Human.4 Read online

  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.

  NOTE—"Coldplay"

  O’Brien makes a persuasive case for a "Coldplay" referring to a kind of dramatic or musical presentation characterized by being utterly bereft of any signs of genuine emotion.

  A recorder recital.

  Some truly mind-numbing dance routines.

  I shook my head.

  Poor Danny.

  "Are you going to be doing a turn this year?" my mum suddenly asked me. She actually wasn’t joking, although it could easily be mistaken for some kind of sick humor.

  I felt the usual prickle of shame pass from my stomach, up my spine, and on to my face, where it magically made my cheeks go red.

  "I don’t think so," I said quietly, and prodded some semicircles of carrot on to the far side of my plate with my fork.

  Just let it go, I prayed silently, please just let it go.

  No such luck.

  "He’s scared he’ll choke again," my idiot little brother Chris said, grinning.

  I scowled at him.

  "Christopher Straker!" Mum said sternly.

  With Mum, full name equals big trouble.

  Chris’s goofy grin fell from his lips.

  "Well, he did choke," he muttered, trying to defend his comment by rephrasing it slightly.

  Mum growled.

  Dad, it seemed, was utterly oblivious to the exchange and was still thinking about Danny’s star turn.

  "I’ve always wondered how stage hypnotists get people to do all those things," he said. "I mean, it has to be some kind of trick, hasn’t it? The people can’t really be hypnotized, can they?"

  "I’m sure I don’t know," Mum said. "Wasn’t there a man who was hypnotized and then died and carried on living because no one had given him the command to wake up?"

  "That was a film, dear," Dad said.

  "It was a story by Edgar Allan Poe," I offered.

  "I didn’t know the Teletubbies had first names," Mum said, and I rolled my eyes at her.

  NOTE—"Teletubbies"

  Many theories exist about this word, but none are particularly satisfactory. Or, indeed, convincing. Kepple in his essay "A Pantheon of Teletubbies" seems sure that it is a word of deep religious significance, referring to a collection of gods or goddesses almost exclusively worshiped by children, although his evidence is seen by most scholars as, at best, fanciful.

  "Danny says he hypnotized Annette," I said. "Made her think she was late for school."

  Mum screwed her face up. "That was a bit mean of him," she said.

  "Was she late for school?" my dad asked, missing the point, as usual, by about twenty-five meters.

  Chris pulled a face at me, but I turned the other cheek and ignored him.

  "The point is that she must have been hypnotized ," I said.

  Blank looks from Mum and Dad said I needed to explain a little further.

  "It’s the summer holidays," I said. "You don’t get ready for school when there’s no school to go to."

  "Oh yeah," Dad said.

  "And it was night time," I finished.

  Mum was looking over at Dad with one of the strange expressions that had become all too frequent in our house.

  Even the simplest, most innocent statements could be met with tension, with Mum and Dad always on the lookout for traps and pitfalls in everything said within the walls of the house.

  Because, I guess, they spent so much of their time setting them for each other.

  This is a portrait of the Straker family before the talent show.

  So, when things get crazy you have a suitable base for comparison.

  You see, Mum and Dad were "having problems", and were "trying to make a go of things". Both of those phrases, it turns out, are a sort of grown-up code for "their marriage was in trouble".

  My dad had left us almost a year before, and he’d only come back a couple of months ago.

  Anyway, to trim a long story not quite so long, Mum couldn’t cope when he was away. And so I stepped in to help her. I became the honorary "man" of the family, with responsibilities that I really didn’t want or need placed upon my shoulders.

  I ended up being responsible for Chris an awful lot.

  Which meant I ended up telling Chris off an awful lot.

  It wasn’t something that sat very easily with me.

  It certainly didn’t sit very easily with him.

  Mum was too emotionally drained to do battle with Chris, so it fell to me to make sure he did his homework, cleaned up his room, ate everything on his plate.

  I became a miniature dictator.

  I might have been helping Mum, but I sure as heck wasn’t helping myself.

  Or Chris, for that matter.

  Then Dad came back, begging for forgiveness.

  Things had been weird ever since he moved back in.

  Every silence, action or look held hidden meanings.

  And I suddenly wasn’t so important any more. I went back to being a kid again. Any power I had assumed was gone in an instant.

  I had been forced into a role that I didn’t want, so why should I feel bitter about being squeezed out again?

  Powerlessness, I guess.

  Chris doesn’t let me forget.

  He resents any attention our parents offer me, and rejoices in seeing me fail.

  Mum and Dad act as if nothing has changed, when even I can see everything has.

  That’s my family.

  Drive you absolutely crazy.

  But you miss them when they’re no longer here.

  When the bad stuff comes—and it always will—you look back on those moments with longing.

  The bad stuff was just around the corner.

  The talent show changed everything.

  Forever.

  That’s why I like to think about the way things were, however imperfect they seemed at the time.

  In extraordinary times, the ordinary takes on a glow and wonder all of its own.

  Chapter 3

  The talent show loomed.

  Danny kind of dropped off the radar and Simon joked that it wasn’t as if he was sitting in his room practising by himself—surely a hypnotist needed people to practice on.

  A few days before the show Dad even toyed with the idea of entering the show himself, announcing that his Elvis impersonation "wasn’t half bad". Good sense prevailed when Mum pointed out it wasn’t "half bad" because it was "completely awful". He sulked a bit, but I reckon he was a little bit relieved when the original bravado had worn off.

  The day of the show arrived and people got up just as they always had. They went shopping. They cleaned their cars. They read newspapers. They gossiped over garden fences.

  They made their way to the green.

  Simon, Lilly and I were near the back, cross-legged on the grass, drinking reasonably cold Cokes from the Happy Shopper, and watching Mr Peterson’s act with something close to horror.

  Mr Peebles was even more hideous than I remembered.

  A grotesque papier-mâché head, like a dried-up orange, sat on top of a square, unnatural-looking body. The dummy’s eyes sort of moved about—they were actually little more than very poorly painted ping-pong balls—but they only went from one impossible cross-eyed position to another.

  Every time Mr Peterson operated the thing’s mouth there was this horrible, hollow knocking sound that was often louder than the thin, falsetto voice that was supposed to come from Mr Peebles.

  To call Mr Peterson a "ventriloquist" is to insult the profession becaus
e there was no art to what he did. It implies that his lips didn’t move and there was at least an illusion that it was the dummy doing the talking.

  Not Mr Peterson.

  Mr Peterson’s lips always moved.

  They moved when he was doing his straight man routine as himself, and they seemed to move even more when he was speaking for his dummy.

  To be brutally honest, I don’t think Mr Peterson ever practises. Between one talent show and another I think Mr Peebles went back into his box and stayed there.

  And the weird thing is that at no point in the proceedings did Mr Peterson seem to draw any pleasure from his own act. He looked, by turns, utterly terrified, and on the brink of tears: as if this wasn’t entertainment but some strange kind of punishment he was putting himself through.

  Year after year.

  He stood there, sweating in the heat of the afternoon sun—the body of Mr Peebles hanging limply from his hand—wearing the wide-eyed look of a rabbit dazzled by headlights.

  "What’s up, Mr Peebles?" he said. "You look sad."

  The head of the dummy swiveled through so many degrees that it would have broken a real creature’s neck.

  "I get you don’t really care ooh-ats wrong with ne," came the reply.

  "Of course I care, Mr Peebles. Now, what’s wrong?"

  "I’ve groken ny gicycle."

  Mr Peterson tried to move the dummy’s head, and then spent a couple of seconds trying to stop the head falling off.

  The smaller kids were chuckling and occasionally roaring with laughter.

  "It’s like a traffic accident," Simon whispered to me, "it’s horrible, and wrong, but you can’t take your eyes off it."

  "The act?" I asked. "Or the whole thing?"

  Lilly leaned forwards. "You know Britain’s Got Talent?" She asked.

  I nodded.

  "They lied," she said.

  NOTE—Britain’s Got Talent

  One imagines a televised version of the talent show that Kyle is describing.

  In Stars in their Lives, Reg Channard writes: "The obsession with celebrity was an all-consuming illness, which had reached epidemic proportions by the early years of the twenty-first century. Adolescents actually stopped studying at schools and colleges in order to pursue this crazy fever dream of celebrity. The end result was that many menial, degrading jobs were taken by people who possessed no formal qualifications, but had reasonable singing voices and knew a couple of poorly choreographed dance routines."

  Mr Peterson stumbled on for a few more minutes that felt much longer, before he took his applause and shuffled offstage.

  The show’s host—Eddie Crichton, who ran the village’s sports and social club—wandered on to the stage looking mildly baffled.

  "Er . . . well . . . um…" he said, possibly trying to work out how year after year Mr Peterson failed to improve his act. "Now for a little bit of a change from the ordinary." He was regaining enthusiasm. "As we set off on a voyage into the mysteries of the human mind. I’d like to hear a big Millgrove welcome for . . . THE GREAT DANIELINI!"

  Simon nudged me in the ribs, really hard and raised his eyebrows.

  "Danielini?" he whispered. "What kind of name is that?"

  "Not a particularly good one," I whispered back.

  I looked around at the people watching, acutely aware of just how badly this could all go for Danny if his act didn’t match up to the billing he’d just been given.

  I could see Danny’s mum a couple of rows forwards of us watching the whole thing through the viewfinder of a tiny camcorder. I remember thinking how cruel it was to be filming him, and how at least I had been spared the humiliation of having my own talent show appearance filmed by my parents.

  For some reason I had a sudden urge to check the crowd for Danny’s sister, but I couldn’t see her anywhere.

  Maybe she was sensible and had found something more fun to do.

  Like hammering nails into her feet.

  Then Danny stepped on to the stage.

  Chapter 4

  You know sometimes you see a person you know, but there’s something different about them and you have to look again—do a double take—because you’re suddenly not certain it’s the person you thought it was. Maybe it’s a haircut that makes you suddenly uncertain, or a look on their face that you’ve never seen there before.

  And often you’re absolutely right, it’s not who you thought it was, it’s just someone who looks a little like them and you’re relieved that you didn’t call out their name.

  Or feel like a total ass because you did.

  When Danny walked out I had the same thing happen inside my brain. I mean I knew it was Danny, but then I doubted it and had to look again.

  It wasn’t just that he’d got himself a smart dinner suit that actually fitted him—although that helped. It wasn’t that his usually random-angled hair had been gelled and slicked back—although that helped too.

  It was something that was both of those things, plus something else.

  "He looks older," Lilly said, almost breathlessly, and Simon laughed at her comment.

  He was wrong to laugh.

  It was true.

  Danny did look older.

  Taller, too, because he’d lost his habitual slump.

  And his face had an intensity to it that made him look a whole lot wiser than the kid who was the constant butt of our stupid jokes.

  He stood in the middle of the stage as helpers lined up four chairs behind him. He was looking out across the audience with a confident expression that seemed spooky on a kid his age, almost as if we were seeing a glimpse of Danny as he was going to be, twenty or so years in the future.

  "Good afternoon," he said calmly and commandingly. "Welcome to my demonstration of the powers of the human mind."

  He unbuttoned his jacket and reached for the inside breast pocket, pulling out a brand new deck of cards. He took them from their box, cracked the seal and removed the cellophane, then mixed them up with a series of overhand shuffles.

  Danny was a master with a pack of cards—he practiced card magic in front of his bedroom mirror—and I was suddenly afraid that he had bottled out of his hypnotism act in favor of some more of what he’d been doing at the talent show for the last couple of years.

  "A deck of cards, new and shuffled," he said, squaring the deck in his hands. "But I only require nineteen of them."

  He counted off the top nineteen cards and threw the rest over his shoulder.

  "Although, actually, it’s not really nineteen cards that I require," he said, fanning the cards out in front of him so that we could only see their backs. "I need something else. Only the cards can tell me what."

  He continued to fan them out, and then turned them around to the audience with a flourish.

  Instead of the usual hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades there was a single letter on each card. Danny had fanned them out in such a way that there were gaps between certain cards that made the word breaks in the sentence the cards spelled out.

  The cards read: I NEED FOUR VOLUNTEERS.

  "Ah," Danny said, as if the cards had just solved a difficult problem for him. "I guess I need four volunteers. Any takers?"

  Chapter 5

  It was a good trick.

  Actually it was an impressive trick, and I know some of the sleight of hand and false shuffles that Danny used to do it.

  The rest of the audience thought it was pretty cool, too. There was a round of applause.

  At the end of it no one had their hand up.

  Danny was looking out across the sea of faces, but there were no takers.

  Moments passed and still no one volunteered. It felt like the longer it went on, the less likely he was to get someone to put their hand up. I realized that I was gritting my teeth and holding my breath.

  And still Danny looked around the audience, and there was a moment where the stage persona seemed on the brink of slipping.

  No Danny, I thought, don’t bottle it. />
  It was only then that I realized my hand had raised itself above my head. I had been thinking about how maybe I should put it up, but I hadn’t got much past the initial thought, and certainly hadn’t reached a proper decision yet.

  To this day I can’t remember lifting my hand.

  Danny saw it and the calm returned to his features.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, we have TWO volunteers," he said, and that threw me. He was looking over at me and gesturing for me to join him on stage.

  Then I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and realized that Lilly had her hand up too.

  She caught my eye, smiled an odd kind of smile, and then shrugged.

  If I’d known Lilly was going to stick her hand up, I’d never have volunteered. I only put it up because I thought it might, you know, spare a friend some embarrassment.

  Still, it was too late now. I couldn’t put my hand down and pretend it had never gone up.

  I saw Simon looking at me with a look like I’d grown an extra head or something.

  "That’s two people my own age," Danny said as Lilly and I made our way to the front. "How about a couple of brave adults to make up the numbers?"

  So there I was. There was Lilly. There was Mr Peterson—without Mr Peebles. And there was Mrs O’Donnell, an ex-teacher who served behind the counter at the Happy Shopper.

  Four volunteers.

  We stood there, in front of the whole village just about, and I reckon we were all wishing we had kept our hands firmly down at our sides.

  I could see my parents in the crowd. My dad was smiling and pointing. He had his phone out and was taking a photo. That’s all mobile phones are good for in Millgrove. I immediately felt self-conscious.

  Danny went down the line of four and welcomed us on stage and then got us to sit on four chairs, Lilly, then me, then Mrs O’Donnell, with Mr Peterson at the end.

  I felt awkward, and not just because this was the same stage I’d died on as a comedian, but simply because I was next to Lilly. There’s . . . oh, it’s complicated . . . an odd dynamic . . . er . . . look, I’ll leave this for now because I’m talking about Danny.