‘We’ve got these fluoro ones,’ he’d reply. ‘Or there’s one with Justin Bieber on it.’
Disappointed sigh. ‘I’ll take Bieber.’
She rummaged through her bag, pulled out her iPhone and set the timer. So mystical.
She picked up on something immediately. Lucky, since we only had twenty minutes.
‘There’s someone who’s crossed over. She’s here. Do you know a . . . It’s definitely an “M” name. Or an “N” name. That’s the sound I’m getting.’
‘Melissa?’ I offered, trying to end her desperate guessing.
‘Yes! Melissa. It’s definitely Melissa. So you know a Melissa who’s passed?’
I didn’t.
‘Yes!’ I whispered. ‘I do!’
She looked very pleased with that.
‘I feel like it’s a female energy,’ she said, successfully deducing that someone called Melissa may, in fact, have been female. ‘Was it a . . . graaaan . . .’
She didn’t seem to want to commit to finishing the word. I jumped in for her.
‘Grandma?’ I asked. ‘Yep. I had a grandma called Melissa.’
I did not have a grandma called Melissa.
‘What did she do for a living?’ Mystical Hippie Lady asked. ‘Was she . . . Was she . . .’
I threw her another bone. I just couldn’t handle her awkward failure. It reminded me of when I used to cry as a kid watching Mr Bean. To me, that turkey on his head represented nothing but the abject failure of a hopeless man who would never amount to anything and would therefore die alone. I didn’t understand why people found that funny. Arseholes.
‘A writer?’ I said.
My actual grandma did have a book published back in the day, so this was technically correct. Also, it was just easier for me at this point to start describing my real grandma, lest I get busted in my pity-induced lie.
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘That’s what I thought. Definitely a writer.’
Mystical Hippie Lady really felt like she was onto something now.
‘She says that you wish you could be a writer too,’ she said, winking at me.
‘Um, well, I sort of write already,’ I replied, definitely not returning her wink. I was just about to tell her that I actually write for a living, but I think by that stage she was amazing even herself with how well this was going. For the first time ever, she had lucked onto the right dead family member and the right name on the first go. She was feeling cocky now, so she cut me off before I could say anything about my writing career.
‘No!’ she said. ‘Not just tinkering around with stuff. Not the way everybody with one of those blog things just says they’re a writer. You actually want to be paid to write! You want it to be your career! What do you do for a living now?’
I was getting paid to write and it was my career. Oh god. Mr Bean was happening right in front of me, in real time. I couldn’t take it. SAY SOMETHING, ROSIE.
‘Um . . . I’m studying,’ I said. ‘Marketing?’
Nailed it.
‘You need to change courses right now,’ she said. ‘You need to make a career out of writing just like your grandma Melissa. That’s why she’s here today – to tell you that if you make a change now, you could end up a paid writer within a few years. Just like she was.’
Well, I was in it now. I had to commit.
‘That’s so weird!’ I said. ‘My grandma Melissa always told me to be a writer!’
I may have been starting to believe grandma Melissa was real.
Satisfied that she now had enough information about me to wing it from that point, Mystical Hippie Lady went on to tell me about my past life (she could see me sitting on a stool, carving into stone – she decided this meant I was an important advisor to Ramesses II). Also that I wanted more affection out of my current relationship (I was single), and that I was going to move to Queensland because I love the sunshine (hate it, get burned walking to the bus stop, Queensland is my worst nightmare).
She finished up by reading some of my tarot cards, which all had to do with my grandma Melissa giving me certain pieces of advice, mostly about giving up marketing to become a writer.
Then, probably more confident about a reading than she ever had been in her life, Mystical Hippie Lady decided to try one more guess. But by this point I was so exhausted by the lies and the fake enthusiasm I couldn’t keep it up anymore. It was time to let this hopeless, real-life Mr Bean spontaneously combust in front of me.
‘Grandma Melissa is giving me some numbers,’ she said, looking into the distance like she was seeing the numbers segment of Sesame Street right before her eyes. ‘Do “7” and “10” mean something to you?’
‘No.’
‘How about “10” and “7”?’
‘No.’
‘107?’
‘No.’
‘710?’
‘No.’
‘There’s no birthday on the 7th of October or the 10th of July?’
‘No.’
There was an awkward silence. It was the first time in our iPhone-allotted twenty minutes that I had shot her down. I was just about to come to her rescue one final time, and make up something about my grandma Melissa being born on the 7th of October 1927, when Mystical Hippie Lady had her final brainwave.
‘Oh. I understand. Melissa must be giving me those numbers because they’re important. So just make sure you watch out for them. 7 and 10.’
And with that, Mystical Hippie Lady’s Mystical iPhone beeped, and our twenty minutes was up. She looked incredibly pleased with herself. I wonder if she now uses our session as validation of her skills. At Christmas, when the family gets together and drunk cousin Peter is giving her shit for ‘talking to ghosts wooooooooo’ and everybody at the table laughs and shakes their heads at the life choices she’s made, she can look back on our twenty minutes together and know that they can all get fucked, because she once made contact with that girl’s grandma Melissa.
I, on the other hand, can look back and know that all it takes for me to turn into a pathological liar is twenty uncomfortable minutes alone with a well-meaning elderly woman.
There was one situation with a different psychic, though, in which I didn’t have to fake anything. And it straight up gave me the heebie jeebies. Tony and I were attending a paranormal conference at an old ‘haunted’ jail. It went for two days, and covered everything from ghost hunting and alien abduction to time travel and past lives. Tony was obsessed with all of that stuff; he was a big believer. (Although the alien abduction seminar made even him uncomfortable – you can only listen to so many theories about aliens raping human women to use them as incubators to create a superhuman–alien hybrid race before you start to feel like maybe you’re just indulging the delusions of someone who is very unwell. That, or these people really are at the forefront of an intergalactic space war and we had all better jump on board asap.)
Mostly, though, Tony was very enthusiastic about the whole weekend. He was a very spiritual person, the kind who believed that he was on another plane that most people just didn’t understand. Which would drive me irrationally crazy. He once told me he’d seen a cut on someone’s hand mend in front of his eyes just through the use of healing energy.
‘You did not see that,’ I said, immediately annoyed.
‘Yes I did, Ro,’ he replied. ‘Energy is more powerful than most people realise. It can heal.’
‘Tony. You did not see a cut close up right before your eyes. You just fucking didn’t. If that actually happened, if someone was physically healed right in front of you just through the use of energy . . . how does that even work? The energy, I mean?’
‘Someone who is trained to handle the toxic, broken energy in other people, takes their hands and rests them above the affected area. It takes years to learn how to take that toxic energy in through your hands and get rid of it safely for people.’
‘So. So. So . . .’ I was losing it. ‘I can’t . . . Oh my god, Tony. So you’re saying that you
witnessed a cut on someone physically heal right before your eyes, just because someone else waved their hands over it?’
‘Yes, Ro! I saw the cut just close up! It was incredible.’
‘You didn’t fucking see that! And I tell you how I know you didn’t – because if you actually saw someone physically heal right in front of you, just through the power of energy, then you basically witnessed the single most important medical advancement of our time. And I didn’t see it on the fucking news, so I know you didn’t see it.’
He was clearly getting frustrated with me at that point, and he was about to hit me with the ‘it’s just not on your level’ argument, which always made me furious.
‘Look, Ro, if you don’t believe it then I don’t know what to tell you. I think this stuff is only visible to the people who are open to it. Not everybody has the spiritual maturity to understand the potential in this world.’
‘Get back to me when you see someone make a leg grow back.’
‘Wanna watch Real Housewives of Beverly Hills?’
‘Yes. Yes I do.’
Tony and I had an ‘agree to disagree’ arrangement when it came to the paranormal, with each of us feeling sorry for the other one and their misguided way of thinking. I couldn’t think of anyone I would rather go to a paranormal conference with.
On the Saturday night, there was a special session with one of those people who talk to ghosts in front of everybody, but only ever through random symbols like: ‘Does anybody in the room have a brown teddy bear at home? Your great aunt wants you to know that there’s something important about your letterbox.’ The only famous person I knew who did that kind of stuff was John Edwards, and nothing I’d seen of his had ever really convinced me beyond a reasonable doubt. I’m not saying I categorically deny the possibility of all that stuff, but I just want proof. If a ghost appears in front of me and can list the exact porn that I watch in secret, then yeah, I’ll believe that ghosts exist.
The ghost whisperer we were lucky enough to witness was a woman, probably around fifty years old, and very . . . normal looking. Just like the kind of woman you’d see in a supermarket, complaining to management about a fifty-cent price discrepancy on her favourite Weight Watchers brownies. Not what I was expecting at all.
Tony was beyond excited. He came from a huge Italian family and there were so many relatives he was hoping would ‘come through’. It seemed like everyone in the room was hoping for certain relatives to come through. There was definitely an air of desperation and competition among the audience. There were only about thirty of us, but she made it very clear that she didn’t control the messages – she just picked them up like a radio – so not everybody was going to get to chat to Grandpa.
She started ‘picking things up’ immediately, and none of it seemed impressive to me. The people who thought she was speaking about their relatives just seemed a little too eager to make the information fit. ‘Someone over the left side of the room,’ she’d say. ‘An aunt who always wore a pink hat.’ ‘My sister’s mother always wore a red cardigan?’ the feeble response would come. ‘Whoa,’ Tony would say, amazed. I wasn’t really feeling it.
Then she ‘felt’ something over our side of the room, in the row of seats that Tony and I were sitting in.
‘It’s someone’s dad,’ she said. ‘The name starts with an “A”.’
‘Andrew?’ someone hopefully called out.
‘No, no. It’s not Andrew,’ she said, her face scrunched up like she was trying to solve a maths equation.
‘Anthony!’ Tony called out. ‘Rosie’s dad was called Anthony.’
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘That’s it! Anthony.’
I glared at Tony. I was in no mood to humour this obvious fraud of a woman in front of an audience.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. He killed himself.’
Wait, what . . .
‘Um, yeah,’ I said. ‘He did.’ I wasn’t giving anything else away. I wanted to test this bitch.
‘But . . . Wait, this is confusing,’ she said, staring intently into nothing. ‘He’s . . . he’s saying that he would have died anyway. Was he not well?’
I shrugged. I knew that he had cardiomyopathy from being a chronic alcoholic. When he was found, he had vomited all over himself and there was an empty bottle of pills next to him, but the autopsy revealed his heart wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. I wasn’t going to tell her that, though.
‘It was his heart,’ she said. ‘From drinking. He drank too much.’
Well, holy shitballs. Tony was beaming from ear to ear. He couldn’t deal.
‘He’s saying that your mum needs to be careful, that she’s the same as him?’
My mum was also a chronic alcoholic.
‘Oh! He’s laughing now! He wants you to know that he saw the funny thing that happened in the car. Do you know what that’s about?’
‘Oh. My god,’ said Tony. ‘Something funny did happen in the car last night!’
Tony and I had borrowed my sister’s car to drive to the conference. And the specifics of this are too humiliating to admit in detail, but let’s just say we were taking selfies and nearly crashed into a tree. We couldn’t stop laughing at what a shameful, stereotypically millennial way that would have been to die. We’d been laughing about it all day. But still, whatever. I didn’t give her any details.
‘He thinks you two are idiots,’ she said, laughing.
Fair call. But still – Refusing. To. Engage.
‘He’s showing me a birthday cake. Is it your birthday soon?’ she asked.
Goddamn it. Yes. My birthday was in two weeks.
‘HER BIRTHDAY’S IN TWO WEEKS!’ Tony squealed. He had officially lost it.
‘Well he wants to say “Happy Birthday”,’ she said. ‘And there’s . . . Well, I don’t know what this is . . . it’s like . . . A toy, maybe? Like one of those trolls, I think. Those old troll dolls.’
Tony didn’t know about this one, so he looked at me expectantly. Everyone in the room was looking at me, wanting so badly for it to mean something.
‘Um, I dunno,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t sound like anything to me.’
It did sound like something to me. She moved on to other people, and I sat there, in confused silence, thinking about my favourite present my dad had ever given me: a troll doll, but a special edition one with a crystal on its belly button. He gave it to me for my seventh birthday, and I still had it, sitting on a shelf at home in my bedroom.
When I told Tony later that night, he was hysterical with glee.
‘WHAT? Why didn’t you say anything! Rosie – this is it. This is proof. Your dad talked to you tonight. You have to believe now!’
But I was already finding ways to explain it all away. If Tony hadn’t yelled out answers, she would have just changed what she was saying. ‘Something funny in the car’? That could literally be any car trip ever. If it hadn’t been my birthday, it could have been someone else’s – it’s not that hard to think of someone you know who has a birthday coming up. And the troll doll . . . Well, I guess I looked like I was in my mid-twenties, which means that was probably a toy I would’ve played with as a kid, or at least would’ve known what it was.
See? IT WAS ALL A SHAM.
And I was happy to let it be a sham, I really was. If it had just been that one ‘reading’ that night, I would have easily written it off (much to Tony’s frustration). But then something happened – and this is the crazy part. This is the part I can’t explain. Please bear with me, because I know it sounds ridiculous.
When Tony and I got back to our apartment, after having been at the conference for two days, I walked into my room and stopped dead in my damn tracks. Right there, in the middle of my bedroom floor, standing upright, was the fucking troll doll.
I swear to Oprah.
The shelf it’s normally placed on was on the other side of the room. It couldn’t have fallen into that place on the floor. And besides, it was standing on its little tr
oll feet – if it had fallen off the shelf, and somehow landed more than two metres away, it would not have landed on its goddamn little troll feet. I was still standing in the doorway of my bedroom, trying to logic my way around what I was looking at, when Tony looked over my shoulder.
He shrieked.
‘Rosie! Fuck off! You did that!’
‘Tony, I swear to Oprah I haven’t moved from this spot. I saw it and I just stood here.’
The great thing about someone who believes is they just believe. I didn’t need to convince him of anything.
‘Oh my god, Ro, this is your dad,’ he said earnestly. ‘Your dad knew that you were doubting that he came through last night so he did this to convince you! This is your dad!’
I didn’t know what to think. But I was freaked out enough to put the troll doll in the living room before I went to bed that night. And then I found myself on the Tony side of many conversations, trying to convince people that the ‘troll doll incident’ had actually happened.
‘Rosie. That did not happen,’ my friend Jamila said, rolling her eyes when I told the story.
‘It did! I saw it! The troll doll was standing in the middle of my fucking room!’
‘No it wasn’t, Rosie. It wasn’t.’
It is really annoying being on the non-sceptic side of that exchange. I saw it. I know what I saw. The only explanation that I can think of is that Tony wanted me to believe so badly that he somehow moved the troll doll. But we drove from the conference together, then we walked from the car to the apartment together, so I don’t know when he could have done it. But that is the only logical explanation. He did really, really want me to believe.
He used to joke that if he died before me, I would be the first person he’d visit, just so he could finally win the argument. He promised to haunt me just to prove to me that spirits are real, thereby shoving it in my face.
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