The Disappearance Boy (14 page)

Reggie, perhaps unsurprisingly, couldn’t sleep. He lay awake until half past midnight, gazing at Mrs Steed’s roses as they ran riot behind the washstand mirror. He had that question that his mother had asked him up there in the cemetery running round and round in his head again tonight, and was wondering if he was ever going to be able to answer it. As you do when you can’t sleep, he was blaming himself, running through all the things he’d done in his search for an answer so far; all that stupid staring at a pair of black-haired acrobats in white tights or at the young Italian cook in his breakfast cafe, all that broom-handled following boys from bus stops into cemeteries. He recalled in detail the last time when things had gone a bit further, which had been in Bradford last year during the run at the Alhambra; he’d spent forty-five minutes in a thin-walled boarding-house bedroom with somebody who the next morning had let his eyes slide off Reggie’s face like a knife off a plate. He wanted to know when one thing was finally going to lead to another, and he was going to actually spend a whole night with someone – spend the night with
someone special
, as his mother always put it. He wanted to know when he was going to kiss the same person goodnight when the lights went out and then hello again the next morning when the sun came up. He wanted to know how he was ever going to make that happen.

Perhaps this is why Reggie’s face and body are so hard to pin down – why he can look like a young man one moment and a damaged boy the next. It isn’t his limp or height, or his strangely pinched and weathered face, but rather the fact that at the age of twenty-two he still has the dreams of a sixteen-year-old. Like a sixteen-year-old’s, his body is aching to catch up with his heart, and his heart to catch up with his body.

Take his fingers, for instance; look how they’re behaving tonight. The effort of clinging to the window frame as he leaned out for his last goodnight stare at the darkened sea has reminded them of the ache involved in clinging to the back of the cabinet, and that, involuntarily, is now making them recall and relive all the other times when they have flexed and clenched in the solitary dark. As he lies there with his eyes closed, they stretch and splay across the thin blanket that Mrs Steed has provided, and take on a life of their own. They think for themselves, and lead young Reggie astray. First, they dig into the blanket; then they push back, so that Reggie’s back is flattened against the flowered wall. They hold him there. In that position, lying on his side, with his knees drawn up and his breath coming slowly and gently – a variation on Pam’s position under the stairs, in fact – Reggie begins to firmly press each separate vertebra of his spine in turn into the rose-strewn wallpaper. He counts the bones off, calling to them by their proper names:
Cervical; Thoracic; Lumbar
. One by one, he persuades the muscles of his back that it is not him pressing his bones into the wall, but the roses themselves that are doing the pushing. It is a very exact sensation, and eventually resolves itself into the illusion that there is another, matching spine just beneath the wallpaper, pushing back against his. If he concentrates sufficiently, Reggie can even tell from the slight warmth that collects across his shoulders that the man lying behind him is also wearing pyjamas; if they had both been naked (Reggie is sure that he knows this) then the heat from their matched bodies would have been more fiery, more intense. Then, once – and only once – this sensation or illusion of a matching spine is fully convincing, Reggie goes on to the next stage.

This is to imagine that the stranger who owns these bones rolls sleepily over, and clasps him from behind. When this happens, Reggie grins, with his eyes still closed, and thinks about how easy it has been to smuggle this companion up into his room without anyone suspecting a thing. When Mrs Steed heard his solitary, slow one-two come thumping up her uncarpeted treads tonight she must have thought no more about it, never even thinking to stick her head out into the hallway and thus catch the owner of the second, clever, silent pair of feet following him up the stairs.
That’ll be young Mr Rainbow
, she would have muttered to herself, sitting in her chair with her ashtray.
Such a shame about that, you know, little difference …
Well, let her. Let her think what she liked.

Being able to smile felt good, and Reggie now brought his routine to a close. Barely mouthing the word, he whispered his imaginary lover a quiet
Goodnight
, floating the word out into the night air of his bedroom as if it was being produced by Mr Clifford’s percussionist with the softest possible stroke of a drumstick across the edge of a cymbal. The fourth time he whispered it, the charm worked, and – hey presto – he slept. As peacefully as he once used to sleep out on that beach at Bishopstone, with only the sound of the stones for his lullaby, or of a distant train.

10

Now that the dusty gilt fringing of the Grand’s curtain was safely rising on the second week of their run, Mr Brookes knew that he had to get a grip. The act was going down well most nights, and Pam was certainly bringing some much needed life to the old routine; however, he had to face the fact that after this booking ended the diary was still looking pure blind empty, and the bills meanwhile would still be coming home to roost as regularly as the starlings of Leicester Square.

This situation meant that Mr Brookes’s days were much more crowded than those of either of his colleagues. Besides the daily phone calls to his booking agent in London and the fixed daily preparations for the act – his solitary sessions in front of the pier glass, the make-up, the hand-wiping – he was now also obliged to get dressed in his slacks and blazer every morning and head out and do the rounds, dropping in on all the other theatre managements in town and leaving cards, enquiring if anyone knew of any likely openings. He made it all look as if it was the easiest thing in the world of course, but no one was fooled. Everyone knew that an act was only as good as its last booking, and while appearing as a second-half stopgap in what was basically a seaside skin show wasn’t the worst billing in the world, it was hardly the best either. There were times during the week when his fingers began to itch with frustration as badly as Reggie’s, and one too-direct query from Mr English as to whether there were any new engagements in the offing for that talented Miss Rose of his almost made him lose his temper with the old duffer. Despite his long days of smiles, phone calls and gins bought for strangers in hotel bars, there really did seem to be nothing about.

Mr Brookes kept track of all these meetings in a little pocket notebook. It was a slim, black, leather-bound affair with pages of thin blue paper that made it look as if somebody had been razoring up airmail letters – it was on one of these pages, torn out, that he’d scrawled Mrs Steed’s address for Reggie. The pages at the back were filled with neatly pencilled lists; every drink that he bought, every name that was mentioned and every potentially useful telephone number he managed to prise out of a saloon-bar conversation was jotted down in double columns. Once listed, the names were then memorised – he’d learnt from experience that there was nothing like immediate recall of a name to impress a manager who would long ago have forgotten what distinguished Teddy Brookes Esq. from a dozen other illusion acts on the circuit. Always flattered to be remembered, they were. In the front pages of the notebook there was another list, and this one consisted entirely of female Christian names, some of them followed by telephone numbers, and some of them by brief one-word notes such as
Twice
,
Children
or
Ginger
. Occasionally, a name would have been scored out so vehemently that the pencil would have cut right through the thin blue paper.

This second list, I suppose, was another kind of record of just how hard Mr Brookes had to work to keep up his act.

Towards the end of this second week a cluster of pages in the otherwise empty middle of the notebook began to fill up with other, less obvious jottings. These notes were also in pencil, and were hastier and less formed than the orderly lists of names and addresses in the front and back, as if they’d been made in a hurry.
Brought To Heel
ran one, with the word
finally !!!!
scribbled underneath.
Decided to make a respectable woman out of her, did you?
ran another. The next page was taken up with a small scribbled sketch of what could have been a woman’s body or dress hanging from a hook inside a travelling trunk or upright coffin – or, of course, inside the harlequin-painted apparatus, reduced to its most childish form of four blunt strokes. Some dashes and arrows seemed to indicate that the cabinet was going to be spun or opened in some different way than it was in the current routine; it seemed to have more doors, for one thing, and possibly some extra handles. On the most crowded pages, the notes were sometimes almost illegible; one set of musings seemed to be headed with a phrase that could have been read as either
box + stairs GONE
or as
boys staring GOOD
. Underlined and circled next to this was the single word
Shoes?

It’s hard to say whether this scrappiness – surprising in a man so otherwise fastidious as Mr Brookes – was in fact deliberate. Men are often funny with their lists and notes, aren’t they, often resorting to code – and of course no illusionist of any kind wants his secrets to be legible to a stranger. To somebody who’s managed to get their hand into his trouser pocket in an off-guard moment.

However, even if their details weren’t clear, the jist of these scribblings was; prompted no doubt by the arrival of an unexpectedly marketable new assistant, Mr Brookes was starting to think about changing the act. The current routine had been on the road for eight seasons in a row now, and while he’d been doing the rounds several potential bookers had recently asked him whether he’d got anything new up his sleeve. He couldn’t afford to buy anything entirely novel in the apparatus line just now, but a few alterations, a couple of different produces in the set-up, some suitably abbreviated and up-to-date re-dressing for the girl and he was sure he’d be able to give the current outfit another round of outings under a new title. People never seemed to get tired of telling him
It’s 19 fucking 53, Teddy; nobody wants the old stuff any more
– but he knew different; what the punters really wanted was business
exactly
as before, but tarted up a bit so that nobody’s wife or girlfriend could complain about things being old-fashioned. A spot of dazzle to hook their attention, some skin in the main body of the act and then a good strong finish, that was what was required.
Hook, Skin, Finish –
he even jotted it down.

In between the lists at the back, the lists at the front and the scribblings in the middle, some thirty-six pages of this little blue-paper notebook were still empty, and nowhere did it appear to contain any indication that he’d mentioned this new act he was planning to either of his colleagues.

What with settling into a new town, and getting used to being so tired last thing after work, the second week neared its end without Pam ever quite getting round to asking Reggie out for that drink. She’d planned to, and had even got as far as tactfully asking a couple of the other girls backstage if they knew what the pubs near the theatre were like; one of them had mentioned a place just off the seafront, the clientele of which reputedly had (as she warily put it)
a rather colourful reputation
, but that was as far as the plan ever went. On the Saturday, she ditched it entirely. This wasn’t because Pam had become suddenly shy of broaching the subject of his singleness again with Reg, but rather because of something she’d seen him do.

As she was arriving for the matinee that Saturday – late, and running, hair flying – she’d spotted Reggie ahead of her down on the other side of North Road, apparently waiting for the traffic to clear so that he could cross over to the stage-door alleyway. He didn’t seem to have seen her running down the hill, and she was just about to wave and call out to him to get a move on and cross over when she realised her mistake; he wasn’t standing still because he was waiting for the traffic to clear at all. Following his gaze, she saw that he was watching a young man who was walking away down the road past the front doors of the Grand. The young man wasn’t anyone she recognised, but from the way Reg was staring after him he certainly seemed to be someone of significance.

About twenty yards down North Road, the young man stopped, and started inspecting something in the window of the ironmonger’s on the corner. Pam caught a glimpse of a face in a collar and tie, topped with a quiff of bright black hair – nothing remarkable, she thought, but reasonably well put together so far as one could tell. Reg, when she looked back at him, was still staring. It was only when the young man in question straightened up and continued on his journey – having apparently decided that he didn’t actually need whatever piece of metal it was he’d been staring at – that Reg seemed to pull himself together and start to look out for the traffic. Then she did wave, and call out his name. Reg looked, but blankly, as if his thoughts were somewhere else entirely – and then he smiled, and lurched straight over to meet her, making a woman coming down North Road on her bike swerve as he almost dodged himself straight under her wheels.

Pam knew better than to ask Reg who the young man with the Italian-looking black hair had been. If that was the way he liked to try to meet people, then good luck to him, and let’s hope he was being careful and having fun.

‘Come on,’ she called across the street as he half hopped to meet her, reaching out to grab an arm to get him up the kerb. ‘You know what that Mr English is like if we sign in late.’

The second show that night went down a storm. Mr Brookes had told them he wanted a good Saturday-night show to end the week, and that was exactly what he got. Smiling, he placed his hand in the small of Pamela’s back to usher her offstage at the end of the calls again, placing it right where the waist seam sat on the top of her hips, and Reggie couldn’t help noticing the proprietorial way that the fingers spread themselves. Pam laughed at something Mr Brookes whispered in her ear as they wove their way across the stage through the arriving nudes – it was something funny, obviously, but Reggie was too far away to catch what it actually was.