The Disappearance Boy (3 page)

Then, the music seems to falter.

The man stops, and stares straight into the girl’s face. You can see straightaway that this gesture isn’t part of the act; an imaginary drumstick clatters to the floor, and nobody in the pit dares to pick it up. An awkward silence installs itself on the stage, and the dust has time to settle across the boards like sifted flour.

Slowly and deliberately, the man in the dinner jacket removes the rope from the girl’s wrists and starts to re-coil it. He takes his time, not giving either her or the empty seats out front any hint as to why he’s stopped. Unsure of how to respond, she lets her body go slack; her hips push slightly to one side. Specifically, she seems unsure whether she ought to keep her wrists held out or not. She lets her eyes drop down to the floor and shifts from three-inch heel to three-inch heel, and for the first time in the proceedings begins to look like an actual woman. She relaxes her face and attempts a smile, revealing that she’s really quite pretty under all that make-up – but then she thinks better of it and snaps her mask back on, because the man is setting to work on her with the rope again now, looping it tightly round her wrists and quickly making her helpless. Again, he stops short of the final knot, and stares at her as if she ought to understand why.

This elaborate routine of threat and deferral happens four more times in a row. The silence intensifies.

If the seats out front are empty – and they undoubtedly are – then who is he doing all of this for? The stare before the missing knot gets stonier each time, and the repetition is beginning to look less like rehearsal and more like a punishment. Is it for something the young woman has done, or merely for something that she
is
? It is only when the man performs the move for the seventh time – the magic number, you might say – that the reason for this threatening hiatus in their routine emerges.

Despite herself, the girl’s stuck-on smile has started to fray, and the insides of her wrists have started to sweat. She always tries very hard to get everything right for rehearsals with this bastard – she even rinsed her rehearsal jumper out in the sink last night, thinking he might have noticed she was making an effort – but stupidly, today of all days, she has forgotten to powder her wrists before starting work. She could kick herself, but it’s too late now, and as the man starts to repeat the rigmarole with the ropes for the seventh time she once again shifts her body weight nervously from one three-inch heel onto the other, and rather too abruptly. This makes her unpowdered wrists slip one against the other, just at that vulnerable spot where the pulse beats under her skin, and –
hey presto!
– the two inches of spare red silk which are the crux of the trick, the hidden two inches of scarlet slack which the man has tucked swiftly between her wrists under cover of her splayed fingers and which need to be kept firmly pressed between in place if the trick knot is to work, slip, and are suddenly revealed, spilling out from their hiding place like blood from a wound. From the frozen expressions on both of their faces (one angry, one afraid) it feels as if the soundtrack at this point shouldn’t be just the clatter of one dropped drumstick, but instead the brazen din of some awful enamelled dinner plate or silver-plated tray being dropped loudly in the wings.

The woman waits, sqeezing hard between her legs (she has just realised that she urgently needs to pop backstage to the Ladies – her bladder never does behave itself, not at the best of times) and he, of course, makes her wait. He re-coils his rope with conspicuous slowness. His voice, when it finally comes, is in lots of ways just like his face: handsome, clean-cut and effortlessly threatening. Without apparently raising it at all, and concentrating the whole time on his hapless, wronged and now-flaccid little scarlet friend, he says:

‘Shall we try that move just the
once
more, Sandra?’

Of course, she daren’t reply.

‘Just the once more … and without one
iota
of fucking feeling – if you wouldn’t mind, my darling.’

Sandra keeps her nerve, and for some odd reason remembers at that exact moment that high above her head there is another woman also trying to keep her poise under difficult circumstances. The dome that topped the New Wimbledon Theatre’s facade was (and still is) crested with a great gilt angel, the woman whose job it was to herald the attractions of the place with blasts from a silent, golden trumpet. For just a moment, Sandra wonders if her employer’s is really the kind of language the angel is supposed to be advertising to the passing shoppers, but she knows better than to express any such thought. She tells herself to concentrate. In particular, she tells herself not to think for even a second about the things which this man’s hands can and have and undoubtedly will again do to her on other and less professional occasions. She readies the backs of her wrists by giving them each a drying wipe across the sides of her thighs, and gets ready to spread her fingers and hope for the best. The man in the dinner jacket coils the scarlet silk, lets it drop and coils it again. The next time he lets the rope fall, he passes the fingers of his left hand across his forehead as if trying to iron out that recalcitrant frown, and now he’s biting his bottom lip, which Sandra knows from experience is
really
not a good sign. She wonders whether to try saying something, and once again decides against it.

Clearly, things are not going well.

Sandra is, in a way, the least of this smartly dressed man’s worries. Time was when even a low billing at a respectable south London house like the New Wimbledon would have pretty much shoehorned you into a few more useful bookings; this time around, however, the usual week-before-closing phone calls to his agent have failed to produce anything except a possible two-from-the-bottom return visit to the Bradford Alhambra – and that not until the middle of May, would you mind, when this was still the week commencing March the twenty-third. Everybody knew the touring game wasn’t what it used to be – but that was bloody ridiculous, and he’d said so. The houses at the New had been thin all week, and then there’d been the old Queen dying, and then – just to depress things even further – there’d been that very unpleasant splash across the front page of the
Mirror
about the bodies found papered up in a cupboard in Notting Hill, which had sent all the girls backstage into a proper twitter, and more to the point was hardly designed to put any of his normally appreciative female punters in the right frame of mind to enjoy a second-half spot billed in scarlet letters as ‘The Missing Lady’.

To make matters worse – if that were possible, which he was beginning to doubt – at the end of the first house yesterday Sandra had tapped on his dressing-room door and enquired with a quite unnecessary edge to her voice if he was planning to take her out for a quick bite somewhere between the shows, an enquiry that came just when he was in the middle of brushing his teeth in expectation of a backstage visit from one of his regulars, a very well-put-together bank manager’s wife from Tooting who quite often turned up when he played south of the river, and who was always good to be touched for a new pair of cufflinks or a small cheque after they’d done the business. This error in timing had led to strong words between himself and Sandra, and then to a quick over-the-chair dressing-room seeing-to that had been meant to get her off his back for the rest of the week but in fact only served to remind him of how terminally dissatisfied he was getting with this particular set-up. There were bones, quite frankly, in all the wrong places. Then – to
really
add insult to incompetence – in the second house, when she’d held out her wrists for the ropes on the key change and was supposed to be looking straight out front and pulling focus with her very best ‘Innocence Wronged’ impersonation, misdirecting the house away from the double finger-spread that masked the false tie, she’d looked straight across-stage instead and winked at him, would you mind, actually bloody
winked
, completely putting him off his stride and almost causing him to lose the knot. Unrehearsed business like that from a girl was not something he would tolerate at the best of times – hence this bad-tempered lunchtime rehearsal – but in a week of unresponsive houses and tricky phone calls it was almost the last straw. In fact – amazing how things can come to a head over one tiny little detail, isn’t it, and all this over a faked rope tie which ought to be one of the absolute basics – it was making him think that the whole bloody situation was in need of an overhaul. What with all the forthcoming celebrations, he’d fancied a summer season somewhere, but the chances of something like that coming in looked like they were receding fast. What were they calling it in all the papers?
The New Elizabethan Age?
– well what was he supposed to do? Come on dressed as Sir Walter fucking Raleigh and drop his cloak for some bloody tart to walk all bloody over? Would that get him a booking somewhere decent before the end of the month?

Instead of doing what he felt like doing, which was to forcibly remind Sandra that there were plenty of other girls in south London who’d be grateful to be got rid of twice nightly if she didn’t fancy the job any longer – three times on Thursday and Saturdays – the man in the dinner jacket re-coiled his rope, took a concealed deep breath and slapped his working face back on.
Every inch the gentleman
, that was what they all said about Teddy Brookes Esq., and who was he to disillusion anybody? His voice sharpened to match the smile.

‘Wrists a bit higher this time please, Sandra. And our eyes are house front at this point in the act, as I’m sure you remember.’

‘Certainly, Mr Brookes.’

He wished he could pull the rope tight, make it bite into her skin and remind her to get the misdirection fucking
right
this time, but you can’t do that with a faked wrist loop; the hidden two inches of slack have to stay just that, otherwise the knot can’t be dropped when she gets to her quick change. He compromised by flashing the rope round her wrists nearly twice as fast as he did in the actual act. Thank goodness, this time, it worked; her eyes stayed wide and the blood stayed hidden. He stepped away, apparently to admire his handiwork but also to check the time again on his watch.

‘And where’s our little limping wonder got to, do you reckon?’ he snapped, baring his teeth in a snarl as stagy as a circus tiger’s. ‘Eh, Sandra, my roped-up lovely? What do you reckon’s become of our little
Reggie
?’

Yes, that’s right; there’s my
reveal
, as they say in the business. Reggie is Mr Brookes’s disappearance boy. And what with being late because of the number 47 bus – not to mention the probable atmosphere he knows he’s about to walk slap bang into, because Reggie’s no fool when it comes to Mr Brookes and his women – quite frankly, as he rounds his final corner into Montague Road, ignoring as he does so the patronising and golden gaze of the second sightless effigy of his day; as he swings left down a side alley and thumps his way into work under the sign saying
Stage Door
with barely a nod through the window to Mr Gardiner, the door’s keeper; as he heads, head down, into the labyrinth of white-tiled and white-walled corridors that will finally lead him onto the bright, dusty stage – quite frankly, as he does all of that,
disappear
is just exactly what young Reggie Rainbow wishes he could sometimes bloody do.

3

It’s a funny sort of job description, isn’t it? Faintly disreputable. But then I suppose most ways of earning a living that don’t begin until all the lights have gone down are, one way or another.

To explain; the disappearance boy is the member of the act who the public never sees. The one – if the act is any good – that they will never even suspect is there. To qualify for the job the boy in question has to be small enough to hide in less space than anyone would think ordinarily possible; the muscles of his arms and shoulders must be strong enough to let him cling to the back of a swinging cabinet door, and his fingers must be deft enough to bring off a quick change in almost total darkness. He has to be sharp-minded enough to know
exactly
when to pull a hidden lever, and he has to have a taste for invisibility. For obvious reasons, the disappearance boy never – ever – takes a bow.

As it happens, Reggie has all of these qualities. You might even say he was born that way – or at the very least that his early life could almost have been designed to equip him for this particular and strange employment.

To explain:

You already know that it was a disease with a beautiful name that had made him so slight and short.
Poliomyelitis
– the word is striking, no matter how ugly its meaning, and on difficult days Reggie still finds himself repeating its musical syllables under his breath when he’s out on one of his pavement-pounding walks, turning them over and over in his mouth, and still wondering why they had chosen him.

He’d once looked the word up in an encyclopedia, and read there that his story wasn’t at all uncommon. According to the fine print of the relevant entry the virus had probably claimed him as its own courtesy of somebody’s unwashed hands, and most likely entered his two-year-old body through the mucous lining of his throat. It had stopped short of its usual objective – destroying the motor neurons that connect the spinal cord to the muscles of the lungs, and murdering its host – and in his case contented itself with merely delivering what the entry called
Acute Flaccid Paralysis
to his legs. Then, he knew, he’d got lucky.

In the decade of Reg’s childhood the accepted treatment of infant paralysis was something called
casting
– the immobilising of the afflicted limbs in heavy moulds of plaster of Paris. The process was thought to encourage recuperation, but often had the effect of wasting the very muscles it was meant to salvage, and sometimes even ended up condemning the child to life in a wheelchair. Reggie was spared this entombment by a simple accident of circumstance. He’d spent the first two years of his life in a ward on the third floor of the London County Council’s National Children’s Home up at Highbury Barn, and as luck would have it, it became official LCC policy at the end of that second year to farm out any child considered unlikely to ever become a suitable candidate for fostering to an independent charity. The now-twisted Reggie fell heavily into that class of unfortunates, and once he was out of immediate danger he was simply sent away. He’d already been given his new name –
Reggie
because by law every abandoned child the Home received on its wards had to be christened, and because Reginald was a popular name in the autumn of 1930;
Rainbow
because a sudden whim on the part of the Home’s registrar made him hope that a little alliterative good luck might somehow rub off on such an optimistic surname’s squalling new owner. Now he was given a new set of clothes for the journey, and the names were written out on a brown-paper label and tied to his wrist; then he was wrapped in a blanket and put on a train with a nurse. A taxi met them at Seaford Station and took them down the bumpy unmetalled road that led past Mr Bridges’s kitchen window, and then turned left along the timber track that led out across the shingle of Bishopstone beach itself. Reg made the entire journey in silence. He was one of the youngest children ever to have made it, and he lived out there on the stones for the next seven years.