Smoke and mirrors, p.1
Smoke & Mirrors, page 1
ALSO BY BARRY JONSBERG
A Little Spark
Catch Me If I Fall
A Song Only I Can Hear
Game Theory
Pandora Jones (Book 1) Admission
Pandora Jones (Book 2) Deception
Pandora Jones (Book 3) Reckoning
My Life as an Alphabet
Being Here
Cassie
Ironbark
Dreamrider
It’s Not All About YOU, Calma!
The Whole Business with Kiffo and the Pitbull
First published by Allen & Unwin in 2024
Copyright © Barry Jonsberg 2024
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
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ISBN 978 1 76118 075 0
eISBN 978 1 76118 838 1
For teaching resources, explore allenandunwin.com/learn
Cover and text design by Debra Billson
Cover images from Shutterstock
Lines from ‘The Old Fools’ by Philip Larkin courtesy of Faber & Faber Ltd
Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia
For Sonja Jonsberg
Contents
Trick 1
Trick 2
Trick 3
Trick 4
Trick 5
Trick 6
Trick 7
Trick 8
Trick 9
Trick 10
Trick 11
Trick 12
Trick 13
Trick 14
Trick 15
Trick 16
Trick 17
Trick 18
Trick 19
Trick 20
Trick 21
Trick 22
Trick 23
Trick 24
Trick 25
Trick 26
Trick 27
Trick 28
Acknowledgements
About The Author
The impossible I do immediately; miracles take a little longer.
DAVID BERGLAS
Someone once said that hell is other people. Wrong.
Other people are much worse than that.
Miss Smith’s Year Nine class stared at me. Miss Smith stood at the back, next to her classroom assistant, a small smile on her face. I paced in front of the whiteboard.
‘Who wants to see some magic?’ I said.
There was silence for about two seconds.
‘Who’re you? Hermione Granger?’
This was a small kid at the front. He had a nose that looked like someone had flattened it for him and a face spotted with freckles. The boy next to him doubled over with laughter. Others joined in. There was back slapping and fist bumps. I sighed.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean proper magic, not CGI stuff.’
Silence for two beats.
‘Make Alicia here disappear. Do us all a favour.’
That was a voice from somewhere in the middle. More laughter, more fist bumps. Alicia gave everyone the finger. I tried to get back on track.
‘Can someone lend me their phone?’
I had to shout over the laughter. It seemed a simple question but it took forever for them to understand it. The Hermione Granger kid finally handed his over.
‘Make Gav’s porn disappear,’ someone yelled. ‘That phone’s full of it.’
This time I thought the laughter would never end. Even Gav cracked up, his freckled face beaming with pride. I lifted his phone high so everyone could see and pressed the power button. The mobile was locked. Of course it was. I should’ve thought about that. I had to get Gav to unlock it and that took ages. I was losing my audience. Under other circumstances I would’ve been glad to lose them. Preferably off a very high cliff.
‘Bring up a video,’ I said. Then I thought again. ‘No porn, okay?’
‘That’s wasting my data,’ said Gav.
‘I only want it for about ten seconds,’ I said. ‘Come on. Hardly any data.’
‘Nah,’ he said.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll use my own for this demonstration.’
I fished in my pocket for my mobile, got up a TikTok video and showed it to the group.
‘The famous writer, Arthur C. Clarke,’ I said, ‘once remarked that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’
‘What you onnabout?’ Another random voice.
‘Imagine,’ I said, though I had to raise my voice, ‘that I could show this video to someone fifty, a hundred or two hundred years ago. They’d think it was magic because they wouldn’t understand the technology. So what is natural for us would be supernatural to them. See what I mean?’
The group went silent as they mulled this over.
‘But you couldn’t show it to them.’ Was that Alicia? I wasn’t sure. ‘They didn’t have phones back then.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s the point I’m making. I’m asking you to imagine. It’s a thought experiment.’
‘It’s stupid, is what it is.’
I sighed again.
‘And even if you could,’ someone else chipped in, ‘you couldn’t show them videos because they wouldn’t exist either.’
Now it was a babble of voices.
‘Yeah.’
‘There wouldn’t even be a way to charge the phone, would there?’
‘Nah, they had electricity back then, ya dickhead. Well, I think they did.’
‘Yeah, but they didn’t have chargers to fit phones.’
‘That’s right. Because phones hadn’t been discovered.’
I thought about telling the kid the word was ‘invented’ rather than ‘discovered’ but there was no point. Anyway, that was Miss Smith’s job. I waited until the babble died down. A bit.
‘I’m trying to get you to imagine,’ I said. ‘Pretend you could go back in time with a charged phone and . . .’ I found inspiration. ‘You already had this video downloaded, so you could just show it to them. They’d think it was magic, right?’
‘So what? You think you can travel back in time?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I want you to imagine I can. Just for the purpose of this illustration.’
‘But you can’t.’
‘I know.’
‘So why are you pretending you can? Are you some kind of idiot?’
‘Never mind. Forget it,’ I said. If you pooled the IQ of this class you probably wouldn’t get to three figures. I wiped a sheen of sweat from my forehead. ‘Okay. Do you think I could make this phone . . .’ I picked up Gav’s again. ‘. . . float in mid-air?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Nah.’
‘Okay. Well, watch closely.’
I pinched the phone between my finger and thumb, held its face towards the class. Then I let go. The mobile dipped towards the floor, steadied and then rose again, hovering. This time I had silence. It felt like heaven. Didn’t last long.
‘It’s on strings,’ someone yelled out.
‘No it isn’t,’ I said.
‘Yeah it is. I can see them from here.’
I took my small metal hoop and passed it over the phone, twisting to show there was nothing keeping it up. Strings? Who would think strings? Fishing wire maybe . . .
‘See?’ I said. ‘Nothing holding it up.’
‘The hoop is fake,’ someone shouted.
‘How can you fake a hoop?’ I asked, but there was no time for anyone to reply because the bell went and kids fell over themselves to get out of the door. Seriously. Five seconds from the start of the bell to a deserted classroom. Even allowing for Gav to snatch his phone from thin air. Last lesson of the day.
Miss Smith strolled up to her desk, her smile no longer small but edging towards the large.
‘You asked to use my class as an audience,’ she said as I stowed things in my backpack. ‘So what do you think of them?’
‘The stuff of nightmares,’ I said.
‘Welcome to my world,’ said Miss Smith.
I was seven years old when my Uncle Mike unlocked the door to the world of magic and ushered me through. I can’t remember the details of that first trick, but I recall exactly how I felt. Like I was coming home.
I probably thought he really was a wizard, that he lived in a realm where the normal laws of physics didn’t exist. Or if they did, he paid them no attention. He’d conjure coins from behind my ears, take a pen and, with a wave of his hand, make it vanish. My eyes were probably as big and round as saucers. That God-like power to astonish was a drug I craved from that moment on. At the age of
It took a couple of years to realise that, in fact, Uncle Mike wasn’t a very good magician. He had some decent moves, but if you looked closely you could see how it was done. And once you see that, there’s no going back. Someone once said – I can’t remember who – that if you spot the zipper up the back of the monster in a movie, then the illusion is destroyed and can never be recovered. They were talking about the times when film monsters weren’t CGI but people dressed in costumes. Anyway, I saw the metaphorical zipper up Uncle Mike’s back and as soon as I did I wanted to know how the rest of it worked. I needed the mechanics. To be fair to Uncle Mike, he never told me.
‘First law of the Magic Circle,’ he said. ‘Never reveal your secrets.’
Now everyone queues up on YouTube to do just that, including the secrets of people like David Blaine and Chris Angel and Dynamo. Taking the magic out of magic, without asking permission.
Actually, Uncle Mike didn’t need to tell me his secrets, because his sometimes-clumsy sleight of hand occasionally gave me the information I needed. It didn’t take me long to understand that there are two essential ingredients to the most basic magic – firstly, the motor skills needed to manipulate objects. Cards, coins, pens, anything that can be held. There’s no shortcut to this. It’s practice, then more practice and when you’ve finished practising, you practise some more. While other kids were playing with toys or video games or scrolling endlessly on their phones, I was in my bedroom making a pen vanish. Sometimes dropping it. Sometimes just screwing up. But working. Always working.
The second key is misdirection, or the art of maintaining the spotlight of attention where you need it. The human mind is weird. Our eyes take in information but then filter it, mainly because there’s just too much to make sense of all at once. We’d go crazy if our brains didn’t protect us from the constant barrage of sights, smells, sounds and all the other things we pick up every fraction of a second. So we focus on one thing and blot out the others. And if a magician can get someone to focus on the trivial – say, an empty hand – then the sleight of the other hand passes unnoticed.
Magic is in the mind.
Anyway, one thing that Uncle Mike did really well was his presence. He was funny, he was warm, he was charming. Always smiling. And that makes you want to believe; it would feel rude not to. Another form of manipulation.
I loved Uncle Mike even though he was a crap magician. I loved him because he made me feel a part of his magic. I loved him right up to the moment I understood that he was a thief and a liar and someone who would screw anyone over if it suited him.
The spell he cast dissolved, and I saw him for what he was, what he is. He never misdirected me again.
And that’s part of the tragedy.
Lunchtime the next day. I was sitting at a concrete table by the canteen with my brother, Jake, eating a salad sandwich that had lost the will to live. Jake had been in Miss Smith’s class, sitting way off to the side by himself, but he hadn’t said anything during my . . . I was gonna say ‘performance’, but that would be wrong. ‘Embarrassment’ is probably the right word. His silence wasn’t support though. Jake rarely says anything at the best of times.
Some kid plopped himself down opposite me. Well, I say kid, but he must’ve been Year Eleven or Twelve. Tall and attractive in a way that’s difficult to explain. Brown eyes, a mouth that was slightly lopsided, nose just a little too broad. If you shifted his features a little, he’d be good-looking, but boring. We stared at each other for a moment. I took a bite of my sandwich and instantly regretted it.
‘Can I help you?’ I asked.
He put his hand across the table, presumably for me to shake it. I didn’t.
‘You don’t know me,’ he said. I thought about telling him I’d worked that out already, but he didn’t give me the chance. ‘My name is Simon, but my friends call me Si.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Simon,’ I lied. ‘I’m Grace, and I don’t have any friends. But if I did, they’d call me Grace.’
He smiled.
‘I heard about your interesting performance in class yesterday,’ he said.
‘Interesting – no. Performance – no. Other than that, you’ve nailed it.’
He scratched behind an ear.
‘What did you think about Miss Smith’s Year Nine class?’
‘If the school was a piece of underwear, they’d be the skidmark on it.’
He laughed and it really suited him. There was silence for a few seconds.
‘Tell me something,’ I said finally. ‘How did you hear about it?’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘My mother. She’s Miss Smith’s classroom assistant. Told me all about it last night. Couldn’t stop laughing.’
‘Very professional,’ I said. ‘It’s good to know staff can be discreet and not embarrass students by blurting out confidential stuff to other students.’ I picked up the rest of my sandwich and then dropped it back on the table. ‘I can’t tell you how honoured I am to be the subject of ridicule in your house.’
His face went a number of shades of red.
‘Oh no,’ he spluttered. ‘She wasn’t laughing at you. She was laughing at the kids in the class. She thought you were . . . She thought . . . I mean . . .’
I didn’t say anything. To be honest, I was enjoying his discomfort.
‘Will you show me some tricks?’ he said after another long silence.
‘In need of a good laugh?’ I asked.
‘No. Seriously. I’m interested, that’s all. Tricks fascinate me.’
I decided to let him off the hook. ‘I do magic,’ I replied. ‘Tricks are for amateurs.’
He held up his hands in surrender.
‘Okay. Will you show me some magic, Grace?’ He paused for a moment. ‘Please?’
I ran through the possibilities. I had a deck of cards in my schoolbag. Hell, I had three. But, for some reason, I thought a bit of purely visual magic would be better. Why not? And I could do this one with my eyes shut.
‘Have you got a coin?’ I asked. ‘Any coin will do.’
He dug around in his pocket, came up with a fifty-cent piece, and handed it to me. I was surprised. No kids I know carry money around and most adults don’t either. Which is why I have a few in my pocket for emergencies. I turned the coin in my fingers, picked up a tumbler sitting on the table and tapped the fifty-cent piece against its side. If it had been glass it would have given a satisfying clink, but the school only uses plastic. Sometimes you have to go with what’s available.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m going to make this coin go through the bottom of the tumbler, so it appears inside. Can’t be done, yeah?’
Simon smiled. ‘Of course it can be done,’ he said. ‘You’re going to do it. But you’ll be using a trick.’
I held up my hand.
‘I’ll be using magic,’ I said. ‘Stay with me, Simon.’
‘Okay.’
I flexed my fingers. I didn’t need to, but this was the Pledge, showing the audience something ordinary and then turning it into the extraordinary, the Turn. I rolled the coin between both hands a few times, and ended up with it in my right hand, flat on my palm. I took the tumbler in my left hand and placed it over the coin.
‘Look inside,’ I said. He leaned over. ‘See the coin?’
‘Yeah.’
Of course he did. It was where I’d put it. I lifted the tumbler so he could see it was still resting on my palm.
‘I’ll count to three,’ I said, ‘and when I bring the tumbler down, the coin will go through the bottom and appear inside. Watch carefully.’
I raised the tumbler slowly, brought it down equally slowly.
‘One,’ I said. ‘Count with me.’
‘Two,’ he said. ‘Three.’
I slammed it onto my palm. There was a dull thud as the coin spun in the bottom of the tumbler. I handed it to him. He turned the tumbler around for a few seconds, then put it down.
‘I know how you did that,’ he said. ‘You moved the coin onto your fingertips and when you slammed down it bounced up onto your hand and down into the tumbler.’
‘Ah, an unbeliever,’ I said. ‘Okay. That would be one way of doing it. But that’s not the method I used.’
‘No offence, Grace,’ he said, so I prepared to take offence, ‘but however you did it, it remains pretty basic. Give me something that’ll blow my mind.’
I tipped the tumbler so the coin fell into my palm. I made as if I was washing my hands and then held them up, palms facing. The coin had gone.
