The
Houdini Girl
by Martyn Bedford
by Martyn Bedford
Blurb:
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.
Available from:
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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:
The Houdini Girl by Martyn Bedford
Lie to Me by Tamara Faith Berger
The Phallus of Osiris by Valentina
Cilescu
Kiss of Death by Valentina Cilescu
The Flesh Constrained by Cleo Cordell
The Flesh Endures by Cleo Cordell
Hogg by Samuel R. Delany
The Tides of Lust by Samuel R.
Delany
Sad Sister by Florence Dugas
The Ties That Bind by Vanessa
DuriƩs
Dark Ride by Kent Harrington
3 by Julie Hilden
Neptune & Surf by Marilyn Jaye
Lewis
Violent Silence by Paul Mayersberg
Homme Fatale by Paul Mayersberg
The Agency by David Meltzer
Burn by Michael Perkins
Dark Matter by Michael Perkins
Evil Companions by Michael Perkins
Beautiful Losers by Remittance Girl
Meeting the Master by Elissa Wald
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