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practised card magic in front of his bedroom mirror – and I was suddenly afraid that he had bottled out of his hypnotism act in favour of some more of what he’d been doing at the talent show for the last couple of years.
    ‘A deck of cards, new and shuffled,’ he said, squaring the deck in his hands. ‘But I only require nineteen of them.’
    He counted off the top nineteen cards and threw the rest over his shoulder.
    ‘Although, actually, it’s not really nineteen cards that I require,’ he said, fanning the cards out in front of him so that we could only see their backs. ‘I need something else. Only the cards can tell me what.’
    He continued to fan them out, and then turned them around to the audience with a flourish.
    Instead of the usual hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades there was a single letter on each card. Danny had fannedthem out in such a way that there were gaps between certain cards that made the word breaks in the sentence the cards spelled out.
    The cards read: I NEED FOUR VOLUNTEERS.
    ‘Ah,’ Danny said, as if the cards had just solved a difficult problem for him. ‘I guess I need four volunteers. Any takers?’

05
    It was a good trick.
    Actually it was an
impressive
trick, and I know some of the sleight of hand and false shuffles that Danny used to do it.
    The rest of the audience thought it was pretty cool, too. There was a round of applause.
    At the end of it no one had their hand up.
    Danny was looking out across the sea of faces, but there were no takers.
    Moments passed and still no one volunteered. It felt like the longer it went on, the less likely he was to get someone to put their hand up. I realised that I was gritting my teeth and holding my breath.
    And still Danny looked around the audience, and there was a moment where the stage persona seemed on the brink of slipping.
    No Danny,
I thought,
don’t bottle it.
    It was only then that I realised my hand had raised itself above my head. I had been thinking about how maybe I should put it up, but I hadn’t got much past the initial thought, and certainly hadn’t reached a proper decision yet.
    To this day I can’t remember lifting my hand.
    Danny saw it and the calm returned to his features.
    ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have TWO volunteers,’ he said, and that threw me. He was looking over at me and gesturing for me to join him on stage.
    Then I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and realised that Lilly had her hand up too.
    She caught my eye, smiled an odd kind of smile, and then shrugged.
    If I’d known Lilly was going to stick her hand up, I’d never have volunteered. I only put it up because I thought it might, you know, spare a friend some embarrassment.
    Still, it was too late now. I couldn’t put my hand down and pretend it had never gone up.
    I saw Simon looking at me with a look like I’d grown an extra head or something.
    ‘That’s two people my own age,’ Danny said as Lilly andI made our way to the front. ‘How about a couple of brave adults to make up the numbers?’
    So there I was. There was Lilly. There was Mr Peterson – without Mr Peebles. And there was Mrs O’Donnell, an ex-teacher who served behind the counter at the Happy Shopper.
    Four volunteers.
    We stood there, in front of the whole village just about, and I reckon we were all wishing we had kept our hands firmly down at our sides.
    I could see my parents in the crowd. My dad was smiling and pointing. He had his phone out and was taking a photo. That’s all mobile phones are good for in Millgrove. I immediately felt self-conscious.
    Danny went down the line of four and welcomed us on stage and then got us to sit on four chairs, Lilly, then me, then Mrs O’Donnell, with Mr Peterson at the end.
    I felt awkward, and not just because this was the same stage I’d died on as a comedian, but simply because I was next to Lilly. There’s . . . oh, it’s complicated . . . an odddynamic . . . er . . . look, I’ll leave this for now because