Escape Read Online Free Page B

with pants and singlets,
like with like, making a little pile. I sit, red-faced, thinking how all
these years what I'd been doing was trying to 'improve' her. As if she
was a book I was writing, a first draft. But knowing something dreadful
about yourself doesn't mean that you can do anything about it. 'All I
was trying to say, Clara, is that it's good to find a career path early on,
and stick to it.' I catch a pair of socks she throws at me and tuck them
into a ball.
    'Like a cockroach to a glue trap,' she says.
    'Well.' Last week Guido stepped in a sticky cockroach bait laid out
on the kitchen floor. He ran screaming into the bathroom to be sick, a
dead roach as long as a mouse still stuck to his bare heel.
    'Anyway, look, I'll leave you to it,' I say. 'I'm sure you know what
you're doing.' I spring up from the bed but a sudden pain in my
knee makes me stagger. Bone cancer, maybe. For that kind of cancer
you'd need a bone marrow transfusion, Doreen told me once, and it
has to come from a blood relation. Clara would have to come home
from Italy. We could sort this out, talk, take the time to say what we
mean. I just need some time. Oh, how pathetic can you get? says the
voice.
    'Your knee playing up again, Mum?' says Clara. The sudden
concern in her face makes the tears start.
    'Just a bit of arthritis in my middle pages.' I laugh. 'Ages.' Oh, what
am I saying? I do a little jump to show her I'm fine. Schizophrenics
often make 'word salads', Clara told me once, breaking up words into
sounds rather than meanings, tossing them together into rhymes.
Meaning is sacrificed for sound and flavour.
    Christ – the tears, the word salads, the brush in the fridge, maybe
I'm really cracking up. Last week I screamed in the car. It wasn't
planned, so none of the windows were wound up. I had to make
a getaway through a red light. I glance at Clara's mirror and my face
looks back at me, a cracked bowl. I always get a surprise when I see
myself in the mirror – there I am looking old and spent and yet I feel I
haven't really grown up at all.
    'Thanks for the camisole, Mum.' Clara's voice is soft , contrite. 'I
love it.'
    I smile at her, hovering in the doorway, so many half-formed
sentences in my head. Then I give up, the way I apparently did with
her father, and pick my way out of the room, careful not to step on the
shipwreck.
    I suppose, looking back, Clara did try to resist me. But she also learnt
a lot about lock picking, and how to create slack. Often, she seemed
to enjoy it. There's no doubt she picked up certain manoeuvres more
quickly than I did. It just seemed to come naturally to her. Maybe she
would rather have watched Play School or Humphrey Bear than learn
how Houdini freed himself from handcuffs while underwater in the
freezing North Sea, but by the time she was nine, she had become my
talented assistant. She could speed read, and knew 90 per cent of the
acts described in the escape manuals that lived on my bedside table.
Once, we put on a show in the living room: we found some red velvet
and made a gorgeous curtain. My parents came to watch, plus Doreen
and little Saraah and, of course, Guido. Clara had painted signs to put
on the front door, decorated with glitter and chains and keys. She
wore a sparkly tiara in her hair and ballet slippers. Her escape from
the Czechoslovakian Insane Muff was faultless. Surely she enjoyed the
applause, the hypnotic effect on her audience as she struggled from
her straitjacket?
    And then, in her last year of primary school, she was a star in
the Christmas concert. She performed the Lightning Shackle Chain
Escape to Joe Cocker's hit song 'Unchain My Heart'. Guido and I were
there, in the front row. She was brilliant . The chain escape described in
the manual we'd consulted involved about sixty metres of chain but I'd
found a plastic garden variety at the hardware store that was ideal for a
young girl, being light to wear but looking impossibly heavy. (You can
buy it in black, with massive