Confessions of a Conjuror

by Derren Brown

  * There is an anecdote attached to Vernon, which runs accurately or otherwise as follows. He was showing a card trick to some fellow magicians one evening when the phone rang. The owner of the place (I suspect it was a back-room in a magic shop) answered the call, which turned out to be from the local hospital, bearing news that Vernon’s wife had just given birth. Vernon, who we might like to imagine would have made a point of being at the birth, did not take the call: instead he finished the trick before calling the hospital back.

  * I remember three occasions in my life when I have experienced moments of absolute private bewilderment; when in some private way the forces of nature seemed to have been suspended and, had I been filmed at the time, you would have seen the background woozily pull away as in a ‘contra zoom’ shot, your author gaping in the foreground like Roy Scheider standing on the beach in Jaws.

  The first was staring at a quarter-drunk mug of tea in my parents’ kitchen, aged perhaps fourteen, and seeing bubbles rise to the surface for no reason that I could understand. It appeared to have suddenly started to boil, or alternatively some unholy amorphous entity had emerged into primitive life beneath the surface of my Tetley’s. I stared, incredulous, my teenage mind unable to fathom what could be suddenly causing movement within the drink. On reflection, I imagine that bubbles of air had trapped themselves around imperfections on the inside surface of the mug and were now dislodging themselves following movement from the drink, but at the time I was both transfixed on the seeming impossibility, and simultaneously running what checks I could that I was awake, sane, and not the victim of some elaborate prank.

  The second occasion happened only a little while after that and was also refreshment-related: I touched a teaspoon to another teaspoon on a dinner-table and found a slight magnetic attraction between the two. I was able to lift the handle of the second spoon a tiny way off the table by letting it cling to the bowl of the other before the effect wore off. This was extraordinary, as it whispered to me of strange psychic abilities within myself. After the few seconds of magic, I could not repeat the effect, and was utterly baffled, believing I had witnessed – or created – something inexplicable. I have since been told that metal can gain magnetic qualities if beaten or treated in a particular way, and perhaps some by-product of the dishwashing process had lent it these mild, temporary qualities. When we do not understand some piece of science (to paraphrase Hume), it becomes indistinguishable from magic.

  The third occurrence was a little different. I was younger, perhaps ten, lying on the grass in some field near the south coast, accompanied by my parents and a picnic we had taken with us. The car was parked nearby, so we may have come from visiting my grandparents, who spent their summers in a caravan in Wittering. I was, as I recall it, sprawled on my stomach in a red T-shirt, supporting my head in my hands, feeling the summer grass along the length of my upper arms, my sandalled feet swinging above me in a clichéd posture of childhood insouciance. I asked my mother for a ham sandwich (of which I was very fond, and still am. To this day, a tray of limp, triangular, white/yellow/pink/yellow/white heavily buttered and crustless ham sandwiches – especially if the filling in question is the thinnest possible sliver of miserable processed substance more aqueous than porcine in its composition – brings sweet flooding memories of early birthday parties, packed lunches and Salt’N’Shake crisps), but there were none left. I turned back to the grass, looked down into its blades, and saw two black ants, shiny and strong, busily exploring. I saw one climb a long green shoot, change its mind, turn and descend. I watched the two walk the earth between the grass, constantly changing direction as they searched for crumbs and other ant treasures, turning and searching, all with a relentless urgency and unstoppable sense of purpose; they moved with the light, accelerated velocity of characters in a silent movie, yet with the meandering tenacity and uniform pace of miniature sci-fi robots. Then I noticed a third ant, and a fourth, trundling silently and with similar steadfastness, enlarging the pattern; then ten more came into view, then twenty, which opened into a hundred, a thousand, as the moving, shifting, living pattern beneath me expanded, and I was floating on this undulating carpet of moving black-brown bodies, all proceeding at the same speed, shifting noiselessly between the grass blades, and somehow I was seeing them all, the entire pattern, not individual ants but the whole.

  And then I was suddenly alone and ten and my parents were gone and there was just me and an empty picnicless field. I could see them nowhere. I got up and headed back to the car and found them there, annoyed. They said that they had several times told me to get up and come with them, before giving up and leaving me to sulk (as they had seen it) over an unavailable ham sandwich. They were unaware that I had neither heard their calls nor thought again of food because I was in the grip of some experience of auto-hypnosis, entranced by the surprising sight of so many insects, seemingly for twenty minutes or more. I excitedly tried to explain to my mother, who, still feeling angry, was not interested. I did not comprehend what had happened, but I remember the return to the white Chrysler in the lay-by, the dismissive reaction, and the warm drive back home as I wondered about ants and the loss of twenty minutes.

  † Some months ago I was at a local gym, being trained personally by D—, my personal trainer. My motivation during such sessions is low, and my awareness of motivational techniques high, so I always enjoy my trainer’s transparent and ineffectual attempts to boost my stamina and make the whole business of lifting heavy objects and placing them back down again seem like great fun. At one misjudged moment, when I was lying on the bench holding up a metal bar with each end inserted into a pitifully petite circular weight, and while I was expressing the usual combination of exhaustion and resentment with him and the entire charade and pooh-poohing the number of ‘reps’ he intended for me, he offered the following spur to prick the sides of my intent: ‘Come on! Remember – I think, therefore I am.’

  The sudden realisation that this exquisite epistemological axiom had, through simple miscomprehension, been reduced to a vacuous motivational slogan had quite the wrong impact upon my reluctant iron-pumping, and I had to hand the weight to D— to avoid a possible health and safety incident.

  After my revolting burst of intellectual smugness had dwindled, I was left intrigued by the unsettling question of whether the phrase was of more use with this misunderstood meaning than it was as intended by Descartes. What was more beneficial, self-help or philosophy? Immediate personal fulfilment or grand intellectual exercises? The obsession with self, or the shedding of self to gain a clearer perspective? Of course there is no need to place the two into an opposing either/or: there is plenty of self-improvement to be found in philosophy: to live a better life has always been a goal implicit in much of philosophical thought. But somehow the fact that I was considering this question on the way home from a gym, which I was attending for what felt like intellectually embarrassing reasons of improving my self-image, made the question more pertinent.

  * Made, of course, from the armour of Lewis Carroll’s unlikely chimera.

  * And I cannot see the word ‘troubled’ prefixing the name of some poor starlet who is being dragged through the mire of tabloid spite without vomiting directly into the newspaper. Troubled by whom? Troubled by you, you fuckwits.

  Twice the card had changed: once from Joel’s Jack to Benedict’s Ten, and again to Charlotte’s Two. But according to the rule of Three, a final stage was needed. A third act to the sequence could offer transformation with a surprise.

  My left hand still held the deck, and now it picked up Charlotte’s Two of Hearts at its fingertips, showed it for a moment, then seemingly slipped it face-down on to the table under my right, which immediately covered it. I rubbed it a little against the table as before, repeating the ritual; then, tensing my hand awkwardly as if it were palming the card, lifted my right hand a few inches. The card was gone from the table, but I knew it appeared to be held against the palm.

  ‘I shall bring it b
ack,’ I added, and brought my hand back down.

  Benedict had suddenly found his moment. ‘You’ve just got it in your hand,’ he declared, clearly rather pleased with himself.

  I pretended not to hear. Charlotte was irritated and responded curtly with a ‘Ben, don’t.’ Joel said nothing.

  The card, of course, had never really been placed under my right hand. This was a stalling subterfuge: a point of time misdirection. I was soon going to show that the card had indeed disappeared, but for the moment I wanted them to think that I still had it palmed, and by delaying the reveal I was going to make it very hard for them to backtrack to the actual point of method.

  Tabletop Vanish

  I enjoyed the tension between Charlotte and Benedict, and once again rubbed my flat hand on the table a little more as if I were still planning on producing the card . . . then spread my fingers to show only tabletop, and the sudden disappearance of the pasteboard. I turned over my hand to reveal the empty palm, feigned surprise at the complete vanish, and peripherally noted Benedict’s confusion and displeasure at the dupe. Charlotte let out a squeal, leant forward and brought her hands to her cheeks, and Joel laughed out loud. It was so much more powerful for having led them to believe the card was still held there a moment before.

  Benedict, feigning indifference, brought his left hand up on to the back of the sofa that held him and looked away, over his shoulder, at the metal artwork on the wall to his side. This arm movement pulled at his tailored, open suit jacket and exposed the liberal left side of his stomach, which lolled loosely over his trouser-top. A small triangle of shirt, I saw, had come untucked. Clearly the ill-ironed garment did not extend far enough to orbit the belly and remain entirely secured by the belt beneath it – at least not at the side, where the shirt-tail sweeps up to meet the edge of the front section, and where an upwards armswing from a tubby wearer might cause this section to emerge from above the belt and expose a small piece of fat flesh.

  I remembered at that moment an interview with John Major conducted by Sue Lawley, just after (or perhaps just before) he had become Prime Minister. Despite the interviewee’s status, the production team had seemingly not included a wardrobe assistant that day, or if it had, perhaps she had been too nervous to say something, for my lasting memory of that interview is not Major wriggling out of Lawley’s questioning about the poll tax, nor of any other aspect of the interview itself. Rather, I remember that Major sat with his legs crossed, a misjudged action which lifted the leg of his right-hand trouser to expose a pale, two-inch-thick strip of bare leg above his short socks. He remained in this position for the whole interview, mesmerising me and, I’m sure, many others with this unexpected semi-display of white English skin, bordered by grey sock and grey-green trouser, which swung a little hither and thither as he spoke words that I barely heard. Lawley, in her first on-screen high-profile political interview, was trying perhaps a little too hard to show her worth and was being (or so it seemed to me) unfairly aggressive with the new (or soon-to-be) PM. There was something rather lovely about her efforts to shine as a serious political interrogator being undermined by a distracting bit of ministerial shin. How blissful if Major, realising that Lawley was going to be trouble, had allowed his trouser-leg to rise that vital couple of inches on purpose.

  The previous moment of lifting my flat, empty hand while keeping it tense (to suggest that the card was retained in a palm when in fact it had never even been placed on the table) was designed to provoke a certainty in the minds of Joel, Charlotte and Benedict that the card was still there. Mentally they could see it, held somehow against my palm, clipped perhaps at its corners between the fingers, and they would seize the opportunity to outfox the conjuror. This made the vanish that then followed far more striking, and importantly, allowed them to forget how fairly or otherwise the card had actually been placed on the table to start with. The action of placing it down was deceptive but might have been remembered had it not been for the pantomime rubbing sequence designed to convince them the card had been genuinely placed there. This, like the previous covering of the card to change it, was a punctuation point, placed in the middle of a sequence, which made it very difficult for them to think back far enough to solve the mystery. Once they believed the card was being secretly retained (because the first unconvincing vanish telegraphed its ‘obvious’ presence in the hand), they would no longer need to retain a memory of what happened before (and whether or not there had been a way of whisking the card away unseen). A presumption (that the card was there a second before the final vanish) had been created, and presumptions sit very snugly in the unconscious and are not so easily undone.

  A magician appears to spirit away presumptions of what is physically possible. In life, there is a deeper, peculiar feeling that comes from realising that a single unquestioned belief, upon which we have built many other understandings, has been a misleading sham. I can chart several such presumptions in my own life that were pulled out from under me and the feelings with which I was left when they vanished like a card believed to be obviously palmed. Ask a person what presumptions they have abandoned in life and you request a fascinating list of private evolutionary steps leading to that individual’s current level of maturity. These are important stages which may remain unknown to a biographer and, in the case of one’s own forsaken beliefs, would feel trivial if setting out a written chronicle of one’s own life. Yet they offer some of the most personal and revealing insights: tiny, seemingly inconsequential points of growth that combine to comprise a person far more fully than descriptions of job, education and hobbies. Here are mine:

  Age Presumption Experience of enlightenment

  7 That my father was the famous British actor Oliver Reed. Upset and embarrassed at the age of seven to find that my parents had been lying to me for so long, and lying because my father looked a lot like the actor when he was younger and it amused them to pretend that he and Reed were one and the same to their impressionable son. I had been insisting on my father’s double identity with my cousins when my mother was called in to answer the point of contention. She, no doubt a little embarrassed to be caught out in front of her sister-in-law, laughed and settled the seven-year deceit by flinging a flippant ‘Of course not, don’t be silly’ in my direction. Mortified.

  c. 9 That Father Christmas somehow snuck into my parents’ house every Christmas Eve and left copies of shop-bought toys at the foot of my bed during the night. Very moved that my parents were buying me all those toys. Closely followed by a worry there may have been other things I needed to know that I hadn’t been told. May have asked for clarification re. the Tooth Fairy at this point.

  c. 11 That I would get into trouble for playing irresponsibly and letting a playmate of my toddler brother’s fall down the stairs. Sheer, evil delight at the realisation that they were too young to tell anyone that the accident had been my fault. So I lied and said that either (a) she had fallen while I was working in my room, or (b) my brother had pushed her.

  11 That schoolchildren were not allowed to talk during lunch or run in playgrounds. The shift from the draconian rule of my primary school headmistress to the more contemporary approach of my secondary school brought with it the newfound freedom of a twentieth-century approach to education. I could not believe my luck. I had been repeatedly ‘sent in’ at primary school for breaking the monastic code of silence, which was enforced by some of the favoured ‘big boys and girls’ during lunch. Once, to my outrage, I received this punishment (which amounted to finishing one’s packed lunch privately with the headmistress in an adjoining room) for expressing joy and amazement at T—’s discovery of a single, massive, conjoined Monster Munch in her crisp bag. Surely after the unearthing of such an extraordinary object astonished discussion* among eight-year olds would be permitted, but no. I was sent in, again.

  25–30 That God existed. A delightful sense of a burden lifted, to realise that I could live this life without worrying about a second, imaginary one; a temporary se
nse of loss of the presence of an objective yardstick (by which I mean a set of prescribed values and a measure by which you were apparently loved and valued even if you didn’t feel the same affection from your peers) which eventually gave way to the realisation that my own values, self-image and outward attitude would provide that sense of inner worth and confidence instead. This felt liberating, life-affirming and mature. Finally, a feeling that I must have been excruciating to be around all the years I’d been claiming I knew for sure that He existed and evangelising to my friends.

  30 That I would always be thin. I weighed in at less than eight stone at the end of my first year at university. I could eat any amount of whatever I wanted without gaining any weight at all, and never involved myself knowingly in any form of physical exercise. I awoke on the morning of my thirtieth birthday to find myself with two handsome pink breasts and a fine round belly. Since then I have experienced a relentless bi-polar swing with regard to my physical health, pulling between boredom in the gym and self-hatred in front of the mirror.

  38 That love would be as I expected. I began some wonderful friendships at university, and imagined that love would come in a similar shape, consisting of a strong intellectual base, bold ideologies and a hunger for adventure. Now I find that what binds me most to my beloved is our ability to make each other weep with laughter. Coming to love at a late age, I was delighted by its surprises: by the lack of any template and its emergence from unsuspecting corners.