The Houdini Effect (4 page)

The fact that this was
ostensibly going to be Dad’s last chance to do up a house only
meant that the renovations were likely to take longer than ever,
maybe
forever
,
and that there was a good chance we’d be camping out for the rest
of our lives, or at least until I was old enough to leave home, get
away, escape from the squalid family nest. I felt personally
downgraded.

Mum stayed alert to the situation long
enough

to insist that Dad
renovate our rooms first and
before
we moved in so that when we shifted we could
establish ourselves in our own spaces and, at long last, arrive
with a sense of ‘this is it, we’re here to stay.’

It was something of a quick-fix job, not up
to Dad’s acquired-over-time perfectionist standards but it was
better than living inside a construction site. Besides, Dad’s
less-than-perfectionist work on our rooms was what most
do-it-yourselfers would call top-notch.

Compared with what we’d had before, our
rooms were lavishly big. That made up for a lot of the
inconveniences we knew were still to come. We could closet
ourselves away and, if we chose, shut out the sounds of demolition
and reconstruction reverberating outside our closed doors. Was it
any surprise then that Harry’s interest in one of magic-trickery’s
specialist branches, escapology, really began to flourish soon
after we moved in? I mean, his room and mine were ones into which a
person could so much more easily escape and disappear.

For those interested in arcane matters, more
about Dad’s methods

(For those who are not, you have my
permission to skip to the next chapter.)

From the outside - when you pass by a
typical house renovation - you might see sturdy scaffolding
surrounding the structure. SUVs (one, two, sometimes even three)
are parked

swaggeringly on the driveway and on the
street.

Whatever the weather, brown, bronzed
builders disport themselves in short, raggedy shorts and Sweet Pea
sized steel-capped boots (a reference to those overly large shoes
worn by Sweet Pea, the girlfriend of the comic-strip sailor
Popeye), their waists encircled by leather aprons holding their
tools. They balance on steep sloping roofs like mountaineers gazing
upon the summit of Mount Everest.

In short, these builders
are called
professionals
.

We once learnt about syllogisms at school.
This is an example of a syllogism:

Amateurs do things differently.

Dad is an amateur, even if he is a
perfectionist.

Therefore Dad does things differently.

He does them well but his
ways are not the ways of other men, i.e.
professional
men.

Dad’s methods:

leaves antique Skoda in driveway

has but one ladder

uses said ladder dangerously. OSH
(Occupational Safety and Health) would not be amused

wears old (read very old, ancient even)
holey, faded, unfashionable, decades-past-their-use-by-date
corduroy trousers whenever he paints, hammers or sands (which is
most of the time)

does not have a special builder’s apron. (He
once tried to wear a flowery cooking apron that Mum inherited from
Gran but we - Harry and I, that is - would not let him. It has a
large but loose

front pocket and we told him his tools would
flop

around inside and he would never be able to
find what he was looking for. Not to mention, of course, that he
would have looked a complete dork if he had worn it, especially out
of doors, but we didn’t have to go as far as telling him this
absolute truth. For once, he listened to us before we were forced
to irretrievably hurt his feelings.)

There you go. Enough about Dad’s arcane
methods and his never-ending madness.

Now, more about Harry and his burning (but
also somewhat mad) ambition

It is not easy when you
have a little brother. It is even less easy when you have a little
brother who keeps trying to become the world’s second Harry
Houdini. As I have said, even when he was little our Harry was
doing magic tricks. Blame Mum and Dad for naming him Harry. (What
is it with them and personal names?) Better still, blame our Uncle
Phil who, after a holiday in France (lucky Uncle Phil) where he
visited a museum of magic in Paris called
Academie de magie
, sent Harry a box
of simple tricks for his fifth birthday, bought from his (Uncle
Phil’s) local Little World Toy Emporium. (Since closed down. Little
did innocent Uncle Phil know the beast he created, and unleashed,
when he made that purchase.)

Harry’s little helper

It seemed that from day one I - and
occasionally Mum and Dad - was press-ganged into being Harry’s main
audience. Harry used to call me

‘Harry’s little helper’ a phrase that made
me gnash

my teeth and want to strangle him.
Eventually he stopped using that cognomen. (Another word for a
nickname. An appropriate choice: a ‘cog’ in Harry’s wheel.) Now he
calls me his ‘little helper’ only when he wants to seriously rile
me.

You’d think Harry, like
most little boys, would have outgrown magic in time but did he? No,
of course not, the contrary little so-and-so. I have to admit Harry
actually became very good, very quickly, at magic. (Thanks to my
word skills whenever he wants to impress people, he now calls his
art ‘prestidigitation’. This was a word I originally found and
presented to him. Why am I so generous?) Harry developed ambitions.
In the weeks before the school holidays he had begun to skimp on
his homework to practise for a nationwide talent quest called SHOW
US YOUR TALENT.

It was going to be televised as well as
webcast. Yes, Harry was aiming high. He wanted to be seen in as
many of the living rooms of the nation as possible. He wanted to
win prestige and money. Lots of money. To buy more effects, I
imagine.

I regularly suggested to
him that he stick to the basics, the card and coin tricks, those
things he’s fabulous at, but did he ever take my advice? No, of
course not. The séance was an instance of how he tried to stretch
himself even if this last example was, as I uncovered, just a
one-off, more designed to impress and fool me rather than be a
serious contender in a talent quest. After I’d rumbled him, it made
no sign of a comeback.

The holidays came at just at the right time
for

Harry, if not for me. After the failed
séance he

went quiet for a time and
it wasn’t until school ended for the term that he finally decided
what his act in the talent quest was going to be. When I found out,
I decided Harry was aiming far too high. At the start, with my
encouragement, he had been going to do a series of standard magic
tricks, the sort of tricks he had performed numerous times in front
of other kids his age as well as to old people at various rest
homes including the one he had discovered soon after we’d moved
into our house, just a few handy blocks away. I should have known
he would decide those sort of tricks were far too lame for SHOW US
YOUR TALENT.

‘
I wouldn’t stand a chance
with them anyway,’ he said to me. ‘The judges would boo me off the
stage before the audience.’

‘
The audience won’t be on
the stage will they?’ I asked with a straight face. Harry was not
amused. (Syntax, as you know, is not his strong point.)

In the end, what he decided to do instead
was focus on escapology, the ‘science of escaping’ he calls it.
This is the branch of magic Harry Houdini was most famous for.

‘
Don’t you think you might
be going just a tad too far if you try something as difficult as
escapology?’ I queried.

‘
Why?’ he asked.

‘
Well, for the obvious
reason that you’ve never done it before unless you count always
getting out of doing the dishes, mowing the lawns and helping Dad
renovate the house. You’ve perfected the art of escaping from all
of those things but you’ve been adept at not doing them for a whole
lot

longer.’

‘
Ha, ha,’ he said. ‘Who’s
talking? Who spends

all her time escaping into words?’ (By this
he meant my love of reading and writing. I was impressed. Who would
have known that Harry could be good with words?) ‘Who spends all
her time these days with her mad friends ogling the parade at the
pool?’

How had he known about the pool? Harry hated
swimming. Did that mean he also knew about my unreciprocated
interest in Troy?

‘
Don’t try and change the
subject,’ I said.

‘
Which is what
exactly?’

This is the sort of roundabout argument I
tire of very quickly. I hardly ever win one of those. The only
thing that works against it is an evasive, attacking reply. So I
said, ‘If you don’t get it now you never will, sock-brain. Besides,
it’s not as if you take notice of anything I say. Not these days,
anyway, that’s for sure.’

‘
True,’ said
Harry.

‘
Go ahead and make a fool
of yourself then.’

‘
I’ve been doing my
homework,’ Harry said.

‘
Have you? Since when? Your
poor teacher will be pleased.’

‘
Not that sort of
homework.’

‘
What other sort is
there?’

‘
Wait a sec.’ Harry went to
his room and came back with a big, old book. ‘I got this from
Marvello.’

Marvello owns the magic shop in town. He
also runs a magic school most Saturday afternoons. It is the refuge
of magic geeks like my brother Harry.

‘
He wouldn’t lend this to
just anyone,’ Harry continued. ‘But the other day, when I told
him

what I wanted to do and why, he said he
thought I had the skill and talent to give it a go.’

‘
Let me look.’ I reached
for the book.

‘
No way! This is top, top
secret.’

‘
Not that again. I’m sick
of you and your silly little secrets.’

Harry ignored me. ‘This teaches me
everything I need to know about escapology.’

‘
Everything?’ I said,
putting on my best ironic voice, wasted on Harry of
course.

‘
More than enough to go on
with,’ he amended. ‘And take a look at this . . .’ He dashed back
to his room, returning with a very weird article of
clothing.

‘
What is it? And where’s it
been? It looks . . . well-used.’

‘
It’s a straitjacket. A
friend of mine got it from his great-aunt who used to be a
psychiatric nurse. He’s lent it to me.’

‘
His great-aunt just
happened to have a straitjacket lying around her house?’ I said. An
even bigger waste of irony.

Harry nodded. ‘Piece of luck, eh?’

‘
I won’t ask why she had it
nor make any comment about your choice of friends,’ I said. ‘You
think you can get out of that? Can you even get into
it?’

‘
I’ll need a bit of help,’
Harry admitted. ‘You know, these things have to be tied up at the
back.’

‘
And of course now you need
me,’ I said, slipping effortlessly from irony to
sarcasm.

Harry was as immune to sarcasm as he was to
irony. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I don’t have elastic arms. I’ll need you
to tie me up in it.’

‘
With pleasure,’ I said
without a trace of irony.

‘Now?’

Harry nodded. ‘Why not,’ he said.

Under his breath I thought I heard him
murmur, ‘Harry’s little helper.’

I fumed. Why not indeed? This is going to
fun, I thought to myself, but we’ll see who ends up laughing.

So I tied him up in the straitjacket - it’s
actually quite easy when you know how - and left him to it. Looking
back, I should have vamoosed as soon as he asked for help and just
let get him it on with it all on his lonesome, even if he didn’t
have elastic arms. I should never have become involved. Again.
Harry’s little helper.

Harry’s question

All right. In the
preceding pages I have set down a few of the various relevant
scenes, as a proper writer should. Quite a lot of scenes, I admit.
I’m sorry if you have become weary or confused reading them but
things do get more interesting from about this point onwards (if I
do my job correctly, that is.) Bear with me.

Right now I am about to do
something I’m not sure a writer is actually allowed to do although
Mrs Tyrell says that the best writers always break the rules. So
maybe that is what I am going to do. Break a rule. Because even
though, technically, this is the beginning of the middle of my
story, somehow I have arrived at the start of another beginning,
the séance being the first beginning . . . if you follow me. (Note
to self . . . do I know what I’m talking about? I
think
I do. Anyway,
press on . . .)

This is the beginning where Harry asked his
question, the question that seemed to kick-start the

business with the mirrors. I don’t mean that
it literally started things but simply that Harry’s question seemed
to be the catalyst for what happened next. (‘Catalyst’ – another
yummy word.)

Fault lines

One night at tea, eaten in
candlelight because Dad had done something dangerous with the
electricity (he claimed it hadn’t been at all dangerous and that it
didn’t need an electrician to fix it but none of us, especially Mum
- ‘Call-the-electrician-first-thing-tomorrow-or-else!’ - believed a
word of it.) All the fuses had blown and there hadn’t
been