0.4

Simon and Lilly had been going out with each other for a while now, and seeing as Simon is my best friend I seem to get pulled along with them a lot these days. It’s weird getting used to sharing a friend… and… well, Lilly and I weren’t getting on if the truth be told.

Danny lives next door to me and kind of just clings on to my coat-tails. Again, I don’t know exactly why. Simon and I make him the butt of a lot of jokes but he just shrugs it all off.

That day we were just trying to fill up the day while using as little energy as we could.

And then, of course, Danny told us that he had hypnotised his sister.

Simon stared at him, with a disbelieving look that summed up how the rest of us felt about Danny’s revelation.

‘You hypnotised Annette?’ he said, and the spare disbelief he hadn’t managed to put into his stare was crammed into the scathing way he said those three words. There was even a snort at the end of it.

Danny seemed to miss the incredulity and nodded.

‘I’ve been reading a lot of books on the subject,’ Danny said, ‘and I’ve been watching lots of Paul McKenna and Derren Brown on DVD. With the talent show coming up I thought I might ditch the magic act this year and do a bit of stage hypnotism. You know, make people bark like dogs, or eat an onion as if it’s an apple.’

Simon groaned.

Of all of the area’s customs and traditions, the Millgrove talent show is by far the oddest. Every summer since Queen Victoria was sitting on the British throne – with a two-year gap during the Second World War – the people of Millgrove have gathered on the green to compete in the competition. Even when local lads were dying in the trenches in the First World War, the tradition continued.

Local folklore says the talent show began because of a dispute between two farmers, who’d fallen out over a woman and needed some way to settle the matter. Rather than firing pistols at each other, they each wrote a song for the girl and performed it on the green in front of the entire village, who were the judges of the competition. The village might have forgotten the men’s names, but a version of their way of settling the argument was resurrected over a hundred years ago and still continued.

The talent show.

Weeks, even months in some extreme cases, were spent preparing acts (and I’m using that term loosely, most of them were lame Karaoke offerings to amateur-sounding backing tracks) for the grand prize – a battered old cup and some WHSmith gift tokens. As long as it was a slow news week there was a chance of a feature about the show in the Cambridge Evening News, with the winners grinning at the camera, holding their prizes.

Who was it who said something about everyone in the world having their fifteen minutes of fame?

In Millgrove it was more like fifteen seconds.

To me the talent show has always been a bit of a cringe, really. When I was eight years old my dad told that me that, as I was always cracking jokes and making people laugh, I should have a go at being a stand-up comedian at the show.

NOTE – ‘cracking jokes’

Humour was, according to Andrea Quirtell, an important coping mechanism for the horrors of the age. Some people actually counted ‘comedian’ (or ‘joke teller’) as their trade.

Quirtell identifies a number of different types of joke. There are: ‘puns’ (which confuse the meanings of words for humorous intent), jokes that work only when written, jokes that appear in the form of a question, jokes that rely on bizarre or ambiguous language.

Immanuel Kant believed that people laughed at constructions like these because ‘(L)aughter is an effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing’. Quirtell disagrees. ‘Laughter is an effect that arises if a race refuses to grow up,’ she writes.

All in all they were the most embarrassing minutes of my life so far, even beating the moments Mum spent getting out the baby photographs the first time I brought a girlfriend (Katy Wallace, it lasted three weeks) home to meet the folks.

I discovered that there is a huge difference between knowing a few jokes and being a stand-up comic. I don’t think I got a single gag right. I fluffed a punch line early on and then made a mistake in the set-up of the next joke that made its punch line irrelevant. Sweating on the makeshift stage, with hundreds of faces staring at me, I dried up and just looked out at them in the grip of a huge panic attack.

I haven’t entered the talent show since.

I rarely drag myself along for it, if I’m honest. I always seem to find something else to do. Like pairing socks, or cataloguing 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.

02

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 hadn’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 Guantanamo 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.