The Houdini Effect by Bill Nagelkerke Page B

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