Майк Ланкастер: Human.4

The bad stuff was just around the corner.

The talent show changed everything.

Forever.

That’s why I like to think about the way things were, however imperfect they seemed at the time.

In extraordinary times, the ordinary takes on a glow and wonder all of its own.

The talent show loomed.

Danny kind of dropped off the radar and Simon joked that it wasn’t as if he was sitting in his room practising by himself—surely a hypnotist needed people to practice on .

A few days before the show Dad even toyed with the idea of entering the show himself, announcing that his Elvis impersonation "wasn’t half bad". Good sense prevailed when Mum pointed out it wasn’t "half bad" because it was "completely awful". He sulked a bit, but I reckon he was a little bit relieved when the original bravado had worn off.

The day of the show arrived and people got up just as they always had. They went shopping. They cleaned their cars. They read newspapers. They gossiped over garden fences.

They made their way to the green.

Simon, Lilly and I were near the back, cross-legged on the grass, drinking reasonably cold Cokes from the Happy Shopper, and watching Mr Peterson’s act with something close to horror.

Mr Peebles was even more hideous than I remembered.

A grotesque papier-mâché head, like a dried-up orange, sat on top of a square, unnatural-looking body. The dummy’s eyes sort of moved about—they were actually little more than very poorly painted ping-pong balls—but they only went from one impossible cross-eyed position to another.

Every time Mr Peterson operated the thing’s mouth there was this horrible, hollow knocking sound that was often louder than the thin, falsetto voice that was supposed to come from Mr Peebles.

To call Mr Peterson a "ventriloquist" is to insult the profession because there was no art to what he did. It implies that his lips didn’t move and there was at least an illusion that it was the dummy doing the talking.

Not Mr Peterson.

Mr Peterson’s lips always moved.

They moved when he was doing his straight man routine as himself, and they seemed to move even more when he was speaking for his dummy.

To be brutally honest, I don’t think Mr Peterson ever practises. Between one talent show and another I think Mr Peebles went back into his box and stayed there.

And the weird thing is that at no point in the proceedings did Mr Peterson seem to draw any pleasure from his own act. He looked, by turns, utterly terrified, and on the brink of tears: as if this wasn’t entertainment but some strange kind of punishment he was putting himself through.

Year after year.

He stood there, sweating in the heat of the afternoon sun—the body of Mr Peebles hanging limply from his hand—wearing the wide-eyed look of a rabbit dazzled by headlights.

"What’s up, Mr Peebles?" he said. "You look sad."

The head of the dummy swiveled through so many degrees that it would have broken a real creature’s neck.

"I get you don’t really care ooh-ats wrong with ne," came the reply.

"Of course I care, Mr Peebles. Now, what’s wrong?"

"I’ve groken ny gicycle."

Mr Peterson tried to move the dummy’s head, and then spent a couple of seconds trying to stop the head falling off.

The smaller kids were chuckling and occasionally roaring with laughter.

"It’s like a traffic accident," Simon whispered to me, "it’s horrible, and wrong, but you can’t take your eyes off it."

"The act?" I asked. "Or the whole thing?"

Lilly leaned forwards. "You know Britain’s Got Talent?" She asked.

I nodded.

"They lied," she said.

NOTE— Britain’s Got Talent

One imagines a televised version of the talent show that Kyle is describing.

In Stars in their Lives, Reg Channard writes: "The obsession with celebrity was an all-consuming illness, which had reached epidemic proportions by the early years of the twenty-first century. Adolescents actually stopped studying at schools and colleges in order to pursue this crazy fever dream of celebrity. The end result was that many menial, degrading jobs were taken by people who possessed no formal qualifications, but had reasonable singing voices and knew a couple of poorly choreographed dance routines."

Mr Peterson stumbled on for a few more minutes that felt much longer, before he took his applause and shuffled offstage.

The show’s host—Eddie Crichton, who ran the village’s sports and social club—wandered on to the stage looking mildly baffled.

"Er . . . well . . . um…" he said, possibly trying to work out how year after year Mr Peterson failed to improve his act. "Now for a little bit of a change from the ordinary." He was regaining enthusiasm. "As we set off on a voyage into the mysteries of the human mind. I’d like to hear a big Millgrove welcome for . . . THE GREAT DANIELINI!"

Simon nudged me in the ribs, really hard and raised his eyebrows.

"Danielini?" he whispered. "What kind of name is that?"

"Not a particularly good one," I whispered back.

I looked around at the people watching, acutely aware of just how badly this could all go for Danny if his act didn’t match up to the billing he’d just been given.

I could see Danny’s mum a couple of rows forwards of us watching the whole thing through the viewfinder of a tiny camcorder. I remember thinking how cruel it was to be filming him, and how at least I had been spared the humiliation of having my own talent show appearance filmed by my parents.

For some reason I had a sudden urge to check the crowd for Danny’s sister, but I couldn’t see her anywhere.

Maybe she was sensible and had found something more fun to do.

Like hammering nails into her feet.

Then Danny stepped on to the stage.

You know sometimes you see a person you know, but there’s something different about them and you have to look again—do a double take—because you’re suddenly not certain it’s the person you thought it was. Maybe it’s a haircut that makes you suddenly uncertain, or a look on their face that you’ve never seen there before.

And often you’re absolutely right, it’s not who you thought it was, it’s just someone who looks a little like them and you’re relieved that you didn’t call out their name.

Or feel like a total ass because you did.

When Danny walked out I had the same thing happen inside my brain. I mean I knew it was Danny, but then I doubted it and had to look again.

It wasn’t just that he’d got himself a smart dinner suit that actually fitted him—although that helped. It wasn’t that his usually random-angled hair had been gelled and slicked back—although that helped too.

It was something that was both of those things, plus something else.

"He looks older, " Lilly said, almost breathlessly, and Simon laughed at her comment.

He was wrong to laugh.

It was true.

Danny did look older.

Taller, too, because he’d lost his habitual slump.

And his face had an intensity to it that made him look a whole lot wiser than the kid who was the constant butt of our stupid jokes.

He stood in the middle of the stage as helpers lined up four chairs behind him. He was looking out across the audience with a confident expression that seemed spooky on a kid his age, almost as if we were seeing a glimpse of Danny as he was going to be, twenty or so years in the future.

"Good afternoon," he said calmly and commandingly. "Welcome to my demonstration of the powers of the human mind."

He unbuttoned his jacket and reached for the inside breast pocket, pulling out a brand new deck of cards. He took them from their box, cracked the seal and removed the cellophane, then mixed them up with a series of overhand shuffles.