The Disappearance Boy (22 page)

Still he didn’t look at her – though he did smile.

‘– but the gentleman is not quite satisfied. He doesn’t quite
trust
her, perhaps. He has an idea. He produces a pair of handcuffs. Dismay on the part of the Lady. He looks at the box on the table; she looks at the box on the table; they both look at the handcuffs …
Consent
, on the part of the Lady. Clearly she’s a game girl –’

Still, he didn’t look at her. She tapped a foot.

‘– and the handcuffs are applied. A blindfold is applied. Whistle! The apparatus is wheeled on, undraped – we’d best get straight down to business this time, I thought.’

Now Mr Brookes stepped aside, and let his voice fall into a more natural register, taking the opportunity to relax and wipe his hands again.

‘We’ll be using two stagehands for the entrance, Reg, like before – the lads here seem pretty up to the mark – and you and I have quite a substantial look-it’s-empty routine to work on at this point. I’m having the apparatus modified so that there’s a full door in each of the two sides as well as a fully opening one in front, and it’s going to involve quite a bit of back-of-door work on your conceals. So I hope your fingers are feeling good and strong.’

‘Yes, Mr Brookes.’

‘Good. Good …’

He flexed his hands again, pocketed his handkerchief and dropped back into showman mode.

‘Full rotation with Reg stowed inside as before; Reg slips out onto the back, I open the front door to prove its empty, Reg moves round to behind the door
left
; quarter-rotation clockwise, I open the second door
right
, continue round, full rotation anticlockwise to the house to show it’s still empty, Reg holding both doors to achieve the conceal and clinging on like mad.’

Brookes was rattling through this as if Reggie already knew how to do all of this – as indeed he did.

‘Yes, Mr Brookes.’

‘I call for the treads; treads affixed; I run up and pop inside to flip open the ceiling – look, no tricks – ceiling closed – sides closed – front-door left open; Reg is now concealed on the back. I turn my attention back to the Lady …’

He slowed down now, and looked at Pamela – or, at least, at the spot where he had indicated that her blindfolded figure would still be patiently standing.

‘The Lady is escorted up into her new home by our two charmingly unskilled assistants. I, please note, keep well clear. At my command, they shut her in. I produce a padlock and chain and throw it; they promptly padlock the doors shut, throw the key cross-stage to me and lift the treads and exit, taking the treads with them as they do so. I am, please note, still nowhere near.’

Pam frowned; surely the steps had gone too quickly for her to be able to get into them in time in a big frock? And where was Reg at this point? Still clinging to the back?

‘At this point, a change …’ said Mr Brookes – as if he’d anticipated or even overheard her thoughts. ‘A change of
tack
.’

He waited.

Pam shifted in her chair again, but Mr Brookes’s eyes refused to be drawn. He slowed down again, making his gestures larger and clearer now. A cuff shot, and a hand arced suddenly up and out.

‘I produce a wand. A spot of tradition never goes amiss, does it? And then … then, I turn my attention back to the table.’

The eyes swung; the hand pressed slowly down.

‘With a little assistance from Mr Clifford in the pit, I dim the lights. Drum roll; a pass with the wand, then a tap on the ring box. A spurt of flame. The ring box is now empty. I display the box to the house. I replace it on the table. I turn my attention to the apparatus. Drum roll number two; pass with the wand, and,
while I am on the other side of the stage
, please note … the padlock and chain fall off the box. Lights up, music change, I cross smartly over and reach up to throw open the apparatus, revealing … revealing …’

His hands hung in the air as the sentence trailed away, joining his raised eyebrows in sketching out the question.

‘Any suggestions?’

Pam bit her lip. Cigarette smoke, sheer stockings, a jewellery box – she of all bloody people ought to know where the story went next. Where the bruises were going to land.

‘Well, there’s no way you can get both Reggie and me in the bottom of that box,’ she snapped. ‘And the treads have gone too early for me to get in on my own in a big formal frock. And anyway, just getting rid of me, they’ve seen you do that before.’

‘Quite. Reg?’

‘Full rig change into a speciality, Mr Brookes, me down below with the previous?’

‘Quite right too. Full rig change into a speciality it is. Now –’

Before Pam had time to ask what the bloody hell the two of them were talking about, Mr Brookes was off. He walked briskly across the stage, and knelt down next to the largest and most battered of the three suitcases which he had previously lined up in a row against the corner of the proscenium arch. Laying the case down on its side, he snapped it open.

‘
Voilà!
’

‘You are bloody joking,’ said Pamela, staring.

Released from its confinement, the fabric of the dress was slowly levering itself out of the suitcase in a confectioner’s-cream sprawl of machine lace and white nylon tulle. Pamela looked at it as if it was something it would only be safe to poke with a stick.

‘Trust me,’ said Mr Brookes, ‘one previous owner, and after a few nips and tucks from our Reg it’ll come up a treat.’

‘I’m sure it will, but who’s going to believe me being walked up the aisle in white? Especially after they’ve seen me come on looking like I’m touting for business in the front bar of the Dorchester.’

‘Ah … but if the punters could see what was coming next, that would rather defeat the purpose of our work, don’t you think? And surely you’re not saying that we won’t make a handsome couple? Or that playing Lady in White isn’t every girl’s dream?’

The question was clearly rhetorical; one quick finger-flex, and he launched into his finale.

‘The band cuts to “Here Comes the Bride” – of course – and the Lady poses for a moment. She demonstrates that the lost diamond ring is now – hey presto, you might say – on the third finger of her right hand; I swing her down to join me. We pose for a quick snap – magnesium flash from down on the footlights, operated by stage management – veil, tiara, spray of carnations, the works. Trust me, the whole effect will be very classy. Very …’

The hands hovered again.

Having set it up so well with those little private reminders – the stockings, the box, the cigarette – Mr Brookes delivered his
coup de grâce
as elegantly as ever. Underlining the word as neatly as if he were signing away a bill, he looked at Pam directly for the very first time, flicking the word’s accompanying dart of a glance straight into her caught-off-guard eyes.

‘…very
special
.’

Close-up work
, it’s called in the trade – using the intimacy of a set-up to heighten the mark’s bafflement. When his black glass eyes hooked into hers, Pam didn’t so much shift in her chair as flinch. Everything from their first time together came back – the bedspread, the lamplight, the expression on his face, the heat in hers – everything.

Then she controlled herself, and breathed out – just as she’d learnt to do when the trap opened under her feet and the black water was waiting. Because of that conversation with Reg in the tea shop – because her feelings about her body and who owned it were very close to the surface that afternoon – she knew straight away that she now had only two options. She could either stand up and blush and shout and tell him exactly where he could stick his tulle and bruises and bouquets and reminders, or she could stay sitting in her chair and trust herself. She hesitated, twisting her bracelet – a Lady’s prerogative, surely – and in that hesitation heard again the words she’d said to Reg out on the prom, the ones the sea wind had stolen so swiftly – not the dirty ones, but the ones about never letting what you knew become a reason to give up. And then she made her choice.

‘All right,’ she said, meeting Mr Brookes’s eyes full on. ‘So some girls will do anything for a piece of jewellery. And once you’ve got me trussed up to the nines and looking like something out of a Bridal Department window display, how does the story end?’

With a simple adjustment of his smile, and without even blinking, Mr Brookes turned from showman back into salesman; from lover, to stranger.

‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I’d be more than happy to show you exactly that. The rest of the routine is actually pretty straightforward.’

It was – so straightforward, he might as well have written it out on a postcard and stuck it up in a newsagent’s window:
Gentleman seeks Lady, preferably compliant, for mutally satisfactory conclusion
.

I’m sure you know the kind of thing.

After the flash of the wedding photo, the groom would spin his lady love into his arms for a kiss. The kissing done, he’d spin her out again, and the rigged wedding dress would split and fly off, leaving her displayed in the traditional white basque-and-suspenders with matching garter. Then came the finesse – the twist designed to make the house feel that the illusion was made to measure for this particular night. The groom would toss her dress stage right, the bride her bouquet stage left; she would then cross her arms demurely across her chest. He’d collect his hat – previously proven empty, you will remember – and with a bravado flourish release a shower of confetti over her head; she’d release two rigged elastics, and by the time the confetti settled around her ankles her basque would have been translated in the twinkling of a moist Coronation-day eye from bridal white into a fetching patchwork of miniature Union Jacks, and – a nice touch, this – even her
garter
would be decorated with a red, white and blue cockade. The band would shift from Mendelssohn to ‘God Save the Queen’, the groom would wave his last white silk handkerchief into a handily sized Union Jack and they’d skip into their bows as the tabs came down – looking forward, the pair of them, to celebrating a well-earned night of patriotic conjugal bliss.
Happy and glorious
, as the anthem says.

His precis complete, Mr Brookes looked to Pam again for her response.

She smiled.

Reg, watching her do it, was already thinking about all the stitching involved in the four new rigs, and wondering why the hell Mr Brookes hadn’t released the rest of them out of the cases yet – they’d be creasing to buggery cramped up in there. And how the hell was Pam supposed to pull off that final confetti-drop change with only two and half weeks’ rehearsal?

2

Reggie’s fingers were already sore by Friday. The final Union Jack basque was built over a nipping frame of metal stays, and taking it apart and restitching the covering so that it fitted Pam exactly enough for her to get three more figure-hugging layers over the top required a lot of work. Pins can run themselves surprisingly deep into a finger when you’re working too fast; thimbles cramp, and elastic snaps. The hot iron required to press the jigsaw of red, white and blue linen back into its newly adjusted shape caught him twice, blistering him badly. And these weren’t the only discomforts; now that he’d had time to get used to the idea, Reggie couldn’t help but be interrupted by thoughts of Mr Brookes’s fingers performing their own nightly variations on the same tasks as he repeatedly adjusted fastenings and lifted skirts and smoothed down seams. He didn’t know – and deliberately didn’t ask – if she was going home with him every night now, but the pictures got in his way nonetheless. He tried to compensate for them by taking even more care of her than usual – working till his eyes ached, pressing and repressing the bodice of the black-and-red frock so that it would mould to her breasts and nobody else’s, even taking her first pair of shoes home and forcing his own naked feet into them so that they would slip more easily on and off hers at the next day’s rehearsal – but still, the pictures wouldn’t go away.

By Saturday lunchtime, all three of them were getting a little ratty – Pam’s first attempts at quick-releasing herself from the trick handcuffs were desperately clumsy – and Mr Brookes was glad to stop work. Needing a break, Reg left the two of them alone and took his sandwich down past the Pavilion to the seafront to get some air.

There is often a day around the middle of May when something seems to shift in the atmosphere of a seaside town – a point where something in the air or light seems to license people to venture off the prom and down onto the beach for the first time that year – and without any warning, this particular Friday seemed to be the one when it happened. Hazy figures were dotted all over the stones, and there was one group of five or six lads and their girls larking about right down at the edge of the silver-edged water. The girls had their shoes in their hands, and were shrieking at the sea as it glittered round their kicking legs; the boys were laughing and jostling each other with their jackets off, shirts flashing in the sun. Their words were inaudible, but the hoots and shrieks came across the stones like the cries of birds. One of the boys fell – heavily – the distant laughter rose – and watching the blurred figure stagger back up to its feet made Reggie realise that he himself hadn’t ventured out onto the beach the whole time he’d been here. He knew why, though; he knew all he needed to know about the bruises involved in falling on stones, thank you very much. The heat from the sun was just starting to make the air above the beach shimmer, and turn the grey flints black. He went cautiously down a flight of concrete steps which led from the promenade to the shingle, stooped with his hand on the rail on the bottom step, and picked up one of his old familiar enemies. It was warm. He remembered that, now – how they’d sometimes been warm while the water was still icy. Cutting.

Testing the stone’s weight in his hand, he stared again at the distant figures. Something about the fractured silver of the sea behind them was making him picture the cabinet back at work – its mirrors – and Pam’s wedding dress. It was still too tight, too constricting for her – and he couldn’t for the life of him get the release fastenings to snap when she needed them to. The thing just wouldn’t
fit
… Then he heard Pam’s voice saying the question which she’d asked Mr Brookes at the end of his explanation, the one about
how does it all end
. He frowned, turning away from the sea, and stuck the stone in his pocket.