Read Online The Houdini Effect by Bill Nagelkerke - Free Book Online Page A

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