Free The Houdini Effect by Bill Nagelkerke Page A

move
onto his next idea, the real (or imagined) Plan B.
    On the other side of the coin, being needed
by Harry provided me with a very useful excuse even though I’d
rather not have needed an excuse at all.
     
     
     
    Excuses
     
    Yesterday, after I’d missed my bus to the
mall for
    the reason you’ve now been
told about, I had to let Rach and Em know I wouldn’t be seeing them
as planned. I would have preferred to hole up in my room for the
rest of that long afternoon and not talk to anybody, but if I’d
done so they would inevitably have been in touch with me and
I
    wanted to get in first. I preferred to be on
the front foot rather than the back.
    So I’d texted Em to say I
wouldn’t be coming to the mall after all. I didn’t go into details,
just offered some weak excuse about being needed at home that day.
I knew she would manage with only Rachel. In fact Em was quite
capable of managing perfectly well by herself at any mall. She is
what my Gran (R.I.P.) would have called, in ‘Granguage’ (Harry’s
and my longstanding abbreviation for ‘Gran’s language’) a ‘fashion
plate’, which in Gran’s day meant someone who thought only the
latest fashions were any good. Rachel, and to some extent I, could
live very happily with op-shop oddments (some of which were
retro-new anyway) but as for Em, well let’s just say her fashion
aspirations were far grander than the contents of her
wallet.
    After texting Emma I’d
phoned Rachel. She had already left for the mall and was, in fact,
probably just about to meet up with Em. Rachel, who must have even
more recessive genes than I do, calls herself a Luddite (a person
who hates new technology. Comes from the nineteenth century. Look
it up if you want to know more) and refuses to own, much less use,
a mobile phone.
    ‘ They give you cancer,’
she’d once said, ‘and I hate, I just loathe, being at everyone’s
beck and call, literally. If I don’t have a phone I can
    disappear if and when I want to.’
    ‘ You could just turn your
phone off if you don’t want to be interrupted,’ Em had
replied.
    ‘ If I don’t have a phone
then I don’t have to turn it off,’ said Rach, using typically
implacable Rach Logic.
    You can see that Rach was, like me, somewhat
unusual but that’s one of the reasons why Em and I liked her. Em,
on the other hand, wouldn’t have minded if her mobile had been
implanted in her, she couldn’t bear to be separated from it as it
was. As for me and mobile phones I fell somewhere between the two
of them, which is perhaps another reason the three of us got on so
well. We over-lapped. We weren’t so much the same that our
friendship could ever become competitive.
    Em texted back on her and Rach’s behalf,
almost before I’d sent my own message. ‘Remind yr olds its hols. C
u @ pool 2morow then. B thr!’
    I dislike text language and hardly ever use
it unless I’m in a huge hurry or the message is getting too long.
So I wrote back: ‘I wouldn’t miss it.’
     
    Swimming pool blues
     
    I missed going to the pool. I’ll tell you
what happened, not that it’s hard to guess.
     
    Apart from the straining sounds of Harry
wresting with his straitjacket the house was preternaturally still.
As I’ve said, Mum was at work and Dad, I
    soon discovered, had gone
underground. I had washed my togs (Southern Hemisphere for
‘swimming costume’) first thing in the morning
    and later on gone back to the laundry to get
them out of the machine to put in the drier, when I saw that the
freezer (our super-sized laundry can accommodate many large
objects) had been shifted and the access cover in the floor beneath
it lifted up.
    The cool, musty,
never-seen-the-sun smell of the earth underneath the house wafted
up as I peered into the hole. The distance between the floorboards
and the earth itself wasn’t very great and imagining Dad crawling
under the house in that confined space gave me the same sort of
creepy, closed-in feeling that seeing Harry