The Prestige by Christopher Priest Read Free Book Online Page B

his foremen would instruct me in the finer craft of
     cabinet-making. My father planned a future for me in his business. If I proved as adept as
     he thought, he would at the end of my apprenticeship set me up with a furniture workshop
     of my own, allowing me to develop it as I saw fit. He would eventually join me there when
     he retired from the yard. In this, some of his frustrations in life were laid plain before
     me. My carpentry skill reawakened memories of his own youthful ambitions.
    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