Lord of Illusion

“Watch me disappear”

Dad was always claiming that he could perform the impossible. When I was young, and he could, he was a god. He’d hold up a blanket to his neck, grinning and eyes waggling, and get me to solemnly intone the magic words, allowing me to stumble over the big ones in my lisping childish mouth. The moment I did, the blanket flew up in the air as if in shock, corners reaching high to the ceiling, and collapsed to the ground with no Dad to be found in its place. I laughed ecstatically when he flung himself out from behind the closest curtain instead, yelling about how his new potion had finally worked and calling out to Mum that we wouldn’t need to go pick up his legs from under the Eiffel Tower this time. She would pretend to make a phone call from the kitchen and tell the travel agent to stand down.

There were times that I knew he was joking, but he worked hard to convince me of his powers. The arsenal he could deploy to blow an eight-year-old’s mind was varied; sleight of hand, card tricks, straight-up lying. Coins were produced from places coins didn’t belong. Cards were guessed correctly every time. Entire fantasy worlds were conceived in the messy, overgrown hedges of the garden or the pristine, barely used study, and he would lift up my imagination to the point where I occasionally thought I could do magic, too. He had boundless energy and indulged my every whim. When my friends asked what my Dad did, I would tell them “anything.”

Mum played her parts, but with a lack of commitment: smiling with only half her face, or forgetting to put on the voice she was meant to do. She would leave in the middle of a game to do jobs around the house or take phone calls. Nobody was as committed as Dad. He once told me that he could talk to animals. I was adamant that he couldn’t, and he winked and said that he would be happy to show me up. The next day, he brought a dog home – a beautiful juvenile Border Collie, as eager to please and full of beans as he was. “Julie,” he said to her, in a clear voice. “Fetch Gina a juice.”

“Julie? Julie’s not a dog’s name,” I said incredulously. “That’s for the lady at the shop. Or for aunts.”

A single finger pressed to my lips shushed me. “She already had a name, darling. We can change it later once she fits a new one, but not now. Just watch.”

Julie had already trotted off gamely into the next room, and Dad squatted next to me while we waited. I could feel his stubble pressed against my cheek, and his skin smelled sour in a way I couldn’t place. He was vibrating. The hairs on my arms strained and stretched to stand up higher and match his.

The dog returned. Carried softly in her mouth, her sharp little white teeth barely leaving an indent, was a carton of apple juice. She padded up to Dad and tilted her head to the side, awaiting instruction. Dad pulled back, undoubtedly gesticulating frantically out of sight, but the nuances of the trick escaped me at the time.

“Yes, yes, now give it to Gina. Give it to Gina. Drop it to GINA.”

The carton was placed gently at my feet, and Julie lay down on her stomach looking up at me. I clapped for her. Mum hadn’t said a word. I heard my parents arguing later that night, half-watching television while the voices in the kitchen got louder and more exasperated, and learned that the new dog was very much a surprise. Dad promised that Mum wouldn’t have to lift a finger and that he would shoulder all the responsibility for the animal’s care. The truce was an uneasy one. I tried my best to come up with a new name for her, but it didn’t matter. Less than two weeks later, Mum drove the dog to an adoption shelter. Dad hadn’t even noticed she was gone.

The years passed and the magic started to break down, the edges fraying and pulling like the sleeve of a favourite old jumper. We tore it apart together, Dad and I: me with the creeping cynicism that comes with age and the subconscious shedding of whimsy, and him with a steady recession into himself. He hurled himself into his performances with the same energy, but they were less frequent and tinged with a mania that I could recognise was off, even as a child. His mugging still made me laugh but there was a desperation to it that made my stomach hurt. He was smiling, but it was fake, and he always looked tired. Yes, that was my card, you’ve done that one before. No, that coin didn’t come out of my ear, I know how you do that now. Where the shed had once been a secret gateway to another world, it was now just a shed.

I almost never saw Mum and Dad in the same room anymore, expect at dinner. He would still talk a mile a minute, dropping food on the table as he did impressions, bloodshot eyes shooting towards mine frequently to check that I was catching his jokes. Mum just looked at her meal and grew lines in her face. She once remonstrated with him quietly to slow down on the wine and he rolled his eyes theatrically at me, smirked, and filled his glass again. I could see his purple tongue between his stained lips when he said, slightly slurring, that he’d had a hard day, and there was no harm in it. Mum made a strange sound, like a hairball was caught in her throat, and stared at him wordlessly. She had the same look on her face as when I would come to her with a scraped knee.

Dad began to spend a lot more alone. We assumed it was alone, anyway: he would disappear for long stretches of time and while sometimes we would find him in the house or roaming the fields that bordered the house, there were occasions too where he would fling open the front door in the middle of the night, bedraggled and boozy, or with mud-stained clothes. Once a deep cut on his arm was dripping blood onto the pale carpet as Mum shepherded him upstairs, leaving a grim trail for me to discover the next morning. He refused to say how it had happened.

He was never cruel, and never physical. He was lively and loving and present, for one of us. But whilst I was becoming a new person and blossoming in adolescence, with all the highs and lows entwined with that, he was fading. I would watch him and convince myself that I could see the strings attached to his body: barely-visible threads hooked into his limbs and his muscles that pulled him and contorted him into the shapes that he thought would make me happiest, rictus grin and rosy cheeks painted permanently on his face. His disappearances got longer, and I grew less clear on what it was that he spent his time on. He and Mum didn’t share a room anymore, and his illusions got sloppier. The joyful sense of wonder he was aiming for collided hard with the oppressive wall of tense stillness that coated every square metre of air in the house, and the stillness won out. It took the shine off of building a house of cards when you realised that the unopened envelopes forming the base were stamped in bold red letters yelling ‘final notice’.

There would be one last flight of fancy before they were grounded entirely. Age 14, I awoke in the nebulous early hours to Dad’s face inches from mine, tear-stained but smiling. “Sorry to wake you, darling,” he said, words dribbling out of his mouth and down his chin. “It’s late, or very early, whatever, but I have to go for while.”

He looked over to the door, and swallowed.

“But I’ll be back.” A grin. “Back before you know it. Just got some bits and bobs to sort out. Nothing I can’t do.” A wink. “You know me, darling. Anything’s possible.”

Another look back to the door. I could see the silhouette of Mum stood there now, arms folded. “Listen now.” He grabbed my shoulders, suddenly and harder than either of us expected. Mum started towards us. “We’ve always had fun, haven’t we? And most of that was pretend, wasn’t it? But there’s something that isn’t.”

His breath stank, but he still smelled like Dad. I was wide awake and a little afraid and I could tell that he was sincere, not just drunk-sincere.

“If I ever needed to, really needed to, I could get in touch with you. You know that, don’t you?”

I nodded agreement, but it wasn’t enough. He leaned in closer, and sprayed tiny flecks of spit on my face as he explained. “No, I mean it, and I need you to believe me. If I need to, even if I’m gone, I’ll be able to talk to you, from anywhere. Anywhere. Because you’re my darling, and I can do that. And you need to believe it when it happens. It will happen. I know that. You believe that? You believe that, darling? I know it will. I can do anything. I will. You know that?”

I managed to squeak out an affirmation. His face softened, and he was still smiling. He stroked my head, and went for the door.

“I won’t let you down. I’ll do it, you know. I can really do it.”

Mum grasped his hand, the first time I’d seen her do that in ages. He never told me what it was that he could do, because I never saw him again.

Mum’s voice on the other end of the phone was unsettlingly calm. Flat, like it had been smoothed over for hours with a paint roller. I was sat curled up on a rug in the window nook finishing an early morning coffee when she told me that his body had been found out the back of a pub in Gloucestershire. They’d already had her identify the body, she told me, in the cadence of dictating a shopping list. He didn’t look like himself, she said. Not for the obvious reasons, she clarified. More that it seemed like there was very little of him left. A small smirk on his cold, sunken cheeks, maybe. That was it.

We spoke for a few little longer after that, but none of it registered. I didn’t move. Seconds, minutes, hours maybe. I don’t think it was grief. It was more that I truly didn’t know how to feel. It was a bright morning, but some scraps of sunrise fog still clung to the grass and whirled about my husband’s feet as he strolled past the window to the driveway. He waved. I returned the gesture. Muscle memory. Synapses fired and nerves twitched and biceps flexed and I was barely there.

The car door slammed and I heard gravel crunching under the tires. A bird calling from the large beech tree in the garden. The soft padding of our dog, still with the name it had at the shelter, slowly making her way to the kitchen. Everything was loud and sharper and more focussed. There was a swelling in my ears, a low bassy rumble, and I thought I might be about to pass out.

But it didn’t stop.

And I didn’t feel faint.

I stepped outside. The rumbling felt even stronger now and my feet vibrated in my slippers and I wasn’t scared. I knelt down slowly, as if any of my movements could disrupt what was happening, and put one ear to the damp ground of the garden turf. The blades of grass on my cheek felt like the caress of a hand I’d not felt in a long time. My whole body felt full of sound. I thought at first that I had just caught the end of the morning dew on me, but this was different. My face was soaked. I sat up, rubbing at my skin, and stopped breathing. There was water rising up from the ground. I ran my hand across the soil, and it came up covered in perfect round droplets.

They hung there for a moment, fat and perfect, and began to rise from my skin one by one into the sky. I watched one of them until I lost it against the grey of the cloud, and in that brief moment countless others had joined it. There was a torrent now, gaining momentum: raindrops, going up into the sky. The flow had been languorous at first, almost in slow-motion, but it was full-blown storm now, just in reverse. It was raining from the ground up, just for me.

And I knew, without any doubt.

It was him.

He could do anything.