The
Houdini Girl by Martyn Bedford
Fletcher
'Red' Brandon is a conjurer, an illusionist, a master of deception who uses his
talents to seduce wild, impulsive Irish rose, Rosa, into his life with a simple
sleight of hand. But when Rosa is killed, Red is pitched into a new world where
betrayal, exploitation and violence are no act. The deeper Red delves into the
life and death of the woman with who he shared one sexy, freewheeling year, the
closer he comes to a painful realization: even the trickster can be tricked.
*****
Excerpt:
Prologue
Truth is, I
tricked her into falling for me. Rosa Kelly: dark hair, blue eyes – wicked
combination. And, though she could’ve had her pick, she fell for me. OK, maybe
‘tricked’ has inappropriate connotations. How about this: she wasn’t tricked so
much as beguiled? Yes. Altogether more apt.
Beguiled.
Comparable to ‘bewitched’, with its suggestions of sensuality and enchantment.
Certainly, the illusion with which I beguiled her depended, for effect and
execution, on intimacy of touch and a semblance of the supernatural. We were in
a pub in Oxford, the Eagle and Child; wood panelling, nooks and crannies. We
were strangers. I was with my friends, she was with hers. Someone in my group
knew someone in hers and, following the complicated rearrangement of tables and
chairs, there were thirteen of us seated together. An inauspicious assembly if
you’re inclined to superstition, which I am not. I’d noticed Rosa even before
the two parties had become one, though I made sure to give no indication of
paying her more,
or less, attention than the other newcomers in our smoky, boozy alcove. The
positioning of the chairs – I swear I had nothing to do with it, occupied as I
was with the transfer of drinks – brought us directly opposite one another. She
was smoking Marlboro and drinking Belgian lager straight from the bottle. Her
eyeshadow was pale green, to match her lipstick. She wore a ring on every
finger and on both thumbs.
‘Watch that one,
Rosa, he’s a magician,’ said one of my friends as the introductions were
completed.
Rosa, drawing
deeply on a cigarette, exhaled across the table. ‘There,’ she said, ‘I’ve made
him disappear in a puff of smoke.’
Everyone roared
at that. Brilliant timing, impeccable delivery. I might’ve reached over and
produced a cheese-and-onion crisp from behind her ear, but when you’ve just
been upstaged in public the least embarrassing recourse is to play the
supporting role with good grace. Besides, a crisp?
So I laughed
along with the rest of them. Rosa’s voice was slightly husky, her accent a
curious concoction of Irish and London; her eyes and mouth smiled in perfect
synchronization, as though she enjoyed nothing more than being made to laugh.
She turned to the guy on her left, asking him to pass an ashtray. They fell
into conversation, her long black hair snagging now and then on his shoulder as
she leaned close to hear him. Me, I drank and talked to my friends and went to
the bar and to the toilet. And, with discretion, I observed her hands – all
those rings, the emerald nails, the way she held her drink, lit a cigarette.
She had long bony fingers and thin wrists engulfed in bracelets and friendship
bands and the cuffs of a multicoloured woollen sweater several sizes too big
for her. Every fresh bottle of beer, she shredded the label clean off with her
thumbnail.
I have
magician’s hands. By that, I don’t mean they are the perfect size or shape for
my work, because such perfection of design is rare. It helps to have hands
large enough to facilitate, say, the concealment of a playing card; but large
hands have large fingers, less well suited to the more nimble manipulations.
The trick is to adapt. Most anatomical deficiencies of the hand can, within
reason, be compensated for by rigorous practice
or by
appropriate props. (If you’ve got small hands, use a smaller pack of cards.) My
hands are neither too large nor too small; what they are is well trained. I
have taught myself dexterity and ambidexterity. A speciality in my repertoire
of sleights is ‘acquitment’ – the showing of a hand as empty while actually it
contains something. Done ineptly, this is known in the profession as
‘hand-washing’. Two tips: one, rehearse in front of a mirror until your
movements appear entirely natural; two, never look at your hands while
effecting a sleight, because the one place the audience is sure to look is
where you’re looking.
Rosa’s hands
weren’t magical; for all their conscious disguise of adornment and
manipulation, they revealed rather than concealed. I longed to hold them. We’d
all been drinking for a while when a familiar appeal issued from the hubbub of
overlapping chatter. Hey, Red, show us a trick.
Even my oldest
friends do this. You get used to it.
‘I’m playing the
Crucible, in Sheffield, next Friday, if you want to come along.’
‘Fuck off and
show us a trick.’
‘Fuck off yourself.’
‘What’s this,
the Illusion of the Cantankerous Git?’
After a moment
or two of this, you give in. And you always involve someone else in the
illusion, because they love all that. I’ll need the help of an assistant
from the audience; come on, don’t be shy . . . That evening, I made eye
contact across the table. Blue irises, green eyeshadow. With no perceptible
alteration, Rosa’s expression said Don’t even think about it. But the
enthusiastic coercion of others as they edged their chairs closer to
our table made
it more awkward for her to decline than to agree.
‘Go on, then.’
Defiance. Her eyes, her tone of voice, the set of her shoulders said she was
prepared to be unimpressed; nothing I could do could possibly surprise or
interest her or escape her detection. And if I tried to make her appear foolish
I’d fail because she didn’t give a shite what anyone thought of her, least of
all me. She smiled. ‘If you’re good, I’ll let you make me a giraffe out of
balloons.’
I instructed her
to hold out her hands, palms downwards. She did this. I took them in mine and
drew them over the centre of the table. Her skin was cool and dry. Releasing
her hands, I told her to make fists. She made fists. Everyone was quiet now,
watching and listening with rapt attention.
‘You’re a Roman
Catholic, right?’ I asked.
‘And there’s you
guessing that, with me talking like a Kerrywoman.’
One or two
people giggled.
‘Do you believe
in the stigmata?’
‘The what?’
‘That we can be
marked with the sign of Christ’s suffering on the cross?’
‘Oh, sure.’
I dipped the tip
of my right middle finger into the ashtray, piled with the accumulated tappings
from her own cigarettes. Displaying the silvery-grey stain at the end of the
finger, I declared, ‘By rubbing this into the back of your clenched fist, I
shall cause the ash to pass through the hand and appear like a stigma in the
centre of your palm.’
Her eyes said Oh,
yeah. I kept my face a blank of composed concentration. Placing my
fingertip on the back of her right hand, I began massaging the ash gently into
the pale skin with a small, circular movement. The bracelets on her wrist
clicked against one another as she responded involuntarily to the pressure of
my touch. All eyes were focused on the point of contact, where a charcoal smear
now blemished the skin.
Rosa glanced up
at me, then down again at the back of her hand.
‘Now, Rosa,
please unclench your fist and display your hand palm upwards.’
She did as
instructed. Her palm was unmarked. Silence gave way to stifled laughs, a groan,
a jeer. Rosa caught my eye again, smirking slightly, and I feigned an
expression of alarmed incomprehension. She was about to recline in her seat.
‘Are you
left-handed?’ I asked suddenly.
She nodded.
‘You are?’
‘Yeah.’
‘In that case,
would you unclench your left hand for me?’
It was her turn
for puzzlement. Her smile became uncertain. The onlookers had fallen quiet once
more, switching attention to her other fist. Rosa uncurled the fingers and,
slowly, hesitantly, revolved the palm upwards. In its centre was an
unmistakable dab of cigarette ash.
*****
Other Modern Erotic Classics available:
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Bedford
Lie to Me by Tamara Faith
Berger
The Phallus of Osiris by Valentina
Cilescu
Kiss of Death by Valentina
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The Flesh Constrained by Cleo
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The Flesh Endures by Cleo Cordell
Hogg by Samuel R. Delany
The Tides of Lust by Samuel R.
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Sad Sister by Florence
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The Ties That Bind by Vanessa
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Dark Ride by Kent
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3 by Julie Hilden
Neptune & Surf by Marilyn Jaye
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Violent Silence by Paul
Mayersberg
Homme Fatale by Paul
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The Agency by David Meltzer
Burn by Michael Perkins
Dark Matter by Michael
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Evil Companions by Michael
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Beautiful Losers by Remittance
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Meeting the Master by Elissa Wald
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