by Giles Ekins
He did however get them a booking on the ‘Princess Diamond,’ a Mediterranean cruise ship, fully intending to be on the ship with them. However, an extremely irate Mrs. Danvers soon put a stop to that idea, it had been her money which allowed Jake to set up his agency –rather her Daddy’s money – and if he went off on the cruise with ’that bitch’ she would divorce him and the money tap would be closed forever, he might even have to go and work for a living.
Layla did not seem too upset and set about sleeping with as many of the other support acts, ships officers, guest speakers and any good looking, or more particularly, wealthy looking passengers as she could, Sara-Sue was the girlfriend of Mark who did the sound mixing and backing tracks for them, Mary took up with a musician from the ships orchestra, and Jane with the second officer, who like Jane, was a lesbian.
Clarrie, for no good reason she could ever rationalise or explain (probably boredom) got into a relationship with Johnny Storm, the lead singer of Johnny Storm and the Breaking Winds, one of the other support acts. Johnny, by no means the brightest of men she had ever met, could never understand her amusement about the flatulent connotations of his band’s name, the Breaking Winds. ‘It’s symbolic, in'it? See. I’m the Storm and they’re the strong winds which break fings, like them whatsits, Thai-phones.’ ‘Typhoons’ she corrected. ‘Yeah, them an’ all. Like I say, it’s symbolic, the Breaking Winds, Japanese sort of, like them Comfy-kharzis they had in the war, they was the breaking wind.’ ‘Kamikaze, it means the Divine Wind.’ ‘Same fing, in’it’
Dim or not, Johnny Storm was a striking presence on stage with long naturally blonde hair, bare chested, a balled up sock pushed into the crotch of his skin tight trousers and a powerful rasping voice to belt out classic blues and rock numbers. such as Robert Johnson’s ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ a la the Blues Brothers, lots of Clapton blues, Stevie Ray Vaughn’s ‘Pride and Joy’ and a stunning rocking version of Howling Wolf’s classic ‘Smokestack Lighting’. Their relationship lasted as far as Alexandria but by then Clarrie had become bored with his lack of intelligent conversant and set him adrift from where he quickly fell into the avaricious bed of Layla di Resta. The Breaking Winds broke up soon after their return to Southampton and it was only some years later that she learned that Johnny Storm, real name Johnny Weatherspoon, had died from a heroin overdose and was surprised at how sad she felt about the news. (But she never did get to learn that Angel Delight from the Pretty Little Things also OD’d)
‘Five Girls, Ten Legs and One Voice’ did not last much longer either, they never did get a recording contract, played a few gigs in clubs around the south and then on a European tour as a support group to Chris Rea. They finally broke up, citing ‘musical differences’ as the excuse but in reality over Layla di Resta’s heavy drinking, coke habit and increasingly insufferable prima donna behavior. She was demanding more solo spots and new routines that put the other girls to the back of the stage, separate dressing rooms and a larger share of their earnings, the final straw coming when Layla, drunk and high, attacked Sara-Sue with a microphone stand whilst on stage in Dusseldorf.
Clarrie returned to London, almost broke and desperate for a job, any job. Deciding she needed a change, she answered another advert in ‘The Stage,’ this time for an assistant to a stage magician and illusionist. The only question ‘The Great Santini’ asked her was why she wanted the job, her answer, ‘Because I’m desperate,’ was good enough for Charlie, who could relate to that. Other girls gave reasons such as ‘I’ve always been fascinated by stage magic,’ ‘would love to work with a magician,’ and ‘I’ve got a few tricks of my own that’ll pop your socks off if you give me the job.’
The fact that Clarrie was by far the best looking of the auditioned girls, with great legs, had of course got nothing to do with his decision. A decision he never regretted, she was agile and supple, quickly learned the routines, had some useful ideas of her own regarding presentation and became very much part of the act The best assistant by far that he had ever employed.
It was whilst she was home during a month long hiatus between bookings that she met Frank Wilding, the brother of another old school friend who had also got in touch with Clarrie through Friends United. They had got on well, went out a few times for a drink, or a meal, cinema and once to the theatre to see a touring ballet company in ‘Swan Lake.’ Clarrie had been entranced, Frank less so, but she found him good company, if a little reserved. They kept in touch when she went back on the road, met up again and Frank proposed. Much to her mother’s barely concealed annoyance, Clarrie accepted.
She invited Charlie to the wedding, together with the other girls from ‘Five Girls, Ten Legs, One Voice.’ Clarrie had kept in touch them all with since the Debacle in Dusseldorf, (apart from Layla di Resta that is, of whom she never heard of again, nor ever wanted to). At the reception Charlie performed a few tricks and then got famously drunk, Jane Benson got off with one of the bridesmaids and for Clarrie it was the happiest day of her life, even the sourness of her mother’s face could not spoil her day.
Frank, who was several years older than Clarrie, seemed to offer her a normal life outside of the stage, a home, a haven of regularity and routine to come back to and a secure relationship beyond the falsity and transient nature of life on the road. He was solid, that was the word, solid, content with his career and hobbies – football at Bramall Lane, an occasional weekend golf game at a municipal course, a pint with his friends and an avid watcher of crime serials on television. He was secure enough to recognise that Clarrie had her own profession on stage to follow; in fact he was somewhat star struck, marvelling in the fact that he had a wife who was on the stage, who had met some famous artists and who travelled around the country to perform. She was an exotic orchid who had somehow, by some alchemy, ended up in his greenhouse, or at least in his house and bed.
And now the safe haven that she thought he provided, the solidly grounded relationship she thought they had had proved to be as false and unfaithful as any on the stage, her secure retreat a lie, a worthless chimera, her foundations rent asunder.
‘I just knew it was a mistake to marry that man, Clarissa,’ her mother carried on in relentless, unforgiving bitterness. ‘I told you so at the time. You know I told you so and now look at you, rejected and jobless. Again. How I can ever face Hester Rhodes-Bishop again, lord alone knows, are you so absolutely determined to ruin my life?’
Yes, mother, I know it might have been a mistake to marry Frank but I don’t really need a lecture at this time, thank you very much, I need you to be a mother, to put your arms around me and tell me that everything is going to be all right, I just don’t need these endless resentful lectures how my life, my mistakes have ruined your life.
‘I mean, like at the choices you have, what have you made of your life, nothing. Your choice of career, your choice of men…’
‘And who are you to talk? Your career? You left school at 16 to go and work in John Lewis, Cole Brothers as it was then. Management trainee you have always claimed when everyone knows you worked behind the perfume counter, and as for your choice of men, hah, who did you end up with? That Man’ that’s who, so don’t presume to lecture me. ‘Not now, Mum, I’m tired, I just want to lie down and try and get my head straight,’
‘Huh, take more than a lie down to bring that about. Go on then, run away from the truth and hard facts, just as you’ve done all your life.’
‘In the end,’ she thought, ‘what have I achieved in life? A failed, marriage, a failed career and the only true friend I have in the entire wide world, Charlie Chilton, is about as reliable as a chocolate teapot.
‘Oh Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, where are you when I need you most?’
THIRTEEN
London, Michael O’Daly’s ‘Magic Lantern
Hang on a minute, what do you mean, last used officially? You mean to say it’s been used unofficially since then?
ASMODEUS TCHORT USHERED CHARLIE into Michaelmas’ workshop. It h
ad been a few years since Charlie had been there and he had forgotten how large it was. Although only a modest double fronted shop front, the premises stretched across the depth of two streets, Commercial Street and Denham Road, the street which ran back to back with Commercial Street. The Denham Road frontage was 6 units wide, far more industrial in appearance and was accessed through a large roller shutter, allowing Michaelmas to back a flat-bed truck or pick-up truck into the workshop to transport the larger, heavier illusions and there was a metal gantry with an electric hoist traversing the workshop to load the trucks or move heavy illusions around.
To the right was Michaelmas’s workbench, with an impressive array of tools –hacksaws, hammers, screwdrivers, electric drills and sanders, drill bits, files, spanners, wrenches, clamps, files, knives, cutters , scissors pliers and mole wrenches – all neatly arranged on shelves or racks or hooks above the bench. Another shelf displayed clear plastic boxes full of every size of screw and nail imaginable alongside a first aid kit, goggles and work gloves. A bank of suspended fluorescent lamps ensured the bench was well lit, whilst two angle-poise lamps were there when close work was to be carried out. There was a lathe, a mounted drill, circular saw, an industrial sanding machine with dust hood, a welding torch, acetylene gas bottles and welders mask, sawhorse and paint spray booth Other racks and shelves held timber battens, steel rods and wire, paintbrushes, handheld spray guns and pots of paint of every conceivable hue together with stacks of plywood, chip board, cardboard and thin aluminum sheeting. Further racks held bolts of multi-coloured cloth and fabrics of every type.
Against the opposite wall stood a work desk with telephone, computer, keyboard and mouse, printer, scanner, shelves of files and filing cabinets… A screened off corner held a toilet and washbasin with an adjacent kitchen unit with sink and Formica worktop , kettle, mugs and cups, and jars of coffee, packets of tea and sugar. A small refrigerator presumably held milk and other perishables. On the floor beside the kitchen unit Charlie could see a mousetrap, primed ready to spring with a very old and mouldy piece of cheese as bait, it would have to be a very hungry mouse to be tempted by that, Charlie thought.
Next to the desk was a maroon velvet Chesterfield sofa and Charlie recalled that Michaelmas Daisy had hurt his back in the car accident and obviously needed to lie down from time to time to ease the pain.
It was, Charlie had to admit, a very professional and workmanlike looking workshop, more than a workshop, it was a factory; the size of the space astounding considering the narrow frontage of the shops to Commercial Street, another grand illusion , eh Michaelmas? he thought.
‘Behold,’ exclaims Tchort, sweeping an arm to encompass all the illusions, large and small arrayed in serried ranks about the workshop,’a veritable Aladdin’s cave of magical cornucopia and fantastic illusion.’
Turning round and round like a starry-eyed boy in a magical toyshop, Charlie stares astounded by the sheer number of finished or illusion in progress. He sees a set of Mis-made Girl cubes, waiting for a final coat of paint, the sharpened metal blades for slicing the girl into four pieces lying alongside them, turning this way he sees an Underwater Table of Death, a glass tank to be filled with water over which is suspended a slab of foot long steel spikes which will plunge into the tank and impale the chained, submerged magician unless he can escape in time, a good illusion, one he would like to use himself but not the show stopper he is desperate to find, looking that way he sees a stainless steel Vanish and Suspension Box in which items vanish from below a cloth and reappear in a box suspended over the stage, a good but not sensational trick, a chain escape frame and stand, an ornamental Tiger Cage with beady eyed stuffed tiger, a smaller Death Drop box with pointed spikes the entire depth of the metal box in which the magician or assistant is entombed, two identical open mesh boxes and identical brightly painted Kawasaki motorcycles for the Disappearing Motorcycle and Rider Trick (the audience only ever see one box and one bike and rider at any one time) a Double Sawing in Half Box in which two persons are sawn in half and emerge from the boxes with the others lower torso and limbs, very good illusion but seen too many times on stage and television to be the showstopper he needs. Alongside it is another variation of the sawing in half illusion in which a timber slotted frame is placed over the recumbent assistant or member of the audience who is then sawn in half with a chainsaw, again not what Charlie wants or needs. Tchort watches as Charlie moves from illusion to illusion, from trick to trick, an amused tolerant smile playing across his patrician face, an indulgent parent letting his child loose in the toy store.
Charlie stops beside a box brightly painted in a the style of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints., a design clearly influenced by Hokusai’s famous print of The Great Wave off Kanagawa which has been reproduced in countless calendars, table mats, coasters and on student bedroom walls. It is a fusian box with mirror tunnel, he strokes the box, it is not the illusion he needs but similar to one he used in his first professional act, making things placed inside the box appear to disappear and reappear at will. There are Bo Staff Boxes, Levitation Cabinets, two more Zig-Zag Lady boxes, the same illusion but differently painted from the one in the front shop, too many tricks, stands and boxes, mirrors and cages to take it all in at once.
‘This is all very well,’ he turns to Tchort, ‘There’s some good stuff here, real good stuff, top class quality tricks, aye, nay doubt about that but nothing that nobody hasn’t seen before. I thought we were talking about something new? Something special? Grab ‘em by the testicles special? Nothing new here so far as I can see. Mind you,’ Charlie adds hurriedly, worried in case he has offended Tchort, ‘that’s not to say if this is all we’ve got I’m not going to say no, you get my meaning, subject to coming to, how’d you put it…an equitable arrangement.’
‘Charlie, I am a man of my word, something that you will surely come to…appreciate as our relationship develops and in turn, I expect, I require that others keep their word to me. Trust Charlie, between friends, and in business, is all.’ He takes Charlie’s arm and leads him over to the far corner of the workshop, towards a large object, some ten or eleven feet tall, shrouded by a black fabric cover. With a flourish, Tchort flips the cover aside, as the lights from the overhead fluorescents flash across the blade of a guillotine. ‘Behold, Charlie, behold.’
‘Arrgghh, shit no. Not the same old phony guillotine routine? I had one these buggers, little bit smaller I grant you in my first box of conjuring tricks, you stick your finger in the hole, a razor blade drops down and it looks as though the blade goes right through, chopping your finger off. This routine, with a million variations has been done to death. To death! I’d get laughed off the stage if I tried that.’
Charlie walks up to and around the guillotine, peering under bascule, a puzzled look slowly seeping across his face. ‘Where‘s the second blade, the lower one that’s the activated by the dropping blade, so it looks as though it’s the same blade?’
Tchort smiles thinly, ‘This is not a phony or trick guillotine, Charlie, oh my goodness no! This my fine friend,’ he says, patting the upright timber frame of the guillotine in an affectionate manner, ‘is the very same machine last used…officially to decapitate one Francois Benoit in 1964, the infamous child murderer who ate the flesh of his victims. The actual execution took place in the St. Joseph prison in Lyon, thereafter, the guillotine was not seen again from that day to this. But…’
‘Hang on a minute, what do you mean, last used officially? You mean to say it’s been used unofficially since then?’
‘But long before then’ Tchort continued, ignoring Charlie’s outburst, ‘our friend Madame Guillotine has had a lengthy and noble history. Manufactured in 1791 or 1792, this particular machine was one of the earliest guillotines ever built and has served well and faithfully ever since.’
Charlie looked to interrupt once more, but Tchort forestalled him with a sharply raised forefinger. ‘You will notice,’ he continued, as if he were a guide in a museum, ‘that
this is in fact a mobile guillotine and it served the Revolutionaries very well during the Revolution and the Terror thereafter. It was transported the length and breadth of France to carry out the work of the Tribunals. Many a nobleman’s head has felt the kiss of this blade. Much patrician blood has stained these ancient timbers,’ Tchort declared, caressing the timbers again, running his fingers around the curve of the lunette.
‘Yeah, yeah, that’s all very well but never mind the history lesson, what about the bloody trick?’ the irony of the word ‘bloody’ seemingly eluding him.
‘All in good time, Charlie, all in good time. Amongst the very many…clients of our good friend Madame Guillotine, one of the very first was the Comtesse Marie-Josephine de Blacam, who dabbled, shall we say in the diabolic arts. In 1792 she was condemned to die as a witch, a sorceress, somewhat unjustly in my view; after all, they were only peasant children she sacrificed. Nevertheless she was condemned to die. To be broken on the wheel, spread-eagled and the bones of her arms and legs to be smashed with a hammer, each to be broken in eight pieces. Afterwards she was to be left to die in agony and then her body burnt at the stake. A hideously agonising death! But she was spared that agony when the use of the breaking wheel was forbidden by the new National Assembly, and despite the efforts of influential friends to get the death sentence commuted she was still condemned to be put to death. Put to death by the new-fangled guillotine, the only method of execution now permitted in France.’ Tchort paused, as if for dramatic effect. ‘It was widely reported thereafter that the Comtesse de Blacam survived the guillotining.’
‘Oh aye, and she walked around afterwards with her head tucked underneath her arm? Like that song eh? ‘With her head tucked underneath her arm, she walks the Bloody Tower, he sings, manifestly out of tune.
