by Derren Brown
My concern of the moment was that I wished to be seen by my employers to be working. To overcome the cowardice that was becoming stifling I decided I would begin with a table of three men, two of them in their late forties or early fifties and, at a guess, treating the third member of the group to dinner after giving him a job in their legal firm: the new employee was younger, and his thick-soled shoes, high-street suit and nervously chosen tie placed him lower on the corporate ladder than the other two, one of whom looked like he had been born in the three-piece pinstripe cloth that was moulded around his lawful corporate gut, silver watch-chain grinning smugly across his front.
But as I stepped forward, a man’s voice, loud behind me – ‘Hey, show us a card trick!’ – made me stop, smile, and turn to face a table near the door that I had not yet considered.
* Post-colonial guilt had reached its height in the exhausting relativism of post-modern hermeneutics. Language and meaning had become the new oppressors: X cannot claim to understand a thing’s true meaning, as that would oppress poor Y, who thinks differently, and what would we be then? The disgrace of one’s Western past seems to have led to a fanatical embrace of all things Eastern, particularly in the realm of interior decor where a pose of esprit de corps with the suffering East could be easily, sentimentally and indiscriminately adopted at the safest, most ornamental level.
* As a parallel to this reductionist self-view that I sometimes adopt, I also note an enjoyment of the clichéd behaviour of glimpsed, unknown others seen through shop windows, viewed at their table from mine, or watched as they pass by the glass front of some café when I, inside, have just looked up to find some dislocated thought. Ambling past a hairdresser’s today, I looked in, and for two seconds I saw this: three young members of staff, assembled at the reception desk, dressed in black T-shirts, the two wide-eyed coiffeuses listening to their flamboyant, tanned, spindle-shanked male colleague report some scandalous event to them, rolling his eyes, running a bony hand through his profuse, meticulously disarranged hair. It seemed a ludicrously hackneyed vignette, more the product of lazy character-writing and unimaginative casting than a glimpse of real people. Quickly one is surrounded by other background extras, crossing the set: here, the businessman barking into his Bluetooth headset; there, the eager charity fund-raiser and the ragged pack of schoolboys, shirts hanging and ties loose, laughing at something on one of their mobile phones. The clichés seem too obvious, too broadly sketched. One is faintly appalled and comforted by such predictable classifications, and for a moment entertains the grandiose delusion that one is the subject of some enormous hidden-camera reality show, in the same way that, on visiting Germany on a school exchange, I was convinced that the locals must revert to English when out of my earshot.
Hello, I’m Derren.’
Two men and one woman sat on low sofas round the table. I greeted the first, the man who had called me over. Benedict. Early forties with strikingly grey hair, firm handshake, slightly Steve Martin appearance, ruddy, overweight, in a good-quality suit. Looked me right in the eye in a practised manner. Next to him, Charlotte: a sumptuous, messy crop of reddish-brown hair high upon and around her head in which every movement from below was amplified and expressed in lively jiggles and shudders that made it appear to move at quite an independent pace to the woman beneath. Tortoiseshell glasses, about thirty years old, pale-skinned, sexy, open, twinkly, bright, a little curvy. Handshake firmly planted but held still, holding my gaze too but with more playfulness than Benedict’s authoritative statement. She definitely works with people, is practised at making them feel at ease. Across from them was Joel: mid to late twenties, dark, funky, spiky hair, green eyes, svelte, feline but not effeminate, attractive, American, could be Canadian – listen for ‘ou’ sounds. (Canadians make ‘ou’ sounds like Bristolians, stands out a mile, worth waiting to find out, many points scored for correctly asking what part of Canada a person is from.) Could be Charlotte’s boyfriend?
Good. Great.
Benedict’s small eyes were flitting between the cards and mine. I guessed he had probably learnt a few tricks when he was younger. I performed a ‘pass’ while he was looking at the deck – a potentially invisible cut that few magicians, including me, can get exactly right but which to a certain extent separates the amateurs from the pros – and he didn’t register it, even though I purposefully made it a little heavy-handed. That was good: not a knowledgeable magician, maybe just knows a couple of tricks.
The Pass
I asked if I might join them and gestured at the vacant side of the table nearest me. Joel was sat opposite Charlotte and Benedict, which made the shorter sides of the table ideal positions from which to perform. I needed a chair; a few were dotted around among the sofas. Behind me at a nearby table a tall woman and a short man were sat with a boy of about thirteen, who was very smartly dressed. I smiled, feeling a pang of bittersweet reminiscence as I recalled being taken for grownup dinners at about the same age, and I bowed and wished him an exaggeratedly formal good evening. There was a weak ripple of amusement from this group; all eyes turned to the kid. I asked the lady if she could spare the chair that had been left at the end of the low table, and after her invitation to take it, I did so, knowing that I had secured an easy approach for later. I transferred the black, slender, Mackintoshesque furniture to my group’s table and sat down with them.
Aiming to ingratiate myself, I complimented Benedict on his shirt, which was clearly brand new: a ghost of a steam-pressed line was still visible around his ribs where he had not fully ironed it after unpacking it that day. Probably lived on his own: it looked like man-ironing. He accepted the compliment silently, so I extended it into making the semi-honest observation that they were a stylish and attractive group.
At that point, Benedict picked up a half-full bottle of Merlot from the table and topped up Charlotte’s glass – unnecessarily, for her glass was already almost full. After pouring her wine he lifted the bottle, affectedly turning it as he did so, and repeated the same action for himself, emptying the vessel. Joel was not drinking red, so Benedict replaced the bottle in front of himself. Because the wine had been in front of him at the start of this process, this was, seemingly, at least twice in a row that he had poured wine for her. It seemed he was drinking it faster than Charlotte and his judgement was likely to be a little softer than hers. Importantly, the wine-pouring seemed to be a move to distance himself from the flattery he was sensing: a means of stepping out of the situation for a second to assemble his internal response to it. It reminded me of the way in which the fluster caused by hearing terrible news or suddenly, self-consciously, speaking up in company over dinner often finds us needlessly straightening our cutlery as we fight our internal agitation, rearranging objects on the table, smoothing out a tablecloth or the folds of our trousers: these are controlling, placating actions that allow us to take charge of and impose order on a seemingly important little something at a time when we feel threatened.
As he poured, he caught Charlotte’s eye and widened his own for a second. She looked from him to the wine, failing to return the sentiment he was trying to communicate. The wine-pouring, then, was also a blocking gesture: a means of cutting me off from the group for a second to re-establish authority himself. The look from Benedict presumably was meant to communicate a weary ‘Who’s this guy?’ attitude, which he wished to be shared and returned by his group.
The other unexpected conclusion from this action on his part was that Charlotte also did not respond when he poured the wine for her. She had laughed when I mentioned the group’s attractiveness, and her laugh had been unaffected and generous. Immediately afterwards she had lowered her eyelids, assumed a comically exaggerated smouldering pout and released a honeyed, husky ‘Really?’ through the vampish sponginess of her lips. To confirm that this flirtatious display was not to be taken seriously, Charlotte curtailed it with a second chuckle, and as if to reiterate, her hair quivered a moment later in agreement. She had been smiling i
n the wake of her own mellifluous tease when Benedict poured the wine for her, and the lack of a ‘thank you’ told me that these two were a couple, or at least had been recently intimate. I had imagined that Joel and Charlotte, opposite each other, were the romantic pairing in the group, but this proved me wrong. Friends thank each other for top-ups; this absence of response was the silent expression of a closeness that does not feel the need for politeness or pleasantries. Perhaps an appeal of love is to extend one’s sense of self to include part of another’s, and an enjoyable by-product of this conjoining is that much of everyday verbal courtesy becomes unnecessary.
Involuntarily, the memory came to mind of a retired couple I had seen sat at a table in a Chinese restaurant near my home. The place was busy and buzzy apart from two tables: mine and that of the couple in question. I had glanced up from reading, or rather across, as I had not rested my book flat on the table but was holding it propped up at eye-level in my left hand, resting my elbow next to my meal, freeing my right to turn the pages between collecting food on my fork and delivering it to my mouth. For such a restaurant where plates and side portions abound and space is valuable, the smaller footprint of this reading posture serves well, unless the book is a heavy one. It must also be said that it confers, too, a distinctly poetic air that echoes, to my memory, the posture of Helen Mirren’s ill-fated lover in the Peter Greenaway classic The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, when we first see him sat reading at his table – an image which had lingered in my formative years as the way to read a book in a restaurant.
My eyes had drifted from the book and were scanning the smart environment, which resembled, as do so many better Chinese restaurants, a 1970s roller-disco. It is hard to move one’s eyes across such a place without looking to see how many or few Chinese patrons have chosen to eat there: I was feeling the satisfaction of being part of a small British minority who had found an Authentic Place, and wondering to what extent even a better restaurant like this really reflected genuine Chinese cuisine for the families and business groups around me who were tucking into extraordinary dishes with absolute familiarity.
As I considered whether my predictable order of crispy duck pancakes had caused groans in the kitchen and flagged up the presence of a limp, ignorant Western diner, I caught the bluish Caucasian eye of a pale, elderly Brit who was also surveying the room and perhaps thinking similar thoughts. I involuntarily looked away, then drifted back, to see him blandly observing a large, lumbering lobster indifferently nudge at the rear of another with an impotent blue-banded claw in the murky water of a tank close by. Across from this man, and with her back towards me, was slumped the blanched hump of his wife, a mound of knitwear supporting a tangle of creamy curls; her cheek, well matted and dusted with old-lady beige, was turned away from the tank just enough for me to see that she was staring across his shoulder and out of the large window at the evening’s to-ings and fro-ings on the rainy street. They neither looked at each other nor spoke.
So they sat, having booked and travelled to a good restaurant where they were paying for the pleasure of having their dinner feel special, opposite each other as plates of plain rice and chicken came and went, conversation as foreign and odd to them as the untouched pairs of chopsticks resting neatly upon the table. When they did mumble something to each other, it seemed each time drab and inconsequential. I could not hear clearly but she appeared to make a comment about the restaurant, which was responded to with an eyebrow raise and a faint nod; and then, some time later, she might have enquired as to what somebody they knew had said previously over the telephone.
I wondered just how they, like so many other couples, had reached this point, and where along the line that traced the familiarity they shared (which started with them as youngsters, accepting a top-up of wine without the need for thanks) things had given way to this dreary resignation that seemed to touch on contempt. I considered how rarely we remember to retain an interest in our partners’ secret motives and barely remembered desires that once burned and crackled in the same way as our early romantic passions. I made a note to remember this point in future years as I resumed my reading in a restaurant that had suddenly become chilly and uninviting.
Some years after that I was first told ‘I love you’ by a new partner, and the generous statement produced a curious paranoia by virtue of me not having been the first to say it. My thought process ran like this:
1. X loves me. Do I love X in return?
2. What does it mean to love X?
3. I sometimes think I might love X. Is that enough?
4. X has declared a binary position: love or not love. I am to take a clear position on either side.
5. If I do not state that I do love X, some time soon, then my position will be taken as not loving X.
6. Now I am going to have to say I love X in order not to cause this relationship to become very tricky by X feeling unloved.
7. Instead we will progress with X loving me and me uncertain about loving X but certainly pretending to do so.
8. What a terrible thing for X to say.
Once this eight-part sequence had run its course, two clear images rapidly passed through my mind. The first was that of a flamboyantly dressed twelfth-century minstrel, one of the feather-hatted troubadours who discovered the tantalising appeal of courtly romance and so began the extraordinary public-relations exercise on love that still leaves us with an oppressively idealised sense of what we are supposed to feel when in its presumed grip. Secondly, I considered all humanity for a fleeting instant as four-legged, two-headed creatures whom, according to Aristophanes, the gods jealously divided, leaving each of us to search the Earth for our estranged, once-conjoined remainder who, when found, will make us whole again. This was an image of love less tyrannical than the first: simply that of looking for a complementing self, a person who completes us.
These images faded and were replaced by warm, sepiatoned close-ups of a black couple embracing: vaguely formed, dim snapshots created by the memory of the lyrics to a smooth, smoky song I had heard called ‘I Love You Forever, Right Now’ by Joi, and which now ran through my head:
If I could make time stand still
I’d be happy in your arms.
Love without end, drowning and overwhelmed by your fire and charms.
It’s hard to explain, really don’t know how, but
I love you forever right now, right now.
The sentiment had struck me as important: that love changes, hides, soars and reinvents itself from one moment to the next according to the caprices of our fitful states of mind. An I love you, therefore, is a statement of feeling right now even if it feels like it should be a forever. An I love you right now admits that feelings change on both sides. It does not demand reciprocation, it need not leave the other panicked. I had been so struck by the notion that I sought out the album, certain that I had stumbled across an artist who would connect with the feelings I had at the time. It was perhaps quite fitting that the rest of the album was not something I enjoyed at all.
As if on cue, Charlotte reached her hand out to Benedict’s thigh and gave the soft, full flesh a squeeze through his already over-accommodated, taut, shiny trouser. It was not a gesture of gratitude for the wine, rather an offered assurance to Benedict that her previous light-hearted coquetry was not meant. His small eyes darted down to her hand, then looked across at me. He raised his chin.
I returned his gaze and placed the deck of cards on the table before him. The empty card box was in my right trouser pocket. I removed it, closed the flap and placed it on the table to my left with apparent disregard; the flap was positioned towards me with the cut-out half-moon downwards. Returning to the cards, I gave them an overhand shuffle – the simplest, most popular means of shuffling. The deck is held in the right hand which makes a repeated chopping motion into the left hand and away; but each time it pulls up from the latter, the left thumb catches a clump of cards from the top edge of the deck and causes them to be pull
ed down into its hand as the right moves away, each new group of cards falling on top of the last group, beneath which they had until then sat. The overhand shuffle is modest and familiar; it does not ask for attention and therefore allows for a journey towards flashier displays of skill as the trick progresses.
I sometimes used a different shuffle, particularly with an Asian audience. It is not known to many that Asian people typically have a way of shuffling cards which is rather different from the way the rest of us set about it. In magic, it is known as the ‘Hindu shuffle’, though I am unsure why. Magic does rather enjoy using names that attempt to conjure up – pun emphatically intended though unimaginatively employed – an Old Empire world of far-off, geographically blurred, culturally confused but fundamentally exotic lands to which unashamed references often seem bewilderingly racist to today’s ears. The popular Asian way of shuffling cards is referred to as ‘Hindu’ perhaps because a travelling Western magician once saw an Indian (one hopes at least it was an Indian) mix his cards in a new manner, and regardless of whether the local prestidigitator was Hindu, Sikh, Jain or Buddhist decided that the ‘Hindu’ moniker would appeal most easily to his impressionable and largely ignorant British countrymen back home, for whom a bejewelled turban and an imposing disposition were enough to convey all the mysteries of the East.
