Escape

by Anna Fienberg

  Metamorphosis. It was always my favourite trick of Harry's. Sometimes I'm not chained to the bedposts, awaiting him – I am Bess in a mermaid costume and Harry is tearing at it, sweat standing out on his forehead. He struggles at my waist, his face contorting with anguish as it does when he's escaping from the straitjacket. He plunges a hand inside the costume, wrapped tight like a bandage and my legs miraculously appear, opening at his touch. He plunges inside me, inside the sack, inside the trunk, while the audience outside hold their breath and gasp as my secret merman and I swim down to the depths of our passion, together.

  Mary rang me again and wanted to see what I'd written so far. Her phone call was like an alarm clock jolting me from a deep sleep. With great effort I left Harry's letters to his wife and his mother, to whom he was also affectionately loyal, and turned to the practical aspects of magic.

  I settled down to focus seriously on the section entitled 'The secret of Houdini's handcuff escapes' – but while I read Harry's eyes lowered under those dark brows to meet mine. The dream of Harry kept me topped up, warm and slightly blurred, the way a couple of glasses of red wine soften the view of a threatening world.

  'On stage,' I read, 'Houdini took on all challenges. He promised to escape from any type of cuffs thrust upon him, inviting the audience to come up and handcuff him themselves.'

  Harry had a vast experience of locks and keys. That was his secret. In Berlin, he'd worked for nothing repairing locks for a locksmith called Mueller. 'Herr Mueller soon discovered,' Harry wrote, 'that his thirty-five years of experience were nothing as compared to my trick in opening locks, and soon he had a thriving trade.' Harry worked for around ten hours every day, 'and soon, with the assistance of four marked picks, I could open any lock . . . ' How admirable was his determination, his focus, his ambition! Imagine having that trained upon you!

  Houdini showed extraordinary skill in the way he manipulated the key in the lock. 'The primary lesson is to learn to use both hands with equal facility.'

  Images of Harry's dexterity, the words associated with his escapes – 'release, enter, manipulate, opening leg-irons, using both hands' – were terribly arousing to me. Later I read more detailed passages about lock picking: how you must 'insert the tension wrench into the bottom of the keyway, feather the tension on the cylinder with one hand, fire the pick gun with the other, feel the pins and plug moving with the index finger or, if you prefer, the thumb' and I thought of Guido and how he used to plunge his thumb so deep into the core of me, I could have been a plum he twirled around. As I read I was in a continually charged state, as if my skin had rubbed against nylon on a windy day. The hair on my arms stood on end, the cord between my groin and belly twanged.

  One night, I crept into Guido's room after he'd turned out the light. I lay down next to him and lightly touched his thigh. I moved my leg over his, my fingers trickling down to the plump soft ness curled against his thigh. I imagined him turning over to face me. He would slide down the length of me until he reached the place between my legs. Maybe he would use his tongue to enter me. The wetness between my legs slid over the backs of his knees.

  'Lasciame,' he groaned, and turned over. His face was pressed against the wall.

  In the dictionary it said lasciare meant 'to leave'. Lasciame, leave me alone.

  When I went to see the Friday women, I felt heavy with news. It was if I had a new lover who I was bursting for them to meet. It was hard not to introduce him. I wanted to list all his admirable qualities, make him real in that elegant living room with the French doors.

  'How are you?' asked Lena, peering into my face. 'You look well – blooming, I'd say. Sex life improved?'

  I laughed, guiltily, feeling myself blush.

  'I wish I had one,' groaned Doreen. 'There's a cute nurse at work but all he does is wink at me when we pass each other in the corridor. Never goes any further. Maybe I'll push him into the storeroom tomorrow and fling off my uniform.' She gave her loud trumpet laugh. 'No, I won't. His politics are awful. I'll just make do with my vibrator as usual.'

  'I'm too tired even to think about that,' said Lena.

  'A vibrator? Where do you get a . . . vibrator?' I whispered to Doreen.

  'Where do you get it?' echoed Doreen, laughing. 'Did you hear that? There's a special on at Woolworths.' She thought I was joking. But I wasn't.

  Lena interrupted then to talk about her boss at work, and how he'd got sick and now she had to do all his work as well as hers. Doreen said she shouldn't do it without being paid, and they argued about compromise in the workplace and the almost exclusively female role of nurturing. I found the discussion very stimulating, but I wished they had gone on to talk about the vibrator as well. When I interrupted, to ask Lena about hers, she said it made a purring sound when you turned it on, just like their cat Tiddlywinks.

  Driving back, on my way to pick up Clara, I thought how wonderful it would be to have a vibrator of my own, at home. I could pretend it was Harry, real and hard and solid, purring between my legs.

  It wasn't until I actually possessed a pair of real Smith & Wesson handcuffs that I shared Harry Houdini with Clara. The feeling of elation I experienced when I managed to lock and release myself from the brown suede armchair, the dining room table, the wardrobe doorhandle and the towel rack in the bathroom was almost unbearable. It had a power similar to the rush of orgasm. I wanted to shout, and the voice was silent.

  Clara was mildly intrigued at first. She liked the shiny silver circles of the cuffs, 'like bracelets', and the tiny, doll-like keys. She had a go at locking herself to the chest of drawers in the living room and trying to release herself. I encouraged her to keep practising, enjoying her display of well-developed fine motor skills but after a while she became so frustrated with 'this stupid bracelet game' that she tore them off and flung them across the carpet.

  I knew how she felt, I told her. All my life I'd experienced the same kind of frustration with real life. But if you persist, I said, you will triumph. It's all about persisting. Harry Houdini persisted with his locks for ten hours a day!

  She took the handcuffs to school one day for show-and-tell. She locked a girl called Cathy to a boy called Shane, who seized the opportunity of such close proximity to kiss the pretty girl on the cheek. Cathy was apparently very upset by this and a letter came home with Clara informing me politely that handcuffs were not a suitable item for kindergarten children and had caused some distress.

  'I'm sorry,' I told Clara. 'I just wanted you to know how to free yourself. It gives you such a wonderful feeling – to free yourself, I mean.'

  With the manacles I'd ordered a set of shims and over the next few weeks I tried out the long narrow tools, which looked like skinny nail files, on a variety of different locks. Slowly, I made progress, but there were some set-backs. The worst involved Clara.

  At the beginning of first grade, she brought a budgerigar home for the week. Each child in the class took turns to look after it. 'Pet Care', the unit of learning was called. It was supposed to give the children a taste of responsibility for another living being. Probably it was the bars on the birdcage that attracted me. I decided to time my release and handcuffed myself to a bar. My left hand was improving so much, it was almost as precise as my right. Unfortunately, I must have overestimated my capacities and I dropped the key, which fell under the sofa and vanished into the darkness beneath. In my horror I dived to retrieve it, knocking the birdcage off the sideboard. It thumped down on the floor, the budgerigar losing its balance and falling from its perch. It gave a startled squawk, and lay still.

  The next half-hour was dreadful. Perhaps the bird was just stunned. Or playing dead. Perhaps it thought it had been attacked. But I had read that budgies were shy, nervous birds and deep inside I was sure it had died of fright. A heart attack perhaps. Oh god, whatever would Clara's teacher think – handcuffs and murdered budgies. I couldn't go to pick up Clara: how could I drive with a birdcage on my arm like a handbag and the budgie rolling ar
ound like a stone with its feet up? But she'd be waiting for me at the school gates, and all the other children would trickle away with the minutes, leaving Clara alone and scared, staring out at the street. Oh why did these things happen to me? Because you are a total fool, said the voice, and you never learn.

  Only five minutes before I was due to leave, I remembered Doreen had said she would pick up the girls from school. The nervous sweat was still beaded on my face when Clara, Doreen and Saraah came in the door to find me handcuff ed to the birdcage. Just a minute later Guido walked in and all four of them stared at me as if I were a lunatic.

  'Is your mother under arrest?' asked Saraah in wonder.

  'Only house arrest, like us all,' said Doreen.

  'What have you done to Bert?' cried Clara.

  God, he even had a name. 'He's just sleeping,' I said. I didn't look at Doreen. 'Guido, can you get me out of here?'

  It took a long time for Clara to forgive me. I didn't talk about Houdini or handcuffs or the joy of freeing yourself for months. Not with anyone. But I continued to practise and read and dream. In the daytime I experimented and wrote; at night I dreamt about Harry. And finally I finished the book.

  I might never have persisted with teaching Clara the art of escape if it hadn't been for two things that happened soon after. Clara became interested in magic when Doreen hired a magician for Saraah's seventh birthday. She began to play with the 'bracelets' again, using them in her dressings up. She and Saraah took turns to wear them, together with my cream silk nightie and scarves around their waists. Clara liked the scarves so much that sometimes she wore them to school. One day she was late when I went to pick her up in the afternoon. She wasn't at the school gates, I looked all over for her. Finally I found her in the girls' toilets. She was tied to the washbasin with her own scarves. She was crying silently.

  'Who did this to you?'

  'Shane Leerman. He said he was the magician and I was the assistant. But he didn't untie me!'

  'Why didn't you yell?'

  'I was too scared,' she whispered.

  'What did he do to you?'

  'Nothing.' But she wiped her mouth.

  'Did he kiss you?'

  She nodded. 'He tasted like sardines. I didn't want him to kiss me. He's got fish breath. And germs. His sister's got glangela fever.'

  'Anything else?'

  She was crying loudly now. 'He pulled down his pants.'

  She was too ashamed to yell. I remembered what it felt like, your own voice too loud and impolite in the silence. Better to keep quiet. Better to say nothing.

  That night she got into bed and we read a new library book, The Most Obedient Dog in the World. After it was finished I had to go into the bathroom to weep. It was about a dog who was so loyal that he waited in the same spot where his master Hugo had told him to all day, even though Hugo had forgotten him and gone off to play at the park. While he waited a cat came by that he was dying to chase and a boy dropped an ice-cream that he was dying to eat. But the dog didn't move. Luckily Hugo finally remembered about his dog and hurried back to get him. And because the dog had been so good, he got to go to the beach with the boy and have his own ice-cream. It ended very happily and Clara was quite satisfied but all I could think of as I cried with my forehead against the tiles was the dog sitting on the boiling pavement all day getting sunstroke and still Hugo mightn't have come back and the dog would slowly keel over and curl up like the cover of a cheap paperback and his tongue would cake and flies would crawl in his eyes and still he'd stay rotted to the spot as if he were a collage piece stuck to the pavement with super glue instead of a living breathing dog.

  I never wanted my daughter to be like that. Like me. I would make sure that whatever acts of freedom I learnt now, I would pass on to her, every last one of them.

  Part III

  The Birth of Venus

  Chapter 17

  There's a package in the letterbox, exotic with stamps. Clara! It's been five weeks, almost six, since she left for Italy. Her emails have been sparse. She's mostly in a hurry – in the mornings to get to class, and in the evenings to get to bed. She doesn't seem to need to share her new reality with us to make it real. I look at the package more carefully. From the USA, says the bearded Freudian face of Abraham Lincoln. With compliments from Starstruck Enterprises.

  I take the package into my bedroom and fling it on the bed. It would have been too much to hope for. I know that. Even so, it's hard to recover from the disappointment. I watch the package from my desk. It's hard not to resent it, that little brown-papered bomb with its trail of exploded hopes.

  Inside is a DVD. My heart lift s a little. Jonny Love gazes up from the cover, Swords of Death hovering above him. Strong chin, prominent nose and jaw, dark hair shot with silver curling to his shoulders. The metal spikes are just centimetres from his forehead.

  Well. This is the next best thing, perhaps. It's after five, my watch says, so I'm allowed to get myself a glass of wine. Guido won't be home for another hour at least. Wine and Love will be a treat, unspoiled by cynical comments from anyone.

  Mary Page rang last week to keep me abreast of the latest news. Jonny's trip to Sydney has only just been confirmed, rather late, because he's had some recent 'health issues'. 'We still have no specific arrival dates,' she said, 'apparently Jonny is in the process of recovering. But it's looking good. Isn't that great, Rachel – you'll be able to meet him and do your interview in person!'

  I think she knows I'm not up to Jonny Love yet. All I've read are his press clippings, revealing that he's had eight long-running hit shows, several high-rating TV specials and sell-out tours, and early on in his career, he taught at the Chicago School of Magic. He is forty-five, divorced, and was 'an inspiring teacher', his students claimed. I liked that about him, the fact that he'd wanted to share his knowledge and experience. Magicians can be secretive, with good reason I suppose.

  But the first thing that flashed through my mind when the publisher told me about meeting Jonny Love was that I would have to shave my legs. It was a random, distracting thought, and a nuisance.

  I pad out to the kitchen and open the pinot noir.

  The opening act shows Jonny strapped to a Bohemian Torture Crib. The sheen on his black pants ripples beneath silver chains, the tight leather allowing us to see his long lean muscles clench and release against the restraints as the metal spikes are lowered, shooting out from an implacable plank of steel. At the last second, having obtained enough invisible slack, he escapes his chains, bounding up and into black star-spangled space. He reappears again suspended against the dark, levitating in a meditative pose two metres above the floor. His hands are raised in prayer and as the camera sweeps back we see the high domed ceiling of a cathedral, the pale fluted columns flanking him. Music hushes in reverence as we contemplate the ethereal power of Jonny's ability. There are card tricks, more escape illusions, vanishments and substitutions. Beautiful.

  'What is your favourite trick?' asks the blonde interviewer afterwards, reclining on the torture crib. She lovingly fondles the link of a chain.

  'Well, let's see,' says Jonny, rubbing his almost square jaw. 'I enjoy all the tricks, otherwise I wouldn't do them. But I guess the levitation act is the most exciting. As a boy I always wanted to fly.'

  'Doesn't everyone?' agrees the interviewer. 'And why the emphasis on break-out acts? You know, why choose the escape branch of magic?'

  Jonny grins at her. It is an inviting grin. The woman shift s her bottom against the steel of the torture crib, edging imperceptibly towards him.

  'Escapology is the most dramatic kinda magic. It can be lethal. I just love the challenge, I guess. And you have to know how to act. Take the king, Houdini – he was the first to escape from the straitjacket in full view. He got the idea from watching a guy in an insane asylum – poor guy was pouring sweat, and Houdini realised that if the man could dislocate his arms at the shoulder joint, he'd get some slack. But the open struggle was everything.'

>   'You'd have to be pretty crazy to do some of the stunts Houdini did.'

  'No, not crazy, just goddam courageous. Outrageous! He was always trying to expand his horizons. Take on new challenges. I can relate to that . . .'

  'In fact, you are related to the king of escape, aren't you?'

  'Yeah, ha! Back some place in my Hungarian ancestry. Maybe it's in my genes, the passion for escape . . . But, gee, he sure is a hard act to follow . . .' Jonny rubs his jaw again, ruefully, looking up at the blonde with that teasing grin.

  'And he'd sure be proud of you!' the blonde smiles back. Now she's practically sitting on his lap.

  'Well, I've often wondered if that's why I'm so fascinated by magic and escapology. But whatever, I love what Houdini loved about magic. The way it defies logic, but you gotta use logic to do it.'

  When it's finished I take the DVD back to my desk. I line up the cover photo of Jonny Love and the full-frontal picture of Harry. I study them one at a time, then compare their features. Both have wavy hair, vivid dark eyes, a full, almost pouting top lip. I finish the wine. My cheeks feel hot.

  The front door bangs. Heavy footsteps down the hall, gathering speed towards the kitchen. Silent seconds while the cold oven, dead cooktop and open pinot noir are surveyed. 'Rachel?' Incredulous tone. 'Is past seven! We do not eat tonight?'

  As I start up guiltily – it can't be seven, really – the memory of a young Guido coming through my door like a magic spell slides me into such a pit of loss that I have to stand for a moment holding onto the desk. 'It'll be hard adjusting to being by yourself,' Rita told me before Clara went away. 'Well, just the two of you, I mean, you and your husband. Change and separation – it takes time.'

  'Rachel?' barks Guido. 'What are you doing? I am so 'angry!'

  I wish it was Guido who was going away for a year, instead of Clara. I wish it with all my heart.

  After dinner – fish curry with red sauce – I trudge back into my room to sit at my desk and stare into space. Sometimes I sit for two whole hours and produce one new sentence.