by Robert Lock
“Didn’t you mention a cup of tea, Mickey?”
He nodded enthusiastically. “I thought you might like a cup of tea. Unless it’s too late. It might be too late.”
She gave the table a brisk percussive roll, beautifully synchronised, with the fingers of both hands, from little finger to forefinger. “How, in the name of all that’s holy, could it possibly be too late for a cup of tea?”
The deckchair attendant wrinkled his nose to push his glasses back up, with limited success. “Uncle Walter says that no one should drink tea after four o’clock.”
“Does he now? And what are we supposed to drink after four o’clock?”
“Beer.”
“That figures.” Bella knew all about the philandering Walter Heaton, who at eighty-one was still as incorrigible as ever, always ready with a smutty remark for a barmaid, or to excuse a fumbled grope as simply the result of his infirmity. Val, manager of the pier’s Tudor Bar, had told Bella that she often saw him on the front row during bathing beauty competitions, playing with himself quite shamelessly beneath the cover of his mac.
“You shouldn’t believe everything your Uncle Walter says,” Bella advised, “he’s just a dirty old man who drinks too much.”
“He got me in the Observer Corps.”
“Did he.” The fortune-teller wasn’t entirely sure what the Observer Corps was, but presumed it had something to do with the war. “Probably wanted you out of the house for some reason or other.”
The character assassination went completely over Mickey’s head, however. “He said I was the best spotter in the regiment!”
Bella looked more closely at the middle-aged man in front of her, assessing him as she would a prospective customer. Mickey Braithwaite appeared older than his years, aged by a straggly mop of grey hair, grey stubble and an air of vulnerability that she found both touching and yet also almost impossible to resist taking advantage of. There was very little to be gleaned from his pale, blue-grey eyes, which peered out from behind National Health glasses so thick and grimy that they resembled the blank eyes of the waxworks on display in the resort’s Museum of Oddities. There was a superficial likeness to a human eye, in structure at least, but behind the pupil and iris lay a catastrophic void. Bella shied away from too long a contact with this absence. She suspected that if you delved too deeply whilst attempting to determine its extremities there was a danger of never returning. Did the deckchair attendant concern himself with the future at all? She suspected not. His world was defined and contained by the wrought-iron balustrade that edged the pier. Time, like the sea, lapped ineffectually beneath the silvery boards, whilst the rows of striped deckchairs, positioned by Mickey with military precision, provided a perpetual present, a geometry of smaller structures upon a greater whole within which he could safely navigate and know his place. He had no need of a future.
“I tell you what, Mickey,” Bella said, “you nip to the cafe and see if they’ve got any cream buns that need eating up, and I’ll put the kettle on. How does that sound?”
“It’s not too late?” There was still a note of uncertainty in his voice.
“Mickey, you’re just going to have to trust me on this.” She stood up and stepped round the table, suppressing an urge to slap him, quite hard, across the face. In an effort to convert this need for physical expression into something more acceptable she gripped his shoulders and shook him gently. “You were the best spotter in the regiment, and I know when it’s a good time for a cup of tea. Alright?”
He seemed to accept quite readily this rather strange conflation of skills as an explanation. “Okey-dokey.”
“Okey-dokey,” Bella reiterated. She released Mickey from her grip. He remained rooted to the spot. “Off you go, then!”
Some lever or cog in the deckchair attendant’s mind clicked into place, turning him round and propelling him away from the booth on a direct heading towards the pier’s cafe, the leather satchel flapping at his hip in which he collected the sixpences and two bobs requested for an hour or a day’s hire.
On turning round Bella saw a young couple studying the sign in her booth window. She attached her welcoming yet enigmatic smile and stepped across to them. “Hello, my darlings,” she purred.
“I’ve got a feeling this is going to be your lucky day.”
The Corrosive Powers of Birdshit
The rain rattling against the booth’s windows was like a massed tapping of fingernails, while below the pier the sea was being whipped into a series of surging waves that crashed into the sea wall and spread across the promenade with an acidic hiss. Seagulls hovered above this brown and white turmoil, excited beyond measure by its unpredictable updrafts. They hung, wings outstretched as though offering themselves up for crucifixion, blanched martyrs screaming their ecstasy in the face of the storm. Spume scuttered over the pavement like the spittle from a madman.
Bella looked up from her Woman’s Weekly and focused on the rain running down the window. “Not a lot of point us being here for much longer, Tom,” she remarked. “Once I’ve finished this crossword we’ll scarper, alright?”
The cat, curled up on her lap, remained silent.
The fortune-teller enjoyed being on the pier in rough weather. She had complete faith in the Victorian engineers and their creation, its roots firmly attached to the bedrock beneath the beach. The pier had remained steadfast in weather far worse than this summer storm, and Bella had no doubt that the resort’s century-old attraction would still be here long after she was dead and buried. The storm excited her, it churned up something primeval inside her, and she could think of nowhere better to witness it than from within her booth on the pier, suspended above the chaos with her crossword puzzle and a cup of tea, cocooned in a bubble of comfort and warmth created by an enduring amalgamation of iron, wood and glass. Bella looked towards the promenade and could just discern a face peering out from the window of a hotel bedroom. Were they, she wondered, as spellbound by the rain, the waves and the daunting sky as she was? Were they thinking what it would be like to offer oneself up to the storm?
“I don’t know, your mum’s going daft in her old age,” she said, tugging gently at the cat’s ears. “I don’t suppose falling into the sea and drowning would be very pleasant really, do you? Although they do say that drowning is quite peaceful, once you stop struggling. I suppose that’s natural, though, isn’t it? To struggle, I mean. We’re not going to give in without a fight, are we? It’s alright for you, you’ve got nine lives, although I’ve never been quite sure whether that means you can have eight really bad accidents and get away with them, or if you can actually die eight times and still get another go.” She shook her head, persuaded by the vibration of the cat’s purring. “No, it has to be accidents, doesn’t it, or lucky escapes. Nothing can be brought back to life once it’s dead. Unless your nine lives are something like reincarnation, but what would be the point of that? Would you come back as the same cat, or a new one? Would you know that you’d lost one of your lives? And how would you keep a count of them? If you only had one life left you’d need to know so you could be a bit more careful.” Bella shrugged, somewhat perplexed by her own philosophising. “It probably just means you’re supposed to be lucky,” she concluded.
Tom stood up, turned round and settled back in her lap, seemingly unconcerned by the possibility that he harboured the ability to defy death.
Bella looked down at her cat. “Well you’re lucky, that’s for sure. Life of Riley, you’ve got.” She returned her attention to the crossword. “Right, eight down… author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, one one eight. Oh, I know that. Val read it not long ago and said she didn’t know what all the fuss was about… said it was a lot of talking and not much how’s your father. That reminds me, she was going to lend it me… I’ll have to… DH Lawrence! That’s it. Ooh, that means Keeler’s right as well.”
Only the D and H had been committed to paper when the door burst open, allowing a gust of wind and rain to sweep into
the booth, riffling through the magazine’s pages and stirring the red drapes into a frenzy of movement. Bella flinched in her chair, startled and slightly disorientated by the customer’s sudden entrance, which seemed for a moment to have recast her booth into a tumult of billowing scarlet. The cat leaped from her lap, its claws piercing her skirt and inflicting pinpricks of pain on her thigh. She caught a glimpse of a young man’s face, pale-skinned and with several strands of dark wet hair slicked across his forehead, before he turned and closed the door, returning the room to relative calm. He stayed in that position for a moment, the limp newspaper which he had been using as a makeshift umbrella still held over his head, his gaze seemingly fixed on the theatre at the end of the pier.
“Un-bloody-believable,” the young man muttered. He let the arm drop that was holding the newspaper, which he then slapped down on the windowsill, swept back the wet hair from his forehead and made a desultory attempt to brush the worst of the rain from the front of his jacket.
Bella, regaining her composure from her customer’s turbulent entrance, coughed in an exaggerated fashion to catch his attention. “This isn’t a public shelter, you know,” she pointed out.
“I know,” he replied, still facing towards the door. “It’s you I’ve come to see.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Should I have made an appointment?”
Bella thought she detected a hint of sarcasm in the young man’s voice, but as his generation had seemingly adopted this combative style as their default form of intonation when speaking to anyone over the age of thirty, for the moment she would give him the benefit of the doubt. “No, that isn’t necessary. Looking at the person you’re talking to is, though.”
“Hmm?” He appeared distracted. “Oh, yeah. Right.” He swivelled on the heel of one narrow, pointed boot, rotating with a measured, insolent grace until he was facing her. “Is that better?”
“Much.” Bella performed one of her snap appraisals, taking in the young man’s pale grey eyes, which looked back at her with a febrile intensity unusual in one so young, his fashionably styled but cheaply made suit, polished boots with worn-down heels, neatly manicured fingernails and an old-fashioned gold signet ring on his little finger. She processed all these observations individually, then combined them and placed the resulting personality on her sliding scale of credulity, all within a matter of seconds. And her interpretation of these details? That she was going to have a tough job convincing this grumpy, hard up, fastidious young man, who was probably close to a dead male relative, maybe his father or grandfather, that she was genuine. He stood quite motionless during this evaluation, unblinking despite the rain still dripping from his fringe. It was as though he knew this process of assessment was taking place, and accepted it without question.
Bella gestured at the chair opposite her. “Take a seat.” She watched the young man settle himself, taking care not to crease the back of his jacket. He crossed his legs and hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his trousers. “Well,” she continued, “what brings you to see Madame Kaminska?”
He gave her an exaggerated wink. “I’d have thought you’d know that already, you being a fortune-teller and all.”
How many times had she heard remarks like that? Everything from which horse was going to win next year’s Grand National to knowing whether they were in for a hot summer. “Personal futures are my speciality, sweetheart,” she replied. “You don’t think I’d be sitting here if I could win the pools every week, do you?”
“So basically you’re telling me you’re not very good, is that it?”
“No, that’s not what I meant at all.” His belligerence towards her confused Bella; it went beyond the normal inter-generational exasperation, and she was certain he had not visited her before, meaning he could not be harbouring a grievance over some unfulfilled prognostication. It was almost as though he were there under duress, sent against his will to uncover a destiny he would rather not know.
“Eizel,” he muttered.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind,” he said dismissively.
Bella took a deep breath, deliberately making it audible as a form of punctuation, a way of moving on the conversation from its present inertia. “First,” she said, “you must cross my palm with silver. Half a crown will do nicely.”
The young man fished in his pocket, brought out a handful of change and selected two coins. He made a great show of placing them on the table in front of her. “I reckon you’re only worth two bob, Mrs Kaminska. Take it or leave it.”
Bella looked at the two shilling coins. A part of her wanted to pick them up and throw them back at this arrogant young man, to teach him a lesson about manners, and to show him that she was not so easily intimidated, but there was something about him, the sort of truculence that usually masks a bruised, mysterious hinterland many women find incredibly seductive. He reminded Bella of the persuasive, slightly dangerous men who enticed people onto their fairground ghost train; you knew there were things lurking in the darkness behind those shabby doors that would make you scream, and yet you boarded the train nevertheless, a willing victim. Despite her misgivings, she picked up the coins.
“Seeing as it’s been a quiet day… What’s your name, sweetheart?”
He looked down for a moment. “Why do you need to know?”
“Well, so that we can communicate properly. It’s common courtesy.” She looked at him quizzically. “Have you got a problem with that?”
He scowled. “What’s it to you? Does it make any difference what my name is? Won’t your,” and here he waved one hand in the direction of the cards, “magic work properly otherwise?”
“I should imagine so,” Bella admitted. She was beginning to feel slightly frightened of this ill-tempered young man, who seemed to take offence at the most innocently posed of questions. For the first time the fortune-teller became aware of the vulnerability of her position; she was, to all intents and purposes, trapped in the booth, which itself was far enough from both shore and theatre for cries of help not to be heard, particularly in the middle of a storm. With its red curtains hiding the interior from view, Bella was at the mercy of any customer strong enough to overpower her, and though she would defend herself as well as she was able, she was under no illusion as to the inevitable outcome of a struggle with her current client. She felt an animosity towards him for causing this change in perception, which would, she knew, burrow into her subconscious and in the future forever colour her time on the pier. To calm herself down Bella reasoned that if he had wanted simply to attack her he would have done so already. Perhaps he was just annoyed by being caught in the storm, and once the reading began he would relax.
“I foresee a hot bath and a change of clothes,” she joked in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere, while wondering where Tom had disappeared to.
“Very funny.”
He seemed disinclined to add anything to this, so Bella mentally crossed out ‘sense of humour’ and decided to get down to business. “I presume you’d like me to give you a reading. Is there anything in particular you’re interested in? You know, love, work, family, health?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be able to guess that?”
“It isn’t easy for me to find my way along the path of your destiny,” Bella explained, repeating a statement she had formulated years ago as a means of avoiding a huge amount of initial guesswork. “If I’m given an area to look in it saves a lot of time.”
The young man leaned back in his chair and studied the ceiling for a moment before returning his dispassionate gaze to her. “Are you a real gypsy?”
Bella smiled. She had expected him to be unpredictable, a test both of her character judgment and initiative, but it seemed he wanted the same questions answered as anyone else. She relaxed slightly, placated by finding herself on familiar ground. “I certainly am, young man. The Kaminskas have been a Romany family since the Middle Ages,” she recited. “We’ve been soothsayers to several courts
of Europe, we’ve been magicians, healers… I’m just the latest in a very long line, and probably not the most powerful, either. My great-grandmother could tell someone’s future simply by holding their hand.”
“I wasn’t after a bleedin’ family history. Just a yes or no would have done.”
“In that case,” Bella said huffily, “yes, I am.”
“Well alright then.” There was something in his voice, an intonation so subtle it was barely audible, that suggested a requirement ticked, as though he had been primed beforehand by someone else.
Bella, her fraudster’s ear finely tuned to such inflections, laid her hands, fingers outstretched, on the table. “So, do I pass?”
The young man thrust forward his head and chest and smiled at Bella’s visible flinch. “We’ll have to see about that, won’t we?”
She could smell the alcohol on his breath, see the skin around his eyes coarsening already from heavy drinking. Bella knew only too well the intense and unpredictable mood swings of an alcoholic; when she was twelve her Uncle Reg began visiting regularly, ostensibly to see Bella’s mother, who was his younger sister, but Bella soon discovered she had reached an age that meant his main interest lay with her. ‘My, she’s sprouting in all the right directions, Janet,’ he would say, slapping Bella on her bottom. Further emboldened on each subsequent visit — a squeeze here, a pat there — Reg helped himself to his sister and brother-in-law’s whisky and bided his time for the ideal opportunity, which came seven months later when her parents were invited out to dinner. Bella had enquired who was coming to look after her for the evening, and was informed that Uncle Reg had kindly volunteered. On hearing this Bella’s blood ran cold, because even at that age she had a fairly good idea as to why he wanted to be alone in the house with her, fears which proved sadly well-founded. Within five minutes of her parents leaving in the cab Reg had poured himself three glasses of whisky, downed each one in a single gulp, refilled for the fourth time and headed upstairs to Bella’s bedroom, where she was curled up on her bed, eyes squeezed shut, expecting a knock on the door at any moment. The clink of ice in his glass echoed up the stairwell like the tolling of a cracked bell, and when it stopped outside her door Bella began to weep silently. Uncle Reg opened the door with a slowness that in other circumstances would have been funny, but on that particular evening could only be interpreted as unspeakably cruel. He walked into the bedroom, closing the door behind him, and strode to her bedside. Bella could hear him breathing heavily through his nose. The ice cubes clattered round the glass as he emptied it, clattered again as he banged it down on her bedside table. ‘Don’t pretend you’re asleep,’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘I know you’re not asleep. Don’t pretend, my beautiful little Bella.’ And then he roared, a voice so utterly different that she opened her eyes, expecting to see a second man standing there, but it was still her uncle, his mouth slackly open, the skin on his face blotchy and red. ‘Don’t fucking pretend!’