The Magician

"So the cruise liner let you set up and do tricks and virtually beg for loose change money like I'm doing here at the mall?"

"No, no, I was employed by the liner business, basically working for low pay but with full food and board and a little pocket change by way of tips. I had switched my bookings agent immediately after the divorce. The one I had while working part-time turned out to be rubbish. My new agent Donna Sharp got me some great gigs, including two summer seasons on cruise liners, one in the Atlantic, the other in the Caribbean, then she followed up with theatre bookings for several years after."

"That's what I'm hoping to build."

"Well, I've been retired for a while but I may still have a few contacts still active. Anyway, I was among a team of various performers provided to entertain during dinner, in the sun lounges during the afternoons, and we staff entertainers were also required to dress in evening wear and dance with the ladies during the evenings well into the night. The cruise liner work I found was too free and easy. I soaked up the free sex, the duty-free booze and one day, I mucked up a trick because I hadn't prepped probably and the object to be revealed wasn't in my pocket, simply because I got too careless and forgot to put it there. Then suddenly, like your Joker and the 3 of Clubs, the object I needed materialised in my pocket. It didn't really register in my befuddled brain the first time it happened, but then it kept reoccurring and somehow I caught on.

"When did you first use the ... curse and for what?" Ty was on the edge of his seat, excited like he'd never been excited before.

"The snake-cane trick you remembered from that clip on YouTube? That was me on the telly all those years ago. I used to make brief guest appearances on variety TV shows and I needed something unique and that trick became my trademark for years even though I only did it for a short while. No one could figure out the trick. I was pestered over and over to do it, and even summoned to trial for cruelty to animals by the RSPCA, who couldn't even prove the live snake existed, so it was laughed out of court. That snake was pissed at me, I can tell you, Gerald kept trying to bite me after each transformation and never liked me even though I kept him as a pet for many years after he retired as part of the act."

"So how did you do it?"

"Just like magic, I would think about the snake becoming a walking stick, but thinking alone isn't enough, that is purely the set up. Then I had to make a gesture with that very thought in mind, so the thought and gesture were in sync. All real magicians do some kind of gesture when they perform a feat of magic. You can be as extravagant as you like, use a wand, outspread hands or you can simply use the gesture of the tip of a finger."

"Why can't you just use a thought without a gesture?"

"You know, magic doesn't come with a manual, I had to learn by trial and error. Just think about it, thoughts are simply things that pop into your head and often they are involuntary, completely random, out of thin air. Look, I might look at the woman behind the café counter over there and imagine what she looks like in her bra and knickers and spread out hot, wet and ready for action on the counter. Just a thought like that might unconsciously drift into your mind at any time, but that is just a random involuntary flash, not something you'd envisage or wish for in reality, so the physical gesture, however slight, is merely a confirmation of your wish."

"What that old girl? Seeing her almost naked and in her grey granny undies? I wouldn't touch her if she was my favourite grandmother who was leaving me everything in her will, eugh!"

"Hey, don't turn your nose up, man, the thought of what possibilities there are at any age will keep you interested in women all through your life. Don't you know the seven ages of man? Well, there's also the seven ages of women,"

"What, like Shakespeare's seven ages of man?"

"Well, I'm impressed, you know Shakespeare?"

"Not really, we had to do some Shakespeare in school obviously. You look old enough to really know Shakespeare himself, like personally."

"Watch it, I may not be a witch but I could still turn you into a toad soon enough."

Moses could see Ty's eyes flicker momentarily to the cane.

"Yes, Ty, Gerald's still with me, and not only in spirit."

"So you could turn him back into a snake if you wanted?"

"Sure I could, but you can't escape anno domini, Ty. If I turned him back into a snake now Gerald would still be a long-dead snake and probably crumble to dust. I keep Gerald as a cane because he fits me, he's my perfect walking stick. You see, the magic can keep us going, can strengthen our life force, even extend our lives to some extent, but still time catches up with us mere mortals eventually. It's fast catching up with me, too. Look at how all magicians are depicted through history, before Harry Potter, that is. They were all old, like Merlin or the Biblical Moses."

"Moses wasn't a magician, he was a saint, wasn't he? No, not a saint, an Old Testament prophet."

"Are you seriously telling me, Ty, that a man who can roll back and hold the Red Sea by simply spreading out his hands, and walking a whole tribe across its dry sandy bottom to freedom in a different continent, is not a magician?"

"Yeah, I guess they had to call him something. And now you're the non-Biblical Moses."

"In a manner of speaking, yes. OK, I'm old and I never knew the original Moses or Shakespeare. But I am over ninety years old, and even my thrice-weekly carers supplied by the NHS say I look a good twenty years younger, and they're paid to care not to flatter to deceive."

"Man, you look good for 90, Moses."

"Well, I don't usually boast about my actual age but time inexorably runs its course, Ty, and I reckon I have maybe only a few good years still left in me. I may go on for another ten years, or pop my clogs during the next cold winter. You see, I never really get that sick, my body repairs itself to a degree better than ordinary but eventually I know I will go the way of Gerald the snake, albeit ending up a slightly taller stiff. I will go the way of everyone I've ever got close to. I've outlived them all, ex-wife, daughter, wife, the lot."

"So why are you still around? And, as you've kept this secret of magic for so long, why show yourself to me now?"

"Life, I guess, I want to share my experiences, and who better to understand my story than someone who was once like me, a young man obsessed with conjuring tricks? I have lived my life and it's running out, son. Sure, I can turn myself into a handsome man, young as you, a bit more handsome, naturally, but it wouldn't last. I've done it in the past for fun but even that trick gets old and it's mentally painful. I cannot change or alter any living creature permanently, even animated objects that appear to be alive never last, otherwise I guess the planet would be overrun with cute bunny rabbits pulled from hats. Look."

Moses took a sugar cube out of the bowl and put it on the table. With a wave of his hand the white cube dissolved and turned into a brown cockroach, which briefly waved its feelers around as if it had woken from a long sleep and had been unaware of its surroundings, before running off scared and disappeared over the edge of the table.

"It'll be a 'roach for a while, but will never really fit in with other 'roaches. It's not a real cockroach, but only a copy, so while it exists it will be an oddity, shunned by the rest of its kind. When I have my nap this afternoon, the magic in my consciousness will lose its grip and a sugar cube will instantly reappear in a place that the café cleaners here might wonder how the hell it got there."

"So, does Gerald reappear this afternoon as a dead smelly snake?"

"No. Gerald was turned in and out so many times he went mad. He tried to bite me, knowing I was the cause of his torment. I continually wiped his memory of the experience but I could tell by his behaviour change that he hated it and he hated me, even though he couldn't quite remember the details why he hated me. It developed into a furious hatred of me, its antagonist. I really only used Gerald for a seasonal tour of a few months, but it was virtually every night, plus a matinee Saturdays, so I must've changed him into a walking stick and then back again over a hundred times. I retired him and kept him as a pet at the end of the tour. He was an extremely unaffectionate pet, of course, until the very day he died. I turned him into the walking stick when he died, a shape which he had spent a considerable time being many years before and, being no longer alive, it became permanent, even when I slept, I supposed because it had become an inanimate object and not a living thing."

"Wow! That's some magic. Think of the things you could do."

"Think of the things you can and cannot do, Ty. Not everything is permanent and most things are destructive."

"So what about magicking up a million dollars?"

"Yes, you think you can do that, the dollar bills being inanimate objects but there is the piper to pay because those bills will disappear back where they came from. Suppose you spent what the magician has created before the magician falls asleep, Ty, then the shop tills who took your money will be empty and some innocent shop assistant is going to be imprisoned for fraud; subsequently his boss is probably financially ruined. Creating something out of nothing, Ty, returns to nothing. Gerald the snake? I sense you ask? His body got changed so many times that it probably forget what its original form was. I can't explain the magic. I do know that if you destroy something, like an island for instance, it doesn't come back whatever you do. Every bit of magic has its pros and cons."

"You destroyed an island, Moses?"

"Not intentionally, no, but yes I did, very early on. A sobering experience, my boy. At the time I didn't know what I was doing, but that is a poor excuse for being a miserable human being having powers he shouldn't be trusted with. Magic has consequences. In my defence I was drunk. I was onboard one of those cruise ships, as I said, enjoying the high life, this time in the Caribbean, and we faced a hurricane heading straight for us. I stopped that hurricane in mid-flow just with a wave of my hand and millions of gallons of water just fell out of the sky on us, threatening to drown the ship. So, with another wave of my hand, just like The Prophet Moses at the Red Sea, the falling water parted either side of the ship. Unfortunately, on one side the water completely swamped a small inhabited island."

"Wow! Amazing!"

"No, Ty, worse than amazing. Devastating more like. We stopped the ship as soon as we could and the crew and the able bodied guests among us did what we could to save lives. I lifted the roofs of collapsed buildings up into the sky to get at injured people and bodies below. I tried to repair broken bones, but I know nothing of human anatomy and probably did more damage than anything, so after the first botched attempt we just made people as comfortable as possible. And people knew it was me that was doing the lifting and realised that I must've also stopped that hurricane in full flow. I didn't think about keeping what I did secret until reflecting when the crisis was over. Then I wished the witnesses couldn't remember what I did from the time the hurricane hit us and it seemed to work, on most of them at least."

"You can do that?" Ty hesitated, "You could make me forget this?"

"Yes, I can, but don't worry, your memories are safe. I found that out I could do that well before the island crisis. I was working on the cruise ships in the early 1960s. I was 45 and my wife divorced me as soon as the English divorce acts were relaxed so that divorces didn't need any reason to end. She thought I was wasting my time being a poorly paid magician and I had become a kept man, so she lost all respect for me. She soon dumped me for her accountant boss. I worked the cruise ship dining tables for a few years and I had my fill of fat old rich women. Got lazy, drank more and practised and prepared less and then I mucked up a card trick, imagined the card I needed for the trick and it suddenly appeared. I found I could change cards, conjure up meals, drinks, overnight I turned from a trick conjuror into a real magician. So, on the island I drowned, I thought of wiping the memory of the hurricane and my involvement in the rescue attempt forgotten by all. I waved my hands and the memories all went away, all except mine."

"Wow! It must've worked, I never heard of anyone stopping a hurricane with magic before."

"Memory wiping is not for the faint hearted, it mostly worked a treat, so I used it all the time for a while. But it didn't always work, which is why I stopped using it."

Moses stopped and thought, a tear escaped his eye and ran down his cheek and he dabbed at it with a serviette.

"So sometimes mind wiping didn't work and you got caught?" Ty asked gently.

"Sometimes. Sometimes it worked for a while then wore off. Until it happened the first time, I hadn't realised it was flawed, or maybe I just wasn't skilled enough to use it properly. Remember, nobody handed me this power, nobody warned me of the rules or told me what I could or couldn't do. It was like giving a steamroller to a kid. I had begun to think I was all powerful, a god amongst men. I used people, Ty. I'm more ashamed about that than drowning that bloody island, at least that was an accident, what I did afterwards to people was deliberate and unforgivable. I took that gift of mind wipe and I used it over and over again, to make people forget the terrible things I did."

"What did you do?" Ty said, "Look, Moses, I'd never tell. I mean, who would believe me?"

"Well, I've gone this far, I suppose there's no going back now."

"Moses. I would never tell."

"We got back on the ship once we had done what we could. I spoke with the Captain and explained that we would all be treated as mad if they said anything about my part in the rescue. The Captain had radio'ed in a very brief Mayday about the hurricane hitting the island at the outset. He agreed with me and sent off another message to the coastguard saying they had done all they could and were unable to stay on station for much longer. The Coastguard were already on their way and as soon as the first rescue ships arrived, we continued cruising as if nothing had happened. A wave of my hand and the Captain was as hazy about what happened as everyone else on board. Most of the crew and passengers had no idea what happened on that island and didn't even remember stopping. I was lucky that this was pre-mobile phones and the island was pretty primitive, no local radio or tv station to keep quiet. I kept a low profile until the passengers were unloaded and I returned to just doing the tricks I was paid to do, but then I started to succumb to temptation."

"Temptation?"

"That's why I don't think this ... curse, gift, ability, whatever you want to call it, is from any god for some worthwhile reason, it's more like a joke played on me from Hell. You see Ty, the temptation to use magic for personal gain is too tempting for an ordinary and frustrated old man like I was at the time."

"So what did you do?"

"As I've said before, I was an ordinary middle-aged man suddenly filled with unbelievable confidence, the world was my oyster for once. I realised later that I was going through a mid-life crisis. I looked good, for a middle age man, I was slim, smart, a good dancer, clever with cards and slight of hand and quite practised in the art of drawing people in and entertaining the punters, charming them. I was 46, recently divorced and I had already played with the ladies that were willing before I discovered what I could do with a little magic. Now, most of the ladies who had come onto me and I willingly dallied with were divorcees. A few even had their husbands along but were still cruising away from home and prepared to play the field. All very free and easy. Some women were my age, a few a year or two younger, but most were older, some a whole lot older."

"You were a dirty young man, then!" Ty chucked.

"Hey, I had no complaints, and I never heard any complaints from the ladies who approached me. Before starting that cruise season I'd had a whole year of separation from my ex-wife, sleeping alone after twenty years of mostly what I had considered a good marriage, whatever she thought about it towards the end. I bedded a guest on that first few cruises most nights from the start, but they were all women who chose me. I was no predator, more a willing victim, though willing and active participant. Before I realised I was really a magician with magic at my fingertips, those rich women were the ones who had the upper hand; they had the confidence and power to draw you into their webs. They chose who they slept with and until then I was more than grateful to justify their choice of me as a temporary bedfellow when they made it."

"A different woman every night?"

"Not all the time, sometimes the same woman all week, sometimes several the same night. Hey, it was the late swinging sixties and early seventies, way before AIDS, so some of the parties were pretty wild."

"So what was the problem? Consenting adults and all?"

Moses looked around, the café was starting to fill up with mid-morning snackers.

"You still thirsty and want to stay here or shall we take this conversation to somewhere a lot more private, with a complete change of scenery?"

"It's still raining out, Moses. I can hear it hitting the glass dome, this covered shopping centre will only get busier with lunchtime approaching. Where do you suggest?"

"I know a place that is quiet and probably not raining and where we definitely won't be disturbed, at least until I fall sleep. Hold onto your hat, kid!"

CHAPTER 2

MOSE'S SOUTH SEA ISLAND

In a flash they were sitting in canvas chairs on a blindingly white sandy beach, at a round table under an enormous umbrella; behind them a thick green jungle backdrop, in front the vista of a deep blue lagoon, beyond which foaming waves crashing into a reef protecting the beach from the ocean beyond. The sky was red in the west, a glorious sunset in the offing. Beside them was a blazing fire made from a cairn of dry driftwood, giving off little if any smoke.

"Wow!" Ty's currently favourite word forming almost silently on his lips.

"Yes, lovely, isn't it? I think we have about thirty to forty-five minutes of daylight left before we think about leaving. I come here a couple of times a week, usually first thing in the morning back home. I generally wake up about 5am, which is early afternoon here. I only come here for a couple of hours, soak up some vital vitamin D, it does me a world of good. The council health and welfare sends round a helper, actually one of several carers, to help me clean my house at about 9am three days a week, usually one of a team of three, and they get my grocery shopping, and meals on wheels comes only on a Friday because they do a nice fish and chips which I can heat up with that just fresh-out-of-the-fryer crispness by a little fingertip magic. The rest of my meals I can sort out from the ingredients I buy. My favourite spot on this tropical paradise of over half a century ago was just around that headland to the right, but twenty years ago the owners built a resort there. I had explored this area years earlier when I was younger and fitter, and this was my second favourite —"

"So the other place was even prettier than this?"

"Much better. It's basically a tourist trap now, but in the day back then it was perfect. My wife and I came here all the time, not just through magic, but we physically lived there in a little house I built myself from driftwood and coconut leaves for a few weeks' vacation every year. I didn't even pay rent, just put on a show for the chief of the island and his family once in a while. I just hadn't realised until it was too late that to protect this place from being spoiled I needed to own it, and the magic shows and the tv series just didn't earn me enough to buy it."