by Mary Hooper
The night before that, I thought I’d have a word with Dad; I wanted to make sure that if they bumped into each other on the stairs he wouldn’t say anything to upset her. If he didn’t provoke her, then maybe she wouldn’t say anything nasty about him.
‘Zara’s coming over tomorrow,’ I started, ‘and I don’t want you to say anything horrible to her.’
‘Well, I won’t say anything at all, then! That’s easiest.’
‘You know what I mean, Dad. Can’t you just be nice to her?’
He groaned. ‘Does she have to come here?’
I tried to keep my temper. ‘She’s not hurting you, is she? And … and she’s having such a rough time at home,’ I added, thinking that I’d try and make him feel a bit sorry for her. ‘Her mum’s awful …’
‘Awfully drunk!’
‘She just drinks all the time now,’ I elaborated.
‘Terrible …’ Dad tutted.
‘And I do feel –’
Here he interrupted me and I nearly lost it with him. ‘Feel!’ he said. ‘Feel with two “e”s and no “w”. Feel!’
I bit back a swearword. ‘I do feel really sorry for Zara,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘She told me she likes coming here because we’re such a nice family,’ I lied, and it was a good job Mum wasn’t around because she would have seen through that one straightaway. Dad didn’t, though. Instead he looked rather pleased with himself.
‘Oh,’ he said, nodding. ‘Does she?’
‘Yes, so it’s good for her to come here and see how an ordinary family lives, isn’t it? Otherwise she wouldn’t know.’
He grunted, but he looked quite smug. I thought he’d be OK.
The next evening – well, it all started off well. When Zara arrived I was making earrings ready to give as Christmas presents, and she helped me with the finishing touches by brushing silver leaf, which is very, very fragile, on to some crescent moon shapes and fixing them on to wires. Really pretty, they looked.
I was going to put silver wire hooks on them next but found I’d mislaid the little packet of them that I’d bought. Annoyed with myself, I rushed up and down stairs a bit without finding them, then Zara said that she’d try and dowse for them.
‘Go on, then!’ I said, cross with myself for not putting them away with all my other earring bits.
She took a large sheet of paper and did a rough plan of the house: downstairs with sitting room, dining room and kitchen, and upstairs with two bedrooms and study. Then she held her dowsing crystal over each room in turn and asked whether my hooks were in this particular room, yes or no. It swung around, saying no to each, so then she tried upstairs and it said yes to my bedroom, which was, of course, the obvious place anyway. She tried to narrow this down by making another plan, this time of the room with bed, wardrobe, desk, table, bookcase in place. She dowsed over each one in turn, and the crystal said no to each of these except bed, so we pulled it right out and had a good look under there with a torch. It all took ages and we didn’t find a thing, so by the time we started the Tarot spread I was in a negative sort of mood and ready not to believe in it. The fact that all that dowsing had failed didn’t seem to worry Zara much. She just said she felt they were there somewhere and would eventually turn up of their own accord.
She unwrapped the cards and placed them on the table.
‘I’m going to do you a look-see spread,’ she said. ‘You can ask a question about this guy and see what the Tarot has to say about him.’
We did the cleansing bell business, and then she dipped her head down to the table as if she was bowing to the cards, and then she did the centring to call down the light into herself. Part of me always wanted to giggle when she did this, and the earthing, but I didn’t. Because she was at my house I was very careful not to do anything to make her cross.
I shuffled the cards, then gave them back to her and she, very solemnly, cut them into three piles. She collected the piles up again, then laid out seven cards, face up, in a pattern: three in a semi-circle around the top, three at the bottom and the last card in the centre.
‘What do you want to ask?’ she said then.
‘You know!’
‘You’ve got to ask formally.’
‘OK,’ I said, feeling a bit daft. ‘I want to know if the boy I’m thinking of – the one I call Lofty – is at all interested in me.’
She nodded her head, ran her hands over the cards like she was getting some sort of warmth from them, then she started saying what each one stood for. The first two cards stood for present circumstances and possibilities, then came past actions, future actions and so on. The final one in the middle stood for outcome.
I must say, even though I wasn’t a true believer, that what she did say made an awful lot of sense. The present circumstances – well, I hadn’t told her that each time I’d seen him it had been raining, but she said something about bad weather being lucky for bumping into him. She also said that I was influenced in my feelings by something I’d found attractive in a previous boyfriend, and that was true too, because the boy I’d met on holiday had had the same little gap between his front teeth, which I’d found really sexy.
There were quite a few things like this that she got right; things that rang true. It was all quite uncanny, really, and more than made up for the dowsing that hadn’t worked.
The last card, the outcome one, was a man helping a woman off a horse. She said this was good and meant that we’d form a close relationship in the future. She then asked me to pick a final card from the deck and place it on top of the last card. This, she said, would emphasise the outcome. It was of a man holding a golden goblet.
‘This is you,’ she said.
‘How can it be me?’ I said. ‘It’s a man.’
‘That doesn’t make any difference. It’s someone holding up the cup of plenty, just about to drink from it.’
‘Is that good?’
She nodded. ‘It’s excellent.’
‘So … next time I see him – Lofty – shall I go straight over and start chatting him up?’
She nodded again. ‘Yes. Do it. I can definitely see a future for the two of you.’
She did the earthing business, then collected up the cards, put them in their pack and didn’t speak any more about anything psychic. We put on a couple of CDs and by the time I thought to look at my watch it was quite late.
‘Nearly ten-thirty. You’d better go now before the pubs turn out,’ I said.
She looked at me sharply. ‘What d’you mean by that? You having a go?’
I shook my head vigorously, feeling myself go red. She’d obviously thought I was talking about her mum. ‘I didn’t mean anything … just that you get blokes hanging about outside the Lamb and Flag on the corner and it’s not very nice going past it.’ I hesitated. ‘D’you want to ring your mum to let her know you’re on your way?’
She looked at me and frowned. ‘No thanks,’ she said, and I thought I’d probably put my foot in it again: her mum was bound to be out drinking – and even if she wasn’t I bet they hadn’t had their telephone reconnected.
We went downstairs. Mum was in the kitchen and called hello and goodbye, and then Dad came out of the sitting room. Of course, the first thing he hit upon was the new piercing on Zara’s eyebrow. This had a small gold bar in it, but at least wasn’t red any more.
‘Hello! New eyebrow jewellery?’ he asked.
She nodded at him coolly.
‘Where’s the next piercing, then?’ he said, then added quickly, ‘No, you’d better not tell me. It’s bound to be somewhere rude!’
‘Yes, never mind that, Dad,’ I said, beginning to feel hot, and I started to usher Zara out of the door before he said anything else.
‘Goodnight, then. Mind how you go,’ Dad said, quite nicely, and as he spoke he put out a hand and patted her on the shoulder in what I thought was a friendly sort of way. The moment he touched her, though, she flinched. Not because his touch had surprised her, but in the way that
you’d flinch if the dirtiest, smelliest beggar in the street came up to you and put his arm on you. As if you were revolted.
Well, I was so embarrassed. He, luckily, didn’t appear to have noticed – or pretended he hadn’t noticed. Funny, I wouldn’t normally have been on his side but he really hadn’t done anything to deserve that. OK, he’d been his usual crass self, but no worse than usual, and actually quite a bit better. He’d smiled at her. He’d talked to her quite reasonably. He’d wished her goodnight. So why had she flinched like that when he’d touched her?
I couldn’t bring myself to ask her. I just waved until she’d disappeared out of sight and went upstairs.
The thing that troubled me was that it really looked as if her reaction had been unconscious. She hadn’t done it deliberately to be nasty, she’d done it without thinking. It had been an automatic reaction to being touched by someone she found obnoxious and hateful. Why, though? Why my dad? What had he done?
As I tried to sleep with all these thoughts going through my head I was glad about one thing: that she’d been wrong about the dowsing business. The little package I’d lost hadn’t been under the bed, so she wasn’t right about everything. Perhaps she was wrong about my dad as well.
But then … just as I was drifting off, I flung my hand out of bed so that it rested on a folded-back throw and felt a tiny plastic bag. I sat up, put the light on and discovered the packet we’d been looking for – one of the little hooks had poked out of the top and somehow attached itself to my throw. It hadn’t been under the bed, it had been on the bed.
So she’d been right about that, as well.
Chapter Eleven
Friday night, full moon, the night of the seance, and five girls were kneeling at a table in my room. The girls were me, Zara, Lois, Sky and Poppy, and the room was lit by candles and was suitably eerie-looking.
I hadn’t wanted it to be at my house, but for one reason or another we’d ended up there. Holding it at Zara’s, of course, was out of the question with her mother being the way she was (Zara had made the excuse that she had the flu) and although Lois’s house would have been the first choice seeing as it was her mum we were trying to contact, she said her dad would have gone absolutely mad if he’d found out what she was up to. Poppy had to share a bedroom, so she was no good, and Sky’s little sister was having a sleepover that night and would be bound to come bursting in right in the middle of the proceedings.
Seeing as my mum and dad were going to be out until quite late at some dinner with Dad’s firm, then my house it had to be. I’d told them I had friends coming round and they hadn’t asked what we were going to do – I think they were just really pleased that I’d said ‘friends’ in the plural.
I didn’t know whether Zara minded about it being at mine – she hadn’t said. And when I’d asked her, she made out that she hadn’t flinched at my dad’s touch last time when she’d come over. ‘It was nothing,’ she’d said. ‘I just shivered, that’s all.’
‘It was more than that,’ I’d insisted.
‘Well, someone must have walked over my grave!’ she’d said, and she pulled a weird face and rolled her eyes back in her head, which didn’t exactly make me feel better.
She’d arrived first that evening, bringing two big purple candles, some black muslin to drape over the curtains and some incense sticks to burn – it would all add to the atmosphere, she said. I knew, of course, that she’d been looking forward to this for ages; it was her big occasion, her chance to prove what she could do, show how very psychic she was.
I’d borrowed the coffee table from downstairs so we could kneel around it and Zara had written the letters of the alphabet on cut-up pieces of paper, with two extra squares saying YES and NO. These were all arranged in a circle on the table with a wine glass standing in the centre. Lois had also brought along a photo of her mum, which was supposedly going to encourage her spirit to make herself known to us.
Looking around and seeing the five of us kneeling around the table whispering nervously to each other, the whole place flickering with candlelight and the smoke from the incense sticks hanging in swirls around the ceiling, it didn’t seem like my bedroom at all, but a strange and mystic place which could have been anywhere, at any time. I couldn’t say I was enjoying it, though. It was all a bit too mystical for me.
Zara got out four crystals and placed one on each corner of the table. ‘These are protective crystals,’ she said. ‘They’ll act as a shield from any negative influences.’
Sky nodded. ‘I know something about those,’ she said. ‘My mum’s got an amethyst she says is protective.’
I felt for the tiger’s eye in my pocket and touched it for luck. I usually kept it on me, although I didn’t really know if I believed it had any powers.
‘Zara …are you really sure it’s OK to do this?’ Poppy asked, glancing over to Lois, who was looking pale and worried on the other side of the table. ‘Only I had a book about magic and stuff and it said that you shouldn’t try to invoke the dead unless you’re very experienced.’
‘How d’you know I’m not?’ Zara asked.
Poppy shrugged.
‘Well, you can’t be that experienced, can you?’ Sky said, but nicely. ‘I mean, the first we even knew you were psychic was a couple of months back.’
‘And then suddenly you’d turned into Mystic Meg!’ Poppy added, laughing a little.
Zara didn’t laugh. ‘Don’t start being negative,’ she said. ‘Or it will all go wrong. The last thing we want is negative vibes.’
We all immediately went quiet. What would happen if it ‘all went wrong’? I wondered. Did that just mean that no spirits would arrive? That we wouldn’t be able to contact Lois’s mum? Or did it mean (as in a book I’d once read) that the powers of evil would be invoked and a wicked elemental would appear and do all sorts of devious things?
Zara suddenly turned and looked at me sharply, and I wondered with a shock if she’d actually read my thoughts.
No! I quickly told myself. No, of course she hadn’t. She wasn’t that good. I was letting my imagination run away with me.
Poppy was sitting next to me and she gave me a half-smile. ‘You OK?’ she whispered. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I just hope I don’t!’ I whispered back.
Zara frowned at me. ‘Please cleanse the room, Ella,’ she said, handing me the bell, and I got up and shook the bell around the perimeter, as I always did.
As I sat down again, Zara got to her feet. She stretched out her arms and said, ‘And now I call on four archangels to stand in each corner!’
It was a real shock when she said this, frightening and hysterical at the same time, and I was scared to look at the others in case I started giggling.
‘Michael, the Archangel of the Sun, Gabriel, Raphael and Zadkiel!’ she went on, and I thought to myself, she fancies herself, doesn’t she – asking for four archangels to come to hang around my bedroom with a group of schoolgirls. As if they didn’t have anything better to do! I was trying to think things like this, treat the whole business lightly, but really I was absolutely terrified. If she actually conjured anything up and I saw a dead person, I thought I’d absolutely die of fright.
Zara didn’t seem to see anything outrageous in what she was doing, but was as calm as if she invoked archangels every day of the week. She sat down and put her finger on the upturned wine glass. ‘And may my personal guide be with me in this quest,’ she added, bowing her head as if she was saying her prayers.
A moment passed, and then she looked around the circle. I couldn’t meet her eyes because I felt squirmy with embarrassment. ‘I want you all to put your fingers on the wine glass,’ she said. ‘Just the tips of your fingers … touch it very lightly.’
We all did this.
Zara breathed in deeply and then out in a rush, making the smoke spirals from the incense sticks shiver and curl. ‘Is there anybody there?’ she asked momentously.
We were all holding
our breath, watching the glass, and I thought to myself, what if it went to NO? How mad would that be?
It didn’t move at all, though.
‘Spirits of the upper air … we invite you to our table!’ Zara said. ‘Is there anybody there?’
Suddenly – suddenly – the glass gave a lurch to one side. We all looked at each other, startled.
‘Wow!’ Poppy breathed.
Zara frowned at her. ‘Concentrate on the glass,’ she said.
We did. At least, intrigued as to what was going to happen next, I certainly did.
‘Is there anybody there?’ Zara said yet again, and the glass moved to the right in a jerky movement, then reversed itself and moved smoothly to the piece of paper saying YES.
We all gave little cries of excitement, although I didn’t quite know how I felt at that stage. Did I believe it? Did I really believe a spirit was there? No, of course I didn’t. I thought someone – Zara, probably – must be pushing the glass to where she wanted it to go. And yet …
‘What is your name?’ Zara asked.
The glass began moving again, going round and round in the middle for a while before lurching over to the ‘V’ and then touching briefly on the letters I O L E T in turn.
‘Violet!’ we all said.
Zara looked round the circle. ‘Did anyone have an Auntie Violet who has now passed away? Or a granny called Violet?’
No one had.
‘No matter,’ Zara said. She closed her eyes. ‘I can feel your presence, Violet. Thank you for joining us.’
Poppy glanced at me and raised her eyebrows slightly, signifying disbelief. I was reassured. It was just a game, of course it was. Zara was showing off a bit, mucking about.
‘Can we ask how long she’s been dead?’ Sky asked.
‘Please tell us in what year you died,’ Zara said, and then realised that she hadn’t put any numbers around the circle. She changed the question to, ‘Who was on the throne when you died?’