by Baker, John
There was a man on the street, watching her emerge from the alley. He had his legs apart and he was swaying. Big man with a long, open raincoat with epaulettes, blue jeans and long greasy hair in a widow’s peak.
‘Y’lost’ darlin’?’ he said, moving his lips as if they were part of an engineering experiment.
Marilyn shook her head. She looked up and down North Lane, wondering where Danny was. She wasn’t lost but she was confused. Could it be that this drunk was part of the test? Was the presence of this man with his flapping raincoat and slurred words an extension of the darkness of the passage? Or was the test over and this real life, real danger?
The man lurched over the road towards her. ‘C’m’ere and give us a kiss,’ he said, attempting to mask his desperation with levity. ‘“Only the lonely, dum, dum, dum, dummy do waa”. Sing you a fucking song, girl.’
He fell forward, pinning her against a garden fence, his huge hands on her shoulders, his breath like the waste pipe from a brewery. Close up his eyes were bloodshot, the veins in the white desert around his pupils overflowing their ruptured banks and spewing tiny falls of crimson plasma.
Marilyn watched the man’s foul mouth come down on hers, his wet lips and thick tongue. At the same time he wormed his hand inside her coat and kneaded her breast while his crotch was pushed up against her. He was so tall that Marilyn’s head only reached halfway up his chest. She found his balls and squeezed and twisted with all her strength, feeling the man reel away from her, head snapped back in a gesture of pain and bewilderment.
He drew back his hand and clenched it into a fist, aiming at her head. In the fraction of a second that remained to her, Marilyn realized that if she allowed him to hit her she would be unable to stop him from raping her. She gave a final twist to his balls, pulling down and to the right while ducking away under his left arm.
And she ran. Within seconds she had put enough distance between her attacker and herself to take a look over her shoulder. He was slumped on the pavement, supported by his head and knees, and showed no intention of giving chase.
Marilyn kept running, up to the top of North Lane and past the Taps, back to the side street where she had parked the car. She flashed the remote to open the doors and locked them behind her, sitting trembling behind the steering wheel, her eyes nailed to the street corner in case the man had decided to come after her.
The clock on the dashboard ticked away for half an hour. Marilyn’s breathing returned to normal. She rationalized what had happened. She’d had a close run-in with a drunk but she’d handled the situation well. If he hadn’t had so much to drink she wouldn’t have managed and he’d have dragged her back into the alley and raped her, maybe beaten or killed her. But that was speculation. What had happened was that the man had tried it on and she’d escaped and she was safe.
She no longer knew if she’d lost Danny Mann or if Danny had lost her. There had been the idea of some kind of initiation while she was in the passage, but surely that didn’t include attempted rape?
Marilyn was confused. She reasoned that she was in shock. In which case she should have a cup of strong tea with sugar. Leeds, half-past one in the morning. Strong tea with sugar wasn’t going to be easy.
She started the engine and drove along the main road, heading towards the centre of town. She stopped at a hot-dog stand and bought a plastic cup of boiling water with a tea-bag in it and four sugar lumps. She asked the vendor for a spoon and stirred until the water was black.
Back behind the wheel of Ellen’s car she sipped the liquid without removing the tea-bag. When it was gone and she was no longer in shock Marilyn drove back to the block of flats where Danny had parked his car. It was still there, standing alone now, so that she could pull in behind it and wait for him.
She took a sprig of privet leaves from a hedge and wedged it under his windscreen wiper so that he’d know she was there. Then she settled down in the driver’s seat of her mother’s car and closed her eyes.
She dreamed about the attempted rapist twice, and woke each time she failed to escape him. But she finally settled into a kinder dream, with the magician, Danny Mann, and a long blue room the colour of a clear sky. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. They loved each other more than words. Sometimes, more than once in the dream, Marilyn wasn’t sure if they had or needed physical bodies.
When she awoke she was calm, composed. It was as if the blueness and the spiritual feelings that had accompanied the dream had permeated through to the very essence of her.
She didn’t mind that she had slept through the night and it was now bright daylight, or that there were pedestrians at the entrance to the flats looking in at her. She didn’t mind that Danny’s car had gone and that he had abandoned her once more. This was one of the things she would have to learn to live with, at least in the short term. A small price to pay for the love of a good man, a special man, a man with extraordinary talents and abilities.
14
If he leaned forward into the bay and looked along North Lane he could see the Taps at the top of the street. Still closed, of course, no customers at this time of the morning. The early mist was giving way to thin sunshine and if he half-closed his eyes he could see undines and sylphs and salamanders, a host of elementals in the magical air dying into and out of each other, allowing themselves to be divvied up into kaleidoscopic patterns before the life-force rushed in to resurrect them.
He hadn’t eaten since leaving home the night before but he had a small plastic bottle of sparkling spring water from which he took sips at hourly intervals. ‘Chew your liquids and drink your food,’ his mother used to tell him when he was small. Funny, the things you remembered. ‘Beef tea,’ she’d say at other times. ‘Beef tea, Danny, will cure anything.’
When he thought back on his life the magician couldn’t remember anyone who had been as constant as her. Not his father. Not uncles or aunts or cousins or school-friends. Not grandparents or agents or other performers. Not audiences. Not women. Most of the people he’d known were fickle, many of them competitors or actual traitors. There’d been illusions of warmth like small oases in memory; a Christmas Eve with his father, a football match with one of her boyfriends, a conjuror with a spotted hat and six doves and a brolly up his sleeve. But the final outcome was always rejection in one form or another. Only she was faithful until the end. Only she was magic.
The second phase of the trick had brought him to this house in Leeds. The couple who lived here were not important, the man was purely incidental, a nuisance. But the woman, the lady of the house, was an essential component in the presentation of the illusion. Her death would be a deception, it would create a false impression.
In the simplest of cheats a magician misleads his audience by showing them an apparently empty container. He goes to great lengths to convince his onlookers that there are no secret chambers or drawers or compartments within the container. And then, hey presto, he withdraws from within it a dove or a rabbit or a rag of silk. The trick is in the presentation of the container and this woman, like the last one, is part of that process. Her death creates an impression, it draws the eyes of those involved in a certain direction. It distracts them from the truth.
But Danny smiled to himself. Only a certain audience would see it that way. Another crowd would be transfixed by the power of the metaphor. They would witness transformation. They would feel themselves to be in the presence of magic. And as every magician knows, no audience is an accident. An audience is created, coaxed into being, moulded by the man with the secrets; the virtuoso on the stage.
The man, the husband, was already dead. The magician had had to dispose of him in the early hours of the morning. He had carried the body to a spare bedroom and dumped it on a bare mattress. He didn’t want that smell in the same room as the woman, in their bedroom where Danny would have to go to work on her at the appointed time. The man was gone but that didn’t stop Danny from checking on him throughout the night. He had been a small man in
life and now he was a small cadaver. There was that distinctive mark on the bridge of his nose that indicated his use of spectacles. His hair was thinning and he had delicate wrists like a woman. He was a specialist in phenomenology at the University of Leeds and his profession and Danny’s were not so distant in essence. They were both privy to the secrets of intuition.
Before rigor mortis occurred the magician had gone to the spare bedroom and laid the corpse out, placing its hands on its chest, closing its eyes and wiping away the clotted blood from its forehead. There was a sense of distant kinship about it, as though in life they had shared a slice of the same reality. If it had been possible to keep the man alive the magician thought they might have become friends or fellow researchers.
Black silk pyjamas, he was wearing. A red hand-embroidered motif over the breast pocket identified one of the man’s heroes: Heidegger. Danny had tried to read philosophy, feeling that it might have bearing on his life, and from time to time he would try again. But the terminology and the way that philosophical writers tended to be trapped in the jargon of their subject always defeated him. He didn’t understand them but he was glad that they were there. One didn’t have to understand everything. Secrets were important.
Danny, like many other boys of his age, had discovered magic during the period of adolescence. While the child’s physical body was being transformed into maturity and when the mind and soul was confined in doubt and insecurity there took place an unconscious search for power. Ultimate power is control and dominance over others and it is achieved by those who know the secret of transformation. As a twelve-year-old boy if you can change the Queen of Hearts into the Ace of Spades while all around look on amazed, it doesn’t matter if your History teacher thinks you are lumpen and the Science teacher refers to you as pond-life. What do they know, these people? They don’t know secrets, they can’t see the processes of alchemy taking hold of your being.
It would be possible to bring the man back to life.
Diamond Danny was under no illusions. He didn’t have the kind of magic that could accomplish such a feat. He didn’t know anyone who could do it, had never in his life met anyone who could do it. But what did that mean? It only meant that he hadn’t come across that person. It didn’t mean that that person didn’t exist. Jesus of Nazareth had brought people back from the dead. He had even resurrected himself.
What happens once can happen again.
A secret learned can never be lost. Not completely.
Only a few ingredients were missing from the corpse on the mattress. His heart was not beating, his lungs were not expanding and contracting, floating their filigree wings in the oxygenated cave of his chest, and the gushing streams of dusky red and blue blood were sticky and congealed against their venous banks.
But a word can start or stop a heart. If the right word at the right time is known and uttered.
All magicians know these things.
Danny took a high-backed chair to the bay window and watched the waking day through the net curtains. He thought about the Indian Rope Trick. During British rule in India there were many reports of this trick. A fakir throws a rope into the air. Before the rope can fall to the ground it inexplicably becomes solid. An assistant to the fakir, a small boy, climbs the rope and when he gets to the top he disappears. The fakir then ascends the rope with a knife. When he gets to the top he also disappears. From up above, though they can see nothing, the crowd then hears the cries of the boy as he screams in pain. Moments later the ground around the rope is littered with the amputated and bleeding limbs of the young boy. The fakir descends his rope, collects the parts of human anatomy and puts them into a basket. When he lifts the lid of the basket a second or two later the boy is in there, intact, smiling and ready to receive the pennies of the crowd.
Over the years there had been various explanations of how the trick was done. Some people had suggested that the fakir was a hypnotist and that the entire crowd in the dusty square were put into a trance. One elaborate explanation had suggested that the rope was thrown up into strands of woven hair dyed the same colour as the sky. That the bloody limbs were shaven monkey-limbs. Another that there were two boys, twins, and for the trick to succeed one of them had to be murdered.
Danny didn’t know the answer. It wasn’t one of his tricks, though he was connected with it through centuries of association with magic and the practices of magic. Well before the advent of Christ magicians like Diamond Danny Mann were confounding audiences with cones and balls in exactly the same way they do to this day. There was a red thread, a line connecting all those practitioners through the ages. It was like a family tree.
He watched the milkman float into the street on his electric cart. Delivering bottles of milk and cartons of cream and collecting empties and pursing his lips together like he was whistling but there was no audible sound. There were several rhythms to the man’s physical work; the pulse and throb of his footsteps up and along the paths to the houses, the pace and tempo of his arms and shoulders as he sorted the empties into their various crates. In the back of his mind the magician could almost make out the lyrics of a work song, something to do with black people and slavery, though the milkman was white and the name on the side of his float was Dai Evans.
When he came up the path to the house the magician froze. Dai Evans was on the other side of the glass and the net curtain, perhaps a metre away. Danny could pick out the stray hairs in his eyebrows and a couple of tiny strands sticking out of his nostrils and ears. He placed one red-topped bottle on the step, semi-skimmed for health-conscious people. The couple who lived in the house and who didn’t want to take too many chances with their cholesterol levels.
The milkman waited a moment, adopting the listening position, as if he could hear the steady rise and fall of the magician’s respiratory system or the stillness of death on the mattress in the spare room. But there was nothing tangible or audible for the man to connect with, just an uneasy feeling, the sense that all was not right with the world. Too much for a milkman to handle in the early morning. He shrugged his shoulders and continued with his round.
The magician didn’t move. He sat like a Buddha, naked behind the window, and watched his own body and his own reactions to everything that happened in his immediate environment. The milk reminded him of his mother and how she hadn’t been able to eat at the end. It had begun with her avoiding olives or anything spicy. She’d stopped eating meat, saying that it was indigestible, then fish and beans. For the last couple of months she’d eat only a couple of spoons of cauliflower cheese, a glass of milk, a poached egg and pasta alphabet shapes. Her body had gradually lost the power to transmute food to flesh and bone, to transform protein and vitamins and minerals into consciousness. This would happen to Danny as well; one day, like everyone else, he would lose his individual magic and become part of the wider magic of the cosmos. He would become food for worms, contribute selflessly to the regeneration of the earth.
But not yet. In the present there was work to be done. Ego work. There were runes to be rhymed and charms to be chanted. There were thunderbolts to be fashioned and hurled at the sun and there was a dreadful noise of water in his ears and sights of ugly death within his eyes.
Danny felt a smile crease his face. Outside the window the rain was coming down again. In Nottingham there had been a group of creationists outside the theatre, their placards predicting the end of the world. Well, anything was possible. But Danny believed that the flood in Genesis was a homily, a local flood like any other, and the ‘world’ that was flooded merely the world that was known to Noah.
When the metallic-coloured Montego entered the street the magician got to his feet. He watched as Sam Turner left the car and walked tentatively up the path of the house opposite, number thirty-seven, where Danny Mann, alias Mr Bonner (his mother’s maiden name), had arranged to meet him. A good-looking man in a tracksuit and trainers answered the door and stood with his hands on his hips. He listened to Turner then shook his
head.
Turner fished in his pocket and brought out a scrap of paper. He said something to the owner of the house and the other man shook his head again. Danny could almost hear his words. There’s no Bonner lives here. No, I don’t know anyone of that name. Not in this street.
The good-looking man closed the door and Sam Turner returned to his car. He stood by the side of it in the rain and looked up and down the street, unable or unwilling to admit that his journey had been in vain.
He unlocked the driver’s door of the Montego and then locked it again. He walked along the street, tentatively, as though his trousers were too tight for him, though they looked like a perfect fit. He crossed over, rang the bell of house number seventy-three to make sure he hadn’t become aphasic. No one answered his ring. Back at his car he stopped a young black woman with an umbrella and must have asked her if she knew of anyone called Bonner. He showed her his scrap of paper with the name and address scribbled on it. But it wasn’t his lucky day.
When Sam Turner got back into his car and drove away Danny went upstairs and entered the woman’s bedroom. She was tied to the bed as he had left her. The gag, which consisted of her own face-flannel and two-inch-wide masking tape, gave her an eastern appearance, as if she was wearing a yashmak, just the eyes staring out at the world.
Black silk pyjamas like the man, but without the Heidegger crest. In place of it she had embroidered the words Hi, Guys. Her hair was cut short and brushed forward, one or two strands of grey in there, but her face was unlined apart from the crow’s feet around her eyes. Danny might have ended up with a woman like her if he’d managed to maintain any of his relationships. If everything hadn’t gone wrong in his life at such an early age. It didn’t matter now, of course, it was just something to think about.
