I first saw the headlines draped across Harry Purvis's recumbent form as he snoozed in a patch of sun on the landing a floor-and-a-half from my flat in Barchester Towers. 'UPROAR AS KENNEDY QUITS' it proclaimed, and I wouldn't have paused in my ascent had it not been accompanied by a large colour photo that bore a strong resemblance to a certain politician I had rubbished at a recent social outing. I quickly scanned the text then snitched the whole edition and scampered upwards before the spluttering drunkard was fully awakened by the sudden influx of sunlight. .
Barry Kennedy — the Right Man in, apparently, the Wrong Place — had made his final speech, and kicked up a cloud of controversy as he did so. He'd quit, denouncing both his peers and profession, and I read gleefully of what was surely a classic case of my brother backing the wrong horse.
It seemed that yet another increase in MPs' pay had provoked his outburst, causing him to examine his conscience and conclude that he was disillusioned with both politics and the self-serving shenanigans of his contemporaries. 'We call for wage restraints then take another healthy pay rise for ourselves. What are we telling people here? What the hell are we becoming?'
Hear, hear! I muttered.
'I look around at many of my parliamentary colleagues and wonder what happened to the caring representatives of days gone by. This lot are only interested in their careers, getting their faces on TV, getting known and getting re-elected. Election promises are just so many lies to be swept under the carpet.'
I had to admit his words had a certain familiarity to them. Could this be the brief influence of yours truly? I read on.
The venue he'd chosen for his damning remarks was a very public one: delivering the opening speech at a national sports awards dinner. Because the place was crammed with sporting personalities, it was also crammed with journalists and the whole event had been carried live on one of the TV networks. Somehow I'd overlooked it in my list of compelling viewing but, back at my bijou residence, there were enough of the highlights on the TV news that night. In fact Kennedy was still the lead story.
I felt a frisson of familiarity when he spoke about the classless Kiwi society being an enduring myth and more than a touch of déjà vu when he asked how one could judge the bottom-line profit in having a healthy, educated and reasoning populace.
Somewhere there was a whiff of a brother-sized rat and my ill-ease-ometer hit red when a cut- away shot showed some of the guests, amongst them my sister-in-law's admirable cleavage, accompanied by none other than the prime suspect himself. In the circumstances, losing his protégé in such a public manner, I thought Stuart looked remarkably composed. In fact he was beaming.
After the news came an in-depth interview with the man. 'In-depth' for television means two and a half minutes on the same subject, with two of those minutes taken up by an interviewer filling in background that everyone already knows. Nevertheless, Kennedy looked good. He caught the right nuances, the right accentuation, that faint tremor of suppressed emotion when he spoke about a caring and responsible society and even squeezed a smile from his interrogator when he described the political animal as being three rungs lower on the ladder of life than the amoeba. But certain half-familiar phrases kept popping up and there was a slickness, almost a glibness to his style. No sooner was a question asked than he had the answer without recourse to any of those conversational fillers that people invariably use. Almost as if he had been rehearsed.
Then there was the choice of venue and the manner of his announcement. It couldn't have been more public. The emotiveness of his speech had somehow struck a chord and there were editorials calling for him to reconsider. People who a week before were saying 'Who is this guy?' were now proclaiming that we couldn't afford to lose him He'd caused a rift within his own party and there were even calls for him to challenge for the leadership.
Suddenly it was all too much. If I wasn't such a cynic, if I hadn't been at that party, if I hadn't practically written the speech myself, if I hadn't seen that shot of Pid positively beaming in the background, I might have believed it. But not this. I suspected the hand of my brother the shaman showman in it all and it didn't leave me feeling very easy.
• • •
My brother's always been a bit of a showman. As a kid he was mad on magic. Not the carefully practised sleight-of-hand kind, but the presentation of grand illusions involving special props designed to deceive and distract an audience. Stuart went in for spectacle. By the age of ten I'd been disembowelled, sawn in half and had more swords thrust through me than I could have counted.
His equipment, in true Kiwi fashion, was home-made. The saw was real enough but the swords were more like pikes since they were made from sharpened broom handles, and the cabinets and boxes came from packing crates cunningly modified to designs found in musty library books, then sanded and painted to disguise their origins. Perhaps it was the embellishment of these old crates that sparked his later interest in graphic design, for their corners and edges were covered in fanciful scrolls and they bore the legend The Stupendous Spalding along the side. Their appearance belied their humble origins; they looked solid and antique. Another illusion, for their innards were rough and splintery.
The venue was the garage beside the shop with my father's latest automotive bargain moved — invariably pushed — out into the street. Amidst a clutter of greasy engine parts, the corpse of an eviscerated lawnmower and the smell of compost, my brother would direct and oversee the dragging out of his boxes and cabinets from their storage place in the old lean-to chicken coop behind the shed. He directed but never actually took part in this labour, leaving Brian, his other press-ganged helper, and me, both much his junior, to struggle with the awkward shapes and sharp edges and get bellowed at for accidentally knocking his paintwork.
His early audiences were culled from our parents and relations and their unwilling offspring, then neighbours and schoolmates, then, as his taste for the macabre became known, teenaged ghouls from far and wide.
Each show was essentially the same so, to encourage more realism and counter the ho-hums of an audience who'd seen it all before on television, he introduced gore. It was subtle at first: a small plastic bottle of fake blood secured part way down the sawing channel when he cut me in half. The rusty saw would smear slightly and a thin trickle would run down the side of the box. One or two would notice and elbow their friends and you could hear a spreading ripple of gasps above the rasping of the saw. Once, an elderly neighbour made a fool of himself by rushing up and trying to stop the show, fearing something had gone horribly wrong, only to be rebuked by a maniacal stage laugh from Stuart, a particularly forceful saw-thrust and an enhanced accompaniment of bloody splatter. The old chap was still looking pale and shaken long after I'd been restored to wholeness.
From there his reputation spread. The story moved from mouth to mouth around the neighbourhood and soon had the old chap being carted away by ambulance. We had to do three shows one Saturday because the garage wasn't big enough for all the bloodthirsty louts that turned up. The blood was actually corn syrup filched from our father's shelves and mixed with food colouring, the syrupiness giving it a suitably languid quality as it ran and dripped in increasing quantities from Brian's severed head or my own dismemberment.
His act got more and more macabre. In the sawing-in-half — an illusion that actually involves two assistants, one unseen except for his feet — I was demoted to being the ankles because Brian was better at the blood-curdling screams and helpless thrashing as the saw appeared to bite. The corn syrup began disappearing at an alarming rate. My father suspected a gang of shoplifters and was ever more vigilant, while his garage was turned into what might have been mistaken for the set of a horror film, his eldest son raising blood-soaked implements to the appreciation of a ghoulish crowd. Not that I ever saw much, cramped and folded double in the feet-end, sweating, nearly suffocating, listening for my cues, happy, at least, to be out of the limelight.
His coup de grass was the offal. He added a one-inch bead around the edge of the two boxes used for the sawn-in-half illusion and created a clever trapdoor that filled this small compartment with gratis offerings from the local abattoir. During the act he would deliberately draw the saw too far back so the audience would be flicked with little fragments on the down stroke, and, when the halves were fully separated, mangled liver, kidney, heart, lung and intestine would tumble out onto the floor.
It was too much for some. One ghoul's girlfriend fainted during a performance and others rushed out to be sick on the lawn. Of course, this made it even more popular for a while, but soon he once again faced what he'd been trying to avoid in the beginning —— viewer boredom. Apart from doing actual bodily harm to his assistants, he really couldn't go much further. Besides, preparation and cleaning-up times had risen dramatically. The cabinets and boxes had to be hosed down after each performance and they soon started to warp and split from the constant attention. The smell of compost was replaced by quite another odour and the continuing splatter of corn syrup was having an adverse effect on the paintwork, just as its continuing disappearance was adversely affecting our father's sanity. In the end it wasn't censorship that killed my brother's shows but time itself, something even the master magician couldn't conjure with. There were demands for other acts, more variety, but Stu was losing interest. Warped, split, stained and bedraggled, the mechanisms of his magic spent longer and longer periods in the lean-to chicken coop until, when I last glanced at them on the move to the first of our 'new' houses, they looked like the props of some nineteenth-century magician — well used and long forgotten.