‘. . . Barry’s right and wrong about Laurie,’ May said, just as Mum was about to make another neutral sounding comment. ‘On the surface he wasn’t a very nice man after Iris passed away . . .’
‘No?’ said Mum.
‘ . . . but underneath he was the same as he’d always been . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘ . . . an old-styled gentleman.’
Was I right in thinking that once again we were supposed to read between the lines here?
(DEEP THOUGHT WARNING #4) Reading between the lines, did this mean that even though Laurie hadn’t seemed so nice anymore, underneath he still was. And was May therefore hinting that
the opposite was true of Barry, that he seemed
okay on the surface but, underneath, he wasn’t
nice at all? Or was I inventing all this simply to keep boredom at bay?)
May’s next contraction was swifter than the others. She seemed suddenly a lot more alert - on edge - than she had been up till now. Her words surprised Mum and me with their hint of ferocity.
‘I don’t think leopards can change their spots so quickly and completely, do you?’ she said.
Leopard spots
Maybe Mum was on more confident ground here. Perhaps her legal mind was able to analyze the possibilities and work out, with greater certainty than I could, who and what May was talking about. I could only guess. Was Laurie the leopard? Or was Barry? Was the reference to leopards a significant metaphor or just a cliché?
‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ Mum replied, slipping her professional voice easily into the conversation. Maybe she was already subconsciously starting to think of May as a client rather than just a neighbour. To date, Mum had deftly tackled a few acrimonious cases of separation and divorce. Had she suddenly sensed another one on the horizon?
Whoever the leopard was, I wasn’t so sure about them not being able to change their spots. Some things did trip people over the edge and change them completely. Good people turning bad, bad people turning good.
There was a story in that. Probably lots of
stories.
‘Laurie never accepted that Iris was dead,’ May suddenly said. ‘That always bothered me.’
‘You don’t mean he thought she was really still alive?’ I said, feeling a bit freaked out myself at the idea of that. ‘Did he imagine she was talking to him or something?’
I was reminded of Harry’s botched séance and how, for a short while, the experience of it had seemed so creepily real. How would I have dealt with a dead and disembodied voice if it had spoken to me through a medium, especially a medium called Harry?
‘No,’ said May, ‘not exactly. But . . .’
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Dad and Barry sauntering back to the house. May must have spotted them too.
‘. . . not long before Laurie left,’ she said, speeding up, ‘he let slip to me that he was still waiting to hear from Iris and was really aggrieved that she hadn’t been in touch with him. It seemed almost as if . . . well, as if she’d broken some kind of promise to him.’ (Now it was definitely starting to sound like séance stuff. Later on I wrote in my writing journal - something every serious writer should have - that May gave birth to a notion that had never seen the light of day before. Totes melodramatic, I know, and still in a medical vein but it seemed so accurate a description at the
time.) ‘But perhaps Laurie was losing his mind and that’s why his son Mitchell wanted him to go up north. That’s what Barry believes, anyway. Gaga he called him.’
‘Sounds as if it would have been far better if he
had stayed around here,’ said Mum. ‘Gone to Stately Havens like you said. Everything would
have been far more familiar to him.’
‘Laurie certainly never wanted to leave,’ May reiterated. ‘In fact, he always insisted he wanted to die in this house, his home. But we don’t always get to choose what we want in life, do we?’
May was well and truly winding down now, just at the point when what she was saying was becoming more interesting. Even Harry, had he stayed to listen, would have pricked up his ears at that latest bit. (Imagine if Laurie had died in this house. Yikes! Harry would have been more right than he knew.) Dad and Barry were back from their barbeque sortie, their loud voices already soaking up the sad atmosphere May’s story had generated.
I surprised myself by asking May one last question. I didn’t want her to have to feel that she had to cease and desist just because the menfolk had returned. Barry especially.
‘When did Laurie leave?’ I said.
‘Late last year,’ May said in a whisper, having to make a real effort now that Dad and Barry were listening in, too. ‘Mitchell was trying to do his best, encouraging his father to move north so they could be close to each other. We shouldn’t blame him,’ she said. ‘Laurie lived alone here until he turned eighty-one. It was obvious it couldn’t go on. Something had to change. The house was starting to fall down around him.’
‘It’s not as bad as all that,’ said Dad, typically focusing on the only thing that really interested him, the bit about the house being close to collapse. His ears were instinctively tuned to
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.
The Houdini Effect Page 5