by Derren Brown
I used to suggest, in these conversations, a comparison with some of the most transparently daft excesses of New Ageism as an example of beliefs that could be just as sincerely held while being patently false. It was comparing my religious belief with more obviously silly, hippy nonsenses that played a large part in undoing my own conviction. Yet I hesitate to use this comparison now. It is an unfortunate by-product of much of modern Christianity that congregations in many churches are led to demonise – literally – much of the New Age movement rather than expose it as the nonsense that it is. Labelling a threat as evil is, of course, a very familiar technique for rallying dedicated forces to a cause (and distracting from smaller, internal tensions), an age-old ploy famously used in recent times by the West during the Iraq War. The most cursory look at cold-reading and suggestion tells us that Tarot cards are not evil; psychics do not ‘usher in’ the Devil or his minions; and even the creepy old Ouija board can be shown to operate via quite everyday, natural, physical forces. It is a shame that so many evangelical preachers feel the need persistently to reinforce a medieval fear of magic rather than help reveal the Devil’s new clothes for what they are. But as long as we teach God, we also need Satan: for all the Church’s fighting talk of defeating him, she re-creates and empowers him every day through keeping the fear alive and well in her ranks. How curious it is to consider that the grip of the great enemy could be greatly reduced by exposing his supposed handiwork as the irrelevant charlatanism and self-deception that it is. Yet should Satan disappear, so presumably would God without His nemesis to define Him; in this way Old Nick would arise elsewhere, stronger than ever, in order to revive the myth and save the Church. Conflict, and therefore drama, and therefore a good story, persistently shine through.
As Joel and Charlotte reacted to the appearance of the three cards, and the Newtonian Third Law as applied to conjuring created the vital ‘off-beat’ that caused them to pay less attention, I picked up their three chosen cards and switched them unseen for the top three cards on the deck. I scattered the three new cards face-down on the table, then sat back in a clear display of relaxation and of having proudly finished the trick. This larger movement signified that I was no longer worth paying close attention to, that I was not about to do anything of importance, and that now was a good time for the other two either to discuss the trick or at least switch off from what was happening with the cards. Therefore, knowing full well that I had a safe moment for a bold ploy, I palmed off the three chosen cards from the top of the deck and slipped them under the card box, which had been placed to my right into the perfect position at the very start of the trick. The balance of the deck, meanwhile, I placed back on the table, further towards them and off to the left, drawing their peripheral eye away from the box at the vital moment.
This was all done as I sat back in the chair. My two participants were not paying attention, according to the Law, and had they seen anything they would have noticed only the placing of the deck towards them, for this was the largest of any of the movements that occurred during those three seconds. Perhaps they had a peripheral sense of me ‘tidying up’, but no more would have been noticed.
The chosen cards were now under the box to my right; on the table were the deck and three random cards face-down, believed to be the selected three.
Had I let this off-beat linger for too long, it might have been seen in hindsight as somewhat orchestrated, so I leant forward again and reinstated the momentum and concentration. The trick about to happen was already done (the cards were in place). Being so ahead of oneself is a very effective place to be when conjuring.
Now, to cut straight to the climax and merely point out that the cards were no longer the ones on the table but were in fact under the box would not have been remotely magical. Without context or drama, there is, again, only bewilderment. So as I leant forward, I instructed Joel and Charlotte to watch carefully.
I pulled the deck a little towards me, picked up the first of the three face-down cards, and held it close to the deck. ‘Call stop,’ I said to Charlotte, and with my left hand I picked up the pack and let the cards dribble down one at a time on to the table.
‘Stop,’ she said, about halfway through this action, and I inserted the card at that point.
I neatened the pile, and picked up the next card as if to repeat the instruction. I hesitated with the card, openly peeked at its face, then changed it for the final card on the table. I did this as if I had lost track of whose was whose, and had first picked up the wrong one – Benedict’s. Here was another ‘convincer’: that is, the switching of the two cards here convinces the participants that the cards being used are indeed the important ones. If they were not the cards (as indeed they were not), such an exchange would be pointless: thus it reinforces the notion that they must still be the cards we have been using. This was another false presumption, to make the part that was to follow far harder to fathom.
I told Joel to choose in the same way a place in the deck for his own card, and I riffled rather too slowly, forcing him to tell me to stop somewhere in the bottom twenty-six. This pointless restriction was a purposeful ruse, and was designed not only as another convincer that I must still be dealing with their cards, but also to create a little tension. The fact that the choice of stopping point had not seemed entirely fair encouraged Joel and Charlotte to pay more attention: they felt they had noticed something they shouldn’t have, and this set up an anticipation of a pay-off – Aha! Will the card be located somewhere in the bottom half of the deck? What use could that have been to him? – which was soon to be greatly surpassed by the appearance of the cards in such an unexpected place as under the card box.
I squared the deck again. ‘And Benedict’s?’ I enquired, gesturing at the last card on the table. ‘Charlotte, would you?’
I dribbled the cards a final time. When Charlotte called for me to stop, I hesitated and let a few more drop before inserting the card believed to be Benedict’s. Another red herring.
I picked up the deck, squeezed and riffled it in my hands, performed a meaningless sleight to suggest some subterfuge had taken place, and then declared the three cards to be vanished.
Fairly and slowly, I spread the cards again in a crescent, this time face-up, showing each of the forty-nine indices that remained. I showed my hands empty in a display gesture, so that they would not be led to wonder if I had somehow removed the cards at that point. I kept both of my palms in view. ‘Gone!’ I exclaimed.
Charlotte let out a ‘No!’, and both leant forward, checking to see if the cards announced themselves anywhere in the spread. Of course, none of them did. While they ran their eyes over the sweep of cards, I watched to ensure that neither of them spotted the cards under the box: to draw out the mystery before both solving and compounding it with the remote revelation of the cards was part of the fun.
Fun. For them. I am not sure if it was fun for me, in any obvious sense. Yet there is the experience, described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced ‘cheeks sent me high’), of ‘flow’: a kind of retrospective happiness we can look forward to when we are in our ‘zones’; when our skills match the ongoing challenges of the moment in such a way that we lose ourselves and our sense of time, and experience the kind of focused reverie, the unhindered creative flux, that chess-players achieve when they play chess, surfers feel when they surf, painters when they paint, and magicians, perhaps, experience when they do magic. It is not pleasure that one feels at the time, in fact one may not feel anything easily describable during the experience, but we later record these occasions as our finest and most blissful times. They are the ones to explore, value and build upon, according to Csikszentmihalyi’s research.
Perhaps the reasons for performing at the restaurant every Thursday night resided in the experience of this ‘flow’. Of doing what I did well, and enjoying the challenges of each intimate situation in which I found myself having to perform. Of having managed the participants to experience a particular thing that
is not just bewilderment or the intellectual challenge of a puzzle, but something deeper and less obvious. Something lost.
Or maybe it was the cheap, childish pleasure of seeming extraordinary, forced through the easiest route available to me: cheating.
After they had a moment to check that the cards were not in the spread, I pointed to the Bicycle box and, beneath it, the face-down chosen cards that had been there throughout the charade, and the mounting rhythm of the revelation caused both Joel and Charlotte to gasp together with pleasure and disbelief. Charlotte’s gasp was louder: a little scream, then a movement of her hand to mouth and then her breasts. Joel dropped his head, exhausted for a moment, clearly spent.
While they were looking at these cards, which were over to my right, I had palmed another three cards from the deck in my right hand, unnoticed. I then dropped that hand beneath the table with its cards as my left came across and removed the tabled cards from under the box, bringing them forward to turn them over. Joel and Charlotte’s gazes were fixed upon these cards as they travelled towards them and away from the box, and this allowed me to place the three palmed cards facedown under the box, in the place just occupied by the previous three, as their attention was drawn away.
All attention was now on the cards in the centre of the table as they were turned over to confirm their improbable flight. Unknown to Joel and Charlotte, this happened to be the precise moment that the other three were loaded beneath the box, in the dead area of the forgotten corner. Again, the placing of the significant action had been heralded through the designation of space.
A comparable technique of misdirection had been systematically employed by my mother between the years 1979 and 1981 to convince me that a soft toy I owned was able to move around of its own accord. Billy was a limp soldier-doll. I remember a red and blue felt uniform on soft padded limbs, each stuffed white hand fashioned into a mitten shape with a small protruding thumb and three fused, rounded fingers with stitching to suggest the separation between them. My mother would secretly remove Billy from my bedroom and leave him in places around the upstairs of the house; when I asked why he was on a stair, or standing dumbly in the airing cupboard, she would casually tell me that he had walked there. Being of that age when one cannot believe a parent could simply lie, I would listen, shocked, to her offhand assurances that she had, from time to time, seen him strolling (or even marching) unaided across the landing while she was cleaning the bathroom. Then she would occupy me with a task, such as taking towels into the spare room, and when I returned Billy would have moved again; never so far as to suggest that she had exploited my distraction, but just enough to suggest that there was elusive, sentient life within the thin, cotton-wool stuffing of this blank-eyed private.
Billy’s curious bedside battalion comprised a bunch of assorted animals that were swept or kicked from the bed on to my floor every night. They were known as the ‘Bunnies’, although in truth there was only one rabbit among them: Mr Bunny, a yellow rabbit-creature of sorts, which bore a similarly questionable level of physical resemblance to a rabbit as Mickey does to a mouse. He had been my favourite for many years, and his tail had once squeaked.* An early collector’s instinct, which still fills my house with clutter to this day, coupled with the then only-child’s need of synthetic companionship, ensured that a dozen or so teddies and puppets and unlikely beasts lined the bed for far too long. My father eventually grew sick of their lingering presence until one cruel day, when I was aged about ten, I returned home from school to find all but Mr Bunny gone. My mother kindly pretended they had been given to charity until, after my outrage, hate and distress towards his unannounced and brutal act had subsided, she admitted he had, in a fury at his son’s unmanliness, bagged them up while she was out and shoved them into the dustbin for collection. Mr Bunny had been saved, in a curious, generous aside from my father, but among the names of those who were not so lucky was Charlie, an expensive ventriloquist’s doll in the form of a doe-eyed tramp with bright knee-patches and heavy stubble of black wool tufts. He was on loan from my cousin Claire at the time and was ditched with all the others. We had to lie to her family about the loss of the doll. I’m not sure exactly what tale was fabricated that would have convincingly explained Charlie’s disappearance, but let this volume now declare the disturbing truth to all.
It was an irascible but understandable act of frustration on his part: the destruction of the Bunnies was a symptom of our two worlds colliding. The world of the Father was different from mine. His consisted of the following:
Bedtime ultimata
The most frequently used was the terrifying count from one to three. I was always reluctant to go to bed, and even at a young age was able to form precociously solid arguments as to why an extension of my time spent before the television would be both logical and prudent. I would begin to calmly explain my reasons for staying up, upon which my father, having none of it, would look fiercely upon me and start counting: ‘ONE . . .’ My voice would become high-pitched and rapid as I begged him to stop the count and listen, fully aware that if I were not well on my way when the final number was reached, I would be smacked hard and carried to bed. ‘TWO . . .’ He was oblivious to the whining crescendo of my pedantic whinges, which made me more frustrated, and thus I would hysterically dispute until the last nano-second, at which point he would make to leap from the sofa, all red face and comb-over, no last-warning two-and-a-halves expected or offered, and I would dart from the room in tears screaming that no one ever listened to me.
Cigar smells
He has always taken comfort and respite from a quiet cigar smoked in the car during craftily engineered private journeys, and my mother has always found distress and disgust in the resultant lingering whiff of stale Castella. He always carried a Gold Spot mouth-freshener spray (which, when rifling through his pockets for change, I would always stop to use), and this covered the musky, musty, leafy smell in the same inadequate way that air-freshener masks toilet-smells (‘Flowers on vocals, shit on bass and drums’, as someone once put it).
Proximity, hot breath and fat fingers,
when removing splinters from his son’s toes with a needle. Father: stocky and very close; densely hairy arms; red T-shirt; smells of cigar, Gold Spot and shaving soap; squeezing the toe to bring the tiny black head of a splinter into view at the surface of the skin while poking and scraping the red sore part with the vicious point. Son: long white legs and blue pants; perched precariously on side of bath, nervous of the needle; complaints unheard, eyes welled up with girly tears. I would tell him to leave it, or insist that Mummy should get it out (which would probably mean cooing words and the comforting smell of pink Germolene), but he always insisted, presumably because he had an army technique that wouldn’t hurt as long as I would KEEP STILL.
Old war films
My or anyone’s father can be placed in front of a television set showing an endless loop of lamentable, long-forgotten fifties war films, or garish Technicolor tales of men on horses among the orange rocks of old California, and, with a pillow for his head and biscuits to hand, he will happily live out his days and nights, intermittently sleeping and waking until death comes and he snores no more.
The world of the Son was very different, rather delicate in comparison to these things that felt at the time so ungentle. I was a sensitive only child for some time, prone to crying, while he had been one of six siblings whose family had to make do with markedly less than we had. The row of teddies, still arranged along my bed when I was a lily-livered and mannered eight-year-old, must have seemed to quietly mock him.
Yet amid this common enough story of son and father, I retain the memory of some surprising areas where we would connect:
Wrestles
Squealing hyper-excitement in our old house (and therefore until the age of six) as we found our way to bond by playing, on all fours, on the hallway floor. Here I was allowed to attack and leap and climb on his big back until he called something like ‘fainlights�
�– a strange word, which I have now learnt was his or my mishearing of ‘Feignites’, a London schoolboy call for a truce.* This meant I had to immediately cease all assaults and fall panting and shrieking and wide-eyed to the floor while my adrenalin subsided and my father slowly brought himself up to standing.
Draughts
He taught me the game, which I loved, and we would play occasionally in the evenings. I knew vaguely of chess only as some esoteric grown-up version of our game, with strange pieces, and which could be played on the same board by those who knew how. Years later I did learn the more difficult game, but do not play well. The sight of draughts pieces fills me with a nostalgia for our games in the front room, sat around one of the smaller pull-out nesting tables.
Drawing
At age six I would hand him my homework book and a pencil for him to sketch Achilles, or a church, or a sea-monster in the designated quarter-page marked out by my wobbly, intersecting pencil lines, and faintly he would begin to sketch light lines or faces or steeples from his imagination with a soft, deft, whispering touch that astonished me. Many years later, after he retired, I bought him art supplies and a course to attend, still touched as I was by the warm memory of being sat with him on the sofa, transfixed by the emerging miniature grey-and-white scenes that I would next day pass off to my teacher as my own.
If I grew up unable to comprehend much of his world, I found my peace with it when, as an adult, I reconsidered my judgement of such things and saw both my parents as fallible, fellow grown-ups. I grew fond of my dad’s Dadness; I understood him, enjoyed his less obvious ways of showing affection, as well as his stories, bad jokes and funny behaviour. He still checks cutlery for dirt in each restaurant we visit and makes awkward jokes with the staff, and I love him all the more for his reliable, worn-in deportment. He also still, at seventy, with the comb-over long gone, wanders the house in his pants of a Sunday morning with a tea cosy on his head and, posing like a ballerina with arms extended, daintily lifts a leg to fart.
