Clear

by Nicola Barker

  ‘i-Pod.’

  Punk’s Not points enviously towards my new technology.

  ‘I mean that man’s really the tick sucking on the pock-eaten arse of Performance Art,’ I harp on, bilefully, nodding (meanwhile: Yup. This is the i-Pod, this is my baby) as I pull off the lid.

  ‘Apparently they really compress the sound,’ he says.

  ‘What?’ I glance up.

  He draws his finger and thumb together (to demonstrate), ‘They compress the sound. To save space. Rendering the music a little…’ he muses, ‘tinny.’

  (The bitch)

  ‘Anyway,’ he continues, ‘I’ve seen him on.’

  ‘Who?’

  (Tinny? Is he serious?)

  ‘Hilary.’

  ‘On?’

  He nods.

  (I quickly deduce that this is Magic Speak.)

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yup.’

  I balance the lid on the bridge’s thick handrail and take a quick sip.

  Urgh. Tea. And with sugar.

  ‘He once told a colleague of mine,’ I say, wincing slightly, ‘that a close relative of hers would lose a limb…’

  Punk’s Not smirks. ‘Yeah. Bly. I know all about that…’

  ‘And then he did,’ (I ignore him), ‘in an accident.’

  ‘Ever happen to meet her dad?’ Punk’s Not asks (a single brow raised, satirically).

  I shake my head. ‘You?’

  He shakes his, too. ‘Nope. But Hilary knew all about him from Bly’s idle chat in the office. A hopeless alcoholic, apparently. Works…’ He pauses, for effect. ‘On a threshing machine.’

  ‘Fuck.’ I nearly snort tea all over him.

  He grins. ‘I mean credit where credit’s due, eh?’

  I take another sip of tea. The tea is good, in actual fact.

  ‘Never waves,’ Punk’s Not muses. ‘Not a waver.’

  ‘Hilary?’

  He nods.

  ‘Probably frightened his scarf might topple off.’

  ‘You neither,’ he observes.

  Huh?

  ‘That’s true,’ I say eventually.

  ‘Nor Aphra,’ he continues. ‘She never waves.’

  This news surprises me.

  ‘I generally find that the people most committed to the spectacle,’ he says, ‘who feel a real part of it, are the ones who rarely wave.’

  I frown.

  ‘How about you?’

  He shakes his head. ‘But then I’m working, aren’t I?’

  I pause, mid-sip.

  ‘And I feel sorry for the guy,’ Punk’s Not continues. ‘He’s waving all bloody day. It’s like people come and they wave. But there’s thousands of them. And they all want something from him. That contact. That moment of intimacy. It’s a complex exchange. And I think it probably takes its toll on him, psychologically.’

  ‘But he likes to wave,’ I say. ‘And he likes to have a toll taken,’ I add.

  ‘I read somewhere that Blaine’s most satisfying moment when he was buried alive for that week in New York,’ Punk’s Not says, ‘was when he finally learned the art of pissing and waving at the same time. When he overcame all his inhibitions and could do both, without thinking.’

  ‘Where’d you read that?’

  ‘Don’t remember. But isn’t that so magicianly?’ he chuckles. ‘You know, just finding that special little knack, that tiny, vaguely socially unacceptable trick, then diligently perfecting it.’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ I say.

  (Magicianly, eh?)

  ‘And apparently his catheter wasn’t the right size on that stunt, so he found himself pissing down on to his sheets all week.’

  He grins. ‘I mean can you imagine how much that coffin stank when he actually came out of it?’

  ‘I’ve observed before,’ I say (keen not to be left behind), ‘how incredibly ill-prepared he sometimes seems. In the Ice Challenge he simply “forgot”, at the last minute, to put his knee-pads on. And this was after months of training himself to sleep standing up, which he couldn’t actually do without wearing the pads in case he stuck to the ice and couldn’t get off.’

  ‘There’s a really classic story from that Frozen in Time thing,’ Punk’s Not sniggers (I note how he’s memorised all the official titles and secretly despise him). ‘They apparently had this kid out the back hoovering up all the melted ice as the glacier defrosted, and at one point he wasn’t paying proper attention and he hoovered up this long transparent tube…’

  ‘What was it?’

  (I’m drawn in.)

  ‘It was the tube for Blaine’s urine. It was actually glued, by the cold, to the end of his penis. When that kid hoovered it up, you could apparently hear his screams reverberating all over Times Square.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  He nods. ‘And the ice was four feet thick.’

  We both glance over–grimacing sympathetically–towards the box.

  ‘His girlfriend at the time probably felt like having a small yank on it herself,’ I speculate.

  ‘Josie?’ he looks surprised. ‘Wasn’t she very supportive throughout?’

  Oh.

  ‘So where d’you work?’ I divert.

  ‘St Botolphs. The shelter. But I’m actually doing a stint of outreach while Blaine’s here.’

  (What? Punk’s Not a charity worker? A paid up member of the God Squad?)

  ‘It’s been really great for Hilary, though,’ he says, pulling the lid off another carton and taking a sip himself, ‘to be able to return–without too much fuss and fanfare–to a place where people knew him from before…’ Silence.

  ‘Knew him from before what?’ I eventually murmur.

  (Oh Christ. Don’t answer.)

  ‘The breakdown.’

  Another silence.

  ‘You should see him at the shelter, though,’ he continues (as if the silence wasn’t painful at all), ‘just reading people. He’s got it down to a fine art now. Every time there’s a new face in the place, he bides his time for a few nights, keeps his eyes and his ears peeled, then just totally shits them up. Basically tells them all this stuff that they didn’t even know about themselves. Astonishing details. Amazing predictions. Of course he plays it down a lot. Just says it’s “kind of mathematical”…’

  He shrugs. ‘I wouldn’t know about that, but it’s certainly an impressive knack…’

  He pushes the lid carefully back on to the cup.

  I clear my throat, painfully.

  ‘Is he over his flu yet?’ I ask.

  Punk’s Not nods, benignly. ‘I think we’ve pretty much got him through the worst of it,’ he says, ‘although it can be pretty dicey with street people. For some reason they’re especially prone to developing long-term problems with their lungs.’

  I balance my cup, gingerly, on the handrail. Then once it’s obviously balanced, I pick it up again.

  ‘Well, I’d better get these down there,’ he says, tapping the top of a carton, ‘before they grow cold.’

  He turns to go, then he pauses. ‘Should I mention that I just saw you to Aphra?’ he asks.

  I try–for a moment–to look blank. Then I give up.

  ‘Better not,’ I mutter.

  He tips his head, in gentle acknowledgement. ‘We’re all just doing our best for the girl, eh?’ he says.

  I nod.

  He pauses. ‘And if you ever feel like you need someone to talk to…’

  He smiles.

  I try (I try) and smile back (but fail). Then he waves and strolls off.

  Shit, man.

  I shove the lid back on my carton and march furiously (determinedly) in the opposite direction.

  In fact I’m halfway up The Highway before it actually strikes me:

  Punk’s Not was wearing CATs. I swear to God. And in tan.

  Bloody Aphra.

  Tinny?

  Did he actually, really say that?

  Tinny?

  A second message comes. It arrives, without fanfare, w
hile I’m lounging at the bar in our local pub on Sunday, ordering a third round and keeping half an eye on the Live Match, on Sky.

  ‘If I was a man,’ she says calmly, ‘I would beat you up. I really would. And I’d enjoy it. I’d take an active pleasure in it. Once was wrong, see? But it was manageable. Now it’s every night. Every night. It’s madness. And it won’t last, trust me. It can’t last. And if it does, by some miracle, then she’ll blame you, ultimately. When everything falls apart, she’ll blame you…’ Her voice cracks and she begins to cry. ‘And so will I.’

  Click.

  For some reason I don’t share this one with Solomon.

  I mean what did I do that was so damn bad?

  God.

  Oh God.

  The i-Pod’s utterly filled up. It’s crammed. It’s choca-bloc. It’s complete.

  Now what?

  It’s no good. I’m too weak. I just have to take a look (a quick peek), to find out if I was actually right or not. (Josie. The girlfriend. Did my eyes deceive me when I watched the TV programme? Or did Punk’s Not fuck up and get it all completely wrong?)

  The Blaine book (shoved idly under my bed for the last week) is rapidly dragged out, and I’m heading diligently for the Frozen in Time chapter when my eye is drawn inexorably back…

  Wow.

  Nice artwork. Great layout. Brilliant photos (author’s own).

  And it’s extremely well written (it is). And very dry. And revealing. And intelligent. And self-aware (within reason). And actually…curiously…quite beguilingly charming. The tone. It’s spot on. I can almost hear him speaking in that deep, slow, measured, slightly ironic-sounding drawl of his.

  When I check out the acknowledgements I see it was co-written with this guy called Ratso who also wrote On the Road with Bob Dylan. And apart from ‘Blaine’s Challenge’ (which is entertaining enough) there’s also loads of information on how to perform various tricks (and pull various scams). I actually learn–there and then–how to relight a candle without holding the match to the wick, try it, at once, then dash upstairs and show off my achievement to a bemused-seeming Solomon.

  Tons of science stuff. And history stuff (it’s virtually a magician’s lexicon). Blaine actually pinpoints his various magical heroes and influences, and if you read closely, it’s possible to see what he’s cherry-picked, why and where from: Alexander Herrmann; the street magician; Robert-Houdin, with his role as international envoy and ‘peace-bringer’ Houdini, with his amazing knack for publicity; Xavier Chabert, who really risked his life for his feats; Orson Welles–a keen amateur magician–gets a plug, for duping dumb America with his radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (So there’s the literary angle neatly sorted, eh?). He even gives Fidel Castro a name-check for cunningly using trained white doves to bring this magical sense of ‘legitimacy’ and ‘wonder’ to his political machinations.

  Here’s another thing: there’s tricks inside the text itself. Blaine claims, near the start, that his publishers (Pan) have agreed to print many different versions of the book, which means (Wha? You think we were born yesterday?) that each copy is somehow particular to the person who’s bought it. That it’s actually ‘magical’ in some way. At one point the casual narrative is suddenly interrupted by a mind-reading section, where Blaine whispers into the reader’s ear directly, saying stuff like, ‘You’re easily hurt. You like to travel…’

  Hell yeah. This is brain-fucking at an executive level.

  I finally get to investigate the whole Jewish angle. Man, the autobiographical content is utterly fascinating. There’s no mention at all of Blaine being Jewish himself (there’s a general impression that he was raised in a nurturing, free-thinking, 1970s New Age style environment–I mean there’s hard times and austerity, no TV and plenty of reading, but single-parent wages are carefully scrimped and saved for Montessori schooling).

  It becomes increasingly apparent how important Jews have been to Blaine from the start. His hero–Houdini–was the son of a rabbi. Blaine’s first big break? Being booked to do magic at a bar mitzvah when he was eighteen, and meeting the hugely wealthy and influential Steiner family who whisk him away to St-Tropez for the summer and teach him everything he could ever possibly want to know about money. And socialising. And glamour (he totally changes his image, at this stage, shaves his head, grows the goatee, dresses in black…I guess you could say it was a ‘Jewish look’.)

  To show need, he soon learns, is never a good thing.

  But he kind of knew this, already. When he worked at a restaurant (this macrobiotic joint he went to in order to try and learn how to cook healthy food for his–by then–very sick mother) he used to perform tricks for all the customers there, and if they gave him a big tip, he’d often hand it straight back. He wasn’t doing it for the cash, see? He was doing it to ‘bring mystification’, because people are at their most beautiful when they’re at their most vulnerable, apparently.

  He actually said that.

  I’m reading the book backwards, Chinese-style, and it’s when I get to the beginning that I finally hit gold. It’s then that I see the photographs. Two photographs. In quick succession.

  The first is of Houdini, Blaine’s hero. Blaine says (underneath) how it was as a direct consequence of seeing this particular photo (in the library, when he was five) that all his subsequent interest in magic was spurred.

  I inspect the photo very closely.

  It’s scary.

  Houdini is straitjacketed and his legs are tied. He is balanced, precariously, on the edge of a high rooftop (or perhaps a bridge), and he seems to be holding on to that ledge only by dint of his chin, which is hooked (resolutely) around a metal strut.

  Blaine says it was the eyes that initially fascinated him. The eyes are desperate. Staring. Frantic (in fact so mesmerised was Blaine by the look of Houdini’s eyes in this particular photograph, that he actually had them tattooed on to his own arm when he grew up).

  It’s an exciting image. Melodramatic. Kinky, even.

  I try to enter the mind of the 5-year-old Blaine. A father dead, a doting but hardworking mother, a sharp intelligence (Aged three he developed a passion for chess. His mother took him to the local parks where he challenged all the old geezers at the game), and this powerful, this overriding sense of physical precariousness.

  They moved around a lot. One of his abiding memories of childhood, he says, was of staring backwards over his mother’s shoulder as he was hurried away from a burning apartment block. ‘For some strange reason,’ he says, ‘the buildings we were living in always burned down.’

  (Yup. I know what you’re thinking. ‘Eeeek! Shades of The Omen.’)

  And the second image? The second photograph? It’s an early family shot. Nineteen seventy-five. A 3-year-old Blaine and his mother posing on a New York street together.

  She’s glamorous. Like a model. But smart-seeming, too. For the benefit of the photo she has hauled the baby Blaine on to one of those New York newspaper dispensers. She is staring at him (mouth slightly ajar from the effort of lifting him up there, head still tipped back as she struggles to sit him still).

  And Blaine? Looking confidently towards the camera. Holding his mother’s knitted hat (with such delicacy and precision) between two tiny hands. Rotating it. Getting to grips with it. One hand flattened, as if he might–if he chooses (and definitely not, otherwise)–draw a small bird, or a pack of cards, or a bunch of those crazy artificial flowers which magicians used to favour so heartily in the seventies from the pale fabric of that most-esteemed piece of woolly head-apparel.

  Now here’s the shocking thing: Blaine has the exact same eyes as Houdini on the rooftop. Fact. Even then, aged three (I flip back and forth. Yup).

  It’s as if Uri Geller was here, playing one of those mind-games where he tells his victim to draw ‘anything you want’ on to a piece of paper, and then, five minutes later, when the secret image is finally revealed, he opens his own piece of paper and has drawn precisely the sam
e thing (Then he goes one step further and holds them together–front to back–and you can see through the paper that they are exactly the same size. The proportions are identical. That’s how similar they are).

  Houdini’s eyes are full of fear, but those baby eyes? Haughty. With just a whiff of hostility (who’s taking this picture? His father? A new friend? A relative? Does it matter? Because the tiny boy Blaine is fiercely protective of his mother. This is her hat, his expression says, and she’s my mother, so who the hell are you, eh?’).

  Tiny nostrils flared. Chin lifted.

  I smile at his boyish defiance.

  It’s then–and only then (when my eye is idly inspecting the newspaper dispenser–that I notice his little legs, and the small, supportive, metal and elastic harness there. The left leg relaxed. The right leg kicked out slightly, under the stress of the wire.

  Mystery and suffering. Mystery and suffering.

  Bly’s words rush back to me.

  I really need to share. I do. But I don’t dare phone Jalisa. And Bly will say I Told You So. And Solomon will just scoff and sneer…

  Aphra’s in a towering rage (we’re talking 30 storey) when she finally gets around to answering her buzzer (‘What?! Who?! Oh for Christ’s sake. Just come up’), and she hasn’t calmed down much by the time I’ve staggered up there. Her front door has been wedged open with a phonebook and she’s in her tiny kitchen, throwing stuff around and cursing.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask, peering tentatively in (she’s dressed in a beige, rough linen, deep-pocketed miniskirt, an expensive-seeming red V-neck sweater–and some antique red Scholl sandals with thick, flat wooden heels. Her hair’s pulled back into a chaotic bun. Hairpins shoved in everywhere).

  ‘The bloody…’ she kicks the cooker and her sandal flies off. ‘Fuck. Something’s blown. A wire. A fuse. I don’t know. But I’m halfway through making dinner…’ (or several dinners- from what I can tell- since all the worktops in that tiny space are literally crammed with bowls and boards and mixers).