The Peppers and the International Magic Guys

by Sian Pattenden

  The trunk knocked once. There was more muffled talking.

  “We can’t hear you, Maureen,” said Monty. “Speak up”.

  “Oh, this is impossible!” yelled Esmé. “We’ll never set Maureen Houdini free!”

  At this moment Jimi walked into the dressing room with the Global Snack Tea Trolley. “Maureen, cup of tea before you go on––”

  “She’s stuck!” explained Esmé.

  “What are you two doing here?” asked Jimi. “I thought that children were not allowed—”

  “It’s a long story,” said Esmé. “Jimi, have you brought a knife with you, or something small that we could use to pass through to Maureen?”

  “I have a slim cheese knife that might do the trick.”

  Jimi handed Esmé the cutlery and she leant over the trunk.

  “Coming through, Maureen… Yes, it fits! Now, if you just try and enlarge some of the breathing holes, we’ll have you out in no time.”

  Deidre appeared with her finger bleeding.

  “What happened?” asked Jimi.

  “Bernard,” replied Deidre crossly. “I’m never giving him energy tablets again.”

  “I have some plasters,” said Esmé, fishing out the packet in her pocket. “Meanwhile, I think Maureen has a chance of being out for the show’s finale.”

  “And of course,” yelled the Great Stupeedo from the cannon, “I shall be entering the jaws of disaster as I leap into the Basket of Doom. Will I survive? Or will I end it all being speared on the Mighty Barb of Immediate Expiration that lies in the middle of the basket, slightly on fire?”

  Here, Clive acted “scared” for Stupeedo, as instructed to do so. He pointed to a spray-starched piece of silk that poked out of the basket.

  Uncle Potty solemnly lit the fuse and stood well back. The audience hushed and Stupeedo lowered his head. There was a small fizzling sound as the fuse got shorter and shorter.

  Booooouuuummmmmph!

  The Lithuanian touchpaper was a lot mightier than Uncle Potty had expected. It had the effect of rocketing the Great Stupeedo out of the cannon in a grand arc. Of course, he was aiming for the Basket of Doom, but Maureen usually dealt with the cannon angles and any maths stuff. Stupeedo went wildly off-course, hitting the lighting rig and bouncing back to land on an astonished Clive Pastel.

  “Argh, ow!” Stupeedo got up quickly, but Clive remained curled up in a ball. “You all right, mate?” he asked.

  “Oooofgh! Broccoli!” Clive squealed, using the IMG code word that had been devised in case anyone got into trouble on stage. “My leg hurts.”

  “Sorry,” said Stupeedo.

  “Clive!” Uncle Potty rushed over to his assistant. “Curtains, please, Deidre!”

  Deidre pulled the curtain cord swiftly.

  “Let’s announce a quick interval,” Stupeedo suggested. “Someone take Clive to hospital.”

  Uncle Potty stuck his head round the curtain. “Ladies and gentlemen, an interval. If you could all mingle with Nigella and say nice things about the show… er, that will be all.”

  He tried very hard not to look in Nigella’s direction, but couldn’t help noticing the one stern face in the crowd. Had the IMG messed up the show already? Surely there was time to put on a spectacular finale. Surely.

  As Uncle Potty and Deidre lifted Clive and set him on a chair in the wings, Uncle Potty was frantic. “What are we going to do? I need an assistant for my Cage of Possibilities act… someone small, speedy and keen… but where will I find such a person at this short notice?”

  Dear friend of mine, Mr Alfred Burlefinger, was a great entertainer. He would supply his dinner guests with eight business cards, then request all of them to write the name of living people whom he did not know upon the cards, with the exception of one guest who was asked to write the name of a dead person on the card. The cards were then given to Burlefinger who would always discover who the dead person was.

  How did he perform such a feat? What Burlefinger had done – and the spectators were never ever to guess – was give one person a hard 2H lead pencil to write the deceased person’s name, when all the others had been given soft 4B pencils. Hah!

  His dinner guests were always enraptured and

  never guessed how he did it.

  Sometimes we magicians have to cheat death ourselves. Barry Houdini was said to have done this many times but was notoriously stringent in the set-up and execution of all his stunts and knew he was never really in danger. Clever chap. Once I immersed myself in perfume and ran through a display of scented candles in a Birmingham department store. But never again!

  In all totality,

  uring the hastily arranged interval, the magicians gathered in Maureen’s dressing room. They each stood around trunk number twenty-seven, staring vacantly at the intense woodiness and not-easy-to-escape-from-ness. No one had the heart to say it, but they were all thinking that the IMG was finally doomed. Clive Pastel would have been staring too, but he was sitting on a plastic chair by the back exit, waiting for his mother to turn up and drive him to the doctor’s.

  Stupeedo was exhausted and Deidre’s finger hurt. But Uncle Potty was the most upset – he was supposed to go on next. “What on earth am I going to do?” he asked woefully. “I can’t do the act without Maureen. It won’t be any good – there will be no atmosphere, no lights, no dry ice, no levers and worst of all – no assistant.”

  “Well,” said Deidre. “Perhaps there is someone who could help you out with that.”

  “Who?” Uncle Potty asked.

  “Monty, of course,” smiled Deidre.

  Monty could not believe what he was hearing. An hour ago Deidre had wanted him and his sister gone. But due to the turn of events, he was now to be made magician’s assistant! Monty was thrilled – it was a dream come true.

  Uncle Potty thought for a moment. “It could work, I suppose. Monty knows the trick – he’s seen Clive and I rehearse for hours. He’s small, he’s speedy… But what if Nigella sees him?”

  “I’ll wear the mouse costume!” pleaded Monty.

  “Hm,” said Uncle Potty, holding up a small furry suit. “Looks like it will fit. But it’s still a gamble…”

  “It’s worth a try,” said Monty. “I’ll do the best I can.”

  “OK, but let me talk you through the trick one more time…” answered Uncle Potty.

  As they were talking, Esmé looked at the breathing holes in the trunk and was sure that they had become bigger. Was the cheese knife working? Could Maureen perform her own escape?

  “I’ll do the lights,” Deidre was telling the magicians. “Stupeedo can hide under the trap door, then take Monty’s place in the box when they dim.”

  “Wonderful,” said Uncle Potty.

  “Now if Monty suddenly needs to stop the performance for whatever reason the code word is ‘broccoli’,” Deidre told the Pepper twins. “Esmé, you watch from the wings and if you hear ‘broccoli’, pull the stage curtains closed.”

  “OK,” replied Esmé.

  “The plan is almost foolproof!” said Uncle Potty, excited again. “Now let’s do this!”

  Nigella Spoon had enjoyed a brief chat with Jimi during the interval as he stood with the Global Snack Tea Trolley in the auditorium. She had been impressed by his array of teas and coffees, including a delicious Lapsang Souchong that had just the right balance of smokiness and tannin.

  “I do like a man who knows his tea,” said Nigella, brightening a little. “I asked a small man to bring me a coffee ages ago and it never showed.”

  “What have you made of the performances so far?” Jimi asked.

  “Hm…” replied Nigella, tight-lipped.

  Usually, if Nigella had wanted to close a club she would have made up her mind by this point, but she liked to wait until after the finale to give the performers a long, laboured speech telling everyone how “sorry” she was, but “needs must” and how budgets were being “squashed” and belts “tightened” and how it really would be nice
if they all “stayed friends”, but “with great sadness” the club was doomed and would shortly be converted into luxury flats.

  There was not much hope in Nigella’s stony heart that the IMG was going to redeem itself after the two very poor performances from Deidre and Stupeedo, but Miss Spoon was a professional and was not going to let slip to anyone – even Jimi – until the final curtain descended.

  A low bell sounded to draw the audience back for the start of the second half.

  “Excuse me,” said Nigella, leaving Jimi by the tea urn. “More magic!” she sighed, trying not to sound disappointed.

  Esmé was watching nervously from the wings as Uncle Potty took to the stage. He spoke in a booming voice: “Ladies and gentlemen, we now have the Grand Finale – The Cage of Possibilities! Can a meagre mouse turn into a brave lion?” At this point Potty was hiding his nerves well.

  Monty followed Uncle Potty on to the stage on all fours, wearing the mouse costume. He stood up and as he did so Deidre swung a large spotlight on to him. The audience applauded in expectation of a great performance.

  “The mouse is sleepy and so he hops into his lovely box to keep him snug,” Uncle Potty announced.

  Uncle Potty instructed Monty to go into the box and Monty dutifully hopped in. Monty had been so looking forward to his stage debut that he had not paused to consider what being curled up in a box for more than a minute would be like – especially in a hot mouse costume. Within a few seconds, Monty was beginning to swelter.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I will put my special mousey box in a protective cage,” said Uncle Potty. He lifted the box and put it on a cage with casters.

  “And to make mousey feel nice and sleepy,” Uncle Potty knew his lines back to front, “I will start twirling him round and round.”

  Here Deidre tried to dim the spotlight, but nothing happened.

  Esmé watched as Uncle Potty twirled the cage round and round. She could see that without a change of lighting, and without music, or dry ice… or any sort of effect, the trick looked clunky and, well, boring. The “magic” just wasn’t there. But what could they do? Maureen was out of action and that was that.

  The sound of rusty castors on wooden boards was not kind on the ears. The cage lurched as it twirled and was clearly hard for Uncle Potty to control. The trick was looking less and less professional by the minute.

  Esmé quickly realised what she had to do. Hoping she would be in time, Esmé ran back to Maureen and the trunk.

  In Maureen’s dressing room, Esmé saw that there was a definite gap in the side of the trunk where three of the breathing holes had been.

  “Maureen Houdini?” asked Esmé.

  “Yes?” said the IMG leader, who for the first time in twelve hours was able to be heard through the larger gap in the trunk.

  “Thank goodness!” cried Esmé with relief. “Firstly, are you all right?”

  “Yes, I have studied under the great practitioners of Eastern philosophy and I have learnt to be very patient while locked in a very small box, but I must say, all this is becoming quite tiresome.”

  “We’ll have you out soon,” said Esmé. “Meanwhile, you are going to have to tell me how to operate the levers and the dry-ice machine. The International Magic Guys will be ruined if the finale continues without any technical help.”

  “You’re telling me it’s looking… not very professional?”

  Esmé gulped. “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “Right then,” said the trunk. “Do you have any experience of conjuring?”

  “None at all.”

  “OK...” It was a huge decision for Maureen to start telling someone she’d only known for a few minutes about the inner workings of the International Magic Guys, but Maureen felt she had no other choice. She would give Esmé the information that no one else in the world was party to, and that information would have to save the IMG.

  “See the painting of my father? Lift it up and press the red button underneath.”

  As Esmé moved the Picasso, then pressed the button, a section of the wall rotated to reveal a small bookshelf filled with titles such as The Art of Deception, Now That’s What I Call Magic 32, Barry Houdini’s Sixty Best Harnesses and many more.

  “Pick up The Real International Magic Guys’ Floorplan, Esmé,” said Maureen. “This is where the classified stuff is. If you can decipher it, it will lead you to the brains of the operation, the technology behind the pizzazz.”

  Esmé took the slim floorplan from the shelf and opened it up. It was like an old treasure map – written in silver pen on parchment. There were all sorts of strange figures on it – coordinates, maybe? Clearly, the author of this plan did not want anyone to know the Houdini Secret. But was it too complicated for Esmé to work out?

  Remembering that she had once taken part in a school orienteering class, that involved walking round the park trying to look for a small metal filing box filled with fruit-flavoured chews, Esmé concentrated hard on the symbols and numbers. Soon, they started to make sense – and if she understood the map correctly, which she thought she did, the technical wizardry was located in the wings! So it had been under the IMG members’ noses all along…

  Esmé Pepper was the only person in the building who had the reasoning to work out where the place that housed the all-important levers was.

  “Go, Esmé! Make the magic happen,” said Maureen. “I’ll be out of here soon.

  “And remember,” she added. “If you need some oomph, press the ‘Houdini’ button.”

  Clutching the diagram, Esmé ran to the wings. The map pointed to a curtain, which looked like an ordinary velvet curtain, but when she pulled it back there was a large wardrobe behind it, with a small sign that read “Operations”. Esmé tried to turn the handle, but it was stiff. She rattled it again, and the door flew open to reveal a high-tech bank of knobs and buttons, levers and pulleys. Some were marked, others were not. There was a small bank of lights that were constantly flashing on and off, in random sequence. It looked like the flight deck of a science-fiction spaceship, if that spaceship was actually a wardrobe and right in the centre of the console was a bright red button marked “Houdini”.

  Esmé glanced round – she could see everyone on stage from this angle. Whether Uncle Potty could see her she did not know, as he was too busy twirling the cage round and round to notice more than what was in front of his one eyebrow.

  Esmé looked at the map again, but there was no clue as to which button to press first.

  I just have to press one… Whatever it might do, thought Esmé, who somehow had more confidence than she had imagined before.

  Esmé spotted a button marked “anti-gravity”, pressed it and waited to see what would happen.

  A pencil is rolled in a sheet of paper. The magician quickly tears the paper to pieces, and the pencil is gone… How do you do it?

  The pencil is just a hollow paper tube. Make the tube out of coloured paper and in one end insert a real pencil tip and an eraser in the other.

  As you can write something florid and elegant with the pencil before you wrap it up, it will seem nothing out of the ordinary.

  But when you roll it up in a sheet of paper, you can tear the paper easily and prove that the pencil has vanished.

  When I am rifling through my suit jacket, trying to find such a pencil or a small flask of whisky, I am alarmed at how many pockets Mrs Dr Pompkins has sewn into my linings. Pockets are a must, if you are to make things appear out of “thin air” – flowers, extra wands, pencils, cats, ladders and such like. The trick is that they must be easy to get to. All your stage clothing must be adaptable.

  ontague Pepper was rather itchy inside the box, but at least the itchiness was taking his mind off feeling hot and at least the heat was taking his mind off the cramp in his left foot. Uncle Potty continued to twirl the cage faster and faster, while waiting for Stupeedo to knock lightly on the top of the trap door. This would let Uncle Potty know he could stop twirling, release the botto
m of the cage and Stupeedo would be ready to catch “mousey”.

  Inside the box, Monty tried to look on the bright side: if he was going to become a magician, he would have to get used to feeling hot and itchy. This was his apprenticeship.

  Uncle Potty had been twirling the cage around for over five whole minutes and the audience were becoming bored. Some of them checked their phones for messages and many were dozing off. Nigella and the panel from the PCMC were almost completely uninterested by now, realising the International Magic Guys could not make the grade.

  “Yentovitz, the Club Eviction papers, please. And a pen,” whispered Nigella.

  Nigella took the forms and started to fill them out.

  On stage, Monty was still feeling sick. “Uncle Potty,” he called. “Just slow down!”

  But Uncle Potty did not hear. He was informing the audience as part of the routine about how mice “sleep for over fourteen hours a day” and “never even wake up for a glass of water” or “a burp”.

  Monty didn’t want to shout “broccoli” – he knew that he shouldn’t stop the show, but the twirling was insufferable. He had to shout “broccoli”. Now. For all he was worth.

  But just as he was about to yell, Monty felt the box lift and rise into the air. How had this happened?

  Esmé had a quick look round the curtain at the stage to see the cage smoothly ascend. This was more like it! But where was the atmosphere? Esmé pressed a button marked “mood music” and at once a lilting piano sonata wafted through the speakers. The “dry ice” button also provided a theatrical fog to the proceedings. Pretty soon Esmé had mastered the small bank of controls that operated the lights, and dimmed them, then added a green tinge to the stage. This was fun. With another button, glitter descended from the ceiling and caught the lights like magic, green snow. Esmé felt her heart beat fast and was thrilled to see the effects were making the show look absolutely spectacular.