Human.4 Read online

  I haven’t entered the talent show since.

  I rarely dragged myself along for it, if I’m honest. I always seemed to find something else to do. Like pairing socks, or cataloging my comics.

  You know, important stuff.

  “You will come and watch?” Danny asked, and there was a note of something close to desperation in his voice. “You will, won’t you?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Lilly said, finally dragging her gaze away from the area of Simon’s neck it had been focused on for most of Danny’s “I’m a hypnotist” revelation.

  I nodded.

  A part of me even wanted to see Danny do well. To knock ’em dead. Become the talk of the village. Maybe even get his picture in the Cambridge Evening News.

  But there was another part of me—and I’m not proud of this—that actually wanted to see him fail.

  Miserably, horribly, and painfully.

  It would be like exorcising a ghost.

  It would be like therapy.

  “Sure,” I said, “I’ll be there.”

  Lilly looked at me oddly, and a strange expression passed across her face, like a cloud across the sun. I had a sudden sense of discomfort, as if Lilly had seen—or maybe felt—something that I should have seen or felt but didn’t.

  I raised an eyebrow to query it, but Lilly looked away, leaving me feeling foolish and confused.

  Foolish, confused, and something else.

  A dark sense of foreboding, as if a storm were brewing.

  CHAPTER 2

  That night—one of the last nights of my ordinary life—I mentioned Danny’s intentions to my parents over the dinner table.

  “Good on him,” my dad said around a mouthful of vegetarian stew. “We haven’t had a hypnotist before.”

  NOTE—“Vegetarian Stew”

  Apparently “vegetarian” was still a dietary choice in Straker’s day, rather than a social responsibility. See Chadwick’s informative history: What Didn’t They Eat? Flesh as Food.

  Of course we haven’t, I thought. Who, apart from someone as mad as Danny, would suddenly decide they were going to become one?

  “It should make a nice change,” he continued, looking at something on his fork with suspicion. A lump of beef-style Quorn stared back at him. “It’s going to be great this year.”

  Yeah, great, I thought.

  I could already pencil in a few of the high spots.

  Mr. Bodean and his trombone.

  Those creepy Kintner twins and their version of “Old Shep” that I’m sure was used in Guantánamo Bay to get Al Qaeda terrorists to talk.

  Mr. Peterson, the village postman, and his annual ventriloquism act with a hideous homemade dummy called Mr. Peebles.

  A whole bunch of hyperactive kids doing bad impersonations of Britney or Kylie or—shudder—Coldplay.

  NOTE—“Coldplay”

  O’Brien makes a persuasive case for defining “Coldplay” as referring to a kind of dramatic or musical presentation characterized by being utterly bereft of any signs of genuine emotion.

  A recorder recital.

  Some truly mind-numbing dance routines.

  I shook my head.

  Poor Danny.

  “Are you going to be doing a turn this year?” my mum suddenly asked me. She actually wasn’t joking, although it could easily be mistaken for some kind of sick humor.

  I felt the usual prickle of shame pass from my stomach, up my spine, and onto my face where it magically made my cheeks go red.

  “I don’t think so,” I said quietly, and prodded some semicircles of carrot onto the far side of my plate with my fork.

  Just let it go, I prayed silently, please just let it go.

  No such luck.

  “He’s scared he’ll choke again,” said my idiot little brother, Chris, grinning.

  I scowled at him.

  “Christopher Straker!” Mum said sternly.

  With Mum, full name equaled big trouble.

  Chris’s goofy grin fell from his lips.

  “Well, he did choke,” he muttered, trying to defend his comment by rephrasing it slightly.

  Mum growled.

  Dad, it seemed, was utterly oblivious to the exchange and was still thinking about Danny’s star turn.

  “I’ve always wondered how stage hypnotists get people to do all those things,” he said. “I mean, it has to be some kind of trick, hasn’t it? The people can’t really be hypnotized, can they?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Mum offered. “Wasn’t there a man who was hypnotized and then died and carried on living because no one had given him the command to wake up?”

  “That was a film, dear,” Dad said.

  “It was a story by Edgar Allan Poe,” I offered.

  “I didn’t know the Teletubbies had first names,” Mum said, and I rolled my eyes at her.

  NOTE—“Teletubbies”

  Many theories exist about this word, but none are particularly satisfactory. Or, indeed, convincing. Kepple, in his essay “A Pantheon of Teletubbies,” seems sure that it is a word of deep religious significance, referring to a collection of gods or goddesses almost exclusively worshipped by children, although his evidence is seen by most scholars as, at best, fanciful.

  “Danny says he hypnotized Annette,” I said. “Made her think she was late for school.”

  Mum screwed up her face. “That was a bit mean of him,” she said.

  “Was she late for school?” my dad asked, missing the point, as usual, by about twenty-five meters.

  Chris pulled a face at me, but I turned the other cheek and ignored him.

  “The point is that she must have been hypnotized,” I said.

  Blank looks from Mum and Dad said I needed to explain a little further.

  “It’s the summer holidays,” I said. “You don’t get ready for school when there’s no school to go to.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Dad said.

  “And it was nighttime,” I finished.

  Mum was looking over at Dad with one of the strange expressions that had become all too frequent in our house.

  Even the simplest, most innocent statements could be met with tension, with Mum and Dad always on the lookout for traps and pitfalls in everything said within the walls of the house.

  Because, I guess, they spent so much of their time setting them for each other.

  This is a portrait of the Straker family before the talent show.

  So, when things get crazy, you have a suitable base for comparison.

  You see, Mum and Dad were “having problems,” and were “trying to make a go of things.” Both of those phrases, it turns out, are a sort of grown-up code for “their marriage was in trouble.”

  My dad had left us almost a year before, and he’d only come back a couple of months ago.

  Anyway, to make a long story not quite so long, Mum couldn’t cope when he was away. And so I stepped in to help her. I became the honorary “man” of the family, with responsibilities that I really didn’t want or need placed upon my shoulders.

  I ended up being responsible for Chris an awful lot.

  Which meant I ended up telling Chris off an awful lot.

  It wasn’t something that sat very easily with me.

  It certainly didn’t sit very easily with him.

  Mum was too emotionally drained to do battle with Chris, so it fell to me to make sure he did his homework, cleaned up his room, ate everything on his plate.

  I became a miniature dictator.

  I might have been helping Mum, but I sure as heck wasn’t helping myself.

  Or Chris, for that matter.

  Things had been weird ever since he moved back in.

  Every silence, action, or look held hidden meanings.

  And I suddenly wasn’t so important anymore. I went back to being a kid again. Any power I had assumed was gone in an instant.

  I had been forced into a role that I didn’t want, so why should I feel bitter about being sq
ueezed out again?

  Powerlessness, I guess.

  Chris doesn’t let me forget.

  He resents any attention our parents offer me, and rejoices in seeing me fail.

  Mum and Dad act as if nothing has changed, when even I can see everything has.

  That’s my family.

  Drives you absolutely crazy.

  But you miss them when they’re no longer here.

  When the bad stuff comes—and it always will—you look back on those moments with longing.

  The bad stuff was just around the corner.

  The talent show changed everything.

  Forever.

  That’s why I like to think about the way things were, however imperfect they seemed at the time.

  In extraordinary times, the ordinary takes on a glow all of its own.

  CHAPTER 3

  The talent show loomed.

  Danny kind of dropped off the radar and Simon joked that it wasn’t as if he was sitting in his room practicing by himself—surely a hypnotist needed people to practice on.

  A few days before the show, Dad even toyed with the idea of entering the show himself, announcing that his Elvis impersonation “wasn’t half bad.” Good sense prevailed when Mum pointed out it wasn’t “half bad” because it was “completely awful.” He sulked a bit, but I reckon he was a little bit relieved when the original bravado had worn off.

  The day of the show arrived and people got up just as they always had. They went shopping. They cleaned their cars. They read newspapers. They gossiped over garden fences.

  They made their way to the green.

  Simon, Lilly, and I were near the back, cross-legged on the grass, drinking reasonably cold Cokes from the Happy Shopper, and watching Mr. Peterson’s act with something close to horror.

  Mr. Peebles was even more hideous than I remembered.

  A grotesque papier-mâché head, like a dried-up orange, sat on top of a square, unnatural-looking body. The dummy’s eyes sort of moved about—they were actually little more than very poorly painted Ping-Pong balls—but they only went from one impossible cross-eyed position to another.

  Every time Mr. Peterson operated the thing’s mouth there was this horrible, hollow knocking sound that was often louder than the thin, falsetto voice that was supposed to come from Mr. Peebles.

  To call Mr. Peterson a “ventriloquist” is to insult the profession because there was no art to what he did. It implies that his lips didn’t move and there was at least an illusion that it was the dummy doing the talking.

  Not Mr. Peterson.

  Mr. Peterson’s lips always moved.

  They moved when he was doing his straight-man routine as himself, and they seemed to move even more when he was speaking for his dummy.

  But that was only the beginning of his lack of talent.

  Every letter B was guaranteed to sound like a G. Every M became a tortured N. The letter F was a horrible Th sound. P was replaced with a Cl that made it sound like Mr. Peterson had a ball of hair in his throat. W was an unconvincing Ooh.

  To be brutally honest, I don’t think Mr. Peterson ever practiced. Between one talent show and another I think Mr. Peebles went back into his box and stayed there.

  And the weird thing is that, at no point in the proceedings did Mr. Peterson seem to draw any pleasure from his own act. He looked, by turns, utterly terrified, and on the brink of tears: as if this wasn’t entertainment but some strange kind of punishment he was putting himself through.

  Year after year.

  He stood there, sweating in the heat of the afternoon sun—the body of Mr. Peebles hanging limply from his hand—wearing the wide-eyed look of a rabbit dazzled by headlights.

  “What’s up, Mr. Peebles?” he said. “You look sad.”

  The head of the dummy swiveled through so many degrees that it would have broken a real creature’s neck.

  “I get you don’t really care ooh-ats wrong with ne,” came the reply.

  “Of course I care, Mr. Peebles. Now, what’s wrong?”

  “I’ve groken ny gicycle.”

  Mr. Peterson tried to move the dummy’s head, and then spent a couple of seconds trying to stop the head from falling off.

  The smaller kids were chuckling and occasionally roaring with laughter.

  “It’s like a traffic accident,” Simon whispered to me. “It’s horrible, and wrong, but you can’t take your eyes off it.”

  “The act?” I asked. “Or the whole thing?”

  Lilly leaned forwards. “You know that show, Britain’s Got Talent?” she asked.

  NOTE—“Britain’s Got Talent”

  One imagines a televised version of the talent show that Kyle is describing.

  In “Stars in Their Lives,” Reg Channard writes: “The obsession with celebrity was an all-consuming illness that had reached epidemic proportions by the early years of the twenty-first century. Adolescents actually stopped studying at schools and colleges in favor of the pursuit of this crazy fever dream of celebrity. The end result was that many menial, degrading jobs were taken by people who possessed no formal qualifications, but had reasonable singing voices and knew a couple of poorly choreographed dance routines.”

  I nodded.

  “They lied,” she said.

  Mr. Peterson stumbled on for a few more minutes that felt much longer, before he took his applause and shuffled offstage.

  The show’s host—Eddie Crichton, who ran the village’s sports and social club—wandered onto the stage looking mildly baffled.

  “Er … well … um …,” he said, possibly trying to work out how year after year Mr. Peterson failed to improve his act. “Now, a little bit of a change from the ordinary.” He was regaining enthusiasm now. “As we set off on a voyage into the mysteries of the human mind. I’d like to hear a big Millgrove welcome for … THE GREAT DANIELINI!”

  Simon nudged me in the ribs, really hard, and raised his eyebrows.

  “Danielini?” he whispered. “What kind of name is that?”

  “Not a particularly good one,” I whispered back.

  I looked around at the people watching, acutely aware of just how badly this could all go for Danny if his act didn’t match up to the billing he’d just been given.

  I could see Danny’s mum a couple of rows forwards of us watching the whole thing through the viewfinder of a tiny camcorder. I remember thinking how cruel it was to be filming him, and how at least I had been spared the humiliation of having my own talent show appearance filmed by my parents.

  For some reason I had a sudden urge to check the crowd for Danny’s sister, but I couldn’t see her anywhere.

  Maybe she was sensible and had found something more fun to do.

  Like hammering nails into her feet.

  Then Danny stepped onto the stage.

  CHAPTER 4

  You know, sometimes you see a person you know, but there’s something different about them and you have to look again—do a double take—because you’re suddenly not certain it’s the person you thought it was. Maybe it’s a haircut that makes you suddenly uncertain, or a look on their face that you’ve never seen there before.

  And often you’re absolutely right, it’s not who you thought it was, it’s just someone who looks a little like them and you’re relieved that you didn’t call out their name.

  Or feel like a total ass because you did.

  When Danny walked out I had the same thing happen inside my brain. I mean, I knew it was Danny, but then I doubted it and had to look again.

  It wasn’t just that he’d got himself a smart dinner suit that actually fit him—although that helped. It wasn’t that his usually random-angled hair had been gelled and slicked back—although that helped too.

  It was something that was both of those things, plus something else.

  “He looks older,” Lilly said almost breathlessly, and Simon laughed at her comment.

  He was wrong to laugh.

  It was true.

  Danny
did look older.

  Taller, too, because he’d lost his habitual slump.

  And his face had an intensity to it that made him look a whole lot wiser than the kid who was the constant butt of our stupid jokes.

  He stood in the middle of the stage as helpers lined up four chairs behind him. He was looking out across the audience with an confident expression that seemed almost spooky on a kid his age, almost as if we were seeing a glimpse of Danny as he was going to be, twenty or so years in the future.

  “Good afternoon,” he said calmly and commandingly. “Welcome to my demonstration of the powers of the human mind.”

  He unbuttoned his jacket and reached into the inside breast pocket, pulling out a brand-new deck of cards. He took them from their box, cracked the seal and removed the cellophane, then mixed them up with a series of overhand shuffles.

  Danny was a master with a pack of cards—he practiced card magic in front of his bedroom mirror—and I was suddenly afraid that he had chickened out of his hypnotism act in favor of some more of what he’d been doing at the talent show for the last couple of years.

  “A deck of cards, new and shuffled,” he said, squaring the deck in his hands. “But I only require nineteen of them.”

  He counted off the top nineteen cards and threw the rest over his shoulder.

  “Although, actually, it’s not really nineteen cards that I require,” he said, fanning the cards out in front of him so that we could only see their backs. “I need something else. Only the cards can tell me what.”

  He continued to fan them out, and then turned them around to the audience with a flourish.

  Instead of the usual hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades there was a single letter on each card. Danny had fanned them out in such a way that there were gaps between certain cards that made the word breaks in the sentence the cards spelled out.

  The cards read: I NEED FOUR VOLUNTEERS.

  “Ah,” Danny said as if the cards had just solved a difficult problem for him. “I guess I need four volunteers. Any takers?”