The Disappearance Boy (6 page)

And because no one ever quite guesses how things are going to turn out, do they? No one ever quite realises just how heavily things are rigged.

The most exposed part of the routine is when Sandra is being wheeled away in the steps. Reggie is back inside the cabinet at this point, bracing himself against the mirrors and giving the box the weight it needs as Mr Brookes sets it off on its final spin. Once it comes to a stop, he has only seconds to get himself down through the trapdoor and curled up out of sight before pulling the lever to release the sides of the cabinet – but as those seconds tick away you’re so busy imagining Sandra still trapped and shaken between her mirrors that it never occurs to you to wonder why the stagehands are wheeling the steps off instead of simply picking them up and carrying them. Then, when Mr Brookes produces his cane, plucked from its hiding place in the black trelliswork outlining the cabinet’s diamond paintwork, it’s once again the girl you think of, and how she must be flinching away from those blows in the dark – never for a moment imagining that she could be already running and ripping and zipping in the wings. When the cane pulls back for the final strike and the drum begins to roll, you never stop to wonder why Mr Brookes feels he has to threaten her with his cane
three
times, only to wonder what kind of state she’ll be in when you see her next – while down inside the cabinet what is actually happening is that Reggie is swearing like a trooper and praying that Sandra doesn’t mess anything up in her change in the wings, cursing the high heels digging into his chest and groping for the lever and switch that operate the spring release and the smoke.

When the cabinet has fallen open, and there is that odd moment of silence in which Mr Brookes casually looks upstage at the clearing smoke, Reggie always hold his breath. A
force
, they call this bit – the trick of making you ignore all other explanations except the one the man in charge wants you to think about. Of course, if anyone in the audience genuinely believed that they’d actually just watched a woman get roped, stuffed into a box and made to vanish, they’d scream. But instead, Reg knows, they are watching the smoke wreathe its way into nothingness over Mr Brookes’s head, concentrating on him and his magical powers, missing entirely the fact that Sandra is busy transforming herself
herself
, and somewhere else entirely.

Why do people never spot how the world actually works? Reg sometimes wonders, as he lies there in the dark, trying not to cough with the smoke.
Perhaps they’re paying us to
– but he never gets to the end of that thought, because there’s always a sharp rapping knock over his head from Mr Brookes, letting him know that the tabs are down and it’s time to uncurl and clamber free.

The rest is just nuts and bolts. The finesse with the reappearing ropes – the
finesse
is the final grace note of an act, the twist that makes you smile – is in fact achieved with the crudest trickery of the whole routine; a second handkerchief with two fresh ropes inside it is already set in Mr Brookes’s right-hand trouser pocket from the moment he walks on. The magical plume of smoke from inside the locked cabinet is produced by two teaspoons of flash powder mixed with a quarter-teaspoon of powdered magnesium; the flick of Reggie’s switch connects an inch of fuse wire in the powder tray to a six-volt lantern battery, and the heat of the wire does the rest. The mirrors inside the cabinet are actually polished zinc; the silver satin drape which shrouds the apparatus is salvaged parachute silk, but with its hems weighted with lead fishing weights so that it will fly like the real thing. Sandra’s ball gown isn’t from Bond Street at all, but from a retired wardrobe mistress in Forest Hill. Her white ‘fox’ fur stole is a length of remodelled angora rabbit. The champagne she’s pouring is French’s Ginger Ale, and the gold-foiled Moët & Chandon bottle she’s pouring it from so elegantly gets washed out and reused every night. Her freshly brushed-out blonde curls are a wig, as you know, and her radiant smile at the curtain call –

Sandra’s smile has been getting a bit harder to keep in place recently, and this afternoon’s rehearsal hasn’t exactly helped. Although she does still fancy Teddy – and God know he’s better on the job than some she’s chosen in her time – after six weeks, she knows a little too much about what those hands can do to her ever to be fully at ease in their company. Grin and bear it may be the routine onstage, but that does have its limits. She’s really not sure – well, let’s just say she’s really not sure how much longer she can put up with transforming herself whenever he clicks his fingers.

Clearly, Reggie isn’t the only thing that’s invisible in this act.

‘I think we can leave that there for now,’ said Mr Brookes, coiling his rope for the very last time and finally declaring the rehearsal over. He stowed the rope carefully back in his pocket, and started wiping his hands on a clean white handkerchief. ‘If I might have my practice mirror now, Reggie – oh, and Sandra …’

‘Yes, Mr Brookes?’

‘You could afford to wear your fur a bit lower on the return tonight at the six thirty, I think. We might as well give the poor deluded sods their money’s worth, mightn’t we?’

Watching Sandra’s thin face as she tried to decide whether to try answering back or not, Reggie reckoned he’d give these two until about Friday.
Please God she doesn’t just run, like the last one did
, he thought to himself as he was clearing up afterwards.
Because then we’ll really be up the fucking pictures
.

5

The mirror that Reggie was asked to fetch at the end of that rehearsal was a pier glass in a battered mahogany frame. Its mirroring was blown and spotted in quite a few places, but Mr Brookes superstitiously refused to replace it – it had been with him for years. As Sandra hung up her gown on the back of her dressing-room door and congratulated herself on having got through all of that without once making Teddy properly lose his temper, and as Reggie collected the parachute silk from where it had landed in the wings and dragged it out into a backstage corridor so he could check the hem for tears, Mr Brookes tilted his mirror and spread his hands into two well-boned fans, making sure they were properly lit. He inverted them, inspected them, bit a nail – and then began the chore of repeating each produce and vanish in the act six times. He repeated each move three times watching his hands, and three times staring himself straight in the eye. As always, he paid particular attention to the production of his smile. He never blinked.

Sometimes, Mr Brookes feels tired – of the repetition, of the telephone calls and arrangements, of the twelve shows a week plus matinees, and of the women. He knows what he’s like, though, and let’s face it, he’s been doing this all his life.

He looked in his clouded mirror, and smiled for the forty-second time.

That’s more like it
, he thought.
Teddy Brookes. Esquire
.

Again, he didn’t blink.

6

There was still no news of a booking by Friday lunchtime, and so that night Reggie came in early to make sure everything was ready to be packed up into storage after the final three shows on Saturday. After he’d cleaned the pier glass rather more thoroughly than was strictly necessary, and laid out Mr Brookes’s make-up, he went down into the wings to catch the curtain coming down on the six thirty first half. The Rigoletto Brothers – the trampoline duo who closed the first act – were one of his favourite turns on the circuit, and he knew he was going to miss rubbing past them in the corridors and popping down to watch them whenever he felt like it. Tonight, when their big finish came, the younger of the two brothers arced so high over the stage in his white tights that Reggie found himself involuntarily tapping his breast pocket for luck. The sweat came off the twisting figure like a spray of diamonds, and when the house applauded, so did Reg. He stayed all the way through their bows – he liked that bit as much as anything, loved the fact that now they were back down to earth you could see how hard they’d been working to fly like that, their thick black Italian hair shining, both of them dripping and gasping for breath, their matted chests heaving – and he trotted off backstage with a grin on his face, ready to check that everything was shipshape for the act. His night continued pretty well. Both houses were good, and there was a very respectable round at the end of the second Friday night showing of ‘The Missing Lady’. It wasn’t until after the curtain came down at the very end of the night that their final weekend in Wimbledon began to go wrong.

Reg never knew exactly what had happened – Mr Gardiner hinted that there had been some kind of a scene at the stage door as the two of them went home – but whatever it was, the incident had obviously led to trouble between them later. Mr Brookes’s customary skill with close-up handwork must have let him down for once, and when Sandra turned up for the Saturday matinee not even the thick layer of Superior Pancake No. 3 she was wearing round her mouth could conceal the split in her lip. The show, predictably, was rotten; her timing was all over the shop. Reggie knew better than to get between them, but after the curtain he did go round to Sandra’s dressing room to ask if she needed anything fetching for her tea between the two evening shows. She said she didn’t, so he left her to it, but he certainly wasn’t looking forward to the rest of the night.

Sandra may not have felt like being fetched a sardine sandwich, but she’d certainly felt like a drink. Years of touring had taught her always to keep two things close at hand whenever possible; her self-respect, and a quarter-bottle of Gordon’s. Now, after the language Mr Brookes had just used to her on the stairs back up to the dressing rooms, she was in need of both. She locked her door, filled her glass, stared at herself in the mirror for a bit and then got to work. An hour later, she emerged from her dressing room for the first evening show with her smile freshly painted and its edges sharper than ever. Nothing had been said, but she knew that after last night’s set-to and the bite of his signet ring into her face the chances of Mr Brookes keeping her on as either his Lady or his current piece of skirt were slight, and while she was redoing her slap she had decided to go out with a bang. No one was knocking her about for a hobby, thank you very much, no matter how good a screw they were three times a week.

There’s nothing like suspecting you won’t have a job to go to tomorrow morning to make you feel like pushing the boat out, and by the time Sandra made her high-heeled entrance in that week’s final evening show her maid had acquired a definite sense of well-oiled bravado. A positive volley of wolf whistles from the second circle greeted her energetic jump-from-standing onto the chair – her skirt got very fetchingly hitched up, and she saw no need to smooth it down – and when the ropes went around her wrists her wide-eyed dismay got a
very
appreciative chuckle from two middle-aged gentlemen sitting together at the front of the stalls. She showed no signs of flagging, either, despite Mr Brookes’s warning stares; her backward hops up the steps were more provocative than they’d ever been, and the audience’s final sight of her framed between her mirrors was as pretty as a very particular and sometimes quite pricey kind of picture. Once the doors had clicked shut she slipped her ropes and lifted and dropped and folded herself quicker than Reggie had ever known her do it – so quickly, in fact, that they almost lost their timing. Then, of course, she slid into the steps, and he had to leave her to it. That was when she made her mistake.

The dangerous moments are always when you think you’re home and dry, aren’t they? – when the body lets down its guard.

When she sailed back on after her quick change, Sandra’s smile was frosted with triumph. However, in her tipsy determination to show Mr Brookes that anything he could do, she could do better (she’d always liked that song), she’d failed to notice that the zipper of her ball gown hadn’t caught properly. Three paces onstage, she let out all the breath she had been holding in during the tension of the change itself, and as her ribs deflated under the corsetry of the dress it slipped. The toe of her leading shoe caught in its front hem, and she tripped. She stumbled, grabbed at her slithering fur, and sent half the
coupe
of ginger ale splashing down the front of her burgundy satin. There was a laugh from some men in the audience, but it died; Sandra recovered as best she could, hitching the fur up over her breasts and letting out a high-pitched little giggle of her own, but by then the damage was done, and the applause which had greeted her entrance pattered away into nothing. The band, of course, carried on regardless. Mr Brookes took the half-empty glass, glared at her, and tossed back the ginger ale as angrily as if it were a neat and punishing vodka.

Then he just stood there. He looked for a moment as though he had half a mind to smash the glass at her feet – never mind the orchestra’s eyes, in the pit – but instead he punished her much more simply. Cutting all of the final business entirely, he let her struggle to keep her stained dress up over her breasts for a full sixteen bars of music; only then did he deign to give the cue to the flyman to bring in the tabs. Adding injury to insult, he deliberately left it to the very last minute to grab her by the wrist and tug her upstage of the descending wall of fabric. She staggered, tripped and almost fell again, and the laughter of the audience grew into ragged, jeering applause.

Reggie knew that something had gone badly wrong as soon as he crawled out. The band was still blaring out the music for the call on the other side of the curtain, but Mr Brookes was standing stock-still and with his face in shadow, his back pointedly turned. One hand was dangling the empty champagne glass, and the other was clenching and unclenching itself. Sandra, ten feet away, was shifting anxiously from foot to foot, one hand straying up to her wig, her shoulders and the tops of her breasts eerily white in the between-the-acts twilight. Mr Brookes turned.

‘D’you know what you are, Sandra?’

The words slit through the music on the other side of the tabs like a razor. She bit her damaged lip, and stuck her chin up bravely as he moved towards her.