by Derren Brown
I sat down to speak to the son, asking him if he liked magic, letting him answer, while I looked back and forth between him and the fat man, who was reaching his friends and now picking past them to his seat.
Just before he sank out of view and settled back into the distant, warm jumble of conversations emanating from that dim corner, the man looked up for a moment and out across the tables and diners, around at the scattered, ludicrous interpretations of the Eastern Orthodox Empire, and for a moment, it seemed, right at me. Then, across the wide lounge, he nodded. He nodded in that male acknowledging style where the head tips up and back rather than down, in a display of recognition rather than affirmation, and I, a beat later from my side, returned the same movement. But as I did so I instinctively blinked and looked away, embarrassed and thrown; glancing across the walls and windows of the interior for a second, the corners of my mouth lifting as an afterthought, so as not to seem rude, in the way I would keep smiling after walking away from someone’s joke, in case I was still being watched.
I turned my attention back to the boy, who had by then already finished speaking. I removed the deck from its case, dropped the empty box in its precise place to my right, cut the deck to bring the shortened Queen to the top and spread the cards in an arc across the table. I instructed them to pick a card each, and turned aside to let them do so.
I looked away, as my profession demands that I do so often, and my eyes alighted on a small window just to the right of the door; the grey woollen hat of a young man passing quickly outside, momentarily backlit by the bright patch of yellow from a streetlamp on the other side of the car park; the lamp haloed by spitting rain, one of several haloed yellow smudges that formed two dotted lines of dwindling size along the route of the main road, lines which (as the family mumbled that their cards were chosen and what should they do next) finally merged into the distant white and red points of the car-lights that were now slowly circling a fat, wet Bristol roundabout in the night rain.
(Then I woke up, then I died.)
* Something about the environment of a hotel and the open invitation of a sprawling breakfast buffet gives one permission to try the most unlikely breakfast combinations. It does not seem untoward to assemble at the communal buffet a salmagundi of smoked salmon, hash browns and pineapple to undergird one’s order of Eggs Benedict; then to return a little later for a fruit salad and, as an afterthought, an experimental union of Shreddies and Coco Pops in the same bowl. (Mixing cereals is an innovative move quite foreign to adult domestic life, but somehow irresistible when we are faced with such old favourites offered side by side in large open-mouthed serving jars. I watch guest after guest combine cereals in this way, and I hope that beneath their casual deportment they are each at that moment enjoying the slightest stirring of delinquent delight that connects them pleasantly with childhood. This I consider to be a valuable service offered by the hotel, unmentioned in the brochure.)
† By ‘half-decent’, I mean hotels with any character and warmth, however shabby. I am bemused by the supposed ‘corporate’ style of many hotels, and wonder which corporations specifically look to entertain their staff or clients in purposefully insipid, soulless environments with foam-tiled ceilings and blank bars with nauseating names like ‘Choices’. Or rather ‘choices’, because Heaven forfend we should ever begin such a name with a capital letter when we want to capture the cool, casual, contemporary chic of these sophisticated brasseries. I have seen a photograph of one of these unpalatable hotels being constructed, and the ghastly snapshot depicted the room-units being lowered into place by a crane, each one pre-decorated and with furniture assembled, right down to the galling landscape prints on the wall. Everything was in place, save perhaps the miniature kettle and two-pack of stem ginger biscuits, to be added at a later date.
‡ I have spent many nights in such hotels while touring, all of them preceded by the infuriating ritual of gaining entry to the bed. If, in my years as a sceptic, I have found one phenomenon that defies rational explanation, it is the habit of these hotels to tuck in their duvets around the sides and base, meaning that I have to walk round the bed releasing the quilt from its pointless restraint. In doing so I invariably bring the undersheet out with it, meaning that I must then walk one more time round the three sides tucking the sheet back under the mattress and therefore in essence making the bed myself – an extraordinarily annoying process to have to carry out when one is tired and perhaps a little woolly from a double-shot of thin Glenfiddich which formed the length and breadth of the entire single-malt range downstairs at Choices (sorry, choices). Sometimes I am too tired to bother with untucking all sides of the duvet and yank out only one long side. This is a mistake, as within moments of entering the partially unlocked bed I find myself attempting to kick or lift the duvet out at its far end with my feet. Not only is this a difficult action by virtue of the fact that leverage is at a minimum, but the fight is also partially against myself, lying as I am on the same heavy mattress, out from under which I am hoping to pull the bedclothes. Thus I become hotter and angrier in the process until, giving up, I fumble around the wall and headboard, blindly flick on the nearest light-switch, leap fuming from the bed, manually rip the duvet free, tuck in the sheet’s edge that I have just inadvertently removed, then get back into bed wide awake and, my temper already irretrievable, reach for the switch again. But this proves as maddening as the duvet procedure, for there is a row of three switches that offers neither labelling nor logic to indicate which operates which lamp in the room, and upon pressing one now at random, the room is thrown into harsh, white light as all lamps are flung on as one. I then wildly move through all possible binary sequences with the switches, lighting different parts of the room and vestibule but never achieving the darkness I had seconds ago. Exhausted, I look to the other side of the bed and see more switches there, the up/down status of which must somehow reverse the on/off condition of their corresponding partners over on my side, thus opening up the possible number of sequences that may have to be explored before darkness is achieved, to numbers immeasurable. In a misjudged, exhausted moment, believing that the involvement of these switches might be of help, I hoist myself over to the other side to reach them. However, in the case of fancier hotels, this involves the surmounting of a mound of cushions of mixed furs and fabrics which I had, shortly before, pushed across to allow access to the bed; cushions which had been arranged upon the bedclothes in an act as bafflingly pointless as the tucking-in of the duvet itself. Stifling the desire to scream, I throw the cushions to the floor and try to push my way to the other side of the bed, but the fact that the duvet’s top edge extends much further up the bed than is necessary means that in pulling back at the covers I also lift and drag the far pillow from its place – a tiny further hindrance but one which by now feels impossibly infuriating as I strain to reach the far light switches with my fingertips and resume my cryptanalysis of their coded functions, throwing the room into repeating, confused combinations of light and semi-light before suddenly and randomly achieving blackness and I collapse, hot, febrile and pumping adrenalin, to begin a fitful night in a room with ineffective air-conditioning, kicking back at heavy bedding until the eventual dawn chorus of rotten families crunching their way across the gravel to the car park stirs me from my misery, lifts me from the bed and sends me off to loathe all humankind under a tepid, dribbling shower.
I have for many years found it impossible to sleep at night in a warm room. At home, even through the winter months, I will throw the windows open and spend the night in numbingly glacial conditions; in the hotter summers I have constructed air-guiding systems out of clothes-horses and cardboard packaging to direct a chilly flow from a noisy portable air conditioner towards the bed and force it to circulate around me. The balance required is that of sleeping inside a warm and toasty bed but to have a freezing room without. I do not require to feel cold in the length of my body, just a bracing freshness around my face and, should I choose to expose it, an
arm. Because of this ludicrous sensitivity on my part, I have devised a way of sleeping when in a hot room which is particularly useful when staying in hotels, where neither partially opening, suicide-safe window nor abortive cooling system allows for a tolerably arctic temperature to be achieved during the night. The trick I have developed is to turn the duvet by a hundred and eighty degrees, untucking the open end (hotel duvet covers are not equipped with press studs or buttons to allow for fastening) from its already bemoaned under-mattress position to the head end of the bed. Then I sleep inside the duvet, directly upon the quilt and with just the upper cover over me. The first and most obvious advantage to this position is that I have the equivalent of a single sheet covering me, which immediately makes things cooler. But there is a second benefit of this system. During the night, it is possible that I will grow uncomfortably cold. If this happens, which it usually does, I can reach back and grab the far edge of the duvet (presuming I am touring and therefore on my own) and pull it across to partially cover me. Now I am still inside and under the thin top cover, but I also have a toasty duvet warming me across my back.
Normally, of course, it would not be tolerable to sleep when only semi-covered in this way. But being already under the thin cover, there is no sense of being annoyingly half-in and half-out. The dual play of duvet proper (shielding the back and side) and thin upper cover (under which the knees and arms find themselves able to move without restriction) achieves a surprising uniformity of temperature; the thick quilty bundle can even be pulled further over or pushed back to raise or lower body heat and state of cosiness respectively. It works very well. The only disadvantages to using this system in a hotel are as follows: the duvet itself can feel a little rough, it won’t always look very clean, and Housekeeping will return it to its original position every morning while you’re downstairs eccentrically combining breakfast ingredients.
Acknowledgements
My fondest thanks to my wonderful friend Iain Sharkey, for reading the manuscript and offering his inspired thoughts for the price of a couple of dinners. Also to Tom Mullica, for inventing such a great card trick, to my editor Doug Young, and to Jennie, and to Joe.
