The Houdini Effect (3 page)

was a great handle for a promising writer to
have

and I allowed myself to agree. At least,
with the ‘promising writer’ bit. But I decided that when I wrote my
first book the name on the cover, spine,

half-title page, title
page and imprint information page would definitely all be
Athena
.

Rumours of a 'backwards' boy

I’d expected to spend the
school holidays starting and finishing a wretched biography
project; malling (as in shopping
mall
-ing); partying; perfecting my
backstroke in the state-of-the-art, heated, indoor pool at the
newly opened leisure centre where I, along with my best friends
Emma and Rachel, would admire the hunky high school boys who went
there to show off their pectorals and six-packs. Especially Troy, a
year ahead of me, who had my favour and who, in truth, was far less
of a show off than his mates, one of the reasons, I guess, why I
liked him as much as I did.

None of those things necessarily in that
order.

I can’t honestly say I’d
noticed Troy ever noticing me but I’d certainly had my eye on him
for a while. As I’ve just made clear it wasn’t just his good looks
either, my attraction to Troy was not as superficial as that. I
liked to believe that if we ever had the chance to discover it,
there would exist between us what writers call a
sympathy
. (i.e. being
able to understand or share the feelings of someone else.) At the
very least it seemed to me that people named after famous and
ancient cities should support one another. I lived in hope that
Troy would come to the same conclusion one day, sooner rather than
later.

Emma, who knew more about these things
than

I did (she’d had two sort-of boyfriends
already and consequently, or coincidently, had a particular
interest in ancient history), reminded me that the

Greeks and the Trojans
fought each other bitterly for ten long years. Oh well, I said to
her, history doesn’t always have to repeat.

Harry had once repeated a
rumour (circulating at school, so I’d already heard it for myself)
that Troy was often referred to as the ‘backwards’ boy on account
of his predilection for throwing the more-than-occasional backwards
word into his conversations. I’d never talked to him so I wouldn’t
know if this was true or not but I supposed it had to be. Everyone
has their quirks, I guess, so why not someone as good-looking as
Troy? I wouldn’t hold it against him. (How was I to know how
practical this predilection would turn out to be?)

To continue . . . I didn’t expect instead to
spend my holidays haunted by mirrors and being trapped in the
house. House arrest by choice I suppose you could call it.

To add insult to injury I kept being called
upon to release my devious little brother, in his obsessive quest
for talent quest fame and fortune, from his self-imposed
incarceration in the carapace of a straitjacket. (Isn’t ‘carapace’
a lovely word? I heard someone say it on the radio. It was
another

writer so I had to steal it. That’s what
writers often do, steal as well as tell lies. I’m amazed that there
aren’t more writers in jail.)

In the course of the two week break I had
hoped and planned to escape as often as possible from the
(mad)house and my biography project. The last

thing I’d expected was for the house itself
to close in around me like a prison. Thank God for the cellular
phone. It saved me, as you will see.

Obsessions

As I write this I realise
that in ‘the olden, golden days’ - i.e. when I was younger - I
would have been perfectly happy to spend my school holidays at home
and do very little else but read and eat. Eating was still an
important and favourite pastime (eating
well
, it goes without saying), and
so was reading but both to a lesser extent than before. I still
scanned my bookshelves most days but not with such a focused eye.
The familiar spines of my books had started to shout loudly at me,
accusing me of neglecting them. And it was true. Many of the books
I had once read and reread had not been opened even once during the
past year, longer if I’m honest. And I hadn’t purchased a single
book in the past twelve months. Buying books used to be another
obsession of mine. Now, when I wanted to read something new I
downloaded books from the library’s website. I spent my money on
other things. Things that might possibly have the effect of
transforming Athens into Athena, even without a legal change of
name.

(DEEP THOUGHT WARNING #1) I have to be
honest and tell you that when I realized that I had used the word
‘effect’ here, I was reminded of Harry and his magical ‘effects’.
Maybe we weren’t that different after all, at least not in the way
we

spent our money on things that would help us
alter

our own, and other people’s perceptions, of
the

reality that was us. For instance I had a
luscious collection of lipsticks in a range of subtle yet
compelling shades. (In truth, not that luscious or subtle, they
were actually rather cheap ones.) I

tried them out (on?) when I went poolside,
possibly not the best time to wear lippy un-less I’d splashed out
on waterproof colours.

(DEEP THOUGHT WARNING #2)
Sometimes I worried that I could be so concerned with
superficiality. Perhaps I wasn’t a real writer after all. However,
I told myself that for the sake of life and living there were times
when even the rules governing a literary life had to be broken. It
helped console me in the dark, uninspiring times. Perhaps I was
just going through the phase called ‘being a teenager’.

Talking about obsessions,
I’m not sure what is most difficult: having a brother obsessed with
escaping from things; a father obsessed with doing up old houses;
or a mother obsessed with her new-found career and second life as a
community lawyer (a transformation Harry and I once agreed was
undoubtedly her way of not having to sand, polish and paint ever
again. Clever!)

It wasn’t always like
that. Once upon a time we were an ordinary family, living in an
ordinary house. By ordinary, read ‘normal’. By normal I mean a
house that was modern, if not brand-spanking new. A house made of
permanent materials rather than impermanent ones like wood that
rotted away if left unpainted and became infested with borer if
left untreated. (Dear Reader, we’re in the Southern Hemisphere,
remember,

where much is made of wood.) A house where
everything worked as well as could be expected, where hot water
came out of taps labelled ‘hot’, where windows opened at once
without fighting

back, where heat was
trapped by double glazing and thermal-lined curtains rather than
escaping through cold, thin glass despite the presence of thick,
old-fashioned drapes. (You see, even the heat got away from this
place. It was better at escaping than Harry).

Dad went mad for the first
time (
house
mad,
that is) when I was around six or seven. Mum, to start with, went
along with his madness. She wasn’t a community lawyer then. They
sold our perfectly acceptable home, the one in which Harry and I
had spent our first formative years and bought a ramshackle,
run-down-and-out weatherboard (that translates as ‘wooden’ in
Southern Hemisphere terminology) place, in one of the oldest parts
of town. They did it up (it took about a year), sold it and
straight away bought another equally bad house and began renovating
that one.

Buying and selling
properties, moving in and moving out of houses, became the pattern
of our lives from then on (and it’s not the sort of pattern that
Chaos Theory would approve of, certainly not my interpretation of
the Theory.) Except I should say that well after the third house
was finished but before the fourth house was complete, Mum had what
she called a Damascus Moment and began studying law at uni. From
then on Dad became a solo renovator. Mum (and we) lived in the
houses that he bought but Mum kept her distance from the renovating
and reselling rigmarole that Dad’s

obsession involved. She now had an obsession
of her own to nurture.

Curiously, the better Dad
got at it the more of a perfectionist he became (i.e. he got slower
and

slower.) As a result, buying and selling
houses became less and less profitable. Eventually Mum
metamorphosed into the main breadwinner while Dad more or less
became a full-time, one-house-only (this house) repairer and
restorer. (In his former life - his glory days, perhaps??? - he had
been an accountant. I’m not sure how good he’d been at this. After
all, it was a long time ago.)

Damascus

Of course I had to know what ‘Damascus
Moment’ meant. That is one of the pitfalls of being a writer.
Little things swell in a writer’s mind the way courgettes (a.k.a.
zucchinis) balloon so quickly into fat marrows. Writers develop an
inbuilt urgency to know. Knowing things, or having to know things,
is their obsession.

Damascus turns out (funny
that) to be the name of yet another ancient city, older even than
Athens or Troy. It’s in present-day Syria and was the place to
which Saint Paul was headed when he converted to Christianity
(
and
changed his
name by just one letter, from Saul to Paul!) He’d had an
over-whelming vision of God, apparently, afterwards becoming a
changed man, not to mention a rabid traveller.

That, apparently, was his ‘Damascus
Moment’.

Maybe we all have moments
like that when everything changes, now and forever. Mine was just
round the corner.

PART TWO

The Middle

(Well, why not? Isn’t that how all stories
are structured? With a beginning, a middle and an end. I’m up to
the middle bit now. It’s the longest part, as middle sections tend
to be.)

Houdini could escape from anything (bar
one)

‘Houdini could escape from
anything,’ Harry told me around the time of the séance.

‘
Didn’t he die young, or
something?’ I said casually, vaguely remembering a snippet of
information about the great man, information that Harry himself had
undoubtedly once passed on to (a then disinterested) me.

‘
He was actually pretty
old,’ said Harry said. ‘Fifty-two.’

‘
Don’t let Mum and Dad hear
you say that!’ I warned him. ‘As if fifty-two is old to them.
Anyway, like I said, there was one thing which your idol didn’t
manage to escape from.’

‘
What was that?’ asked
Harry, momentarily tricked.

‘
Death,’ I said, feeling
ridiculously pleased with myself for believing I’d got one over on
Harry.

I should have realized that Harry would
always have a comeback even if, in this case, it wasn’t a complete
contradiction of what I’d said.

‘
He gave it his best shot,’
said Harry.

I knew he was just dying for me to ask what
he

meant by that but I wasn’t going to take the
bait. Looking back, I wish I had asked. The knowledge might have
helped me sooner rather than later.

In Laurie’s house

Harry didn’t seem to mind the constant
change and upheaval that trading in real estate involved, certainly
not nearly as much as I did. (Why is it called ‘real’ estate, as
opposed to ‘unreal’? I didn’t quite get it. Dad once tried to
explain that the ‘real’ is something to do with ‘immovable’
property but it still seemed like a loose use of the word to
me.)

Harry was already living in a magical world
of his own by the time of the second house renovation. It was a
world in which he had hardly any responsibilities unless you
counted as ‘responsibilities’ his constant desire to improve his
people-fooling skills and his attempts to manipulate victims
(mainly me) into helping him.

Actually, all things considered and in
retrospect, I didn’t have all that many worries and
responsibilities either. Mum and Dad were perfectly capable and
rational about most things even if at first they (together) and
later Dad (alone) were beyond reason when it came to doing up old
houses.

But still, I hated all the
shifting and everything that went with it. It got to the point
where I couldn’t even be bothered unpacking all my stuff whenever
we moved into a new old place and arranging it into some sort of
permanence because nothing ever
was
permanent. It seemed to us kids that we’d forever
be living in a kind of holiday house/camp ground
arrangement.

Then, everything changed.

Mum, in a rare moment of
distraction from her Damascus Moment (i.e. her community law
career) said just before we moved into Laurie’s villa (not at all
like an Ancient Roman villa, by the way, just our Southern
Hemisphere term for a particularly old house. Weatherboard, of
course), ‘This is the
last
one!’

Dad, amazingly, did not
make the mistake of disagreeing. After all, even though she had
withdrawn her involvement in the nuts and bolts of renovation, Mum
was still forced to be a part of it just as Harry and I were. I
don’t think Dad would ever have contemplated ‘going it alone’,
com-pletely alone, if that was what ignoring Mum was going to
mean.

‘
Upsizing’ was the word Dad
used to optimistically describe our final move. No one else felt
optimistic. The opposite, in fact. I called the last move
‘desperately downgrading’. Not only was Laurie’s place the biggest
house we’d ever owned it was also the most dilapidated. All those
big rooms with their high ceilings. The wide, shadowy hallway. The
dim, dark panelling encrusted with years and years worth of dark,
dismal, depressing varnish.