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********* EXCERPT **********
Prologue
Truth is, I tricked
her into falling for me. Rosa Kelly: dark hair, blue eyes – wicked combination.
And, though she could’ve had her pick, she fell for me. OK, maybe ‘tricked’ has
inappropriate connotations. How about this: she wasn’t tricked so much as
beguiled? Yes. Altogether more apt.
Beguiled. Comparable to ‘bewitched’, with its suggestions of
sensuality and enchantment. Certainly, the illusion with which I beguiled her
depended, for effect and execution, on intimacy of touch and a semblance of the
supernatural. We were in a pub in Oxford, the Eagle and Child; wood panelling,
nooks and crannies. We were strangers. I was with my friends, she was with hers.
Someone in my group knew someone in hers and, following the complicated
rearrangement of tables and chairs, there were thirteen of us seated together.
An inauspicious assembly if you’re inclined to superstition, which I am not. I’d
noticed Rosa even before the two parties had become one, though I made sure to
give no indication of
paying her more, or
less, attention than the other newcomers in our smoky, boozy alcove. The
positioning of the chairs – I swear I had nothing to do with it, occupied as I
was with the transfer of drinks – brought us directly opposite one another. She
was smoking Marlboro and drinking Belgian lager straight from the bottle. Her
eyeshadow was pale green, to match her lipstick. She wore a ring on every finger
and on both thumbs.
‘Watch that one, Rosa,
he’s a magician,’ said one of my friends as the introductions were
completed.
Rosa, drawing deeply
on a cigarette, exhaled across the table. ‘There,’ she said, ‘I’ve made him
disappear in a puff of smoke.’
Everyone roared at that. Brilliant timing, impeccable
delivery. I might’ve reached over and produced a cheese-and-onion crisp from
behind her ear, but when you’ve just been upstaged in public the least
embarrassing recourse is to play the supporting role with good grace. Besides,
a crisp?
So I laughed along
with the rest of them. Rosa’s voice was slightly husky, her accent a curious
concoction of Irish and London; her eyes and mouth smiled in perfect
synchronization, as though she enjoyed nothing more than being made to laugh.
She turned to the guy on her left, asking him to pass an ashtray. They fell into
conversation, her long black hair snagging now and then on his shoulder as she
leaned close to hear him. Me, I drank and talked to my friends and went to the
bar and to the toilet. And, with discretion, I observed her hands – all those
rings, the emerald nails, the way she held her drink, lit a cigarette. She had
long bony fingers and thin wrists engulfed in bracelets and friendship bands and
the cuffs of a multicoloured woollen sweater several sizes too big for her.
Every fresh bottle of beer, she shredded the label clean off with her
thumbnail.
I have magician’s
hands. By that, I don’t mean they are the perfect size or shape for my work,
because such perfection of design is rare. It helps to have hands large enough
to facilitate, say, the concealment of a playing card; but large hands have
large fingers, less well suited to the more nimble manipulations. The trick is
to adapt. Most anatomical deficiencies of the hand can, within reason, be
compensated for by rigorous practice
or by appropriate
props. (If you’ve got small hands, use a smaller pack of cards.) My hands are
neither too large nor too small; what they are is well trained. I have taught
myself dexterity and ambidexterity. A speciality in my repertoire of sleights is
‘acquitment’ – the showing of a hand as empty while actually it contains
something. Done ineptly, this is known in the profession as ‘hand-washing’. Two
tips: one, rehearse in front of a mirror until your movements appear entirely
natural; two, never look at your hands while effecting a sleight, because the
one place the audience is sure to look is where you’re
looking.
Rosa’s hands weren’t magical; for all their conscious
disguise of adornment and manipulation, they revealed rather than concealed. I
longed to hold them. We’d all been drinking for a while when a familiar appeal
issued from the hubbub of overlapping chatter. Hey, Red, show us a
trick.
Even my oldest friends
do this. You get used to it.
‘I’m playing the
Crucible, in Sheffield, next Friday, if you want to come
along.’
‘Fuck off and show us
a trick.’
‘Fuck off
yourself.’
‘What’s this, the
Illusion of the Cantankerous Git?’
After a moment or two of this, you give in. And you always
involve someone else in the illusion, because they love all
that. I’ll need the help of an assistant from the audience; come
on, don’t be shy . . .
That evening, I made eye contact across the table. Blue irises, green eyeshadow.
With no perceptible alteration, Rosa’s expression said Don’t even think
about it. But the
enthusiastic coercion of others as they edged their chairs closer
to
our table made it more
awkward for her to decline than to agree.
‘Go on, then.’
Defiance. Her eyes, her tone of voice, the set of her shoulders said she was
prepared to be unimpressed; nothing I could do could possibly surprise or
interest her or escape her detection. And if I tried to make her appear foolish
I’d fail because she didn’t give a shite what anyone thought of her, least of
all me. She smiled. ‘If you’re good, I’ll let you make me a giraffe out of
balloons.’
I instructed her to
hold out her hands, palms downwards. She did this. I took them in mine and drew
them over the centre of the table. Her skin was cool and dry. Releasing her
hands, I told her to make fists. She made fists. Everyone was quiet now,
watching and listening with rapt attention.
‘You’re a Roman
Catholic, right?’ I asked.
‘And there’s you
guessing that, with me talking like a Kerrywoman.’
One or two people
giggled.
‘Do you believe in the
stigmata?’
‘The
what?’
‘That we can be marked
with the sign of Christ’s suffering on the cross?’
‘Oh,
sure.’
I dipped the tip of my
right middle finger into the ashtray, piled with the accumulated tappings from
her own cigarettes. Displaying the silvery-grey stain at the end of the finger,
I declared, ‘By rubbing this into the back of your clenched fist, I shall cause
the ash to pass through the hand and appear like a stigma in the centre of your
palm.’
Her eyes said Oh, yeah. I kept my face a blank of composed concentration. Placing
my fingertip on the back of her right hand, I began massaging the ash gently
into the pale skin with a small, circular movement. The bracelets on her wrist
clicked against one another as she responded involuntarily to the pressure of my
touch. All eyes were focused on the point of contact, where a charcoal smear now
blemished the skin.
Rosa glanced up at me,
then down again at the back of her hand.
‘Now, Rosa, please
unclench your fist and display your hand palm upwards.’
She did as instructed.
Her palm was unmarked. Silence gave way to stifled laughs, a groan, a jeer. Rosa
caught my eye again, smirking slightly, and I feigned an expression of alarmed
incomprehension. She was about to recline in her seat.
‘Are you left-handed?’
I asked suddenly.
She
nodded.
‘You
are?’
‘Yeah.’
‘In that case, would
you unclench your left hand for me?’
It was her turn for
puzzlement. Her smile became uncertain. The onlookers had fallen quiet once
more, switching attention to her other fist. Rosa uncurled the fingers and,
slowly, hesitantly, revolved the palm upwards. In its centre was an unmistakable
dab of cigarette ash.
*****
Other Modern Erotic Classics available:
The Houdini Girl by Martyn Bedford
Lie to Me by Tamara Faith Berger
The Phallus of Osiris by Valentina Cilescu
Kiss of Death by Valentina Cilescu
The Flesh Constrained by Cleo Cordell
The Flesh Endures by Cleo Cordell
Hogg by Samuel R. Delany
The Tides of Lust by Samuel R. Delany
Sad Sister by Florence Dugas
The Ties That Bind by Vanessa Duriés
Dark Ride by Kent Harrington
3 by Julie Hilden
Neptune & Surf by Marilyn Jaye Lewis
Violent Silence by Paul Mayersberg
Homme Fatale by Paul Mayersberg
The Agency by David Meltzer
Burn by Michael Perkins
Dark Matter by Michael Perkins
Evil Companions by Michael Perkins
Beautiful Losers by Remittance Girl
Meeting the Master by Elissa Wald
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