A House Without Mirrors Read online

  Kajsa was kneeling by the oven door. She was still wearing her coat and wellies, her blonde hair gathered back in a hard, taut ponytail.

  “Who ordered a calzone?”

  No one replied. No one ever ordered calzone, but Kajsa always bought one in any case, every time.

  “Ah well,” she said grumpily. “I suppose I’ll have to eat it myself then.”

  She always said that too, every time.

  “Is there one with pineapple on it?”

  Everyone froze, as if they didn’t understand where the clear, tiny voice was coming from.

  Only Dad and I looked at Signe.

  “What was that, Signe?” Dad said carefully, as if he didn’t want to frighten her. “Would you like one with pineapple? A Hawaii?

  Signe nodded.

  “I like Hawaii,” she said loud and clear. “I like pineapple.”

  Kajsa gave a short laugh, but you could tell she was still grumpy.

  “Holy Moses, the child speaks!” she said. “Well, well, I suppose she can have some of Thomas’s, then.”

  Dad nodded and Signe smiled, showing all her teeth. I don’t think I’d ever seen her do that before.

  “Thomas can have some of my pizza,” she said. “We can swap so that it’s all fair.”

  She really was completely different. It was strange, but at the same time it felt quite normal. As if something inside Signe had suddenly been turned on.

  The mood around the table brightened after she had said that thing about the pizza. Not happier, exactly, but more animated. Uncle Daniel, particularly, looked at Signe more often than he normally would, and he even stroked her cheek once. I was thinking how weird it was that everyone was so surprised, because we all knew that Signe could speak. It was just that she wouldn’t normally do so.

  The rare good spirits lasted for at least ten minutes, with no one quarrelling with anyone else. But at about the same time that Erland slid off his chair and sneaked out without saying thank you, the conversation slipped back into the same old pattern as always.

  “So what’s new, Thomas?” Kajsa said, wiping her mouth roughly with a napkin.

  Dad, who was huddled over his pizza with that distant look in his eyes, looked up.

  “What?”

  “How’s she doing?” Kajsa said again. “Any change?”

  Dad looked around as if he couldn’t really be sure who we all were. It occurred to me that he had gone somewhere far inside himself.

  “What?” he said again. “Sorry, I was just…”

  His voice died out in an apologetic mumble.

  “Has the old bag said anything?” Kajsa said slowly and deliberately, as if she was talking to a child. “You are up there twenty hours a day, Thomas. You must have something to tell us.”

  But Dad just shook his head.

  “She is weak,” he muttered, taking another bite of his cold pizza. “It’s hard to know what she wants. Sometimes you can tell that she wants some water, or—”

  “She wants water?” Kajsa was almost yelling. “Well, isn’t that great? It’s bloody perfect!”

  As she stood up the legs of the chair screeched against the stone floor. She threw her napkin onto her half-eaten pizza and started folding the pizza cartons with angry, jerky movements.

  “But, Kajsa—”

  “This won’t do, Thomas!” Kajsa interrupted, staring at Dad. “Can’t you see that I have a business to run? Kjell’s struggling to keep up with the books, and Wilma’s missed almost a month’s worth of riding lessons!”

  Dad opened his hands in a helpless gesture. Then he pushed the last bit of pizza into his mouth, and after chewing for a little while his eyes disappeared into the distance again.

  “Go home, then,” said Daniel with an annoying little smile. “No one’s forcing you to stay, are they?”

  Kajsa turned to him. Her eyes looked as if she were peering at a snake.

  “That would suit you just fine, Daniel, wouldn’t it?”

  Her voice was quieter now, but just as angry.

  Wilma glanced at me and I saw that her throat and cheeks were flushed. I knew exactly what she was thinking. Nearly every night we had discussed how hard it was when the grown-ups fought. Dad never fought, of course. But that was almost as bad.

  “I have to ring Kjell,” Kajsa muttered, taking her squashed-up pizza carton to the sink. “Not that I have a clue what to say to him.”

  Wilma rolled her eyes and sort of glanced towards the place in the ceiling where her room was. I nodded carefully, so that only Wilma could see.

  She got down from the table first, then Uncle Daniel and Signe. Dad and I stayed in the kitchen to clear up.

  There was no washing-up to do, exactly, but I flattened the pizza cartons and placed them on top of the others on the pile by the stove. Dad was rinsing the glasses with his shoulders hunched up; his entire back was tense and stiff.

  “Thanks for supper,” I said when I was ready. “I’ll go up and see Wilma for a while before I go to bed.”

  Dad turned his head. At first it was as if he couldn’t see me, or didn’t know who I was. Then there was a little smile, like a brief glimpse of sunshine through a cloud.

  “Sleep well, sweetheart,” he said, and grew serious again. “Don’t forget to call Mum.”

  Sometimes I remembered what Dad’s eyes looked like before Martin died. They were completely different. Rounder, and sort of glossier, and I wondered if they weren’t bluer too. How could eyes change that much?

  “Blame my mum.”

  Chapter Four

  IN WILMA’S ROOM

  “Ah, it’s driving me mad! Why does it have to fall over all the time?”

  I got up from Wilma’s bed and walked over to the desk where she was sitting.

  The little pocket mirror she’d borrowed from Kajsa had slid down once again until it lay flat on the tabletop. I picked it up, then fetched a book from the pile on the floor and propped it in front of the mirror as a support.

  “Thanks, Tommy,” Wilma sighed, pulling the top off her eyeliner pen. “Remind me again, why don’t they have any proper mirrors here?”

  That was the strange thing about Wilma’s voice. It changed according to whom she was speaking to.

  When she was with her mum she spoke quietly and rarely, and with her so-called friends from school she sounded stupid and giggly. But when it was just the two of us, her voice sounded the way it was supposed to be. I loved Wilma’s real voice. She was the only person in the whole world who called me Tommy.

  “Henrietta had them removed,” I said, picking up another book and flicking through it. “When she left the theatre.”

  The book was in English, a novel about vampires. It wasn’t really my kind of thing, but Wilma liked that sort of stuff. She read really thick books set in fantasy worlds, about knights and wizards. I put the book back on the pile and saw Wilma’s eyes squint into the tiny mirror as she drew a black line across her eyelid. Her eyes always looked strange and small when they weren’t being enlarged by the thick lenses of her glasses.

  “Did she think that she had grown ugly?” she said. “Or, you know, old?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and it was true. “I don’t think she was all that bothered about that sort of thing. Dad said that she wasn’t at all vain back when she used to appear in the newspapers.”

  “Me neither,” said Wilma quickly. “Vain, I mean.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Wilma was sensitive about her appearance, especially when she was about to meet up with the girls from her class. They were always talking about clothes and hairstyles and that kind of stuff.

  Wilma went to school in another part of the city, some distance away. I’d only been there once, to see a school cabaret that Wilma had written the script for, but that was enough for me never to want to go again. I was freezing the whole evening, although the hall wasn’t particularly cold. The chill came from the way Wilma’s schoolmates and their parents looked at Dad and me. Or, ra
ther, how they avoided looking at us. No one even asked who I was, and they talked to each other in a way that made you feel stupid. Mum said it was a school for snobs and it was a shame that Wilma had to go there.

  According to Wilma it was a good school, and you could get into any college if you got good grades from there. It might be true, I don’t know.

  “When is the party?” I asked. “Not tonight, is it?”

  “Tomorrow,” Wilma said. “I’m just trying out some new make-up. Actually, I don’t really want to go.”

  In spite of the fact that only people in her class were going to the party, and in spite of the fact that she always says that she couldn’t care less about them, Wilma had bought one hundred and fifty kronor worth of make-up. A new dress too, and Kajsa had helped her pick it. I wondered if I would be like that too when I reached ninth grade. It was only two years away. Would I suddenly find myself spending a whole hour sitting like that, trying out my make-up, just because I was going to a party the next day? It seemed unlikely.

  Wilma moved the eyeliner to her left eye and I held my breath. It was her right eye that was the weak one. I knew she could hardly see a thing when she closed her left eye.

  “But you have to make a bit of an effort,” Wilma said, drawing a shaky line across her fair eyelashes. “Life gets easier if you look nice.”

  This time it was Kajsa’s voice I heard, sort of breathing under Wilma’s own.

  Kajsa had probably once used exactly those words, and they had lodged themselves in Wilma like the truth. She paused with her eyeliner in the air and turned to me.

  “You are lucky, you are, Tommy,” she said. “Your eyes were already made up when you were born.”

  Before I could help myself, my hand flew up to the point where my black eyebrows almost met just above my nose.

  “Blame my mum,” I mumbled. “If she hadn’t plucked her eyebrows they would have looked just like mine.”

  Wilma replaced the top of her eyeliner and opened a tube of mascara.

  “I know, we read about it at school,” she said. “If one parent has dark hair and brown eyes the kids get them as well. It’s a law of nature, like.”

  “But not always,” I said. “The dark one can have a light predisposition, and then the child can end up blonde anyway. That’s the way it was with…”

  I fell silent, but it was too late. Wilma looked at me with her partly made-up eyes.

  “That’s how it was with your little brother,” she said slowly. “You think of Martin nearly all the time, don’t you?”

  I looked down at my shoes and shrugged.

  “Mum says…” I tried, but it wasn’t as easy as that, of course. My voice thickened and I had to wait a few seconds before I could carry on.

  “Mum says you have to move on. Hold on to the memories and let go of the grief.”

  “That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard!” said Wilma. “As if you could just make up your mind about it!”

  When we were alone Wilma came right out with things like that, even if she’d never dare to say them if somebody else was there. But it felt good when she did. The air immediately grew cooler, and it became easier to breathe.

  “Kajsa hates it when anyone cries,” Wilma said as she started to colour her eyelashes with small, firm strokes of the brush. “It must run in the family.”

  “But my mum doesn’t belong to this family,” I said.

  Wilma looked up, really surprised.

  “She doesn’t?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Mum’s not related to anyone here apart from me.”

  Wilma was quiet for a moment. Then she sighed.

  “No, that’s right,” she said. “It’s Thomas and my mum who are related to Henrietta. Jesus, I can never keep all that stuff in my head. She is sort of their aunt, isn’t she?”

  “Great-aunt,” I said. “Henrietta was the younger sister of my great-grandfather on my dad’s side, who was your great-grandfather on your mum’s side, and—”

  “Okay, okay, okay!” Wilma said, waving a pink lipstick wildly in the air. “So she’s the great-aunt-granny-aunt to my great-grandmother’s second cousin’s cousin. That’s what I said all along!”

  I laughed. “Okay.”

  “That’s it,” Wilma said, throwing away the tissue that she’d wiped her lipstick on. “Does this look all right for tomorrow?”

  “Lovely,” I said. “You look a lot older, kind of.”

  Wilma turned her head and looked at her reflection in her pocket mirror. She didn’t seem to like what she saw.

  “But do I look cuter?”

  I shouldn’t have hesitated, of course, but I did. For maybe only a fraction of a second, but it was enough.

  “Sure, absolutely. But you also look lovely just the way you are.”

  Wilma looked serious, almost impassive. But without warning a tear welled out of her right eye, the weak one.

  “Thanks,” she said in a completely normal voice with the tear rolling down her cheek, leaving a grey snail trail of make-up in its wake. “But you don’t have to lie, Tommy. I know that I’m fat and ugly.”

  “But you are not ugly! You are…”

  I went completely cold when her round face screwed up in tears, like a clown’s mask. Wilma’s weeping could be so forceful that it scared me. Like watching an accident happen. Her shoulders started shaking, but there was no sound. I wanted to soothe her, say something that would help, but there was nothing I could say.

  “Why?” she sobbed. “Why didn’t I turn out pretty? Like Mum.”

  My own eyes grew dim and my nose pricked. I still didn’t know what to say, but I leant forward and held Wilma while she cried. Her large, warm body shook in my skinny arms and I pushed my mouth into the soft curls at her ear.

  “I don’t know, Wilma,” I whispered. “I don’t know.”

  If only they knew.

  Chapter Five

  A PRAYER

  I only started to cry when I was by myself again. That’s how it always happened.

  I lay there in my bed in Henrietta’s house, and felt wave upon wave of weeping washing through me. The waves began like a tickling in the stomach, and they continued in a rolling cramp that pressed the air out of my lungs and up through my throat. There was nothing I could do to hold back the tears, but I could at least stay quiet. I was always able to do that.

  I think I inherited my silent crying from Dad. On quite a few occasions I walked into Henrietta’s room and saw him sitting with his face buried in the duvet and her hand in his. There was no sound, but you could tell from his back that he was crying. I always went before he saw me.

  When the tears finally dried up I was no longer sleepy. The house was quiet all around me, so the others had probably gone to bed. I wrapped the duvet like a mantle round my shoulders, got up and walked to the window.

  It was a clear night, with a full moon and lots of stars in the sky. A man with a dog was passing by, and he stopped by the garden gate. Both the dog and the man lifted their heads towards the house with the dark windows. I often saw people doing that, and every time I wondered what they saw. How much did they really know about those of us who lived in Henrietta’s house?

  Some things were known to everyone in the neighbourhood, of course. The house had been here for over a century, and our family had owned it all this time. Dad said that we used to be rich, when Granddad was little. And almost everyone knew who Henrietta was. Or at least that she used to be a famous actress and that she would soon be dead. People who regularly walked past the house probably knew that her family was here to look after her, and that we came and went, taking turns to look after her. A large, wealthy family where everyone takes care of everyone else and no one has to be alone.

  If only they knew.

  Uncle Daniel still had some kind of a job at the university, but Mum said that was just because they couldn’t get rid of him. Erland was seriously wrong in the head, and Signe seemed afraid of almost everything.
Kajsa and her husband Kjell were always busy with their advertising agency. They’d go shopping, and take Wilma out, but it was as if they were never really part of what was going on around them. Wilma said that Kjell drank wine every day, and that Kajsa probably did too but she was better at hiding it. And Wilma ate too much and Kajsa hardly anything at all.

  Not that Dad and I were much better. We had been here for months now, and with every day that passed it was as if things were slipping a bit further away from us.

  The world out there, and Mum too. Although she had been drifting away for a long time now, ever since Martin died.

  I don’t know how we ended up like this. We were a normal family once, but without anyone noticing we started falling apart. Like when the nuts are shaken loose on a bike.

  When I was little, Mum, Dad and I used to do everything together. There was a kitchen table where I used to sit with my crayons and paper and do drawings for Mum. Dad used to sit opposite, writing. Once, in the library, I found books that he had written. There were several of them listed in the catalogue and I had never even heard him mention them before.

  I didn’t dare take Dad’s books out of the library, so over the course of several weeks I went there every afternoon to read them. They were good, actually. No wizards, no murders; just stories about ordinary people living their everyday lives. The kind of stuff that I thought I would write about myself, if I could.

  Dad no longer wrote. He only looked after Henrietta and me. Mum didn’t want to be looked after, so he rarely saw her. They weren’t divorced or anything like that, but Mum lived in our flat and Dad and I lived at Henrietta’s. It felt as if it had been carrying on like this for a very long time.

  Would it have been better if I had moved in with Mum?

  The very thought made me panic. I couldn’t leave Dad, although I didn’t actually think that he needed me. And what could I do for him, anyway? I couldn’t save him. Not alone.

  Please help us, I thought, closing my eyes. Make us into something different than we are. Something better.