The Houdini Effect by Bill Nagelkerke Page A

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