Floods 6 (7 page)

The sign outside the theatre said:

‘I don't believe my eyes,' said Mordonna. ‘We're going to see a wizard, or at least a human pretending to be a wizard. This should be fun.'

‘Maybe he's a real wizard,' said Betty.

‘The Great Klunko?' said Mordonna. ‘I don't think so, not with a name like that. No, he'll be a sad middle-aged loser called Terence.'

Betty and Ffiona's prize was seats right in the front row, the best place to see everything, and the very best place to be when the Great Klunko called for volunteers.

The Great Klunko, who actually was a sad middle-aged loser called Terence, had seen better days. At least it is to be hoped he had, because if he was now at the height of his powers, he should have given up and got a job making sandwiches. He swept onto the stage in a long black cloak, a tall black cardboard hat and threadbare trousers that were coming unravelled at the hems.

The Sensational Brenda was worse. She was quite a lot larger than someone wearing a sequinned bathing costume and red high heels should have
been, and it appeared she had put her lipstick on with her eyes closed or in a dark room during an earthquake or both.

‘Good evening, everyone,' called the Great Klunko.

‘Good evening,' said three small children somewhere at the back of the theatre.

‘I CAN'T HEAR YOU!' roared the Great Klunko.

‘Then wash your ears out!' shouted someone. There were roars of laughter from the audience.

The look of resigned desperation that had been on the Great Klunko's face when he had walked on stage was now joined by a look of pathetic sadness.

The Sensational Brenda twirled around in her glittering costume. Some bits of her twirled faster than other bits and it was at least a minute before all of her caught up with itself and faced the audience again.

‘Ladies and gentleman,' said the Great Klunko, ‘a big hand for my assistant, the Sensational Brenda!'

‘Hey, Grandma,' shouted a voice in the darkness, ‘the old folks' home called, your dinner's getting cold.'

Over the years the Great Klunko and the Sensational Brenda had undoubtedly heard every single insult they could possibly imagine and had tried to develop thick skins so they could ignore
them. But although they managed to hide it very well, Mordonna could see the two performers were upset inside. She realised that even the most rubbish actor or performer had a dream inside their head of hitting the big time and becoming really famous. As time passed and they got older, that dream faded, but it would never go away completely. The Great Klunko and the Sensational Brenda must have put their dreams in a cardboard box right at the back of the cupboard.

Even though they hadn't done a single trick yet, it was obvious that the magician and his assistant were not going to be very good. There would probably be a couple of card guessing tricks, a coin being made to appear out of thin air, maybe a white dove and some vanishing stuff.

Mordonna decided to help them. She would put the Great into the Great Klunko and create a night that everyone in the theatre would remember for the rest of their lives.

‘Show us your knickers, Grandma,' shouted the voice from the audience.

‘I bet they're all big and baggy,' shouted a second voice.

‘And brown,' shouted a third.

And tonight,
Mordonna said to herself,
you three will most definitely vanish
.

She turned to see where the three boys were sitting in the darkness at the back of the theatre and, clicking her fingers, made one of the spotlights on the stage turn round and shine right at them. This, of course, made them all go instantly very quiet.

‘You seem very enthusiastic young men,' said the Great Klunko. ‘Why don't the three of you come up on stage and help me?'

Normally, he only invited one person at a time onto the stage, but Mordonna had done a little magic as he spoke. The three louts came down the aisle and blundered up onto the stage. Once everyone in the audience could see them, they weren't quite so brave and stood in a line looking stupid and embarrassed.

‘Don't be shy, young man,' said the Great Klunko. ‘You're a little treasure chest.'

He waved his hand over the first teenager's head and produced a gold coin. ‘You're a regular gold mine, aren't you?'

He produced three more coins out of thin air. He clicked his fingers behind the boy's head a fourth time. At the same time Mordonna clicked hers and seventy-five-thousand two-dollar coins rained down around the boy and buried him up to his neck.

‘Wha … eh?' said the boy.

The three boys struggled out of the pile and began grabbing as many coins as they could. This was a bad move because Mordonna rewarded their greed by changing every coin they had put in their pockets into slimy, smelly and very dead rats, with just enough not-dead ones to give each boy a rather nasty bite.

The Great Klunko and the Sensational Brenda were speechless, but only for a split second until Mordonna clicked her fingers a second time and the rats vanished.

‘Now,' said the magician, under Mordonna's
control, ‘I will transport all three of you to a far-off place. Drum roll, please.'

‘Yeah, as if,' sneered one of the boys, who were just too stupid to know when they were beaten.

‘As if, as if, as if,' chanted the other two and then all three sang, ‘Here we go, here we go, here we go.'

The Sensational Brenda opened the door of a black cabinet at the back of the stage. Everyone in the audience knew that the cabinet must be standing over a hidden trapdoor in the floor so that when the door was shut, whoever was inside would fall through the hole onto a big mattress underneath the stage.

The three young men all squeezed inside the cabinet. Brenda locked the door with five chains and ten padlocks and then the Great Klunko said the magic words.

‘Alakazoo, alakazaam, alakaseltzer…'

What should have happened next is that Brenda should have pressed a hidden button, which would let off a big flash of magnesium smoke while
the trapdoor opened and the three louts fell through on to the mattress.

But what actually happened was far more exciting.

The cabinet rose in the air until it was three metres, four metres, five metres above the stage. The whole theatre held its breath as it hung in the air surrounded by tiny sparks of lightning.

The lightning grew stronger, big flashes sparking all around the cabinet and out over the audience's heads. For a whole minute the cabinet hung there defying gravity, and then there was an almighty clap of thunder and it came crashing down onto the stage, shattering into a thousand pieces. There was another blinding flash of light and there was the cabinet, all back in one piece, looking as shiny as the day it had been made. Its door flew open to reveal a few remaining flashes of lightning dancing around inside it and three pairs of shoes. The louts were nowhere to be seen.

The audience erupted in the loudest cheers the Great Klunko and the Sensational Brenda had ever heard in their whole forty-two years on the stage. In fact, if you added all the cheers they had
ever heard together, this was better.

‘Quick, slip downstairs and see that the boys are all right,' the magician whispered to Brenda.

‘But, but … I didn't press the button,' Brenda whispered back. She went to check the mattress below the stage anyway.

The audience were on their feet cheering for a full five minutes.

‘They're not there,' said Brenda. ‘There's no sign of them.'

Mordonna walked down to the edge of the stage, took off her sunglasses, looked up and caught the Great Klunko's eye.

‘Don't worry,' she said. ‘Just carry on with your act.'

The magician and his assistant both looked down at Mordonna and felt great waves of peace and happiness sweep over them. The happiness tide had been out for a very long time in their lives, so long that they had never expected it to return, but now they felt as happy as they had the day they had first met and fallen in love.

‘Everything will be wonderful,' Mordonna whispered to them. ‘Just do all your regular tricks and they will be brilliant.' She sat down again.

Meanwhile, in a sausage factory in a small town in Belgium – a factory that, many years before, had been a small theatre – three speechless louts had appeared in the Sausage Twisting and Snipping Room. Four young Belgian girls, who had been twisting and snipping sausages before sending them down the conveyor belt into the Sausage Boiling and Wrapping Room, stood open-mouthed as an ever-growing mountain of untwisted and unsnipped sausages began to pile up round their feet.

‘Why is there a sausage factory underneath the theatre?' said one of the young men.

The four girls, who only spoke Flemish and knew exactly how to tell a local taxi driver where they would like to go,
screamed
and ran out of the room.

‘I don't think we're underneath the theatre,' said another one of the young men.

They followed the girls out of the room, ran down a corridor and found themselves outside in the main street of Silly.
³⁶

‘This ain't Port Folio, is it?' said the first lout.

‘No, and it's not eight o'clock in the evening, either,' said the second, looking out the window at a sunny sky.

‘I want my mum,' cried the third.

How the three of them got home again from a country where they couldn't understand a single word anyone said to them and where they had no money or shoes or passports or any signal on their mobiles is another story.
³⁷

Back in the theatre, the Great Klunko and the Sensational Brenda were going from strength to strength. Never in their entire career had they had such a wonderful and appreciative audience. And never in their entire career had all their tricks not only gone exactly how they were supposed to but ten times better.

Now the Great Klunko could not only guess which card the volunteer from the audience had picked, but he could make it vanish and reappear in the underpants of the person they had been sitting next to in the audience. And on top of that – and this was not something Mordonna had had any control over – the person with the card in their undies was a top television executive who happened
to be visiting his grandmother in Port Folio and had, against his wishes, been taken by the old lady to see the Great Klunko.