Escape (3 page)

I try to keep my eyes fixed on the window, and not look at the mess
of underwear and jeans and oh my god, a balled-up black silk dress
lying like a crumpled funnel-web on the floor. Doesn't she
know
she'll
never get the creases out?
No
, says the voice,
because you've always done
her ironing for her.
I feel the familiar rising panic. She has only an hour
before her grandparents arrive and then at dawn practically we'll have
to get in the car and drive to the airport. How's she going to have time
to prepare for a whole year? The floor is the sea after a shipwreck, odd
bits of clothing floating about like severed limbs. The arms of a jumper
wrap around an upturned shoe lying on top of a long matt ed woollen
cardigan she bought at St Vincent de Paul's at fifteen. God, she's not
going to take that horrible old thing? What will the elegant Italians in
their velvet smoking jackets think of her?

The Doors are playing on the ghetto-blaster. How she can think
with all that screaming, I can't imagine. It's always been like this,
homework set to the pace of rock songs. I wouldn't allow it for years
but the fights became too wearying, and anyway, by the time kids are
in senior school, you're supposed to 'give them their heads', aren't you?
What a strange, uneasy expression that is.

'You can't live their lives for them,' says Doreen, wagging her finger
at me. 'Overfunctioning mother, underfunctioning daughter.'

And just look at the ironing
, says the voice.

I try to find a space on the bed without moving things around
too conspicuously. The suitcase lies open at my feet, almost empty. I
bump it sideways, just a little, with my foot. On the bed I lay out the
things I bought: lip balm and 30+ suncream, she's going into spring
and summer there, antibiotic cream for the impetigo she'd had in
kindergarten, a lovely jade silk camisole that will bring out her green
eyes, a good thick toothbrush, vitamin C.

'Can I help you with anything?' I keep the same light tone.

'No, everything's fine,' Clara says, surveying the devastation of her
room. 'See, I'm almost done.'

We stare at each other but then I register the corner of her mouth
twisting sideways as she bends to pick up the funnel-web. This is one
of those times when I realise that I don't know my daughter – I just
don't understand her sense of humour. She can laugh about the most
serious, anxiety-making things.
Joke
. I don't joke very much. Recently
I dreamt that I'd lost my sense of humour, which had been wrapped
in a small brown paper package. My mother told me she had seen it
in a tree and I went to look where she pointed but the package was
too high up to fetch. As the parcel had no label, I couldn't tell if it was
really mine, so I went home empty-handed.

'I just thought you might want something to read on the plane,
sweetheart,' I say. 'Something from home, a familiar face in all that
unknown!' I hear a snort from under the bed where she's trying to
retrieve a shoe. 'It's a really interesting book, Clara. Gives you such a
good picture of Harry when he was your age and just getting started
on his career. Actually, I suppose you wouldn't call it getting started,
he was well on his way by your time of life.'

'Yeah, and I'm still fluffing around, is that what you want to say?'

'No, no, of course not.'
God
. I smile brightly. But all I can think
of is Clara's short jabs at careers. She did a year of psychology
at university, and pranced around the house with her repressed
memory theories and Freudian interpretations. She said we should
all loosen up, say what was on our minds.
She'd
never had a problem
with that, I thought privately. When I told her my dream about the
cut in the sole of my foot, and how millions of tiny worms were
multiplying in there, she made me a cup of tea and patted my knee.
'Freud would say you were really dreaming about your soul,' she said,
'you know, your spirit. He says we disguise our real fears in different
ways because they're too painful to confront.' And she drew her
eyebrows together, concerned. 'What is festering in there, Mum, in
your
SOUL
?'

I said that was interesting because what Freud described sounded
exactly like misdirection, as if our brains unconsciously misdirect our
own psyche! Then I told her how Houdini kept a shim in
his
sole, what
did she think of that, but she got irritated with me and stopped patting
my knee.

After that first year, Clara never went back to university. I don't
really know why. She wasn't good at sticking at things. For another
year she worked at Love-in Lingerie with Saraah. Saraah is still there,
loving lingerie. Clara said Saraah would have worn her lilac bras and
apple-green G-strings on the
outside
of her clothes, like Superman,
if the manager had allowed it. I often wondered how Clara felt about
Saraah's long succession of boyfriends. Doreen told me if you lined
them up, head to toe, they'd fill a football field. She said that about the
large intestine, too.

Oh, Clara. I can hear her teeth tapping. She started that habit
at fourteen, and for a while she did it almost every time I began a
conversation with her. Once, when I couldn't stand it any more – how
rude can you get, I shrilled, when I'm only trying to help you with
your homework? – she told me that
I
should try it, because tooth
tapping was a great technique for shutting someone out. If you do it
fast enough, she said, you can't hear anything but your own teeth.

I take a deep breath. 'Look, Clara, I've done so many things wrong
– but it's just that now you're twenty-one I'd like to know that you can
make your way in the world. You know, that you've got some security,
that you have a passion, not just wandering through life but pursuing
something you really love, you know, some kind of goal.'

'What, like Harry?' She flings a white nightie onto the bed. It
lands in my lap. 'He was dirt-poor for years, you told me so yourself.
Hung out in beer halls and dime museums with his poor wife, escaping
from handcuffs and things. They lived in squalor – it was all totally
squalido
.'

She opens her eyes very wide, staring into mine. She holds them
like that deliberately, aggressively. Clara is good at confrontation,
eager to take in the full effect of her words.
Squalido
is one of Guido's
favourite words. He uses it to describe the state of the living room,
the knee-high grass in the backyard, the level of literary and cultural
debate in this country. It's all
squalido
.

'And how weird was he?' she goes on, her voice rising. 'All that
performing he did with a punctured bowel. How sick in the head is
someone who has to keep getting up on stage when they're dying?
Night after night?'

'Well,' I say, swallowing hard, 'he didn't
know
he was dying. And
anyway, that's what magicians do. They carry on with the show. The
professional
ones.' A swift wave of fury rises. 'Others just fade into
insignificance and slouch around in their pyjamas trying to get in
touch with their unconscious.'

'What, you mean like Dad?' Clara drops the bra in her hand. Her
eyes are wild.

'Oh, no, well, I didn't mean...It's just – oh Clara, your father was
magnetic on stage, you should have seen him. He held the audience in
the palm of his hand! He was dazzling, extraordinary! I just think...all
that talent wasted.'

'Dad's a
poet
, Mum.' She shakes her head coolly, picking up the
bra, folding one cup into the other. 'See, that's your problem right
there. You've always confused the two, Houdini and Dad. In my
opinion you've given up on your husband and opted for a ghost
instead. Ghosts are much easier to live with – after all, you can walk
right through them.'

'Yes, well, something went wrong somewhere, that's true.' I
close my eyes for a moment. I can feel the tears pricking. They come
suddenly, sharp as a shock, as they did when Clara was little.

'Oh, Mum, it's just – I'm sick of you telling me who I should
be
.
What I should
do
.'

Clara turns away and starts putting bras with pants and singlets,
like with like, making a little pile. I sit, red-faced, thinking how all
these years what I'd been doing was trying to 'improve' her. As if she
was a book I was writing, a first draft. But knowing something dreadful
about yourself doesn't mean that you can do anything about it. 'All I
was trying to say, Clara, is that it's good to find a career path early on,
and stick to it.' I catch a pair of socks she throws at me and tuck them
into a ball.

'Like a cockroach to a glue trap,' she says.

'Well.' Last week Guido stepped in a sticky cockroach bait laid out
on the kitchen floor. He ran screaming into the bathroom to be sick, a
dead roach as long as a mouse still stuck to his bare heel.

'Anyway, look, I'll leave you to it,' I say. 'I'm sure you know what
you're doing.' I spring up from the bed but a sudden pain in my
knee makes me stagger. Bone cancer, maybe. For that kind of cancer
you'd need a bone marrow transfusion, Doreen told me once, and it
has to come from a blood relation. Clara would have to come home
from Italy. We could sort this out, talk, take the time to say what we
mean. I just need some time.
Oh, how pathetic can you get?
says the
voice.

'Your knee playing up again, Mum?' says Clara. The sudden
concern in her face makes the tears start.

'Just a bit of arthritis in my middle pages.' I laugh. 'Ages.' Oh, what
am I saying? I do a little jump to show her I'm fine. Schizophrenics
often make 'word salads', Clara told me once, breaking up words into
sounds rather than meanings, tossing them together into rhymes.
Meaning is sacrificed for sound and flavour.

Christ – the tears, the word salads, the brush in the fridge, maybe
I'm really cracking up. Last week I screamed in the car. It wasn't
planned, so none of the windows were wound up. I had to make
a getaway through a red light. I glance at Clara's mirror and my face
looks back at me, a cracked bowl. I always get a surprise when I see
myself in the mirror – there I am looking old and spent and yet I feel I
haven't really grown up at all.

'Thanks for the camisole, Mum.' Clara's voice is soft , contrite. 'I
love it.'

I smile at her, hovering in the doorway, so many half-formed
sentences in my head. Then I give up, the way I apparently did with
her father, and pick my way out of the room, careful not to step on the
shipwreck.

I suppose, looking back, Clara did try to resist me. But she also learnt
a lot about lock picking, and how to create slack. Often, she seemed
to enjoy it. There's no doubt she picked up certain manoeuvres more
quickly than I did. It just seemed to come naturally to her. Maybe she
would rather have watched
Play School
or
Humphrey Bear
than learn
how Houdini freed himself from handcuffs while underwater in the
freezing North Sea, but by the time she was nine, she had become my
talented assistant. She could speed read, and knew 90 per cent of the
acts described in the escape manuals that lived on my bedside table.
Once, we put on a show in the living room: we found some red velvet
and made a gorgeous curtain. My parents came to watch, plus Doreen
and little Saraah and, of course, Guido. Clara had painted signs to put
on the front door, decorated with glitter and chains and keys. She
wore a sparkly tiara in her hair and ballet slippers. Her escape from
the Czechoslovakian Insane Muff was faultless. Surely she enjoyed the
applause, the hypnotic effect on her audience as she struggled from
her straitjacket?

And then, in her last year of primary school, she was a star in
the Christmas concert. She performed the Lightning Shackle Chain
Escape to Joe Cocker's hit song 'Unchain My Heart'. Guido and I were
there, in the front row. She was
brilliant
. The chain escape described in
the manual we'd consulted involved about sixty metres of chain but I'd
found a plastic garden variety at the hardware store that was ideal for a
young girl, being light to wear but looking impossibly heavy. (You can
buy it in black, with massive two-inch links, selling for only $2.50 a
metre.) We spray-painted it with chrome aluminium so that it looked
like the real thing. The house came down as she finished that first act.
I remember Clara beaming out at the audience, her face shining in the
footlights.

But maybe she'd been right about the Siberian Chain Escape.
She hadn't wanted to do it. True, it was less showy than the Lightning
Shackle, as it only involved the wrists. And it was much trickier. One
escape is enough, Mum, Clara said, I don't want to overdo it. But I told
her how Harry Houdini had made the act famous when he escaped
from a German court. Before a judge and jury he freed himself from
a restraint that was supposed to be impossible to open once locked.
Harry escaped in four minutes! Use that in your patter, I said, anyone
would find it fascinating. Well, the audience was still clapping in time
to 'Unchain My Heart' as she went into the Siberian Chain Escape.
She couldn't make herself heard so her potted history of Houdini and
the whole
point
of the trick were lost. As the noise petered out Clara
was left to finish the act amidst the audience's bewildered silence.

The traditional Siberian Escape
is
rather complicated. You have
to chain your two wrists together, making a loop in the chain and
slipping it over your left wrist, allowing the end of the chain to hang
down. You place your right hand against the left , and invite spectators
to loop the end of the chain around your right wrist, over the top, and
to lock it into a loop or a ring. You then escape using the fundamental
principle of slack.

Clara was supposed to pick Guido as her volunteer, but the
bastard didn't even put up his hand. I nudged him hard, just under the
ribs, but still he wouldn't budge. He looked straight ahead like a statue,
unblinking. He was furious with me, I know, because I'd insisted on
this second act and he was damned if he was going to do anything to
please me. But why punish our daughter when it was me he hated?