Mike Lancaster - 0.4

Immanuel Kant believed that people laughed at constructions like these because ‘(L)aughter is an effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing’. Quirtell disagrees. ‘Laughter is an effect that arises if a race refuses to grow up,’ she writes.

All in all they were the most embarrassing minutes of my life so far, even beating the moments Mum spent getting out the baby photographs the first time I brought a girlfriend (Katy Wallace, it lasted three weeks) home to meet the folks.

I discovered that there is a huge difference between knowing a few jokes and being a stand-up comic. I don’t think I got a single gag right. I fluffed a punch line early on and then made a mistake in the set-up of the next joke that made its punch line irrelevant. Sweating on the makeshift stage, with hundreds of faces staring at me, I dried up and just looked out at them in the grip of a huge panic attack.

I haven’t entered the talent show since.

I rarely drag myself along for it, if I’m honest. I always seem to find something else to do. Like pairing socks, or cataloguing my comics.

You know, important stuff.

‘You will come and watch?’ Danny asked, and there was a note of something close to desperation in his voice. ‘You will, won’t you?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ Lilly said, finally dragging her gaze away from the area of Simon’s neck it had been focused on for most of Danny’s ‘I’m a hypnotist’ revelation.

I nodded.

A part of me even wanted to see Danny do well. To knock ’em dead. Become the talk of the village. Maybe even get his picture in the Cambridge Evening News .

But there was another part of me – and I’m not proud of this – that actually wanted to see him fail.

Miserably, horribly and painfully.

It would be like exorcising a ghost.

It would be like therapy.

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’ll be there.’

Lilly looked at me oddly and a strange expression passed across her face, like a cloud across the sun. I had a sudden sense of discomfort, as if Lilly had seen – or maybe felt – something that I should have seen or felt but didn’t.

I raised an eyebrow to query it, but Lilly looked away, leaving me feeling foolish and confused.

Foolish, confused, and something else .

A dark sense of foreboding, as if a storm were brewing.

That night – one of the last nights of my ordinary life – I mentioned Danny’s intentions to my parents over the dinner table.

‘Good on him,’ my dad said around a mouthful of vegetarian stew. ‘We haven’t had a hypnotist before.’

NOTE – ‘vegetarian stew’

Apparently ‘vegetarian’ was still a dietary choice in Straker’s day, rather than a social responsibility. See Chadwick’s informative history: What didn’t they eat? Flesh as food.

Of course we hadn’t, I thought. Who, apart from someone as mad as Danny, would suddenly decide they were going to become one?

‘It should make a nice change,’ he continued, looking at something on his fork with suspicion. A lump of beef-style Quorn stared back at him. ‘It’s going to be great this year.’

Yeah, great , I thought.

I could already pencil in a few of the high spots.

Mr Bodean and his trombone.

Those creepy Kintner twins and their version of ‘Old Shep’ that I’m sure was used in Guantanamo Bay to get Al Qaeda terrorists to talk.

Mr Peterson, the village postman, and his annual ventriloquism act with a hideous homemade dummy called Mr Peebles.

A whole bunch of hyperactive kids doing bad impersonations of Britney or Kylie or – shudder – Coldplay.

NOTE – ‘Coldplay’

O’Brien makes a persuasive case for a ‘Coldplay’ referring to a kind of dramatic or musical presentation characterised by being utterly bereft of any signs of genuine emotion.

A recorder recital.

Some truly mind-numbing dance routines.

I shook my head.

Poor Danny .

‘Are you going to be doing a turn this year?’ my mum suddenly asked me. She actually wasn’t joking, although it could easily be mistaken for some kind of sick humour.

I felt the usual prickle of shame pass from my stomach, up my spine, and on to my face, where it magically made my cheeks go red.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said quietly, and prodded some semicircles of carrot on to the far side of my plate with my fork.

Just let it go , I prayed silently, please just let it go.

No such luck.

‘He’s scared he’ll choke again,’ my idiot little brother Chris said, grinning.

I scowled at him.

‘Christopher Straker!’ Mum said sternly.

With Mum, full name equals big trouble.

Chris’s goofy grin fell from his lips.

‘Well, he did choke,’ he muttered, trying to defend his comment by rephrasing it slightly.

Mum growled.

Dad, it seemed, was utterly oblivious to the exchange and was still thinking about Danny’s star turn.

‘I’ve always wondered how stage hypnotists get people to do all those things,’ he said. ‘I mean, it has to be some kind of trick, hasn’t it? The people can’t really be hypnotised, can they?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ Mum said. ‘Wasn’t there a man who was hypnotised and then died and carried on living because no one had given him the command to wake up?’

‘That was a film, dear,’ Dad said.

‘It was a story by Edgar Allan Poe,’ I offered.

‘I didn’t know the Teletubbies had first names,’ Mum said, and I rolled my eyes at her.

NOTE – ‘Teletubbies’

Many theories exist about this word, but none are particularly satisfactory. Or, indeed, convincing. Kepple in his essay ‘A Pantheon of Teletubbies’ seems sure that it is a word of deep religious significance, referring to a collection of gods or goddesses almost exclusively worshipped by children, although his evidence is seen by most scholars as, at best, fanciful.

‘Danny says he hypnotised Annette,’ I said. ‘Made her think she was late for school.’

Mum screwed her face up. ‘That was a bit mean of him,’ she said.

‘ Was she late for school?’ my dad asked, missing the point, as usual, by about twenty-five metres.

Chris pulled a face at me, but I turned the other cheek and ignored him.

‘The point is that she must have been hypnotised,’ I said.

Blank looks from Mum and Dad said I needed to explain a little further.

‘It’s the summer holidays, ’ I said. ‘You don’t get ready for school when there’s no school to go to.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Dad said.

‘And it was night time,’ I finished.

Mum was looking over at Dad with one of the strange expressions that had become all too frequent in our house.

Even the simplest, most innocent statements could be met with tension, with Mum and Dad always on the lookout for traps and pitfalls in everything said within the walls of the house.

Because, I guess, they spent so much of their time setting them for each other.

This is a portrait of the Straker family before the talent show.

So, when things get crazy you have a suitable base for comparison.

You see, Mum and Dad were ‘having problems’, and were ‘trying to make a go of things’. Both of those phrases, it turns out, are a sort of grown-up code for ‘their marriage was in trouble’.

My dad had left us almost a year before, and he’d only come back a couple of months ago.