The Houdini Girl - Couverture rigide

Ask away, I won't tell you how it's done. I never divulge the methodology of a specific effect. 'Exposure' -- that is, deliberate revelation of the secret means by which magic is accomplished, as opposed to 'disclosure' by accident or incompetence -- is discreditable. This isn't mere adherence on my part to a tenet of the Magic Circle, nor stubborn respect for the traditions of our profession (although it's true we've endeavored to guard our secrets for four thousand years). No, my reason for keeping schtum is pure self-interest. Methods are seldom as interesting as the feats performed by their means; if I tell the audience how it's done, I diminish their respect for me. Simple as that. Exposure, especially in the immediate aftermath of an effect, can't be anything but anticlimactic. Besides, divulging the 'trick' might satisfy an onlooker's curiosity, but magic isn't about tricks. To trick someone suggests you have (to your benefit and their disadvantage) cheated, swindled or deceived them in some underhand way. Trickery implies a perpetrator and a victim.

    I am not a trickster, I am a magician. That is, I perform feats of conjuring and illusion for the purposes of entertainment. Performance is the key. In truth, tricks are incidental; if magic consists of mere trickery, then acting requires nothing but costume and make-up. I used to be an actor. To be exact, I was a member of an undergraduate drama society at Oxford (Poly, as was, not the University). I still live in Oxford; I still act. When I'm on stage, I'm an actor playing the part of a magician. Spectators, for all this, remain fixated on secrets, on trickery. They witness the performance -- the performance -- of a stunning magical feat, and barely has their initial amazement subsided than they are asking (I hear them, I see it in their faces): How the fuck did he do that?

     As I say, magic, as an art form, isn't the mere presentation of puzzles to confound the onlooker; it isn't about tricks, it's about illusion. And being privy to the mechanics of a magical feat destroys any sense of illusion. I am an illusionist. Without illusion I am nothing. I believe Rosa appreciated this from the very beginning.

     When our friends in the pub that evening -- mine and Rosa's -- implored me to divulge how the ash stain came to appear in her left palm, I declined. When they proposed various theories and hypotheses, I smiled non-committally. And when they urged me to repeat the illusion, I said no. Another of my golden rules: never perform the same feat twice before the same audience; once the element of surprise is gone, the illusion is devalued as a spectacle and the method becomes easier to detect. Rosa, who had more reasons than most for wanting to know the trick, didn't add her voice to the collective plea for disillusion. She sat quietly, frowning, holding her palm in front of her face as if to assure herself that the 'stigma' was there. Then she licked it off. Looking me full in the face across the table, her tongue streaked with ash, she said, 'How come they call you Red? You a fucking communist or something?'
Later that night, when I asked why she'd decided to sleep with me, she said a) I didn't cough when she made me vanish in a cloud of smoke; and b) my hands, as I guided hers into position for the stigmata illusion, weren't clammy.

     'No other reason?'

     'Nah.'

     'It wasn't because you fancied me?'

     'I shagged you, didn't I?'

     She told me she was twenty-four going on twenty-five, four years younger than me, though there were occasions when I felt juvenile in her presence. For instance, I couldn't refrain from asking whether she was friends with the guy she'd been flirting with in the Eagle and Child. Rosa said she'd never met him before.

     'Anyway, I wasn't flirting with him.'

     'Come off it.'

     'You were the one I was flirting with.'

     'You didn't speak to me all evening. You didn't even look at me.'

     'Exactly.'

     I reflected on this, running over the sequence of events that culminated in our introduction. I visualized her, assisting in the rearrangement of tables and chairs. I asked, 'Did you engineer it so we wound up sitting opposite each other?'

     She smiled, shaking her head. 'Now, that would be telling.'

     I asked Rosa about herself, and she told me. She was born in Killarney, County Kerry, and emigrated to London with her parents at the age of nine. An only child, despite what they say about Catholics. Something to do with a difficult labor. Daddy fucked her putting me in there, and I fucked her coming out. Seeing my expression, she shrugged off my unease at her remark. When Rosa spoke, whatever she said, you could like it or lump it. Mammy (Mary, natch) was a school dinner-lady; Daddy was a postman. Postman Patrick. They died in a car crash when she was fourteen. Mangled. You should've seen the car. She was put into care -- children's homes, foster parents. She left school, examless, and moved into a bedsit before she was seventeen. Kensal Rise. And, by the way, she wasn't R C any more. Not a proper one; she'd lapsed.

     'How is it you've retained your Irish accent?'

     'Retained, is it?'

     'No, seriously.'

     Another shrug. 'I work with a bunch of Micks.'

     'Doing what?'

     'Dogsbody.' She stubbed out a cigarette. I'd no idea how many she'd smoked since we'd walked home from the pub. 'You heard of Erin?' I shook my head. 'Newspaper for Irish ex-pats. "Editorial assistant", that's me. Carting bits of paper from one gobshite journalist to another, answering the phone and making tea. Oh, and I get to sort the fucking post.'

     'You enjoy it, then?'

     'You should see the office -- like a public convenience, with computers instead of sinks.'

     The second syllable of 'convenience' was elasticated to accommodate several 'e's between the 'v' and the 'n'. It must've been three in the morning. We were sitting cross-legged on my bed, facing one another, naked, smoking and listening to music. We'd fucked, twice. I don't know how we came to leave the pub together, it just happened. One minute, thirteen people were saying beery cheerios in St Giles; the next, the two of us were strolling through town towards Osney. A clear, cool night in early spring. Rosa wanted a burger from the cabin by the station, so we had one each with chips and ate from grease proof bags as we walked. Her mouth tasted of minced beef and ketchup when we stopped to kiss outside my house. In the glare of the security light, her hair hung in black swathes that framed a face made spectral by the harsh magnesium-white. The green strokes of make-up were rendered luminous.

     In my bedroom she asked two questions before we undressed.

     'D'you have condoms?'

     'Yes.'

     'Are you shagging someone else?'

     'No.'

     She held my gaze for a moment before beginning to unbutton my shirt. In bed, I was a puppet -- hands, mouth, cock maneuvered about her body by the tug of invisible strings. Rosa fucked me. And she used me to fuck herself. I told her, truthfully, I'd never had such a good shag in my entire life; she said she was glad about that. As we lay there afterwards, however, I found myself wondering about someone who would fuck a stranger less than four hours after they'd first met. It didn't occur to me that I'd behaved no differently to her. At least, it didn't strike me to make a comparison. Not at the time, though it does now. Besides, it wasn't just the fact that we'd fucked, it was the way we'd done it. I was at once exhilarated and excited and unfathomably afraid of the implications of a woman who could fuck so well.
'You a fucking communist or something?'

     I drained my pint. Raising my voice above the noise of the pub, I replied, 'Red was the name of a horse.' My throat was raw from the smoke. 'Red Alligator, '68 Grand National. Dad won so much money he treated himself and Mum to a holiday. That was when I was conceived, so they reckon.'

     Rosa said, 'Your old feller named you "Red" after a horse?'

     'No, he called me Fletcher, after the winning jockey. Fletcher Brandon is my actual name. People call me Red because ... I suppose, as nicknames go, it's more interesting than "Fletch".' I elaborated. 'What it was, a friend of mine called me Red one time and it just sort of caught on.'

     'Fletcher Brandon.' She rolled the name in her mouth like a boiled sweet.

     'Dad was hoping I'd grow up to be a jockey. Wrong build, as it turned out.'

     'What if the horse hadn't won?'

     'Yeah, I used to wonder -- suppose his big win had come up at that year's Derby. Sir Ivor. I'd have been christened Piggott instead of Fletcher.' Rosa, noting my empty glass, offered me a slug of her lager. The side of the bottle was tacky where the label had been pared off. 'That would've meant me being conceived in June, though, rather than April.'

     'So?'

     'Different egg, different sperm, different me. I'd have been made to vanish even before I was born. The greatest disappearing act of all!'

     Rosa reclaimed her drink. 'Anyone ever told you you talk a load of shite?'

     I could've expanded on the subject of my name. My names. But someone interrupted to ask what I was drinking (My fucking beer -- Rosa) and anyway, her previous remark -- for all it'd been dressed in a smile -- had had a deflating effect. In the months to follow, the accusation that I was talking shite would become a familiar refrain. So I didn't tell her Brandon wasn't the name I was born with. I chose it for myself. My original surname was Clarke, but I changed it, legally, when I was nineteen, when Dad fucked and then fucked off with a woman who was only two years older than me. Why 'Brandon'? At that time, I was starting to take my 'hobby' more seriously -- no longer content to practice magic without an appreciation of its theory, its art, its history. Among the books, I came across a reference to the principal juggler and conjuror in the court of Henry VIII. Brandon: the first British illusionist on record. His wasn't the most pleasant repertoire, but as an anarchic mathematics undergraduate he appealed to me. One of his feats -- performed before the king -- was to cause a pigeon to drop dead from its perch while the magician, uttering incantations, repeatedly stabbed a picture of the bird. The illusion was accomplished by Brandon having previously dosed the pigeon with nux vomica, timing the climax of his performance to coincide with the requisite number of minutes (established by experiment) for the poison to take effect. This is one secret method I don't mind exposing, my namesake's 'trick' being seldom scripted into modern conjuring routines.

     No further mention of names, then. And, in all honesty, I forget what we did talk about, Rosa and I, as the fuss engendered by my small act of illusion evaporated, people returned to their places, and my fee -- a fresh pint -- was set in front of me. I recall that she showed no interest whatsoever in eliciting from me the secret of the stigmata; I recall, also, being impressed by that. A sucker for unpredictability, me. A sucker for Rosa, to tell the truth.

     Even so, our initial meeting happened almost a year ago, and I find that some details of our time together in the intervening months are uncertain or elusive, while others are etched in my memory with all the definition of the present. In the light of what has taken place, I'd willingly re-create each minute of each day we shared and expand every one of those moments to last an hour. But this is a feat beyond the power of magic. Although, as I go over events in my mind, I appear to be doing just that -- reviving and magnifying spent time. Another illusion, self-inflicted. What began as a commitment to memory, a preservation of the past before it slipped like sand through my fingers, has assumed the nature of a quest. A quest for truth. My obsession has been the scrutiny of moments and details in the belief that contained within them are the secrets of understanding. I understand this, at least: the clearest, most vivid recollection I have -- my abiding and unalterable memory of Rosa Kelly -- is of how vibrant she was that first night. I have never met anyone who was so alive.
The morning after was a Sunday, we stayed in bed until mid-afternoon. We ate breakfast and lunch off trays like a pair of bedridden invalids. We dozed, on and off, and we fucked. At four o'clock, Rosa got up without a word and began to dress. I asked where she was going and she said she was away home to collect her things.

     'I thought I could move in, if you like.'

     I sat up. She was finger-combing her hair in the mirror above the chest of drawers, applying make-up. Seeing her in reflection, I noticed something about her mouth. Her lips. Full and sensual, set in something between a pout and a blown kiss, her lips seemed permanently to be slightly parted. I was reminded of those models in ads for telephone sex. But Rosa wasn't posing, not even conscious of being observed. She reached inside her T-shirt and doused each underarm with my deodorant.

     'Rosa.'

     'Seen my woolly anywhere?'

     'Over there.' I pointed to a corner of the room, where her patchwork-quilt-patterned jumper was spilling from the rim of a wastepaper basket. She retrieved it and pulled it on. The upper portion of her bright green leggings disappeared.

     'You never see a girl get dressed before?'

     'Have you thought this through?' I asked.

     'Not much.'

     I reached over to the bedside table for cigarettes, lit one and offered the pack. She took a drag on mine instead, releasing a plume of smoke towards the ceiling.

     'Yes or no?' she demanded.

     'How long for?'

     She shrugged.

  &nbs...

"Unusually deft and witty dialogue--. With great aplomb, [Bedford] has brought off an erotic thriller."-- The New York Times Book Review

In The Houdini Girl, award-winning mystery writer Martyn Bedford explores the pulsing spiritual chaos that lies at the heart of erotic obsession. Fletcher "Red" Brandon is a master magician who uses his talents to seduce Rosa, a flinty Irish woman. But when Rosa is killed suddenly, Red discovers secrets about the woman with whom he shared one sexy, combative, freewheeling year. Inside Rosa's shoulder bag are a wig and a stranger's passport. And when a routine investigation reveals that Rosa has vanished before--and that her father was a terrorist for the IRA--Peter suspects foul play.

Red finds himself in Amsterdam, a stranger stumbling through his lover's secret history. Following a trail of addiction, prostitution, and murder, Red's search for the truth becomes more and more laden with mystery and forces him to reveal his own unsavory secrets. Masterfully plotted, The Houdini Girl transcends sleight-of-hand trickery for a stunning tale of love, loss, and the lure of illusion.