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when they’re no longer here.
    When the bad stuff comes – and it always will – you look back on those moments with longing.
    The bad stuff was just around the corner.
    The talent show changed everything.
    Forever.
    That’s why I like to think about the way things were, however imperfect they seemed at the time.
    In extraordinary times, the ordinary takes on a glow and wonder all of its own.

03
    The talent show loomed.
    Danny kind of dropped off the radar and Simon joked that it wasn’t as if he was sitting in his room practising by himself – surely a hypnotist needed people to practise
on
.
    A few days before the show Dad even toyed with the idea of entering the show himself, announcing that his Elvis impersonation ‘wasn’t half bad’. Good sense prevailed when Mum pointed out it wasn’t ‘half bad’ because it was ‘completely awful’. He sulked a bit, but I reckon he was a little bit relieved when the original bravado had worn off.
    The day of the show arrived and people got up just as they always had. They went shopping. They cleaned their cars. They read newspapers. They gossiped over garden fences.
    They made their way to the green.
    Simon, Lilly and I were near the back, cross-legged onthe grass, drinking reasonably cold Cokes from the Happy Shopper, and watching Mr Peterson’s act with something close to horror.
    Mr Peebles was even more hideous than I remembered.
    A grotesque
papier-mâché
head, like a dried-up orange, sat on top of a square, unnatural-looking body. The dummy’s eyes
sort of
moved about – they were actually little more than very poorly painted ping-pong balls – but they only went from one impossible cross-eyed position to another.
    Every time Mr Peterson operated the thing’s mouth there was this horrible, hollow knocking sound that was often louder than the thin, falsetto voice that was supposed to come from Mr Peebles.
    To call Mr Peterson a ‘ventriloquist’ is to insult the profession because there was no art to what he did. It implies that his lips didn’t move and there was at least an
illusion
that it was the dummy doing the talking.
    Not Mr Peterson.
    Mr Peterson’s lips
always
moved.
    They moved when he was doing his straight man routineas himself, and they seemed to move
even more
when he was speaking for his dummy.
    To be brutally honest, I don’t think Mr Peterson ever practises. Between one talent show and another I think Mr Peebles went back into his box and stayed there.
    And the weird thing is that at no point in the proceedings did Mr Peterson seem to draw any pleasure from his own act. He looked, by turns, utterly terrified, and on the brink of tears: as if this wasn’t entertainment but some strange kind of punishment he was putting himself through.
    Year after year.
    He stood there, sweating in the heat of the afternoon sun – the body of Mr Peebles hanging limply from his hand – wearing the wide-eyed look of a rabbit dazzled by headlights.
    ‘What’s up, Mr Peebles?’ he said. ‘You look sad.’
    The head of the dummy swivelled through so many degrees that it would have broken a real creature’s neck.
    ‘I get you don’t really care oo-ats wrong with ne,’ came the reply.
    ‘Of course I care, Mr Peebles. Now, what’s wrong?’
    ‘I’ve groken ny gicycle.’
    Mr Peterson tried to move the dummy’s head, and then spent a couple of seconds trying to stop the head falling off.
    The smaller kids were chuckling and occasionally roaring with laughter.
    ‘It’s like a traffic accident,’ Simon whispered to me, ‘it’s horrible, and wrong, but you can’t take your eyes off it.’
    ‘The act?’ I asked. ‘Or the whole thing?’
    Lilly leaned forwards. ‘You know
Britain’s Got Talent?’
She asked.
    I nodded.
    ‘They lied,’ she said.
    NOTE –
Britain’s Got Talent
    One imagines a televised version of the talent show that Kyle is describing.
    In
Stars in their Lives
, Reg Channard writes: ‘The obsession with celebrity was an