The Houdini Effect (2 page)

Anyway, to get to the
point (I admit, it can often take me a while) it’s the perfect room
for a séance, for calling up the dead or the
may-quite-likely-be-dead. The table at which we are sitting (no
surprises, it also came with the house) is a smallish, one-legged
round one. On one side sit I while, just an arm’s length away sits
my younger brother Harry. How crazy is this? I, the older sibling
by three years, am doing exactly what my eleven-year old brother is
telling me to do. At times like this, when he is at his impressive
best, I tend to forget he is a magician (in training) and I forget
he is a liar (no longer in training, but an expert).

‘
Don’t talk,’ he commands
me, enjoying the power trip he is on. I fall silent.

‘
Shut your eyes,’ My
eyelids close tight. Well, for the time being. Long ago I resolved
never to make promises to a magician, no matter how impressive.
(The magician, not the promises.)

Of course, I don’t know if Harry’s eyes
are

closed or not, but I can
sense that he is con-

centrating hard. Eventually, as the waiting
becomes too prolonged (and tedious) and hoping he won’t notice, I
open one of my eyelids a fraction. I can barely glimpse Harry in
the self-imposed gloom. Even so, I am able to sense, if not
properly see, his tightly focused frown as he does his damnedest to
conjure up the ghost of the grumpy old man who used to live here.
(More about him soon.)

Reluctantly, I shut out the light once more.
Harry is the only one of our family who has ever shown signs of
being superstitious yet, despite my best intentions, I find that I
do not want to spoil his spell. Perhaps I too am susceptible to
supernatural suggestion. (The hand may not be quicker than the eye
but the mind is far too easily taken-over by the imagination. Good
for a writer - when writing - but not so good for a mainly
sceptical and rather reluctant guest at a séance organized by a
magician.)

I long to ask Harry if he has made a
‘connection’ yet but I remain silent. From what Harry has told me,
I know that any sound I make might break the link he is forging
with the spirit of the old man. For some reason Harry believes that
something - possibly an ‘essence’ - of Laurence Harvey Laurison
came with the house along with all the other fittings and
furniture. To begin with I am sceptical. Very. That is changing. I
can’t help it. My eyelids flick open again. I can’t help but shiver
either. What’s happening?

I shift slightly on the hard,
bum-uncomfortable chair. In the gloom I can just make out Harry,
both

his eyes wide open, staring blankly ahead of
him.

He must be able to see that I am disobeying
the

rules but, if he does, he
doesn’t comment or criticize. Is he in a trance? He seems to be
seeing something or is it someone? What, or who, is it?

The single sliver of light from the crack in
the drape just happens to reflect in the mirror behind me. The
light bounces back onto Harry opposite, enough for me to see his
enlarged pupils and the narrow seas of white surrounding them.
Harry suddenly groans. It doesn’t sound like Harry at all. It
sounds . . . well, it sounds exactly like the sort of groan a very
old, possibly very grumpy, man might make. An old, grumpy man in
pain.

I jerk with shock. My
chair leg seems to be scraping back over the wooden floor. Except
it’s not my chair. Harry’s? Of course it is. It
has
to be his, there’s no other
chair at the table. But wait. It isn’t a chair at all, but the
stork-leg of the table that moved. Is still moving. On no, now the
whole table is convulsing!

Is it Lawrence Harvey Laurison, Laurie for
short, doing this? The thing is, we don’t know if Laurie is dead or
alive. None of us knows for sure, neither our neighbours, May and
Barry, who knew Laurie, nor Harry who is trying to call him up.

Before we started this I
said to Harry (with heavy irony), ‘Would it not make all the
difference in the world to the success or otherwise of the séance
if you knew whether or not Laurie was actually dead?’

Harry looked at me when I
said that. He doesn’t much like it when I use long words and/or
speak in a formal, writerly way. Likewise, irony pisses him off big
time. (Even more ironic is the fact that he’s

unlikely to know that I’m using a technique
called

irony, and what irony is exactly.) Pissing
off a

mostly super-confident younger brother is an
excellent achievement.

Furthermore, my syntax (that means ‘sentence
structure’) forces Harry to think about what I might or might not
mean and therefore it slows him down, a helpful technique whenever
I need an advantage over him.

This particular question, though, fell flat.
When Harry eventually deciphered what I was asking him, he declared
it wasn’t important.

‘
Athens,
it’s his
house
spirit
I want to attract,’ he
explained, in his most annoyingly pompous voice. ‘The part that
stayed in the house. I thought you’d understand that.’ (Naturally,
Harry’s accidental use of irony manages to piss me off much, much
more than my deliberate use does him.)

House spirit

House spirit? Come on! Who are you fooling?
Has anyone ever heard of such a thing? Not me, that’s for sure.
Hardly surprising though especially if, as I imagine was the case,
Harry made up the term on the spot.

I try to remember if Harry has ever shown a
previous interest in calling up the dead, or ‘house spirits’, or
whatever he wants to call them. I don’t believe so. It’s only ever
been magic tricks and, more recently, escapology that have been his
passion. Harry’s greatest hero is the magician and escape-meister,
Harry Houdini. Having said that, I do remember Harry once telling
me that Houdini

was also into all this spirit-searching
stuff. I’m not

sure, however, if holding a séance will go
down

very well in a talent quest, assuming that
is why Harry is trying this. I should have asked him, I suppose.
More about the talent quest later. But, for now, back to the
séance.

Harry’s hands are still folded over mine. As
usual, his are hot and sticky. Yuck! Our two pairs of hands rest on
the tabletop. The toes of our respective shoes have been touching
each other the whole time. So, how does the table move? How does it
jump? Yes, believe it or not, the table is now jumping. Only bunny
hops, the sort of moves a learner driver might make before stalling
the car (I speak from experience) but, still, it’s movement where
there should be no movement at all. Scareee! (Impressively so!)

Hop. Clunk. Hop. Clunk. The table moves
left, it moves right. It strains upwards, pressing against our
flattened hands. The table starts to rise. OMG, it’s
levitating!

I cannot believe it!

Soon the spirit of Laurence Harvey Laurison
will appear like a dark vision between us. He will mutter, grizzle,
groan. Perhaps he’ll instruct the two of us about some unfinished
business he wants us to complete on his behalf. That’s what
apparitions do, isn’t it?

Anyway the ‘signs’ of his coming are exactly
what Harry had predicted would happen once - or if - he managed to
communicate with the ‘other side’.

Exactly
.

Less is more.

And, suddenly, I smell a rat. (A figurative,
not

literal, one although in this house the
appearance of a real rat would not have come as a big
surprise.)

Maybe because things are
happening too accurately, they are no longer quite so believable.
Maybe because I have spotted the slight, hardly noticeable lift of
Harry’s mouth, the beginning of that supercilious smirk he gets
when he knows that, despite my way with words, he’s on the winning
side of an argument.

I snatch my hands away and reach over the
back of my chair to click down the light switch, which luckily is
within easy reach.

Now I see it all. The whole set-up has been
another one of his elaborate magic tricks. And, I have no doubt, an
expensive trick into the bargain. You wouldn’t believe how much
some of Harry’s magic apparatus has cost him over the years. His
pocket money (miniscule, as is mine) and paper-round earnings
(slightly less miniscule) all go towards buying, or paying off,
tricks - what Harry calls ‘effects’. And this is not to mention
Xmas and birthday gifts. It’s so easy to buy presents for Harry.
Just give him money.

I have been set-up; seduced by the dim
darkness and Harry’s patter.

‘
You rat!’ screams Harry.
(I know he also means it figuratively but, all the same, it feels
literal.)

Well, he should know both kinds of rat when
he sees them. Boy, does he hate it when I uncover one of his
secrets, because magicians are never, ever

supposed to let their secrets get away from
them.

I’m not a magician. I could, if I wanted,
reveal all about the séance. But I won’t. I have a writer’s

proper sense of mystery.
(And, looking back at the séance, a prickly sense that said séance
was uncannily prophetic.) Less is more, don’t you agree? Pity that
Harry didn’t think the same. I would never otherwise have suspected
him of cheating.

By any other name

If you recall (but only if you’ve been good
and haven’t skipped anything) a few pages back you’d have found out
what my name is. I’d rather not have given it away but, in a book
like this - autobiographical (despite what Ms Kidd believes) and
therefore with a first person narrator - the writer doesn’t have
many choices. I guess I should devote a few words explaining how I
came to be labelled with it. I mean, my name.

My parents were both on their OE (Overseas
Experience) and met on the Acropolis in Athens. (Athens is the
capital of Greece, but I’m sure you knew that. The thing is, I
don’t want to assume the knowledge you bring to this story.)
The

Acropolis is a large rock
in the middle of the city and on this rock is a ruin called the
Parthenon, the ancient Greek temple to the goddess Athena. I’m not
completely convinced that this combination of things really had
anything to do with them falling in love with each other except,
the way they tell it, it did.

Dad says, very poetically, that when he
saw

Mum for the first time it was like seeing a
living, breathing vision of Athena. Mum says when she saw Dad it
was like seeing a ruin, even if he

wasn’t quite as ancient as
the ones surrounding them. ‘Joke, joke,’ she always adds. But I
think there was some truth in her comparison. I often wondered if
Mum had had a premonition that Dad and ruins would somehow always
go together. How else would we have ended up in this extreme ruin
of a house? (More about this soon, I promise.)

The logical thing for them to have done when
I was born, and something I would have understood and appreciated,
was to have called me Athena after the stately and magnificently
composed Greek goddess. Not an inappropriate choice of course,
given my outward nature. Who would have foreseen that they’d
choose, instead, to call me Athens, the name of the city for God’s
sake, not the goddess, and by all accounts a chaotic, shambolic
city, totally unlike my outward personality.

I’m sure don’t need to tell you that Athens
is not a very prolific first name. Personally I don’t know of any
other females, anywhere, called Athens. Not long ago I looked it up
on the web and found it’s used as a boy’s name but even then the
website said it was a very rare choice of name for a boy. Duh!

If Mum and Dad were really
keen on geographical names for their first-born then why not select
something that sounded as beautiful as it looked in the pictures,
like Jamaica or Malindi? (I used to spend long hours poring over
the maps and photographs in my World Atlas, searching for the
perfect name. These were my top choices. I

suppose I should have been relieved that my
parents didn’t call me Galapagos, the turtle island they once went
to and which would have been a

far worse a name than Athens.)

Whenever I complained to
Mum or Dad (and it was nearly always one or the other, never both.
Hardly surprising considering the miniscule number of times their
separate orbits intersected) and swore to them that I wanted,
really, really wanted -
had
- to change my name, nothing more than a
teeny-tiny (but very significant to me) alteration to the last
letter, they both simply shrugged and said that I could do this
legally when I turned eighteen. (This meant that they must have
occasionally bumped into one another, otherwise they wouldn’t have
been singing from the same song sheet, would they?) So until that
happy event arrived (my eighteenth birthday), they suggested I
remember that cities were usually thought of as female and that,
after all, the city of Athens was derived from Athena. As if either
of those things helped. My name, nothing more than a
derivation!

They left me with no choice. Whenever I had
to tell someone what I was called, I fudged the last letter and if
they happened to come to the conclusion that I was called Athena
rather than Athens I didn’t bother to correct them. That way I got
by. This method did not help with friends and other people who had
known me a long time. They called me Athens, regardless of how I
felt about

the name and I suppose I got used to it,
just as they had. My English teacher, Mrs Tyrell, was very kind and
sympathetic and assured me that Athens