The Prestige

Meanwhile, my other skill, the one I saw as my real one, was developing apace. Every possible moment of my spare time was devoted to practising the conjurer's art. In particular, I learnt and tried to master all the known tricks of playing-card manipulation. I saw sleight of hand as the foundation of all magic, just as the tonic scale lies at the foundation of the most complex symphony. It was difficult obtaining reference works on the subject, but books on magic do exist and the diligent researcher can find them. Night after night, in my chilly room above the arch, I stood before a full-length mirror and practised palming and forcing, shuffling cards and spreading them, passing and fanning them, discovering different ways of cutting and feinting. I learnt the art of misdirection, in which the magician trades on the audience's everyday experience to confound their senses — the metal birdcage that looks too rigid to collapse, the ball that seems too large to be concealed in a sleeve, the sword whose tempered steel blade could never, surely?, be pliant. I quickly amassed a repertoire of such legerdemain skills, applying myself to each one of them until I had it right, then re-applying myself until I had mastered it, then re-applying myself once again until I was perfect at it. I never ceased practising.

The strength and dexterity of my hands was the key to this.

Now, briefly, I break off from the writing of this to consider my hands. I lay down my pen to hold them before me again, turning them in the light from the mantle, trying to see them not in the so familiar way that I see them every day, but as I imagine a stranger might. Eight long and slender fingers, two sturdy thumbs, nails trimmed to an exact length, not an artist's hands, nor a labourer’s, nor those of a surgeon, but the hands of a carpenter turned prestidigitator. When I turn them so that the palms face me, I see pale, almost transparent skin, with darker roughened patches between the joints of the fingers. The balls of the thumbs are rounded, but when I tense my muscles hard ridges form across the palms. Now I reverse them and see the fine skin again, with a dusting of blond hairs. Women are intrigued by my hands, and a few say they love them.

Every day, even now in my maturity, I exercise my hands. They are strong enough to burst a sealed rubber tennis ball. I can bend steel nails between my fingers, and if I slam the heel of my hand against hardwood, the hardwood splinters. Yet the same hand can lightly suspend a farthing by its edge between my third and fourth fingertips, while the rest of the hand manipulates apparatus, or writes on a blackboard, or holds the arm of a volunteer from the audience, and it can retain the coin there through all this before sliding it dexterously to where it might seem magically to appear.

My left hand bears a small scar, a reminder of the time in my youth when I learnt the true value of my hands. I already knew, from every time that I practised with a pack of cards, or a coin, or a fine silk scarf, or with any one of the conjurer's props I was slowly amassing, that the human hand was a delicate instrument, fine and strong and sensitive. But carpentry was hard on my hands, an unpleasant fact I discovered one morning in the yard. A moment's lost attention while shaping a felloe, a careless movement with a chisel, and I cut a deep slash in my left hand. I remember standing there in disbelief, my fingers tensed like the talons of a claw, while dark-red blood welled out of the gash and ran thickly down my wrist and arm. The older men I was working with that day were used to dealing with such injuries, and knew what to do; a tourniquet was rapidly applied, and a cart readied for the dash to hospital. For two weeks afterwards my hand was bandaged. It was not the blood, not the pain, not the inconvenience; it was the dread that when the cut itself healed my hand would be found to have been cut through in some final, devastating way, immobilizing it forever. As events turned out no permanent damage was done. After a discouraging period when the hand was stiff and awkward to use, the tendons and muscles gradually eased up, the gash healed and knitted properly, and within two months I was back to normal.

I took it as a warning, though. My legerdemain was then only a hobby. I had never performed for anyone, not even, like Robert Noonan, for the entertainment of the men I worked with. All my magic was practice magic, executed in dumb show before the tall mirror. But it was a consuming hobby, a passion, even, yes, the beginning of an obsession. I could not allow an injury to put it in jeopardy!