The Houdini Effect (8 page)

Was that a premonition, or what?

To begin with,
nothing
did
happen, not until weeks after that evening when Harry asked
his question, a question that in its own, unexpected way
changed

everything. Think of an impossible thing and
it

will happen. (A line
inspired by
Alice in
Wonderland
. In that book the Queen says,
‘. . .

sometimes I’ve believed as
many as six impossible things before breakfast.’ I loved that book
when I was younger but haven’t reread it for ages.)

The first day of the school holidays.

The time of the pool and party plans
aforementioned.

The period in which I should have been
starting my biography project.

Harry, in full swing, escaping from his
straitjacket, roping me in to help him.

I’d walked past Harry’s
room where the door was ajar (cue, Canned Laughter) and Harry was
already struggling (again in vain it seemed) to get out of the
straitjacket. It was satisfying yet in truth pathetic really, to
see him rolling around on his bed, face sweaty, moaning and
groaning like a person in terrible pain as he tried to escape from
his bondage.

What a way to start the holidays I remember
thinking. Little did I know what lay ahead.

‘
Who tied you up this
time?’ I asked out of polite yet fascinated interest.

‘
Mum . . . before . . . she
. . . went . . . to . . . work.’

Harry, this embodiment of embarrassment,
wriggled and writhed some more, his erratic movements punctuating
his words making them staccato.

‘
Why don’t you give up on
the straitjacket fits?’ I asked cleverly. (Straitjacket Fits = the
name of a Southern Hemisphere band from long ago. Mum and Dad still
love listening to their music.)

He replied without hesitation. ‘I’m . . .
almost. . . almost . . . there. Can’t . . .you . . . see . . . the
. . .

straps . . . are . . . coming . . . un . . .
done?’

‘
Hmm, I
guess so,’ I said, going across to inspect them. ‘They look a
little looser. But perhaps the struggle is just wearing them out?
Like it’s wearing you out. Undoing
you
. Like it will wear out and undo
the judges and the audience

who will probably all have stopped watching
by now and fallen asleep.’

‘
Strait . . . jackets . . .
don’t. . . wear . . . out. . . but . . . if . . . this . . .
doesn’t . . . work . . .out . . . time . . . wise . . . I . . . can
. . . go . . . to . . . the . . .next . . . thing . . . I . . .
have . . . a . . . plan . . . B.’

‘
Which is?’

Harry didn’t bother answering. This made me
think he might be bluffing. Magicians bluff a lot. On the other
hand it may have just been because he had no energy left for words.
He carried on undoing himself, or trying to, and I carried on to my
room to apply some finishing touches before I went to catch my
bus.

Rachel, Emma and I had planned to meet
often. Today we were going to the mall, to shop until we dropped.
Well, window-shop until we dropped, of boredom. Then we’d spend our
meagre savings on hot chocolate and gooey mud cake and sympathise
with each other about what we might have treated ourselves to if
we’d had the wherewithal.

Tomorrow, the plan was to go to the pool
where Troy and Co. would, in all likelihood, also be hanging out.
It was strange I have to admit. Lately I’d been thinking about Troy
more and more often, I mean at times outside the usual school
hours

when I could reasonably expect to see
him.

(Remember, I’d been contemplating having
him

come to the barbeque, if we’d been allowed
to invite our friends.) What did it mean? Was that the reason why
the whole thing about love and relationships - Mum/Dad,
Iris/Laurie, May/Barry, Harry/Straitjacket (pick the odd one out) -
had lately become of such interest to me? Was there a chance that
Troy was thinking about me at odd times as well? Realistically I
didn’t expect so, although it was pleasant to ponder the
possibility.

Should I treat these new feelings with
dispassion, I asked myself, analyzing them from a writer’s point of
view? Or would this be a cop-out for admitting my true feelings.
Did I even know what these ‘true’ feelings were or were they all
still too vague for me to fully understand them?

I neither made it to the
bus stop that day nor followed up on the question of how I should
treat my thoughts about Troy. That afternoon, before I had time to
decide anything at all about the Troy question, I had been forced
to contact Rach and Em to offer them my humblest apologies for not
turning up as agreed even though I’m sure they could tell my heart
wasn’t in the apology, just as my shallow desire for malls and
make-up, coffee and chocolate, pools and parties had lost their
allure, temporarily at least, that afternoon when I saw Laurie and
Iris for the first time. Yes, you read right. Laurie and Iris
Laurison. The grumpy curmudgeon and his late, beloved
Missus.

There were three faces in my bedroom mirror.
Only one of them was mine and it was the least

clear of the three. The
other two were the faces of a young couple looking into each
other’s eyes,

smiling deeply at one another, clearly happy
and in love.

Naturally I turned around pretty smartly
thinking the faces had to be reflections, the same as mine was.
That there must be two extra people in the room, standing close
behind me. That was scary enough but at a rational level I knew
there was no one else in the room but me. I was alone. And that was
scarier still.

I don’t know how long the image stayed in
the mirror, it may have been a few seconds or possibly a few
minutes. Then suddenly it was gone and all I saw was myself again
in the mirror’s usual, everyday clarity: my too large nose, my
pulled-back hair, and the puzzled line of my mouth. But in my head
was the image of the young people and the strange fact that the
room in which they had been standing was the same room I was
standing in now.

It hadn’t been a mirror image of my room
though, the furniture in it was older, bigger and darker, the
wallpaper wasn’t painted over (that had been one of Dad’s first
tasks), there were no posters, no collection of teddy bears on the
bed, no computer, no mobile phone recharging in the socket above my
writing desk: but in every other way it was identical. The same
high ceiling, the same ornate trinity-lampshade hanging from it,
the same square windows on either side of the bed, the same drapes,
the same built-in wardrobe with its massive doors.

The world in the mirror was the same as the
one I inhabited, only in a different time. I knew that

straightaway from the clothes the couple
were wearing, the way their hair was cut, the fact that I

saw them in black and white, unmoving, like
a still photo.

It goes without saying
that in my own mind I identified them as Laurie and Iris although
at the time I didn’t know for a fact that it was them. They could
have been anybody although my guess that it was Laurie and ‘The
Missus’ turned out to be correct. I think one of the reasons I
didn’t freak out completely was that my first instinct was to blame
Harry.
He
was
behind the mirror image.

For years, whenever I asked him how
magicians did their tricks, Harry’s second most favourite mantra
had been, ‘They do it with mirrors. Smoke and mirrors’. His most
favourite was ‘Magicians never reveal their secrets.’ (He tricked
me badly once by asking me straight after a particularly impressive
trick if I could keep a secret. ‘You

know you can trust me,’ I’d said, far too
eagerly. ‘Of course I can keep a secret.’ ‘So can I sis,’ he said,
‘so can I.’ And he walked off. Was that cruel, or what?)

‘
They can’t do it with
smoke or mirrors,’ I remember telling him. ‘If they did, then
you’ve just told me a secret, two secrets actually, which is
something you’re not allowed to do.’

‘
It’s only a saying. It
doesn’t mean anything,’ he replied evasively.

But it does, actually.
I’ve sneaked a look at some of his magic books and some
tricks
are
done
with smoke and/or mirrors. Especially mirrors.

I tried - unconvincingly - to convince
myself this

was just another of Harry’s magical tricks.
A very elaborate magic trick, to give him credit, but a trick
nevertheless, an illusion, nothing more than a

particularly impressive piece of
prestidigitation.

I lugged the mirror off the wall (it was
heavy and an awkward shape) searching everywhere for whatever
apparatus Harry had hidden behind it to create the effect of seeing
faces but I found nothing. The wall on which the mirror hung faced
a windowless opposite wall so there

was no chance that Harry had rigged
something up outside to project what I’d seen onto my mirror. If
Harry had been responsible for this, there was no way I could work
out how he’d done it.

Quickly I came to the
realisation that he couldn’t have done it. And if that were true
then I didn’t think even Harry would be able to figure out how what
had happened, had happened. So, after the first shock of seeing
Laurie and Iris, I im-mediately began doubting that I’d seen
anything out of the ordinary at all. It simply couldn’t have been
real. It wasn’t possible. I was asleep; I'd been dreaming;
hallucinating; in a temporary, migraine-induced trance, even though
I had no wavy line in the corner of my eye or the sensation of an
impending, sick headache.

Who was I kidding?

The result - I missed my bus. And I didn’t
feel like trying to make it in time for the next one.

Two more questions

At first, I tried to put
the mystery of the
how
aside and, instead, focused on a couple of other key
questions.

Think rationally about
what can be rationalized
. This was a
phrase I’d found in one of Mum’s

legal-aid advice books. (I quite enjoy
reading other people’s books. If they leave them lying around, why
not?) Firstly, who were the people in the mirror?

I didn’t want to leap to conclusions but the
most obvious possibility (as already stated) was that the young
couple was Laurie and Iris. I’d had no idea beforehand what they
looked like of course but who else could they be? Okay, maybe it
wasn’t exactly a rational realisation but it seemed logical enough.
Probably the two of them had been in the back of my mind ever since
May had talked about them that first and, so far, only time she and
Barry had been over at our place. And then the business with the
séance had reinforced it.

The second question was, why? It came in two
parts. Why had I seen them, and why had they shown themselves to
me? I didn’t have any answer at all to either of those. (Rational
thinking has its limitations.)

I decided my next strategy
would be to forget all about what I’d seen, to continue trying to
pretend I hadn’t seen anything at all. That turned out to be just
as impossible as what I knew I
had
seen. You can suppress fear but it simply stays
that way, suppressed. It remains there, lurking like a beast in the
background.

I found myself
looking
at
the
mirrors more often than I was looking
into
them as I waited for the next
time. Because there was going to be a next time, somehow I was
certain of that. The anticipation made me so nervous I found it
hard to

think and act normally. And of course I
began then to wish that we had never hung on to any of the wretched
mirrors.

Tied up, as it were

The next day, after breakfast, it was
somehow my turn again to tie Harry up in his straitjacket. I really
wasn’t in the mood as I’m sure you’ll appreciate. Despite
everything however, I tried to keep focused on the day’s pool plan.
I was determined not to miss that even if I didn’t feel much like
it. The thought of seeing the ‘backwards’ boy kept me resolute.

I said to Harry, ‘Why do you want to carry
on doing this?’ and he replied, ‘Why do you think?’

‘
Money and glory,’ I
snapped at him.

‘
Glory first,’ said Harry,
‘but money a close second.’

I felt claustrophobic just looking at him
swaddled in the thing. It gave me the creeps, in fact. Harry didn’t
seem one iota bothered (that means he didn’t care at all. Iota is
the name given to the smallest letter of the ancient Greek
alphabet) about what he was tied up in and who might have been
restrained in the straitjacket in days gone by. It gave me the
creeps but Harry was simply focused on escaping.

‘
Why don’t you admit you’re
never going to be able to get out of it?’ I said, much more
caustically than usual. Harry picked up my mood immediately and
gave me a sideways, irritated look.

‘
Because I will,
eventually,’ he said.

‘
You haven’t so
far.’

‘
Give me time.’

‘
The audience and the
judges of SHOW US YOUR TALENT won’t wait, not if it’s going to take
you this long. It’s painful to watch, not entertaining.’

‘
You’ll see. I’ll do
it.’

This seemed highly unlikely to me and I said
so.