Chapter 1: The Shopping Centre

The old man looked to be almost on his last legs as he walked with the aid of a stick from the outside into the open thoroughfare of the enclosed town centre shopping centre. Under the weatherproof cover of the huge glass dome sheltering the two levels of shops, customers were able to seek their purchases in relative if crowded comfort. He took off his ancient leather hat and shook off the fresh rain drops from the rim before looking around and checking his bearings. He looked as if he hadn’t been here for some time.

The feint upward curl to his lips seemed to register the faintest impression of satisfaction as he noticed that the elevators and escalators were running, probably pleased that he wouldn’t have to use the stairs if he needed any of the stores on the upper floors.

He stopped perusing his surroundings when his eyes alighted on a young man performing card tricks in front of a small audience of mostly children and parents, maybe a few silver-haired grandparents in the mix too. The old man’s head slightly nodded as if recognising something from his past and then he shuffled forward towards the impromptu street entertainment.

Regular shoppers at the mall were accustomed to a wide range of performers using this area of space to entertain and amuse passers by. Anyone willing to pay a small annual licence fee to the council could book the space; unlicensed performers were swiftly moved on by the shopping centre security.

The illusionist was a young man with a scruffy week-old beard and longish tousled red hair, wearing casual street clothes. He had an open honest face and attractive smile, the sort of face that looked trustworthy. He had placed a beanie hat on the floor for the reception of coin donations and behind the hat her performed card tricks for the passing shoppers, some of them pausing long enough to watch one trick, others a short series of them.

The old man watched a couple of tricks and smiled, as if he enjoyed the young man’s performance, appreciated his skills and his easy rapport with the crowd, particularly the children, who looked fascinated.

His current trick, the old man noticed, was the simple “palm the controlled card” trick which he would finish by plucking the very card selected by the punter from his trouser pocket.

One of the kids in the audience selected a card, and showed the 3 of clubs to the rest of the audience, before the illusionist returned it to the pack. The performer shuffled the pack, skilfully controlling the position of the selected card, revealing to the punter and the audience that the selected card was neither on the top or bottom of the pack and then he reached into his trouser pocket to delicately pick out with thumb and forefinger a card with its back to the audience.

The old man smiled more broadly at this point and made the smallest of gestures with his gnarled index finger of his free hand that wasn’t holding onto his walking stick.

The illusionist revealed the card to the expectant audience, most of whom giggled at the result. The illusionist turned it around to look at it.

It was the Joker card, although the illusionist really had no idea what the selected card was, he had never seen it, but he knew with absolute certainty that there were no jokers in his deck of cards, in any of his decks of cards. He looked back at the smiling audience.

“This is not the card?” he asked.

“No!” several people replied as well as the disappointed kid who had picked out the original 3 of clubs. The kid really wanted to be impressed, after all, he had stuck his neck out and ventured forward to volunteer to be the illusionist’s temporary assistant for this trick. Several couples and individuals in the small crowd turned away, including the old man, who waved his hand at drug illusionist as he continued his walk towards the escalators.

The illusionist looked at the card again. His eyebrows twitched as he recognised the card.

“Wait!” he cried to the small audience that he was rapidly losing, “Is this the card?”

He turned the card over to reveal to the crowd still watching, that it was no longer the Joker but the 3 of clubs.

The kid that picked the card and been watching the scene intently, jumped up in the air, “Hey, that’s way cool!” he yelled, his face full of toothy grin. Then with quiet awe the kid asked the illusionist, “How’d you do that, mister?”

“Magic, kid, pure magic.”

Most of those shoppers that had turned away for a moment, turned back. They had all seen the 3 of clubs being selected, then the flourished Joker, before finally the 3 of clubs reappeared again. He now had their attention. Coins and a couple of notes appeared in his hat, by generous hands, not by magic.

The illusionist noticed that the old man with the walking stick had never looked back, the only one of his audience not to.

The illusionist’s eyes narrowed. He had seen that Joker, that unexpected and impossible Joker, something that never happened before, couldn’t happen, ever since he had perfected and started showing this trick in public. This trick was a reliable standard. He knew his cards and his audiences and that old man was the only variable in the stack.

“Sorry, folks, that’s the last bit of magic from me today, I’ll be back here same time tomorrow, so tell all your friends.”

He swiftly gathered up his coins in the hat and chased after the old man, but he had lost sight of him while he cleared up. Where did he go? That old man couldn’t move that fast, surely?

Ah. There he was, the illusionist noticed, halfway up the escalator, standing to one side being borne slowly upward. The performer ran to the escalator and walked up to the top, where the old man stood and waited for him, leaning both his hands on his walking stick, but standing with a ramrod straight back.

“What did you do old man? What did you do?” asked the breathless youngster to the old man, “Mass hysteria, hypnosis or what?”

“Undoubtedly ‘or what’ I would think, young man,” the old man replied calmly, measuredly, in a voice that was old but crystal clear as a bell. “Come, treat me to a beverage in the café yonder, for some reason I feel about ready to unburden my story on you. I think in your line of business, you’ll find it interesting.”

“Yeah? Why should I treat YOU to a coffee? I’m the entertainer here, you should treat me.”

“Sure, I could treat you, I could even teach you, but I don’t think you’d learn, you’re not ready to learn my secrets, so I’ll just go on my way. See you around, kid, when you grow up.”

He turned and started to shuffle away from the young man, each shuffle punctuated with the click of his silver-tipped cane on the porcelain tiles.

“Wait,” the young man implored, looking at the crumpled notes and loose change in the bottom of his folded hat. He quickly estimated that he could afford a couple of rounds of coffees and even have enough over for a cheap light lunch. The day was not a total loss but there were more donations than he was otherwise used to although it still looked like his gamble to perform and build a following hadn’t paid off and the finances were starting to pinch. Maybe the old man did have something he wanted to hear. What would be the harm?

“Yeah, I can treat you to a drink, old man.”

The old man turned and extended a gnarled hand, “Moses Grant, son, pleased to meet you.”

“Ty Barker,” the young man grinned, “short for Tyler, it was pretty popular twenty-three years ago as both a boy and girl name, I got a lot of stick at school and that got me a few cuts and bruises. Ty sounds a little less girly and needed less defensive footwork on my part.”

“Huh! Well, both of us have names we might not give thanks for!” snorted Moses, then smiled, “I came from a large family, with Jeremiah the eldest, Elijah and Noah came next, then me, followed by Jessica, Miriam, David and Zachariah. I was always kind of envious of David.”

Moses sat in a booth in the café. “I’ll have a lapsang souchong, please young fella,” he requested. Ty collected the beverages from the self-service counter.

“So,” Ty asked, once they were settled. He had brought over a cup of black tea for his guest and a frothy coffee with a pattern of chocolate dust in the leaf shape of the café’s logo for himself, “how did you play funny games with my magic trick?”

“Your trick is just a trick, son, an illusion, it’s not magic. What I did was magic.”

“Yeah? So I’m just a sad trickster and you’re a real magician? Someone with the gift of magic at his fingertips?” Ty had played the scene back in his head and all the man did to get his attention was a waggling finger, a dismissive wave, and walking away while everyone else walked towards him.

“Magic is not a gift, Ty, to be honest it’s a curse. It’s just that you don’t realise what it really is at first, or even for a long while.”

“You think? What magic can you do, Mr Moses, turn water into wine, a walking stick into a snake and back again?”

“What’s that? A walking stick into a snake? What made you say that?”

“It was a trick I remember seeing that my grandfather recorded off the tv onto VHS, back in the days of black and white. It’s on YouTube too, in colour, shot from a different angle. It was a great trick. My grandfather was a semi-professional magician in his day and he taught me all my card tricks, passing his skills on when his hands were almost getting too shaky to show me. He made me work at each trick for hours on end until I got each one right.”

“You’re good, kid. I could see that from what I saw. You worked your little audience well, and you may end up being one of the few that can earn a reasonable living from performing, but believe me it’s hard, really hard to make a decent living doing tricks. Most illusionists just show off at parties and live a frustrated existence waiting for a chance that will never come. You got a family, Ty?”

“Yeah, a wife and two young girls, 3 and under 1.”

“And you can support them doing this?”

“Yeah, I can support them ... but I only do these tricks part-time. I’m an electrical contractor, so I can switch my hours around to get down here for my four one-hour rented slots a week.”

“Four slots? You seem obsessive.”

Ty shrugged.

“Well, son, I was just like you once. My obsession with conjuring cost me my first marriage and I barely scraped a living doing it full-time for a couple of years until I discovered I was cursed with real magic. I was married too and had a baby girl once. I did the card tricks and sleight of hand, made both my wife and kid laugh. But then I lost my job during the oil crisis — don’t worry, it was well before your time —and I tried to do conjuring tricks for a full-time living. I even worked for a while as a clown, with face paint and baggy trousers, making balloon puppets at children’s parties. Couldn’t make a living at any of it and my wife wanted a 9 to 5 husband doing a well paid professional job, and I no longer fit her bill. So she divorced me.”

“That sucks. I wouldn’t want to lose my family.”

“Neither did I at the time, Ty. I had no choice. I argued with her until I was blue in the face, but I’d already been replaced by a new man in her life, the paperwork done and we were finished.”

They sat quietly for moment.

“So,” Ty started, “the magic gift, that you call the curse?”

“Yeah, sorry, lost in my thoughts there. It happens a lot now. I suppose it’s really all I’ve got left, memories, regrets, some good times ... anyway, I didn’t realise it was a curse at first. I used it and made a killing, really made a killing, yeah snakes and canes kid, snakes and canes, but that was a lifetime away, the cost was too great. It’s a sorry tale young man. You sure you want to hear it?”

“Sure, I’ll get another coffee, you want more tea?”

“No, I have trouble with my prostate if I drink more than one cup of tea at a time. Most of the public loos seem to closed nowadays, or at least they are when I need them. Anyway, it’s my round, so let me top that one up for you.”

He stirred the air with a slight circular movement of his right index finger. Ty watched as his coffee cup half filled from the bottom up with steaming black coffee, then topped up to the top with frothy milk and even the chocolate shape materialised on top of the froth. He looked at the cup then the old man, who nodded back to him. Ty picked the cup up with a slightly shaky hand, the chocolate dust leaf shape wobbling on the frothy surface.

He sipped, “Damn, that’s hot!” he said, the froth forming a white moustache on his unshaved upper lip, which he wiped off with the back of his hand. “That’s no illusion, is it? Am I going mad?”

“No, Ty, that’s magic, real magic.”

“And it even tastes like the real thing.”

“Of course it does, all I am doing is making a copy of what you had before, using the same ingredients in the sequence I recall from memory. It’s a logical outcome if you believe in magic and accept that it is simply a natural phenomenon that, for some unknown reason I can tap into.”

“Can you do that all the time? You know, magic stuff, I mean.”

“Yes and no, son, yes and no. Magic, if it’s within you, gives but also it takes, and when it takes it takes too much, it can take everything from you. It made me a successful performer for the only time in my life but it can take you over and you have to pay the piper eventually. I hardly ever use it now. I’m afraid to, to be honest.”

“So how did you get this gift—”

“The Curse, Ty, it’s nothing like a Gift.”

“OK, curse. Where’d it come from? When did you know you had it? Did another magician pass it on to you? Can you pass it on, you know, before you, er, pass— er, past performing it?”

“That’s a lot of questions and, to be honest, I don’t know all the answers. Look, first of all, I have no idea where it came from, or how long I had it until one day I used it, and used it completely accidentally.”

“How was using magic an accident?” Ty asked, shaking his head in disbelief.

“I was doing what you were doing, conjuring tricks in front of small groups in lounges, by the poolside and during the evening meals. I was working as an entertainer on a cruise liner, week after week, performing in front of a different crowd of holidaymakers every week to ten days. Not working as a stage performer, but entertaining at tables, where people were relaxing. There were other acts, jugglers, singers, it was a gig for a season of cruises until the entertainment team wanted a change for the next season. That liner I was on was one that sailed between England all the way down the west coast of Africa, round the Cape up to Durban and back again, ten days each way. Twenty days and sea and four days off before doing it all again. I was single and it was the life I led at the time, having been divorced as I said and forced out of my home. Plenty of food and drink, lots of eager ladies to spend time with and all with no consequences. I enjoyed what I could and that made me stupid and careless.”

“So the cruise liner let you set up and do tricks and virtually beg for loose change money like I’m doing here at the mall?”

“No, no, I was employed by the liner business, basically working for low pay but with full food and board and a little pocket change by way of tips. I had switched my bookings agent immediately after the divorce. The one I had while working part-time turned out to be rubbish. My new agent Donna Sharp got me some great gigs, including two summer seasons on cruise liners, one in the Atlantic, the other in the Caribbean, then she followed up with theatre bookings for several years after.”

“That’s what I’m hoping to build.”

“Well, I’ve been retired for a while but I may still have a few contacts still active. Anyway, I was among a team of various performers provided to entertain during dinner, in the sun lounges during the afternoons, and we staff entertainers were also required to dress in evening wear and dance with the ladies during the evenings well into the night. The cruise liner work I found was too free and easy. I soaked up the free sex, the duty-free booze and one day, I mucked up a trick because I hadn’t prepped probably and the object to be revealed wasn’t in my pocket, simply because I got too careless and forgot to put it there. Then suddenly, like your Joker and the 3 of Clubs, the object I needed materialised in my pocket. It didn’t really register in my befuddled brain the first time it happened, but then it kept reoccurring and somehow I caught on.