Five minutes before the bell goes, she declares the Chokey a success, and tells me to go to the common room and eat something. After yesterday’s door-slamming incident, she’s clearly afraid of me getting hurt and it being all her fault.
Most of the girls have walked into town to buy their lunch, but a few people are still lounging around the classroom and avoiding the February cold. Lily O’Callaghan is sitting on her own with a book, her long dark-blonde fringe brushing into her eyes. I can see red swollen spots around her temples, acne breakouts where the grease from her hair touches the skin. How often is she washing her hair these days? Lily isn’t dirty, per se; it’s just that she doesn’t really like to live in her body. She doesn’t like to notice it. If she could just be a brain in a jar, reading books and drawing, she’d be much happier.
She looks up and gives me a tight smile, fiddling with her hearing aid as I walk past. I spot a clutch of girls I know and quickly join them, bustling past Lily without a word.
Why do I do this? Why am I so awful to her, when we’ve been through so much together?
I go and sit with the gang. Michelle has a new make-up palette from this American brand endorsed by all the most famous drag queens, apparently, and she’s very excited about it. It’s hard to see why. The colours look exactly like the kind of thing you’d get for twenty quid in Urban Decay, which I make the mistake of saying, and then everyone laughs and Michelle looks annoyed.
“Sorry,” I say, when I see that her ears are red. Michelle is ginger so any tiny changes in her mood are highly detectable. I sit silently for a while and listen to them talk. It gets boring quickly. I start fidgeting, and I shove my hands into the pocket of my school blazer to find the tarot cards sitting there. What? I was sure I had left them in my school bag.
My face must look confused, because the girls stop and look at me.
“What’s up?” Michelle asks. “You look like you’ve just smelled a bad fart.”
“Nothing,” I say, straightening my expression. “Hey, do you want me to read your tarot cards?”
“My what?”
I show her and the rest of the girls crowd around.
“You can’t actually read them, though, can you?” asks Michelle.
“A bit,” I say. “I practised last night.”
Michelle shuffles and draws. The Queen of Rods, the Three of Cups and the Ace of Pentacles.
Just like last night with Dad, everything slots together perfectly. It all seems so simple what these cards are trying to say. I weave the story for Michelle. About how her creative passion for make-up and her love for her friends are the twin forces in her life, and how they are going to be her path to success.
Michelle is clearly impressed. “Wow. Maeve, it was only last night that I made a YouTube channel for my make-up.”
There’s an audible gasp, and I can already tell that the tarot cards are going to be a big deal.
“No!”
“Yes! Look! Let me show you!”
She pulls out her phone and brings up the YouTube app. She’s telling the truth: there, with zero subscribers and a grey circle for a photo, is a YouTube channel called “SweetShellFaces”. Michelle is burning with embarrassment at showing us, but clearly wants to underline the uncanniness of the reading.
“Don’t be embarrassed. The cards think it’s a good idea.”
“Really?”
“Positive. Look at these!” Then I outline how the Queen of Rods is all about female creativity, the Three of Cups about friendship, and the Ace of Pentacles is financial success.
From that moment, lunches are taken over with tarot readings. Everyone seems to think it’s magic, that I’m psychic, but as much as I would like to believe my own hype, I know that’s not the case. It’s just a case of knowing the cards and knowing these girls really well. When the three of swords comes up for Becky Lynch, I know that the pain of the card is referring to her parents’ divorce. When the Death card comes up for Niamh, everyone screams, but I know that the card is pointing to the fact that Niamh recently had to give up her horse because her family moved from the super rural countryside to the middle of the city.
“Gypsy isn’t going to die, is she?” she asks tearfully. The whole room leans in, high on the drama.
“No,” I say, after a breathy pause. I can’t pretend like I’m not high on the drama, too. “It’s just, you need to accept that the Gypsy part of your life is over, so that something new can begin.”
Soon, the whole year knows about my tarot cards. I’m waiting to use the toilet one morning when Fiona Buttersfield walks right up to me and asks for a reading.
“Hey,” she says. “You’re that girl.”
“Fiona,” I reply nervously. I’m a little intimidated by Fiona Buttersfield. We only have one class together, but she’s kind of a celebrity in our year. Fiona is one of those Saturday-stage-school kids who manage to make it not embarrassing. She’s been doing it for so long that the older kids have all gone on to college, but they still let her hang around and even be in their plays.
“Fiona’s your name, too?” She looks confused.
“No, your name is Fiona. My name is Maeve.”
“I know what my name is.”
“Do you want something, or…?”
“I heard you were doing tarot readings.”
“Uh…” I stall a bit and try to wonder whether or not I could really read for someone I don’t know. “Do you want one?”
She nods. “I want a career reading.”
“I see,” I respond. “Well, come and find me at lunchtime.”
“No way,” she says, folding her arms like I’ve just asked her to take her knickers off. “You’re not supposed to do readings in public. Don’t you know that? They’re supposed to be private.”
“You already seem to know a lot about this.”
“My tita used to do readings back in Manila,” she says, and then clocks my confused face. “My aunt.”
“Oh, right. Why don’t you just ask her, then?”
“Because she’ll tell me to do something boring, like law or medicine.”
“Right. OK.” The bell goes for class, and I’m still bursting to go to the toilet. I push into one of the cubicles and pull down my tights. Fiona lingers outside.
“So will you do it?”
“Yes!” I call, conscious that she can hear me pee. “The Chokey, lunchtime!”
“I’ll cross your palm with silver!”
For a moment, I’m sure I’ve misheard her. “What?”
“I’ll pay you!”
At lunchtime, Fiona is at the Chokey. I still have the key Miss Harris gave me, and we sit cross-legged on the floor with our phone torches on, our faces ghoulish in the darkness.
As I shuffle, I can’t help but look at her curiously. It’s a genuine surprise to see her here. She’s not a mean girl, exactly, but definitely distant. I can’t say I blame her. Her mum is Filipino, and as one of the few non-white people in our school, she gets a few comments about her looks. Last year when we got back from summer holidays, a few of the other girls asked her to hold her bare arm out against theirs, so they could all compare tans. Her shiny black hair is complimented constantly, but almost always with a weird qualifier. Something like: “Well, I bet it’s because you eat a lot of fish.”
I pass the deck back to Fiona, asking her to shuffle and separate. She picks her cards. I take one look at them. For a second, I don’t say anything.
“Are you … OK at the moment?” I ask tentatively.
“What do you mean?”
“Your cards just seem a bit … sad.”
“I asked you about my career.”
“Yes, but…”
I wave my hands over the cards. Five of Cups. Sadness, anxiety, loss. Three of Swords. Heartbreak. Nine of Swords. Worry.
Her lip twitches. I’ve always seen Fiona Buttersfield as a bit full of herself. Someone too good to mingle with the unsophisticated masses.
“It just see
ms there are other things on your mind that aren’t your … uh, career.”
She gazes at the cards for a long moment, and I assume she is about to call off the reading.
“I’ve got this boyfriend,” she finally says. “He’s older.”
“Oh,” I say. I try to keep my cool. Like: Oh yeah, sure, I have plenty of older boyfriends, too.
“He’s twenty.”
“Wow.”
“We met in the theatre,” she says, putting a little breathy voice on. There’s something intensely annoying about the way she says “theatre”. Like there’s no “r” in it. The-ah-tah.
“He wants me to…”
“Have sex?” I venture.
“Yes,” she responds, grateful.
“And you…”
“I don’t know!” She suddenly explodes, raking her fingers through her hair. “But, you know, we’ve been going out for three months. It would hardly be scandalous.”
“Uh-huh,” I say again, thinking, This is already way above my pay grade. I’m an amateur tarot reader, not a therapist. I do my best. “Well, the cards are clearly trying to tell you something here.”
“What?”
I pick up the Nine of Swords. “This is a picture of a
woman who is literally crying in bed at the thought of a man getting into it.”
And she laughs. Not a fake little titter, but a real, full laugh.
“Shut up, it does not mean that.”
“Just tell him you’re not ready.”
She twists her mouth and looks at the card again. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think I’ll ever be ready. I don’t know if I even fancy him that much. But he’s in the theatre group, and they’re all older…”
I think for a moment. “Well, you could always say that romance is distracting you from your … your craft.”
She nods, considering this. “That’s not a bad shout.”
“Or you could break up with him.”
She smiles and looks at the ground. “That’s not a bad shout either.”
At that moment, there’s a knock on the cupboard door, and there are two first-year girls standing outside.
“We heard you were telling fortunes,” the braver one says.
Fiona pushes past me. “She is,” she says. “Two euro, ten minutes.”
She whips her head around back to face me, her smile full of mischief. “I’ll take care of appointments if you give me free readings. Deal?”
“Deal,” I say, uncertainly.
“Every star needs her own psychic.”
She’s trying to sound casual, but underneath the bravado I’m starting to spy something that I can only recognize because I possess it myself. Fiona is lonely. Every star needs her own psychic, and every girl needs someone to talk to.
And that’s how the Chokey Card Tarot Consultancy begins.
That night, I spread every card out on my bedroom floor. I decide to test my knowledge, to make sure that I can remember every one. If I’m going to go into business with this, I need to know that I won’t be stumped, regardless of what card comes out. I point at them, saying each meaning aloud as though I were weaving a magic spell.
“Ace of Cups, compassion! Two of Cups, romance! Three of Cups, friendship!”
How is this all so easy?
Once I’ve been through every card at least three times, something weird happens. There’s a spare card, stuck to the World, the final card of the Major Arcana. It has no number or suit, the way all the other cards do. It shows a woman with long, black hair and a knife in her mouth. She’s wearing a long white dress. I’ve seen her before, I think. My eyes flicked to her briefly that day with Rory on the bus, but she hasn’t popped up since.
Her teeth are bared in an expression of playful wickedness. Some kind of long-limbed dog, like a greyhound or a whippet, is standing forlornly next to her, his head leaning against her leg as if for balance. Underneath the illustration of her is just one word:
H O U S E K E E P E R
I search the e-book for the term Housekeeper and nothing comes up. I check Google for Housekeeper card and there are no relevant matches.
The longer I look at her, the more unsettled I feel. She’s not the grimmest card in the deck by any means – the Ten of Swords, for example, is a dead guy with ten swords sticking out of his back – but the Housekeeper is different.
My stomach starts to churn with an ill-placed sense of guilt, the kind you get when you’re sure you have upset someone but you don’t know how. The blood in my fingers feels fizzy and electric, and I’m suddenly hyper-aware of my own skin. Each flayed cuticle, the dry corners of lip. I’m stuck in a staring match with this card, one I can only lose.
She is, after all, a drawing. It gives her the competitive edge on staring contests.
“Maeve!” Joanne is calling up the stairs.
“What?”
“Are you coming down for food or what?”
“Coming!” I get up, collect all the splayed cards and put them back into an orderly deck.
Except for her. The Housekeeper, who must be some kind of weird Joker card that has no place in a real reading.
I take her out. I open my desk drawer, wedging her carefully between pages of Abbie’s old French phrasebooks that she sent over.
I head downstairs, eat pad thai, and don’t fight with Jo for the rest of the evening.
CHAPTER FIVE
AFTER A FEW DAYS I’M SO KNACKERED FROM READING PEOPLE’S tarot that I spend every free period lying on the floor of the Chokey while Fiona counts out our earnings.
“Sixteen euro!” she says with glee. “And that’s just today and yesterday.”
Usually I would be delighted at the concept of more money, especially as Mum and Dad haven’t adjusted their allowances for inflation since Abbie was a teenager. I’m too tired to celebrate, though. I keep my eyes closed.
“Cool.”
“You should invest it back into the business,” Fiona says. “There’s a shop in town where you can buy witchy stuff.”
“Witchy stuff?”
“Yeah,” she says. “My tita says the woman in there throws you out if your aura is bad.”
The shop is called Divination, and I head there after school. It’s pokey and fragrant, thick incense filling the room. Crystals, dream catchers and bottles of homemade perfume fill every surface. As I’m waiting for the shopkeeper to finish selling someone a deodorant stone, I start picking up and examining things, trying to be as respectful as possible while simultaneously sure that most of it is bollocks.
“Hello there,” the shopkeeper says brightly. She’s in her mid-fifties and wearing red cotton harem pants, a chunk of amber hanging around her neck. Her hair is bright blonde and tied into a ponytail, a red satin scrunchy making her whole head look strangely girlish.
“Can I help you with something?”
“I need crystals,” I say, and take out the fourteen quid I made today from readings. “How many can I get with this?”
“That depends. What do you need them for?”
“What do you mean?”
“You need different crystals for different jobs, pet.”
I pick up a glittering piece of grey and purple stone the size of a potato. “How much is this one?”
“Thirty-five euro.”
“Wow,” I say, quick to let it drop out of my hands. It lands on the display with a thud.
“Amethysts are a powerful protective stone. Plus, they need to be a certain price if we’re going to source them ethically,” she says. She doesn’t seem too offended by my ignorance, thank God.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s just, I’ve started doing tarot readings lately, and I thought it would be nice to have some stones around to help my … uhh, clients … relax.”
“Congratulations,” she says, smiling. “Tarot readings are a lot to take on. I don’t do them any more. The older you get, the more crowded you get with other people’s energy. After I turned forty, every time I
gave a reading I woke up with a crick in my neck. Other people’s bad juju, you know. It’s really a young woman’s game.”
“Oh,” I say, thrown by the idea of ingesting people’s energy. “Is that … a thing that happens?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“Sensitivity. Empathy. The kind of people you read for. They bare their heart to you, uncork all this bottled up junk they’ve been working on for years and years, then they give it to you. And it sticks. That’s why I burn wild sage in here,” she laughs. “It’s less about cleansing the customers. It’s more about protecting me from the customers.”
“I think I know what you mean,” I say. I decide I like her. I stick out my hand. “I’m Maeve Chambers.”
She sticks out her hand, and for some reason, instead of saying her own name, she laughs at mine. “You have three ‘e’s in your name,” she says, with mild interest.
“So?”
“Names are powerful. Three ‘e’s means when you fall in love, it’s for real. My sister Heaven was the same.”
Heaven. Of course someone who owns a witchy shop has a sister called Heaven.
I leave to get the bus twenty minutes later with a pocket full of rose quartz, orange-tipped calcite and tiger’s eyes. She also throws in a few incense sticks for free.
“Remember to cleanse the space you read in regularly,” she says chidingly. “And take care of yourself! Don’t get stuck with other people’s gunk!”
“Thank you,” I say, unsure.
“Go raibh maith agat.”
The 5.15 bus is quiet. Too late for school kids, too early for rush hour. I have my thin plastic headphones from the Walkman on, the Spring 1990 tape playing in my lap. I find it oddly comforting, like white noise I can turn my brain off to. I see Rory O’Callaghan sitting on his own and it seems rude to not sit next to him. We both say “hey” at the same time, and then lapse into silence. He is still clearly embarrassed by the incident from a few days ago, so I don’t mention it.
All Our Hidden Gifts Page 3