I was a geeky ten year old dreamer who used to walk home from school saving the bus fare to exchange for a sweet roll at the bakery or hot chips from the chippy.
Passing the Post office one afternoon, I saw a bedraggled magician.
Mr Manifest-O cried, “Step up! Step up! Come see the world’s greatest magic tricks.”
Appearing to be just another crazy person, most of the public scoffed and scooted past trying to avoid him. And there were those who, without watching him perform, threw money into a battered black top hat near his feet. The hat had an oddly perfect, ”Thank you” sewn onto a silk label.
I stayed to see Mr Manifest-O make birds appear and coins fall from the sky. He asked me for my homework which I proffered only to have him tear into into tiny pieces. I half-heartedly protested thinking at the time, it would be a good reason for not doing my homework, unfortunately the magician reassembled the papers with the wave of his wand. Astonished, I dropped my bus fare into the top hat and stayed gawking.
After the show, the magician bowed deeply. I was transfixed by his kindly, creased face and sparkling eyes. He removed his floor length cape, folded it’s length and breadth it into a piece of fabric so small it fit into his back pants pocket, he tipped the contents of the hat into the palm of his hand, closed and opened the hand again and the money was gone. Mr Manifest-O knocked his hat into a pancake shape, tossed it into the air and it disappeared. He pulled at the sleeves of his filthy sweater (nothing there) and with a flourish, turned on his heel to leave. Something compelled me to follow him as he walked to the alley behind the chippy, opened a heavy door that I hadn’t seen before and let me go before him then he closed the door behind us. The hallway was brightly lit. We passed curtained rooms, glass fronted office doors and finally came to a wooden door with a simple brass handle. The magician stepped in front of me and opened the door, bade me enter and I walked into the room.
In the reddish lamp light everything was warm and homely. There was an ancient, striped, boucle couch, and on the walls were posters of Houdin and Houdini, David Devant and David Copperfield. Books about magic filled shelves. There was a stuffed black cat and a model of the moonscape. So many quirky things that I could have spent a week there without seeing it all. Mr Manifest-O offered me a glass of orangeade, which I drank, then he said, “Would you like to learn how to do what I do?” Spellbound, I nodded my head mutely.
The first afternoon I learned card shuffling and cutting. Thereafter, I saw him nearly every day and practiced assiduously each spare moment. The magician taught me card tricks, rope tricks, tricks with scarves and hoops and flowers. Eventually I graduated to birds. Everything and anything were my tools. Over the following months, I was so involved in magic I forgot all about school. Teachers contacted my parents about my absence. But as the magician swore me to secrecy I lied and told everyone I’d been at the library. Being such a bookish person they believed me.
When the old man left town, I was unable to go with him. I was upset and couldn’t tell anyone why, and spent hours cloistered in my bedroom, practising magic.
One night, the magician came to me in a dream, he handed me a wand of ordinary shape, it was black, long, and white tipped. The magician told me to follow him, which I did. We ended up in an arena with thousands of people sitting on stone steps listening to a man in a toga talk about existence and the magic in life. When the lecture finished, we left the arena and followed a line of people who gathered in a clearing. It was as though we had known each other although we’d never met. We all held hands, words were spoken and one by one, the members of the circle, of all ages and genders, hugged each other and said farewell. I woke up in reality. The dream felt more real than life. On the bedside table lay a magic wand, just like the one in my dream.
I was excited and troubled by the dream, wanted to go back there, wherever ‘there’ was, but knew I couldn’t. I carried my magic wand with me everywhere I went, to school, church, friends’ places, home, to see relatives and even grocery shopping. I would practice waving the wand and imagine magical outcomes everywhere I went. My mother tolerated my behaviour, my father told me not to, my best friend accepted it, but strangers looked at my mother with pity and at me as though I were crazy.
One afternoon, when Mom and I were alone in the bowels of the shopping centre carpark, we were unpacking the trolley and stuffing the car boot with bags of groceries. Mom had just shut the boot when a man attacked her. Holding a pocket knife at her throat he ordered her to give him the car keys, she was trembling so violently she dropped them. The man and my mother made a dash to find them and while they were searching around the car, I took my wand from my pocket, pointed it at the man and muttered, “Go away, disappear, never, ever come back here.”
The man stood up, bent over, crumpled and vanished. My mother stood up with the keys in her hand and looked around, “Where did he go?” She asked. I shrugged.
There have been many times since then, when I’ve intervened for my family, friends and strangers.
Things always seem to work out, magically.
