The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  It was amazing the things people told me. I was surprised at how open everyone was. In America, people would have thought I was crazy, but here, they immediately started sharing their stories. And there were so many stories. Birds were found dead on the ground. Dogs wouldn’t go outside. Babies were stillborn. Everyone had a sense that Greyswell Circle was a cursed place, filled with bad luck. I could feel it, too.

  Just like people and animals have identifiable essences, the land has a soul, too. In Greyswell Circle, the energy was so heavy it was almost dead. There weren’t any children outside in the yards or on the sidewalks playing. It was as if the Pied Piper had come and lured them all away.

  I didn’t really know what I was supposed to be doing. I was making it up as I went along. But I could sense the bad energy of that place.

  At one house, a Pakistani woman opened the door and invited me in to meet her son, a boy of seven or eight, who was very ill. His mother told me that he couldn’t sleep at night, because no sooner would he shut his eyes than a man with a black hat would arrive.

  “Does he have eyes?” I asked.

  Shuddering, the boy shook his head. “No.”

  I knew it was the same man and that this was the reason I was here. I realized that the children who had been visiting me before I came to England were from this piece of land and that they had all died here. But I didn’t know why the boy also saw the man in the black hat. I didn’t know what to do about it.

  When I got back, I called the vicar and told him everything that I had seen and felt. “There used to be a workhouse there a hundred years ago,” he told me. “I think there was an epidemic or a fire and the children were all buried in a mass grave.”

  He didn’t know who the man in the black hat was, though. “Maybe he was a cruel landlord,” the vicar suggested, “who hurt children.” Possibly, but it felt like something more powerful than that. The vicar told me that he would do a ceremony to help the souls of those doomed children move on.

  After talking with him, I stopped at a bookstore in the village. There was a whole section on ghosts and hauntings, and I actually found a booklet, which I bought, called Eyes on Fire. It was interviews with people all over the south of England who had seen a man in a wide-brimmed black hat. It documented their experiences, but it didn’t offer any explanations of who this particular demon really was other than saying that he was a powerful ghost of some sort.

  I felt increasingly strange at the Frumptons’. I lost track of time in the bathroom and in my bedroom. Hours would disappear. It was even worse than when I had fallen into the mirrors at home. It didn’t feel like I was listening to something from another world. It felt like I was visiting some other realm, although I could never remember what had happened.

  One morning I woke up just at dawn, it must have been around five in the morning, my usual wake-up hour, and I got out of bed and opened the French doors to the garden. I heard the softest of music. Petals and blossoms and leaves were softly falling, and something I can only describe as feathers drifted through the air. I felt as though I were looking through gauze in that soft light just before sunrise.

  I can’t tell you how long I stood there in my nightgown. Three, maybe four hours, although it felt like only moments. And I can’t tell you what happened. I will never forget that morning, and yet I can’t remember anything consciously about the experience. The hours disappeared. But I do believe in fairies and a dimension where we can commune with the souls of everything that’s alive. I knew with certainty that my old life was done, that the taunts and bullying were gone forever. I knew who I was and who I was supposed to be. I was home.

  Mrs. Frumpton put milk out for the fairies every night. In those days a lot of the country people still did. When Alice Frumpton, Maya, and I took a bus tour to Glastonbury, I saw the pans of milk left out everywhere for the little people. At Glastonbury they left out bowls of apples for the fairies, too. Maya tried to eat one and was scolded for it.

  Mrs. Frumpton had insisted that Maya and I visit Glastonbury. I’d never even heard of the place and didn’t know how it was connected to King Arthur and was supposed to be the place where Arthur sleeps with dragons. Supposedly, Joseph of Arimathea, the man who gave his tomb to Jesus and brought Mary Magdalene to France, had founded the first Christian community there. I would learn all about that much later.

  Today Glastonbury is very beautiful, with the remains of an ancient church and gardens and a sacred well, but what I found most striking, without then even knowing the history, was the energy I could feel rising out of that earth. People think that God comes from the heavens, but in Glastonbury the divine is in the earth itself. Something is under the ground there.

  I had never heard about ley lines, the geographical energy alignments that connect sacred places, but I can feel them. And I felt them at Glastonbury. Call them dragons, call them ley lines, there is something happening under the earth there and it is filled with magic and power. If the ground beneath Greyswell Circle had felt cursed, this land felt blessed. I could feel the electrical energy rising up through the soles of my feet and coursing through my body right out of the crown of my head. Everything within me was awakened at Glastonbury. Every light was turned on. I had never felt this kind of pure joy before.

  Winding our way up the ancient hill called the Tor to St. Michael’s Tower, I had an unexpected vision of Jesus and Mary Magdalene walking there together during their lost years. They had been there. I knew it. It doesn’t jibe with anything you’ll ever read about them, and there’s no way I can prove what I know, but I believe they visited Glastonbury as a couple, before they began teaching. Was King Arthur really buried there? Was Merlin? I don’t know, but it’s one of the most sacred places I have ever been in my life. It’s one of the few places left where you can feel the ancient pagan energy intersecting with Christianity. No wonder so many people of different faiths go there on pilgrimage.

  Towards the end of the day, just at sunset, I was walking around the thorn tree, the one that blooms in winter. Joseph of Arimathea is said to have brought it into being when he thrust his staff into the earth. I saw a rusted safety pin in the grass. As I bent over to pick it up, a very nondescript old woman appeared beside me. Her shoulder-length brown hair was flecked with gray. She wore glasses. She took my hand in hers without a word and looked into my eyes. The others had gone ahead into the church.

  “Do you know who you are?” She smiled. “You belong here. This is your place.”

  “Yes.” I nodded. “I know.”

  “This is your land.”

  I couldn’t say anything more. I was overwhelmed with emotion. Her words gave me a surge of unfamiliar power. It would be years before I would read The Mists of Avalon, about the pagan priestesses of Glastonbury, but I could feel the Goddess welcoming me home on that trip. I didn’t even know what that meant or who she was. At eighteen I had no name for her; all I knew was that she was the energy of the earth beneath my feet and I was hers. For the first time in my life I felt taller than my five feet.

  The rest of our visit seemed to be charmed. At least for me. People welcomed me everywhere we went. I got admitted free to places, handed ice-cream cones out of the blue. When Maya, Alice, and I hitchhiked to London, we were picked up by a man who told us he’d happily take us all the way into the city, but first he had to deliver something to Shepperton Studios.

  Shepperton was where they filmed Oliver!

  When we got to the famous studios, I begged to see the old sets, and it turned out they still existed. They were like a ghost town, dilapidated and falling apart, but still there. I walked through the undertaker’s shop and Fagin’s den. I took a stone from the ground and a cap one of the boys had worn that a nice woman let me have from the costume shop. As we were leaving, I saw Sigourney Weaver walk by. She was there making some top-secret movie about aliens.

  I had my first drink in London, a Harvey Wallbanger. I danced at a club, visited Dickens’ grave at Westminster Abbey,
and walked through the streets knowing exactly where I was and where I would be when I turned the corner.

  I was mesmerized by the murky waters of the Thames. I wished I were alone, that if I were I would be able to read something about myself in its currents. I wanted to dredge up my past with a towrope. It was there in that river, the lives I had lived. I felt thrillingly restless.

  But when we got back to Surrey, Mrs. Frumpton announced that Maya and I had to leave. At once. The next morning. No question about it.

  “There’s too much going on. You’re getting the spirits riled up,” Mrs. Frumpton said.

  “But we can’t go home now!” cried Maya. “Our tickets home aren’t for two more weeks.”

  “Everyone’s complaining about the ghosts,” said Mrs. Frumpton, unmoved by a new torrent of tears from Maya. “Hauntings, bangings, it’s too much. I can’t keep track of the furniture. And little John was run over by a motorbike today. And we know why that happened, don’t we?” She glared at me, certain it was my fault even though I’d been in London all day. “You’ve got to go. You’ve got to leave this house,” she insisted. The littlest Frumpton, John, appeared in the doorway, tread marks still visible across his forehead.

  I was devastated. I felt like I had been betrayed by the very people who knew who I was. I imagined running out into the street and getting hit by a car and put in the hospital so I wouldn’t have to leave.

  “And another thing,” added Mrs. Frumpton. “The flasher’s back.”

  “What do I have to do with a flasher?” I protested.

  “He’s a ghost flasher and everyone’s seeing him again,” said Mrs. Frumpton. “The ghosts are all churned up because of you. You’re ruining the neighborhood.”

  I almost laughed at the thought of a spirit exposing his noncorporeal dangly bits, but I was too upset. What a hell that must be, doing that for eternity. Still, I didn’t want to go. I think I’d imagined I’d find a way to stay in England forever. I imagined that I was going to find Jack Wild.

  Somehow Maya and I got home. Maya’s tears made it easy for me to lie at the airport. I said our mother had died and they put us on a plane back to JFK. Daddy picked us up and drove us home.

  After England, the bland suburbs of New Jersey felt intolerable. In so many places in America, especially for some reason in New Jersey, the old energies of the land have been obliterated. The land was stolen, raped, and paved. Everything has become superficial, vapid, and disconnected from the earth. I hated it.

  For a week or so after I returned, the kitchen clock began running backwards whenever I was in the room.

  “It’s showing us the time in England,” said Aunt Mary suspiciously.

  “Something’s wrong with the battery,” said my mother, glaring at me.

  I didn’t have anything to say about it because I was still in shock. How could I be recognized everywhere I went, how could I know that I was home and yet not be allowed to stay? I’d been asked to leave Catholic school and now I’d been asked to leave England. No one wanted me.

  My mother was right, after all. I was a failure. At no time in my life have I ever felt such hopelessness and despair. I didn’t know that my destiny was in America, that I had to be here for reasons it would take so many years before I would ever understand. I thought I belonged in England. I thought I was in exile.

  Always in my pocket was the safety pin I had found at Glastonbury.

  AT&T hired me for their corporate picnic once. I was supposed to sit at a table under a tree while executives and their secretaries wandered over to me for a reading. I was the novelty act.

  It’s never a good idea for people to think my readings are free. There’s a deep meaning behind crossing the Gypsy’s palm with silver. A number of the men tried to trick me and pretend that what I was telling them wasn’t true. One man, in a very snazzy suit, came over and stared down at me for a long time.

  “What are your credentials?” he finally said.

  “My what?’

  “Your credentials. Who taught you to do what you’re doing?”

  I nearly laughed out loud. My credentials? Did he mean what school had I been to? Had I gotten good marks in Being a Psychic 101?

  “Who licensed you?” he added.

  I looked him straight in the eye and answered, “God.”

  7

  Night School for X-Men (and Misfit Girls)

  I got a job at a Baskin-Robbins and was fired almost instantly for scooping too big. Then I started waitressing at the local pizzeria for $1.50 an hour plus tips and sexual harassment. I spilled Cokes on people’s laps. I’d clean tables by blowing off the crumbs. The man who owned the pizzeria would grab my buns every time I walked past. I had no friends, no talents, no guidance. I felt hopeless.

  I knew I shouldn’t be doing this, that I had some kind of mysterious calling in life, something that made me special, but I didn’t really know what it was or what to do with it. What kind of job could you get if you had the sight?

  Anyway, I couldn’t even drive because my eyes were so bad. I walked back and forth two miles each day to this crappy job while truck drivers and perverts honked at me as they roared past.

  When I came home from work, if I was at all late, my mother usually would be staring out the window, often bashing her hands against the glass. “Where have you been?” she’d scream hysterically. She’d start banging pots and pans, harder and harder, muttering to herself. She’d ball her hands into fists and start pummeling the walls.

  I’d have to restrain her hands so she wouldn’t hurt herself.

  You didn’t have to be a sensitive to know she was nuts. I couldn’t breathe in her house. There was always a storm on the horizon; the air was always dark and heavy. I wanted to hide in my room and I felt trapped by both how angry she made me and how sorry I was for her.

  She opened all my letters from England. She still put clothes out for me to wear and flew into a temper if I tried to dress myself. If I put on mascara before work, she’d slap me across the face with a towel and scream at me to scrub it off. But when I didn’t wear makeup, she’d stare at me and shake her head. “Steve would be so embarrassed if he could see you. Your skin is terrible.”

  Sometimes I clawed at my face, leaving streaks across my cheeks. I was so upset. Then I did have to wear makeup to cover the marks.

  “You think I’m ugly, don’t you?” my mother would scream.

  “No, Mommy, you are beautiful, so beautiful,” I would reassure her. “Calm down, calm down.”

  Often I’d come home and she’d just be sitting in the dark in the living room, staring at nothing.

  “What’s wrong?” I’d ask her, concerned.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look so sad.” I wanted to find a way to talk to her. I wanted to be genuinely close to her.

  “What is it? Is it my face? You don’t like my face. What? Do I have to smile for you? Is that it? If you don’t like me, don’t look at me then.”

  I never yelled or cursed at her. I never even argued. I was cautious. It was like my higher self, or my guardian angel if I had one, knew that this was not really my life, that this woman was not really my mother. I came from somewhere else. And yet I couldn’t abandon her. Where could I go? The one place I’d dreamed of my whole life had rejected me.

  My mother would whisper to me that she was sick and going to die soon and that we didn’t have much more time together. She told me not to tell my sister or my father. She said I had to keep it a secret.

  I dreamed about going back to England and going to school. I’d study literature and history and psychology. But my mother told me there was no money for me to go to college, even though she’d paid for my sister to go. So I read and read and read. Pictures of different times poured through my mind—cathedrals, wars, plagues. Maybe if I’d gone to school, I’d have channeled all of this into writing books or learning about the past or being a novelist. But I didn’t. My mother made sure of that.

 
; I still feel angry at her, haunted by her, really. Sometimes even today I find myself wanting to scream at her, “Why didn’t you help me go to college? Didn’t you know I wanted to be a psychologist? How come you could pay for my sister to get a master’s, but you didn’t expect anything of me at all? Why?”

  “Because I knew you’d fail,” is what I imagine her answering.

  I often wonder, in my line of work, about free will. How much of our life is determined by the choices that we make? And how much of it is destined to happen? What if I had gone to college? What if I had become a psychologist? Would my psychic powers have blossomed so fully? I don’t know. Maybe having such an unhappy mother was the real training I needed for the work that lay ahead of me. When I look back at my own life, I know that so many of the things that happened to me were part of some plan I could barely glimpse, much less understand. We think we are the agents of our own destiny, but there are forces at work in our lives that are so much bigger than we can possibly ever understand.

  Out of desperation, for some kind of distraction from home and waitressing, I decided to audition for a musical at the local community theater, a production of Jesus Christ Superstar. I got a small part in the chorus and a bigger role as the hidden girlfriend of the music director.

  He was my first love.

  I thought he looked like James Taylor. He had those soulful eyes and a lovely voice, but he really wasn’t very nice to me. Whenever we were out in public, he’d say, “Pretend you don’t know me. I don’t want other people to see me with you.”

  When I had first started going around with him, he had taken me to the movies and afterwards we had parked and kissed a bit. I gushed about it in my journal. But the next day when I walked into the house, my mother, who’d read my diary, started hurling English muffins at my head and screaming at me that I was a whore. “You dirty slut!” she yelled at me over and over again.

  What was strange was that I felt like one deep down inside. I reacted like she was right, even though I was a just-kissed virgin at that point. Needless to say, my mother’s attack on me helped me decide to sleep with the music director. If she was going to call me a slut, why not be one?