The Wonder Brothers, page 4
Who is not going to look when you say a thing like that?
Nathan looked down. I held up a pencil and then I did this little magic trick that Dad had shown me ages ago. You’re not supposed to tell anyone how to do magic tricks. It’s one of the sacred rules of magic. So I can’t go into details here. Maybe later. But it’s this really simple trick where you stick just the tip of a pencil up your nose and then you pretend to sniff the whole pencil. The pencil doesn’t really go up your nose. It’s hidden behind your hand, but if you do it right – for instance, if you do a really big sniff – it’s really convincing. So convincing that when Nathan saw me do it, he gasped in fright. And then he laughed. He wasn’t rigid with fear any more.
He said, ‘How? How did you do that?’
‘Come down and I’ll show you,’ I said.
He swung his leg over. Held on tight and lay flat. I grabbed hold of his feet and guided him back into the loft. He was talking twenty to the dozen by now.
‘How did you do that? Where’s the pencil? Was that magic? Can you do magic? Are you magic?’ On and on like that. Never once said thanks for saving him from certain doom.
‘No. Of course I’m not magic,’ I said. ‘There’s no such thing as magic. It’s a trick.’
I was trying to get him to come downstairs so everyone could stop worrying and climbing up ladders to look for him. But he wouldn’t move until I’d proved I wasn’t magic by showing him how to do the Pencil Vanish.
OK, I’ll tell you how to do this now because this isn’t really a trick. It’s a skill. You use a skill to make a trick, just like you use words to make a joke. This skill is called ‘sleight of hand’. You don’t push the pencil up your nose; you let your fingers slide up the pencil and it LOOKS as if the pencil is going up your nose when it’s really just going behind your fingers. As long as you’re standing so that your audience can’t see behind your hand.
Anyway, as we were finally coming down from the loft, Nathan spots one of those kids’ magic sets sticking out of the corner of one of the unpacked boxes. On the lid was a little top hat, a pack of cards, a magic wand and the words Hey Presto Magic Set.
Nathan picked up the box. ‘Is this it?’ he said. ‘Is this where you learned to do magic?’
He opened the lid slowly, slowly, like it might be the last resting place of Captain Barbossa’s treasure.
And there, inside, was nothing. Just the plastic tray that the bits go in, the instruction book, one joke cigarette and a tube of fake blood. Apparently, back in the day, people’s idea of fun for all the family was smoking and injuries. I was not convinced that I could amaze or amuse anyone by pretending to smoke or bleed.
I said, ‘I can’t really do magic. Just that one trick. Dad taught me.’
When we moved house it was the middle of summer term. So I had to leave all my old friends behind and start in a new school where I didn’t know anybody. Everyone already had made friends. My first day I was refusing to go in, but Dad said, ‘I probably shouldn’t do this. I’m going to show you a foolproof way to make friends. Just don’t mention that you got this from me. OK?’ He took a pencil out of his jacket and taught me the Pencil Vanish.
That day, I walked into my new class where no one knew me. Everyone was talking in little huddles, or staring at their phones. One girl looked over at me. As soon as she did, I vanished my pencil up my nose.
The girl screamed, ‘Look what she did!!! Did you see?’
She came clattering through the desks to make sure that I was all right. Ten minutes later I knew everyone in the room. The first girl who’d screamed – Lily – she’s still my friend.
So the Vanishing Pencil is a cure for shyness and for getting stuck on a roof. Magic can be handy like that.
CHAPTER TEN
SCHOOL IS A TOUGH AUDIENCE
NATHAN:
The day Middy showed me the Pencil Vanish, that was like being given the answer book to life.
Middy’s house is like a cousins-only Center Parcs. You get to sleep in a tent in the garden. You have picnics instead of tea. Her mum and dad are always dead busy, so you nearly can’t get into trouble. At Middy’s I can be all ‘Wonder Time!’ and ‘Behold!’
Home is different. For one thing, at home you have to go to school. School is a tough audience. Or it used to be until Middy introduced me to magic. After that, everything was different.
I don’t like school lunch hour. It always seems to end up with me in trouble. I tried to persuade Miss Khoshroo to let me stay indoors at dinner-time. She said fresh air and sunlight would do me good.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘Why’s that then?’
I said the first thing I could think of. Sadly that was, ‘I’m a vampire, Miss.’
As soon as I said it I knew it was a stupid thing to say. This used to happen to me all the time. I’d say something stupid, then realize it was stupid. I was always wishing I could realize something was stupid before I said it. It would make life loads easier.
At break the other kids followed me round making hilarious blood-sucking noises. Someone even got a crucifix down off the classroom wall and waved it at me.
I was thinking, Right, well, I’ve said it now. I have to make people believe it. So next day I filled my water bottle with tomato juice instead of water, and stood in the middle of the playground chugging it. I used the fake blood from the Hey Presto magic set to make it look like blood was dribbling down my chin. It really did look gruesome. Kids were running everywhere, screaming that I really was a vampire.
Like I said, that’s kind of how magic works. You say something impossible or bonkers, and then you make it true. And people will believe you because in their hearts, they really want bonkers and impossible things to be true.
Miss Khoshroo didn’t believe it though. She came steaming over the playground the minute she heard the screams, demanding to know what the noise was about. Fury made her face all creased up like a walnut. ‘Oh what a surprise! The trouble is Nathan Wiley. What are you up to?’
I don’t know what made me do it, but instead of answering her, I took my pencil out of my pocket and made it vanish up my nose. Every angry crease in Miss Khoshroo’s face disappeared and her eyes went like saucers.
‘What,’ she gasped, ‘did you just do!?!’ She didn’t wait for me to answer. She just clapped. Just one clap. Like a happy baby. ‘How?’ she said. ‘Just how did you do that?’ By now other kids were crowding around to see what was happening. They all thought she was giving me another telling-off. Instead she said, ‘Do it again. Show the others.’
Now it’s not easy doing a Pencil Vanish twice because . . . well, first of all, the pencil has vanished. So you don’t have a pencil to vanish. Second of all, you’re stuck standing there with a pencil hidden in your hand.
I bent over and did this big, horrible, rattling cough, then pretended to cough the pencil up. The pencil shot across the playground, which made everyone scream in horror but then made them shout, ‘Do it again!’
So I did it again.
And everything changed.
I did this big, mucousy sniff for the up-my-nose bit, and this great gurgling cough for the cough-it-up bit. And all these people who’d been laughing at me and calling me an idiot, all of them suddenly thought I was a wizard.
Just because I knew how to slip a pencil behind my hand.
That’s real magic.
A good magic trick makes people surprised.
A great magic trick makes them happy.
It definitely made Miss Khoshroo happy. She told me to wipe the blood off my chin and come and show the other teachers. It was the first time I’d ever been in the staff-room. The staff couldn’t get enough of the Pencil Vanish. They were laughing and yelping like children. The woman from the library gave me a biscuit. From that day on, all I’ve ever wanted to do was surprise people into happiness.
Which is what we are doing here. I promised to bring back Blackpool Tower. And now we’re going to make it happen.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK
MIDDY:
At the end of every summer, the cousins all go home. The house feels really empty. End of summer is also the start of the Illuminations. Mum and Dad’s busiest time. So the house feels really, really, really empty. And, just to make everything a little bit worse, Nathan sent everyone a clip of him doing his version of the Pencil Vanish. Everyone loved it. Mum was all, ‘Have you SEEN this?!’
‘I taught him how to do it.’
‘Yeah. But not like this. This is BRILLIANT.’ She showed it to Dad.
‘Oh this is brilliant. Have you SEEN THIS, Middy?’
‘You taught me how to do that. And I taught him.’ ‘Yeah, but not like this.’
Until that moment, we all knew who we were.
Brodie was the rabbit cousin.
Nathan was the complicated cousin.
And I was the magic cousin.
Now all of a sudden Nathan was the greatest thing the world had ever seen, and what was I?
When another magician’s tricks are better than yours, be encouraged, not discouraged. It only means that there are more things to be learned, more wonders to perform.
Karabas the Modest, My Secrets Revealed
So I decided to learn a new trick. It was Dad who’d taught me the Pencil Vanish, so I started by asking him to teach me a new one. He said he didn’t know any tricks.
‘You taught me that one. The Pencil Vanish.’
‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘But anyone can do that. It’s the oldest trick in the book.’
‘There’s a book?’ I said.
‘Not literally. Although come to think of it, yeah. Probably. Probably there’s a book. Try the library.’
Our library closed down years ago and I’m not allowed to go to the one in town without a grown-up. But I remembered the book inside the Hey Presto Magic Starter Set.
The fake blood had gone – I guessed Nathan had nabbed that and was probably using it to get into bother at school. But the instruction book was still there – My Secrets Revealed by Karabas the Modest (Second-Best Magician of All Time).
I guess Karabas the Modest must have been the magician on the front of the book. They were so modest that their face was hidden behind a deck of cards. It was only a little book, but it had cracking tricks in it, and someone had written extra notes in the margins. They turned out to be really good too. Anyway, the first chapter was called ‘The Oldest Trick in the Book – Cups and Balls’.
Cups and Balls works like this . . . The magician puts a little ball down on the table. Then puts a cup over the ball. Then lifts the cup up again and the ball has vanished! Where did it go!?! Then the magician looks under the next cup. Nothing there. Puts the cup down and lifts it up again and now there’s TWO balls under that cup. Where did they come from? And it goes on like that – making balls appear and disappear. Making it look as though the balls are magically invisibly skipping from cup to cup. You keep the audience watching until they’re practically dizzy from trying to keep up with the balls. You have to keep them guessing, but you have to make sure they guess wrong every time.
You might think that because it’s the oldest trick in the book, Cups and Balls must be the easiest. But no. To do it properly, you’ve got to learn nearly all the techniques of magic – sleight of hand, French drops, good patter. I can’t tell you how to do it, but I can tell you how to make it work.
Practice.
A lot of practice . . .
As Karabas says on page thirty seven of My Secrets Revealed:
Remember, if you want to amaze people, it takes time. It takes many hours of practice to make one moment of wonder.
CAPTAIN JIMENEZ:
At this point the boy, Nathan, encouraged the girl, Middy, to demonstrate the Cups and Balls trick using three paper cups from the water fountain and some cookies instead of balls. He seemed to be under the impression that if I saw them doing a magic trick, I would believe the rest of their story.
The trick ended with the three of them each eating a cookie. At which point I realized the whole performance had been nothing but a way of hijacking my snacks.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I see folks doing tricks like that all the time in the old town area, doing it to gouge money out of tourists. If I’d seen you doing this downtown on Fremont Street, you would be in the Juvenile Detention Centre right now.’
The girl said, ‘Exactly.’
I said, ‘What do you mean, exactly? I’m telling you that if you don’t explain what you’re doing here, I’m going to put you in jail.’
She said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to do, but you keep interrupting.’
I perceived that the sugar rush from the cookies had made them tetchy and resolved to give them no more.
MIDDY:
So there I was with nothing but an empty box of tricks. What I did have though was LOADS of the most important thing – time.
In the back garden there’s a space between the yellow shed and the back fence. It’s full of old plant pots and stuff, which gave me the idea of doing Cups and Balls with plant pots and onions. It would be harder to do because plants pots are bigger and heavier than plastic cups. Hard is good because the harder it is to do a trick, the easier it is to believe in the magic. I tried to show Dad one day. Not being funny, I thought the way I did it was cracking. At the end he said, ‘You know that onion you were looking for – it’s under that plant pot.’
‘Ah. But is it?’ I lifted the plant pot. No onion! Tadah!!!
He said, ‘Right. My mistake. If you really want an onion, there’s some in the veg basket.’
‘Dad, I’m trying to show you a magic trick. There was an onion, but now there isn’t. Magic! See? No. You don’t see. Because you’re on your phone.’
Dad said, ‘I just thought you wanted me to help you look for an onion. Right. Is it over now?’
To be a better magician, you have to show your trick to someone to see if it works. That person needs to be someone you can trust. A friend who will tell you the truth. I ended up face-timing Nathan. D’you know what he said? He said exactly the same thing as Dad – ‘Is it over now?’
‘Haven’t you been watching?’
‘I have,’ he said. ‘It was good. But I can’t tell if you’re finished or not. A trick needs, you know, a Wonder Time moment at the end. Otherwise you could be stuck there all day moving plant pots around.’
‘I could say, Ta-dah! And then they’ll know it’s over.’ ‘You can’t just say, Ta-dah! You have to earn Ta-dah.’ I said, ‘Look, Nathan, this is really ancient, this trick. It was first performed in Ancient Egypt. You can see people doing it on murals on the walls of the tombs of the pharaohs. Being honest, the picture of that looks more like two bald men making sandcastles. But the point is that people have been doing this trick for thousands of years. In Africa, China, Japan, America and Blackpool. No one has ever complained about the ending. Until now.’
‘It still needs an ending. Like when I cough up the pencil.’
‘Which is horrible, by the way.’
‘That’s why it’s an ending. People are shocked. Also, they think it went into my skull and out of my nose, which is impossible, and that’s magic.’
So I thought – the audience is sitting there trying to guess how many onions there will be under the plant pot. ‘What if,’ I said to Nathan, ‘on the last time, I give them something they could NEVER have guessed.’
‘Like?’ said Nathan.
‘Like a banana,’ I said.
‘Apple is better,’ said Nathan. ‘A banana might be funny because bananas just are funny, but an apple is kind of the same shape as an onion. So some part of everyone’s brains would be telling you a story about how an onion had turned into the apple. Which is really magic. They’ll laugh when you’re shuffling onions, but at the end they’ll lean forward and go, ‘Oh . . . but that . . . How did that . . . ? Was that magic?’
CHAPTER TWELVE
LET THE MAGIC BEGIN!
MIDDY:
Normally there’s a lot of ‘look who’s grown’ and ‘back to back – who’s tallest?’ type of talk when the cousins arrive for the summer holidays. Not this year. Because no amount of human growing could even begin to compare with how much Queenie had grown. She was the size of a toddler. ‘Are you sure she’s a rabbit?’ said Mum. ‘She looks more like a small, fluffy cart horse.’
The first time I realized something was going on was when Lydia-next-door shouted over the fence, ‘Is this thing on now?’
‘What thing?’
‘The thing on the Tobago Avenue Neighbours News app.’ That was Lydia’s dad, who had just popped up behind her, carrying her little brother.
‘What Neighbours News app?’
‘The one that tells you what’s going on in the street. It said the thing was on today. Shall we just climb over?’
They were climbing over the fence when the doorbell went. Mum sent me to answer it. It was someone I’d never seen, asking me if she was too late.
‘Too late for what?’ I said.
‘Is it through here?’ She took herself through to the back garden. Before I could shut the front door, someone else arrived. Now there were more people at the front door. By the time I got into the back garden, there must have been about twenty people out there, mostly kids from up and down the avenue. They were sitting on the grass, waiting in front of the camping table where I’d set out the pots for my trick.
Lydia shouted, ‘It’s starting.’ Everyone stared up at me expectantly.
‘Go on then,’ whispered Mum.
‘But . . .’
In the introduction of My Secrets Revealed, Karabas the Modest says
Never underestimate the importance of boasting. If you tell people a trick is going to be astounding, they are more likely to be astounded. But remember, the most important part of the art of boasting is making sure you never, ever, ever boast about anything you can’t really do. Promise me you will not call yourself ‘the Great’ until you’re great.
