by Johnny Mains
He put his hands together over his chest in an attitude of prayer and gave a miniscule nod to the crowd, Hindu fashion. He climbed into the coffin and lay flat as the undertakers screwed the lid back into place.
The crowd remained silent and still as the pallbearers lowered it into the bespoke grave. Sand was first piled in by a bulldozer, then flattened by spades – an irrationally or perhaps rationally disturbing experience for those of us watching, resembling as it did some laboriously drawn-out execution in some far-off barbaric fundamentalist dictatorship. Later on some bright spark had the theory that there was an escape hatch to a fully-fitted underground apartment kitted with plentiful food and drink, though how a ‘fully fitted apartment’ could have been constructed under the beach of a popular English holiday resort without anybody noticing is anybody’s guess.
Barely seconds after the spot was marked by a wooden cross, the magician’s face appeared back on the massive screens, showing us in a pre-recorded message that he had written something down and put it in a sealed envelope, handed to the Mayor of Seagate to place in a safe deposit box in a bank of his choice.
Close-up. ‘This envelope contains something vitally important – but it must only be revealed when the coffin has been removed from the grave after forty days and forty nights. Not before.’ Finally, and movingly, he said he believed he could perform the superhuman task he has set for himself, but Fate might have other plans – and that if he failed, he wanted his family to know that he loved them very much. ‘And Annabelle, what can I say? You are my rock, my sun, my moon. I will see you in forty days and forty nights, my darling, or I will see you in the afterlife. God bless you all.’
The end credits rolled – no music – as the camera tracked back from the grave, cross-fading to the ECG.
The woman with wind-tossed hair watched. Eyes behind sunglasses. Cheeks white. Lipstick red.
That night, when the crowds had dispersed and the production crew had drinks and canapés on the beach to celebrate, she left early. It must’ve been quite an ordeal for her, so I wasn’t that surprised. It must’ve been a strange sort of thing to celebrate, if you were her. I watched her cross the beach alone, leaving the penumbra of the television lights, her husband’s heart still pulsing with an even monotony in the air. When I went back to the hotel, there was no sign of her.
The next morning the cross was at an angle. Messages had been left there. Flowers, predictably. I guess security let them through the cordon. A trail of thin wires led from the grave to the trailer where the scientists had their equipment. The bass throb of the magician’s heart was still beating loud from the speakers. It had become slower over the first twenty-four hours, imperceptibly at first, the number in the corner of the screen flashing thirty beats per minute – technically well into bradycardia. Near it I saw Annabelle Fox drinking one of the coffees in polystyrene cups. She was surrounded by members of the production team, but she looked terribly alone.
Eventually I plucked up courage to sit next to her in the hotel bar, because nobody else did. She didn’t know my name, but knew I was one of the runners. I’d brought her those coffees enough times. She said she thought she needed coffee right now.
‘I love his shows.’ I ignored the fact she was tipsy. ‘What a great man.’
She laughed. ‘Nothing is what it seems.’ She could see I didn’t know why she said that, so changed the subject. Or did she? ‘You know, people talk about charisma, but they don’t really know what charisma means. Charisma is power. The power to make the other person, the weaker person, to do exactly what you want.’
‘Is it?’
‘Look at Aleister Crowley. You’ve heard of Aleister Crowley? Frater Perdurabo. Ipsissimus. Master Therion.’ I tried not to look blank. ‘Magick with a “k”. The Great Beast 666. Crowley wasn’t particularly attractive. Pretty fucking far from it. He was a repulsive, pot-bellied old goat – but he was charismatic in spades.’ Her eyelids were heavy. ‘He’d say to a friend, “Watch this.” And he’d follow a person down the street, make them faint to the floor by just willing them to. Just by staring at the back of their head. That’s real magic. Through Crowley – through Thelema. Tantric rituals . . . Sex magic . . .’ She looked at me lop-sidedly. ‘My husband is really, really interested in sex.’ Then she held me with a steady gaze, rolling ice cubes in her glass. ‘You’re interested in sex, right?’
‘Yes.’ I said without thinking.
She rose and swayed and pronounced the need to go to bed. My room was on the same floor as hers and I said I was tired too. By the time we got out of the lift I wasn’t sure what I’d heard or why I’d heard it.
‘Do you want to come in for a . . .’ She paused before the last word. ‘. . . chat? I was going to say “drink”, but I think I’ve had more than enough of that.’
Immediately I was through the door she started to undress and so did I. The bedside lights were on and neither of us switched them off. I told her I’d never felt so hard before. She laughed and pressed me down on my back, and knelt beside me and slipped a Durex over me with her fingertips. I came almost immediately but she kept me erect, a smile on her face the whole time. We switched positions and I felt her cold hands stroking my lower back then gripping hard as I drove in. She covered her mouth so that nobody could hear, but I snatched her hand away and held her lips with mine until we ran out of breath.
Afterwards I lay inside her and said I wanted to lie that way all night. She laughed like it was a childish but nice thing to imagine. Her skin burned against mine, but her hands and feet were like ice from a day on the beach. The soft thrum of his heartbeat touched the window panes as we lay in each other’s arms.
She said she didn’t like hotel rooms. They made her a bit crazy. I grinned, saying you can do crazy things in hotel rooms. She said Kelso liked the anonymity. The fact nobody could tell anything about you because a hotel room contained none of your belongings. None of your history.
‘He doesn’t like people knowing things about him. He’s a bit paranoid like that. He’s worried about the paparazzi, yes. It’s enough to make anyone think they’re being watched, bugged, hacked. It’s a terrible feeling. But it’s more than the Press, to him. They’re not the enemy any more. Everybody’s the enemy. I’m the enemy. He likes me to stay indoors as much as possible, or know exactly where I am every second of the day.’
‘Why?’
‘He thinks I might give away his secrets.’
‘What secrets?’
‘All kinds.’
She went and crouched at the mini bar, a sprig of damp pubic hair visible in the gap between her buttocks. She returned with shots of whisky emptied into tea cups from the hospitality tray.
‘When we were on honeymoon in Rome we woke up one morning and the bells were chiming in St Peter’s Square. We’d asked for breakfast to be delivered to our room, and pastries and coffee arrived piping hot. He got up, stark naked, and put crumbs on the windowsill. I asked him what he was doing. He said he could control which bird would peck it up. I giggled, but he said he meant it. He came back and sat cross-legged on the bed next to me. I waited for seconds, minutes. Then he smiled at me and clicked his fingers and right at that moment – that exact moment, a bird landed and started eating up the crumbs.’
‘What first attracted you to millionaire Kelso Dennett?’ I ran kisses up her arm.
She smiled. ‘Maybe his – manual dexterity . . .’ She took my hand and placed it over her private parts, guiding my middle finger towards her clitoris.
‘Obviously he likes to be in control.’
‘That’s what magic is. The ultimate control of the external world.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘He can’t control you now.’
I arched over to kiss her on the lips, but she stiffened.
‘I think you should go.’ She held my face in her hands. ‘I’m enjoying this too much.’
; ‘So am I.’
‘I mean it.’
She got off the bed and put her dressing gown on, pointlessly, not moving as she watched me dress.
‘What’s your name again?’
‘Nick.’
‘Nick, this never happened.’
‘Pff. Gone,’ I whispered before closing the door.
My own room was significantly colder than hers, so I turned up the thermostat. My mind was racing. I knew I wouldn’t sleep so I put on the bedside light to read, but the bulb was dead. I switched it off and on again, mystified, because it hadn’t been dead earlier.
I saw Kelso’s wife again at breakfast but she didn’t acknowledge me with so much as a glance. I also saw her later in the catering wagon – a converted double-decker bus. I wanted to sit with her, in fact I had a fantasy of touching her up under the table, or her touching me up – but that was impossible. There was no way any of these people could find out what had happened between us. What was I thinking? That she would call a meeting? Announce it from the rooftops?
I looked at the rota. I stood at my allotted station, by the coin-operated telescope overlooking the sweep of the bay.
The grave had almost lost any delineation against the rest of the sand. You wouldn’t have known where it was, if not for the circle of footsteps around the small cross, the fence of plastic ribbon attached to iron rods, the trailer containing the equipment, and of course the video projection screens and tall, angled spotlights, the kind you often pass on motorways when they have road works at night.
People gathered occasionally in small groups, pointing or taking snapshots or videos with their camcorders. Then they’d move on, or linger, sometimes not moving or speaking. Typical British holidaymakers with their anorak hoods up, peering around like meerkats, not wondering for a second about the metaphysics of life and death, wondering where to go to get a two course lunch for under a tenner.
As well as the channel’s news programme, which gave it a minute slot every day, there were teams from most of the terrestrial and cable networks, a few from America – where Kelso was big – and Japan, where he was even bigger. Then there was the locked-off CCTV cam pointed at the grave itself, uploading to the internet on a dedicated website, buriedalive.co.uk, where you could watch 24/7. The fact there was very little to watch was irrelevant. It was already going viral on twitter, with endless comments and retweets – (‘OMG loving @buriedalive’; ‘KD #completenutterorgenius?’; ‘Cant watch 2 spookie’; ‘Diggin the Kels’) – the numbers exceeding even the broadcasters’ high expectations. It was quickly obvious that this wasn’t just ‘event’ television, it was a national event, period.
The tall lights came on as the sunlight faded. The slippery rocks where Dad and I used to catch crabs reflected a shiny glow. The men in Hi-Viz vests protected the twelve-foot cordon around the grave, but they let through a little girl in a sky blue parka and matching wellies who stuck her little windmill in the ground next to the flowers before running back to her mum and dad.
When my shift was over I went to the hotel bar. Kelso’s wife wasn’t there. I waited. She didn’t appear.
I went to my room. Drifting to sleep, I started to hear scratching, like a small animal trapped in the cavity wall behind the head board. A bird but bigger than a bird. Perhaps a squirrel. Wings or paws scurried as if desperate to escape. I was annoyed because I knew it would keep me awake. Obviously something had fallen down the chimney and got trapped – then I heard a sudden bang, like a door slamming, and it stopped completely.
I pulled on my jeans and went out into the corridor. Nobody else was out there. Surely the person in the next room must’ve heard it too? I raised a fist to knock on the room next to me, but I could hear the TV on. They were listening to the live coverage of Buried Alive. I looked down the corridor to the far end. For some reason I expected Kelso’s wife to be standing there, but she wasn’t.
The next day I saw her overlooking the beach. I went up to her and leaned on the rail beside her. I wondered if she felt guilty and might move away, but she didn’t. It was almost as if I wasn’t there. Her eyes were fixed on the circus – by which I mean, her husband’s grave.
‘It’s getting to people,’ I said. ‘Anticipation.’
‘That’s what it’s all about.’ She took a deep drag on her cigarette. I wondered if it warmed her. ‘Will people lose interest, d’you think?’
‘They adore him. Look at the viewing figures.’
‘Things can change.’
‘Can they?’
‘Have you read the newspapers today?’
‘They can’t get enough of him.’
She exhaled a short, sharp breath. ‘You know what the papers are like. They build people up and up, then they like to knock them down. He’s a cash cow right now, yes. But they could turn against him without batting a fucking eyelid.’ She sucked the cigarette like an addict.
‘Are you afraid?’
‘For him? Yes, of course. Always. But he knows what he’s doing. He always knows what he’s doing, don’t worry. He plans it to the nth degree. You have no idea. He leaves nothing to chance, my husband the magician. He knows everything, absolutely everything that can happen, and will happen.’
‘That’s what I mean. Does that scare you, ever?’
‘What do you think?’
She crushed dead ash on the balustrade and brushed it off into the wind, her hair flickering and lashing like the torn shreds of a flag. I heard a rasping voice in my walkie-talkie and switched it off.
‘The woman from Hello magazine is waiting to do an interview. She says she waited all day yesterday, with her photographer. The office are hassling me to hassle you, but if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. Fuck them. I’ll tell them you’re not feeling well.’
‘Thank you.’
Over the next few days I decided not to intrude into her space. In my spare hours I slept or when I couldn’t sleep I watched old DVDs of Kelso Dennett’s magic shows: Bamboozler and Scaremongering and MindF***. You probably remember them all. I know I do. The man who wakes up to find all the doors and windows of his house have been bricked in. The girl made to think she can bend spoons. Even more astonishingly, the guy who wakes up in what he thinks is the past, thirty years ago, and meets himself as a child, having been hypnotised to think a lookalike boy actor was literally him.
This one set the tone for the outrageously ambitious and controversial ‘specials’ to come, some of the greatest ‘did you see?’ TV moments of all time. Abduction – inducing a UFO abduction experience. Guillotine – inviting an audience who believes in the death penalty to witness a beheading. Invisible – making a young woman think she is invisible for a day. Sleepwalkers – getting a dozen people to sleepwalk at exactly the same time, on the same night – making them climb onto roofs across the London skyline – a stunning image caught by a helicopter camera as the sun came up. In the minds of many it was the culmination of the use of technology and sense of ‘event’ that had become Kelso Dennett’s hallmark.
Then there was the infamous Easter Special, Crucifixion. Not hard to see why Christian groups were immediately up in arms. Badgered by the Press, the magician explained he simply wanted to find out whether the experience was as truly transcendental as some claimed. No slight to any religion intended. Nevertheless, lobby groups found a loophole in the broadcasters’ charter and the transmission was cancelled. It was rumoured that he went to Philippines anyway, going through with the ritual without the presence of cameras. However there were cameras at Heathrow on his return, to film him – as I saw now – getting off the plane, hobbling, and with bandages round his hands.
I paused the picture as the phone rang. It was Annabelle’s voice asking me to come to her room. I left the DVD in the player and went. She was already naked and her first kiss as she captured me in it tasted strongly of white wine. She almost gnawed off my li
ps, tore out my tongue. I wanted to do it the same way as before but she had different ideas and got onto the bed on all fours.
As we lay afterwards in our salty sweat, I asked her how she’d got the long, puckered scar I’d felt across her shoulder blade. She said her mother always told the story that when she was born she shot out so quickly she hit the bed post.
‘Unlikely.’
‘All right then. My father said I was an angel come down to earth. And that’s where they had to cut off my wings so that nobody would notice. You prefer my father’s version?’
‘What about the other wing?’
She laughed and kissed my bare chest. I thought I could hear my own heart beating, but it wasn’t. She didn’t need to say anything.
I sat up and pulled on my socks and underpants. The sliding door of the closet was half open. Beyond my bisected reflection I could see a row of Kelso Dennett’s suits on hangers, all black, all identical. Black patent leather shoes arranged perfectly on the floor.
‘Nick? Stay.’
On sentry duty, I looked down at the grave, a mandala-type geometry incised around it by a myriad of footprints, now. The print place in Church Street had the enterprising thought of printing Buried Alive T-shirts and were doing a roaring trade from a stall next to the fishing boats and cockle vendor. Groupies descended, some booking into B&Bs for the whole forty days. Others, the vultures of the tabloids for instance, seemed to be hovering in morbid expectation, eager for him to fail, to die. I thought about him dying too. I thought about him lying in complete darkness in that coffin under the sand and not coming out. I thought about that a lot.