“I learned the vanishing act from my father, who was a magician before me,” the circus magician says, leaning against the tailgate of a battered truck outside the magic circle of light and attention, in the liminal fringe before backstage, outside the tents and stalls and noise, becomes merely the outdoors. “And one day, when I was a girl, he went to the shops for a pack of cigarettes, and we never saw him again.” She swigs from a bottle of water. “Always working the crowd, that one,” she says. “A knowing tip of the hat to say you already know this one and how it’s done, but....” She screws the cap back on the bottle, unhurriedly. “He never smoked,” she adds.
Jenny makes a nervous clearing-of-throat, so that she might be able to insert an appropriate I’m sorry or some such; but it fills the moment that feels like it’s not too late to do so, leaving her awkward and unspoken in the too-late after it.
“My mother wasted away without him,” the magician says, then frowns, uncaps her water again. “Ah, no. You see, now I’m doing it? She wasted away. Cancer. She already was; probably why he went. We went the rest of three rounds without him; remission, remission…curtain.” She swigs again.
“I’m sorry,” Jenny actually says this time, sounding panicked and artificial.
The magician shrugs, shoulders broad and muscled in her midnight-coloured tailed tuxedo. “That’s life,” she says.
Jenny shifts uneasily. The evening is cooling, but not uncomfortably; she has a letter in her pocket, addressed to someone she’s never met. The daughter she hadn’t known existed, of the man her own mother had lived with after her divorce. A man now dead; a long, unwinding series of duties to discharge, small bequests to people who are hard to find. And a missive to a daughter somehow left behind.
“Anyway,” the magician says abruptly, jolting Jenny out of her slow plucking-up of courage to pull out the letter and collapse the shapes of the unknown by asking is this you—? “I’m short a lovely assistant, Carla has the runs from a bad kebab on the way up here. How do you feel about letting a woman saw you in half?”
Jenny stammers, accidentally catching dark eyes and unable to look away or coherently eject her desperate oh god no not me thank you.
The magician holds up considering thumbs, squinting, measuring out Jenny’s width and height in the air. “You’ll fit enough of the costume,” she says. “And we can improvise a little. Do something with that look you have.”
The only look Jenny has is deer-eyed fear. She opens and shuts her mouth, trembling.
“No time to rehearse, so we’ll have to leave out the complicated stuff,” the magician says. “But you can be sawed in half. Nothing to it.” She pauses, almost long enough for Jenny to articulate some protest. “Good girl,” she says casually, and Jenny makes a noise as though someone has put a boot to her prone and quivering form and inexorably pressed the air out, not like a kick or any abrupt motion but slowly, with consideration and cool precision, watching her like an experimental specimen.
When the magician kicks off the truck and walks off in the presumable direction of preparation, Jenny stumbles along behind her as if on a string, the most pathetic puppy from the litter, unable to refuse.
