Micky Marvello

MICKY MARVELLO

The Ringmaster drew himself up to his full five feet seven inches and over dramatically announced, ‘You’re fired, Micky,’ in that dreadful French accent he thought fooled everyone.

Micky looked at the Ringmaster and shook his head, ‘Now don’t be hasty, Monsieur Le Blanc,’ he said. ‘The trick very nearly worked. I just need to use quicker setting cement, that’s all.’

‘Mon Dieu! I ‘ave given you too many chances. You ‘ave to go,’ said the Ringmaster before turning on the heels of his shining high boots and flouncing away.

Micky carried on chipping the set cement from Pingo the clown’s feet and tutted. ‘I don’t know why he gets so upset,’ he said. ‘Oi, Pongo, keep still, if you want me to get you out of this.’

‘It’s Pingo,’ said the clown, unhappily.

That was Micky, you see. He did tend to get things wrong.

Micky Marvello, to give him his stage name, had been with us for a year. To tell the truth, I doubt he would have been taken on as the resident circus magician if not for a pretty freak series of events. First, The Great Zandini drowned himself in the bath. It wasn’t suicide and there were bizarre rumours about the circumstances, but it did leave us without one of our star turns. Around the same time, we lost half our acrobats because they were extradited back to their home country and the Health and Safety Executive closed down our catering. Circus Le Blanc was suddenly not a terribly attractive employer, but Micky didn’t seem to mind and applied for the vacant magician role.

‘It’s a dream come true,’ Micky said to me on his first day.

‘Have you been a magician long?’

‘A fortnight,’ he said.

I laughed.

‘No, really,’ said Micky, in a low conspiratorial tone. ‘I told Mr Le Blanc I’ve been at it for years, but I’ve only just given up plumbing. Of course, I have done the odd kid’s party in my spare time. What do you do?’

I told Micky I looked after the horses and he asked if he could borrow one.

‘Why?’

‘Cos I’ve never had the opportunity to make one disappear. I’ve been pretty much confined to rabbits,’ he said.

That’s when we had the first Micky disaster.  I got one of the horses, he set himself up and I watched with the bearded lady and the dwarfs as he made it disappear before our very eyes. We were astonished. We applauded louder than I can ever remember because we’re not easily impressed. The trouble was we never saw that horse again. He made it disappear and it never came back.

‘Where’s my bloody horse?’ I asked him, over and over again.

‘Honestly,’ said Micky, ‘I haven’t got a clue. Mind you, if I can just work it out, what an act eh?’

He could pull off some astonishing illusions. Have you ever seen a lady sawn in two and then her bottom half run three circuits of the ring whilst her top half lay in a box on a table? Neither had we until Micky did it. And we had never seen anyone throw a knife at a board and tell it to stop in mid-flight. He almost brought the house down when he ran up to the knife, turned it to face the opposite way and then commanded it to fly back the way it had come.

But whilst he could do some illusions really well he would mess up others. I lost count of how many watches he’d taken from the audience, wrapped in a hankie, hit with a hammer and actually totally destroyed. He also had a really bad run on tearing up bank notes belonging to audience members and leaving them in hundreds of pieces that never went back together again.  Then when Monsieur Le Blanc would be about to sack him, Micky would pull off something so astonishing people would say he was worth the entrance money alone.

‘What did you think tonight, Bill?’ Micky would ask me after every show.

‘You nearly killed a high wire performer with a chainsaw, Micky.’

‘True. But wasn’t it marvellous when I turned the chainsaw into a bunch of lilies?’

And that was how it was for a year with Micky Marvello, until the night he pushed Monsieur Le Blanc too far.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ shouted Micky. ‘I will now attempt to set Pongo…’

‘Pingo,’ said Pingo.

‘To set this clown’s feet in concrete and then levitate him fifty feet in the air to the very apex of this big top. Thank you.’

Micky ushered Pingo to his metal bowl of concrete and the clown stepped inside with a squelch.

‘I shall need absolute quiet, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Micky as he walked slowly around Pingo. ‘Thank you. We need only to wait a few minutes for the cement to set and in the meantime I shall amaze you.’

Micky did a series of card tricks and sleight of hand illusions for a few minutes and the crowd were enthralled. Maybe I should have realised he’d got too many things in a row right and that things were bound to change. He told the audience he would make several white mice appear from an empty box, but the circus cat emerged instead, licking its whiskers. Still, the audience just clapped and laughed and Micky waited for the applause to die down before speaking again.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Pongo the clown…’

‘Pingo!’ yelled a small child from the crowd.

‘Thank you,’ said Pingo.

‘This clown,’ continued Micky, ‘will rise high above you, purely through the power of my magic.’

The lights dimmed. The drum roll commenced. Pingo looked mildly uncomfortable and Micky started to parade theatrically around, chanting his unintelligible magic words and waving his arms.

Then, slowly, Pingo began to rise off the ground taking the set bowl of cement in which his feet were trapped. The crowd gasped. I gasped. Pingo was looking nothing short of astonished.

Higher and higher he rose and I shook my head. How was he doing this? I could see Pingo couldn’t work it out and he was the one on the air.

Then, when Pingo was about thirty feet up, the bowl suddenly fell off his feet, hurtled ground-ward, hit one of the circus ponies on the head and killed it stone dead. Pandemonium ensued.

There were no children under the age of eleven who do not see the execution of a cute pony as nothing short of the greatest disaster of their short lives. At least two hundred of them burst into tears and a number of older kids and parents followed suit.

Monsieur Le Blanc rushed to the middle of the ring to attempt a restoration of calm, but the audience was stampeding for the exits. Bizarrely, Pingo was still about thirty feet up, just hovering with a big lump of concrete attached to his feet.

‘Bring him down, Micky, ‘ I yelled.

Micky sort of shrugged, waved an arm in Pingo’s direction and the clown slowly descended to ground level. I ran over to help him free of the wires that had to have raised him and found absolutely none.

‘How did you do it?’ I asked Micky

‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said. ‘I really liked that pony.’

‘Not that. The trick.’

And then we were enveloped in chaos and it was some time before things were calm enough for Monsieur Le Blanc to say, ‘You’re fired, Micky. ‘

Once Pingo had all the cement chipped from his feet he made a sharp exit and I had the opportunity to ask the magician again, ‘How was it done, Micky? There were no wires.’

Micky winked at me. ‘Magic,’ he said. ‘Just magic, Bill.’

Monsieur Le Blanc didn’t change his mind this time. Micky asked him to but he said that the circus couldn’t put up with Micky anymore.

I helped Micky pack. Looking back on it now, I’m pretty sure he put five times as much as should have been possible into his little suitcase. I kept asking him what he would do, but he just said that something would turn up.

‘I’ve still got my magic,’ he said.

‘It doesn’t always go right, though does it?

Micky smiled. ‘But that’s the nature of magic, Bill. Sometimes it works and sometimes…’

‘Yes?’

‘And sometimes I’m just not sure.’

Micky put on his coat and picked up his case. ‘Thanks for everything, Bill,’ he said. ‘Oh, and I am sorry about the missing horse…and the pony…and…’

‘You can’t go without telling me how you do these things,’ I said.

But Micky just smiled, shook my hand.

I never saw or heard of him again. But I can tell you this; I watched him walk away and I can’t be sure if he was just lost in the fading evening light or if he actually disappeared into thin air.

by Tony Domaille