The mid-year break normally flies by. This one didn’t. I guess there’s an irony somewhere in that. I imagine, for Gran, time was rushing past, but for me it was crawling. Einstein once suggested that time is relative depending upon the observer. I was living proof of that, confirming once and for all that old Albert was a smarty-pants.

It wasn’t that, under other circumstances, I’d be partying or hanging out at shopping malls or going on dates with attractive but personality-deficient boys around my age. As you might have guessed, this wasn’t part of the Grace McKellon lifestyle. So I did what I always did when I was at home, ignoring Mum. I practised my tricks and I dreamed up new ones and I slept and I ate and then put the previous day on repeat. So, no change. But also massive change.

Gran’s pain got steadily worse. She tried to hide it, but after a while that became impossible. Even the smallest movement brought a gasp. She took her tablets but it was obvious that they weren’t doing anything. One day Sonja came round with a contraption with a tube attached that she inserted into Gran’s stomach.

‘This is a syringe driver, Mrs McKellon,’ she said. ‘It’s a battery-operated pump that administers a controlled amount of painkiller. I think you’ll find it works much better than the oral drugs you’re on.’

‘Can I get it to give me an overdose?’ said Gran. I’m not sure she was joking.

Sonja smiled. ‘Not possible,’ she replied. ‘It’s tamper-proof. I’ll top up the medication daily, so really you should be getting the exact amount of pain relief you need twenty-four seven.’

The nurse put the pump itself into a small bag and placed it on the chair next to Gran. Then she gave me instructions on what to do with it when it was time for Gran to go to bed or get onto the toilet or have a shower. When she left, Gran was starting to doze.

‘She should definitely be more comfortable now, Grace,’ said Sonja as I let her out the front door.

‘I hope so,’ I said.

Maybe Gran should’ve been feeling better, but it didn’t seem that way. By the end of the school break I was having to help her on and off the toilet and in and out of the shower. It answered a question that had been simmering in the back of my mind. I could do it. In fact, it wasn’t revolting or even uncomfortable – well, not for me. I suspect it was for Gran. Each faltering step brought a sharp intake of breath. I had no idea how she felt about me seeing her naked, though I remembered what she’d said about dignity and how it was the last precious thing she owned. The thought made a small part of me break. As I rubbed her down with a cloth in the shower, I understood that her body was going to be mine one day, the wrinkled skin, the sagging breasts, the way time shifts and erodes and brings us to the point of collapse. But this was something I couldn’t explain to her. From her point of view it would’ve seemed patronising, even offensive. We both suffered, I guess, in our different ways.

And I felt our suffering brought us closer.

At night, I’d sometimes wake and hear her sobs through the wall that separated us. I’d think about going in, but I never did. There was nothing I could do and I sensed that this pain couldn’t be shared, it had to be endured alone. So, small though mine was in comparison, I hugged my own pain closer and in time I’d drift off.

In those two weeks I thought long and hard about what to do with Uncle Mike and the money he’d stolen from Gran. I thought about grand gestures. Now that I had his account details I could transfer the twenty k into my bank, withdraw it and hand it over to Gran, maybe in front of her son, who could do nothing to stop it. I’d invent some great trick where twenty-dollar notes would rain from the ceiling and drift into piles on the floor before the amazed audience. I smiled when I thought about the look on Uncle Mike’s face as he realised he’d been found out. And what could he do? He couldn’t complain without admitting he’d stolen it in the first place.

It was an attractive vision, but it couldn’t work.

The money would go back into Gran’s account and Uncle Mike would get it anyway once she died.

I could put it into my account to stop that, but that would make me the same as him – a thief. His bank would easily identify that I’d taken the cash, and what then? The police? A court case? Probably. Especially after Gran had gone and her son had control over her finances. And again, he’d get the money back, so all my efforts towards justice would be wasted.

I even thought about risking the police and taking the cash out into the main street of the town, perhaps getting a huge crowd and making the notes burn and twist through the air, videoing the destruction. That would feel good, and maybe I could take screenshots of his and Gran’s bank statements to prove he’d stolen it in the first place.

But it still wasn’t my money to destroy. It sure as hell wasn’t Uncle Mike’s, but it wasn’t mine either.

In the end, I arrived at a simple answer. It wouldn’t involve magic, unfortunately. There’d be no fanfare. Once Gran was dead I’d simply transfer the money, put it into a bag and dump it on the counter of the closest Cancer Council office. Would they have problems with accepting that amount of cash from someone who just breezed in? Maybe, but I’d worry about that when the time came. I thought I could make it work.

I did a few more tricks for Simon to post on TikTok. He’d shown me the post he’d done where he teased the ‘grand event’ coming in a couple of weeks. It made me laugh, which was good. Laughter had been in short supply recently. He’d set up his phone with a close-up of his face and the Amazing Grace banner behind him, and talked in these weird hushed tones about the great illusion that was coming. It would, he said, ‘blow everyone away’. Not that he had any idea what it was, except that it involved a swimming pool. Maybe I was getting emotional in my old age, but I felt some affection for him as I watched. He had faith in me, hence making himself seem like a dickhead in an online video. He had nothing to gain. For a moment I was tempted to rethink my view of human nature – that it is essentially nasty and brutish and driven by self-interest. I’d been fairly horrible to Simon, but he still did things for me without asking anything in return. Clearly I should be nicer to him.

Then I thought, stuff it.

He probably had an agenda. Everyone does.

Anyway, I did a few practice TikTok sessions and they were good, if I say so myself. I was learning something (and learning is key if you’re ever going to be a great magician): there is a fundamental difference between doing magic in front of a live audience who are distanced from the action and close-up magic in front of a camera. Yeah, okay, I already knew that intellectually, but now I had to really think about it and adjust my performances accordingly.

Conversations with Gran became increasingly bizarre. And increasingly rare. The painkillers being pumped into her system often made her sleepy, so she dozed in her chair for a good number of hours in the day. A few times I had to get her from the chair to her bed at about nine o’clock in the evening, which was her preferred time for shutting the day down, when she was barely aware of what was happening. She could hardly walk and I couldn’t really carry her, so we kind of limped along together, a weird hybrid creature, until I could get her into bed and pull the covers over her.

Increasingly, when I got up in the morning, I’d find that her bed was wet and I would have to strip it, wash the bedclothes and remake the bed. I told Sonja and she helped organise for some rails to be installed so Gran could get from place to place more easily when she had control of herself. And most times, she did have control. On many days she was her old self, sassy and rude and determined to do everything independently. Then she might fold in, like she’d given up. It was hard. Sonja organised a delivery of underwear that Gran could wear to bed that would help cut down the number of times I’d have to wash the bedding. That was good for me. It was tragic for Gran.

‘I’m travelling backwards, Grace,’ she said to me one time when she was feeling good. ‘That old cliché that at the end we revert to childhood. I’m in nappies now and soon I’ll be completely unaware, drooling and gooing like a baby. But babies come out of that stage. I won’t.’

‘Jeez, Gran,’ I said. ‘Cheerful shit.’

‘Do me a favour, Grace,’ said Gran. ‘In my bedroom there’s a book of poems by someone called Philip Larkin. Find it, will you?’

I did. It took some time, because Gran had a lot of books in her bedroom. Old people do. They’re probably the last generation that will. But I got it and brought it back.

‘Look up a poem called “The Old Fools”,’ said Gran.

‘Jeez, Gran.’

‘Stop saying “Jeez Gran” and just do it, will you, Grace?’

I did.

‘Now read the second stanza,’ said Gran. ‘You know what a stanza is, do you?’

‘I might be young, but I’m not stupid, Gran,’ I replied.

She smiled at that. ‘Read,’ she said.

‘Okay. What’s a stanza again?’

This time she laughed.

‘A verse. Read the second verse.’

I did.

‘At death, you break up: the bits that were you

Start speeding away from each other for ever

With no one to see . . .’

I closed my eyes.

‘Do I have to do this, Gran?’ I asked. My voice sounded strange, distant somehow.

‘Yes,’ she said.

I took a breath.

‘. . . It’s only oblivion, true:

We had it before, but then it was going to end,

And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour

To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower

Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend

There’ll be anything else . . .’

I slammed the book shut. What the hell was happening to me? Tears were in my eyes and I had no idea how they’d got there. But one thing I did know. I couldn’t read anymore. And I knew that Gran was dying and that she could ask for whatever she wanted and you’d have to be an arsehole to deny her anything, let alone reading a few lines of poetry from an old book, but I just . . . couldn’t. I couldn’t do it.

I ran into the bathroom and locked the door. Why the hell was I locking the door? Gran couldn’t make it here by herself. I almost laughed. But I couldn’t do that either. I wanted to cry. But that also wasn’t available. The tears had gone. I leaned against the wall and took deep breaths. After a few minutes I flushed the toilet and went back to the front room. Gran hadn’t moved. Of course she hadn’t.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Me too.’

There was silence for a minute or two.

‘I hadn’t thought about that poem in many, many years,’ she said, but it was almost like she was talking to herself. I kept quiet. Then she laughed.

‘Miserable old sod, Philip Larkin,’ she said. ‘If you think that poem was a bit gloomy, you should read “Next Please”. Makes “The Old Fools” seem like a barrel-load of laughs.’

‘He must have had them rolling in the aisles at literary festivals,’ I said.

That made Gran chuckle even more.

‘Read me something else, Grace,’ she said. ‘Something lighter. Choose a book from my bedroom. A novel. Your choice.’ Then she thought, before adding, ‘If that’s all right with you.’

‘It is,’ I said. ‘I’d enjoy that.’

It was enjoyable. I found a book – I can’t remember the title now, but it didn’t seem from the blurb to have anything to do with dying – and I read to her for two hours. It was peaceful, the way the words spilled into the air, a kind of silence despite the sounds. There was a small thought at the back of my head: that I was doing what Gran’s mother might have done when her daughter was tiny, reading stories because she couldn’t read them herself. And that made me think of the poem Gran had wanted to hear.

Time folding in on itself. Or feeding an endless loop of living and dying. Philip Larkin would’ve liked that.

When I woke up, with a start that dumped the book on the floor, Gran was asleep. It was time to make her some dinner she almost certainly wouldn’t eat, and then there was the routine of cleaning, tidying, showering and getting ready for bed. Another day over. Another step forward. For what it was worth.