The Houdini Effect (17 page)

than during its sojourn in the garage.

‘
You finished it?’ I
asked.

‘
Course.’

‘
Fast worker.’

‘
Focused, that’s
me’

‘
That’s what . . .’ I
stopped.

‘
What?’ asked
Harry.

‘
Nothing.’ I’d been about to say that May had used that very
word about Harry - focused
and
intense - but did I want Harry to know that May
and I had talked about him? No. He’d ask why. He’d get
paranoid.

As it turned out I don’t
think it would have mattered much what I’d told Harry. He was much
more interested in the talent quest than about a half-finished
sentence. Now that he had given up on getting dressed in a
straitjacket having ‘perfected’ (his word. Highly unlikely, in my
humble opinion) the chest-escape, Harry was just going to wear his
‘normal’ clothes. Normal for his magician’s clothes, that is. Top
hat, tie, tails. Very trad I said and Harry said it was the retro
look. I guess he had a point. He could have been echoing

my musings about the retroness (is that a
word? I don’t know. Who cares!) of letter writing. Retro is
obviously in fashion.

‘
This is what you have to
do as far as the pointing and waving is concerned,’ Harry
explained.

‘
I’d almost forgotten I had
to do that,’ I said.

‘
I hope not.’

‘
No, not really,’ I assured
him.

‘
Stop wasting time then,’
he said. ‘This is the deal. You point at me. You wave at the
chest.’ He demonstrated by rippling his hand and arm

alluringly in the air. ‘But,’ he emphasised,
‘only when you’re supposed to. That’s critical. You have to get
people to focus on what I want them to focus on.’

‘
Yes, you told me.
Distraction. Besides, I’m getting to know your methods
Houdini.’

‘
It’s not really
distraction as such, it’s misdirection and . . . well, never
mind.’

‘
Professional secret,
right?’

‘
Maybe.’

‘
So when is the right time
to do this . . .’ and here I imitated his flowery gesture, ‘. . .
and how will I know it’s the right time?’

‘
We’re going to have a
rehearsal right now,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you through your
paces.’

‘
Are we?
Appreciate the advance notice. And I’m not a racehorse to be
taken
through my paces
I’ll have you know.’

‘
Neigh,’ agreed
Harry.

Sometimes that boy is infuriatingly and
deviously clever. In spite of the recurring rancour between us I
have clearly been a positive influence on his language life.

What else did I have to do
that day? Everything and nothing. I felt exhausted but, all the
same, I acquiesced. As things turned out, in the end Harry realised
(if he hadn’t already planned this in advance) that I could
actually become a much more active part of his new, improved act,
if I were game enough to try.

Harry had, in fact, practised the chest
escape really well. He impressed even me. He folded himself inside
the chest, minus his top hat and tails (these

he flung to me in a
dramatic gesture and I had to catch them, not part of the original
deal I protested but I did it anyway), and got me to chain and
padlock it. (Someone from the audience would be

asked to do this in ‘real life’. I refrained
from asking where Harry had got the chains and locks from in case
it was the same person who had provided him with the straitjacket.
If it were, I decided it was better not to know. I’d only be even
more curious about this person who knew where to get hold of such a
random collection of restraining devices.)

Thirty seconds later Harry
was out of the chest. I couldn’t believe it. From straitjacket
struggles to chest escape success. Amazing!

My role was a little more
than just to point, wave and be a catcher of clothes. During the
rehearsal I had to hoist a curtain over the chest and hold it in
place. Harry had rigged up a circular screen using my old hula hoop
(Q: ‘Where did you find that?’ A: ‘In the garage along with the
chest.’) with a shower curtain looped around it. I did inquire as
to the origins of said curtain since it looked suspiciously like
one that Mum had bought

a while ago and stored away until Dad did up
the bathroom. Harry, needless to say, did not reply. He certainly
hadn’t found it in the garage.

The curtain had to be held up high enough to
shield Harry immediately before he reappeared on top of the chest
in which he had been locked. Because it was too hard on my arms to
hold it that high, I stood on a stepladder. I had to face the
audience (imaginary at this stage) as I wasn’t allowed to look down
into the screen and see how Harry managed his escape.

‘
I’ll tell you later,’ he
said.

‘
You’d better,’ I
replied.

It wasn’t until we’d practised the trick (or
‘illusion’ as Harry preferred to call it) a few times

and I was rather
un-expectedly imagining myself being on a real stage with real
people watching the real performance, TV cameras ogling nearby and
feeling nervously excited about the whole thing, that Harry
suddenly had another ‘brainwave’.

‘
You know,’ he said, ‘we
could make this thing even better. Bigger and better.’

‘
We could, could we,
secret-keeper? How? And do I really want to know?’

‘
Maybe you do,’ said Harry.
‘Listen. This is what happens now. I get locked up and I can
escape, real quick.’

‘
You don’t say.’ (Remember,
irony is wasted on Harry.)

‘
Other magicians do a swap
as well as an escape. Houdini did it brilliantly.’

‘
That figures.

‘
It’s called the Sub Trunk
Illusion,’ said Harry. He was getting really excited
now.

‘
Swap? Sub Trunk? Explain,
maestro. Are we

talking submarines here, or what?’

‘
Just be quiet a minute,’
Harry said. ‘Sub stands for substitution. Swap, in other words. The
assistant who holds up the curtain, or whatever it happens to be,
swaps places with the magician. He gets out, she ends up locked in
the chest.’

‘
Are you serious?’ I said,
feeling my throat and chest suddenly constrict at what Harry was
implying. Me, shut inside the wooden chest?

‘
I know you get scared in
small places,’ said Harry, ‘but this wouldn’t be for long. You
won’t

have time to get scared, believe me.’

‘
Long enough,’ I said. ‘No
way.’

‘
I’d have no choice but to
let you into the secret then,’ Harry said.

‘
You don’t have any choice
but to tell me anyway. You promised,’ I reminded him.

Harry made no response to that. Instead he
said, ‘Maybe you’re right Athens. You wouldn’t be any good at it.
Just forget I asked.’

I knew his game and wasn’t going to fall for
it. On the other hand he was correct about me always having been
claustrophobic. Maybe Harry was unknowingly offering me a way of,
as they say, facing my fear and doing it any-way. It was worth
thinking about. What’s more, although the idea of a more active
participation in the performance, especially in the way Harry was
suggesting, spooked me greatly, it also strangely tempted me (and
this was the part that I found really hard to comprehend.)

‘
I’ll have to think about
it,’ I said, playing for time.

I never thought I would have felt anything
like excited about getting hooked up into the public

performance thing. I‘d always thought of
myself as the ‘typical’ writer, re-served and shy, saving my true
self for the written word. I didn’t have a page on social media and
I’d never contemplated the idea of having my own blog, both of
those things being way too ‘out there’ for my liking. So what was I
thinking, implying to Harry that there was even the slightest
possibility that I would become an integral part of his act?

Harry, as I could have predicted, was in a
huge

hurry.

‘
Don’t take a long time
thinking about it,’ he warned me. ‘We’re moving into a critical
time period here. Soon there won’t be any going back,

whatever you decide.’

I’d forgotten the talent quest was so soon.
There were too many competing concerns. But I seemed to be on a
treadmill that kept on turning, compelling me to turn along with
it. There wasn’t any going back for me either.

Party time

That afternoon I saw Laurie and Iris again.
While I’d been expecting another ‘mirror-vision’ (mirror ‘invasion’
to be more accurate) when it came it was still accompanied by that
disconcerting mix of disbelief, fascination and fear, not to
mention disconnection from the real world.

Again it was in a different mirror, the
large one in the lounge (a.k.a. the séance room) just to the right
of the dry-rot infested and dangerously disintegrating chimney.
Because it was a large mirror the picture leapt out of it as if it
were in 3D.

I almost expected stereo surround-sound
effects but of course there was none of that. Like the previous
images this one was flat, still and silent . . . a mirror image of
another one of the photographs that Laurie and Iris would once have
had on their walls. Maybe this connection (still conjectural, I
hasten to add) made the image even more potent. The past and the
present merging for a few brief moments of time.

A birthday party was in progress. Whose
birthday

was it? Well, there was a cake that had what
looked like far too much food colouring in the icing and a little
boy who was gazing longingly, eagerly and expectantly at the cake,
waiting for the

word to blow out the candles that were
burning brightly. I could count eight of them so the probability
that this was Laurie and Iris’ son’s birthday was pretty high.

I brought my face closer to the mirror to
get a better look at Mitchell. This was my first glimpse of the boy
- in real life a man now - to whom I’d so recently written. I was
scared my breath would mist up the mirror before I got a clear view
although, even when my lips were almost touching the glass, nothing
seemed to disturb its surface. The boy had short back and sides and
a chubby, cheerful face. You couldn’t help but smile with him,
enjoying the promise of the celebration that was about to happen.
He seemed a nice enough, ordinary sort of boy. (But then so does
Harry and you know what sort of ratbag he is!). I wondered if
Mitchell’s birthday had been an especially good one. I wondered
what he’d been given for presents and if he’d had friends at his
party or if it had been

just him and his parents.

The picture made me remember my own
birthdays, and Harry’s. Ours were both in the summer, mine in
December and Harry’s in February (Southern Hemisphere, in case
you’d forgotten) and they were perfect excuses for Dad to haul out
the barbecue and invite people over. We’d always had lots of people
to our birthday parties, sometimes too many, but the celebrations
had always been fun times with food and talk, music and singing.
These days my birthdays were celebrated differently. Last year I’d
spent the day out with friends. This year . . . well, we hadn’t
planned it yet. The idea of an old-fashioned party somehow felt
appealingly retro.

I heard Harry call out. He was already
following up on me for an answer.

‘
Athens, where are you?
Have you decided yet?’

It was then that the
picture faded and dis-appeared. Great timing!

‘
Gross,’ he said when he
saw me peering at my reflection. ‘Talk about Narcissus.’

‘
What do you know about
Narcissus?’ I asked.

I was far too surprised by Harry’s reference
to the classical god of vanity, doomed forever to love himself
because he spurned the goddess Echo, to feel embarrassed at being
caught at what looked like mirror-kissing.

Harry smirked. ‘I’m not such an ignoramus as
you seem to think I am,’ he said.

‘
Anyway, I was only . . .
only . . .’

‘
Don’t bother to think up
some feeble excuse,’ he said. ‘I don’t really care. I’ve always
known

that you love yourself.’

‘
But I don’t, I wasn’t . .
. oh, never mind you silly little boy, you’d never understand, not
in a million years.’

‘
Have you decided?’ Harry
repeated.

I made a big show of looking at my watch.
‘It hasn’t been that long since you asked me,’ I pointed out.

‘
Plenty of time for normal
people to make up their minds,’ Harry said. ‘Girls on the other
hand, a certain girl who I won’t name but who isn’t

anywhere near normal, not lately anyway . .
.’ He turned to go. ‘Remember, the clock’s ticking.’

Hadn’t I been normal lately? Behaving
normally, that is? As normally as I could have in the
circumstances? Maybe not. It was hard for me to tell. Had the
stress and anxiety been eating away at me like the dry rot in the
bricks and was I about to fall completely apart, shattering in a
cloud of mortar dust? Was it obvious to everybody except me? The
clock was definitely ticking.

‘
Wait!’ I said to Harry. ‘I
wanted to ask you something as well.’