‘I have come for my son, William Little. I believe you have imprisoned him by mistake.’
The officer on duty looked through to me in the cell and to Crisp at the counter, but instead of laughing at the lack of family resemblance, nodded in absolute agreement without even asking Crisp for any identification. How he did it, again I didn’t know. The hapless constable selected a large brass key from his jangling collection and gave me my liberty. I didn’t know whether to punch Crisp or kiss him, for in the cell my fears had begun to creep, time had ceased and abstract shapes in the sandstone seemed to shift and reform into the faces of all those I had ever wronged.
‘Come on, son,’ he said as he slapped me on the back, hard enough to make me cough and splutter.
We were halfway down the street when Crisp spoke. I seethed with each step I took.
‘That was lesson number two,’ he said, as smug as a drunk with his lips around the bottle. ‘I hope you learned it well.’
The lesson of being a fool I did not need to learn. I felt a bilious shiver and the desire to crush his windpipe.
‘I can see it on your face, William, that you haven’t learned it yet. You are so angry and consumed by your own rage, you are unable to see what the lesson was.’
I kicked the footpath, the stone grazing my shoe, heat threading its way tight up to my neck. He had called me William. No one ever, not any two-bit whore or sideshow salesman, ever used my full name. It was my name. The name I would use when I would hear it declared on the lips of the woman who would sanctify my honour, with love and obedience.
‘What lesson is there in behaving as your fool?’ I spat, my own spittle hitting my chin. Crisp laughed, the sound of it making me froth and fizz. Oh that I had my knife!
‘Did you not say you were Crisp when you were asked?’
I nodded, ashamed. He must have been watching as I was arrested.
‘Therein lies the lesson. Do you know why you said you were me? I will spare you the embarrassment of your ignorance. It was the power of suggestion, my boy, in the consulting room beforehand. Do you not recall? Can’t quite remember it all? Blink and you missed it? That is the key.’
My mind swam. How had he suggested to me that I was someone else against my will? What a fool I was then, so easily gulled out of even my own name. But no more, I would learn my lessons as if they were tattooed on my heart. William Little. Nobody’s Fool.
My rage still glowed in my guts even months later. It churned in me, a constant companion that would not go away. I couldn’t wait any longer now, watching her from the window, smiling like a beacon. Quietly I leaned over a neighbour’s fence and plucked some choice blooms, a bunch of red camellias and a branch of wattle that showered its pollen in the air like gold dust. I bounded up the stairs with my offering, turned the handle and entered. Was it the flowers or the sun-like smile upon my face that made them all stop and wait in silence for what I had to say?
‘Congratulations,’ I said. My words all for her and none for him. I thrust out my bouquet with one hand and pulled her up to me with the other. And in one smooth movement, as though sweeping her to me to dance, I planted the tender surprise of a kiss upon her snowy lips.
FOURTEEN
Ari
Miss du Maurier was waiting for us when we got in, a bottle of champagne sitting in the kitchen sink surrounded by ice. Her solo applause rang out for us as we came in the back door after settling the birds in the shed.
‘Bravo,’ she cried as she saw us and folded us both into her arms, Lily’s arm encircling my waist, her hair caught in my mouth. We had walked the short distance home with the birds swinging in their cages, the air electric.
‘Come, come,’ Miss du Maurier said, ushering us into the sitting room, the dripping bottle in one hand and a trio of glasses in the other. ‘This should be but the start of celebrations, dears, we should have a party.’
‘A party?’ Lily said. ‘Why?’ The fireplace had gone cold while Miss du Maurier had seen our act, but the room felt overly warm.
‘In honour of your performance. A costume party,’ said Miss du Maurier. ‘You two are probably tired of costumes already, but the rest of us would love to dress up. It will be fun!’ Miss du Maurier propped her thumbs against the cork and it shot through the air and landed obediently at her feet.
Lily laughed. She had been so full of the lights and applause and sheer wonder of pulling something magical out of the hat. All the way home we walked beneath the streetlights, the cold air swirling around us, but her cheeks roared with heat. She was animated, excited, the thrill of it all spilling out of her, but I felt strangely lost for words.
We had been a surprising success, but I couldn’t shake the disappointment that I had had no family to share it with, just the applause of strangers. I’d known my uncle would consider the performance too much, but my aunt had not even tried to come. It was more than that, though; a greater absence gnawed at me. The loss of my parents, the incomplete fictions that they were. I couldn’t even imagine their faces, for my father was a mystery to me, and my mother was fading in my memory, growing vaguer every year, mottled like the silver surface of an old mirror.
After I arrived here as a child, I tried so hard to remember who had inked my tattoo, the mysterious word that seemed to burn under my uncle’s disapproving glare. Could it have been my father who pierced my skin with a needle over and over, rubbing in the stinging ink? Yet where my father’s face should be was a vacancy, like the cut-out windows in my uncle’s newspapers. But it didn’t stop me creating my own portrait – false or not. In my imagination it was always the Master Mystifier, Harry Houdini, who took on the paternal role, his face revealed to me through a puff of smoke.
I had seen Houdini’s face in a newspaper my uncle had discarded. The scissors had snipped a little into the photograph, but there he was, wavy haired, sparkly eyed, challenging the world to place him in bonds that no one else could escape from. Did I resemble him?
He was in Australia to fly his plane, the first to do so across this hot dry continent. My uncle had told me this country was desert at its heart, just like a knish is cheese in the middle. Houdini could not only break the shackles that held him, but he was brave and light enough to strap himself into his Voisin plane, which seemed as fragile as a moth, and fly with no fear of falling Lucifer-like to earth. That Houdini was going to fly across a landscape that was bigger than my imagining just made him larger in my estimation. He was not only a Jew, but he was a genius and a revered magician too, a fact that was lost on my uncle.
While he was in Sydney preparing for his flight, Houdini’s name was splashed all over the streets. Day after day, challenges were published in the newspaper, tests that would seem impossible for any mere mortal. I would have done anything to have seen him in the flesh, hoping that his showman’s face would look down to me with a father’s acceptance. I did all sorts of things to sway my uncle – I tidied my room, spent hours practising my Hebrew, in the hope my uncle would acquiesce to my desire to see the Great Houdini at the Tivoli. All I could think of was Houdini’s weightlessness, his freedom, treating the air as if he owned it. Patiently, Aunt Hephzibah listened to me chatter on about every lock and chain Houdini threw off, every challenge he rose to conquer, my childish opportunism injecting every conversation with a dose of Houdini.
The first challenge was issued in the Herald.
William Elphinstone lived, according to the advertisement, not five minutes away in Camperdown. The first opportunity I had, I was down there, looking through the windows, hoping to see what the carpenter had built, but there was no sign of it. Only a dog stirred that afternoon, his raspy tongue lapping at my salty hand. The box, I found out the next day, had been taken to the Tivoli so the public could inspect it before Houdini’s arrival. The night of the challenge came and eleven minutes was all it took for Houdini to reverse the nails that had been pounded into the timber and driven through the rope, eleven minutes to step out to the audience, calm and
unruffled. The box was left in the Tivoli foyer, a trophy to baffle everyone as to how he had done it.
The next challenge was posted five days later from a group of asylum attendants. I had to ask my aunt what the word meant, for the language was almost religious:
1. They will bandage his hands to his sides.
2. They will roll him in a number of large sheets in mummy fashion.
3. They will fasten him down to an iron hospital bed with strong linen bandages.
4. They will pour from 10–15 buckets of water over his form, so as to cause all the materials and knots to shrink, holding him in a positively helpless condition.
5. The attempt to escape to take place in full view of the audience.
The date of the challenge came and went and no mention was made of it in the Herald. Part of me despaired that he was still there trying to find release from his tortures, until my Aunt Hephzibah unwrapped a cabbage from a page of newspaper that contained a small paragraph from the Town and Country Journal. It reported that he had given them the slip after all, even though the challengers had objected to his blue swimming costume, thinking it part of his escape technique, and had given him the calico pants the insane were made to wear. Thirty-five minutes was all it took, from incarceration to freedom.
The third and last challenge was from a saddler at Rawson Place. Instead of the bag going over Houdini’s head, it was made to fit around his shoulders and held into position by a broad leather strap encircling his back. He was to be strung up like a criminal on the way to the executioner – would he escape death?
This was my final chance to see him.
On the last day of all my hopes I rose early, ate my oatmeal, washed the bowl and put it away. I made my bed and helped my Aunt Hephzibah with the chores and swept the kitchen floor with a vigorous intention. Time came for the lessons my uncle gave to me and a couple of other Jewish boys who lived within walking distance. The other boys were older, readying themselves for their bar mitzvahs, and they kept to themselves, partly out of their sense of superiority that they would learn the ways of men before me, and partly because they associated me with my uncle. We were one and the same thing to them. I was his parrot, possibly transmitting all their petty adolescent secrets into his ear. Sometimes they would include me in their games in the small break we had, but more often than not I would stay inside at the table and shuffle a pack of cards that I had taken to carrying in my pocket, consoling myself with the flick of hearts and the retrieval of aces in my own attempts at card tricks. After the break we each had to tell part of the story of Moses.
One of the boys told how Moses was found in the reeds, by Batya the Pharaoh’s daughter, the other told of how Moses parted the sea. I saw this as my chance. I could not ask my uncle outright; a no would come too swiftly to his lips. He had to know how I felt, what direction I wanted to head in. I would hint without saying it directly, impress him with the learning he had imparted to me. So I said:
‘Moses, having had a stutter, commanded his brother to speak the eloquence of the Lord on his behalf, so Aaron became the first high priest. Aaron beheld a magic staff, a staff like no other. It was no ordinary rod, for on it was inscribed each letter of the name of the ten plagues and it was made from acacia wood studded with sapphire. HaShem created it in the quiet twilight of the sixth day of creation and bestowed it upon Adam when he and Eve were exiled from the Garden of Eden. It was a magical rod passed down generation after generation after generation to Adam’s son Shem, then Enoch, Abraham, Isaac and Joshua. Until it fell into the hands of Jethro. Now the rod, being fond of the soil of Eden, whispered somehow to Jethro to plant it in the ground. He did, and it bloomed. He tried to draw it from the ground but he could not, the rod engraved with the Unspeakable name of G_d. Moses visited Jethro’s house and it was Moses who read the Name, and the Rod released itself into his keeping. Jethro gave Moses his daughter Zipporah for marriage, for he had promised her hand to he who could ever withdraw the rod again.
‘When Moses and Aaron faced the Pharaoh, the Pharaoh called his magicians to defeat them by casting their staffs upon the ground, upon which the staffs turned to snakes. Aaron threw down his rod and it turned into a great snake that consumed them all. Thus Moses and his brother Aaron were great magicians able to cast out the ten plagues, ride up the mountain on a cloud, receive the Ten Commandments and part the Red Sea, among other miracles. Because of his magic rod, Moses was a magician just like Houdini.’
The older boys barely suppressed their sniggers. My uncle’s face was stony, not even the slightest expression rippled across it. At the time he said nothing, but moved on directly to the next task he had set for us. I knew his anger would come, just as the sun had to sink behind the horizon. The other boys left, their conversation fading to a whisper beyond the door.
‘Ari, what was that?’ He could barely contain the exasperation in his voice. I didn’t want to speak it. My hopes of going to the Tivoli veered close to being dashed. ‘Moses is our Patriarch, our Elder. Whatever power moved through him was not his, but HaShem’s. He was not a magician.’
‘I want to see Houdini. His final challenge of escape is tonight,’ I pleaded, desperate.
My uncle’s face softened for a moment, a mere break in the clouds, as if he could remember the senseless obsessions of children, having been a child himself an age ago.
‘I don’t know what that mark upon your hand has convinced you of,’ he said, one of the rare times he spoke of it, ‘but you know, Ari, that it is Friday, tonight is the start of the Sabbath, the day the Lord commanded as a day of rest, just as he rested on the seventh day. Tonight we will welcome the Sabbath as the bride she is. Your aunt will prepare the Sabbath meal and sweep our home from top to bottom as if to welcome the most of important of guests. You and I will attend shul as it is our mitzvah, regardless of whether you are a boy or a man. If he was a real Jew Houdini would do the same instead of participating in foolish parlour games to entertain the masses.’
And nothing more was said, though I willed it, dragging my feet from flat to synagogue and back again, but he would say no more.
‘What do you say? Let me throw a party in your honour this Friday!’ Miss du Maurier drew my attention back into the room. Friday. I wouldn’t be making those familiar steps between the synagogue and flat this Friday. My place at the table would be empty. My aunt would light the candles before she covered her eyes and welcomed the Sabbath as was custom. Would they say a blessing for me? Lily looked at me. Why shouldn’t we celebrate?
But before I could say anything, Mr Little strolled into the house as if he owned the place, a large bunch of freshly stolen flowers in his hand. I had seen them on the neighbours’ bush, the comfort of bees.
‘Congratulations,’ he said and pulled Lily up from the sofa as lightly as if she had been a jacket he had discarded. He pulled her close, his hand in the small of her back, before pressing his mouth to hers. My heart pitched. Had I gravely misjudged things? Did they share more than just a house? How hadn’t I seen it? I had been so focused on our act and my expulsion that my thoughts had not rested on much else. He liked her in a way I hadn’t noticed until now. He had helped her to find a job. That time in the park when her hat had blown away, he had held it close to him rather than come any closer, waiting for her to come to him. I hadn’t imagined his acid tone toward me made sense. But it was not because he was an anti-Semite; it was because I was the man in his way.
She broke the contact between them, her hands reaching up to his lapel and pushing him away. The flowers dropped their blown heads on the floor, a clutch of twisted brown stalks left in his hand.
She resumed her seat beside me, her legs trembling, subtle vibrations transmitting through the springs of the sofa. How could I have not noticed how drawn he was to her? Was she drawn to him in the same way? How could I speak? I cared for her in a way that I couldn’t express: the words were locked down inside of me, where no pick could spring them open.
; PART TWO
The Switch
FIFTEEN
Lily
His lips were a surprise, a warm wet press against mine. I was so confused I didn’t know whether to twist away from them or to press my lips back with equal fervour. For there was something strangely alluring about Billy’s lips demanding life from mine that caught me unawares. It was not just that he had plucked me from my chair. I knew he liked me. We shared a laugh, a house and a workplace. But with his kiss was it possible we shared something else? He was a handsome man with his piercing blue eyes and blond hair like risen bread. Every time he moved the forelock of it out of his eyes and looked at me I found myself reddening like a flare. His hands were large and muscular, and when I felt them rope around me into the small of my back I felt the power in them.
It was so different from my first kiss on that very hot day, the day I left home. A discarded newspaper sat on a chair, so I picked it up and lazily scanned the headlines, feeling my eyelids getting heavier with each line of print. The scent of petrol was like a dangerous hypnotic perfume. I am sure I only fell asleep for a moment, and I woke in an instant when my boss pressed down on me. His name I have banished from my mind, but still the touch of him lingers, malignant. I squirmed like a fish brought to land, twisting and turning under him, but I couldn’t break free. The weight of him hurt my lungs, my breath ragged and nearly extinguished, my voice choked, as his lips roamed terribly all over mine. He used one hand to tug my braid as a rope to wind me in, the other struggled to undo my trousers fastenings, but the button stayed true.
The Bird's Child Page 14