46

ONE season flows into another with the inevitability of the tide. Before Melbourne there was Hamburg. After Melbourne there will be Sydney, where the Mick Simmons chain of sporting goods stores uses the headline ‘HALLEY’S COMET ECLIPSED’ to advertise its annual sale. Specials include generous discounts on gun-cleaning tools and fishing hooks. After Sydney there will be a European tour, though not until Harry has endured one more stomach-heaving sea voyage via New York, where he will be with his adored mother for her sixty-ninth birthday. He had expected to return as a conquering hero. Now he is not so sure. He has taken the Voisin up, as he planned, but it may not be enough.

He blames Brassac and his caution. He could have been aloft weeks ago except for his mechanic’s timidity. Yet Rickards has dismissed Custance as an irritation. Harry must have faith in the theatre owner, whose interests are also at stake, and trust he is right about Taylor of the Aerial League.

Now he has a final show to perform. On stage in London or Paris or San Francisco he usually has a sense that he will return one day. But he is certain he will never come back to Australia. It is too distant, too dislocating. The harsh light and accents are foreign. He cannot sleep. Yet he is a showman and appreciates that there will be people in the Opera House in Melbourne this Friday night who will see him on stage for the first and only time. So he must give them something remarkable. Something to remember.

‘Okay, boss?’ Kukol asks him when they encounter each other backstage. Bess asks much the same question before returning to the hotel to rest before his performance. Harry gives the same answer to each: ‘I’ll be fine.’

His assistants have prepared the required apparatus for a baffling escape – a rope to restrain him constructed in two sections, fastened together with a screw and socket. The join is so neat it cannot be detected with a casual inspection. But a half-turn brings it apart. Then, when his hands are freed out of the audience’s sight, it can be reconnected, allowing Harry to wriggle free of the chair in which he is trussed with all knots still intact in the rope. Remarkable.

Amongst the cheering audience members it is only Bess and Rickards who wonder why he performs the trick wearing a cream-coloured suit. He even stays in it for the milk-can routine that follows, and because it is his last show he allows Kukol to feign panic and take a harmless swing with his axe at a lock on the metal cocoon before he materialises.

Water streams from his sleeves and cuffs when he closes his season.

He raises his arms, calls for quiet, urges spectators to be seated once again. Standing in the wings, Vasco the Insane Musician, the Harmonious Huxhams, and the Australian Dartos gather to hear what he says.

‘I’ll bet he won’t thank us,’ Teddy McLean of the Dartos mutters to brother Roy.

He is right.

Harry does not acknowledge his fellow performers, his assistants or even his wife. Instead, after reminding people that although many of his challenges have been pirated by imitators, he was the originator of the routines they saw. Then he makes a brief farewell speech.

‘This is my first visit to Australia,’ he says, ‘and is very likely to be my last …’

‘No!’ Rickards calls out, keeping his head well down.

‘Yes! My last, for within two years I intend to retire and devote myself exclusively to aviation. And when The Handcuff King has long been forgotten, I trust that my name will firmly be cemented in Australian history as the first man to fly here!’

‘A nice touch, Double,’ Rickards says to himself as the applause begins, hesitantly at first then more enthusiastically as Harry takes a final bow, a damp circle around his bare feet on the stage.

‘What’s he mean with that flying business?’ Roy McLean asks his brother.

‘Beats me,’ Teddy replies. ‘Probably another one of his tricks.’