Christopher Priest - The Prestige

A great loneliness had descended on me, one the Pact yet prevents me from describing in full, except to say that I was the only friend I craved for myself. Yet I, of course, was the only friend I could not meet.

I touch on this as delicately as I can.

My life is full of secrets and contradictions I can never explain.

Whom did Sarah marry? Was it me, or was it me? I have two children, whom I adore. But are they mine to adore, really mine alone… or are they actually mine? How will I ever know, except by the cravings of instinct? Come to that, with which of me did Olive fall in love, and with whom did she move into the flat in Hornsey? It was not I who first made love to her, nor was it I who invited her to the flat, yet I took advantage of her presence, knowing that I too was doing the same.

Which of me was it who tried to expose Angier? Which of me first devised The New Transported Man, and which of me was the first to be transported?

I seem, even to myself, to be rambling, but every word here is coherent and precise. It is the essential dilemma of my existence.

Yesterday I was playing at a theatre in Balham, in south-west London. I performed the matinйe, then had two hours to wait before the evening show. As I often did at such times I went to my dressing room, pulled the curtains to and dimmed the lights, closed and locked the door, and went to sleep on the couch.

I awoke—

Did I wake at all? Was it a vision? A dream?

I awoke to find the spectral figure of Rupert Angier standing in my dressing room, and he was holding a long-bladed knife in both hands. Before I could move or call out he leapt at me, landing on the side of the couch and crawling quickly on top of me so that he was astride my chest and stomach. He raised the knife, and held it with the point of the blade resting above my heart.

"Prepare to die, Borden!" he said in his harsh and horrid whisper.

In this hellish vision it seemed to me that he barely weighed anything at all, that I could easily flip him away from me, but fear was weakening me. I brought my hands up and gripped his forearms, to try to stop him thrusting the knife fatally into me, but to my amazement I found that he was still wearing the greasy compound that prevented my getting a strong hold on him. The harder I tried, the more quickly my fingers slipped around his disgusting flesh. I was breathing his foul stink, the rank smell of the grave, of the boneyard.

I gasped in horror, because I felt the pointed blade pressing painfully against my breast.

"Now! Tell me, Borden! Which one are you? Which one?"

I could scarcely breathe, such was my fear, such was the terror that at any second the blade would thrust through my ribcage and puncture my heart.

"Tell me and I spare you!" The pressure of the knife increased.

"I don't know, Angier! I no longer know myself!"

And somehow that ended it, almost as soon as it had begun. His face was inches away from mine, and I saw him snarl with rage. His rancid breath flowed over me. The knife was starting to pierce my skin! Fear galvanized me into valour. I swung at him once, twice, fists across his face, battering him back from me. The deadly pressure on my heart softened. I sensed an advantage, and swung both my arms at his body, clenching my fists together. He yelled, swaying back from me. The knife lifted away. He was still on me, so I hit him again, then thrust up the side of my body to unseat him. To my immense relief he toppled away, releasing the knife as he fell to the floor. The deadly blade clattered against the wall and landed on the floor, as the spectral figure rolled across the floorboards.

He was quickly on his feet, looking chastened and wary, watching me in case I attacked again. I sat up on the couch, braced against another assault. He was the phantasm of ultimate terror, the spectre in death of my worst enemy in life.

I could see the lamp glinting through his semi-transparent body.

"Leave me alone," I croaked. "You are dead! You have no business with me!"

"Nor I with you, Borden. Killing you is no revenge. It should never have happened. Never!"

The ghost of Rupert Angier turned away from me, walked to the locked door, then passed bodily through it. Nothing of him remained, except a persistent trace of his hideous carrion stench.

The haunting had paralysed me with fear, and I was still sitting immobile on the couch when I heard beginners called. A few minutes later my dresser came to the room and tried to get in, and it was his insistent knocking that at last roused me from the couch.

I found Angier's knife on the floor of the dressing room, and I have it with me now. It is real. It was carried by a ghost.

Nothing makes sense. It hurts to breathe, to move; I still feel that pressing point of the knife against my heart. I am in the Hornsey flat, and I do not know what to do or who I really am.

Every word I have written here is true, and each one describes the reality of my life. My hands are empty, and I fix you with an honest look. This is how I have lived, and yet it reveals nothing.

I will go alone to the end.

I was only five at the time, but there's no doubt in my mind that it all really happened. I know that memory can play tricks, especially at night, on a shocked and terrified child, and I know that people patch together memories from what they think happened, or what they wish had happened, or what other people later tell them had happened. All of this went on, and it has taken many years for me to piece together the reality.

It was cruel, violent, unexplained and almost certainly illegal. It wrecked the lives of most of the people involved. It has blighted my own life.

Now I can tell the story as I saw it take place, but tell it as an adult.

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My father is Lord Colderdale, the sixteenth of that name. Our family name is Angier, and my father's given names were Victor Edmund; my father is the son of Rupert Angier's only son Edward. Rupert Angier, The Great Danton, was therefore my great-grandfather, and the 14th Earl of Colderdale.

My mother's name was Jennifer, though my father always called her Jenny at home. They met when my father was working for the Foreign Office, where he had been throughout the Second World War. He was not a career diplomat, but for health reasons he had not entered the military but volunteered instead for a civil post. He had read German Literature at university, spent some time in Leipzig during the 1930s, and so was seen as possessing a skill useful to the British Government in wartime. Translation of messages intercepted from the German High Command apparently came into it. He and my mother met in 1946 on a train journey from Berlin to London. She was a nurse who had been working with the Occupying Powers in the German capital, and was returning to England at the end of her tour of duty.

They married in 1947, and around the same time my father was released from his post at the Foreign Office. They came to live here in Caldlow, where my sister and I were eventually born. I don't know much about the years that passed before we came into the world, or why my parents left it so long before having a family. They travelled a great deal, but I believe the driving force behind it was an avoidance of boredom, rather than a positive wish to see different places. Their marriage was never entirely smooth. I know that my mother briefly walked out during the late 1950s, because one day many years later I overheard a conversation between her and her sister, my Auntie Caroline. My sister Rosalie was born in 1962, and I followed in 1965. My father was then nearly fifty, and my mother was in her late thirties.

Like most people, I can't recall much about my first years of life. I remember that the house always seemed cold, and that no matter how many blankets my mother piled on top of my bed, or how hot was my hot-water bottle, I always felt chilled through to the bone. Probably I am remembering just one winter, or one month or one week in one winter, but even now it seems like always. The house is impossible to heat properly in winter; the wind curls through the valley from October to the middle of April. We have snow coverage for about three months of the year. We always burnt a lot of wood from the trees on the estate, and still do, but wood isn't an efficient fuel, like coal or electricity. We lived in the smallest wing of the house, and so as I grew up I really had little idea of the extent of the place.