The Houdini Effect Read Online Free Page B

move
‘desperately downgrading’. Not only was Laurie’s place the biggest
house we’d ever owned it was also the most dilapidated. All those
big rooms with their high ceilings. The wide, shadowy hallway. The
dim, dark panelling encrusted with years and years worth of dark,
dismal, depressing varnish.
    The fact that this was
ostensibly going to be Dad’s last chance to do up a house only
meant that the renovations were likely to take longer than ever,
maybe forever ,
and that there was a good chance we’d be camping out for the rest
of our lives, or at least until I was old enough to leave home, get
away, escape from the squalid family nest. I felt personally
downgraded.
    Mum stayed alert to the situation long
enough
    to insist that Dad
renovate our rooms first and before we moved in so that when we shifted we could
establish ourselves in our own spaces and, at long last, arrive
with a sense of ‘this is it, we’re here to stay.’
    It was something of a quick-fix job, not up
to Dad’s acquired-over-time perfectionist standards but it was
better than living inside a construction site. Besides, Dad’s
less-than-perfectionist work on our rooms was what most
do-it-yourselfers would call top-notch.
    Compared with what we’d had before, our
rooms were lavishly big. That made up for a lot of the
inconveniences we knew were still to come. We could closet
ourselves away and, if we chose, shut out the sounds of demolition
and reconstruction reverberating outside our closed doors. Was it
any surprise then that Harry’s interest in one of magic-trickery’s
specialist branches, escapology, really began to flourish soon
after we moved in? I mean, his room and mine were ones into which a
person could so much more easily escape and disappear.
     
    For those interested in arcane matters, more
about Dad’s methods
     
    (For those who are not, you have my
permission to skip to the next chapter.)
     
    From the outside - when you pass by a
typical house renovation - you might see sturdy scaffolding
surrounding the structure. SUVs (one, two, sometimes even three)
are parked
    swaggeringly on the driveway and on the
street.
    Whatever the weather, brown, bronzed
builders disport themselves in short, raggedy shorts and Sweet Pea
sized steel-capped boots (a reference to those overly large shoes
worn by Sweet Pea, the girlfriend of the comic-strip sailor
Popeye), their waists encircled by leather aprons holding their
tools. They balance on steep sloping roofs like mountaineers gazing
upon the summit of Mount Everest.
    In short, these builders
are called professionals .
     
    We once learnt about syllogisms at school.
This is an example of a syllogism:
     
    Amateurs do things differently.
    Dad is an amateur, even if he is a
perfectionist.
    Therefore Dad does things differently.
     
    He does them well but his
ways are not the ways of other men, i.e. professional men.
    Dad’s methods:
    leaves antique Skoda in driveway
    has but one ladder
    uses said ladder dangerously. OSH
(Occupational Safety and Health) would not be amused
    wears old (read very old, ancient even)
holey, faded, unfashionable, decades-past-their-use-by-date
corduroy trousers whenever he paints, hammers or sands (which is
most of the time)
    does not have a special builder’s apron. (He
once tried to wear a flowery cooking apron that Mum inherited from
Gran but we - Harry and I, that is - would not let him. It has a
large but loose
    front pocket and we told him his tools would
flop
    around inside and he would never be able to
find what he was looking for. Not to mention, of course, that he
would have looked a complete dork if he had worn it, especially out
of doors, but we didn’t have to go as far as telling him this
absolute truth. For once, he listened to us before we were forced
to irretrievably hurt his feelings.)
    There you go. Enough about Dad’s arcane
methods and his never-ending madness.
     
    Now, more about Harry and his burning (but
also somewhat mad)