The Houdini Effect Read online

  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

  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 no
ticed 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.

  PAR
T 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.