Escape (26 page)

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 around 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.

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.
Out
rageous! 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.

Stacked on the small pine table are my four magicians tucked
neatly into their folders. Patrick O'Leary from Ireland, Chip Hanson,
Chuck Lancer and Jonny Love from the USA. Except for Jonny, Mary
had said, you'll have to do all your interviews by email. The men are
happy to send you the brochures and DVDs from their shows, their
baby pictures, school compositions, addresses of friends and family,
reviews.

But how do I juggle four extra lives? I find it so hard trying to hang
on to my own. I can feel the men leaning over me, breathing heavily,
waiting to see themselves in a new spotlight. Which events in their
lives best illustrate who they are? Will they agree with my choice? Will
they feel misinterpreted, misunderstood? Will they argue? It would be
far easier if they were all dead.
See, there you go again,
says the voice,
wishing people ill
.

I'm getting that itchy feeling under my skin, where I can't scratch.
My legs are sticking to my chair. The clock says I have another two
hours to go tonight. I didn't do more than forty minutes today. If
I leave the chair for any length of time, the voice will conclude I am
even more of a total failure than I was yesterday.

Surely I'm not the only person in the world who finds it hard to
sit still? When Simon came round the other day with the chlorine,
he told me about a famous author who chained himself to his
chair for six hours each day so that he couldn't leave his writing.
What about the bathroom? I wondered. What about food? When
I mentioned this to my mother, she rolled her eyes. Of course he
was a
male
author, she sniff ed. Who would bring you
your
lunch,
Rachel?

Well, that was a fair question, but it wasn't really the inequities
of gender that ruffled my mother. No, the problem for her is the
subject I'm writing about. I knew it. My mother has never approved
of magic. She calls it 'practised deception', or 'professional lying'.
But at least it's honest, I wanted to say. Just by standing up on
stage the magician announces he's about to deceive us. He'll make
us disbelieve our senses, show us beautiful lies that will look like
the truth. If you ask me, there's none of that clarity in real life. There
are no announcements. And yet, isn't there a lot of lying or let's say,
double messages going on? I spent most of my youth getting lost in
misdirection, obediently looking where I was told while the real action
was taking place somewhere else. I was always confused, startled by the
way things turned out, and life seemed to slip by, incomprehensible, a
series of sleight-of-hand tricks I never managed to grasp.

'Is there any dessert?' Guido calls from his room.

Guido is always waiting for his dinner. He doesn't go out much any
more at night. He doesn't lie on the sofa and read, or play with his
word mosaics. Since Clara left he goes straight to his room to work on
his script.

He's like a man possessed. 'How do you show time passing,
without using clumsy dates and seasons flashing by on the screen?'
he demands, charging suddenly into my room. As if I'd know. And he
won't tell me the context of what it is he's writing, so I find it hard to
make an intelligent comment. He stands there in the doorway, jabbing
his notebook with a pencil. 'What is the colloquial espression for
something "very loud" in English?' he insists. '
Capisci
, the film is set
in Italy, this is where I know best, but I want to write also in English,
because is here that I 'ave contacts, who will supply the funding. If they
can't understand my writing, they cannot support it.'
Ear-splitting
, I
think, too late, as he rushes away.

He works late into the night. Sometimes I hear him go to
the bathroom and my clock says 3 am. Then he sleeps late into the
morning.

Our worst argument was last week, when I woke him accidentally.
I needed my book
Nature's Magic
for my school lecture at Kirkwood
Public that morning. I was running late, searching for my experiment
ingredients, and just before walking out the door, I remembered the
book. I could see it in my mind, in Guido's room, balancing on top
of the bookshelf above his head. He'd taken it only two nights before
for some research he'd been doing. I'd asked him what he'd found
useful, a bit flattered and intrigued, but he'd just waved me away. 'Is
not important,' was all he said.

I tiptoed into his room. There were papers and magazines spread
over the floor. My eyes travelled over the bookshelf and then I saw
Nature's Magic
, its bright red corner sticking out from beneath Guido's
head. Christ, could it have been any worse? I stood there hesitating,
trying to assess the situation. I inched forward until I was so close I
could see the individual dark points of stubble on his chin. Speed and
accuracy, I knew, were going to be the most important elements here.
Carefully, holding my breath, I took gentle hold of the book and, with
one rapid movement, slid it out from under his head. I'm quite skilled
at this because I've had hours of practice with a similar magic act
where a strip of paper is pulled from under a stack of Chinese checkers
without causing the pile to fall. I've done it a hundred times with
gratifying success. But as I discovered long ago, inanimate objects are
much easier to control than husbands.

'
Che cazzo fai
?' he shouted, leaping out of bed as if he'd been shot.
'Get away from me! What's wrong? I did nothing wrong!' He was
looking around wildly, his eyes wide and staring.

'I . . . I was just getting my book,' I mumbled, trying to breathe.

Guido just stood there, his neat narrow feet bunched anxiously
into the carpet. He looked peeled, somehow, naked as an egg, his
saggy old boxers clinging to his hips.

'I'm sorry I gave you such a fright,' I whispered.

Guido shivered. 'Why you do this to me? I 'ave not slept. You 'ave
no consideration for me and my work. Is very important, I am trying
to create a whole world on paper,
hai capito
? Is like building the Sistine
Chapel, each brick. Oh you 'ave no understanding, you do not let me
find any peace!'

Guilt flipped to anger, hot as oil in a pan. 'I can't help it if I have
to get up and to go to work while you're still in bed. My school visits
help pay off our mortgage! How else do you think you'd be able to play
around all day with your mosaics or your scripts or whatever the f—'

Guido uttered a gurgle of rage and sprang at me, but I had already
turned, my chest thumping with what Clara called the flight response,
and I was winging down the hall, as fast as my high heels would carry me.

'This mortgage is like the prison,' Guido shouted after me. 'I don
even
wan
this mortgage, always stuck in one place, in this cultural
dessert
!'

From the doorway I yelled back, 'Well go then,
go
why don't you,
you miserable
bastard
!'

I was ready to slam the door and run but his eyes had widened, as
if my words had plunged him back into a dream and each of his elegant
feet had landed suddenly in dangerous, different worlds.
Go
, I'd said, oh
how could I, how
could
I? Terror flashed through me. What if he
did
?