they’ll be doing is their own, sooner rather than
later.

I felt stricken for Laurie. To put it
inelegantly, my gut ached when I thought about the situation he had
found himself in. And that made me feel extra sympathetic towards
Mum and Dad for not liking to be reminded that they’re getting old
- well, older. And then, believe it or not, I started feeling sorry
for myself because one day I’d be old, too. At least it wasn’t
going to be for a long, long time, that was some consolation.

One of our clocks (a clock
that came with the house, what else?) had two inscriptions on its
face. The first read,
Tempus fugit
which, after some research on my part, I had
discovered was Latin for
Time
flies
; while the second said, in
English,
Soon I Shall Find In Passing On,
Time Gone
. (Very consoling,
NOT!)

More often than not I wanted to be older.
But maybe, given future prospects, that was completely the wrong
attitude.

Hall of mirrors

And now I will tell you about the mirrors.
(‘Hurrah! Finally!’ you say. ‘Why have I had to wade through more
than fourteen thousand words to get to this point?’ Fair enough but
I say to you what would the mirrors be without all the rest? As

far as a story is concerned, context is
everything.)

Ever been to a fun fair? Paid good money to
enter a Hall of Mirrors? If you have then you know the score. The
mirrors have odd shapes: convex, concave, corrugated. They fatten
you up, slim you down, stretch you, shrink you, bend you. They
transform you into strange parodies of yourself. People laugh. You
even laugh at yourself. It doesn’t matter that the real you is
altered. You know that what is happening is all a trick, a
distortion, an illusion. The real you isn’t really changed at all
except in the reflection. You see an altered you but it’s still the
you you know and love.

What happened next was a completely
different experience. And now, even though it’s all over and done
with - I wouldn’t be writing this if it wasn’t - it isn’t. What I
mean is, I’m still haunted by what happened because there’s nothing
I can do to explain it away. Absolutely nothing.

And there never will be.

Deep thoughts indeed!

In situ

Along with the various
bits and pieces of furniture and furnishings (I have already
mentioned the thick drapes; the small one-legged table Harry used
for his pseudo séance; the literary clock with its melancholy,
fatalistic messages) Laurie and Iris (and their son Mitchell, too,
I guess) left us their mirrors,
in
situ
as Dad liked to say, which means they
were exactly where the couple had originally

placed them.

When we moved in, the house seemed full
of

the things. Wherever we turned they caught
and threw back (unlike the mirrors at a fun fair) our ordinary,
everyday reflections. In the hallway, in the bathroom. There was
one in each bedroom, too, as well as a monstrous mirror in the
lounge and a miniscule one in the laundry. They were all (even the
laundry miniature) mirrors of the ancient variety: thick, bevelled
glass backed by solid slabs of wood. Made to last forever, except .
. .

. . . (DEEP THOUGHT WARNING # 6) Nothing
lasts forever, not really, not even - as I was shortly, and sadly,
to discover during my private talk with May - solemn vows.

The largest mirrors were
heavy to lift and therefore inconvenient to move. Where else in the
house would they have fitted if we’d chosen to move them? For those
reasons and because the olds actually liked them and because we
didn’t have many mirrors of our own we just left them where we
found them.
In situ
. All except one, which Laurie had taken away with
him.

‘
You can see exactly where
it hung,’ was the second thing May said to us the night of the
barbecue, just as she was leaving. (Told you I’d get back to this.
Be honest, you’d probably already forgotten :-)) For some reason
Mum had made a small-talk comment about all the mirrors we had
inherited.

‘
There.’ May pointed to a
darker patch of varnish just inside the hallway by the front door.
‘Laurie didn’t take much with him to the rest home when he left but
he took the mirror that always

hung there. It was Iris’ favourite. It had
sparkling cut-glass bits around the perimeter. Diamante.

Laurie said it would be just the right size
for his room.’

‘
How could he have known
that?’ Barry had huffed and puffed. He made it sound like a
put-down, not only of Laurie but of May for having believed Laurie.
Even before Dad gave us his assessment of him I was starting to
like Barry less and less. (My feelings about him had
been

neutral to begin with but it’s impossible to
stay neutral forever.)

‘
Maybe Mitchell described
the rest home room well enough for Laurie to be sure,’ I said,
sounding defensive on Laurie and May’s behalf. ‘Or maybe he just
wanted something from his old home.’

Barry shrugged. ‘Doesn’t much matter,
anyway,’ he said. ‘He’d hardly have got much joy out of seeing his
ugly mug in it every day!’

I almost said out loud, ‘I bet you don’t
either,’ but I kept that thought to myself.

It’s weird how sometimes
things have a way of being true even when, at the time, you never
think about whether they might be true or not. Sen-sitivity again.
A writer’s intuition. I’ll get back to this soon. (You know I
will.)

Smoke and mirrors

But first I come back to Harry’s question.
Do you remember what it was? No, I thought not. I don’t blame you.
I do seem to ramble on a bit. It must be my writing style. Every
writer has a unique style. Rambling must be mine. Oops. I’m doing
it again. Get to the point!

Harry said, ‘Isn’t it funny that we’ve been
living with someone else’s mirrors for so long?’

After Harry had asked this perfectly
innocent question I began to be haunted by our mirrors even before
I became haunted by what I started seeing in them. We’d been in the
house for a couple of months by then, through late winter and early
spring. And let me tell you, if it wasn’t for electric blankets,
snugly plump quilts, grossly unfashionable flannelette pjs and the
saving grace of primitive convection heaters (oh, for air con!)
camping out in the wild woods would have been warmer than living in
this house.

None of us had, up to now,
thought (or said they’d thought) that living with other people’s
mirrors was particularly unusual or funny. Funny-strange, I mean.
No funnier-stranger than all the other things we’d ‘inherited’. But
I suppose when you did think about it, it
was
strange, sort of. Here we were,
smack in the middle of major renovations where the old was being
repaired or covered over or completely replaced by the new and we’d
kept a set of ancient mirrors almost because of our own laziness
and Mum and Dad’s peculiar tastes.

It wasn’t as if they were especially nice
mirrors either, not in my humble opinion. A lot of them had
blemishes, like dark bruises, which must have been the backing
staring to wear off, while others had scratches and, sometimes,
cracks in the corners that, even more than the bevelled edges,
split your face or body into kaleidoscopic pieces. Not only this,
but many of the individual links of the heavy chains the mirrors
hung from had corroded to a rusty brown that stained your fingers
if you tried to adjust the tilt of them. And the

mirrors themselves were often odd, unhelpful
shapes, either too big or too small for satisfactory

viewing.

But anyway, we’d kept them and then, because
of Harry’s sudden, random question, they caught my attention in a
way they hadn’t before. I began to see the mirrors as objects in
their own right, not just useful ornaments in which I could view
myself. In a short space of time they became like unblinking eyes
staring at me, drawing me in. It was weird and a bit baffling and
un-expected. Why were they affecting me like this, now, when they
hadn’t made any impact at all before? Maybe it wasn’t due only to
Harry’s question, maybe it was because the ‘people’ whose mirrors
they had once been weren’t anonymous anymore. They were now Laurie
and Iris’s mirrors. The Man and The Missus.

Suddenly, every time I
walked past one, I found myself stopping to stare back, my
reflection suspicious, alert, uncertain. Even in the few crack-free
mirrors, especially the smaller ones, my face was bevelled,
wavering in the same mysterious way as the migraine line I
sometimes got in my left eye wavered. They almost gave me a
headache, too. I would turn away from the mirrors only to swing
back as if I were trying to catch them off-guard. Stupid really,
what did I think was going to happen?