My favourite-ever vanishing, other than the early one to Neptune, was a vanishing to Iowa. In Iowa I was Roland Harry and I ran a hardware store. The idea came from a film the English teacher, Mrs Lyon Dean, made us watch at the end of one term. I can’t remember what it was called, and I didn’t get to follow the story too closely because of all the nattering and mucking about, but I could see it was about a massively fat lady and her family who lived in an old wooden house on the outskirts of a small town in America. One of her sons wasn’t quite right and he liked to climb up to the top of a water tower, and his older brother always had to go and rescue him, always had to look out for him. Even when he was angry and annoyed with his brother for doing stupid things, you could tell that he still loved him. l liked that, but it wasn’t just the story of the film that interested me; it was the landscape: the wide blue skies, the long straight roads, the massive yellow fields and the quiet, dusty towns. It looked like a safe place. The kind of place where you could be born, live and die and never have to come across any trouble if you didn’t want to. The kind of place where you sit on your porch at night and watch the sun go down on a quiet day and look forward to more of the same the next day, the day after and for ever.
In the vanishing my hardware store was on the main street in the middle of the town. We sold everything you could think of: mops, buckets, hammers, nails, screws, paint, paintbrushes, locks and hinges, everything. It was a dusty old store with long shady aisles, wooden floors and high shelves. Every space filled with something someone might want. On the off chance we didn’t have it in stock we would order it for you – all part of the service. During the week I worked there alone. My wife, Lucy, dropped by with sandwiches at lunch and we would eat them at the counter and chat for a while before she headed back home. At weekends business picked up and I employed a Saturday boy who served, and helped customers with their purchases to their cars, whilst I advised and rummaged through the shelves and the stock room for whatever was needed.
For a while, when the Iowa vanishing was new and fresh, it was a great place to be. I loved settling into bed at night and transporting myself to the middle of America, to my white house with the porch, my store on the main street of a sleepy town, at night my wife next to me, a warm breeze slipping through the room, a dog asleep at the foot of the bed. It was perfect. It was such a good vanishing, so vivid, so calm, that it was one of the few that worked in the daytime too. Sat with my mum eating our tea, neither of us with anything to say, or on a bad day when every thought turned back to the dead little boy, all I needed to do was think of Iowa and I could escape, for a while at least. But vanishings get used up, they wear themselves out through use, and once they’re worn out they’re empty. You can keep trying to go back, you can keep trying to escape, but it’s never the same and eventually they don’t work at all. And then you’re back to reality with a thump, and you have to wait for inspiration to strike again, you have to wait until you’re able to conjure up a whole new vanishing to somewhere else.