High and dry
‘Who are you?’ Mum repeated, blinking twice.
‘Who am I?’ I asked, confused.
‘Who is that?’ Dad’s sleepy voice said from the bedroom.
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Mum replied.
I felt the blood drain from my face and my hands went clammy. I looked at Mum in horror.
Somehow, Stubbins Crick had wiped my parents’ memory of me. Had he brought some kind of device from the future with him? A mind-blanker? An amnesia ray? Or had he travelled back to before I was born and stopped me from ever being born? But if he had, why was I still here? And why did Mum look so angry?
‘It’s certainly not my son,’ Mum continued. ‘Because no son of mine WOULD EVER SNEAK OUT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT!’
She was shouting now but I didn’t care. I let out a huge sigh of relief.
‘WHERE WERE YOU?’ she shouted.
Before I could answer, Dad stumbled from the bedroom. ‘What is going on?’
‘Nick has been out somewhere and is just sneaking home now,’ she snapped.
Dad’s face went from sleepy to confused to all business. Dad never got angry like Mum. He got down to business. He furrowed his bushy eyebrows and rubbed his bleary eyes and spoke like he was interviewing me for the job of being his son.
‘Can you expand on what your mother is saying, Nicholas?’ he said, running his fingers across his stubbly chin.
‘I was just out for a ride . . .’
‘IT’S TWO IN THE MORNING!’ Mum shouted. ‘WHO GOES OUT FOR A BIKE RIDE AT TWO IN THE MORNING?’
‘Nicholas, I’d like you to tell me the truth,’ Dad said before pulling out his favourite threat. ‘Or I will come down on you like a ton of bricks.’
Mum crossed her arms. ‘Until you give us a reasonable explanation for where you were, then you’re grounded.’
‘Grounded?’ I said. My mother had never actually grounded me before. I’d lost television privileges, been sent to my room and given extra chores. Grounding was completely new. I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure what it even meant to be grounded.
‘No going out, no spending time with your friends, no television, no parties, no nothing,’ she ranted. ‘INDEFINITELY.’
Indefinitely. That I understood. For an unlimited or unspecified period of time. To an unlimited or unspecified degree or extent. In perpetuity. Eternally. Forever.
‘But—’ I began.
‘NO BUTS,’ Mum cut me off. ‘GO TO YOUR ROOM.’
Hot tip: never start a sentence with ‘but’ when arguing with your parents. It makes them furious. Put it in the middle of a sentence and you’ll sound much more reasonable. For example: ‘I know I shouldn’t have put my little sister in the recycling bin but she was being very annoying and at least I recycled her.’
But it was too late.
I needed to get to that fete on Saturday. I needed to see that magic show. I still didn’t understand exactly why, but Beatrix and Trixie seemed to think it was very important to the future of time itself, and if they said it was, then I had to believe it was.
But there was no way Mum and Dad were going to believe that. So I tried begging. I tried yelling. I tried demanding. I even tried hypnotic suggestion again, but that only made them angrier. By Tuesday I had talked them down from eternity to two weeks.
Late on Tuesday night, there was a tap at my window. It was Trixie.
‘Where have you been?’ I hissed into the dark.
‘Where have you been?’ she hissed back. ‘You haven’t been out of your house in days.’
‘I got grounded for sneaking out the other night. Why didn’t you just come and see me at school?’
‘Your teacher figured out I wasn’t actually in your class. I think Crick dobbed me in. I couldn’t risk getting caught.’
Trixie pulled herself through the window and tumbled in head first, landing with a thud on my bedroom floor.
‘Crick has disappeared too,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘Now he knows I’m here, Beatrix thinks he’s biding his time until the big fete.’
‘Do you think he’ll try to stop the magic show?’ I asked. ‘Cancel whoever the magician is?’
She shook her head. ‘No, the school could always just book another magician. He’ll try to stop you from seeing the show.’
‘So what should I do?’ I asked.
‘Leave it with me,’ she said. ‘I’ll think of something. Just keep practising.’
‘Practising?’
‘Your magic,’ she explained. ‘Remember, everything depends on you being a half-decent magician.’
I screwed up my nose. ‘Don’t you think there are more important things to worry about than practising magic tricks? No one ever saved the world with sleight of hand.’
‘Haven’t you been listening?’ Trixie said. ‘This all depends on you becoming a magician. Besides, you’re grounded, what else are you going to do?’
She had a point.
After Trixie had left, I pulled out my copy of the Encyclopedia of Amateur Magic and flicked it open. It landed on the page about stealing watches. I’d been back to that chapter so many times I’m surprised it wasn’t stuck open to that page. I’d resigned myself to never being able to steal someone’s watch without them noticing.
I flicked through the pages until I landed on a trick called the Mystic Twelve.
No skill required. Perfect.
That was my kind of trick.
And all I needed was a deck of cards.
The first step is to put a tiny pencil dot on the top card of the deck. It has to be big enough for you to see but small enough that no one notices it.
Next, hand your friend twelve cards. (Make sure the pencil dot card isn’t one of them. That card is still on the top of the deck.) Turn your back and get them to shuffle the twelve cards and sit on some of the cards. That’s right, they have to sit on some of the cards. They can sit on as many as they want. Once those cards are safely under their bum like an egg under a chicken, get them to remember the bottom card of the remaining cards in their hand.
Once they’ve remembered the card, have them put the cards they are holding on the top of the deck. There is no way you can know how many cards they are sitting on or what card they were thinking of. After all, your back has been turned the whole time.
Turn around and pick up the deck of cards, dealing out twelve cards in a row face down from left to right. Have a look for your little pencil dot. Their card should be the card immediately to the left of the pencil dot card. You could just stop there. But now you’re going to tell them how many cards they are sitting on. Secretly count how many cards are to the right of their card, including the pencil dot card. This is how many cards your friend is sitting on!
I like to tell them how many cards they’re sitting on first and, once they have counted and are amazed that I was right, turn over their card. It’s a nice one-two punch. You just have to make sure they don’t see the pencil dot or notice you counting.
The best part of the trick is that it requires no skill, and if you follow the instructions, the trick just works by itself.
Of course, you also need someone to do the trick on. And sitting by myself in my room, I didn’t have anyone to sit on the little pile of cards. Mum and Dad were still angry at me and Trixie and Beatrix had left me high and dry.
Suddenly, I felt very alone.