The Houdini Effect by Bill Nagelkerke

by brick.’
    I wasn’t at all surprised by his happy
enthusiasm. That was Dad all over.
    ‘ Really,’ I said. But by
now we had both
    stopped listening to each other. Dad’s mind
was
    off solving the latest house crisis while
mine was trying to deal with a different but equally real
    crisis of my own. You may
ask, why didn’t I come clean to Dad, persuade him to take notice,
ask him to sort out my problem? Well then, short answer. Unless you
were Harry, would you want to end up in a straitjacket? Speaking of
the devil . . .
    ‘ Is that Harry I hear?’
said Dad. ‘What does he want?’
    I listened, too, pleased with the diversion,
pleased for once with Harry. I needed an excuse to leave the
laundry and the little mirror that had suddenly created a big
problem, the sort of difficulty that not even Dad with all his
skill at cutting out and restoring, could solve or resolve.
    ‘ He probably wants someone
to undo him again,’ I sighed, feeling undone myself. ‘I’ll go and
sort him out.’
     
    The ‘blame-Harry’ effect
     
    The motivation for having a good time at the
pool (even one as compelling as the probable presence of Troy) had
suddenly vanished in a puff of smoke (and mirrors). All I could
focus on was what I had seen.
    So, just as on the day before, I ended up
cancelling my prior engagement. To tell the truth I didn’t exactly
cancel it. After helping Harry I just didn’t go. Against my usual
policy of front-footedness I resolved to make my apologies later. I
figured it would be easier this time to give an excuse after it was
too late for anyone to try and change my mind. I figured the
pressure on me
    from Em and Rach to still go would have been
a
    lot more intense than yesterday’s mild
acceptance of me abandoning the shopping expedition. But
    no way could I have changed my mind and
gone. All I could think about was that either I was being haunted
(bad enough) or that I was going mad (far worse).
     
    So I lent my aid to Harry. Initially I
assumed that undoing a fiddly straitjacket would be a useful way of
diverting, albeit briefly, my attention from what had just
happened. In hindsight, going to the pool as planned would probably
have been an even better diversionary tactic, but who can know in
advance how things will pan out?
     
    Harry was in a sour mood, well, more sour
than I’d experienced for quite some time. He was used to achieving
what he set out to do and didn’t cope at all well when things
didn’t work out. In some ways he was a worse (or maybe that should
be better?) perfectionist than Dad.
    ‘ Stupid straitjacket!’ he
said after I finally had him out of it. (Well, he didn’t actually
say ‘stupid’ but I figure you’d already worked that out for
yourself.)
    ‘ A bad worker blames his,
or her, tools,’ I said, equally testily. It was a phrase we said to
Dad when things didn’t go according to plan. Dad knew he wasn’t a
bad artisan so he never took a rise out of it but Harry,
surprisingly, given how often he had joined us in accusing Dad of
the same thing, went ape.
    Once again, I won’t repeat what he said to
me. A writer should use bad language only sparingly
    and for maximum effect. Harry’s bad
language
    was simply gratuitous and ill-considered. If
I tell you that his every second or third word began with
    the letter ‘f’ you will get the idea. I will
admit that maybe I shouldn’t have risked upsetting his highness’
magical composure in the first place by making my comment, or that
I should have lowered my own standards by calling him, immediately
after he had finished his tirade, a name that also began with ‘f’
and ended with ‘wit’ but, much to my shame, I did.
    We parted on a hostile footing.
     
    Communication breakdown
     
    I escaped to my room where
I must have dozed off. The first I knew of it was waking up to the
sound of the phones. Em had texted my mobile and then Rach rang our
portable landline, which happened to have ended up in my room