53

HARRY is exasperated. All these people, and he has made a false start. But he knows what the problem is: the breeze has loosened some of the wires in the wings. Once they are tightened he can get going again. He will not even leave the machine while adjustments are made. A crowd surrounds him: too many sticky hands prodding and poking. Where is Brassac? Haste is imperative but the mechanic is missing. And what has become of Banks? He feels helpless and frustrated – a birdman ensnared on the ground.

At last. He sees the mechanic’s hat bobbing through the onlookers and his arms pushing people back. Then he is close by, breathing heavily as if he has rushed from some distance away. He tightens some nuts securing wires. But even as he does so, he is shaking his head and saying it again:

‘Beaucoup de vent.’

He is right. Harry knows this. It is windy. The Voisin has been tossed around like a scrap of paper. Yet he won’t be stopped. In Aberdeen the grey waves were flecked with foam and authorities wouldn’t let him jump off the pier. Too dangerous. But Harry couldn’t disappoint the spectators: he hired a dinghy and knocked his head going over. So he will ignore Brassac. All these people have come to see him fly – if he stays down, they’ll call him yellow. He must go. The voice is telling him to fly: his mother’s voice this time. Cecilia urging little Ehrich to be a Prince of the Air again.

Now Banks is there. Banks with Brassac, still talking with his hands. Banks looks at Harry, staring straight ahead while his hands clasp the controls, and sees himself on the morning of his own flight: a skier halfway down a slope; committed; unwilling and unable to stop. So it is Banks who warns people to stand clear; Banks who swings the propeller after catching Adamson’s gaze just long enough to show where his allegiance now lies.

As soon as Harry hears the engine ignite and feels his body shaking he opens the throttle hard. After just fifty yards, sensing the tug on the wing tips, he leans into the elevator control.

‘She’s up!’ Banks calls out. Then, as he sees it swerve: ‘No – down! Up – yes, she’s really off this time!’

Adamson waits for the American to fall.

Harry holds the control tight, urging the machine to rise. But at forty feet, or so he guesses, the tail dips down. The paddock and dam, fence and track and trees all vanish beneath him. He can only see up. Sulky grey sky.

‘Ah – cabre, cabre!’ Brassac sighs. ‘The rearing horse. Danger!’

Adamson checks his watch. Only thirty-seven seconds have elapsed.

Harry hears the engine sputter. Gently, gently he pulls back on the control. The elevator shifts and the paddock reappears. He has righted his machine. Then a breeze buffets him, pushing him to one side. He turns the wheel, trying to force the rudder round. It won’t move.

His mother is beside him. The bicycle, Ehrich, remember your bicycle.

He is a boy with bloodied knees and elbows in Appleton, Wisconsin, USA, trying to balance on the bicycle with the solid rubber tyres passed down from his older brother William. He wobbles and falls, wobbles and falls. Then he stops fighting. When the bicycle swerves and the handlebars twist to one side, he pedals. He turns instead of falling and then pedals some more. He progresses in a series of Ss but doesn’t skin his elbows again.

So when the breeze catches the Voisin, he allows it to be swung around. All the tension in his arms and the controls and the cables eases. Instead of pushing the machine in an arc following the line of the paddock boundary, he lets it keep going over walls and fences and buildings and horses and roads, further from his starting point than he has ever ventured before, and only when the breeze allows him to turn does he head back towards the paddock, high now, very high, twice the height of some of the trees. Well over one hundred feet, it must be. He has another figure in his head: five minutes twenty-five seconds, the reported duration of the Custance flight. He’s out to beat that, but can only guess how long he’s been up. In an ice-bath, in a packing case, in a flying machine, he lets others do the timing.

Harry looks down as his course takes him back over the spectators, some of whom appear to be waving their hats. He is invisible to them, merely an indistinct shape amidst the struts and cables between the wings. And because of his goggles, which were grimy to start with and are now slightly foggy as well, his own view is imperfect. He thinks he spots Brassac.

It must be Brassac. A small solitary figure waving a red flag, the flag for danger, urging him to come down. He will say he didn’t see him.

He sees his wife, his darling Bess, looking up, her hands clasped. He sees Banks standing in the wreckage of his Wright machine. Sees his beloved mother, in an overcoat for the New York winter, smiling up at him. Sees Mayer Samuel, his little boy, chasing the Voisin’s shadow. Sees the young swimmer in his bathing trunks, dripping wet. He cannot beat him this time.

He sees Audran in his black jacket, the clouds reflected in the lenses of his rimless spectacles, and all around him, arrayed like waiters, are Little Tich and the Australian Dartos; Fred Bluett (holding his sheep’s head on a silver tray); the Harmonious Huxhams; Frank Curran; the Brothers Martine; and Vasco the Insane Musician. Their mouths are open but Harry cannot tell if they are cheering or calling out a warning. He sees Kukol and Vickery: Kukol with his fireman’s axe; Vickery burdened by a huge coil of chains. Sees the fellow from the morgue cradling the dead woman he called Lily: she cannot wave because her arms have been cruelly broken. And there’s Rickards, balancing on a high-wire, saluting his biggest attraction, the star of several continents and now the greatest aviator in the Antipodes.

Harry sees them all. But still he doesn’t come down. He passes overhead, much lower now, so they can hear the engine and almost feel for themselves how every part of the machine vibrates and admire one last time the painted ‘HOUDINI’ signs in capital letters.

His fuel must be almost gone. He coaxes the Voisin into a sweeping turn and brings it down as close as he can to where he started, holding it steady so he can hardly tell where the air ends and the ground begins and the wheels are spinning and rattling and every part of him is tingling.

‘Seven minutes, thirty-seven seconds,’ Adamson says, clicking the cover of his timepiece shut. ‘Blast!’

Everyone else is yelling and applauding but Harry cannot hear them. His ears are numb under the flaps of his cap. Rickards and Taylor congratulate each other and shake hands. Harry eases himself out of his seat and ducks under the elevator. His feet are close to the ground when the first of the running, laughing, whooping children reach his machine and try to touch him. His legs buckle and he almost falls, still feeling the vibrations. He tugs his goggles off. His wife is approaching, eyes down, smiling shyly as if they’d never met. The puffing cinematographer is unfolding his tripod. McCracken, the reporter, has his notebook out, waiting for him to speak.

‘Never any fear,’ Harry begins, ‘never in any danger.’

Through the viewfinder of his camera, Lestrange sees the birdman’s wife present her cheek to be kissed, just as she did before the flight. He keeps winding the handle as Rickards and Taylor come into frame together. Rickards is carrying something he has brought from Melbourne in a Gladstone bag, something he had knocked together by his backstage boys using pieces of wood and glass and metal from discarded theatrical props. It is a cumbersome and surprisingly heavy trophy that incorporates a map of Australia, a pair of eagle’s wings, and something that resembles a section of propeller. Rickards hands it to Taylor, who steps forward to present it to Harry. As he does so, Lestrange feels the tension in the hand crank he is turning suddenly ease. He knows what this means. He has run out of film.

He continues to rotate his right hand, but it is only for show. So there is no permanent record of George Taylor’s erudite speech about the importance of aviation to the future defence of the empire and the presentation of this ugly trophy that delights Harry as much as anything he has ever received in his life – not for what it is but all that it represents.

Triumph. Vindication.

Affirmation of all he has set out to do in this country so far from his home.

For there it is, etched in ornate script:

The Aerial League

of

AUSTRALIA

to

H. HOUDINI

for the

FIRST AERIAL

FLIGHT

in

AUSTRALIA,

March 16th, 1910.

McCracken moves closer and reads the inscription so he has it right for his Argus report. He takes some notes. Pauses. Flips a few pages back in his notebook. Underlines something on the fresh page. Frowns.

He waits until the aerialist poses for a photograph with Taylor and this trophy. Rickards is looking on, a proud uncle at a christening.

He grunts to acknowledge McCracken when he ambles up next to him.

‘What day is it?’ the reporter asks, lighting a cigarette.

‘Sunday,’ Rickards replies. ‘A day of rest and heroic achievement.’

‘And the date?’

‘You tell me.’

‘The twentieth, mate.’

‘Is that so?’

‘But that trophy is dated the sixteenth …’

Rickards appears to be enjoying their conversation.

‘Ah, but it refers to the first flight,’ he says.

‘I know. That was Friday. I was here. Friday the eighteenth of March.’

‘Fancy that! And the trophy says the sixteenth, you say?’

‘Yeah. Which would be Wednesday. The day before Custance had his crack at the record in Adelaide.’

‘Well I never,’ Rickards responds, shaking his head in astonishment. ‘The day before, you say? This Houdini truly is an extraordinary fellow. Even more remarkable than I had him pegged. What a marvel! He can leap into a river in chains. Escape from ropes and crates or a lunatic’s restraining vest. And now, in his greatest feat, fly backwards in time. Take off on a Friday and – Shazam! – come down the previous Wednesday.’