I met up with Simon once Gran was safely settled in the hospital. Uncle Mike had stayed with her when we’d got all the paperwork done and there wasn’t much I could do anyway, other than wander around and get depressed. I told her I’d come to visit that evening. She tried to talk me out of it on the grounds that it would be very boring, but I insisted. Then she clarified that it would be boring for her, but I still insisted.

I did, however, make the solemn promise not to bring her any grapes.

‘Want to get a coffee or something?’ said Simon. He had on a ghastly T-shirt with bright primary colours in geometric shapes and he wore sunglasses on the top of his head. Clearly a hopeless case.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Ready to do some videoing?’

He opened a small canvas bag that was hanging from one shoulder and pulled out a telescopic tripod, the kind that phones can clip into.

‘I’m doing Media Studies in Year Twelve,’ he said, looking really pleased with himself. I sighed and shook my head.

‘Come on, James Cameron,’ I said. ‘Let’s get this done.’

We’d met up in the main street of town. I say main street, but that’s giving it more credit than it deserves. A couple of hundred metres of bitumen with about a dozen shops, most of them sad specimens. A florist that mainly deals in wreaths for funerals, a cafe with a seriously bad-tempered owner who gives the impression that customers giving him money is a constant source of irritation, a small supermarket where George Clooney gets his cut-price ice cream and a pub whose silent customers stare at the TAB on large screens and scratch their long, greying beards or their arses. Sometimes both at the same time.

We made our way towards the cafe. It was the only place where people under fifty might congregate. The sun was doing its best to put on a show, so there were a couple of tables outside with customers sipping coffee and staring at plates of shrivelled lemon meringue. I stepped up to the first table – a man and a woman, both about thirty years old – and put on my best smile. In the interests of accuracy, however, I should point out that even my best smile isn’t likely to win any awards.

‘Would you mind if I videoed you watching me do some street magic?’ I asked.

‘Piss off,’ said the man. The woman didn’t even raise her eyes.

‘I’ll take that as a maybe, then,’ I replied.

‘Piss off,’ he said again.

The table on the far side of the crumbling verandah produced better results. Not by much, though. This was a family: a man and a woman somewhere in their mid-twenties and a small kid with large eyes and unkempt hair. He looked like he was wearing a dark cloud as a hat. I repeated my question.

‘Will it take long?’ said the woman.

‘Couple of minutes,’ I said.

She glanced at her watch.

‘I suppose,’ she said. The kid with cloud for hair stared at me impassively.

I’d watched so many YouTube videos of Dynamo doing exactly this kind of thing. He always seemed to be surrounded by cool young people who were amazed at his tricks. He had to beat off volunteers. There’d be yelling and hollering, whoops of ‘That’s amazing, man’ or ‘Whoa, that’s awesome’, before he’d wander off down a crowded LA street leaving the gobsmacked in his wake. As far as I could remember, no one told him to piss off or said I suppose with all the enthusiasm of someone having root canal treatment. Then again, he was Dynamo. I was Amazing Grace and no one was amazed. Yet.

I sat opposite them at the table, while Simon set up his tripod and phone. Before he started filming, I asked the man if I could borrow his mobile for the trick. He’d been staring at it like it held the secrets of the universe, so he was the obvious choice. He didn’t seem happy about letting it go but finally handed it over with a grunt.

I took a large plastic bottle of water from my bag and put it on the table. Simon gave me the thumbs up. Showtime.

‘Can you check this bottle?’ I said to the man. ‘Make sure there’s nothing out of the ordinary with it?’

He did. Grunted again and put it back down. I wasn’t sure how grunts would come across on a TikTok video, but my options were limited.

I picked up the bottle in my left hand, tipped it upside down to show the water sloshing around. Then I took his phone in my right and brought the one up against the other. Slowly. I did this twice. The third time I slammed the phone against the bottle and there it was, suspended in the water. I put the bottle and its drowning contents back on the table.

To be fair, the man was amazed. He picked up the bottle and stared at it, tilted it a bit. It didn’t matter what he did, the phone bobbed in the water.

‘What have you done to my phone?’ he cried.

I should point out here that there was another word – between my and phone – that Simon would have to edit out later on the grounds it wouldn’t be appropriate for my target audience, but I reckoned he could do that.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. I took the bottle from him and shook it gently. Before our eyes, the phone started to dissolve, giving off a small and steady stream of bubbles. I kept the bottle raised and hoped that Simon was focusing on it. If I do say so myself, the visual effect was pretty hardcore. In less than ten seconds, the phone had vanished and I was holding, to all intents and purposes, a simple bottle of water. I put it down.

‘Where’s my phone?’

More expletive deleting needed. The man was getting increasingly agitated. I felt it was wise to bring the trick to a conclusion, not just because brevity is key in TikTok videos but also because I was getting dangerously close to becoming a victim of violence. Phone rage, perhaps. There was something in the man’s eyes. On the plus side, the cloud-haired kid looked at me like I was Gandalf the Grey from The Lord of the Rings. I could’ve told him that all the Gandalf lookalikes were next door staring at the TAB screen and scratching their parts, but I didn’t have time. Instead I took the bottle, shook it violently and put it back on the table. The water was gone, the phone was inside. The time on its display ticked over to the next minute. I hoped Simon had caught that.

The man looked at the bottle, looked at me, looked at the bottle again.

‘Amazing,’ he said.

‘True,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m known as Amazing Grace.’ I’m going to be honest here: I was a bit proud to have got that line in.

I’ll pass over the next bit, since most of it ended up on the cutting-room floor. Of Simon’s editing app. The man wanted to know how he could get his phone out of the bottle. He tried to find a slit in the plastic but there wasn’t one. In the end, I had to take a steak knife from another table and cut the top off the thing. The man turned the phone around in his hands, checked that it was still in working order. Then he shook me by the hand and made a few suitably awestruck comments on the trick. If he’d known the amount of work that had gone into it, he really should have been more enthusiastic, but I couldn’t complain. As an encore, I did a few simple things for the kid, including producing a salt-and-pepper set from the bird’s nest of his hair.

Then the owner came out from the cafe and told us in colourful language to be on our way, that we were bothering his customers. The family informed him that they weren’t being bothered, so he got stuck into them instead. As Simon and I left, I’m fairly sure the family was being banned from ever coming back. Judging by the state of the lemon meringues, he was doing them a favour.

Simon didn’t say much as we drove home, but he kept glancing at me from time to time. Finally he opened his mouth.

‘Are you going to tell me how you did that trick?’ he said.

‘Absolutely not,’ I replied. ‘Maybe you can work it out for yourself.’

But I was fairly confident that he couldn’t. It was a good trick and I had spent a lot of time on it. I just hoped it would get me a few followers on social media.

It was very nearly a full show for Gran’s visiting time. When I turned up, Uncle Mike and Mum were already there, sitting by her bedside and muttering the kind of stuff that families do at the bedsides of other family members. The sort of thing that runs out after ten minutes and leaves you without inspiration for the following fifty. I’d been in this situation before when Mum was in hospital for alcohol poisoning. Jake wasn’t at Gran’s bedside, of course. That was good. He wouldn’t have known how to behave.

There were only two chairs, both occupied by my mother’s and uncle’s respective bums, so I sat on the edge of Gran’s bed and tried to catch up. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a kind of eagerness in Uncle Mike’s body language. Mum just looked like she needed a drink.

‘So how are you, Gran?’ I chipped in.

‘I’ve got cancer,’ she said. ‘They told me this afternoon. Nothing to be done. Six months to live. If I’m lucky.’

There was a stunned silence.

‘And don’t call me Gran,’ she added.