Derren Brown - Confessions of a Conjuror

Contents

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First published in Great Britain
in 2010 by Channel 4 Books
an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright Objective 2010

Derren Brown has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of non-fiction. In some cases names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events have been changed solely to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true.

Photograph on p. 147 courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library/Harry Price. Line illustrations by Patrick Mulrey.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBNs 9781905026579 (cased)
9781905026586 (tpb)

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For the Dolly

Also by Derren Brown

Tricks of the Mind

Portraits

I loathed myself again. My heart pounded beneath my stupid blousy gay shirt, and as ever, I found it absurd that I had done this a thousand times yet still battled with the same weary desire to be veiled in the shadows of a corner, to keep out of everyones way and let them enjoy themselves in peace. I was conscious that the grey eyes of the French barman, who had now seen me emerge from the disabled toilet three times in the last fifteen minutes, were resting on me with an appropriately mixed signal of curiosity, admonishment and condescension. This glance, on reflection, may have simply been the natural look of a Frenchman abroad, but it struck me at the time as a recognition of my ludicrously transparent capacity for procrastination, and my self-hatred ratcheted up another notch, making it even more difficult to shake myself from the immobilising stupor.

For all he knows, I have to prepare mentally and take time to choose my spectators with care and precision. So with a serious expression I surveyed the restaurant for the hundredth time and flipped over the deck of cards in my hand.

The new deck of red-backed Bicycle-brand poker cards had that afternoon been worn in for the gig through bending and riffling and springing until the decks spirit had been broken; in the way that a puppy, made to walk to heel, piss on the newspaper and not eat the roast, loses its bungling vigour and learns to behave. A brand-new Bike deck is, for a short while, wanton and precarious. For those first few minutes it may simply spread effortlessly in the hands, the cards riding the frictionless slivers of oily space that lie between each virgin surface and gliding on their own advertised air-cushioned finish; absorbing and re-directing the pressure of the fingers into a beautiful, even spread at the slightest touch; each pasteboard fluidly moving along with its one-higher/one-lower neighbour. But as marvellous as this evenness of movement is, and as satisfying as it feels to see a ribbon of fifty-four perfectly spaced and ordered indices appear almost instantaneously between the hands with an apparent mastery of controlled pressure that could not likely be wielded upon grubbier cards after a career of practice, the new deck is at other times reckless and prone to belching itself without warning from the hand, leaving usually just two cards held: a circumstance caused by the natural moisture from the thumb and forefinger pads adhering to the back of the top card and face of the bottom respectively and holding them back while the others issue defiantly from ones grip towards the floor.

Idiot. In my velvet frock suit and ruffled cuffs, like some ludicrous hybrid of J. S. Bach and Martin Kemp back in the day. Around the bottom of my face a goatee like a seventies pubic bush, untouched by clippers since its first appearance as a student years before and which would remain so for another year still, reaching madly in all directions, until one morning, standing at the mirror in my freezing mezzanine bathroom just down the stairs from my flat, I would eventually cut into its sides with the bacon scissors with a view to divesting myself of it completely, and a pleasing Mephistophelean point would emerge.

I held the deck level in my hands and played at tilting and squeezing the slippery pile, almost but not quite enough to discharge it on to the flagstone tiles in the manner I found myself considering. I pictured them tumbling to the floor, myself bending over to gather them up, and the embarrassed derision of the silent diners as they watched me carry out the apologetic, uncomfortable process. I caught myself being distracted again, and tried to heave my attention back towards these covers I was being paid to entertain. Tried, but within seconds my focus returned obsessively to the shifting fifty-two pasteboards in my hands and the further preoccupation they offered.

Following the unstoppable spillage caused by the combination of pinching pressure and the merest accidental misalignment, the finger and thumb will instinctively continue their trajectory towards each other following the sudden disappearance of the remainder of the deck, and the top and bottom cards (in the case of a newly opened and unshuffled set of Bikes, these will always be the Joker and an advertising card offering a discount of fifty cents against further purchases from the US Playing Card Company) will be brought together in an action not unlike that of a belly-dancers finger-cymbals, while the balance of the cards lie scattered on the floor in a face-up/face-down slop. Here you are faced with two sources of annoyance, the greater being the anticipation of having to kneel down and begrudgingly assemble the cards into a disordered pile of single orientation, which involves not only upturning all the downturned cards (or vice versa, whichever set is smaller), but also the trickier task of neatly squaring up a near-deck of chaotically strewn playing cards into a single satisfying block. This is easier said than done, and is most easily achieved through a manoeuvre known to experienced card-players and magicians: grabbing the entire set of misaligned cards into one cluster and holding them perpendicular to the floor (or table), then