The Houdini Effect Page 4

  different! The second was that, when she was

  around, Mum was able to offer me some quite useful writing and reading tips.)

  ‘Where be flowers?’ I asked.

  ‘Underneath all this lot,’ said Mum.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Hmm indeed,’ Mum said. I liked the way she sometimes used words but, right then, I didn’t like the tone of her voice. It was a voice that had switched to code. Her ‘hmm’ really suggested ‘work’. Translated literally it meant ‘weeding work.’

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ I said, quickly.

  ‘If we all pitched in,’ said Mum, more wistfully than expectantly, ‘we could soon turn this border into something lovely for the start of the summer.’

  ‘We?’ I asked. ‘You mean us, excluding yourself. You never have time for anything other than lawyering these days. You’re probably thinking about one of your clients right now.’

  ‘Things are busy,’ she agreed, evading a direct answer. ‘So many people need legal help in the run-up to Christmas.’

  ‘Christmas is nearly three months away,’ I said.

  ‘It seems to get earlier every year,’ Mum replied.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I have too much homework right now to spend time gardening.’

  Mum raised a doubting eyebrow. I noticed. I am very observant. A writer needs to be.

  ‘It’s true,’ I told her. ‘We have to begin a biography project these holidays.’

  ‘A biography?’

  ‘Uh huh. That’s school life for you these days, Mum. We students don’t have things as easy as

  you did in the good old days.’ (Mum snorted. You

  can see from whom I got my ironic/sarcastic streak.) I elaborated. ‘We have to write about a person we admire or want to emulate or just someone who’s done good deeds, who’s interesting, a bit different.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘That’s a wide open field to choose from.’

  ‘And there's the rub,’ I said. ‘The choice is too big. They can be living or dead. Where do I start? And the wretched thing has to be finished pretty much before we go back.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mum. ‘There’s absolutely no doubt then that you’ll be far too busy for a little spot of light gardening.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said. Unlike Harry, I do recognize irony and sarcasm when it comes my way but, just like Harry, I can let it ‘pass me by as the idle wind which I respect not’. (A line from Julius Caesar by Mr William Shakespeare. We did it in Year 9.)

  ‘How long does this biography have to be?’ Mum asked.

  ‘How long is a piece of string?’ I replied.

  ‘So, why aren’t you working on it right now?’ she asked cutting, as all mothers do, to the chase.

  ‘Because I’m talking to you,’ I said. ‘Walking the borders.’

  ‘Well, don’t let me hold you up,’ said Mum. ‘I shall just have to cope with the ‘weeds and the wilderness’ on my own.’ (Long live the weeds and the wilderness. In case you don’t know - I didn’t until Mum told me - these words were written by a poet called Gerard Manley Hopkins. Mum said

  they come from a poem of his called ‘Inversnaid’,

  which is the name of a town in Scotland. From

  what Mr Hopkins wrote I don’t imagine he was much of a gardener . . . but what lovely words. I will have to delve more deeply into his poems when I get the time.)

  ‘I’m sure you’ll make a great job of it,’ I said, ‘if you ever start.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Mum again. And then, true to form and although it was a Saturday, she suddenly remembered she had to write up some reports and disappeared to the office she shares with two other community-law lawyers on the far side of town.

  I could write about her, I supposed, or about Dad. But probably they’d never let me and would I really want to anyway? Did I admire them enough to want to emulate them? Had they done enough good deeds? Were they interesting?

  Hmm. Tricksy.

  A possible subject for a biography

  When I happened to mention my biography project to Harry (don’t ask me why I brought it up, I don’t remember, maybe at the time I was just desperate for something to say) he suggested - guess who? - Harry Houdini.

  ‘Somehow, I don’t think so,’ I said.

  ‘Why not? He’d be perfect. Interesting. Famous. Different.

  ‘Not different enough,’ I said to Harry. ‘Who doesn’t already know about Mr H Houdini?’

  Harry gave me one of his superior glances. I hadn’t seen it since the séance so he must finally have gotten over his disappointment of not having

  retained the upper hand then. ‘Bet you don’t know

  half there is to know about him,’ he said. ‘Not

  even a third. Not even a quarter. Not even a smidgen. I bet you don’t know anything. You only think you do.’

  ‘Boring,’ I said in reply. ‘And full of tautologies.’

  Nevertheless Harry lent me (wonders will never cease) his favourite and precious (to him) book about Houdini. I put it on my dressing table where it lay unread, slowly gathering a fine layer of dust.

  Not exactly barbeque weather

  As you now know before we - before Dad, that is - bought this house, an elderly, grumpy man lived here, alone (although, as I soon discovered, he hadn’t always lived alone). His name was Laurence Harvey Laurison.

  If Laurence Harvey Laurison had had a social media page during his later years he probably wouldn’t have had many, if any, friends who liked him. His was a rather sad tale, something along the lines of a weepy novel or a television soap.

  Before he became grumpy (or ‘a sod’ as our next door neighbour Barry called him) he was married to a lady called Iris. According to Barry, Laurie always called Iris ‘The Missus’. (I’m sure Laurie didn’t say these words with capital letters but that’s how I visualized them.)

  Laurie’s parents had built the villa originally and then, after Laurie got married, he and Iris moved in with his olds (I could never imagine doing that. Well, I could, but I didn’t want to. Any potential partner of mine would take one look

  at the mess and walk out on me) and, after they

  died, Laurie and The Missus stayed on.

  The house was like a car with only two owners except by the time Dad bought it, it had millions of miles on the clock and the engine had more or less dropped out.

  We didn’t know any of this until we got talking to the neighbours, Barry and May, who came round for a visit only a week or so after we’d moved in. Dad had invited them even though, according to him, they were a rather unusual, argumentative pair. He’d encountered them when he’d been at the house by himself renovating Harry’s and my rooms.

  Dad had fired up the barbeque specially. It wasn’t the sizzling season yet but Dad doesn’t need much of an excuse to grill and char. The day had started off frosty and fine and had ended with a rare-for-this-time-of-year nor’westerly wind blowing in across our back garden. To cut short the risk of more purple prose, the evening was very mild for late August.

  Comparing them with Mum and Dad, Barry and May were an older couple (although not old), early to mid-fifties I guessed. They seemed an unlikely combo. Straightaway I wondered how compatible they were. May was taller than Barry. That was the first thing I observed. I’ve read that men generally don’t like their partners or girlfriends to be taller than them. (Troy is taller than me. I know that’s superficial, like my collection of lipsticks, but still . . .) The second, less superficial, thing I noticed was that Barry was the talker. He was the matey one. I guessed that’s why Dad had invited him and May over in the first place. Deep down, Dad likes

  to pretend he’s a bit of a bloke’s bloke even

  though he drives an antiquated Skoda and doesn’t

  wear a proper builder’s apron.

  Being garrulous (means talkative, especially about things that don’t matter and using too many words) isn’t necessarily something that works against compat
ibility (oh shit, but if it does, does that mean I’m never going to be compatible with anyone?), it’s just that May seemed (at first) to be the complete opposite of her husband. She kept in the background, like painted-over wallpaper.

  At the start, she said hardly anything at all. She didn’t look totally depressed but I didn’t think she looked tremendously happy either. I wondered if she and Barry had already been together far longer than they should have been. I looked at Mum in case she was thinking the same thing.

  Interestingly, Mum didn’t look as if May had come as a complete surprise to her. That in turn made me suspect that Dad had forewarned her at a time when Harry and I hadn’t been in earshot.

  Sometimes I’d had a similar notion about Mum and Dad’s marriage, especially when I considered the separate sort of lives they led these days, not to mention Mum’s implied threat that Dad would have to go it alone if he kept on buying more houses. I have to say though, that in comparison with M and B, my parents positively glowed with togetherness. There was still a spark between them. With Barry and May the fizz seemed to have completely fizzled out, always assuming it had been there in the first place.

  It crossed my mind to wonder if Harry had noticed any of this. He’s not the subtlest of human beings. There are some things he just doesn’t seem

  to be aware of, such as the coded, silent messages

  people give out. Not that I’m boasting about

  myself, honestly, I’m just being truthful.

  When I was younger, Mum used to say I was a ‘sensitive’ person. ‘Thin-skinned’ Dad sometimes called me when I had one of my childish tantrums. (Those tantrum days are long gone. Now I’m patient and long-suffering, as you can tell from my encounters with Harry.) Then, I didn’t like being called sensitive, or thin-skinned. Nowadays I take it as a compliment rather than an insult. I under-stand a person has to be sensitive in order to be a writer and by sensitive I mean perceptive, empathetic and aware. Besides, in my opinion sensitive people aren’t necessarily thin-skinned at all. I’ve read that writers, in particular, have to be thick-skinned in order to survive all the criticism they get.

  Laurie and Iris

  Both Harry and I had wanted to invite some of our friends to the barbeque. As well as inviting Em and Rach I’d been nervously considering inviting Troy, too, but Mum ruined that notion.

  ‘Let’s wait until we’re a bit more settled before we invite any more people,’ she’d said.

  I had a sneaking suspicion that she hadn’t been very keen on a barbeque that night, much less on having anyone over. As I’ve already said, it was Dad who’d pushed for it even though he didn’t often do something that Mum wasn’t keen on (except for buying old houses, that is. A BIG exception).

  Anyway, over the sausages, steak and hot

  potato salad, Dad went on about his plans for our

  house. ‘Once it’s finished, the Historic Places

  people will be falling over themselves to list it as a A-category building,’ he boasted. By that stage of the evening he’d just finished his first glass of wine and one is all it takes for him to start getting swimmy and talking silly.

  ‘Really?’ Barry queried, looking sceptically at the house. ‘It may have been an okay place once, but now . . .’

  ‘Take no notice of him,’ said Mum, meaning Dad and his exaggerations. ‘It’s nothing special, just an ordinary twenties villa, but it will look a lot better when it’s finished.’

  The conversation about the house went on in this vein for quite a while. Harry, I suspected, was already bored out of his brain. Even I was getting fed up with it when, during a conversational lull, May’s quiet, unassuming voice surprised us all by saying, ‘They loved this place.’

  ‘They?’ quizzed Dad.

  ‘Iris and Laurie,’ May said. ‘The couple who owned it before you.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Dad. ‘Do we know anything about them?’ he asked Mum.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she shrugged. ‘You told me the owner lives up north, that’s all I remember.’

  ‘That’ll be their son, Mitchell,’ Barry said. ‘He looked after Laurie’s affairs when the old man went to live in a rest home near him. We don’t actually know if the old bugger’s still alive, do we?’ He directed this question at May but without really looking at her or giving her a chance to answer. ‘Grumpy old sod. Never heard from him once he’d gone. No loss really. Never got on well

  with him.’

  ‘He would rather have gone to the rest home

  nearby,’ said May. ‘Stately Havens.’

  I knew the place although not as well as Harry did. (‘The oldies were asleep most of the time,’ he had told me. ‘Was that before or after you started doing your tricks for them,’ I had riposted. Verbal fencing. How I love it. Jab, stab and touché! Harry No-Chance, if I’m lucky, which isn’t that often.)

  ‘But Mitchell wanted him close,’ May finished.

  ‘If they loved this place so much why didn’t they look after it properly?’ said Harry sourly. Hearing him ask a question when I thought he must have tuned out, surprised me almost as much as having heard the soft but intensely serious sound of May’s voice a few seconds earlier. I would not have blamed Harry if he had fallen asleep standing up, like a horse. Even for a writer, despite people dynamics being of no small interest to me, the conversation up to now appeared to have taken a tedious turn for the worse. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  May’s muted voice eventually sounded again, answering Harry, by the time the rest of us had just about forgotten what his question had been. ‘Laurie couldn’t do much anymore. He’d had bad arthritis for years. It became a lot worse after Iris died. Before that, the house was very well looked after.’

  Harry shrugged. He didn’t really care. Neither did Barry, it seemed. He said something to Dad about the barbeque and then they were off discussing the latest makes and models and how Dad had an idea for making a permanent place for the new machine he was almost certain to buy in

  the very near future. (First we’d heard of it!)

  Dad insisted that Barry follow him down into

  the garden so he could show him the proposed spot. Harry, after muttering something about having to practise his magic tricks, also sloped off, proving my point about how good he is at certain kinds of escapology. (Even before the talent quest Harry was always practicing. He claimed it was one of the burdens of being a prestidigitator. Practise makes perfect he always said. Actually, I understood and agreed. The same thing goes for writing.)

  Mum and I were left alone with May.

  ‘Boys and their toys, eh?’ laughed Mum. May smiled back self-consciously. Then followed, as the books say, an awkward silence. May didn’t seem the sort of person who’d be interested in a lengthy discussion about barbecues.

  ‘How long ago did Iris die?’ I asked for the sake of saying something.

  ‘Quite a long time before Lawrence went to live in the home,’ May answered after more long, dreary moments of silence, during which I started to wonder if she’d even heard my question. ‘It must already be more than fifteen years ago. They were both in their late sixties then. She got

  cancer. It hit Laurie very badly when she died. Then, on top of that, his arthritis became worse and worse until in the end he found it very difficult to get around.’

  Mum nodded glumly. ‘Even the late sixties aren’t very old these days,’ she said.

  Mum and Dad were both on the wrong side of forty themselves so the combination of the words ‘old’ and ‘age’ did not appeal to them at all. Hence

  my warning to Harry about his ‘old’ Houdini.

  Based on Mum’s comment, Houdini was still

  positively youthful when he died.

  ‘You’re right,’ said May. ‘But there’s no such thing as a disease that stops to consider its victim’s age.’ (Yes, I know. HEAVY stuff. Sorry about that. One of the burdens of being a writer. It’s not all sweets and confetti. I’ll try to keep my narrativ
e as light as possible but I suggest you skip whatever bits you feel you need to.)

  That was the end of that particular sentence, but the full stop was not the end of what May wanted to say. So much for her earlier reticence. I had the sudden premonition that she could become unstoppable. It was like a tap washer had split. (We’d had our fair share of leaking taps since we’d moved in so I know what I’m talking about.) The water didn’t start to gush exactly, it just began to drip. Most steadily.

  ‘Up until then Lawrence did most of the maintenance on the house himself,’ May said. ‘Barry felt . . . ’ she glanced furtively into the gathering gloom of the garden, ‘. . . Barry felt that Laurie’s standards were far too high. Because

  Laurie judged him you see and found Barry wanting.’

  ‘Did he?’ said Mum (I’m not sure who the ‘he’ referred to, Laurie or Barry. You decide.)

  In the pause that followed Mum and I looked at each other as furtively as May had done. It was as if we could read each other’s minds. We could both ‘see’ what May was getting it. She was saying something (between the lines) about Barry. But what? And how could we ask her what she

  really meant unless May herself was prepared to

  say?

  It didn’t seem as if she was.

  ‘Well, Laurie would have got on well with Jim,’ Mum said at last. (Jim = Dad)

  ‘Like a barbecue on fire,’ I said, making an extremely feeble joke.

  Another pause. What the stories call a pregnant pause. And then came the birth contractions, each one several seconds apart. (I don’t hold with medical metaphors but you can’t always get away from them.)

  ‘. . . Laurie and Iris were always out working in the

  garden once Laurie retired . . .’ May said.

  ‘ . . . they had lovely flowerbeds each year . . .’

  ‘ . . . and mountains of vegetables . . .’

  ‘ . . . it was very sad that they didn’t get to enjoy their retirement together for long . . .’