The Houdini Effect Read Online Free

colours.
     
    (DEEP THOUGHT WARNING #2)
Sometimes I worried that I could be so concerned with
superficiality. Perhaps I wasn’t a real writer after all. However,
I told myself that for the sake of life and living there were times
when even the rules governing a literary life had to be broken. It
helped console me in the dark, uninspiring times. Perhaps I was
just going through the phase called ‘being a teenager’.
     
    Talking about obsessions,
I’m not sure what is most difficult: having a brother obsessed with
escaping from things; a father obsessed with doing up old houses;
or a mother obsessed with her new-found career and second life as a
community lawyer (a transformation Harry and I once agreed was
undoubtedly her way of not having to sand, polish and paint ever
again. Clever!)
    It wasn’t always like
that. Once upon a time we were an ordinary family, living in an
ordinary house. By ordinary, read ‘normal’. By normal I mean a
house that was modern, if not brand-spanking new. A house made of
permanent materials rather than impermanent ones like wood that
rotted away if left unpainted and became infested with borer if
left untreated. (Dear Reader, we’re in the Southern Hemisphere,
remember,
    where much is made of wood.) A house where
everything worked as well as could be expected, where hot water
came out of taps labelled ‘hot’, where windows opened at once
without fighting
    back, where heat was
trapped by double glazing and thermal-lined curtains rather than
escaping through cold, thin glass despite the presence of thick,
old-fashioned drapes. (You see, even the heat got away from this
place. It was better at escaping than Harry).
     
    Dad went mad for the first
time ( house mad,
that is) when I was around six or seven. Mum, to start with, went
along with his madness. She wasn’t a community lawyer then. They
sold our perfectly acceptable home, the one in which Harry and I
had spent our first formative years and bought a ramshackle,
run-down-and-out weatherboard (that translates as ‘wooden’ in
Southern Hemisphere terminology) place, in one of the oldest parts
of town. They did it up (it took about a year), sold it and
straight away bought another equally bad house and began renovating
that one.
    Buying and selling
properties, moving in and moving out of houses, became the pattern
of our lives from then on (and it’s not the sort of pattern that
Chaos Theory would approve of, certainly not my interpretation of
the Theory.) Except I should say that well after the third house
was finished but before the fourth house was complete, Mum had what
she called a Damascus Moment and began studying law at uni. From
then on Dad became a solo renovator. Mum (and we) lived in the
houses that he bought but Mum kept her distance from the renovating
and reselling rigmarole that Dad’s
    obsession involved. She now had an obsession
of her own to nurture.
    Curiously, the better Dad
got at it the more of a perfectionist he became (i.e. he got slower
and
    slower.) As a result, buying and selling
houses became less and less profitable. Eventually Mum
metamorphosed into the main breadwinner while Dad more or less
became a full-time, one-house-only (this house) repairer and
restorer. (In his former life - his glory days, perhaps??? - he had
been an accountant. I’m not sure how good he’d been at this. After
all, it was a long time ago.)
     
    Damascus
     
    Of course I had to know what ‘Damascus
Moment’ meant. That is one of the pitfalls of being a writer.
Little things swell in a writer’s mind the way courgettes (a.k.a.
zucchinis) balloon so quickly into fat marrows. Writers develop an
inbuilt urgency to know. Knowing things, or having to know things,
is their obsession.
    Damascus turns out (funny
that) to be the name of yet another ancient city, older even than
Athens or Troy. It’s in present-day Syria and was the place to
which Saint Paul was headed when he converted to Christianity
( and changed his
name by