Days Like Today

by Rachel Ingalls

  Maria turned her face away at the sight of the flames. She looked for the way out. He pulled her closer and ran his hand over her hair.

  Professor Miracolo waved his wand again. The row of lights sank from sight. He repeated the action and they all came back. He singled out the candle at the end, the one at the beginning. It was easy to see that the flames were live fire; how did he do it? The audience applauded, even Maria.

  For the last, the culminating show of skill, the barker rolled a large, heavy-looking ball into the spotlight. He told everyone that this magical demonstration was the best of all, saved to the last, and only the professor – the highest genius in the world of magic – could carry out this extraordinary proof of mind over matter.

  Professor Miracolo emerged from between the dark curtains. He approached the ball, which reached above his knees. He bent over it, put his hands on it and then lifted himself up into a handstand. An outbreak of clapping stopped as he began to take one hand away. There was silence while everyone watched. He brought back the hand, placed it so that only one finger touched the ball and – in a move that looked both naturally easy and strangely untrue – put all his weight on that one finger and took away the other hand. He was balancing upside-down on top of a round rubber ball and using only a single finger of one hand. The audience was so astonished that for a while everyone simply sat and looked. Then people began to realize that no matter how impossible it seemed, the trick was worth a show of appreciation. They went wild.

  At the height of the cheering and stamping, the lights blinked out and came back almost immediately. The ball had disappeared and the professor was revealed standing between the announcer and the female assistant. All three of them bowed.

  *

  They came out into the sunlight and he repeated what he’d already said several times: ‘It’s impossible.’

  ‘I don’t understand it, either,’ Maria said, ‘but I had it explained to me once. Apparently you can give the illusion of practically anything if you cut off the real thing by a reflection from a mirror.’

  ‘But he was right in front of us.’

  ‘I know. It’s amazing.’

  ‘I really liked that,’ he said. ‘If I were ten years old, it would drive me crazy, but I think I’ve reached just the perfect age for magic.’

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘The House of Horrors. We were going in the wrong direction.’

  ‘And some of our bunch coming out of it.’ He whistled. The children turned their heads. He called to them. They came running to tell him about their adventures. Two of the girls admitted that they’d been scared in the House of Horrors but the two older boys said it was nothing – just kid stuff: not a single good thing; you could see the wires everywhere, like a puppet show.

  One of the younger boys didn’t say anything. He stayed behind when the others went on to the next entertainment.

  ‘Did you see Professor Miracolo?’ Maria asked him.

  ‘Oh, that was the best.’ He flushed with eagerness to talk about the magic. They walked together to the entrance of the House of Horrors. Another thing he’d liked, he told them, was the princess in the thimble, who could dance to the music of a guitar even though she was so tiny that you had to look at her through a magnifying glass.

  ‘You didn’t like the haunted house?’ she said.

  ‘Not as much. Everybody was screaming and it was dark.’

  ‘Want to try it again?’ he asked. ‘You can come with us. If you’ve already been through once, you’ll remember when things are going to jump out, so you’ll know what to expect. And you can tell us about the really bad ones ahead of time. I don’t want Maria to be upset.’

  The boy nodded. It was impossible to tell whether he was reluctant or overjoyed, but the answer came a few minutes later, after they’d taken their seats in the open carriage – the boy behind and he and Maria in front. His son’s voice filled with confidence as he began his commentary.

  I’ve got a rival, he thought. The boy’s hardly more than a child and he’s fallen in love with his father’s woman.

  The track was full of curves, sudden twists and bumps. As they creaked around the corner, ghosts wavered into their faces from the sides of the tunnel. All around them people burst into shouts and laughter.

  ‘There’s a very noisy skeleton next,’ the boy informed them.

  He was glad of the warning. The sound took him back to the days when he was in uniform. With almost the same boom and crunch, followed by a loud crack, a skeleton shot towards them, seeming at the last moment to fly over their heads. Shortly afterwards a shoal of smaller skeletons danced in a moving archway, giggling and gibbering above and beside the train; one of them had part of a skeletal arm in its mouth, with blood dripping down the sides of its bony jaws and blood smeared across the captive hand.

  He laughed, but his son didn’t. Out of consideration for me. Because of my lost hand. But one hand is like another once it’s bare of flesh; one corpse is like the others when it’s turned to bones.

  Every day he had to resist the urge to go out to the quarry. The temptation was almost unbearable, but he knew that that was the way people wrecked their lives: by picking at the details, over and over again, trying to cover their tracks and get everything right. It was better, even if you’d made mistakes, to leave it and not go back – to let the world move on. Time would overtake the past.

  He had to keep repeating the good advice he’d decided to abide by: not to go back there for at least a year and not to admit anything, ever. He’d report the disappearance after it was too late to tell one person from another; and then they’d have the incident officially closed. His wife had run off with an aid worker: that was all, unless somebody went down there and started to identify people, in which case it would appear that the man had probably tried to kill her but in the act of pushing her into the quarry, he’d fallen in too. Or maybe her assailant had succeeded in killing her and somebody from his gang of crooks had pushed him over the side later; the state of his head could be attributed to that, or even to something done to him by other people down there in the pit. That was as much as anyone would be able to guess.

  The train ran through cackling monsters, witches, cauldrons of boiling oil and bright, crawling things that appeared to be falling from the tunnel roof and landing all over the passengers: those were the most effective of all. Everyone tried frantically to brush the things off.

  The boy crowed with delight. He said, ‘There isn’t anything there. It’s like pictures. They don’t stay there when you’re in the light.’

  Laughter overcame the sounds of distress. What had they been worried about? Maria too laughed heartily, secure against the arm he held around her. As the horrors came faster and with an ever greater excess of grotesque detail, the enjoyment increased. Everybody loved the ride, even the small children who had been brought in with parents. He remembered that his initial acquaintance with the place had been different, but it seemed to him that what made the difference was probably his own subsequent experience rather than any of the elaborate props and tricks of lighting added by the owners. Some of the dusty and faded monsters that worked on wheels or springs might have been the very same ones he’d met years ago. Yet they still had an effect on their audience. And on him. He was charmed. At the same time he was aware of how strange it was that – having lived through so many horrors – anyone should want to subject himself to this gallery of artificial terror. Was it a kind of protection, like a prophylactic medicine? The answer wasn’t that no one knew the difference between the true and the false; they knew. But they still needed magic. The delights of illusion were similar to the pleasure of imagining a thing true when you knew that it couldn’t be, or hoping for a marvelous event when you didn’t really think it could happen. The workings of memory too, like the magician’s sleight of hand, made you believe. You couldn’t go on living if you didn’t believe that through the power of heart and mind you could keep whatever you lost: that the part of y
ou that was good could transform and outlast even the chaos of war – that there could still be love and that love didn’t die.

  They had to shade their eyes against the light when they came out. Maria said, ‘That was fun. That was really nice.’

  He caught sight of Anna up by the gates. ‘See where Anna is?’ he said to his son. ‘Go tell her to stay there till we catch up.’ The boy ran off. Maria called after him, ‘Thanks for the guided tour.’

  ‘That kid is wildly in love with you,’ he said.

  ‘I hope so. In my condition I can use all the encouragement I can get.’

  He squeezed her to him and she turned up a smiling face. She breathed in deeply and then let the air out in a long sigh. ‘This is what I’m going to tell my grandchildren about,’ she said. ‘Days like today.’

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Rachel Ingalls, 2000

  The right of Rachel Ingalls to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–29847–1