The Houdini Effect Read online

  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 After all, even though she had withdrawn her involvement in the nuts and bolts of renovation, Mum was still forced to be a part of it just as Harry and I were.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.

  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

  time to check them before our tea got cold.

  Harry said, innocently (?), ‘Isn’t it funny that ever since we moved here we’ve been living with someone else’s mirrors?’ (He could equally have said ‘drapes’ or ‘wood panelling’, but he didn’t. He said ‘mirrors’.)

  His words had the effect of an earthquake.

  Sorry, sorry, that’s way too dramatic a comparison. I don’t mean an earthquake where things rattle and roll, topple over, crash down and break. No, I mean the type of tremor that for most of its life runs nearly silently through a fault line, the sort you notice only as a ripple or as a vibration through your bones, the sort that signals the start, possibly, of something bigger, something a lot more serious. Nothing bad is going to happen, it s
ays, not right now but later, well, it will.

  So what happened then was an infinitesimal (a

  very, very, very small) shift in the tectonic plates, so to speak. If you looked closely a hairline crack

  appeared that wasn’t there before. A mind-crack that could never be sealed again. Eventually the only thing it could do was open wider. That’s the effect Harry’s question had on me, even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time.

  (DEEP THOUGHT WARNING #3) The fault line was in me. Or I was the fault line itself.

  When the first still-picture appeared in the mirror, I remembered exactly what Harry had said.

  Long live the weeds and the wilderness

  On the Saturday before the holidays began Mum and I were inspecting the flower borders along the side of the house. I say flower borders but, in reality, they were weed borders. Not a flower plant in sight, not that I could tell the difference between proper plants and weeds. Mum had a much keener eye than mine when it came to things organic.

  She poked around in the sandy soil and said, ‘Here be flowers.’

  (As well as studying law at uni Mum had done a couple of English Literature papers. Doing these had produced two spin-offs. The first was that she sometimes spoke English in a strange, archaic way, which I quite liked, being that way inclined myself. I blame my obsessive love of reading, writing and language, verbal as well as written - in other words, words - on some kind of a recessive family gene or evolutionary quirk. I haven’t met anyone else my age quite like me except Rach, maybe, but she’s eccentric in a different sort of way. More about her soon. But hey, we’re all