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She always struck me as the kind of girl who’s going to be a star. Some people are just like that. You know that they
will, as my grandad used to say,
land butter-side-up.

There was no way that Danny – who, no matter how hard he tried, would always end up
butter-side-down
– could have done what he had told us he had.

Danny’s face was pale and thin, with dark semicircles under each eye, and his hair was a dirty brown colour, tousled on top. He was small for his age. Heck, it was my age too – and that’s fifteen and a half, thanks for asking – and I was almost a full head taller than him. And he seemed to exaggerate that smallness by hunching his shoulders and bending his back.

‘You should have seen it,’ he said, his eyes sparkling with excitement. ‘It actually worked. I mean, I knew it
could
work, but still, I didn’t really think it
would.
’

He ignored our disbelieving looks.

‘I got her to relax. And I guided her into a hypnotic state. I didn’t even need to say “sleep” like they do on the telly. As I relaxed her, her eyes closed and her body went . . . sort of floppy. I hadn’t even thought about what I’d get her to do when she
was
hypnotised, to be honest. So I told her that she was late for school – it was well past eight in the evening –
and suddenly she flew into a panic, running around, throwing stuff into her school bag and complaining about the alarm clock not waking her up.’

He shook his head.

‘It was priceless,’ he said.

He waited for one of us to say something.

And waited.

There was me, Simon McCormack, Lilly Dartington and Danny. We all lived down the same road in the small village of Millgrove, and we’re all roughly the same age, so we tend to hang out together.

We were in ‘the shed’, the bus-shelter that squats by the side of the village green, and it was one of those long, hazy summer days that seem to stretch out into something closer to a week. To local kids the shed was a place to meet up, hang out, practise some inept graffiti, and generally waste some time.

Across the green from the shed is the Methodist church, and next to that the combined infants and junior school that we all went to before moving to secondary school in the next village over, Crowley.

There’s not a whole lot to do in Millgrove.

We couldn’t get high-speed broadband yet and we were in the middle of a mobile-phone dead spot that meant you couldn’t get a signal within the village itself. We were one of the last generations in the country that didn’t rely on mobile phones, although there were rumours that a new mast was going to help us catch up with the rest of the twenty-first century one day soon.

There’s a tiny playing field where the older kids try out smoking and train for future binge drinking, so we tended to avoid that. Then there are the three shops – a Happy Shopper, a family butcher’s shop and a newsagent.

The shed is pretty much in the centre of the village, near enough to the shops in case we needed supplies,
and it has a roof in case of English summer rain.

Simon and I have been friends for years. In all honesty I can’t even remember how our friendship came about. Sure, we have a lot of the same interests and attitudes about things, but all that came later . . . I mean, it was revealed over time, so there must just be some . . . I don’t know . . .
instinct
for friendship that’s separate, somehow, from all of that.

Without the friendship we’d never have discovered the reason we were friends.

You can drive yourself mad going round in paradoxical circles like that.

Simon and Lilly had been going out with each other for a while now, and seeing as Simon is my best friend I seem to get pulled along with them a lot these days. It’s weird getting used to sharing a friend . . . and . . . well, Lilly and I weren’t getting on if the truth be told.

Danny lives next door to me and kind of just clings on to my coat-tails. Again, I don’t know exactly why. Simon and I make him the butt of a lot of jokes but he just shrugs it all off.

That day we were just trying to fill up the day while using as little energy as we could.

And then, of course, Danny told us that he had hypnotised his sister.

Simon stared at him, with a disbelieving look that summed up how the rest of us felt about Danny’s revelation.

‘You hypnotised Annette?’ he said, and the spare disbelief he hadn’t managed to put into his stare was crammed into the scathing way he said those three words. There was even a snort at the end of it.

Danny seemed to miss the incredulity and nodded.

‘I’ve been reading a lot of books on the subject,’ Danny said, ‘and I’ve been watching lots of Paul McKenna and Derren Brown on DVD. With the talent show coming up I thought I might ditch the magic act this year and do a bit of stage hypnotism. You know, make people bark like dogs, or eat an onion as if it’s an apple.’

Simon groaned.

Of all of the area’s customs and traditions, the Millgrove talent show is by far the oddest. Every summer since Queen Victoria was sitting on the British throne – with a two-year gap during the Second World War – the people of Millgrove have gathered on the green to compete in the competition.
Even when local lads were dying in the trenches in the First World War, the tradition continued.

Local folklore says the talent show began because of a dispute between two farmers, who’d fallen out over a woman and needed some way to settle the matter. Rather than firing pistols at each other, they each wrote a song for the girl and performed it on the green in front of the entire village, who were the judges of the competition. The village might have forgotten the men’s names, but a version of their way of settling the argument was resurrected over a hundred years ago and still continued.

The talent show.

Weeks, even months in some extreme cases, were spent preparing acts (and I’m using that term loosely, most of them were lame Karaoke offerings to amateur-sounding backing tracks) for the grand prize – a battered old cup and some WHSmith gift tokens. As long as it was a slow news week there was a chance of a feature about the show in the
Cambridge Evening News,
with the winners grinning at the camera, holding their prizes.

Who was it who said something about everyone in the
world having their fifteen minutes of fame?

In Millgrove it was more like fifteen seconds.

To me the talent show has always been a bit of a cringe, really. When I was eight years old my dad told that me that, as I was always cracking jokes and making people laugh, I should have a go at being a stand-up comedian at the show.

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.’

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.

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.

‘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.’