The Houdini Effect (12 page)

‘
Oh, I don’t necessarily
have to interview anyone,’ I said. (This was actually true.) ‘We
can research from books and the internet if we can’t decide on
anyone local, contemporary and easily available to talk to. (Also
all true). And so it doesn’t have to be about someone still alive.
(True, too). But, like I said, Laurie and Iris sounded interesting
people when you and Barry - well mainly you - were telling us about
them. (Sort of true. They had become, through no fault of my own,
much more interesting since.) So I thought, why not do them?’ (Not
true, not until that

very moment.)

‘
To be honest, there
probably isn’t a great deal more I can say about them,’ said May.
‘They were both rather private individuals as people their
generation tended to be. And in the years after Iris died, Laurie
turned into something of a recluse.

Eventually he didn’t even want to talk to us
anymore.’ Automatically, her voice dropped. ‘Well, even to me, to
be exact. Before that he never liked to talk to . . . well, anyway,
maybe I can add a few extra colours to the picture if I put

my mind to it.’

‘
A picture would be
perfect,’ I reminded her, trying to sound firm. ‘The project needs
to be illustrated so unless you happen to have a photo of them
there probably isn’t any point in going further. I’d have to choose
someone else.’

I crossed my fingers behind my back.

‘
As it happens I do have a
photo,’ said May. ‘Not of Iris, just of Laurie. It was taken a
while after Iris died, before Laurie got really miserable and
retreated into his shell. It was on or around his seventieth
birthday as I far as I remember. I organised a little party for him
and for his and Iris’s friends, not that there were a great
many.’

‘
That’d be
prefect.’

A photo of an old Laurie minus Iris wouldn’t
be as good as a young Laurie with Iris but it would be better than
no photo at all. With luck I’d be able to recognise the young in
the old.

‘
Can you show me now?’ I
asked, hoping I wasn’t coming across too eager, or too bullying. I
didn’t want to sound like Barry.

‘
Of course,’ May said,
‘Come in.’

So I followed her inside.

The weight of the world

(Full of DEEP THOUGHTS, mainly May’s, not
mine, so don’t shoot the messenger.)

As I had anticipated, I envied May and
Barry's house even if their garden was too well organised for my
liking. It was about the same age as ours I guessed, although
smaller. Unlike ours it had been

thoroughly modernised. ‘Completely ruined’,
Dad

might have described it but who cared. It’s
not as

if Dad was that pure
himself anyway, he wasn’t intending to keep our place in its
pristine, original form.

Here, at least one of the
internal walls had been taken out to let the morning light flood
through. Panelling had been stripped back to the bare wood and
re-varnished a light, golden colour; while the plaster walls above
the panelling had been painted a soothing apricoty-white. Some of
the ceilings had been lowered while all of the old wooden window
frames had been replaced with aluminium look-alikes. (You see, I
know what to look for in a house. All those years of shifting from
place to place and listening to Dad have sharpened my real estate
skills. Unreal!) There was an air con unit in the lounge into which
I followed May and no musty smells anywhere. Lovely.

‘
The photo album I want is
in here,’ said May opening one of two doors at the bottom of a
china cabinet. She rummaged for a while and eventually surfaced
with a red-covered album. ‘Sit down. I’ll show you.’

‘
This is actually our
twenty-fifth wedding anniversary album,’ she said, her already
quiet voice dropping another decibel or two. ‘I remember putting
Laurie’s photo at the back where there was a spare
pocket.’

‘
Twenty-five years is a
long time,’ I said, wondering if I’d been wrong about the
in-

compatibility of May and Barry. Mum and Dad
had been married for sixteen years and in some ways that felt like
forever to me.

‘
I suppose so,’ said May.
‘Sometimes it feels shorter than that, but mostly a lot longer.
Which of

course it is. It’s just over thirty now.
Probably from your perspective a quarter of a century seems

a long time.’

‘
From anyone’s, I would
have said. Have you and Barry got any kids?’ I added, scaring
myself by my own inquisitiveness (although for a writer this was a
perfectly natural thing to be). It wasn’t something I’d been
particularly curious about but as soon as I asked it I realised
that I was. I hadn’t seen any family photos anywhere. Perhaps there
were some in the anniversary album.

May shook her head. I couldn’t tell if she
was annoyed with me or not. ‘No,’ she said, adding, ‘We never got
round to it.’

I wasn’t sure what to say to that so I said
nothing. Never got round to it. She made it sound like not having
kids was sort of accidental when for lots of people the accident
was in having kids! ‘Curiouser and curiouser’ as Alice said.

May flicked efficiently through the pages. I
could see only fleeting glimpses of her and Barry. At a dinner
table somewhere, eating, chatting, posing, toasting, being toasted
. . .

‘
Must be nice to have those
memories,’ I said.

‘
One of our friends took
the photos and presented us with the album,’ May said. ‘She was my
bridesmaid at our wedding, in fact.’

‘
It’s great you’re still in
touch with each other,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Mum is in touch with
her bridesmaid anymore.’

‘
She didn’t only take the
photos, she organised the dinner and everything,’ May said.
‘Invitations, the lot. Without her . . .’ She hesitated. ‘You’re
obviously a perceptive young woman,’ she said to me, out of the
blue. ‘So perhaps you’ll understand

when I say that I wonder sometimes if all
the trouble she went to for Barry and me was really worthwhile and
if her friendship was misplaced.’

I wanted to believe May
when she said I was perceptive but then, when I realised I didn’t
entirely understand what she was talking about, I wondered if it
was
her
judgment
that was misplaced.

‘
But aren’t you glad you’ve
got all those memories, ’ I said a second time.

‘
I wanted to be happy with
them and I was for a while but, honestly, they matter less and less
now. Memories are funny things, Athena. You think you’ll have them
forever, unchanging, but like everything else they shift about and
what you think was an accurate recollection goes and changes on
you. Or, at least, you as a person changes and your memory alters
at the same time. You look back and ask yourself, was it really
like that, the way it seemed, or was it totally
different?’

Maybe I was perceptive, after all. ‘Is it
Barry?’ I asked. ‘Is it because of him that you can’t enjoy
remembering things the way you want to remember them?’

Naturally I hadn’t expected any of this. To
be honest I didn’t really need May telling me her private stuff,
not on top of everything else that was happening, but what could I
do? I couldn’t run away from her. For some reason she was trusting
me with her secrets, me, a person she hardly knew

and had only met once before. I guess I felt
I had to meet the challenge of the trust she was placing in me.

May said, ‘It’s maybe more
that at the start I
let
him stop me, while these days I stop
myself.

Because he stopped caring,
ages ago. Now I don’t

know if he ever cared. Time doesn’t stand
still,’ May went on. ‘We have to go along with it even though some
of us resist. These days Barry looks in the mirror and he doesn’t
see in it what he’d like to see.’

I could relate to that!

‘
And when he looks at me,’
May went on, ‘it’s the same story. He doesn’t like what he’s seeing
anymore either.’

‘
Then why don’t you . . .?’
I began.

‘
Get away? Leave him?’ said
May, looking round the room towards the brow-beaten garden. She
shook her head. ‘Somehow we’re locked together and we can’t get
free of each other. I can’t explain why. Not to you. Not even to
myself. Don’t get me wrong. Barry’s not violent or abusive. Mostly
when it’s just the two of us, he’s simply silent. The silence is
crushing sometimes. It weighs on me. It’s so heavy I can’t seem to
move. I can't act.’

‘
Perhaps my Mum can help,’
I ventured.

‘
What can she do?’ May
asked.

‘
She’s a lawyer,’ I said.
‘Specializes in relationships. ’

May shrugged as if to say, ‘Lawyers, what
possible use are they?’ (A lot of people seem to think that about
the legal profession. I suspect legal beagles get an even harder
time than pen-pushers.)

‘
It might be a place to
start?’ I said. ‘She’s good at giving advice, anyway.’

‘
Maybe I will,’ said May.
She sighed again and, with an effort, refocused on the album,
turning to the last page. ‘But you haven’t come here to
listen

to the story of my life,’ she said. ‘It’s
Laurie

you’ve come about. And here he is.’

The man in the mirror

She turned the album for me to see. ‘This is
Laurie, alone in the photo just as he was in real life at the
time.’

I looked at the picture. The Laurie in the
photo was different from the Laurie I had seen in the mirror,
something that was not in the least surprising given that here he
was a lot older. But the harder I stared at him, the more familiar
he became. A long face; straight, badly cut hair at the sides; head
bald in the middle; a mouth unsmiling, serious, sad and . . . yes,
angry too.

The Laurie in the mirrors
had straight, thinning hair too, he just wasn’t bald like his older
version. His younger face was rounder but still long and his mouth
had a serious look even then. In the mirrors it had been smiling
and, as far as I could re-member, there hadn’t been any anger there
at all. But in those early days Laurie had had Iris to keep him
company. In May’s birthday photo of him you could tell straightaway
that, despite the celebration with friends and neighbours, Laurie
was miserably alone.

‘
It’s not a great shot but
it’s all I have,’ said May apologetically. ‘Perhaps not enough for
an illustrated project?’

I felt guilty. The project excuse had gone
straight out of my head.

‘
No,’ I said. ‘You’re
probably right. It’s quite a small photo and, like you said, it’s
the only one you’ve got.’

‘
The only thing I can think
of that you could do,

if you still want to go ahead with your
project about Laurie and Iris, is to write to him. I’ve got
Laurie’s rest-home address.’

‘
You’ve only heard from him
the once though, isn’t that what you said?’

May nodded. ‘The chance that he would write
back to you is slim, I’m afraid.’

‘
Probably zilch,’ I said.
‘I mean, why would he write to me, someone he’s never even heard
of, when he wrote only that one time to you guys? To you. What if
he’s died since?’

‘
It’s a possibility,’ said
May. ‘But there’s no harm in trying if you want to pursue it.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’

‘
You could give me the
address,’ I said. ‘I can think about it.’

May found where she had kept it and wrote it
on a piece of paper for me.

‘
Thanks for showing me the
photo,’ I said, getting up to leave. ‘It was nice seeing what
Laurie looked like, in any case.’

Why I’d used the meaningless word ‘nice’ I
didn’t know. Just being polite. It confirmed that Laurie (and Iris
by default) was the man in the mirror but what was ‘nice’ about
that? At least I knew now that they weren’t some other people
altogether, that would have been even harder to deal with. I would
have been back at square one knowing even less than I knew now.

‘
I think Iris must have
been very good-looking when she was young,’ May said. I wondered if
this was going to be the start of another drawn-out conversation,
like the one at our house when a tap seemed to have been turned
on.

‘
They had a lot of photos
of themselves in the

house you know, wedding ones, family ones
and so on. I thought she was quite beautiful. It’s so sad that she
died young, well relatively young, and sadder still that Laurie
found it so difficult to live life without her.’

May sounded terribly stricken herself almost
as if . . . well, almost as if she was jealous of Laurie and Iris,
not only of their happiness but also Laurie’s sadness. Weird but,
given the sort of uncaring person Barry appeared to be, maybe
understandable, too. Perhaps sadness was a kind of parting gift
when it came from happiness to begin with, because you couldn't
have the one without having had the other.

‘
Anyway, you know I have
this photo if you decide you do want to do your project on Laurie
and Iris,’ said May, ‘and I’m sure I could dredge up some other
useful verbal memories for you. But if I were in your shoes I think
I’d tackle an easier subject.’

That was the chance for me to go. I hadn’t
planned on staying so long anyway. But now something kept me
talking. I guess I sort of felt I’d be abandoning May if I left
immediately. Besides, I didn’t have the impression that she was in
a hurry for me to go.