7 Miles Out

by Carol Morley

  ‘Nothing bad has ever happened in this house,’ said the clairvoyant, laying his hands on the woodchip wallpaper. ‘This will suit me down to the ground.’ His hair was black and slicked back, and he wore a dark suit. I half closed my eyes and his edges blurred, and for a split second Dad was there. The clairvoyant looked at me like I was strange in the head; or maybe he was looking at me like he had second sight.

  ‘I’ll read your palm for free one of these days, if you like,’ he said.

  ‘That’d be great,’ I lied. I was thinking about fortune-tellers giving people nervous breakdowns by telling them too much about what lay ahead.

  I stayed off school and faked a long telephone conversation so that I could monitor the women waiting for their consultations. They were all dressed in black and lined up on dining-room chairs that Mum had put against the wall in the hallway.

  Could the clairvoyant really predict the future? I was sceptical. What were all these worried women looking for? What were they hoping to discover? Based on how miserable they all seemed, I imagined that they wanted to be told that their future was going to be happy. But would they really believe it? I doubted it. If people knew what was waiting for them in their futures, would they bother going on with their lives? What would be the point if there was nothing lined up but bad news and tragedy?

  Could a fortune-teller have looked at Dad’s palm when he was young and told him that he would have a wife, three children, and die by his own hand? Would there be any point knowing any of that? Could the future in our hands be changed if we wanted it to be? Or are we just born with lives ready to live out, like following a script? Was all my life already screwed up in my fist?

  I looked at my palm and wondered if there was the line that marked the death of Dad. This was the point I decided that I really did want to find out what was waiting for me, whatever the outcome. The last of the clairvoyant’s customers left and I knocked on his door.

  ‘Come in.’

  He was putting his tarot cards away. My nerves prickled and I wondered if I should go through with it. I took a deep breath and exhaled.

  ‘Would yer read me palm?’

  ‘Young lady, it would be my pleasure.’

  He waved his hand at the chair opposite him and I sat down. He stared at me, as though he was reaching deep inside me, and I blushed. Even though I had only heard bad things about people who had their fortunes told, I felt oddly excited.

  ‘Give me your left hand,’ he said.

  Nervously, I held it out.

  ‘This is your lifeline.’ He indicated with a point of his finger. ‘This is your heartline and this is your headline.

  ‘You’re going to travel all over the world. People will be very jealous of you.’

  Why were people going to be jealous of me? Maybe I truly was going to be a famous pop star and earn a fortune – I needed to get another band together.

  He frowned. What was it?

  ‘I see someone with black hair who finds you a negative influence in their life. They are themselves a negative force to be countered.’

  I thought of who it could be, but drew a blank.

  He looked at my palm again and an ambiguous look came to his face. He glanced at his watch.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘I must get going,’ he said. ‘I didn’t quite realise the time.’

  My heart was pounding. Had he seen that I was to die soon? Was I going to get some disease? Did he know that I would be murdered? Had he seen how Dad had died and was embarrassed? Maybe he’d seen I was going to kill myself too?

  Or maybe he hadn’t seen anything at all.

  *

  The next week I saw Drac on the bus. I didn’t hang out with her much any more, as her mum wouldn’t let her go to gigs, but whenever I saw her I was always friendly and we’d talk about the latest music on John Peel’s radio show and I’d tell her about the books I was reading and we’d reminisce and laugh about her mum’s reaction to my choking on the fifty pence. Drac told me that her mum was planning to marry the tongue-and-groove boyfriend and that they were all moving to some grotty village somewhere nobody had ever heard of. We both bemoaned the fact we were too young to be in control of our lives and our futures. I told Drac about the clairvoyant and that I’d decided he was probably a fraud. He could no more see my future in the creases of my palm than I could. Then I told her he said someone with black hair was against me, and her face twitched uncontrollably. I looked at her black, spiky hair.

  ‘He couldn’t have meant you, right?’ I said.

  ‘Ann, I don’t know how to say it but I have to be honest, right? I were tellin’ someone yesterday that I hated yer. I’m dead sorry.’

  She knitted her fingers together and cracked her knuckles, and I wondered if this was what was meant when writers described people as wringing their hands.

  ‘Why do yer hate me?’ I asked. ‘Tell me, I won’t mind.’

  ‘Yer just don’t seem real. That’s what it is.’

  ‘What do yer mean?’

  ‘I dunno, really.’ She shrugged.

  ‘Do yer think I’m pretentious?’ I asked. Being thought of as pretentious was my worst fear.

  ‘Yeah summat like that,’ she said. ‘Yer always going on with these big words and everythin’ and yer think you’re a cut above everyone else.’

  I was shocked. I thought of how I hated that Mum always thought we were better than other people. Now Drac thought I was exactly like my mum.

  *

  The clairvoyant never came back.

  ‘He read Ann’s palm and that was that, he was gone,’ Mum said to Rita.

  ‘Ann’s a dark horse,’ Rita said.

  They both looked at me standing awkwardly in front of them and laughed. I began to understand why the ladies that had lined up to see the clairvoyant had looked so troubled. Finding out about your future was not a good thing at all. I wished that I had never let the clairvoyant look at my palm. It wasn’t what he had said, it was what he hadn’t said. It was how he had looked at me as though he had seen something bad. I began to think of the future not as a place to escape to, but as somewhere filled with bad things waiting to happen. The clairvoyant must have stopped coming to our house because he had seen something horrific lined up for me.

  Mum and Rita recovered from their laughter attack.

  ‘This one’s as passive as anythin’ in’t she?’ Rita said, looking me up and down.

  ‘Oh she is, she really is,’ Mum said, smiling and taking it as a compliment.

  I rushed to my dictionary. Being passive meant I was lethargic and I had no interest. It seemed far worse than being pretentious. It was time to find love. That was going to be the best way out of being passive. I had turned fifteen and if I couldn’t find love now then I doubted I ever would.

  *

  I met her at an Orange Juice gig. I say her, but she wanted me to call her him. Her last girlfriend had called her he, and her girlfriend’s young son had called her Dad.

  She was called Terry and was twenty-two and on the dole. She played the bass guitar.

  ‘I nearly joined Bay City Rollers once,’ she said. ‘I got picked at the auditions. I were fifteen, your age.’

  ‘So why din’t yer join?’

  ‘Me dad found out and phoned up the manager and told them I was a girl,’ she said. ‘He were always spoiling things.’

  On the days I didn’t see Terry she rang me from a phone box and wrote me letters. Mum knew that she was a girl but had no idea that we were going out together. If Queen Victoria didn’t suspect that females could do sex things together, then I assumed neither would my mum.

  When Mum got an extra booking, I would give up my bedroom and go and stay with Terry. Terry’s flat was in a council tower block and I’m sure Mum would have found it common once, but she was too busy preparing breakfasts and dinners and making beds to be concerned whether things were common any more. Lots of people that visited the guesthouse were common by her old
standards, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  *

  Mum never gave me chores like characters in children’s books were given, but I decided my regular chore would be to go to the launderette. Terry came with me once and we sat close together on the wooden slatted bench. I was becoming hypnotised by the spinning colours behind the bubbles of glass on the front of the washing machines.

  ‘Where’s yer dad?’ Terry asked.

  ‘He killed himself,’ I said clearly. I felt nothing.

  She looked at me, and I could almost hear the questions rustle about in her head.

  ‘I nearly died once and it were quite nice,’ Terry said. ‘I were dying and I saw a light and I wanted to keep walking towards it. They say if yer reach it, yer dead.’

  ‘Who do?’

  ‘Oh, everyone and anyone that’s nearly died has gone and said it.’

  ‘How come yer nearly died?’

  ‘It were raining dead hard. Me dad were driving and we were on the motorway and he overtook a big massive lorry and then he were skidding into fast lane and into a car. It were a miracle nobody died. I broke both me legs and I were out of it for a bit but I can remember the sound of me sister screaming and that’s what stopped me going to that light. I don’t know what it was. It weren’t God, if that’s what yer think I thought. I don’t believe in him. If he existed he wouldn’t have made me like I am.’

  I squeezed Terry’s hand quickly so that nobody would notice and she blew me a kiss.

  ‘Are yer gonna show me a photo of your dad?’

  ‘If yer like.’

  There were two black and white photographs I kept in my dictionary – Dad’s suicide letter was no longer there and I suspected Mum had discovered it and taken it back. There was one photograph with blurred, cloudy-white edges. In the background was an overgrown hedge. Dad was wearing tight dark jeans with a belt. He had on a white shirt and I was in his arms, an infant clutching his thin tie in my fingers. I had white hair and wore a white dress and I was looking away from him, my mouth open, ready to cry. Dad’s hair was as black and slicked back as ever, and he was looking at my open mouth.

  Terry handed the photograph back. ‘He’s like Elvis,’ she said, ‘Elvis when he were young.’

  ‘They died the same year,’ I said.

  I’d made a note of everyone in the news that had died in the same year as Dad. ‘He died the same year as Elvis, Marc Bolan, Charlie Chaplin and Bing Crosby.’

  I handed her the other small, square photograph. Dad wore a dark jacket, white shirt and pale tie. His arm was outstretched and his palm was flat against a brick wall. He was smiling but his eyes were shut and not letting me in. There was something about his closed eyes that really got to me, like he was already dead even then.

  ‘He’s a bit Gregory Peck in this one,’ Terry said, handing the photo back.

  No matter how hard I looked at the photographs I couldn’t get rid of the thought that they were only bits of fragile paper. The photographs weren’t enough. They weren’t nearly enough. I put them back into my dictionary. I kept them amongst the D definitions. It seemed significant that there was only one letter difference between Dad and Dead.

  *

  ‘Can I take them something?’ I asked Mum.

  ‘You could cut up a couple of oranges and put them on a plate. That would do nicely, very refreshing,’ Mum said.

  I peeled the oranges and broke them apart, arranged them as petals and ran outside with the plate. The road swarmed thick and long with people marching, mostly men. They carried banners that showed a winding black road with a white line down the middle, which said People’s March For Jobs May ’81 Liverpool–London. I didn’t know how many miles it was from Liverpool to London, but I reckoned it was hundreds, and they were going to walk it all – a real feat. I distributed the orange segments to the marchers.

  ‘Good luck!’ I said, as many times as I could.

  Terry looked down at the people from the top of her ladder. Mum had got her painting the woodwork on the outside of the guesthouse. She looked longingly as the marchers passed and I wondered if she wanted to join them. She was registered unemployed after all.

  *

  Rita turned up later and said that Duncan and her had had a heated discussion over whether the person up the ladder was a boy or a girl.

  ‘He said boy, but I said, no, he’s too pretty to be a boy. It’s got to be a girl.’

  ‘He is a girl,’ I said.

  ‘I were right! That’ll get him.’

  Terry didn’t want to be pretty. She wanted to be handsome. Around her chest there was a wide elastic bandage that kept her flat. She wouldn’t remove the bandage or her Y-front underpants, so I never saw her naked body.

  One night I reached between her legs, wanting to do what she did to me, but she pushed my hand away.

  ‘Imagine yer were a bird and had no wings,’ she said.

  She told me how she’d visited a doctor and told him how she had been born into the wrong body.

  ‘He laughed at me,’ she said. ‘He told me it were all in me head. I’ve written a poem about it.’

  Besides wanting to be a man, Terry also wanted to be a poet. She had handmade business cards that said Terry – Poet with her address on them. She would leave piles of them in record companies and clubs but nobody ever wrote to request a poem, and some stacks of cards got sent back in the post. Her veiled poems always featured metaphors for being trapped.

  *

  ‘Let’s go outside and see if we can see anything,’ Terry said.

  ‘But it’s happening in Moss Side,’ I said.

  ‘It could spread, though,’ Terry said, licking her lips.

  We both wanted it to. We wanted to be a part of it. We had been watching the riots on the telly with growing anticipation. Buildings and cars were on fire, windows were being smashed, and there was violence and looting and petrol bombs and destruction and riot police barricades.

  Terry stood outside the house with her hands on her narrow hips, looking up the stretch of main road.

  ‘It’s us and them,’ Terry said.

  As I expected, we couldn’t see anything and so we went back inside to watch the TV. There was talk on the telly of bringing back the birch and of spraying people with gas.

  ‘The law must be upheld, people must be protected,’ Margaret Thatcher proclaimed.

  ‘Bloody awful woman,’ Mum said.

  I realised how much Mum’s opinions had changed since Dad had died. She’d never vote Conservative now.

  We watched the riots spread on the television news. I sat with my chin propped in my hand and felt a thrill that all this was happening so close to us.

  ‘Out of the ashes of these last days must come new life and hope,’ commented some religious person on the TV.

  ‘What’s he witterin’ on about?’ Terry said, throwing an orange at the screen.

  ‘These God types,’ Mum said, ‘they’re just stuck in their ivory towers on their high horses, looking down at us. They haven’t got a clue about real life.’

  ‘You’re not wrong there, Mrs Westbourne,’ Terry said. ‘The riots aren’t just about race, y’know. When everyone left school in Liverpool recently there were only fifteen jobs available in the job centre. Everyone’s told they should get a job but there ain’t any bloody jobs to get. It’s ludicrous. No wonder there’s bleedin’ riots.’

  ‘Make us a cup of tea, go on Terry,’ Mum said, smiling. ‘There’s a job for you.’

  *

  Terry came around to watch the royal wedding. We sat on dining-room chairs arranged in a circle around the TV. Terry and my sister sat either side of me, and the guests watched with us. Mum came in with a tray of cheese sandwiches cut into neat white triangles. What we were doing was what millions of people around the world were doing, watching Prince Charles and Lady Di get married. It felt as though I was on the same wavelength as the whole world for once.

  We watched as Lady Di, her father beside her, shy
ly waved to the flag-waving crowds from her horse-drawn glass coach, which processed slowly through sunny London. Everyone was looking forward to Lady Di stepping out of the coach so that we could see her dress, which was rumoured to have the longest silk train a wedding dress had ever had. When we saw the dress, the biggest observation was that, considering the money that had been spent on it, it was terribly creased. It looked like she’d just taken it out of the launderette dryer.

  ‘That dress could do with an iron,’ said Susan, who had recently got engaged to Greg and had been given an ironing board by his sister as an engagement present.

  ‘But she looks so beautiful,’ said Alistair. He was our twenty-one-year-old Scottish guest. He had a black eye and a cut on his forehead, crossed and hidden by pink plasters; he was accident-prone, he said, and had recently collided with a lamppost. In spite of his comment about Di, I knew he was really thinking how beautiful Susan was, because he kept casting her sidelong glances. Greg was missing the wedding celebrations, as he was in bed with flu, and I wondered what he would think about Alistair’s interest in Susan. I concluded he’d probably punch him.

  The TV camera switched from the flag-waving crowd to Diana inside the church, walking along a red carpet, holding her father’s arm. I thought of how if I ever got married, I would never be given away by Dad wearing a grey suit and a white carnation in his buttonhole. I also thought about how unlikely it was I’d ever get married, and what a strange idea it was to be given away by your father. I looked at Susan, who had a faraway gaze in her eyes, and I wondered if she was absorbed in thoughts of Greg and her ironed wedding dress. Perhaps she was longing for the impossible – for Dad to give her away.

  ‘Too young to get married is what I say,’ Mum said. ‘Mind you, I was already married at her age with a kid. But, then again, that was what people did in those days. No need for it now.’

  We all laughed at Princess Margaret outside the church afterwards. Her arms were suspended in a strange position, like a puppet on a string, and the verdict was that she was drunk. But after that there was nothing much to report on. I grew impatient for something else to happen, so when Susan accepted Alistair’s offer to take her for a ride somewhere in his Mini later that evening, I made sure that I was invited, and Terry too.