The Houdini Effect Read Online Free Page A

just one letter, from Saul to Paul!) He’d had an
over-whelming vision of God, apparently, afterwards becoming a
changed man, not to mention a rabid traveller.
    That, apparently, was his ‘Damascus
Moment’.
    Maybe we all have moments
like that when everything changes, now and forever. Mine was just
round the corner.

PART TWO
     
     
    The Middle
     
    (Well, why not? Isn’t that how all stories
are structured? With a beginning, a middle and an end. I’m up to
the middle bit now. It’s the longest part, as middle sections tend
to be.)
     
    Houdini could escape from anything (bar
one)
     
    ‘Houdini could escape from
anything,’ Harry told me around the time of the séance.
    ‘ Didn’t he die young, or
something?’ I said casually, vaguely remembering a snippet of
information about the great man, information that Harry himself had
undoubtedly once passed on to (a then disinterested) me.
    ‘ He was actually pretty
old,’ said Harry said. ‘Fifty-two.’
    ‘ Don’t let Mum and Dad hear
you say that!’ I warned him. ‘As if fifty-two is old to them.
Anyway, like I said, there was one thing which your idol didn’t
manage to escape from.’
    ‘ What was that?’ asked
Harry, momentarily tricked.
    ‘ Death,’ I said, feeling
ridiculously pleased with myself for believing I’d got one over on
Harry.
    I should have realized that Harry would
always have a comeback even if, in this case, it wasn’t a complete
contradiction of what I’d said.
    ‘ He gave it his best shot,’
said Harry.
    I knew he was just dying for me to ask what
he
    meant by that but I wasn’t going to take the
bait. Looking back, I wish I had asked. The knowledge might have
helped me sooner rather than later.
     
    In Laurie’s house
     
    Harry didn’t seem to mind the constant
change and upheaval that trading in real estate involved, certainly
not nearly as much as I did. (Why is it called ‘real’ estate, as
opposed to ‘unreal’? I didn’t quite get it. Dad once tried to
explain that the ‘real’ is something to do with ‘immovable’
property but it still seemed like a loose use of the word to
me.)
    Harry was already living in a magical world
of his own by the time of the second house renovation. It was a
world in which he had hardly any responsibilities unless you
counted as ‘responsibilities’ his constant desire to improve his
people-fooling skills and his attempts to manipulate victims
(mainly me) into helping him.
    Actually, all things considered and in
retrospect, I didn’t have all that many worries and
responsibilities either. Mum and Dad were perfectly capable and
rational about most things even if at first they (together) and
later Dad (alone) were beyond reason when it came to doing up old
houses.
    But still, I hated all the
shifting and everything that went with it. It got to the point
where I couldn’t even be bothered unpacking all my stuff whenever
we moved into a new old place and arranging it into some sort of
permanence because nothing ever was permanent. It seemed to us kids that we’d forever
be living in a kind of holiday house/camp ground
arrangement.
    Then, everything changed.
    Mum, in a rare moment of
distraction from her Damascus Moment (i.e. her community law
career) said just before we moved into Laurie’s villa (not at all
like an Ancient Roman villa, by the way, just our Southern
Hemisphere term for a particularly old house. Weatherboard, of
course), ‘This is the last one!’
    Dad, amazingly, did not
make the mistake of disagreeing. After all, even though she had
withdrawn her involvement in the nuts and bolts of renovation, Mum
was still forced to be a part of it just as Harry and I were. I
don’t think Dad would ever have contemplated ‘going it alone’,
com-pletely alone, if that was what ignoring Mum was going to
mean.
    ‘ Upsizing’ was the word Dad
used to optimistically describe our final move. No one else felt
optimistic. The opposite, in fact. I called the last