Murmuration

by Robert Lock

  After that Bella could only remember his hands on either side of her face, pushing her down in front of him, then one hand moving to unbutton the fly of his trousers. The heat of his erect penis on her cheek was like a branding iron. He squeezed open her mouth, held it wide, thumb and fingers pushing down on her jaw, and rammed his penis between her teeth. Bella closed her eyes, closed her mind to what was happening, and instead thought only of her favourite climbing tree, a giant sycamore in the rectory grounds nearby. She began to climb that tree, concentrating on each branch and handhold, as familiar to her as the staircase in their house. Birds sang in the branches above her, a breeze tickled the leaves, and the higher she climbed, the further she retreated from the appalling violation being visited upon her. The tree welcomed her into its sanctuary, a shifting world of dark green and dappled sunlight, where the grunts of Uncle Reg, the pain in her jaw, and, finally, the viscid jet that hit the back of her throat and made her gag, all fluttered away, falling to the ground like the winged seed pods liberated each year from these same branches, leaving Bella to draw up her knees, wrap her arms round her legs, and fall asleep to the sound of rooks squabbling on the graveyard’s drunken stones.

  “So,” she began, “how would you like me to read your future? Cards, crystal ball or palm?”

  He stuck out his bottom lip, looked first at the crystal ball on the side of the table, then at the neatly stacked Tarot cards, and finally at the palm of his hand, as though assessing each method’s accuracy. Still looking at his hand, the young man spoke, his voice edged with what sounded very much like dismay. “It’s all there, then. My life, from start to finish, all done in a few lines.” He snorted and shook his head in an expression of mordant amusement.

  Bella looked up, surprised by this glimpse of a more contemplative side to his character. “They show the main events, the biggest influences, but what happens in between, and how you use this knowledge, well, that’s down to you.”

  “Oh yeah, right, like a rat in a maze has choices. Hmm, what shall I do today? I know, I’ll turn left. Yeah, that should be exciting. Better than turning right.”

  Bella relaxed in her chair. If she had been given a pound for every time a customer asked her about the possibility of change, of them being able to somehow alter the path of their life, then she would be a rich woman. Her own belief was that almost everyone followed the path of least resistance, a route of ever-diminishing choice dictated by timidity, self-delusion and compromise. Of course there was happiness, and love, and fulfillment, but Bella regarded all such positive outcomes as particularly fortuitous corollaries of certain paths; in other words, luck. The universe did not select winners and losers, and for Bella there was no mitigating God. She knew, however, what to say to her customers.

  “The influences are fixed,” she asserted, “but there are always different ways of reacting to them. That’s where your choice lies. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Not really.”

  Why, she wondered, had this morose man come to see her, and in such foul weather? And why was she taking so much time to explain things that she did not believe in? Perhaps it was because there was something about him that intrigued her, quite apart from his possession of a much older man’s fatalistic attitude, and which chimed neatly with her own pragmatism. For all his arrogance and hostility she thought she discerned a dread behind the bluster, and she could not help but wonder what could be haunting someone so young.

  “Well, imagine if I turned over the Death card—”

  “Oh, brilliant.”

  “No, no,” Bella added hurriedly, “that’s my point. The Death card doesn’t literally mean death, it means an ending. So you see, if you took it pessimistically you might think it meant you were going to die, or lose someone close to you, but you could also see it as meaning one thing ending and another starting, like a job, or a new girlfriend.”

  He glanced at the pack of Tarot cards. “All seems a bit vague to me.”

  “Well, it isn’t quite as straightforward as that,” Bella explained. “It’s all to do with positions, and how one card relates to another, that sort of thing.”

  “Nah, I don’t fancy that,” the young man stated. “I don’t want to know about any fortune that depends on a card with a bleedin’ skeleton on it, whether it’s an ending or whatever.” He thrust his hands towards her. “‘Ere, read my palm, and if there’s a skeleton on that as well you can leave it out.”

  Outside the storm was abating, driven inland by gusts of wind that hummed and keened through the struts and girders of the pier. Rain was still crackling against the south-facing windows, but as Bella reached across to begin her reading an ingot of sunlight crashed across the table, erasing all detail of the palms resting there with its sudden brilliance. And then it was gone again, extinguished, a momentary expiation.

  “Are you right-handed or left-handed?” Bella asked.

  “Right-handed. What, so my right side’s got a different future to my left?”

  She laughed. Perhaps she had been wrong about the sense of humour. “No, it’s just that your dominant hand gives the best reading. Some say the left is what the gods gave you and the right is what you do with it, or left is past and right is future, but I think that just complicates the reading. Shall we begin?”

  His only reply was to take away his left hand and edge the right closer to Bella’s side of the table, so taking this as a gesture of approval, she leaned forward to begin her well-rehearsed routine. But then she hesitated. Normally Bella held her customer’s hand in both of hers, cradling it for the duration of the reading unless to point out some particular feature, but for some reason she felt a reluctance to instigate physical contact with him. She stared at his hand, with its unremarkable shape, unremarkable colour, and nicotine-stained fingers, and wondered what it was that was pushing her away, a repulsion which reminded her of that invisible yet tangible force felt when attempting to bring together the like poles of two magnets. The nearer her hands got to his the stronger it became. It was really most peculiar.

  “What’s up? Forgotten what to do?”

  “Of course not!” Bella snapped. The tension she had felt earlier had returned, and she found herself wishing that he had chosen Gypsy Rose Lee for his reading rather than her. Bella could see the scene in her mind’s eye: the police holding back a crowd of onlookers gathered outside her booth, craning their necks to get a glimpse of the poor fortune-teller lying in a pool of her own blood, and then the image, frozen in black-and-white by the pop and flash of a press photographer’s camera, splashed across the front page of the newspaper under the declamatory headline FORTUNE-TELLER BRUTALLY MURDERED. With a decisive movement she erased the vision and took hold of his hand, which she was surprised to find both soft and warm. “Let me see… Ah, yes, an interesting life-line.” She always began with the life-line. Over the years Bella had learned that her customers’ main priorities were longevity, wealth and love, in that order. Clear those concerns and then she could have a little fun with the rest. “Quite long, with no big breaks, so no major health problems, and a nice shape too.” What she really saw was a pale crease, almost obscured by a jumble of criss-crossing small lines on its curve near the base of the thumb. Bella couldn’t remember what this was supposed to signify, but she assumed it was bad, and therefore not an advisable opening statement.

  “Ah, but look here,” she continued, adding a sympathetic note to her voice. “Do you see this line, the one that curves away near the top?” This was her first presumption, a necessary but always risky move, when she assimilated one of her initial observations into the reading. This almost always set the tone for the rest of the reading; find an accurate interpretation and they were hers for the taking; miss the target and their suspicions inevitably spoiled the mood and made them less likely to accept any further prediction, no matter how hard she tried.

  “What about it?”

  “You lost someone close to you, didn’t you? When you were quite young.�
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  He laughed once; it was the closest Bella had ever heard someone come to a disparaging ‘ha’. “Wow. Unbelievable. A relative dying. How could you have possibly known that?”

  Bella was stung by his contempt, and decided to make a guess as to the original owner of the signet ring. She was no expert on men’s jewellery, but it looked quite old, with its flat-topped, dark red stone. She would show him. “It was your grandfather. You were always closer to him than your father.”

  She felt the slightest of movements, an almost imperceptible recoiling. If their hands had not been in contact she would never have noticed it, but Bella knew instantly that her speculative arrow had found its target. She glanced up at the young man, preparing to fend off a protestation, even a denial, but he remained silent, his gaze fixed on the palm of his hand as though witness to some form of betrayal.

  “You see the way that line joins your heart line,” Bella continued quickly, seizing the initiative, “well, that means a very strong bond… One that even death can’t break.”

  “He was trimming the hedge,” he said simply. “That’s all. Just a bit of gardening because the doctor had told him the fresh air and exercise would do him good. My gran found him when she brought him a cup of tea. He must have been there a while because she noticed a bird had shit on his face.”

  Bella did not know how to react to this spontaneous, calmly delivered statement. The young man clearly felt a great deal of anger concerning the manner of his grandfather’s death, yet at the same time saw nothing wrong in making public the poor man’s final humiliation, caused by the simple and unknowing action of a passing bird. And unless he had been there at the time he could only have found out this detail from a third party, either his grandmother or someone to whom she told it, which begged the question as to why they would burden a grieving grandchild with this demeaning particularity.

  “A bird… ” was all she could come up with.

  “Yes, a bird. My old man reckoned it was a blackbird getting its revenge for Grandpa pulling out its nest.”

  “It was your father who told you.”

  “Oh yes,” he confirmed tightly. “My old man doesn’t believe in sugaring the pill.”

  “No,” she agreed, “he certainly doesn’t.” Bella surmised that the young man’s father had informed his son about the birdshit as a way of showing him that the grandpa he had idolised was in fact just as fragile and transient as anyone else. Whether that was through petulance, having not been accorded the sort of hero worship he felt was his due, or simply out of a belief in exposing his son to the tenuous nature of life, she did not know, but whatever it was Bella began to feel some sympathy for the man sitting opposite her. His memory of perhaps the only person he had ever regarded as flawless would always be marked by that innocent deposit on his grandfather’s face, and who knew what else it might in time corrode.

  “Wouldn’t it be better to remember him when he was alive?” She offered. “The two of you must have had lots of fun together… I’m sure your grandpa wouldn’t want how he died to be the first thing you think of when people mention him.”

  He looked up. “Tell me what the other lines say.”

  Bella licked her lips, shaken by the utter lack of emotion in the young man’s voice. It was like hearing a corpse speak. “Well… Don’t you want to know how long you’re going to live?”

  “Not really.”

  The fortune-teller glanced round the tiny room, hoping to find some respite in its familiarity, but all it offered was claustrophobia and menace. Was he seeking one sign or answer in particular? And what would he do if she failed to deliver it? “Well, alright then, we’ll go on to the next. You see the line nearest the top of your hand? That’s your heart line, which obviously has things to say about love. Yours is telling me that you’ve liked one or two girls, but you haven’t loved any of them… not yet, but there’s another you know. She…” Bella smiled and nodded. “She thinks you’re interesting… a bit of a challenge, but you hardly notice her, because she’s quiet, and not quite as pretty as her friends. Not ugly, just a bit on the plain side, but she’s a lovely girl, funny and bright. She’s your true love.”

  He frowned. “And I know her already?”

  “Yes. You’ve met several times.”

  “What colour hair has she got?”

  Bella grimaced. “Oh, I can’t tell that, sweetheart. The lines don’t give everything away.”

  “Thin? Fat? Tall? Short? Black? White? Big tits? Small tits? Blue eyes? Brown eyes? Come on, give us a clue, for Christ’s sake! How can you say she’s the love of my life when you don’t even know what she looks like?”

  Bella was curiously reassured by her customer’s latest outburst. She prided herself on her ability to assess and categorise someone’s character, and having spoken to him for several minutes now she had come to the conclusion that his hostility was a defence mechanism, cultivated to disguise an insecurity that presumably stemmed from what had been a difficult relationship with his father. Truly violent people tended not to shout and scream, they just acted; this young man, hardly more than a boy, really, was simply covering his anxiety in the only way he knew how, which made Bella wonder where his mother fitted in to the picture. She began to plot an enquiry into her reading.

  “We’re expected to put a bit of effort in ourselves,” she said.

  “Who expects it? Who puts these stupid lines on our hand and then expects us to figure it all out?” He demanded, lifting his hand towards her face. “God?”

  Bella stared at the palm laid out before her, hoping against hope that an answer would miraculously form itself from the jumble of creases that taunted her incomprehension. No one had ever entered her booth on the pier and challenged her to a philosophical debate, and she was ill-equipped to respond. Had the powers-that-be decided to check up on fortune-tellers, she wondered, putting into operation a policy designed to root out the fraudulent, and was this young man some kind of inspector trying to catch her out?

  “I don’t think we need to bring Him into it,” she replied, now thoroughly flustered. “It’s just a bit of fun.”

  “So why not invent her?”

  “Who?”

  “The ‘love of my life’. You only had to say a short blonde with big tits, or a tall brunette with blue eyes, and I’d have been happy.”

  Bella took a deep breath. “I’m just trying to be honest, sweetheart. I tell you what I can see, nothing more.” She clung to her performance as affronted authentic like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood. “Or would you prefer me to just make it all up?”

  He looked at her with a curious expression in his grey eyes, as though alerted to the possibility of irony, but Bella knew that the brown of her own could easily keep grey at bay, and so it proved. His gaze slid away, and his hand settled back onto the table.

  “Alright,” he snapped, then, more quietly, “alright, I get it. I’m supposed to fill in the blanks.”

  “Like a crossword puzzle.”

  “And the lines are the clues. Very profound. Alright then, Madame Kaminska, what else you got?”

  “Well,” Bella continued, “do you see the line below the heart line? This is your headline… what’s going on in your head, basically.”

  Again he stuck out his bottom lip, mouth downturned in an expression of distaste. “This should be good,” he drawled.

  “It’s not so bad, sweetheart.” She stared at the short, wavy line, which sliced straight through his line of fate and racked her brains for a way of explaining this formation whilst simultaneously teasing out some detail about his mother. Had he failed to mention her because she had played a minor role in his life up until now, or did he want to protect her from the grubbier and yet psychologically more influential poles of his father and grandfather?

  “Mmm… you’re having a hard time making your mind up about what you want to do,” she ventured, “but I can see success, once you decide. It’ll take a while, but you’ll get there in the end
… if you keep at it. Oh dear,” she said, with a laugh that she hoped would disarm her following words, “I’m sounding like your mother, aren’t I?”

  He looked at her again. The animosity in his eyes, expressed in a mineral-like flatness that gave Bella the impression she was looking at two pebbles from the beach twenty feet below, encircled her bowels in a cold, relentless grip. “Why do you think that’s funny?”

  “I just thought—”

  “I just thought,” he mimicked. “I just thought. What? What did you think?”