Grave Importance

by Vivian Shaw

  He was already heading for the door when I threw this out, and he kept right on going. I was about as likely to get a drink out of him as I was to get a French kiss.

  So I got down to unpacking, a task that was made harder by the fact that these cases hadn’t moved out of Pen’s garage in the last ten years. There were all sorts of things in among the stage-magic gear that gave me a moment’s—or more than a moment’s—pause. A Swiss Army penknife (it had belonged to my old friend Rafi) with the main blade broken off short an inch from the tip; a homemade fetish rigged up out of the mummified body of a frog and three rusty nails; a feathered snood, looking a bit threadbare now, but still carrying a faint whiff of perfume; and the camera.

  Shit. The camera.

  I turned it over in my hands, instantly submerged in a brief but powerful reverie. It was a Brownie Autographic No. 3, and all folded up as it was, it looked more like a kid’s lunch box than anything else. But once I flipped the catches, I could see that the red-leather bellows was still in place, the frosted viewfinder was intact, and (wonder of wonders) the hand-wheeled stops that extended the lens into its operating position still seemed to work. I’d found the thing in a flea market in Munich when I was backpacking through Europe. It was nearly a hundred years old, and I’d paid about a quid for it, which was the whole of the asking price, because the lens was cracked right the way across. That didn’t matter to me—not for what I principally had in mind at the time—so it counted as a bargain.

  I had to put it to one side, though, because at that moment the first of the party guests were shepherded in by a very busty, very blonde, very beautiful woman who was obviously much too good for the likes of James Dodson. Or the likes of me, to be fair. She was wearing a white bloused top and a khaki skirt with an asymmetric hang, which probably had a designer name attached to it somewhere and cost more than I earned in six months. For all that, though, she looked a touch worn and tired. Living with James Supercop would do that to you, I speculated; or, possibly, living with Peter, assuming that Peter was the sullen streak of curdled sunlight hovering at her elbow. He had his father’s air of blocky, aggressive solidity, with an adolescent’s wary stubbornness grafted onto it. It made for a very unattractive combination, somehow.

  The lady introduced herself as Barbara in a voice that had enough natural warmth in it to make electric blankets irrelevant. She introduced Peter, too, and I offered him a smile and a nod. I tried to shake hands with him out of some atavistic impulse probably brought on by being in Hampstead, but he’d already stomped away in the direction of a new arrival with a loud bellow of greeting. Barbara watched him go with an unreadable, Zen-like smile that suggested prescription medication, but her gaze as she turned back to me was sharp and clear enough.

  “So,” she said. “Are you ready?”

  For anything, I almost said—but I opted for a simple yes. All the same, I probably held the glance a half moment too long. At any rate, Barbara suddenly remembered a bottle of mineral water that she was holding in her hand and handed it to me with a slight blush and an apologetic grimace. “You can have a beer in the kitchen with us afterward,” she promised. “If I give you one now, the kids will demand equal rights.”

  I raised the bottle in a salute.

  “So…,” she said again. “An hour’s performance, then an hour off while we serve the food—and you come on again for half an hour at the end. Is that okay?”

  “It’s a valid strategy,” I allowed. “Napoléon used it at Quatre Bras.”

  This got a laugh, feeble as it was. “We won’t be able to stay for the show,” Barbara said, with a good facsimile of regret. “There’s quite a lot still to do behind the scenes—some of Peter’s friends are staying over. But we might be able to sneak back in to catch the finale. If not, see you in the interval.” With a conspiratorial grin, she beat her retreat and left me with my audience.

  I let my gaze wander around the room, taking the measure of them. There was an in-group, clustered around Peter and engaged in a shouted conversation that colonized the entire room. There was an out-group, consisting of four or five temporary knots spread around the edges of the room, which periodically tried to attach themselves to the in-group in a sort of reversal of cellular fission. And then there was stepbrother Sebastian.

  It wasn’t hard to spot him; I’d made a firm identification while I was still unfolding my trestle table and laying out my opening trick. He had the matrilineal blond hair, but his paler skin and watery blue eyes made him look as if someone had sketched him in pastels and then tried to erase him. He looked to be a lot smaller and slighter than Peter, too. Because he was the younger of the two? It was hard to tell, because his infolded, self-effaced posture probably took an inch or so off his height. He was the one on the fringes of the boisterous rabble, barely tolerated by the birthday boy and contemptuously ignored by the birthday boy’s friends. He was the one left out of all the in-jokes, looking like he didn’t belong and would rather be almost anywhere else—even with his real dad, perhaps, on a day when there was a work crisis on.

  When I clapped my hands and shouted a two-minute warning, Sebastian filed up with the last of the rear guard and took up a position immediately behind Peter—a dead zone that nobody else seemed to want to lay claim to.

  Then the show was on, and I had troubles of my own to attend to.

  I’m not a bad stage magician. It was how I paid my way through college, and when I’m in practice, I’d go so far as to say I’m pretty sharp. Right then I was as rusty as hell, but I was still able to pull off some reasonably classy stuff—my own scaled-down versions of the great illusions I’d studied during my ill-spent youth. I made some kid’s wristwatch disappear from a bag that he was holding and turn up inside a box in someone else’s pocket. I levitated the same kid’s mobile phone around the room while Peter and the front-row elite stood up and waved their arms in the vain hope of tangling the wires they thought I was using. I even cut a deck of cards into pieces with garden shears and reconstituted them again, with a card that Peter had previously chosen and signed at the top of the deck.

  But whatever the hell I did, I was dying on my feet. Peter sat stolidly at front and center, arms folded in his lap, and glared at me all the while with paint-blistering contempt. He’d clearly reached his verdict, which was that being impressed by kids’-party magic could lose you a lot of status with your peers. And if the risk was there even for him, it was clearly unacceptable for his chosen guests. They watched him and took their cue from him, forming a block vote that I couldn’t shift.

  Sebastian seemed to be the only one who was actually interested in the show for its own sake—or perhaps the only one who had so little to lose that he could afford just to let himself get drawn in, without watching his back. It got him into trouble, though. When I finished the card trick and showed Peter his pristine eight of diamonds, Sebastian broke into a thin patter of applause, carried away for a moment by the excitement of the final reveal.

  He stopped as soon as he realized that nobody else was joining in, but he’d already broken cover—forgetting what seemed otherwise to be very well developed habits of camouflage and self-preservation. Annoyed, Peter stabbed backward with his elbow, and I heard a whoof of air from Sebastian as he leaned suddenly forward, clutching his midriff. His head stayed bowed for a few moments, and when he came up, he came up slowly. “Fuckwit,” Peter snarled, sotto voce. “He just used two decks. That’s not even clever.”

  I read a lot into this little exchange—a whole chronicle of casual cruelty and emotional oppression. You may think that’s stretching an elbow in the ribs a touch too far, but I’m a younger brother myself, so the drill’s not unfamiliar to me. And besides that, I knew one more thing about birthday boy than anybody else here knew.

  I took a mental audit. Yes. I was letting myself get a little irritated, and that wasn’t a good thing. I still had twenty minutes to run before the break and the cold beer in the kitchen. And I had one surefire winner
, which I’d been meaning to save for the finale, but what the hell. You only live once, as people continue to say in the teeth of all the evidence.

  I threw out my arms, squared my shoulders, tugged my cuffs—a pantomime display of preparation intended mainly to get Sebastian off the hook. It worked, as far as that went; all eyes turned to me. “Watch very carefully,” I said, taking a new prop out of one of the cases and putting it on the table in front of me. “An ordinary cereal box. Any of you eat this stuff? No, me neither. I tried them once, but I was mauled by a cartoon tiger.” Not a glimmer; not a sign of mercy in any of the forty or so eyes that were watching me.

  “Nothing special about the box. No trapdoors. No false bottoms.” I rotated it through three dimensions, flicked it with a thumbnail to get a hollow thwack out of it, and held the open end up to Peter’s face for him to take a look inside. He rolled his eyes as if he couldn’t believe he was being asked to go along with this stuff, then gave me a wave that said he was as satisfied of the box’s emptiness as he was ever going to be.

  “Yeah, whatever,” he said with a derisive snort. His friends laughed, too; he was popular enough to get a choric echo whenever he spoke or snickered or made farting noises in his cheek. He had the touch, all right. Give him four, maybe five years, and he was going to grow up into a right bastard.

  Unless he took a walk down the Damascus Road one morning and met something big and fast coming the other way.

  “O-o-okay,” I said, sweeping the box around in a wide arc so that everyone else could see it. “So it’s an empty box. So who needs it, right? Boxes like this, they’re just landfill waiting to happen.” I stood it on the ground, open end downward, and trod it flat.

  That got at least a widened eye and a shift of posture here and there around the room—kids leaning forward to watch, if only to check out how complete and convincing the damage was. I was thorough. You have to be. Like a dominatrix, you find that there’s a direct relationship between the intensity of the stamping and trampling and the scale of the final effect.

  When the box was comprehensively flattened, I picked it up and allowed it to dangle flaccidly from my left hand.

  “But before you throw this stuff away,” I said, sweeping the cluster of stolid faces with a stern, schoolteacherly gaze, “you’ve got to check for biohazards. Anyone up for that? Anyone want to be an environmental health inspector when they grow up?”

  There was an awkward silence, but I let it lengthen. It was Peter’s dime; I only had to entertain him, not pimp for him.

  Finally, one of the front-row cronies shrugged and stood up. I stepped a little aside to welcome him into my performance space—broadly speaking, the area between the leather recliner and the running buffet.

  “Give a big hand to the volunteer,” I suggested. They razzed him cordially instead—you find out who your friends are.

  I straightened the box with a few well-practiced tugs and tucks. This was the crucial part, so of course I kept my face as bland as school custard. The volunteer held his hand out for the box. Instead, I caught his hand in my own and turned it palm up. “And the other one,” I said. “Make a cup. Verstehen Sie ‘cup’? Like this. Right. Excellent. Good luck, because you never know…”

  I upended the box over his hands, and a large brown rat smacked right down into the makeshift basket of his fingers. He gurgled like a punctured water bed and jumped back, his hands flying convulsively apart, but I was ready and caught the rat neatly before she could fall.

  Then, because I knew her well, I added a small grace note to the trick by stroking her nipples with the ball of my thumb. This made her arch her back and gape her mouth wide open, so that when I brandished her in the faces of the other kids, I got a suitable set of jolts and starts. Of course, it wasn’t a threat display—it was “More, big boy, give me more”—but they couldn’t be expected to know that look at their tender age. Any more than they knew that I’d dropped Rhona into the box when I pretended to straighten it after the trampling.

  And bow. And acknowledge the applause. Which would have been fine if there’d been any. But Peter still sat like Patience on a monument, as the volunteer trudged back to his seat with his machismo at half-mast.

  Peter’s face said I’d have to do a damn sight more than that to impress him.

  So I thought about the Damascus Road again. And, like the bastard I am, I reached for the camera.

  This isn’t my idea of how a grown man should go about keeping the wolf from the door, I’d like you to know. It was Pen who put me up to it. Pamela Elisa Bruckner—why that shortens to Pen rather than Pam I’ve never been sure, but she’s an old friend of mine, and incidentally the rightful owner of Rhona the rat. She’s also my landlady, for the moment at least, and since I wouldn’t wish that fate on a rabid dog, I count myself lucky that it’s fallen to someone who’s genuinely fond of me. It lets me get away with a hell of a lot.

  I should also tell you that I do have a job—a real job that pays the bills, at least occasionally. But at the time currently under discussion, I was taking an extended holiday, not entirely voluntary, and not without its own attendant problems relating to cash flow, professional credibility, and personal self-esteem. In any case, it left Pen with a vested interest in putting alternative work my way. Since she was still a good Catholic girl (when she wasn’t being a Wicca priestess), she went to Mass every Sunday, lit a candle to the Blessed Virgin, and prayed to this tune: “Please, Madonna, in your wisdom and mercy, intercede for my mother though she died with many carnal sins weighing on her soul; let the troubled nations of Earth find a road to peace and freedom; and make Castor solvent, amen.”

  But usually she left it at that, which was a situation we could both live with. So it was an unpleasant surprise to me when she stopped counting on divine intervention and told me about the kids’ party agency she was setting up with her crazy friend Leona—and the slimy sod of a street magician who’d given her an eleventh-hour stab in the back.

  “But you could do this so easily, Fix,” she coaxed over coffee laced with cognac in her subterranean sitting room. The smell was making me dizzy—not the smell of the brandy, but the smell of rats and earth and leaf mulch and droppings and Mrs. Amelia Underwood roses—of things growing and things decaying. One of her two ravens—Arthur, I think—was clacking his beak against the top shelf of the bookcase, making it hard for me to stick to a train of thought. This was her den, her center of gravity—the inverted penthouse underneath the three-story monstrosity where her grandmother had lived and died in the days when mammoths still roamed the Earth. She had me at a disadvantage here, which was why she’d asked me in to start with.

  “You can do real magic,” Pen pointed out sweetly, “so fake magic ought to be a doddle.”

  I blinked a couple of times to clear my eyes, blinded by candles, fuddled by incense. In a lot of ways, the way Pen lives is sort of reminiscent of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations: she only uses the basement, which means that the rest of the house apart from my bedsitter up in the roof space is frozen in the 1950s, never visited, never revised. Pen herself froze a fair bit later than that, but like Miss Havisham, she wears her heart on her mantelpiece. I try not to look at it.

  On this particular occasion, I took refuge in righteous indignation. “I can’t do real magic, Pen, because there’s no such animal. Not the way you mean it, anyway. What do I look like, eh? Just because I can talk to the dead—and whistle up a tune for them—that doesn’t make me Gandalf the bastard Grey. And it doesn’t mean that there are fairies at the bottom of the sodding garden.”

  The crude language was a ploy intended to derail the conversation. It didn’t work, though. I got the impression that Pen had worked out her script in advance for this one.

  “‘What is now proved was once only imagined,’” she said primly—because she knows that Blake is my main man, and I can’t argue with him. “Okay,” she went on, topping up my cup with about a half-pint of Janneau XO (it was going to be dirty
pool on both sides, then), “but you did all that stage-magic stuff when we were in college, didn’t you? You were wonderful back then. I bet you could still do it. I bet you wouldn’t even have to practice. And it’s two hundred quid for a day’s work, so you could pay me a bit off last month’s chunk of what you owe me…”

  It took a lot more persuasion and a fair bit more brandy—so much brandy, in fact, that I made a pass at her on my unsteady way out the door. She slapped off my right hand, steered my left onto the door handle, and kissed me good night on the cheek without breaking stride.

  I was profoundly grateful for that when I woke up in the morning, with my tongue stuck to my soft palate and my head full of unusable fuzz. Sexy, sweet, uninhibited, nineteen-year-old Pen, with her autumn bonfire of hair, her pistachio eyes, and her probably illegal smile would have been one thing; thirty-something Earth Mother Pen in her sibyl’s cave, tended by rats and ravens and Christ only knew what other familiar spirits, and still waiting for her prince to come, even though she knew exactly where he was and what he’d turned into—there was too much blood under the bridge now. Leave it at that.

  Then I remembered that I’d agreed to do the party just before I made the pass, and I cursed like a longshoreman. Game, set, and match to Pen and Monsieur Janneau. I hadn’t even known we were playing doubles.

  BY VIVIAN SHAW

  THE DR. GRETA HELSING NOVELS

  Strange Practice

  Dreadful Company

  Grave Importance

  Praise for Vivian Shaw

  Strange Practice

  “Strange Practice is written with elegance, wit, and compassion. The prose is gorgeous, the wit is mordant, and the ideas are provocative. Also, there are ghouls.”

  —Laura Amy Schlitz

  “An excellent adventure.”

  —Fran Wilde

  “An exceptional and delightful debut, in the tradition of Good Omens and A Night in the Lonesome October.”