The Dead Couple’s pleasure and agony were building to a climax, but I stopped paying them any attention as I backed away towards the door, my bag clutched to my stomach, leaving behind a disgusting trail of blood smeared across the floor. When I got outside the door slammed behind me, but I didn’t care.
I went over to the steps, took off my shoes and left them at the bottom. When I got into my house I washed my hands and examined my nails to make sure no lethal traces of blood had got stuck underneath.
Through the fear I realised with absolute clarity that I was overreacting. You couldn’t be infected just by being near blood. I sluiced my face with cold water and had almost convinced myself that there was nothing to worry about when someone knocked on my door.
I grabbed the edge of the washbasin and stood there motionless, hardly daring to breathe, childishly thinking I’m not here. The knocking came again, harder this time. Driven by another infantile reflex, I turned the key in the toilet door, so that there would be two locked doors between me and whoever was outside.
It could only be the Dead Couple. No one had ever knocked on my door before. They had seen the footprints in the blood and my shoes at the bottom of the steps. Now they wanted to get hold of me and…Fear has a tendency to evoke childish reactions, and yet another one popped up now. When I heard knocking for the third time, a rhyme started running through my head, a song from the previous year’s student parties, with alternate parts sung by girls and boys:
GIRLS: ‘Who’s knocking on my door? Who’s knocking on my door? Who’s knocking on my door?’ said the beautiful virgins.
BOYS: ‘Me and my boys are on parade, and we want to get laid,’ said Scout Leader Frasse.
I didn’t want to know what the Dead Couple might have in mind. The song about Scout Leader Frasse was running on a loop, accompanied by the animalistic grunts and yells from the shower room. I could easily imagine the worst, so I clung to the basin and waited for the moment to pass.
The knocking stopped, but I didn’t hear any feet descending the steps, so I stayed where I was. After five minutes I finally plucked up the courage to unlock the toilet door as quietly as possible. My inner child was still in charge, so I checked the room: nothing had changed, the front door looked the same as usual and there were no faces at the window. I didn’t know what else to do then, so I sat down at the desk and rested my hands on its surface.
My gaze settled on the scar on my right arm. I often rolled up my sleeves when I performed, because many people mistakenly believe that’s where we magicians hide things. Occasionally someone would ask about the scar, and I always lied. A childhood accident, et cetera, et cetera.
Sitting there now, all alone, I suddenly got the idea that it was the cross that had put me in this situation. I was marked, chosen—I will find you—and now it had caught up with me like one of the Hounds of Tindalos, pursuing their quarry through time and space in order to devour him.
Intuition is a strange phenomenon. A momentary cohesion of impressions stored in the subconscious creates a conviction without the help of sentient reasoning. So I can’t explain which connection of the synapses led me to the conclusion that the scar on my skin and what was happening in the shower room were linked. It was unfortunate, because I would eventually be proved right.
I made an effort to think about the cell instead. It had worked earlier in the evening, and it worked again. The image of that bare, silent little room cocooned my naked heart in soft material, and peace crept in. I breathed more calmly, opening and closing my magician’s hands.
It had gone so well. That was what the evening was about. Success, being on my way, a bright future.
Me and my boys are on parade
No. No chance. I had nothing unresolved with anyone; I hadn’t harmed a fly. Outside my walls, in the city around me, was an audience that would grow, one couple at a time, one table at a time, and soon my skills would be in demand. Are you here on Saturday? Are you here next week? Do you work in any other restaurants?
There you go.
*
I slept well that night, in spite of everything. Once I had managed to shake off the suggestions with the help of other suggestions, I realised how tired I was from the exertions of the day and the evening, and I fell asleep around midnight after playing ‘Somebody’ without the needle jumping. The lyrics followed me down into slumber, and I dreamed about this somebody who could make me see things in a different light.
When I woke up the events of the previous evening had been sent to the slagheap with a sign that said: Nothing to do with me. It was quite a busy route these days. Big cars with tinted windows.
There were only two days to go until Saturday’s performance, and I didn’t think I could do the same act when there would be at least one person in the audience who’d seen it before. I hadn’t felt comfortable repeating the same effects at the larger table when I’d already shown them to the smaller table. What I needed was a number of tricks to choose from, so that I could vary my performances, making each one different—at least during the same evening.
After a cup of coffee and a cheese spread sandwich, I turned to the bookshelf for inspiration. As usual I homed in on Paul Harris. I took out Close-Up Entertainer, Supermagic and Las Vegas Close-Up, and spent a couple of hours making a list of possible tricks that could be included in a more flexible act.
To a layman it might seem over-ambitious to learn several new tricks in just a couple of days, but the truth is that the lion’s share of all magic tricks is based on the same hand movements. If you can master five or six card manoeuvres and two or three coin manoeuvres, you can do most things. It’s about combinations of these movements, plus the presentation—the spiel around the trick.
There are exceptions, of course—tricks based on complex manoeuvres that require hundreds of hours of practice. On the other hand, there’s no guarantee that these tricks are any more striking or entertaining than the basic ones. Often the reverse is true.
Paul Harris has come up with some complex moves, but in my opinion his greatness lies in what he’s done with the simple moves. The illusion known as Reflex is a nerve-jangling battle between the magician and a member of the audience that culminates in something that appears to be completely impossible. All achieved with a couple of double lifts and a palming.
The day ran away as I sat or stood at my desk with my cards and coins. I took some of Paul Harris’s patter, added my own and modified the trick accordingly. By four o’clock I had expanded my act by six or seven minutes, and decided I could break for a late lunch or early dinner.
I had managed to distance myself so successfully from the events of the previous evening that there was a moment of confusion when I was ready to go out and couldn’t find my shoes. Then I remembered. I opened the door and looked out. They were exactly where I had left them. I felt stupid for having overreacted so badly, but I still filled a jug with water to clean the soles, then padded down the steps in my stocking feet.
When I had rinsed off the dried blood, I found a folded piece of paper inside the right shoe. I opened it up and read WE’LL BE BACK, written in the same neat capitals as the ad for the television and the note on the shower room door. The woman might have set aside her human dignity, but she had retained her faultless handwriting.
A threat, a promise or merely a statement? If this was meant to scare me, it had the opposite effect. The bellowing, bleeding spectres who had knocked on my door last night turned into ordinary people who could write notes, then fold them tidily and tuck them into my shoe.
*
Nothing special happened on Friday, and the Dead Couple didn’t fulfil their promise. I practised my double lift and my Elmsley Count, came up with a new presentation based on the concept of hiding things in the air, watched a documentary about Viking, the Swedish space probe, slept.
I carried on practising on Saturday. Perhaps too many card tricks had sneaked into my act, so I worked on a variation of the Coin in the Bottle.
After a dozen or so attempts the elastic band in the gimmick I was using snapped, and I had to give up, so I decided to go out for a coffee.
When I stepped into the street and the main door slammed shut behind me, someone shouted, ‘Hey, you there!’ I turned around and recoiled.
Coming towards me along Luntmakargatan was a skinhead. Under his open bomber jacket I could just see a T-shirt bearing the Odal rune, and his black boots thumped on the pavement as he marched along with an aggressive look on his face. He didn’t just look like the shaven-headed guy I had seen sitting on the smartly dressed man’s knee, on my knee, that day in the tunnel; he was that guy. He stopped a metre away from me and jerked his thumb towards the door. ‘What’s the entry code?’
Even under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have given the code to someone like him, and the memory of him sitting on my knee left me standing there at a total loss, as he frowned irritably. His face was smooth, and the lack of hair made his eyes and lips stand out as if he were a mime artist. A difficult-to-read mixture of hardness and innocence. He waved his arm and said, ‘The code! For the door!’
I looked at the door as if I needed a visual aid to understand what he was talking about. I was about to say something when he clicked his fingers, pointed at me and said, ‘You’re a magician, aren’t you?’
‘Yes…yes, I am.’
He wagged his finger in front of me as if this was something for which I needed to be chastised, and said, ‘Saw you in the Old Town last summer. Fucking fantastic!’
‘Thanks...’
I remembered a Friday evening when so many people had gathered that Västerlånggatan had been completely blocked by my audience. A group of four skinheads had pushed their way through the crowd, which obediently parted. They came and stood right at the front, glaring at me, their faces immobile. I performed my last two tricks with a growing sense of panic as the audience drifted away. When I finished and bowed, bending my body over the bad feeling in my belly, there was no one left but the four of them, standing there with their arms folded.
There is no shortage of stories about people who have been beaten up by gangs of skinheads who’ve tired of hanging out around the Helicopter Platform in the Old Town and have taken to the narrow streets searching for some fun. Maybe I had been selected to provide the evening’s entertainment as a punishment for having blocked their route.
Arms over the head, fists tightly clenched. Not the skull, not the fingers.
Occasionally the police would come and move me on for causing an obstruction, but there was no sign of them or anyone else in the extensive no-go area that had formed around me and the skinheads. I was alone.
The biggest member of the group slowly began to applaud. The others joined in. I stood there with my arms dangling by my sides as the big guy reached into his pocket and took out an unopened can of beer, which he placed in my hat. ‘Fucking hell,’ he said, and then they walked away. I sank down on a nearby step, opened the beer and took a couple of swigs.
I have never been good with faces, and the skinheads’ uniform makes things even more difficult, so I couldn’t say if the guy asking me for the door code now had been part of that group. Anyway, the fact that he recognised me had softened his attitude: ‘Come on, man. I really need to get in.’
Did I have any real reason to deny him? Did I care what he might get up to? Besides which, there was something about him that suggested he might have more going on inside his head than Sweden for the Swedes, tra-la-la-la-laa. It might have been an excuse to avoid any unpleasantness, but I said, ‘Nineteen nineteen.’
He grinned. ‘Votes for women, right?’
‘Wasn’t that…1921?’
He shook his head. ‘That was the first time they actually voted. The decision was taken in 1919. Read up on your history, for fuck’s sake.’
There was no aggression in his last comment; it was more of a joke. I watched him go over to the keypad, enter the numbers and open the door. As if I didn’t have enough to think about.
I had decided to meditate on my act over lunch, see if any weaknesses spontaneously occurred to me, elements that could be improved. Then I would come home and work on them. But when I sat down with my chicken salad, my mind kept returning to the skinhead, as I had feared.
It was partly his character. I had never spoken to a skinhead before, but judging from their general behaviour, he didn’t seem to me to be typical. Women’s suffrage was hardly likely to be the main topic of conversation among the beer cans on the Helicopter Platform. Once when I was passing on the way to a street magic session I had heard someone bawling out a filthy song about tits and arses.
Then there was the question of his role in the smartly dressed man’s fantasies. Was he a rent boy, on his way to do his job? That was one step too far for me. An intellectual skinhead who was also a prostitute. Maybe in a song by Marc Almond, but not in the street outside my door.
When I had eaten my salad and drunk my coffee, I did what I always did in those days: consigned my thoughts to the slagheap. Rubbish that I could dig up and examine if the opportunity arose, but not now. I had a show to do.
*
Like Donald Duck, when we are children we have the propensity to switch from sadness to joy to anger within the course of one minute. Quack, splat, hiss, ho ho! These mood swings become less pronounced as we grow older, because our internal processor has more to keep on top of, and works more slowly. Impressions are chewed over and manipulated until they result in a more considered response. The older we get, the less we resemble Donald Duck.
I still had Donald’s ability to shake off anything incomprehensible or alarming, and to face any new situation with confidence. Not completely, but enough to be able to put the skinhead, the blood and the bad feeling behind me as I set off across the ridge at five-fifteen to do my act. My thoughts were solely focused on the tricks I was going to do, the words I was going to say.
I opened the door bearing the sign with my name on it, and said hello to Roberto and Miguel. There were three bookings this evening in addition to the party of ten who were coming especially to see me; they were due at seven.
I don’t need to go through the evening in detail, because my account of Thursday gives the general picture. The new tricks worked well, and Reflex in particular captured the attention of the whole table; everyone wanted to see if the hand really can be faster than the eye. At ten past seven the large group arrived, much to my relief, led by Hasse. He patted me on the shoulder and introduced me to his colleagues as if I were a rare ape he’d discovered in the big city jungle.
‘Here he is! The man, the legend!’
He and his party had had plenty to drink before they came out, and Hasse’s gestures were wild, his eyes glazed. The party noisily took their seats at the table they’d booked.
You might think it’s easier to perform magic for people who are drunk, because their observational skills are impaired. Quite the reverse. Many tricks depend on what is known as misdirection, which means using words and/or gestures to divert attention from something you don’t want the audience to see. Drunks are unpredictable. Their eyes dart around all over the place, and in the worst-case scenario can land on exactly what you don’t want them to notice.
Alcohol also has a tendency to erode social conventions and normal, everyday politeness. If sober people see something a little bit suspect, they usually keep quiet out of consideration for the performer, or because they’re not absolutely sure of their ground. Not the drunk. The eyes flicker, pause, and a second later the finger is pointing and out come the words: Hey, look at that!
It took a while for Hasse’s group to place their order, and meanwhile I worked out an act that depended as little as possible on misdirection. Once their drinks had been served I was called in, and against all expectations the performance went brilliantly. Hasse must have built me up to his colleagues in advance, and maybe he was the boss, because they all reacted to my minor miracles with the same enthusiasm as him. I
n fact it almost became embarrassing as they cheered every little twist and turn.
I was worried about how the other customers would react to having such a boisterous group in the middle of the restaurant, and looked around apologetically. I happened to glance through the window, and saw a number of people peering in, curious to find out what all the noise was about. Before I moved on to my next trick, I saw the people outside moving towards the door.
At the end Hasse collected money from everyone in his group—‘At least ten kronor each!’—and I walked away two hundred kronor better off. I sat down in the kitchen and let out a long breath. After a while Roberto came in and gave me the thumbs up.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It got a bit crazy there.’
Roberto shrugged. ‘As long as they’re spending money like those guys, it’s fine. Champagne before dinner. And an expensive one at that. The only kind I had. I love yuppies. It’s cool.’
He knocked three times on the table as if to protect himself from bad luck, and said, ‘Listen, another table has asked for a performance too.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll just let the big group calm down a bit. Five minutes.’
‘Okay.’
To tell the truth, I was the one who needed to recharge my batteries. Wipe the slate clean, reboot ready to meet the next audience as something new and exciting. I leaned back and closed my eyes, using the same method I employed when I had a headache. Give the pain a shape, a colour and a precise location, and imagine a hole in your skull directly above the pain. Then slowly tilt your head and allow the pain to run out through the hole. I did that now, although I was tipping out noise and impressions instead of pain.