The Disappearance Boy (4 page)

It must have been a strange place. The Home for Poor Brave Things, it was called, and it cared for a small but constantly replenished community of orphaned or abandoned children with disabilities from whenever they arrived until they reached the age of sixteen. The most striking of the surviving images of how it looked in Reggie’s day is a photograph showing nineteen little boys lined up in a row out on the black-and-grey pebbles in order of their height, seven of them on crutches and one in a wheelchair. All of them are scowling at the camera and all of them naked except for their institutional linen underpants. They are all shockingly dark-skinned, and seem to be about to be herded into the sea by a pair of nurses in gull-like headdresses and heavy overcoats – evidently, the morning when the photograph was taken was a cold one, despite the sunshine that defines every detail of the boys’ bodies. Nobody looks as though they think there is anything odd about children being forcibly immersed in freezing water, neither the boys nor their guardians. They just look cross with the photographer for interrupting their routine.

Thalassotherapy
, sea-bathing for invalids it is called now – another beautiful word for something harsh – and though some commentators at the time labelled its pioneers barbaric, it has since been recognised as a perfectly legitimate therapy for wasting diseases like polio. There was much talk at the Home for Poor Brave Things of the light, air and salt water of the beach
cleansing
the Home’s infant charges, of
stains being washed away
– as if disability, like being orphaned or illegitimate, was a sin rather than a fact – but that (I suppose) we must now forgive, as we must forgive the Board’s choosing the Home’s remote location so that the sight of its inhabitants shouldn’t offend anybody. What matters now is that the doctors and nurses were at least to some degree right in their belief that self-help, fresh air, constant exposure to sunlight and above all repeated immersion in salt water could help repair their variously damaged and stigmatised charges. The regime certainly rescued Reggie. Being constantly half naked under the nurses’ watchful eyes gave him the defiance he needed to survive; the painful daily slide down that bank of unforgiving flints and the screaming kicks against the beach’s icy water strengthened his ‘useless’ leg, and the necessity for hauling himself across the floor of a chilly dormitory soon gave him a new and compensating set of muscles in his shoulders and arms. By the time he was seven, the metal brace that had been kept strapped to his leg for six hours a day as an infant was judged no longer necessary, and he swung and dragged himself from place to place using just a pair of crutches. He learnt how to live with bruises, and how to lie awake at night with no company except the moon slicing in through an open window, and no sound except the chatter of distant stones. Perhaps more importantly still, he learnt how to keep his head down, and to take off on his own the moment his nurses’ backs were turned. Even before he could walk entirely unaided the young Reggie had learnt how to squeeze himself and his unusual body away in the gaps in other people’s attention – and to be at home there.

Without meaning to, the Home even equipped him with the cabinet-clinging fingers that make him so invaluable to Mr Brookes, and the teeth that make him so reluctant to smile outright. The peculiar combination of strength and dexterity in his hands came not only from handling his crutches, but from the apprenticeship in metalwork that the boys were given three afternoons a week in the largest of the Home’s huts. It was Reggie’s allotted task to twist and trim wires which had been gripped in a vice, and it was a task he performed with grinning relish, nipping, jerking and clipping as if the bright metal deserved to be shown who was boss. The grin itself came about courtesy of the Home’s kitchen sugar-cupboard. Once a week the ranges in the kitchen were used to manufacture boiled sweets which were then sent away for sale in a tea shop in Seaford; once a week, young Reggie would sneak in and wait for the cook’s back to be turned. He loved the colours in their little stoppered bottles – bile green, rose pink – and the cyanide smell of the fake almond essence. He loved watching for the moment when the muscle-thick sugar threatened to blacken in the pan – and he loved to steal. Sugar quickly became his favourite food, and he still has the rotten teeth to prove it. His twenty-three-year-old self still keeps his lips sealed when he grins, lest they give away what he wants to keep hidden – and he still thinks of sweetness as something you have to steal when nobody’s looking.

Every Sunday morning, the children were crocodiled over Mr Bridges’s level crossing and onto a footpath that led over some fields to Bishopstone’s tiny flint-walled church. Reggie didn’t mind the walk – in fact, he always thought of the expedition as a treat. The windows of the church were full of stained glass, and on sunny days watching their colours come and go on the stone floor reminded him of the cellophane wrappers from his favourite sweets. One window was more brightly coloured than all the others, and he would always try and sit where he could see it.
Just like your name, Reg
, one of the nurses whispered, seeing him staring up at it. He grinned at her, lips closed, and looked back up. Sunday by Sunday, colour by colour, this window taught Reggie a lesson that wasn’t directly stored in his body, but which nonetheless was planted so deep inside him that no surgeon’s knife could ever have reached it.

He couldn’t remember
when
the nurses had told him his mother was dead, but he was quite sure he had always known it as a fact. It never occurred to him to worry about the lack of detail in their story – the why and where and how – but instead he latched on to the good news in the tale, which was that she was now watching over him, and during his seventh summer, when every Sunday morning seemed to be sunny, and his favourite window always bright, this idea of being continually spied on and cared for began to take a very concrete form in Reggie’s mind. The window featured a pair of bare-armed creatures swooping down from on high on outspread wings, all indigo and violet and parrot yellow – the source of the colours on the floor – and it was in exactly this gaudy and muscular shape that Reggie began to imagine his absent mother. The creatures in the window were smiling as they gazed down at the world, and as he stared up at them Sunday after Sunday it occurred to him that that was what she must be doing too. Admiring their muscular arms, he concluded that she would be well capable of turning up and carrying him away at a moment’s notice should a dramatic rescue ever be required, and like a stolen sweet tucked in the roof of his mouth this secret thought would sometimes keep him grinning to himself all week. That thought was why, two years later, when at nine o’clock on a fine but hazy mid-September morning the staff and children were told by a flustered and scared-looking young doctor that instead of heading to the workshop for their metalwork training they were all going to be something called
evacuated
, young Reggie knew almost immediately what it was that he had to do.

The doctor – a junior – was in a state of shock. He’d only been given twenty-four hours to empty the buildings of the Home – Seaford Bay was thought to be a prime potential invasion site, and had been designated for immediate clearance and fortification by the Ministry of Defence – and had snapped out the phrase
or stay here and get shot
at one of the nurses when she had raised her hand and asked him if the Ministry really needed the children to leave quite so soon, making her cry. Although Reggie understood very little of the rest that was said, he knew he was in peril, and by the time the nurses had begun ushering their charges back to the dormitories to pack their cardboard suitcases he had already hit on his idea. He waited for his supervising nurse to be distracted, and then – even though he was stripped to his underpants, because the children had been told to change into their Sunday best for the journey – he ducked under his metal cot, grabbed his crutches and shoes and dragged himself out of sight across the floor and out through a door.

The back of the dormitory led out onto a concrete sun terrace, and then down onto the beach. After working his way round to the rear of the kitchen block on the stones – falling twice in the process, and hurting himself quite badly – Reggie squatted on a doorstep to lace on his right shoe, and threw the left one out onto the beach; then he slid his hands and forearms into the biting aluminium supports of his crutches and began to propel himself furiously down the concrete path that led out onto the timber road. When he reached it, he swerved right – not looking back once – and swung himself away from the Home, his bare foot alternately dangling and dragging on the tarred timbers. Fighting his way through a ragged gap in a blackthorn hedge (he fell again at this point), he climbed the slippery grass of the embankment, threw away the crutches, and picked his spot on the line. As he drew himself upright on his chosen sleeper, he closed his eyes, not because he was frightened, but to help him listen out for the next sound he was sure he would hear; the downward rush of his mother’s rescuing, rainbow-bright wings.

What actually happened next, you already know.

Being swept off the line into a pair of unknown arms just as the scream of the train was drowned out in the thunder of its wheels taught that desperate little boy a powerful but contradictory lesson. In the moment between being knocked off his feet by the force of Mr Bridges’s final lunge and the shock of landing under him in the long rank grass by the side of the tracks, Reggie really did think that he was being carried up into the air by his mother. By the time he finally opened his eyes – by the time they had been forcibly smacked open by Mr Bridges – he knew that he was on his own. I’m not saying that his childish self knew it in the same conscious way that his twenty-two-year-old self now thinks he knows it – he could never, for instance, have been able to put the thought into an actual, word-by-word sentence – but that was undoubtedly why the nine-year-old Reggie kept his eyes screwed tightly shut as Mr Bridges roared right into his face, and why he didn’t cry. He needed time to think, and time to scrawl a pledge to himself across the back of his blood-dark eyelids. A pledge that he would never ask for anybody’s help ever again – time to write it, sign it and seal it shut.

That promise is the reason why everybody backstage in Wimbledon agrees that Reggie’s a young man who
knows how to keep his head down
. It’s the reason why – from the methodical way he lays out Mr Brookes’s props to his own cheerfully and filthily tight-lipped way with words – everything about our Reggie is pretty much self-contained. It also explains why Reggie was keeping his eyes so firmly fixed down on the pavement as he ducked round the corner into Montague Street. He’s still allergic to rainbows, and to people with unfurled wings, no matter how golden or high up or obviously ludicrous they are.

When Mr Brookes looked up and saw Reggie finally limping out onto the stage that morning – jacket flapping, face twisted into that odd little tooth-hiding grin of his – he completely forgot to be angry. Typical Reggie, he thought – slipping on like a fox through a letter box, jaunty as all get up and without a trace of apology on his face.

‘Ah, Reggie,’ he said, re-coiling his rope one more time. ‘So good of you to join us.’

‘Sorry, Mr Brookes,’ replied Reggie, pulling his lips even tighter, surreptitiously tapping his breast pocket while he did it.

‘That number 47 was being a right pain in the arse again. Where’ve we got to then? D’you want me inside the apparatus?’

4

Illusion acts are always rehearsed without witnesses; as with certain other bits of life, it all has to happen behind locked doors. In order to describe how this particular rehearsal continued I’m obviously going to have to break with that convention, but I don’t want anyone to accuse me of taking the magic out of the proceedings. So first I’m going to describe the act as it will be tonight when all the lights are up on the six thirty house, and then I’ll go back and show you how Mr Brookes does it. All I’d say by way of a warning is that you need to remember that a magician is not someone who deceives, but someone who keeps his promise. Which is to deceive.

All right?

Sandra is just about to be lifted up onto a chair to have her ankles secured as firmly as her wrists, and the band are already on their fourth chorus of Ray Noble’s ‘The Very Thought of You’. The lights are starting to get properly warm. As I promised you earlier, Mr Brookes is looking even more the handsome devil than ever – now that it’s show time, he’s wearing a strong foundation, surprisingly firmly pencilled eyebrows, pulpy red lips and enough mascara to make sure that that penetrating gaze of his reaches right up to the cheap seats. Sandra, in comparison, is still looking quite pale under that pulled-backed scrape of blonde hair of hers. She’s smiling, of course, and doing her best to make the most of her costume – back-seamed stockings, matching black satin skirt and blouse, starched collar, cuffs, cap and apron – but after her afternoon ordeal it can’t be said that she’s looking quite as pert as a French Maid is usually paid to look. The satin of her skirt is so tight that it makes it difficult for her to move. When Mr Brookes walks round in front of her, however, squeezes his hands onto her hips and gives her a quick lift, she’s suddenly up on the chair in one straight-from-standing jump – and if you think that’s easy, just you try it in three-inch heels and with your wrists tied. She wobbles slightly, but Mr Brookes moves swiftly on; another coil of scarlet rope appears from nowhere, and this one is deftly looped and knotted around her ankles. Mr Brookes gestures dramatically to the flies, and to the sound of a smartly timed cymbal-crash a spotlight hits the exact centre of the stage, outlining in silver the mysteriously draped object that has been waiting so patiently for its moment in the limelight.

Now we seem to be getting down to the point of these elaborate proceedings.

Leaving Sandra stranded on her chair, Mr Brookes prowls around the drapes as if they concealed a familiar adversary. In the pit, the band vamps admirably. Mr Brookes stoops, and gathers a handful of silk. Up on her chair, Sandra – still smiling – shifts her weight nervously from hip to hip, and with (thank goodness) her wrists and ankles pressed firmly together. Then, preparing himself exactly as if he were about to execute that old chestnut whereby the conjuror pulls a tablecloth away without breaking a single plate, Mr Brookes whips the drapes away with a matador flourish, and sends them flying – silver, suspended, gone-in-a-flash – into the wings.