And then, in that same flat voice, Alison said, 'Help me.'
Part One
Chapter One
Sunday 7th August
I met Tori by magic two years ago.
It was on an otherwise average night at Edward's Bar in the city centre. It was one of those places where they don't serve pints, only bottles, shots or cocktails, all at prices that make you feel you should be somewhere better. There was bar space for about five people, assuming they hunched their shoulders. If you actually wanted to sit with your drink, you had the choice of perching on stools with supermodel legs, or else hunkering down on fat leather settees round shin-high coffee tables. That was if you got in early. Otherwise you had to stand, and ignore the sensation of your shoes slowly sticking to the tiles.
Everything was a misfire. When he had started the place, the manager - who was called George, not Edward, which is exactly what I mean - had hoped for a slightly better-groomed clientele. The customers liked to think they were posh and trendy, but if anyone genuinely well-heeled had ventured inside they'd probably have been robbed in the toilets by someone who would have gone back and finished their drink afterwards.
George persevered. A friend introduced him to me and Rob, and George decided that a couple of roving amateur magicians might add a touch of class. Not a bad idea in itself. Unfortunately, it was another slight misfire, because he got us.
Rob and I would work the room separately. Rob did a fairly impressive mentalism routine, whereas I concentrated more on sleight-of-hand: close-up stuff, most of the time with cards. We weren't classy, not by any stretch of the imagination: the best you could say was we started off well. By the end of the evening, I was usually more drunk than the punters, telling them secrets that the Magic Circle would have frowned upon, while Rob would be staring into some girl's eyes, attempting to guess a phone number off her.
We made beer money. And, one night, I met Tori.
The secret to handling a group of drunken strangers is picking out the leaders and winning them over. So I didn't notice her straight away. I targeted a couple of her friends instead, as they seemed to be the ones holding court at the table.
The most vocal, a guy called Choc, was a small black man in his late thirties, wearing an unironed shirt, cheap suit trousers and old, white trainers. His hair and beard were bobbled to the same short length, and from both his manner and his breath I guessed he'd been drinking for a while: possibly several days. Sitting beside him, Cardo was taller, rangier and in his early twenties, dressed in baggy sports gear and a baseball cap that hid most of his face. In contrast to Choc, he was slouched and uncommunicative: more interested in his mobile than the people beside him. But I did a trick - bare hands, sleeves rolled up, coin produced from behind his ear - and he broke into a sheepish grin, like a teenager whose cool had slipped.
Aside from those two, the rest of the table was a weird mixture. It felt like a gathering of strangers who'd all, if they were honest, probably rather be somewhere else. As I worked through my routines, I slowly figured out the glue between them all was the girl on one end.
I perched on the arm of the settee across from her.
'Hi there. What's your name?'
'Tori.'
'Nice to meet you, Tori. I'm Dave.'
She was small and self-contained, wearing her long brown hair tied back, and dressed in a flimsy, pale-blue shirt. The top two buttons were undone, revealing a silver cross on a necklace that I would later learn belonged to her sister, who'd died four years ago. Her face was pretty without being beautiful, but there was something about her that caught my attention as soon as I sat down there. Throughout the earlier part of my routine she'd been quiet, mostly just sitting back and smiling to herself, as though content to enjoy the evening from a distance, comfortable in her own thoughts.
I didn't know it properly then, but this was the truth about Tori. Most people, by their mid twenties have usually been messed around with, and they've hardened themselves up as a result. They take longer to trust someone: to relax the protective shell they've formed. Tori wasn't like that; she offered everything about herself without any kind of guard. That's a rare thing.
'Okay,' I said. 'I want you to tell me when to stop.'
I held a pack of cards face-down, then riffled slowly down the edge.
'Stop.'
I did: not quite halfway down. I cut the deck at that point and, turning my head away, held it up for everyone at the table to see.
'That's the card you cut to. I have no idea what it is, but I want you to remember it.'
'Okay.'
I put the deck back together, then handed it to her.
'Have a look through, and make sure the cards are all different, so you know I'm not cheating.'
I watched her fan them out towards her. Her hands were very delicate and precise.
'That's good. Now you might think I know where in the pack your card is, so I want you to shuffle them as much as you like.'
She did, her actions methodical and unhurried.
Then I went through a few more things she should do. By the time we were finished, the cards were shuffled, cut, back inside the packet again, and she'd chosen a bemused man standing nearby to hold the resealed deck for us.
I looked into her eyes.
'Okay. I can't see him. He's not making any sounds or giving me any clues. Right?'
'Right.'
We'd both leaned forwards a little now, and she was looking back at me, amused and unintimidated. I realised that although her face was pretty, her eyes - big and brown - were fully beautiful. For a moment, the trick almost got away from me.
'Okay.' I breathed deeply, apparently making a real effort, then said to one side: 'Sir? Can you tell me - do you smoke?'
'Er, yeah.'
I nodded once, as though it mattered. 'I thought so. Tori, would you do me a favour and look under the ashtray, please?'
She lifted it up to reveal a single card lying face down.
'Is that the card you cut to?'
It bowed in the middle as she fumbled slightly, and then a smile broke across her face when she turned it.
'Yeah.' She looked across at the guy holding the deck, then back at me, and it felt like my heart beat a little harder. Just once. 'Well, that's impressive.'
I smiled and stood up. 'Thank you.'
I'd noticed three couples in the group around the table, discounting Choc and Cardo, and then her. It was why I'd gone for that particular card: a small flourish that Rob swore - and occasionally boasted - by. I wasn't so good with the cheesy come-ons, but something about her had made me think: why not?
'Two of hearts. You know what that means? Maybe the man of your dreams is here tonight.' Whatever effect Rob managed with this, it sounded a lot less suave coming from me. 'But anyway - thanks for having me, and enjoy the rest of your evening.' I nodded around the table. 'All of you.'
I got a small round of applause, Choc clapping like he was smacking something hard, over and over, one step from fucking wolf-whistling, and I acknowledged it all gratefully before moving on to the next table. And later on, when I was done for the night and a few drinks down, I tentatively went back.
It's at this point that I'd like to be able to tell you it was perfect. But it wasn't. It turned out that Tori and I had very little in common. She didn't drink, for example; I did. Her CD collection consisted mostly of women playing acoustic guitars or pianos very quietly. I liked heavier stuff, but never dared put any on in case it bruised her. I watched crap, whereas she knew a lot about obscure foreign arthouse films, and for some reason wanted to see more of them. And she was ludicrously well read: an English graduate with shelves full of poetry and proper literature, which she was actually capable of discussing. When we were together, I found I was always editing myself in a bid to keep us together, and a relationship like that is never going to last.
Ours lasted for two and a half months. I spent most of it feeling very confused with myself, and I could tell that she did too. We both liked each other a lot, but for some reason it wasn't enough. There was destined to be no happy ending. But at least there was an ending. The night it finished, we were lying in bed together in her house: on our backs, arms touching. We both knew it was over.
'This is probably where it should stop, isn't it?' Tori said.
I forced myself not to disagree. Something told me not to ruin this the way I might have ruined other things in the past.
'I think so,' I said. 'It's not what I wanted to happen.'
'Me neither. I'm sorry it's not worked out. I really am.'
'Can we be friends?'
'Of course.' She turned on her side to face me, and I did the same. Huddled up together, she smiled and touched my face. 'Always.'
I looked at her and, even though I knew it was right, I felt about as sad as I could remember. I'd never been in a relationship that had ended up this way. There'd always been cheating, or screaming, or just growing indifference; whereas with Tori, I felt none of those things. Whatever would or wouldn't work between us, something about her mattered to me more than I could explain, and I wanted her to be part of my life.
'If you ever need me,' I said, 'I'll be there for you. No matter what.'
She smiled at me again. 'The same.'
And then, perhaps stupidly, we made love for the last time. It felt different from all the times before. There was an emotional connection that had always been missing in the past, perhaps because we'd admitted now that we were nothing more than friends, and that, at least, was something we didn't have to pretend.
Over time, Tori moved slowly but surely into the periphery of my existence, but she was never far from my thoughts, and I never stopped caring about her. Because what else is there? If someone's important to you then you make an effort to keep them.
So I never forgot what I said to her that night: if she ever needed me, I'd be there. No matter what.
And, two years later, I found out exactly what that meant.
It's a rare thing to know you've just had the worst day of your life, but this was mine. At the time it was true, but I didn't know how bad things would get afterwards. Later on, it would just be the day when everything began to fall apart.
I woke up at eight o'clock, and was up by five past. It's usually the way for me - ever since I was little, my body has felt programmed to burn the candle at one end as a default setting, whatever happens at the other.
As it happened, the other end had been burning too, but not by choice. My mind had kept me awake last night. It had been exploring, and whenever I started to drift off, it picked that moment to nudge me awake again and show me whatever it had just found. Stuff about Emma, mostly. None of it was helpful, but it kept dredging all this shit up anyway: turning good and bad memories round and blowing the dust off them, maybe hoping that one piece or another might turn out to be gold.
Emma had been my girlfriend for the last year. I hadn't met her by magic - I'd met her on the internet - and things had been good to begin with, to the point that she'd actually moved into my small, rented flat only two and a half months after we met. We liked the same music, films, books. Things had been great for a while. What my subconscious had been busy searching for was the single moment when great turned into okay, or when okay had turned into indifferent. Maybe it would have settled for the shift from indifferent to suddenly miserable, but that had probably been last Monday, when Emma had told me it was over between us and moved out. Later on today, she would be calling round to collect the last boxes of her things from the lounge. The jury was still out on how that was going to feel.
Regardless, I had work to do.
I drank some coffee, ate some toast, and then took another coffee through to the study. It was really just the spare room: barely large enough to fit a couple of bookcases along one wall, a desk in the corner, and a 'second bedroom' into the estate agent's lies. As with the rest of the flat, nothing in here matched. I'd been renting the place for nearly three years, but generally bought furniture on a whim rather than as part of any overall plan. When I ran out of shelf space, for example, I bought a new bookcase, then searched for a wall where it would fit.
I sat down in a leather executive chair that still had the price tag on the lever, booted up the computer and thought about the day in front of me.
Work-wise, I had an article to write for Anonymous Skeptic. That was the monthly magazine Rob and I produced. We ran some magic reviews in there, but mostly we were dedicated to debunking a wide variety of New Age claims. Ghosts, psychics, UFOs, alternative therapies, crystals, anyone who uses the word 'energy' without knowing what it means - we're onto them. The piece I had to do that day was about astrology, and it was paint by numbers stuff - just a couple of pages I would have been able to write in my sleep, if I'd managed to get any.
Twenty minutes later, I was about halfway through the article when my mobile phone rang, jittering on its back on the desk. I paused, my fingers hovering over the keyboard.
[Withheld number]
I picked it up.
'Hello?'
'Dave!' I recognised Tori's voice, but already something about it sounded wrong. 'It's so good to hear you.'
'You too. Sorry - it's been ages, hasn't it?'
I realised I hadn't spoken to her properly for at least four or five months; I'd barely even emailed or texted. It was mostly because of how things had been deteriorating with Emma, who'd never been pleased I was still friends with an ex at the best of times. So I hadn't wanted to exacerbate any problems. But now, the way things had turned out, that didn't seem like much of an excuse, and I felt a twinge of guilt over the lack of contact.
'How are you doing?' I said.
'Not great. Although I've been sitting out in the sun this morning, and that's been nice. There are leaves everywhere.'