A House Without Mirrors (3 page)

“A
h, 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, rather, 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.”

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.

When I looked up again the man with the dog had vanished. It was cold by the window, so I lay back down on the bed again. My body felt empty and calm and I knew that there’d be no more crying that night.

I looked up at the ceiling and wondered why it was that Mum never cried and I cried so seldom. Why Dad only cried when he thought no one was watching.

I sometimes wondered why the whole world wasn’t crying all the time.