Clear (12 page)

‘She’d never even
heard
of Blaine before?’

I’m shocked.

‘Nope. Says she doesn’t have a
TV
. Never reads a paper. Didn’t have a
clue
, I swear. Like she’d just landed here from
Mars
, it was.’

‘But now she’s here most days…’ I casually muse (Sherlock, eat yer heart out).

‘Most
nights
,’ he corrects me.

‘Of
course
,’ I murmur.

‘Only comes when he’s sleeping,’ he sighs, glancing up towards the magician who has–just that minute–lifted his head on to his hand and is now lying on his side, still warmly ensconced in his sleeping bag.

‘Arrives at around ten or eleven, most evenings,’ Seth continues, ‘then usually stays right through. Some of the other lads worry a bit about her–I mean it gets quite
wild
down here sometimes. But she’s
fine
. She told me once how she has a nice little flat just down the cobbles a way…’ he points.

‘She does,’ I confirm.

He gives me a straight look. ‘Been there,
huh
?’

(And I don’t think he means the
flat
, either.)

‘Why,’ I ask (quick as a flash), ‘have
you
?’

He slowly shakes his head (and not a little regretfully).

At this point one of his colleagues calls him over. He turns, waves his ready compliance, then glances, briefly, back at me. ‘Amazing
nose
, though, eh?’ he murmurs, in a strangely inscrutable parting shot.

Amazing
nose
?

‘Yeah.
Yeah
, absolutely
amazing
…’ I bluster pointlessly after him.

And the tits aren’t half bad, either.

Did
I
just say that?

I charge into the office, crash down in front of my computer, and dive straight on to the internet.

Wham
!

Amazon…

Bam
!

Bookfinder…

After sniffing around for a while I pull out my Master-card and order:

(1)
The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka
(Vintage Classics, £9.99).


(2) Primo Levi,
If This Is a Man/The Truce
(Abacus, £8.99).


(3) David Blaine,
Mysterious Stranger
–‘
The Sunday Times
Bestseller: His secrets will become yours’ Pan, £12.99).

I do a mite more surfing, but find out surprisingly little of personal interest about Blaine. The full-on autobiographical detail is sketchy, at best…

• Born in Brooklyn, New York, 1973 (no actual date available).
  
• First got ‘into’ magic aged four, when he saw a man performing conjuring tricks on the Subway.
  
• His mother remarried when he was ten (no information about his real father or stepfather–although someone did mention something about his dad having died when he was very young) and the family moved to New Jersey.
  
• As a teenager Blaine became an actor, attending a Manhattan acting school and then appearing in a few commercials and playing some cameo roles in a couple of soaps.
  
• His mother died in 1994, when he was twenty-one.
  
• He started doing ‘magic for the Movie Stars in Hollywood’, so consequently has many ‘celebrity fans’, including Leonardo Di Caprio, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.
  
• He sent an amateur video of himself to ABC and they responded by offering him a million dollar contract to perform what they called ‘street magic’ on TV (So he didn’t invent that phrase himself? Well this makes Solomon’s theories look a little dodgy,
  eh
  ?).
  
• Apparently–now I
  like
  this–Blaine absolutely loves Tower Bridge. Always has. That’s why he’s doing the stunt here.
  

(
Hmmn
. Think this ‘loves Tower Bridge’ thing has that distinctively
feculent
aroma of a big ol’ pile of wheedling PR).

On one of the fan-sites there’s passing reference to Blaine’s (now almost legendary) ‘public demeanor of vacant detachment’, which strikes me as fairly interesting…I mean is all that very flat yet very deliberate slow-moving, slow-talking stuff just a
public
persona? (Does he jerk and buzz like Woody the fuckin’ Woodpecker in private?). More to the point: doesn’t
everybody
talk that way in Brooklyn?

Of course
then
there’s the reams of people trying to cash in on the whole
magic
side of his work (i.e. ‘Make all your friends gasp in astonishment…buy this video/ DVD/book…put your hand through a glass window…levitate…do a card trick…bring a fly back to life…’
blah blah
).

I also happen across Wakedavid.com, ‘the site dedicated to keeping David awake for 44 days and nights’.

God
, I really
dig
that about the internet: you’re banging through an apparently endless, incredibly turgid pile of fan-shite one minute, then the next–and completely without warning–you’re suddenly entering a world peopled entirely by
haters
. And yet here they are, rubbing up benignly against each other, almost as if–underneath all that careful packaging–they’re actually just one and the same thing…

Which they
are
, effectively (i.e, two sides/same coin etc.).

‘Cos that’s Modern Life,
huh
?

Wakedavid.com…

ENTER

Wow
. It’s a flashy old site, though, for something so apparently
ad hoc
.

And the first thing I notice–apart from the unnervingly detached, yet effortlessly
jocular
tone–is how incredibly keen these people are to make it clear, up front, that their campaign against David Blaine has
nothing whatsoever
to do with any kind of
racial
motivation–

Good
God
, no!

Never
!

Uh-
uh
!

I call Bly over at lunchtime to take a quick peek.

‘You okay?’ she asks, in passing.

‘Huh?’

‘You look a little
pale
,’ she says.

‘Did you see this before?’ I ask, pointing at the screen.

She puts her hand on to the back of my chair, leans in closer, and commences reading.

‘I had a boyfriend once,’ she informs me, a short while later, as we share a sandwich, walking along the river, ‘who was
really
into his four wheel drive Landcruiser…’

Okay
…

‘…And you might well think that this has nothing whatsoever to do with the Blaine thing…’

Yes, I might
.

‘And you may well be right…’

‘But?’

(
Jeez
. This girl’s certainly no Jalisa on the information front. It’s like pulling fucking
teeth
with her.)

‘But when I read that Wakedavid stuff just now it
totally
reminded me of the kind of tripe
he
used to download. The general
tone
,’ she says, ‘and this particular kind of…uh…
mind
set…’

‘Was the boy a Nazi?’ I ask sweetly.

She slits her eyes at me. ‘At least credit me with more discrimination than
that
.’

We grind to a halt in front of a dazed if cheery-looking Blaine. I peer down at my half of the sandwich. It suddenly looks quite unappetising. And while there’s a chill in the air, I feel a little…
phew
…hot.

‘Oh
fantastic
,’ Bly suddenly gasps (between urgent mouthfuls of her tomato and mozzarella ciabatta), ‘it’s Hilary, Adie,
look
…’

I turn to where she’s pointing (somewhat irritably–I mean when does she finally
elucidate
on the improbable 4x4/Wakedavid connection?) and see that the individual who’s generating such excitement on her part is sitting on Aphra’s bench, two spaces along from a currently blissfully dozing Punk’s Not (doesn’t this guy have a
home
to go to?).

He’s this slightly overweight, conventionally dressed, smug-looking, bespectacled, 30-something guy who happens to be wearing a preposterous headscarf–red and white, the kind favoured by Middle Eastern politicos (Yasser Arafat probably has the copyright).

To say the scarf looks a mite
incongruous
would be to dabble in a grotesque world of profound understatement (If he’s not wearing that thing for a
bet
, then I certainly wanna know why).

The scarf is literally just
tossed
over his head (like someone threw it at him and he didn’t quite duck in time). Next to him (and I mean
directly
next to him–in the gap between himself and Punk’s Not) is a small, rather scruffy, home-made sign which goes some way–I guess–to partially explaining this fabulous head-apparel: ‘Fortunes Read’, it says.

‘You actually
know
this creature?’ I murmur.

(
Jesus
. The Illusionist is certainly drawing all the freaks out of the woodwork.)

‘It’s
Hilary
,’ she says. ‘Remember? Worked as Mike Wilkinson’s PA last year?’

Nothing clicks.

‘Fourth floor?’

Nope (This chick isn’t in Human Resources for nothing,
huh
?).

‘Think he has the gift?’ I ask.

Bly nods. ‘He told my fortune last December,’ she says, ‘and he was
really
good.’

‘Oh yeah?’

She nods. ‘He said my father would lose his arm. And he did, three months later…’

I jolt to attention. ‘Your father lost his
arm
?’

She nods. ‘In an accident at work.’

‘And he said
that
? He said, “Your father will lose an arm?” ’

She chuckles. ‘No, not
exactly
…’

Ahhh
.

‘So what
did
he say?’

‘He said, “A close, male relative will lose a limb.”’

‘Good God.’

‘I
know
. Weird, huh?’

She pauses. ‘And the strangest thing was that my mother’s brother, Marty my favourite uncle–lost his toe to gangrene literally a
month
before my dad had
his
accident, and I briefly thought he was the person Hilary was talking about…But at the time I just kept thinking, “A toe is
not
a limb…”’

She gazes up at me, full of emotion, ‘I mean it just
isn’t
, is it?’

‘Wouldn’t it’ve been
awful
,’ I interject, ‘if, on top of everything else, Hilary’s
linguistic grasp
had been found wanting?’

She continues to look up at me, but now more cautiously.

‘You’re
harsh
,’ she eventually mutters. ‘I’m going over to say hi. Coming?’

Oh yes. Of course. I remember now. He’s put on some weight and he’s changed his glasses, but underneath that baroque headdress he’s fundamentally the same straitlaced, cynical, world-weary,
unbelievably
punctilious
tool
from the fourth floor that he always used to be.

We had an argument, once, about photocopying paper. His department had over-ordered, our department had run short, so I ‘borrowed’ a couple of packs without bothering to fill out the relevant acquisition slip and he got all snooty and snitchy and up on his hind legs about it.

Man
.

Who
needs
that shit?

So get this: I am approximately five feet away from this would-be Paragon of the Paranormal when he glances up from the book he’s reading- a particularly lovely (deliciously battered-looking) American paperback edition of the collected works of Richard Brautigan, with a fantastic black-and-white front cover (featuring a charming, old-fashioned photographic image of the author and his hippie-chick girlfriend), and then a beautiful, bright red
back
cover with only the word ‘mayonnaise’ written on it, in white, dead centre (
Wow
. So isn’t this itinerant paper hoarder
quite
the man of the moment now with his independent life-style, mystical leanings and iconoclastic
reading
matter?)- when he looks up, frowns and yells, ‘
Stop
!’

(About ten tourists freeze and turn around, in shock. Punk’s Not wakes up from his light doze, with a gasp.)

Bly and I both grind to a sharp halt.

‘Go home,’ the Paragon tells me in shrill, ecclesiastical tones (while pointing, rudely, like Moses on the damn Mount). ‘You have a contagious virus.’

‘Fuck off,’ I say.