pleasure. A ship was forming before his very eyes—there was the prow, and the mast, a plank propped up at one end by a footstool, the other by a wooden bench. As Jimmy watched, a sail went up, a bed sheet folded into a triangle with fine ropes holding each corner firm and proud.
Vivien had seated herself on an upturned crate and drawn a book from somewhere—her handbag, Jimmy supposed. She ran her fingers along the middle margins, creasing it flat, and then said, ‘Let’s start with Captain Hook and the Lost Boys—now where’s Wendy?’
‘Here I am,’ said a girl of about eleven, her arm in a sling.
‘Good,’ said Vivien. ‘Now make sure you’re ready for your entrance. It won’t be long.’
A boy with a pirate’s patch over one eye and a hook made from some sort of shiny cardboard in his hand, began to walk towards Vivien in a rollicking way that made her laugh.
They were rehearsing a play, Jimmy realised, Peter Pan. His mother had taken him to see it once when he was a boy. They’d made the trip to London and then had tea afterwards at Liberty’s, a fancy tea it had been, during which Jimmy had sat silent and out of place, stealing glances at his mother’s tight wistful expression as she peered over her shoulder at the clothing racks. There’d been a fight between his parents later over money (what else?) and Jimmy had listened from his bedroom as something smashed into pieces on the floor. He’d closed his eyes and thought back to the play, his favourite moment when Peter had flung out his arms and addressed all in the audience who might be dreaming of Neverland: ‘Do you believe in fairies, girls and boys?’ he’d shouted, ‘If you believe, clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.’ And Jimmy had been moved to stand up from his seat, thin legs trembling hopefully as he brought his hands together and shouted back, ‘Yes!’ with all the emphatic trust that in doing so he was bringing Tinkerbell back to life and saving everything that was more and magical in the world.
‘Nathan are you ready with the torch?’
Jimmy blinked back to the present.
‘Nathan?’ Vivien said. ‘We’re ready for you.’
‘I’m shining it already,’ said a small boy with curly red hair and his foot in a brace. He was sitting on the floor, aiming his torch at the sail. ‘Oh yes,’ said Vivien. ‘So you are. Well, that’s—good.’
‘But we can hardly see it,’ said another boy, standing with his hands on his hips where the audience might sit. He was craning up at the sail, squinting through his glasses at the spread of feeble light.
‘It’s not much use if we can’t see Tinkerbell,’ said the boy playing Captain Hook. ‘It won’t work at all.’
‘Yes it will,’ Vivien said determinedly. ‘Of course it will. The power of suggestion is a tremendous thing. If we all say we can see the fairy, then the audience will, too.’
‘But we can’t see her.’
‘Well, no, but if we say we can—’
‘You mean lie?’
Vivien glanced towards the ceiling, searching for the words to explain, and the children began to bicker amongst themselves.
‘Excuse me,’ said Jimmy from where he stood in the door-way. Nobody seemed to hear him so he said it again, louder this time. ‘Excuse me?’
They all turned then. Vivien drew breath when she saw him, and then she scowled. Jimmy admitted to taking a certain pleasure in upsetting her; in showing her things didn’t always go her way.
‘I was just wondering,’ he said. ‘What if you used a photographer’s light? It’s similar to a torch but far more powerful.’
Children being what they were, not one reacted with suspicion or even surprise that a stranger had joined them in the attic nursery and weighed in on this most specific of conversations. Instead, there was silence as they all considered his suggestion, and then light whispery noise as they discussed it, and then ‘Yes!’ shouted one of the boys, jumping to his feet with excitement.
‘Perfect!’ said another.
‘But we don’t have one,’ said the gloomy boy in the glasses.
‘I could get you one,’ Jimmy said. ‘I work at a newspaper, we have a studio filled with lights.’
More excited cheering and chatter came from the children.
‘But how would we make it look like a fairy, flying about and what not?’ said the same cheerless chap, piping up over the top of the others.
Jimmy left his doorjamb and entered the room. All the children had swivelled