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When Sidney Scott was eight, her father showed her his favourite magic trick.
It was a mid-winter weekend, a sopping wet afternoon with rain dribbling down the windows and the steady drip-drip of an overflowing gutter beside the back door. Sid sat at the kitchen table, colouring in a horse in her pony fun activity book. Chestnut coat, black mane and tail, and she was wondering if she should give it a tan saddle and bridle, or be more adventurous and make them red or purple, when her father came and scooted the cat off the chair beside her, and sat down.
‘Shuffle the cards.’ He passed Sid a deck.
She put her felt pen down and reached for the cards. She wasn’t great at shuffling but with her tongue pressing against her lower lip, she did her best before passing it back.
‘Cora,’ he called.
‘What is it?’ Her mother’s voice drifted down from the study. She was ordering stuff online for her shop in town. Joss-sticks, scented candles, dream catchers, anything woo-woo, as her dad would say, but with a twinkle in his eye.
‘I need you to shuffle.’
‘Oh. I thought you might have lost something. Hang on…’
With his small, bright brown eyes and slightly dishevelled air, Sid’s dad resembled an amiable bear, a bear that could, however, drive Mum and her mad with his absent-mindedness. He’d mislay keys, spectacles, his wallet, with monotonous regularity. The refrain, ‘Have you seen my…?’ would have them rolling their eyes, but they’d always chip in on the hunt for whatever it was he’d mislaid.
Her mother arrived in a flurry of tinkling bangles and patchouli. She was almost as bad as Sid at shuffling but Dad looked happy when he took the cards back, fanning them out, face-up. ‘All different, and all well mixed up now.’
He put the deck face-down and squared it neatly on the table.
‘Now,’ he told Sid. ‘Cut the deck into two while I look away.’
Dutifully, she did as he said.
‘Without showing it to me, remove the card you cut to and have a look at it.’
The eight of clubs.
‘Now replace the card and reshuffle the pack so we don’t know where the card is.’
Both Sid and her mum shuffled. By this time, Sid was riveted but her mother stood behind her father with an amused expression. When her father took the deck back, he began to deal the cards face-up onto the table. ‘Try not to react when you see your card, okay?’
Sid was holding her breath as she watched, determined not to respond but she was sure something must have showed in her face when he dealt the eight of clubs, but to her amazement he didn’t stop, he just kept going, creating a messy pile on the table between them. Finally,
he dealt the last card, leaned back and crossed his arms.
‘I bet you tonight’s washing up that the next card I pick up will be your card.’
‘Deal,’ Sid said. She didn’t hesitate. She hated washing up.
She was preparing to crow, because her father hated washing up almost as much as she did, when, to her astonishment, he reached forward and plucked her card from the pile. ‘Eight of clubs, right?’
She shot to her feet so hard she almost toppled her chair over. ‘How did you do that?!’ She picked up the deck and checked, but they were all different, seemingly genuine. She checked her card but couldn’t see any marks. She flipped through the deck again before looking at him, her mouth hanging open.
He laughed. ‘It’s easy. I’ll show you.’
‘Michael,’ her mother said gently. ‘Leave some magic for her.’
He twisted in his seat and looked up at her. ‘But she needs to learn that even magic can be explained.’
‘She’s just a child. Magic’s fun.’
‘Magic is nothing but a trick of the mind. I don’t want her misperceiving the world or being controlled by others.’
‘So says the scientist,’ her mother said.
‘So says Mystic Meg.’
Her mother gave a snort and rolled her eyes as Dad put his arm around her waist and drew her close. He was chuckling.
‘Please show me,’ Sid said. She was wriggling with anticipation.
Her father looked up at her mother, waiting for her consent.
‘Please, please,’ Sid begged. ‘Then I can trick Aero.’
Aero was her best friend at school, nicknamed after the Aero peppermint chocolate he never seemed to be without.
Her mother sighed. ‘I just think it’s a shame to take the mystery out of life. Not everything can be explained.’
Her father arched his eyebrows but, surprisingly, he didn’t say anything.
‘Oh, go on then,’ her mother capitulated, ‘but just the one trick, okay? Or she won’t have a spiritual bone in her body.’
With her mother upstairs, Sid’s father proceeded to show her not just that one, simple trick, but another where he asked her to choose a card from the pack, write her name on it, and fold it into four. He made the card disappear, and then revealed that it had been magically transported into her mother’s jewellery box upstairs. Which was locked
Something happened that day. Sid could never explain it, but she became hooked on the science behind magic and the paranormal, and when her father disappeared six years later, she honestly thought it was another trick and kept waiting for him to reappear, ta-da! When he didn’t, life became monochrome without him.
Her mother visited clairvoyants, psychics and tarot card readers to try and find her husband while Sid railed at her that they were just fleecing her with lies. They didn’t argue all the time, but Sid never let her mum trot off to yet another psychic without protesting she was wasting her money.
When her mother fell ill, diagnosed with cancer, nobody seemed surprised. They talked about the horror of being abandoned, the stress of being on her own with no support for bringing up her daughter, the trauma, the strain and grief.
Four years after her father disappeared, Sid’s mother did the final disappearing act, and died.
Her mother had told Sid to listen out for her when she’d gone, that she’d send her daughter a message, and even though Sid didn’t believe in ghosts, she still kept an ear open, just in case, but her mother never contacted her. Which, as far as Sid was concerned, simply confirmed that ghosts didn’t exist.
Sid was fast asleep when the phone rang. Pitch dark, country dark, not a pinprick of light. Her consciousness struggled to heave itself from a vat of dreamless treacle. She groaned. Fumbled her fingers over the bedside table and managed to knock over the glass of water.
‘Fuck.’
She found the lamp switch. Flicked it on. Picked up her phone. Two minutes past seven in the morning. For a moment she couldn’t believe it. It felt like the middle of the night and Tank seemed to think so too. He’d scrambled up the stairs and was now standing in her bedroom doorway yawning widely, his long pink tongue curled between rows of shiny white teeth. Sometimes, like now, she couldn’t believe she shared her cottage with a dog. A huge dog at that; an attack dog. A bullmastiff. She’d never had a dog before and when her landlord – a down-to-earth, no-nonsense farmer – had insisted she take Tank in for a fortnight, she’d only done it to prove she didn’t need a guard dog. Ha ha. Because here Tank was eight years later, greying around the muzzle, a little fatter, a lot more spoilt, and completely part of the furniture.
She squinted at the phone’s display. Number unknown. She couldn’t think who it might be. Nobody rang her outside work hours. She switched it to mute before shoving it aside. Another nuisance call, no doubt. She’d been getting loads recently. Been in an accident? Been mis-sold an insurance policy? She really must do something about it.
Tank flopped on the floor, gave a sigh. He obviously wasn’t ready to go out yet and although she didn’t have to get up for another hour or so – the joy of being self-employed – she was now too awake to go back to sleep. Her mind was already flitting over her presentation to a group of psychology students at Bath uni that morning. Would they be open to her explaining that as far as she was concerned, the paranormal didn’t exist? That it was the human psyche that created things that went bump in the night?
At her last talk, a woman had called her the Devil’s Mouthpiece before storming out, unable to believe her pet psychic – who’d also been in the audience – had been using nothing but a box of common psychological tricks to convince her that she was talking to her dead mother.
Why did people believe they were talking to the dead? Why did they believe in ghosts? Questions like these were Sid’s bread and butter. She was fascinated by uncovering the psychology that made people believe they were experiencing the paranormal which, nine times out of ten, turned out to have a sound scientific answer. Some people called her a ghostbuster, but on BBC Radio Wiltshire last year, they’d called her a supernatural scientist.
Ha! Don’t make her laugh. Scientist she was not. She did one term at uni before dropping out. But at least now she could see why her mother had put her faith in the paranormal rather than face the truth that her husband had abandoned her. It was all about comfort.
Kicking the bedclothes back, she pulled her father’s oversized dressing gown over her
pyjamas. Pushed her feet into a pair of sheepskin-lined Ugg boots. The heating hadn’t come on yet and the floorboards were freezing. In the bathroom she switched on the boiler before heading downstairs. Tank mooched along behind her.
While he sniffed and peed in the back garden, she brewed some tea and lit a cigarette, moving to the window to watch the blue tits and goldfinches come and go from the feeder. When she caught her reflection, she shifted so she couldn’t see it anymore. Her face was thin and unsmiling. She looked angular, unapproachable. The woman she used to be – warm, lively, fun; she’d vanished when she’d overheard the gang talking about her in the pub. Not that she blamed them as much as herself. After her mother died, she’d gone off the rails in a spectacular fashion. It may have been a coping mechanism but when she looked back, she cringed. She’d been so reckless, so stupid. Little wonder she couldn’t bear to look at herself.
She drank her tea and finished her cigarette. Beyond the drystone wall, the rolling fields were empty of Jersey cows, who were being wintered indoors. She missed seeing them but it wouldn’t be long before spring was here and they’d be browsing past her garden, huffing and swishing their tails and filling the air with the sweet smell of grass and warm cow hide.
Her cottage, a tiny two-up two-down, apparently used to house a farm worker, his wife and five kids, which made Sid feel strangely selfish moving in on her own. Her favourite room was the kitchen with its wood-burning stove and original 400-year-old timber beams. She’d sit at the table and plan out her next gig, be it spending a sleepless night in Hampton Court Palace, supposedly one of the most haunted buildings in Britain, or travelling to the Isle of Wight to investigate a psychic dog. The one thing you could say about her job was that it was never dull.
In the garden, a sparrow darted from the hedge to the feeder. There was something comforting about the rhythm and movement of the countryside, just yards away. She used to live in Jericho, in Oxford. She’d been a townie, nipping to the pub once or twice a week, partying, clubbing, but now? She’d be in her jim-jams by nine in the evening watching whatever Netflix had to offer. She frowned. Perhaps she should move. But where to? Why? She was content here. At ease.
A scratching at the back door reminded her to let Tank in, give him his breakfast. While he ate – extremely noisily as usual, pushing the tin bowl across the stone flagstones to jam it against the skirting board – she
picked up her phone to check her emails. Four missed calls, all from the same number unknown. Perhaps it wasn’t a nuisance caller after all, but she still couldn’t think who it might be. She was gazing nonplussed at the phone when it rang again. This time, she answered, but she didn’t say anything.
‘Hello?’ a man said. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello,’ she responded.
She thought she heard him say, ‘Thank fuck for that.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Miss Scott?’ the voice asked. ‘Miss Sidney Scott?’
‘Who is it?’
‘My name is Detective Kelly. I’m from the Gloucestershire Police.’
It was like being doused in ice water. Her father was still listed as missing. Had they found him?
‘What’s it about?’
‘Are you Miss Sidney Scott?’ His voice held weary impatience.
‘How do I know you’re a policeman and not some scammer?’
She thought she heard another ‘fuck,’ then, ‘Trust me, I’m a policeman. I need to come and see you. This morning, if possible. You’re at Nook Cottage, Neston, am I right?’
‘I won’t be in.’ Her voice was crisp, covering her lie. She had no intention of having a stranger in her home, Tank or no Tank. She wondered if she could hear the detective grinding his teeth.
‘Perhaps you could come to the station?’
She dithered briefly before saying, ‘I’ll be at Bath university, if that helps.’ She could purloin an office if necessary. ‘Newton Park campus.’ She gave him directions.
‘I’ll be there in an hour.’
‘I’ll be there at midday.’ She was firm. There was no way she was going to compromise her course until she knew what was going on.
‘Can’t you make it any earlier?’
‘No.’ The word came out more abruptly than she’d planned, but she seemed to have lost the art of feminine, polite niceties after living alone for so long.
When he didn’t say anything, Sid hung up.
She felt odd, her hands disembodied from her arms as she put the phone down. He hadn’t mentioned her father. Why not? Was he alive? Was he dead? Out of nowhere she felt the urge to cry. Shit, shit.
Real fear opened inside her, dark and cold, like an underground river that never sees the sun.
She’d always held out the hope her father was alive. That maybe he’d knocked his head, lost his memory, forgot who he was. She’d pictured him working in another country, sharing a beer with another physicist at the end of the day, maybe in Melbourne or Singapore. She’d imagined him married to someone else. Maybe with another kid or two. Then she’d imagine the police or Missing People finding him and putting them in touch. Dad ringing her. Asking her how she was. What grades she’d achieved at uni.
I dropped out, she’d tell him.
She’d imagine his response. Horror, dismay, disbelief.
But you were going to be a lawyer. Fight for the underdog. It was what you always wanted to do.
I couldn’t concentrate.
What a waste. He’d shake his great shaggy head. All your education, thrown into the bin.
In her imaginary conversations she never told him about Mum’s illness. Instead, she’d dream about him introducing her to his new family. Pictured them all getting along brilliantly, cooking together, laughing and holidaying in the sun. She’d fantasise that she had a family again. But if he was dead, then she couldn’t do that anymore. ...
