Mum helps me up the ladder and gives me a friendly wink. The music swells as I lie face-down in the box. I don’t stretch my legs out like the audience imagines. Instead, I tuck my knees up under me, into a secret compartment, and poke my head out the hole at one end. At the other end of the box, Kit’s been hiding in his own secret compartment, on his front, bent in half, head down. He’s been there since the start of the act, when the box was wheeled out. Any moment now, he will stick his feet out the hole at his end of the box, and everyone will think they’re my feet. We’re wearing matching red socks and he’ll wiggle his toes while I turn to smile at the audience.

This sawing-in-half trick is not big magic. It’s little magic, a trick that ordinary, everyday magicians do; something you could learn from a book. Mum does tricks like this and big magic. Not that the audience can tell the difference. They want to believe in any magic, according to Mum. They want to see something they cannot explain; they long to know that the impossible is, in fact, possible.

Mum taps on the box with her wand, as if she’s a fairy godmother or something, and lowers the spinning circular saw. Woodchips spit and fly, and the box vibrates around me.

After a minute, she lifts the saw clear. I smile and waggle my eyebrows at the audience as she brushes a few flecks of sawdust from her old, shimmery blue suit – the one she and I just finished repairing, sewing new sequins on for what must be the tenth time. From under her blue satin top hat, her long hair falls like a gleaming black curtain.

The audience claps loudly as Dad helps Mum pull apart the two ends of the box, to show that the box (and, supposedly, me) is in two parts. Dad looks like I imagine the Vikings did, with his blond beard and ponytail and huge, strong hands. He’s the tent boss, in charge of putting up the big top, and also our Mr Fix-it, mending everything from truck engines and generators to bikes and the ice-cream machine.

Dad and Fatima, our stagehand, wheel the two halves of the box backstage as Mum pulls a bunch of fresh roses from the handbag of a woman in the front row. That’s big magic. She uses a spell to transform a leafy twig into flowers. The audience roars with delight as Mum hands the roses to the astonished woman.