Free The Bullet Trick by Louise Welsh

courtyard selling soup that was all noodles and dumplings. I bought myself a bowl, added a beer to go with it and sat on a wooden bench in sight of the theatre entrance, watching the audience arrive.
     
    Unless you’re a children’s entertainer, your audience doesn’t believe that what you’re doing is truly magic. They want showmanship. Anyone can feel the satisfaction of teaching their hands to twist the rope until it unravels the way they intend. It isn’t so hard to jump the right card from the deck, or snap a shiny silver coin into your fingertips. The skill lies in making these moves into a performance.
     
    I was always in the smart-suited-cheeky-chappy conjuring brigade, bounding on stage and spinning a line as I spun through my act. I’d long ago consigned mime to a box marked ‘puppets and face painting’. I lacked the nimbleness for a dumb show. And all those exaggerations of the face and form, the Marcel Marceau smiles and grimaces, made me cringe. Sitting outside the theatre in Berlin I began to think how important words were to my act and began to hope that it was true all foreigners understood English these days.
     
    The arriving audience looked young, bundled against the cold in dark coats livened by bright hats and scarves. I watched them drift in and wished I was one of their number, out for the evening with a pretty girl, looking forward to a show. I got up and returned my empty dish and half-drunk beer to the stall. It was time to get focused.
     
    Inside I bought another beer, deposited myself on a seat near the back and watched an old woman in a black dress going between the tables trying to sell the contents of her tray of clockwork toys. She wasn’t having much luck. I signalled her over and blew twelve euros on a small tin duck. I turned his key and let him clack between the ashtray and my beer.
     
    Then the lights dimmed, the audience grew quiet and high on a platform, way above the stage, a woman with the black hair and red lips of Morticia Adams grinned and stroked the ivories of her baby grand into something soothing that spoke of the sea. She reached out her right hand, never letting the music fail, and caressed a huge hollow drum as it descended past her to hang mysteriously over the stage.
     
    The ensemble from the poster ran from the wings, the females in thigh-skimming dresses, the men in close-fitting shorts. Kolja jogged on last, his face shuttered and his muscles specially inflated for the occasion. The troupe waved to the audience, acknowledging their applause then stood still, like a starship crew ready to be teleported, as the glowing drum descended all the way down to the stage, trapping them within its bounds, silhouetting their forms against its pale walls. One by one each dark outline peeled off its clothes to reveal the black shape of their naked body, then they started to rotate slowly, forming a living magic lantern. Each disrobing received a polite round of applause that was rewarded with a pose as the artistes took turns to fold themselves into new shapes, slipping from athletic to romantic, from Charles Atlas to Rodin’s Kiss. There were no unfortunate bulges, no regrettable slips of decorum, and I guessed that the nudity was an illusion, each person contained in some tight-fitting body stocking. Kolja was the easiest to spot. His was the widest chest; the thickest thighs. It was he who held two seemingly naked girls on his shoulders, balancing their weight like a set of human scales. He too who got the loudest applause as he flexed his physique through a catalogue of muscleman positions. Overall it was a good effect, an innocent erotic, about as naughty as an Edwardian postcard.
     
    The first of the performers to appear solo was a lithe lycra-clad girl with a blonde ponytail, who seemed to be in love with her hula-hoop. The audience sat still in anticipation as she twirled the hoop around her body, letting it rotate her waist, chest, neck then suddenly drop to