The Houdini Effect (9 page)

‘
But seriously,’ I said to
him, letting myself be distracted by his little game. ‘What if you
can’t get out? Even Houdini must’ve had an off day.’

‘
I won't fail.’

‘
You might’

‘
Thanks! I’ve already told
you. I’ve got a Plan B. I’ve got heaps more ideas,’ he
said.

‘
Really? Okay then. I’ll
believe you. Thousands wouldn’t. But what if you can’t get out of
the straitjacket right now, today? Mum’s at work. Dad’s disappeared
somewhere.’

‘
You’re here.’

‘
Not for much longer
Harry-o. I have plans.’ I tried to inject some enthusiasm into my
voice. ‘I’m escaping to the pool. Don’t count on me.’

‘
As if I ever would,’ said
Harry. ‘I’ll go see May next door if I have to,’ he added. ‘She’s
always around.’

Harry was right. Being at school for the
best part of the day meant I hardly ever saw May but Dad (who was
also home most of the time) said that she was often ‘pottering
about’ (his words) in the garden, which he translated to mean that
she just wandered about, ‘looking a bit lost’ he thought. Sometimes
she took the car out for an hour or so - ‘probably to get the
shopping’ - but that was about it.

‘
What does Barry do for a
job?’ I asked.

‘
I’m sure he told me the
evening we had the barbecue,’ said Dad, trying to remember. ‘He
works for the City Council. Or is that what he used

to do? Blowed if I know for certain
anymore.’

‘
Maybe he works in Building
Consents,’ I suggested, riling Dad up. His worst arguments have
been with Building Consents people.

‘
Nah,’ said Dad. ‘He would
have said. Wouldn’t he?’

‘
Better keep in his good
books,’ I said.

‘
Nah,’ said Dad again. ‘Not
worth it.’

‘
What did he say or do that
made you turn against him?’ I asked Dad.

‘
I didn’t ‘turn against’
him as you so melodramatically put it,’ he said. ‘He’s just not my
cup of tea. And, like I said, I feel sorry for May.’

‘
He’s not my cup of tea
either,’ I said. ‘And I feel sorry for her as well.’

‘If you do ever need May’s help just make
sure no one else in the street sees you wearing that thing,’ I said
to Harry. ‘You’d bring shame to our family.’

As it turned out, that day
I
was
able to
untie Harry, much to our mutual annoyance: his because he was
forced to call on me for assistance and mine because I was at home
to be called on. As it turned out his cry for help signalled the
last straw in the straitjacket saga but his failure only motivated
him (eventually, and with my encouragement I have to admit) to move
onto his next idea, the real (or imagined) Plan B.

On the other side of the coin, being needed
by Harry provided me with a very useful excuse even though I’d
rather not have needed an excuse at all.

Excuses

Yesterday, after I’d missed my bus to the
mall for

the reason you’ve now been
told about, I had to let Rach and Em know I wouldn’t be seeing them
as planned. I would have preferred to hole up in my room for the
rest of that long afternoon and not talk to anybody, but if I’d
done so they would inevitably have been in touch with me and
I

wanted to get in first. I preferred to be on
the front foot rather than the back.

So I’d texted Em to say I
wouldn’t be coming to the mall after all. I didn’t go into details,
just offered some weak excuse about being needed at home that day.
I knew she would manage with only Rachel. In fact Em was quite
capable of managing perfectly well by herself at any mall. She is
what my Gran (R.I.P.) would have called, in ‘Granguage’ (Harry’s
and my longstanding abbreviation for ‘Gran’s language’) a ‘fashion
plate’, which in Gran’s day meant someone who thought only the
latest fashions were any good. Rachel, and to some extent I, could
live very happily with op-shop oddments (some of which were
retro-new anyway) but as for Em, well let’s just say her fashion
aspirations were far grander than the contents of her
wallet.

After texting Emma I’d
phoned Rachel. She had already left for the mall and was, in fact,
probably just about to meet up with Em. Rachel, who must have even
more recessive genes than I do, calls herself a Luddite (a person
who hates new technology. Comes from the nineteenth century. Look
it up if you want to know more) and refuses to own, much less use,
a mobile phone.

‘
They give you cancer,’
she’d once said, ‘and I hate, I just loathe, being at everyone’s
beck and call, literally. If I don’t have a phone I can

disappear if and when I want to.’

‘
You could just turn your
phone off if you don’t want to be interrupted,’ Em had
replied.

‘
If I don’t have a phone
then I don’t have to turn it off,’ said Rach, using typically
implacable Rach Logic.

You can see that Rach was, like me, somewhat
unusual but that’s one of the reasons why Em and I liked her. Em,
on the other hand, wouldn’t have minded if her mobile had been
implanted in her, she couldn’t bear to be separated from it as it
was. As for me and mobile phones I fell somewhere between the two
of them, which is perhaps another reason the three of us got on so
well. We over-lapped. We weren’t so much the same that our
friendship could ever become competitive.

Em texted back on her and Rach’s behalf,
almost before I’d sent my own message. ‘Remind yr olds its hols. C
u @ pool 2morow then. B thr!’

I dislike text language and hardly ever use
it unless I’m in a huge hurry or the message is getting too long.
So I wrote back: ‘I wouldn’t miss it.’

Swimming pool blues

I missed going to the pool. I’ll tell you
what happened, not that it’s hard to guess.

Apart from the straining sounds of Harry
wresting with his straitjacket the house was preternaturally still.
As I’ve said, Mum was at work and Dad, I

soon discovered, had gone
underground. I had washed my togs (Southern Hemisphere for
‘swimming costume’) first thing in the morning

and later on gone back to the laundry to get
them out of the machine to put in the drier, when I saw that the
freezer (our super-sized laundry can accommodate many large
objects) had been shifted and the access cover in the floor beneath
it lifted up.

The cool, musty,
never-seen-the-sun smell of the earth underneath the house wafted
up as I peered into the hole. The distance between the floorboards
and the earth itself wasn’t very great and imagining Dad crawling
under the house in that confined space gave me the same sort of
creepy, closed-in feeling that seeing Harry swathed in his
straitjacket did. (And this sentence, I have to say, prefigures the
darker places into which my story progresses. I would have
preferred it to be a light and frothy concoction free from all DEEP
THOUGHTS but, hey, a writer has to follow where her story leads.
Right?)

I was about to call out to Dad to make sure
he was okay and not wedged beneath a floor joist or something
equally horrible, when I spotted the circle of light that was his
torch playing up, down and around quite happily. I decided,
therefore, not to say anything in case I frightened him into

banging his head on the joists. He would not
have been a happy chappie if that happened.

I transferred my (non-shrink) togs to the
drier, set the temperature on low and left that very handy machine
to do its work. I had plenty of time to get my other stuff ready
before heading poolside. Then, as I turned to leave the laundry, I
made the

mistake of glancing at, and then into, the
tiny

mirror that hung on the wall beside the
window. That’s when I saw them again, Laurie and Iris, if

indeed that was who the young couple
was.

My first thought was very
colloquial and unoriginal, if understandable.
Shit
!

This time they were sitting on a hillside. I
could see their faces only from side on, Laurie (if it was him) at
the front and Iris (if it was her) beside him but just a little
forward of her man. Iris had shaded her forehead with her right
hand so she and Laurie must have been looking into the sun. Laurie
was wearing a floppy sort of sunhat that provided enough protection
for him not to also have to raise his hand, even though he was
squinting. He had little wrinkles radiating from the corners of his
profiled eye, lines that made him look older as well as smiley.

I followed their gaze,
which was in the direction of a beach below and a vista of the sea
stretching beyond white sand into infinity - or at least in the
approximate direction of Tierra del Fuego. A road ran between them
and the beach and there was the shadow of a car at the corner of
the picture. The mirror in the laundry was a minute one (that’s
mi
nute
,
not
min
it) but
the image I saw could have been shrunk in order for it to fit the
mirror. There was even a border around the picture, just like on an
old-fashioned photo. I blinked and the picture was still there,
unchanged. Only when I heard scrabbling sounds from under the
house, which made me think the Kraken (mythical sea monster.
Probably not the best metaphor to use unless our underfloor had
flooded,

which it hadn’t. But Kraken is another
evocative

word) was about to emerge from the depths
(it was only Dad, of course), did I lose my concentration,

turning my head momentarily. When I looked
back the faces and the scene they were gazing at

were gone.

‘
What’s wrong?’ said Dad
rising from the pit, smudged with grime and dirt and looking like a
coalminer. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

Little did he know.

‘
I had a fright, that’s
all,’ I said, playing it down although it was perfectly
true.

‘
Sorry about that,’ said
Dad, assuming I was blaming him for having startled me.
‘Interesting thought, isn’t it, how you sometimes have to go into a
dark place to find the light. (A DEEP THOUGHT, not that I
especially registered it then.) You know what, I’ve discovered the
source of the problem with the chimney.’

Problem with the chimney?
Had Dad mentioned this before? I couldn’t remember. We hadn’t used
the chimney since we’d been here. Mum was against the pollution it
would cause. Dad was hoping to one day install a City Council
approved woodburner, assuming he got Mum’s approval as well. Now
he’d have the perfect excuse.

‘
The brickwork is infested
with dry rot. The pipe leading to the hot water tank’s leaking.
Probably has been for years. That’s what caused it. The ground
around the concrete slab supporting the chimney is wet. I’m going
to have to take the old chimney down, brick by brick.’

I wasn’t at all surprised by his happy
enthusiasm. That was Dad all over.

‘
Really,’ I said. But by
now we had both

stopped listening to each other. Dad’s mind
was

off solving the latest house crisis while
mine was trying to deal with a different but equally real

crisis of my own. You may
ask, why didn’t I come clean to Dad, persuade him to take notice,
ask him to sort out my problem? Well then, short answer. Unless you
were Harry, would you want to end up in a straitjacket? Speaking of
the devil . . .

‘
Is that Harry I hear?’
said Dad. ‘What does he want?’

I listened, too, pleased with the diversion,
pleased for once with Harry. I needed an excuse to leave the
laundry and the little mirror that had suddenly created a big
problem, the sort of difficulty that not even Dad with all his
skill at cutting out and restoring, could solve or resolve.

‘
He probably wants someone
to undo him again,’ I sighed, feeling undone myself. ‘I’ll go and
sort him out.’

The ‘blame-Harry’ effect

The motivation for having a good time at the
pool (even one as compelling as the probable presence of Troy) had
suddenly vanished in a puff of smoke (and mirrors). All I could
focus on was what I had seen.

So, just as on the day before, I ended up
cancelling my prior engagement. To tell the truth I didn’t exactly
cancel it. After helping Harry I just didn’t go. Against my usual
policy of front-footedness I resolved to make my apologies later. I
figured it would be easier this time to give an excuse after it was
too late for anyone to try and change my mind. I figured the
pressure on me

from Em and Rach to still go would have been
a

lot more intense than yesterday’s mild
acceptance of me abandoning the shopping expedition. But

no way could I have changed my mind and
gone. All I could think about was that either I was being haunted
(bad enough) or that I was going mad (far worse).

So I lent my aid to Harry. Initially I
assumed that undoing a fiddly straitjacket would be a useful way of
diverting, albeit briefly, my attention from what had just
happened. In hindsight, going to the pool as planned would probably
have been an even better diversionary tactic, but who can know in
advance how things will pan out?

Harry was in a sour mood, well, more sour
than I’d experienced for quite some time. He was used to achieving
what he set out to do and didn’t cope at all well when things
didn’t work out. In some ways he was a worse (or maybe that should
be better?) perfectionist than Dad.