The Blue Book (28 page)

Francis is insistent – like an elegant cosh. ‘You don't what? You don't know what the show is? I don't care if you don't know what the show is. Whatever it is, it will be a delight. And, on your way, you can reflect repeatedly on your good fortune and continuing health.'

Derek puzzles at the silence.

Then, ‘Off you go.' And for a moment Francis puts his arm around Beth's waist – warm, light – kisses the top of her head. ‘Starts at
8
.
30
. Don't want to be late – it'll help you both to get a good night's sleep.'

And for saying this Beth could kiss him – so she does and this time she can't avoid it feeling like goodbye.

Kiss him with a lover's mouth. Francis also understands about love.

And then she kisses Bunny, ‘You have a top-quality husband there.'

Bunny who smells of Chanel and powder and constant moderate pain: ‘He's not bad. But I can't tell him that – he's unbearable as it is and in a funny mood at present.'

They conduct their conversation as if Derek has already gone and he soon does bump away from the table, heads out, fast and ungainly, between the other diners and then loiters at the far door.

‘I am not in a funny mood.'

‘He always says that when he's in a funny mood.'

‘And you always say that.' Francis sitting down beside his wife, attentively snug beside her and slightly pleased with his recent performance, excited, and Beth leaves them being themselves only mildly louder for her benefit and thinks that when she's gone they'll drink their tea and maybe have an early night and continue from there.

Derek escorts her so effectively to the theatre that they arrive fifteen minutes early.

Actually, he didn't escort me – pacing a foot ahead of me in a morbid sulk isn't escorting.

I should tell him – then he could go, or I could go. Put us both out of my misery. Let us get away, each to our own.

But I'm a coward.

After the show. I'll do it then.

After the wait for the show and then the show.

I promise.

We can manage the wait – quiet wait. Quiet as staring numbly in a resentment-filled lift while Gordon from Nuneaton (with wife) and Ted from the Channel Islands – he doesn't say which island, or maybe he lives on several – I know a man who lives on a single specific Channel Island, who talks about it – so this Gordon (with wife) and Ted (without wife) – Ted's wife having an early night: he says it gives his ears a rest and we all smile at this, complicit in its minor hatefulness – all of us smile, that is, except Derek, who has troubles of his own, which I will add to and that's why I despise them and myself.

Despising is as good as anything, though – it's an adequate diversion.

So Gordon and Ted discuss their knee operations – and then, the lift finally letting us go, precede us into the auditorium while I ponder – as they have at great length – the benefits and drawbacks of keyhole, as opposed to open-cast, orthopaedic surgery and yet find myself truly more interested in whether Gordon's silent but deep-eyed wife will one day strangle him with a pair of pastel golfing slacks – he needed the plastic knee to continue his golf – or whether perhaps she'll swap murders with Mrs Ted, disguise herself as a hooker who looks like his mum – his preferences would undoubtedly lie that way – and then bugger him to death with some large unbuttered vegetable while he's strapped to his own kitchen table.

I don't mean that.

They were all right.

Probably.

Even Ted – sexually frightened and too old for his current persona, Ted. He thinks his world isn't working because fox-hunting scenes have been banned from Christmas cards by socialists and Muslims and the UN. This, when the Prince of Peace's tender birth, his virgin mother's baptismal kiss, the harmoniously crowded manger, should obviously always be commemorated by drawings of borderline Nazis and admirers of Pinochet galloping out across farmland they no longer own to prove a point before watching dogs rip an almost-dog to pieces – or a cat, or some other equally tasty domestic pet.

Christ, I don't want to be like this.

Or here – waiting for a magician.

Naturally.

Beth is almost relieved she has ended up having to watch ‘Not to be missed, the personality and magic of Matt Mitchell'.

And I have to be grateful for him because he'll keep Derek out of the cabin and awake – until the heavy meal and the scopolamine kick in.

I hope.

Francis hoped.

When Francis ought to be saving his optimism for better things.

The house lights dim and then go out, but mean nothing melancholy by it.

If Derek's sleepy, docile, then we can be civilised.

Or, putting it more frankly, I would like him to be temporarily disabled, because this will work to my advantage when I admit what I have to and should have long ago and everything becomes my fault.

A swirl of portentous music clambers up to the balconies and then washes back.

And here's the lovely Matt.

Matt is vaguely tubby, something failed in the line of his shoulders.

It seems he hasn't brought his personality with him tonight. I wonder if he's got his magic . . .

Arthur said I was merciless.

Matt begins his routine, manipulates his velvet-draped props and scuffles limply round his strangely proportioned tables, as the stage creaks and heaves.

Black suit, orange waistcoat – I'll bet he's wearing, yeah, the orange socks to match . . . and the ladies and gentlemen adore him – and they adore his newspaper which he will now tear up and restore and then, I suspect, form into a tube and fill miraculously with milk.

This truly is the 1970s – '
74, or '76.

And we're all at a sodding birthday party.

Dad, he'd have rocked the place. He had proper patter and style and he could do it – genuinely prestidigitate – I thought that word was so magnificent – he'd throw in an extra pickpocketing, or a levitation, or move that card to where it couldn't be, because you were sure it couldn't be, because you'd
looked, you'd concentrated, you'd expected to be fooled and you'd
been careful, but there it is: inside the card box you'd covered with your hand for all that time, for surely every minute – you wouldn't be confused about such a simple thing, or about when a trick is started and when it stops.

He would make you amazed.

Yes, he did the kids' stuff mostly, but when he performed for adults – only once in any evening – he'd shake them. He'd move their thinking; not far, but he'd move it. I saw.

And the milk is poured into the newspaper and – goodness – now it's gone.

How absolutely fucking amazing.

If I could make anything I wanted to appear, if I could take the broken and the ripped to pieces and make them whole and show the multitudes that here is a genuine, absolute miracle –– would I waste my gifts on newspaper and milk?

And here come the scissors and the bit of dodgy rope.

This is purgatory and I deserve it.

He didn't like Arthur, my dad – and I wanted him to: two men with beautiful voices, strange interests, they should have negotiated an understanding.

Very clear that they wouldn't – how could a dog like an almost-dog? And both of them thinking the other is only the almost-dog.

But I was being optimistic and introduced them.

Mum was making an effort: first meeting and I've said Arthur's important and I've never brought a bloke here before and me and him, we're braced for dinner – the
finally we have to do this and just bite the bullet, catch it in our teeth, which is a dangerous trick and can kill you
dinner – and she'd got the house pristine and there were fresh flowers and candles and she was treating Arthur like a blacksuitman, a member of the tribe, one that she'd accidentally missed and should know better and that's as friendly as it gets. She made him eat too much dip – he hates dip, but he was also beyond his own skin with the effort of being the gentleman they'd favour: swallowing down this pinky goo and wearing a tie and a suit – blue suit – and taking her hand and kissing it. Dad leaning beside me but not speaking, a palpable shiver in the air around him indicating his need to be sitting in a Mississippi rocking chair, set out on a broiling porch with a shotgun on his knees and ready loaded.

Which was only the usual fatherly feelings and I think we were aware of that and managing. Dad cared. He was supposed to. He was expecting – just quietly, not getting ridiculously demanding – a presentable wedding with tail coats and hats and photos and his wife in enjoyable tears and then kids and more photos.

Only none of us could make a magic to manage that.

We were sitting down to eat – Mum and Dad and me and Arthur – a cheery four. She'd laid out the posh Christmas place settings, only minus the berries and tinsel and we were not without tension, but working on it. Arthur and I were working, concentrating out into the room harder than we'd thought we could – trying to harmonise with Mum and Dad and each other and to calm things, trying to help. And, on the other hand, it did not help that Arthur was teetotal. He had decided he needed an ultra-clear head always, so no additives or fixes. The teetotal phase came after the gloves. Dad viewed teetotal as peculiar. Christ knows what he'd have said about the gloves.

And early on, the evening still stiff and early on, before we were done with the home-made beef broth, Dad asking him, ‘And what do you do, Arthur?'

And Arthur told him the truth.

When he could have said anything and been believed.

Matt shows his audience rope in pieces, rope complete, rope knotted, rope pulled through the neck of a small and unharmed boy.

Tricks for a grandson – Dad was born for that.

The current magician laughing with his audience – an inward, piggy snort of laughter. He's filling his hands with sponge balls – dear God, sponge balls, not even billiard balls – a wilderness of sponge balls and he's snorting and shuffling his feet.

He is terrible.

Which is why they love him, why they will clap when he pushes that long needle through that big balloon – which, to be fair, is moderately tricky when the ship's moving this much.

So tricky that he bursts the balloon.

Well, that's fine, though – try again. The audience can wait.

And again.

There are two reasons for watching performances of any kind.
They are both human and understandable reasons.

We can come out and see people, members of our own species, excel themselves, transcend expectations, burn in their work. And clearly these performers are bigger and finer and more amazing than we can be, but this is a good thing, this is wonderful, a gift – and maybe they have reached a place where we can go, are the truth of ourselves revealed. Maybe we have in us an equivalent light. They are people and we are people and when we stand up and applaud them, discover that we are standing, have been drawn up by this wonder they've provided, then we are applauding something of which we're a part – we have humility and pride both avid in us and are delighted. We let them heat us into being slightly someone else.

Or we can come out to see people, members of our own species, fail and be uncomfortable, unhappy, deluded, ridiculous, cheap. And perhaps we have been all these things, have felt ourselves be all these things, but tonight the performers suffer and we are safe and more competent and poised than we believe they could be. They are people and we are people and we abandon them. We aren't overwhelmed, uncovered, we get to stay the same and be quite sure we're adequate.

Tonight I am sitting in the second kind of audience. They are why I no longer have a television: too much of the second, not enough of the first. Important not to hate them for being as they are – because they are as merciless as I am and the truth is that they can transcend themselves and blaze, astonish, be amazed – probably have and could still – and, as repeatedly established, their hearts will be broken, perhaps more than once, and at some inevitable point they will cease to exist – they will be a tragedy – these things are certain for them. So they can deserve only tenderness.

But these are the people – and I'm not unlike these people – that I would want Arthur to headfuck – to take advantage of their rigidity and their hatreds and their fears.

And really that's almost saying they're the ones who deserve the best magic: not pulls and cards and linking rings and disappearing women, but eternity and love for ever, loves restored.

I think maybe Arthur imagined my dad would be able to see him that way. As a magician – as someone who offers wonders.

But when Arthur was working he said that his wonders were real – they couldn't be wonders unless he could say they were genuine – and there's only one rule in magic: you can't claim that it really is magic. That's the lie you can never tell.

‘Don't bring him back here.' Dad gone from the table and Mum in amongst her best napkins, her nice things, and stricken, but I had to chase my father, find my dad.

He looked the way Francis did about Derek, ‘I can't, I can't stop you . . .' the same fury and he's embarrassed for me as well and protective. And he wants to start a fight. ‘Can't have him in the house.' But he has no one that he can bear to fight with.