I want to tell you about Dagobert Roehmann, Mac Norton, Hadji Ali and David Blaine.

Bear with me on this. It’s important.

All magicians, but with a speciality (okay, Blaine does all sorts of amazing stuff, but . . . well, bear with me).

Dagobert, presumably working on the assumption that with a name like his he was unlikely to be remembered, or even pronounced properly, took the stage name The Great Waldo. Much easier to remember, if slightly up himself. The Great Waldo would produce live rats from his mouth in his shows. He produced other things, but rats, apparently, were the go-to. He’d have a cigarette between his lips, smoking happily, and then a live rat would appear in his mouth. Followed by another one. And another. This was a while ago, when magicians could smoke on stage. And rats, it would seem, though I guess they were passive smokers. The crowds went wild. Maybe the rats weren’t so pleased, but there’s no record of their reviews.

Mac Norton was known as the human aquarium because he would do pretty much the same as Waldo but with fish and frogs. He liked bringing up goldfish, which he would spit out into a bowl where they would swim around . . . I was going to say ‘happily’, but perhaps that would be a stretch. Hadji Ali, wisely, one imagines, gave live critters a miss entirely. He specialised in spewing petrol onto a flame, which would then erupt, and, without missing a beat, he would promptly put the fire out with gushes of water pouring from his mouth. Useful, I suppose, for neighbours’ barbecues and random acts of arson.

David Blaine, like I said, is a marvel and can do the most outrageous tricks. Cards, vanishing things . . . he can do it all. At some point in his career, thinking that he should do something more outrageous, he channelled his inner Great Waldo. Or Mac Norton. On The Tonight Show in America, he shocked fellow guests and the presenter by regurgitating a frog, which he spat into a glass where it sat, doing frog things, clearly alive and possibly dreaming of lily pads.

It’s quite a spectacle, seeing a live frog appear in someone’s mouth, but the answer is obvious, right? Simple sleight of hand. Using misdirection, he slips the frog into his mouth and then spits it out. That’s what I did with the card in my TikTok video at the library. It’s done by nearly all magicians at some stage because it looks really cool and it’s simple to perform. Most times it’s just having something tucked into your cheeks. The rest is simple showmanship.

But none of those magicians used sleight of hand.

Their magic wasn’t magic at all. It was real. They spewed up animals and water and petrol because all those things were in their stomachs to start with. They’d swallowed them. Then they sicked them up.

Sometimes the most dramatic tricks aren’t tricks at all. They’re just gross stuff that no one can believe. No difference between my mother vomiting onto a police officer and David Blaine throwing up a frog. Except no one was paying my mother a fortune or saying how amazing she was.

Regurgitation magic has a respectable history, if the words ‘regurgitation’ and ‘respectable’ can be used in the same sentence. All of those magicians learned to control their gag reflex and their peristalsis, so that they could swallow live creatures, keep them in their stomachs or lodged into their throats, and bring them up at will. It’s thought that the Great Waldo kept the rats in his throat because of stomach acid, which, let’s be honest, isn’t recommended in any good rodent health care manual. Some have argued that Mac Norton, the human aquarium, would swallow his fishy friends and they would be okay because he controlled stomach acid, probably by drinking craploads of water.

Whatever. It’s not a trick. That’s all I’m saying.

What I’m also saying is that this is something I have no wish to copy. Yes, I love magic performances and will, more often than not, try to incorporate a particularly good one into my routine. But I draw the line at spewing. I draw the line mainly because the amount of practice you need to put in must be stomach-churning, forgive the play on words. It takes many, many hours of practice to control your gag reflex – that thing your body does when something revolting is stuck in your throat or your belly. There are some magicians who can regurgitate coins and tell you whether they are heads or tails before they appear in the mouth, just by the feel of the thing on the tongue. What’s the point? I can do more amazing things without having to have crazy control over my oesophagus.

So. I was going to head down a much simpler path. Now you know.

Gran was still in bed when I got back from the supermarket. I had a suspicion that she might never get out of it again. So I got a bucket, a couple of sponges and a towel or two and gave her the best bath I could, which was not very good. She stared at me with eyes that seemed to be getting bigger by the day. When I was done, she took my hand in hers and gave it a little shake. When had her hands got so bony? When had her eyes got so wet?

‘Feeling better, Gran?’ I asked when I’d put everything away.

‘Not yet,’ said Gran. ‘But soon. Thank you, Grace. Thank you so much.’

‘Oh, stop it,’ I said. ‘You’re turning into a sentimental fart in your old age.’

‘I mean it.’

‘Yeah, well. I mean it, too. And sentimental old fart is not something you should ever be accused of.’

‘I’ve remembered you in my will,’ she said.

It might have been a tender moment. Maybe I should’ve gasped, put a hand to my chest, shed a tear or two. I didn’t. Because I know Gran.

‘It will be read out,’ I said, ‘and there will be a paragraph that says, I remember Grace. I just wish I could forget her. Am I right?’

Gran laughed but it turned into a fit of coughing.

‘Can you not even allow me my punchlines?’ she said when she’d got her breath back.

‘Nah. That’s not the way we work.’

She stroked my hand.

‘I need to sleep now, Grace,’ she said. ‘No joke.’

‘I’ll go and cook you a roast dinner,’ I said. ‘Pork crackling, so get your false teeth sharpened.’

‘I’ll do that,’ she said, but her eyes were already closing.

Uncle Mike was in the kitchen, talking on his phone. I had to give him credit, he had been there all the time. Then I remembered what he’d done and decided he didn’t deserve any credit. I waited until he’d finished the call. From what I could gather from a one-sided conversation, there were offers in on a property, but something had come up in the inspection reports. What a tragedy.

‘If you need to go somewhere,’ I said, ‘you can. Gran is sleeping at the moment. I’ve got this.’

‘It’s not very urgent,’ he said.

‘Go,’ I said. ‘There’s no point both of us being here.’

I didn’t have to push the point. He was out of there in a couple of minutes. I waited until the sounds of his car engine had faded, then I went into the kitchen and got out the stuff I’d bought at the supermarket. I looked at the bottles. This wasn’t something I was looking forward to, especially since it almost certainly wouldn’t work. But, I reminded myself, like Sonja and I had agreed, there was nothing to lose. I found some plastic bottles under the sink. Gran doesn’t throw much away and I’d noticed them before when I was doing basic cleaning. Four one-litre bottles that at some stage had contained water. I rinsed them out and filled them from the kitchen tap.

What is the colour of pain?

Black must feature, that seemed obvious. But what else? Maybe some red, to indicate blood. I took a glass measuring jug from a cupboard and filled it with water from the kitchen sink. This needed experimentation. It took a few attempts with the little bottles of food colouring I’d bought, but I finally got the mixture as good as it could be. It would have been fabulous if I’d got a concoction that had flecks of red in it – much more dramatic – but that wasn’t going to be possible.

I made four litres of the dark-coloured water. Then I drank them. Or tried to.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to drink four litres of water? It’s . . . hard. And dangerous, incidentally. People have died from drinking too much water, so all of this must come with a ‘don’t try this at home, children’ warning. I’d googled this stuff. Two litres in one sitting is okay, three to four can cause water intoxication. Who knew? All this time I’d wondered if watering down Mum’s grog would stop her getting pissed, when three or four litres of water can produce the same effect. Helluva lot cheaper as well. Anyway, the first litre went down okay; the second was a struggle; the third a nightmare. I looked at the fourth bottle and then poured it down the sink. Three litres had to be enough. It was probably my imagination, but I thought I gurgled when I rinsed out the empty bottles and put them back under the sink. Water was sloshing around my insides. I felt sick. Maybe I felt seasick.

I took a deep breath and looked at the closed door leading to Gran’s bedroom.

Showtime.

Gran was still sleeping, but it was a restless sleep. She groaned and twitched, her eyes fluttered open, then closed again. I waited for a few minutes. I needed her fully awake. I needed her attention sharp and focused. Finally, she opened her eyes and looked at me. A small smile, instantly turning into a pained frown.

‘I need you sitting up in bed, Gran,’ I said.

She groaned again.

‘I’m not sure I can, Grace.’ She didn’t ask why she needed to be sitting up and that brought a lump to my throat. Everyone was making decisions for her and she simply accepted it. I thought briefly about leaving her lying down, but now wasn’t the time for me to be weak. She had to sit up, even if it brought her pain. Especially if it brought her pain. Because that would focus her attention, keep her in the here and now. Sharpen the senses.

‘I’ll help you,’ I said.

But it was hard. Gran weighed virtually nothing – she was a bag of bones with a light covering of skin, but it was still hard to get her upright. When I was done, she lay against a couple of pillows, panting. I sat on the edge of her bed.

‘Gran,’ I said. ‘You remember you once asked me if I could do to your heart what I do to playing cards? Reach in and make it disappear?’

‘Yes. I’m a foolish old woman,’ she said.

‘I’m going to try,’ I said. ‘Not with your heart, but with your pain. I don’t know if it’s possible. Probably not.’ Should I have said that? The belief of the patient in the placebo is of the utmost importance, according to Sonja. But I was already lying to Gran – well, maybe misdirecting her – though it was the same thing in the end. ‘Do you remember The Green Mile? When the prisoner, that huge guy, breathed in whatever was hurting Tom Hanks. He took the pain as if it was his own and then spat it out. That’s what I’m going to try to do.’

It was the sudden hope in Gran’s eyes that nearly undid me. Maybe right at the end, we want to believe in miracles so badly that logic flies straight out of the window. How else do we explain those people, atheists their entire lives, who, when they stare death in the face, suddenly believe in God and heaven and redemption and all the other stuff that they’d ridiculed their entire lives? Because hope is stronger than logic? Just grasping at straws because there’s nothing else to hold on to? I don’t know. But Gran’s hope both saddened and excited me. Perhaps my placebo would work. Perhaps already Gran’s body was summoning up those pain-killing chemicals because her mind was instructing her body.

Or maybe – probably – the pain would be as strong as ever and all I would have achieved was offering hope where there was none. One more act of cruelty before she died. What had Sonja said? We have nothing to lose. But maybe we did. If hope is dashed, wouldn’t it be better not to have introduced it in the first place? I tried to concentrate. It was too late for second thoughts. The look on Gran’s face told me that.

‘Open your mouth,’ I said.

She did, but it was painful for her. I leaned forward, put my lips against hers and drew in huge breaths, moved back a little, then did it again. I tried to avoid Gran’s eyes because I felt ashamed.

I stood and coughed. Then I coughed some more. The performance mattered, even now. Especially now.

I’d thought about bringing in a bucket – the same one I’d used to bathe her – but that was too rehearsed. Belief. Magic in the mind. Don’t let the punter think about how the trick was done. Misdirect. Misdirect. And ramp up the drama.

I activated the little device I’d created last night in my bedroom, using my box of magic bits and pieces. A simple spring mechanism operated by my teeth, a mechanism I’d lodged in my cheek. A small arm sprang out and hit the back of my throat, stimulating the gag reflex. I could probably have done without it. I felt sick enough as it was, for all sorts of reasons. But I wasn’t prepared to take chances.

The vomit was spectacular – even better than I’d imagined. Well, it was dramatic from my point of view. A huge gush of blackish water straight onto the comforter that covered Gran’s legs. Then another gush. And another. My stomach cramped and I imagine my face twisted in pain, which is not something I had anticipated, but which would add to the showmanship. I coughed again and again, drips of black water running down my chin. I put both arms on the bed and tried to get my laboured breathing under control. It took a few minutes. Finally I stood and looked at Gran. There was wonder there, her eyes round. I despised myself a little. More than a little. Then I looked down at the bed. What a mess.

‘I’ll clean this up, Gran,’ I said. And I did. It gave me something to do, and I needed that desperately. I removed the sheets, wrapped them into a ball and took it to the laundry. Then I got the new bedding and put it on. Gran didn’t say a word as I helped her get comfortable. At least I hadn’t spewed on her or the pillows. That was about the only thing I could feel grateful for. When I tucked in the last bit of sheet, I wanted so badly to get out of there, to go into the garden, get some fresh air, maybe go for a walk, visit those freaking ducks or the freaking skateboarders or . . .

I didn’t want to ask how Gran was feeling. That was something I couldn’t do.

‘I’m tired now, Grace,’ said Gran. ‘I think I need to sleep again.’

I took her words as medicine for my pain. Or maybe they were a placebo. But I left. I went into the garden, sat on a chair and stared at nothing. I have no idea how much time passed. I can’t even remember when Sonja arrived and sat next to me. One moment I was alone, the next she was talking to me.

‘Your grandmother is sleeping,’ she said, ‘and I didn’t want to disturb her. How are you, Grace?’

I told her that I had given Gran a placebo. Just that. No details.

‘Big red pills?’ Sonja asked.

‘Something like that,’ I replied.