The lady introduced herself as Barbara in a voice that had enough natural warmth in it to make electric blankets irrelevant. She introduced Peter, too, and I offered him a smile and a nod. I tried to shake hands with him out of some atavistic impulse probably brought on by being in Hampstead, but he’d already stomped away in the direction of a new arrival with a loud bellow of greeting. Barbara watched him go with an unreadable, Zen-like smile that suggested prescription medication, but her gaze as she turned back to me was sharp and clear enough.
“So,” she said. “Are you ready?”
For anything, I almost said—but I opted for a simple yes. All the same, I probably held the glance a half moment too long. At any rate, Barbara suddenly remembered a bottle of mineral water that she was holding in her hand and handed it to me with a slight blush and an apologetic grimace. “You can have a beer in the kitchen with us afterward,” she promised. “If I give you one now, the kids will demand equal rights.”
I raised the bottle in a salute.
“So . . . ,” she said again. “An hour’s performance, then an hour off while we serve the food—and you come on again for half an hour at the end. Is that okay?”
“It’s a valid strategy,” I allowed. “Napoléon used it at Quatre Bras.”
This got a laugh, feeble as it was. “We won’t be able to stay for the show,” Barbara said, with a good facsimile of regret. “There’s quite a lot still to do behind the scenes—some of Peter’s friends are staying over. But we might be able to sneak back in to catch the finale. If not, see you in the interval.” With a conspiratorial grin, she beat her retreat and left me with my audience.
I let my gaze wander around the room, taking the measure of them. There was an in-group, clustered around Peter and engaged in a shouted conversation that colonized the entire room. There was an out-group, consisting of four or five temporary knots spread around the edges of the room, which periodically tried to attach themselves to the in-group in a sort of reversal of cellular fission. And then there was stepbrother Sebastian.
It wasn’t hard to spot him; I’d made a firm identification while I was still unfolding my trestle table and laying out my opening trick. He had the matrilineal blond hair, but his paler skin and watery blue eyes made him look as if someone had sketched him in pastels and then tried to erase him. He looked to be a lot smaller and slighter than Peter, too. Because he was the younger of the two? It was hard to tell, because his infolded, self-effaced posture probably took an inch or so off his height. He was the one on the fringes of the boisterous rabble, barely tolerated by the birthday boy and contemptuously ignored by the birthday boy’s friends. He was the one left out of all the in-jokes, looking like he didn’t belong and would rather be almost anywhere else—even with his real dad, perhaps, on a day when there was a work crisis on.
When I clapped my hands and shouted a two-minute warning, Sebastian filed up with the last of the rear guard and took up a position immediately behind Peter—a dead zone that nobody else seemed to want to lay claim to.
Then the show was on, and I had troubles of my own to attend to.
I’m not a bad stage magician. It was how I paid my way through college, and when I’m in practice, I’d go so far as to say I’m pretty sharp. Right then I was as rusty as hell, but I was still able to pull off some reasonably classy stuff—my own scaled-down versions of the great illusions I’d studied during my ill-spent youth. I made some kid’s wristwatch disappear from a bag that he was holding and turn up inside a box in someone else’s pocket. I levitated the same kid’s mobile phone around the room while Peter and the front-row elite stood up and waved their arms in the vain hope of tangling the wires they thought I was using. I even cut a deck of cards into pieces with garden shears and reconstituted them again, with a card that Peter had previously chosen and signed at the top of the deck.
But whatever the hell I did, I was dying on my feet. Peter sat stolidly at front and center, arms folded in his lap, and glared at me all the while with paint-blistering contempt. He’d clearly reached his verdict, which was that being impressed by kids’-party magic could lose you a lot of status with your peers. And if the risk was there even for him, it was clearly unacceptable for his chosen guests. They watched him and took their cue from him, forming a block vote that I couldn’t shift.
Sebastian seemed to be the only one who was actually interested in the show for its own sake—or perhaps the only one who had so little to lose that he could afford just to let himself get drawn in, without watching his back. It got him into trouble, though. When I finished the card trick and showed Peter his pristine eight of diamonds, Sebastian broke into a thin patter of applause, carried away for a moment by the excitement of the final reveal.
He stopped as soon as he realized that nobody else was joining in, but he’d already broken cover—forgetting what seemed otherwise to be very well developed habits of camouflage and self-preservation. Annoyed, Peter stabbed backward with his elbow, and I heard a whoof of air from Sebastian as he leaned suddenly forward, clutching his midriff. His head stayed bowed for a few moments, and when he came up, he came up slowly. “Fuckwit,” Peter snarled, sotto voce. “He just used two decks. That’s not even clever.”
I read a lot into this little exchange—a whole chronicle of casual cruelty and emotional oppression. You may think that’s stretching an elbow in the ribs a touch too far, but I’m a younger brother myself, so the drill’s not unfamiliar to me. And besides that, I knew one more thing about birthday boy than anybody else here knew.
I took a mental audit. Yes. I was letting myself get a little irritated, and that wasn’t a good thing. I still had twenty minutes to run before the break and the cold beer in the kitchen. And I had one surefire winner, which I’d been meaning to save for the finale, but what the hell. You only live once, as people continue to say in the teeth of all the evidence.
I threw out my arms, squared my shoulders, tugged my cuffs—a pantomime display of preparation intended mainly to get Sebastian off the hook. It worked, as far as that went; all eyes turned to me. “Watch very carefully,” I said, taking a new prop out of one of the cases and putting it on the table in front of me. “An ordinary cereal box. Any of you eat this stuff? No, me neither. I tried them once, but I was mauled by a cartoon tiger.” Not a glimmer; not a sign of mercy in any of the forty or so eyes that were watching me.
“Nothing special about the box. No trapdoors. No false bottoms.” I rotated it through three dimensions, flicked it with a thumbnail to get a hollow thwack out of it, and held the open end up to Peter’s face for him to take a look inside. He rolled his eyes as if he couldn’t believe he was being asked to go along with this stuff, then gave me a wave that said he was as satisfied of the box’s emptiness as he was ever going to be.
“Yeah, whatever,” he said with a derisive snort. His friends laughed, too; he was popular enough to get a choric echo whenever he spoke or snickered or made farting noises in his cheek. He had the touch, all right. Give him four, maybe five years, and he was going to grow up into a right bastard.
Unless he took a walk down the Damascus Road one morning and met something big and fast coming the other way.
“O-o-okay,” I said, sweeping the box around in a wide arc so that everyone else could see it. “So it’s an empty box. So who needs it, right? Boxes like this, they’re just landfill waiting to happen.” I stood it on the ground, open end downward, and trod it flat.