Boring, I thought. Horoscopes were too vague.
“Erica specializes in the runes …”
That didn’t sound especially specific, either.
“And Martha takes instructions directly from a spirit cat …”
“A spirit cat?”
“Yes,” said the telephone operator. “But don’t worry, the cat communicates in English.”
A spirit cat. It was, of course, the daftest thing I’d ever heard, but at that time of the night it seemed as though it was more likely to get me the results I wanted than crunching numbers or throwing tiles. It was good enough for me. “I’ll have Martha,” I said.
“All right, Ashleigh. I’ll just need your credit-card details and then I’ll ask her to give you a call.”
I read out the long number on the front of my MasterCard.
“Okay. It’s twenty-nine pounds ninety-five for the first twenty minutes, then one pound fifty a minute for every minute or fraction of a minute after that. Still want me to go ahead?”
I told her that I did. The figures she had quoted didn’t mean much to me right then. Having seen Michael and Miss Well-Sprung looking so very together, I thought I might actually die from the pain of it. I wanted answers. I wanted good news for the future and I would have paid just about anything to hear them. Even from a stranger and her spirit moggy.
“All right,” said the chirpy telephonist. “That’s gone through. Martha will call you back in the next ten minutes.”
I waited eagerly, with the phone receiver still in my hand. It rang at the seven-minute mark, just as I was about to call the switchboard back and make sure the girl had taken down the right number.
“Hello?” I said quickly.
“Ashleigh,” said my mother. “It’s your mother.”
“It’s eleven at night,” I pointed out. “You’re always asleep by eleven.”
“I know, dear, but I just had a feeling you wanted to talk.”
“Eh?”
“Call me a silly old woman, perhaps it’s a mother thing, I just thought, I’m going to call my little girl and remind her how much I love her.”
“Thanks, Mum,” I said. “That’s really great, but can I call you back? I’m waiting for someone else to call.”
“What? At this time of night?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s calling you now?”
“You did,” I suggested. “But, seriously, I’m sorry to shove you off the phone but I’m waiting for a very important call from Los Angeles.”
“About work?”
“A possible client,” I lied.
“In that case …” She put her hand over the receiver but I could still hear her very clearly as she yelled to my father, “She’s waiting for a call about work. From Los Angeles! That sounds exciting,” she said to me.
“It is. Okay, Mum. Thanks for calling. I have to clear the line for this really important call. But I love you, too.”
“All right, darling. You know that anytime you want to talk, we’re here for you, your dad and me. We may be silly old duffers …”
“I’m not!” Dad shouted.
“… but we’re your parents and we love you, and whatever we can do to make your life better, we will.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” Then I put the phone down before Mum could start off another thread of conversation. I didn’t want or need motherly love right then. I needed that spirit cat! I felt compelled to hear its views and decided that this wish—to get my mother off the phone so that the psychic cat could talk to me—must be in some way significant. It meant that the cat must be picking up messages for me already.
As soon as I got rid of Mum, the phone rang again almost immediately. I stabbed the green ACCEPT button and prepared for the future to unfurl.
The phone was quiet, except for the sound of someone mouth-breathing.
“Hello,” I said, hoping this was the psychic and not just a plain psycho.
“Miaow,” said the caller.
“Martha?” I asked.
“No. Miaow. I am Tiberius, the great spirit cat. Miaow. Rrrooowwwlll. But in my last earthly lifetime I was Princess Fifi, the Burmese cat belonging to Martha, yes. Purr. Purr.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Do not be afraid,” Martha as Tiberius intoned. “I have inhabited Martha’s mortal corporeal being in order to be able to speak with you today. What … miaow … is your question?”
The question should have been, what on earth was I doing spending £29.95 to have a telephone conversation with a woman from South London who thought herself inhabited by the spirit of her dead pet? Instead I said, “I want to know what’s going to happen in my love life.”
“Miaow,” said Martha. “Very well.” A pause. “Do you want to be more specific?” the psychic asked in her normal voice.
“I’d rather hear what you pick up in the other world,” I suggested. I didn’t want to give her any clues in case they influenced what she said. I’d heard that telephone psychics tried to pump people for information and adapted their readings accordingly.
“Okay. Miaow … I can tell at once that you have been wronged by a man.”
Spot on. I was hooked.
“Tell me his name.”
“Aren’t you getting it from the spirits?” I asked.
“They’re not always that forthcoming, but wait …” She miaowed again. “I am getting some letters. I’m getting an A. No, I’m getting an L. The letter N.”
“Did you say M?” I asked.
“Maybe that was it.”
“His name is Michael.”
“Aaaaah.” Suddenly Martha/Tiberius hissed. She sounded exactly like a cat that had been cornered by a dog lover with a broom. “I feel bad energy coming from this person,” she said. “Is he allergic to felines?”
Amazingly, he was. In fact, Michael was allergic to just about everything. He had to have some kind of antihistamine shot in his buttock once a year to be able to go outside once the pollen was flying. As for animals, cat dander made his eyes as red as an experimental rabbit’s; a lick from a Labrador could kill him.
“What else are you getting?” I asked Martha.
“I will try to tune in to his aura,” she told me.
Another minute passed.
“Oh, it’s dark. It’s very dark in here.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. Bad energy,” she said. “Bad energy indeed. Miaow, miaowwwwwwww,” she added. “What do you want to know about this man? Michael.” She gave a little hiss again.
“He was my boyfriend,” I told her. “And I want to know if he’s going to come back to me.”
“He did you harm,” she said again.
“I know, but …”
“He’s not entirely out of your life, right? And you want to know whether he will come back to you? And whether he will give you the commitment that you so desire?”
“I do,” I admitted.
“Well, the Great Ceiling Cat says that we can have anything that we wish for, but we should be careful what we wish for.”
Ceiling Cat? Wasn’t that lolcat code for God?
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means …” Martha purred for a moment. “It means that you need to look deep into your heart and try to see where the right path lies for you. Lift up your heart to the Great Cat in the Sky and ask him to pour light over you so that you may see.”
“Right,” I said. “But can’t you be a bit more specific? Could you tell me, for instance, whether he is in love with someone else?” I clung to the hope that Miss Well-Sprung had broken up with him on the way home from the barbecue.
“I can only tell you what I am shown,” said Martha. “But I will look once more into the silver glass.” She did some more purring for good measure. I waited, pen poised over my notepad to start taking down any revelations. The purring continued for quite some time.
“Are you still there?” I asked, in case
it was a fault on the line.
“Rrrrrrrroooooaaaaawwwww,” said Martha. I took that to mean that I should try to be more patient.
“Er …,” I tried again, after another three minutes.
“Something is coming,” Martha assured me. “Something you very much need to know. Be patient. Be patient.” She slipped back into cat noises again.
I kept the phone pressed against my ear as I glanced at my watch. My twenty minutes were over. I was now listening to a grown woman purring at a cost of seventy-five pence every thirty seconds. I had absolutely lost it.
But still I hung on. On the other end of the line, Martha/Tiberius squeaked and rumbled. She rawled and miaowed. She sounded at one point as though she might be having a kitty stroke. The clock ticked. Still nothing. Nothing. And then …
“The Great Cat in the Sky says,” she intoned at last, “that there is a strong female energy around him. I sense the spirit of a capybara!” she added triumphantly.
A what?
“A capybara,” she repeated. “But all is not well. Ah, no …”
I heard a mobile phone trilling in the background, somewhere in Martha’s house.
“The spirit is leaving me!”
“But … Tiberius.”
The mobile in the background was insistent.
“I’m Martha again now,” she said. “Was that all right for you, Ashleigh? Did you get everything you needed?”
“Thanks,” I said. “I think so.”
I had been on the phone for forty minutes. Sixty quid for a capybara. What on earth did that mean?
Capybara. I looked at the word written on my notepad and tried to make sense of it. Wasn’t a capybara some kind of rat? Or was the word an anagram? Bar capay? Yap a crab? I couldn’t come up with anything sensible, so I opened up my laptop again and plugged the letters in, guessing the spelling. And there it was. A capybara. I had been right. It was a cross between a beaver and a rat. And it was one of the most common wild animals to be found in Brazil.
“Brazil!” I exclaimed when I read the word. My God. It was too ridiculous to be a coincidence. Tiberius must have tuned in to Miss Well-Sprung. She was a Brazilian! It was the only explanation. Of course her spirit was represented by an animal from her homeland. I hadn’t told Martha that Miss Well-Sprung was Brazilian. This was proof that the telephone psychic had not been giving me some preset speech.
I needed to know more. I picked up the telephone and dialed the psychic hotline again. To my irritation, the switchboard operator informed me that Martha was on another call and would not be available for at least an hour.
“Do you want me to put you on to one of the other readers?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “It has to be Martha. I think she has a message for me. From Tiberius.”
“I understand,” said the switchboard operator, sounding as though she really did understand. “I’ll make sure that you’re next in the queue.”
I didn’t know what to do with myself while I waited for Martha to call back. I typed “capybara” into Google again and brought up a couple of pictures. I looked into the shiny black eyes of a female capybara and imagined it sitting in Michael’s lap. It looked like a malevolent sort of thing. I decided that the malevolence of the capybara’s spirit was what was making Michael’s aura so dark. He’d been bewitched by a rodent in human form.
Martha finally rang me back at a quarter to three in the morning. I was disappointed when she addressed me in her normal speaking voice rather than in the miaows of Tiberius, but she assured me that there was no problem. She had no doubt, since the capybara image had been so accurate, that Tiberius had more to say to me and would be back before I knew it.
Unfortunately, she was wrong. Tiberius was not back for the whole of my expensive twenty minutes.
“Aren’t you getting anything from Tiberius at all?” I begged as the clock ticked into overtime.
“You can’t hurry the spirits, love,” Martha told me. “Maybe you should call back tomorrow.”
I did. I called back the next evening. And the next and the next. But Tiberius was on an extended catnap. Unable to get through to the spirits without him, Martha offered me the benefit of her personal female wisdom on men instead.
“What you have to understand, my love,” she said, “is that all of them are bastards. It just takes some of them longer than others to prove it.”
On Thursday night Martha thought that Tiberius might be coming back, but just as she started to purr, she got a text to say that her eldest son had been picked up by the rozzers and she was needed at the police station.
Still I kept calling, at a cost of £29.95 for the first twenty minutes, in the hope that something, anything, useful or at least hopeful, would be revealed. And finally, finally, on Saturday night, Tiberius returned.
Martha cut short a long speech about her bastard ex-husband and let out a miaow that sounded distinctly like a miaow of irritation. “He’s here,” she informed me. Then she settled into a long bout of purring.
“I’m sorry,” I said as the clock hit nineteen minutes again, “but twenty minutes have almost passed and I don’t have a lot of money. I just have to know what to do next.”
“You’re sure that you still want to get back together with your ex-boyfriend?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s what I want more than anything in the world.”
I wanted to be with Michael. I had wished for that ever since our first kiss. Being dumped had not changed how I felt at all. Neither had seeing him taking Miss Well-Sprung to my friend’s barbecue. Be careful what you wish for meant nothing to me right then. I felt sure that if I got what I wanted, I would live happily ever after.
“Miaow,” said Tiberius. Martha’s South London accent had been replaced by a luxuriously deep growl. “Then I can help you. I can cast a spell that will bring him back to you and ensure that your rival never bothers you again. It will be an easy process for me. I can see into any human heart. But you have to do your part as well.”
“What is it?” I asked. “I’ll do anything.”
“This is what you must do.”
Tiberius gave me my instructions.
“You have been chosen,” said the psychic cat. “To receive the blessings of the Great Ceiling Cat. But in order to receive those blessings, you must first make an offering. You must come to my mortal home for a personal consultation.”
Martha slipped back into her real voice to give me an address. I wrote down the address. Then Martha became Tiberius again to tell me, “I will see you there when you are ready.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Tiberius. “You must bring a thousand pounds. In cash.”
The phone line went dead. Tiberius had hung up on me.
I know, I know. Madness is the only word for it. I’d already spent five hundred pounds on improving my image to match Miss Well-Sprung. That week alone I had spent a further three hundred pounds on calling a psychic hotline. And now said telephone psychic had asked me for a thousand pounds and I was seriously considering giving it to her. So that she would cast a spell.
But haven’t you ever wanted something so much that money became irrelevant? It’s not as though I was thinking about blowing a grand on a pair of shoes. The way I saw it, I was considering an investment in my future happiness, and that of Michael. If we were meant to be together and a thousand pounds was what it would take to bring us back together, then it seemed like a bargain to me.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a thousand pounds. In the month since Michael dumped me, I had just about melted my credit card. I had never been much of a saver and had nothing left in my current account at all after paying that month’s rent. It was with that in mind that I had gratefully accepted my mother’s invitation to have Sunday lunch in the family home in Croydon. I could spend three pounds on a train fare or a fiver on a ready meal to eat all by myself. The train fare was all I could manage. I could not afford to spend a grand on juju.
I tried to forget all about it.
The downside to not having to cook my own lunch that Sunday was that lunch with my parents always meant lunch with my brother as well. Lucas, or “the Accident” as he was affectionately known, coming into our lives as he did shortly after my mother first told me of the dangers of men and the importance of contraception, still lived with Mum and Dad. Not so surprising, I suppose, given that he was only twenty. There were twelve years between us.
My relationship with Lucas had always been somewhat difficult. He was cute enough as a toddler, but when I was going through those tricky teen years, Lucas was just coming into his own as the master of the practical joke. I didn’t appreciate finding snails in my brand-new pixie boots. Neither did I appreciate a six-year-old Lucas and his friends using my bras as catapults.
Now that Lucas was twenty, he was at college, studying for an art foundation course that he hoped would help him make it to film school. Lucas looked every inch the art student that day. He would not have seemed out of place on the arm of one of the Olsen twins. He wore his dirty-blond hair straggly and long beneath a greasy old hat that had belonged to our grandfather (his gardening hat). His tight jeans were pulled bizarrely low so that his underpants were clearly visible over his waistband. Not such a good look, as far as I was concerned. Especially since I had no doubt that the underpants he was showing off had been bought by our mum. But Lucas’s bizarre fashion habits were apparently very hip and they didn’t seem to be costing him success with the girls. Since his voice broke (and actually before—he was a very sweet child when he wasn’t tormenting me), he had been surrounded by girls. When I arrived that Sunday, one of the latest batch of girls was just leaving. She sloped away from the house as though she were sneaking past the paparazzi outside the home of Russell Brand.
“Did that girl stay the night?” I asked Lucas. She had a distinct walk-of-shame air about her.
“Uh-huh,” said Lucas.
Getting Over Mr. Right Page 8