The Disappearance Boy (28 page)

From then on, of course, it all happened very quickly. The Devere Girls giggled themselves offstage for their change, the silver drapes dropped halfway up the stage to hide the descending backdrop for the finale, and the lights shifted colour; out in the pit, the music rallied, ended and then struck up again with Mr Brookes’s play-in. In the auditorium, people looked in their programmes to remind themselves which act was coming up next, and quite a few of the more well-oiled members of the crowd smiled at the title. In the centre of the stage, Mr Brookes turned his back, flexed his hands and assumed his opening position. Only when she’d seen him do that did Pam swing her bloody, stiffened skirt round to the upstage wing to await her cue. And then, at just gone half past seven on the evening of June the second 1953 – that long-awaited day – the curtain finally rose on Teddy Brookes’s Coronation tribute.

The trick of starting with your back to the house is always a good one – provided, of course, that you’ve got the looks to bring it off when you finally turn. Mr Brookes had, and from the first moment he glanced round at the audience he seemed to have them on his side. The top hat and tails helped, of course. He’d got the mix of distinguished, delayed and debonair just right; the long and exciting day that his audience had just shared had been all about waiting for a very special lady to arrive, and now his nicely judged combination of anticipation and suavity as he shot his first cuff and checked his watch meant that they all knew straight away what this particular gentleman was doing. The single boys who’d brought their dates with them knew just how he felt as he checked his hair and watch one more time, and laughed; the girls by their sides smiled because they were glad to see a man getting himself in a bit of a state for a change. The unaccompanied men mentally wished him luck – but after the beers and laughter of the day they were as sure he’d get his prize as they were that they themselves would get lucky before the night was over. The booking agent down from London, sitting in a house seat next to Mr Clements, was impressed by the neatness of the presentation. A married woman sitting next to her husband in the sixth row in the stalls shifted from thigh to thigh as Mr Brookes directed one of his subtly interrogative stares right at her, and was glad she’d come.

Pam’s entrance went down even better. An amused ripple of comment ran round the house as people clocked her daring resemblance to a certain glamorous and still conspicuously unmarried royal lady, and the way she paraded her costume – swinging the stiffly supported skirt from her hips with each turn – earned her a good-hearted chorus of whistles from the boys up in the gods. Milking the moment, she dropped a curtsy, and then lifted one glove in a cool approximation of a Buckingham Palace wave. At that, the laughter turned into applause. The business with producing and pinning on the red rose corsage went down well – except with Mr Clements, who couldn’t help but take note of the difference between the grateful response to her floral tribute of the distinguished-looking lovely up on stage and that of his wife, whose own opening-night corsage, far from being magicked from under a silk handkerchief, had cost him seven and six, and not even earned him a kiss. When the engagement ring appeared, the audience seemed momentarily confused – surely such a glamorous creature as this had no particular reason to fall for that old trick? However, the saucy rise of Pamela’s eyebrows persuaded them that the lady knew exactly what she was after this evening. It was quite a ring, after all – and from the look of her, she was enjoying herself. The ropes, handcuffs and blindfold were all swiftly and elegantly applied – Mr Brookes was careful with her hair – and when the apparatus appeared, gliding between its two attendant stagehands, the audience accepted Mr Brookes’s elaborate demonstration of its emptiness in good faith, recognising this as the necessary prelude to the revelation of its true function: to confine and test the young lady and her well-dressed nerve. It was all looking very promising.

Once Pamela was safely padlocked away inside, the anticipatory tension began to rise. The audience scented – as they always do – a challenge. The ring was on the table, shut away in its box, and she was shut away in hers; how was she – and he – going to get out of this one? Mr Brookes paused for a moment, and swiftly wiped his hands – and just when he did that, the more eagle-eyed members of the audience spotted a mistake. As the two stagehands wheeled away the set of treads behind him, one of them stumbled – it looked as if one of the castors might have been loose, or had jammed – and almost tipped the stairs over. The incident was so slight and sudden that Mr Brookes, working downstage, didn’t even see it, and the treads were quickly back on course, but the sudden reminder that all of this smoothly rehearsed nonsense could at any moment go badly and entertainingly wrong brought people forward in their seats. Mr Brookes produced his wand, dimmed the lights, and flexed his fingers as he prepared to magic the ring from its spotlight box on the table into the cabinet. The drum rolled, the wand waved, the flame from his fingers flashed – and now that the ring box was empty, people were genuinely wondering what he had up his sleeve. Mr Brookes directed their attention across the stage to the padlock and chain around the cabinet, and prepared himself. The drum rolled again – and he seemed to hesitate.

For the audience, of course, this just seemed like showmanship. As far as they were concerned, everything was part of the act – even the sweat. Their eyes made no distinction between the silk handkerchiefs Mr Brookes used to produce and vanish his props and the linen one which Reggie had forgotten to set in his breast pocket and which Mr Brookes now quickly but expressively patted across his brow; they had no idea that he was genuinely trying to buy some time. This very last moment before he made the final pass with the wand – the build-up to the reveal that the ring was now firmly fixed on the lady’s finger, and she was his – was the one bit of the act that still made him feel helpless. If for any reason Pam hadn’t completed her change into the wedding dress in time then her hands wouldn’t be ready on the quick-release bolts for the chain and padlock. If the chain didn’t fall on cue from the cabinet handles, the whole illusion of his control would be blown, and there was nothing he could do about it. He flicked a warning glance to the percussionist in the pit, and trusted to opening-night luck.

The wand thrust; a cymbal crashed in the pit, and the padlock and chain fell – right on cue.

Bloody good girl …

Mr Brookes wasn’t sure if he muttered it, or if he just thought it. Vanishing the wand, he took one brief moment to tease his lady friends in the stalls with a raised eyebrow, wiped his hands for the last time, and crossed to the apparatus. Now he broadened his attention to take in the whole house, cheap seats included. Did they know what was coming, or didn’t they? Any suggestions? Flicking Mr Clifford his standby for the downbeat on ‘Here Comes the Bride’, he reached up to the handle on the cabinet’s front door. He paused, grinned, and proudly threw the door open, presenting its contents to the packed and expectant house.

The woman in the sixth row was disappointed. A lot of empty mirrors, and no music. What sense did that make?

Mr Clements scented disaster, and stiffened. That couldn’t possibly be right, could it?

Mr Clifford’s baton stayed in the air.

Mr Brookes saw Mr Clifford’s upraised hand, but not, at first, his frozen face. Then, as silence came crashing down exactly where there should have been music, he turned away from the house to see what his colleague was staring at.

Mirrors.

Not Pam, in a wedding dress; mirrors. Empty ones.

His skin started to crawl. He turned to face the house, his mind a blank, and felt his smile stretch into a rictus. Then a cold sweat began to break in the pit of his back.

Walking straight down to the footlights, Mr Brookes jerked the last of his seven trick silks out of his pocket, scrunched it into a ball with both hands and unfolded it into a Union Jack. No one responded, but he could think of nothing else. His face began to burn with shame. Still grinning, he waved the flag stiffly over his head, and gestured towards the empty cabinet as if it deserved a hearty round. A few desultory claps started in the stalls, followed by murmurs of confusion. Mr Clifford – who knew a proper first night fuck-up when he saw one – hissed a quick instruction to the band, and they duly cut into a ragged rendition of the last eight bars of the national anthem. That produced a slight thickening in the applause – the audience wasn’t at all sure why the woman had just vanished after all that palaver with the ring, but was too well-oiled not to respond automatically to the red, white and blue – and Mr Brookes doubled himself up into a deep, face-saving bow. The stage manager gave the cue to bring in the curtain, Mr Brookes straightened and doubled one more time and then stepped back – still idiotically brandishing his flag, and still grinning. Finally the tabs hit the deck, and everyone started talking about what the hell had just gone wrong.

As soon as he could, Mr Brookes spun round. The now-dark mirrors of the cabinet returned his stare, and he stepped towards it. Around him, of course, a muffled, half-lit chaos was breaking loose – girls were running onstage clutching at unsteady headdresses, the stage manager was shouting, and the upstage drapes were already rising. He reached forward to touch one of the empty zinc panels as if touching might be believing – and only then did he notice that the interior of the cabinet wasn’t actually empty at all. Lying in the exact centre of its mirrored floor was a small tangle of red silk rope – but not the single, familiar rope that would have dropped from Pam’s wrists as the first step in her change. This was a handful of short, neatly chopped-up pieces of scarlet. How had she done that? He reached in and picked up one of the mutilated fragments.

‘Bloody hell, you might have told us, mate.’

It was the older of the two stagehands, trying to close the cabinet door so that it could be dragged offstage. Two others came running up to join him.

‘What?’

‘The bloody treads. I almost went arse over elbow. Move!’

The door clicked shut, the next piece of music was already starting out front, and the stage manager was desperately calling
Places, places!
as the girls tried to get into position but found their way blocked by the still-unshifted cabinet.

‘I’m sorry –’

An angry finger jabbed at Mr Brookes’s chest.

‘If there was going to be somebody bloody inside them, then that’s what you should have rehearsed. Now get out of the sodding way and let’s get this bastard off before the tabs go out.’

The men heaved together to get the apparatus moving, and the thoughts clicked into place inside Mr Brookes’s head as definitely and unpleasantly as the closing of a handcuff around a not-quite-small-enough wrist. He spun – so violently that he knocked one of the half-naked girls almost to the floor – and strode off, pushing several more out of his way. The staggering girl scrambled herself back into position, swearing, and clutching at her tilted crown. Much to their professional credit, they all of them just about got themselves appropriately covered or uncovered as the curtain rose, plastering their smiles back on just in time for the lights to hit their already-sweating skin.

He didn’t know how or why Pam had done this to him – or why she had done that to his lovely scarlet rope – but he sure as hell knew where she’d have gone to hide herself.

He’d kill her.

He could hear her crying even before he started kicking down the door, and one quick glance under the partition of the next-door cubicle confirmed that it was her, the silly bitch – did she really think that he wouldn’t look for her down here? He leaned back against the nearest washbasin, gripped the porcelain with both hands, and kicked out with both feet together, hard.
Engaged
, the lock said – well, they’d soon see about that. On the second slam of his feet, the dark wood began to splinter, and he began to grin. A couple more thrusts, and he’d be in. He heard the crying noise go up a key – and he could even bloody
smell
her now, for Christ’s sake, smell that stinking cheap scent she always used. One of his hands slipped on the porcelain, and he adjusted his grip. For no reason that he could think of, he was singing the music from the opening of the new act while he worked, spitting the words out through his teeth, punctuating them with kicks.

‘
To each, his own
–’

Another panel splintered.

‘
To ev’ry boy, a girl
–’

That was the lock going – good – and –

‘Mr Brookes!’

The voice was thin and querulous, but doing its best to be brave; it went with the white hair and the cravat. Mr Brookes had never liked Mr English at the best of times, but being interrupted by an old quean in the midst of this particular labour of love was the last fucking straw. He paused, and snarled – he could see that the figure in the doorway was shaking already, and he was in no mood to beat about the bush.

‘What?’

‘I really don’t think you –’

‘Don’t you? Well you take my advice dear, and never interrupt a real man when he’s on the job – all right? Now you just run along and leave me be, unless the theatre’s on fire, in which case I suggest you get on the fucking telephone and tell somebody about it.’

The knuckles on the elderly hand that was gripping the door frame for support whitened with determination, and Mr English held his ground. His chin rose perceptibly, as did his pitch.

‘Very well, but I thought you might like to know that Mr Clements is in the wings and would like to see you at once,’ he said.

Mr Brookes drew back his feet for another kick, laughing.

‘And that your guest from London is with him. A booking agent of some kind, I think he said. I got the distinct impression that he’d rather like a word too.’

The feet stopped. Mr English pressed his advantage, throwing caution to the winds.

‘At
once
, Mr Clements said. Shall I tell the gentlemen you’re coming?’