Sex, Spooks and Sauvignon (Adventures of an Accidental Medium Book 1)

by Tracy Whitwell

  I’m left standing there with some god-awful, plinky-plonky hippy shop music seeping out of the old CD player in the corner. It’s not that loud, but yesterday’s one glass of wine at Minnie’s turned into five, as a huge debate ensued on whether you can be obsessed with shoes and still be considered a serious person. I like Elsa, but sometimes when I’m drunk I despair of her hatred of talking about anything deep because she finds it vulgar and her terrified refusal to think about anything to do with death.

  Death is my default subject of conversation while drinking. Now my head is experiencing the ‘plinks’ as tiny darts of glass go straight into my amygdala and I wonder if it’s supposed to sound like angel tears falling from heaven or something, because if so, it’s failing miserably.

  As I poke the duster at a giant amethyst that looks like a magic cave, the first customer of the day floats in like Nosferatu. He’s a young man, he’s wearing a cape, and he stops dramatically in the middle of the shop, smiles and regards me like a museum exhibit. He’s only about twenty, but has a crop of thin, receding hair that frames his huge domed forehead eerily.

  ‘Erm. Hello…’

  He bows.

  ‘I’m Antony. How are you?’

  He extends his hand; I tremulously offer my own and he kisses it. There’s a touch of froth at the corners of his wide mouth. I really don’t need this.

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘I’m Tanz.’

  ‘Hellooo Tanz, you’re going to adore it here.’

  He motions around the shop like it’s the land of plenty. I’m not sure what to say. He has very, very wide-spaced grey eyes under that dome of a forehead. I think on my feet, taking an almost imperceptible step back from him.

  ‘Did you have a nice weekend, Antony?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, thank you, I did. I’m an alchemist, you see, and I took a client of mine to the Valley of the Kings. We went into the great chamber of Tutankhamun’s tomb and I held a quartz crystal in the air and, after several incantations, it turned into a pure diamond! It was wonderful…’

  Fuckety fuck. The hairs on the back of my neck have started to wave about like anemones. This is exactly what I expected from this kind of shop. Nutters. I smile encouragingly while wondering how I can run faster than the wind without seeming rude. I’m tempted to ask if he is jet-lagged from the flight back from Egypt, but I think he might detect my disbelief and produce some kind of ceremonial dagger from the folds of that crazy cape and jab it into my lung.

  Never has the sound of a door opening been more welcome.

  The woman who’s just entered is wearing a long, maroon, leather jacket – the kind you see in charity shops. She’s got shoulder length hair, bleached white, and she’s wearing quite a lot of gemstone jewellery. There’s a ruby on her finger (presumably fake) the size of my fist. I want to get down on the floor and kiss the soles of her golden sandals, though her toenails aren’t the best I’ve seen. She smiles at the alchemist and nods at me.

  ‘Hello. Are you Tanz?’

  I nod and wave.

  ‘Hiya love, I’m Sheila. Hello Antony, are you chatting up the staff again?’

  She has a cheeky London twang. He giggles like a girl and puts his hand to his foamy mouth.

  ‘God no, Sheila, I’m behaving impeccably, aren’t I, Tanz? I was just relaying some of my latest adventures. I’ve had a wonderful weekend in the Valley of the Kings…’

  ‘Nice. Jet-lagged?’

  ‘A little. But I have a special crystal, given to me by my godmother, that stops the exhaustion.’ He lifts his disproportionately large hand back to his face and places his finger on his lips. ‘But don’t go on about that or everyone will want one!’ He turns on his heel, back towards the door. ‘Must fly my darlings… more packing to do!’

  When he’s gone, I look to Sheila who smiles. She’s late fifties, has good teeth and lots of lines around her eyes. I’ll bet she smokes. I gave up a long time ago; ageing my face when I’m trying to get telly jobs is a very bad idea. I like her lop-sided smile. She holds out a bejewelled hand, obviously noting my anxiety.

  ‘Don’t mind Antony. He’s actually a very intelligent boy. A few problems, though.’

  ‘I noticed. He told me he turned a crystal into a diamond in King Tut’s tomb. Who would leave him alone in a famous tomb to cast spells?’

  Sheila shakes her head.

  ‘He does like to embellish, but he’s only a danger to himself. He’s been rushed to hospital three times in the last two months, you know.’

  ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘Pills and drink twice and last time it was his wrists. His little fantasies are part of a bigger picture.’

  ‘That’s awful.’

  She moves towards the back room.

  ‘Anyway, his godmother is taking him to Italy tomorrow so he won’t be bothering us for a while! Now, I’ve just got to light my candles and take my coat off love.’

  She has a much more earthy voice than I would have expected. She doesn’t have the slow, deliberate speech pattern that comes straight from Victorian séances. I’ve always thought that if you have the ‘gift’ you shouldn’t have to speak like you’re on Mogadon, and she doesn’t. She smells of cigarette smoke (knew it!) and strong perfume. It’s not the cheap stuff. I have a great nose for perfume; I reckon it’s Samsara. Her nail varnish is peeling. It’s green.

  The last time I had a reading it was out of curiosity and the reader was a young lass. She was pretty and well dressed and she came across as a frustrated performer. I left certain she was full of shit. I fed her far too much information, she was quite negative and I felt duped for a week. I’ve always believed there was ‘something else’; I just don’t quite know what it is.

  There’s a huge crash from the back room and an expletive. I follow the noise. Inside there’s a little table with two chairs facing each other across it. Sheila has put a pretty cloth on it, spread some gemstones about and laid down her cards. On one shelf a candle and an incense cone burn. Two holes in the wall show where the other shelf was, until about a minute ago. Now it’s on the floor with a surprisingly unscathed CD player next to it. Sheila is clutching her knee.

  ‘Ow. The bloody shelf’s loose. I caught it with my shoulder and it came out of the wall.’

  We decide not to push the shelf back in, in case it falls off again. Her knee is bruised, but not broken. I offer to make her a cup of tea, which she is very thankful about. I wonder if she lives with anybody: she seems touched by such a tiny kindness. When she’s ensconced in her room, with her cuppa, I check the diary. She has five readings booked already. Blimey. There’s only room for two more half hour slots, the rest are hours and already taken. I decide I’ll call Elsa later; I think I may have found her a good one.

  The phone rings and a nervous-sounding lady called Rita asks for a reading with Sheila. She snaps up a half hour. I peep round the door and tell Sheila, who emits a big, throaty monster of a chuckle.

  ‘Rita would come every bloody day if she was allowed. I only let her visit once a month, though. I’m not her therapist.’ She pronounces it ‘ferapist’. She chuckles again. ‘Well, if she’s coming in I might be up for a day of people making problems where there are none.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Well, she’s a lovely lady, but there’s nothing actually wrong with her life, she just wants to talk. And you often find when you’re doing a whole day of readings that they start to follow a pattern. The ‘problems’ follow a theme. Some days you’ll get six people who just need assurance. Another day it’ll be all kinds of relationship nonsense; another, God forbid, it’ll all be odd and dark.’

  My ears prick up like nosy meerkats. Anything to do with scary stuff and I’m interested. But the door has opened behind me and I know it’s time for Sheila’s first customer. Blast.

  The man is short, Chinese and very quiet. He wanders into the room that’s barely bigger than a stock cupboard with a blissful look on his face and Sheila closes the door behind him
. I would really like to be a fly on the wall in there. This is a good sign. Maybe I might like working here after all, despite the nutters and the hangover. I’ve taken some aspirin, I have a mug of coffee in front of me, a book to read between customers and a colleague who gets ‘odd and dark’ people in.

  Yes. This could be OK.

  ‘Home Sweet Home’ Time

  I always like the drive up north. There are two reasons for this:

  1) I passed my driving test when I was twenty-eight, so the novelty of the freedom that this fast-moving, albeit old and cranky, piece of metal affords me as I pop up the motorway, howling along to my favourite CDs, still thrills me – especially since I’ve been single and not answerable to anyone else.

  2) Newcastle is still one of the best places in the whole world, and seeing as I travelled all over the world as an actress before it all went tits up, I know what I’m talking about. Theatres, cinemas, museums, art installations, music venues, poetry nights, pubs with character, gorgeous old buildings, history, lovely hotels. I could be a tour guide up there. The countryside is beautiful, the nearby beaches are white and unspoiled (and mostly chilly) and the people are hilarious.

  Like anywhere else it has its problems, but Newcastle and its next door neighbour Gateshead contain my family, many of my old friends and a huge barrel of nostalgia from my upbringing and teenage years. In the old days when I couldn’t drive and I went off to ‘that London’ to college, one of the biggest thrills of my existence would be my first sight of the Tyne Bridge from the train (the train I could ill afford on my student grant but couldn’t resist catching every fortnight.) As it approached Central Station in Newcastle, I would draw an excited breath, knowing I could soon alight and make my way to the nightlife – nightlife that I didn’t really leave behind until I reached my thirties.

  By the time my thirties came, I had a car and a man who didn’t like me driving off up north to see friends all the time. I had budget restraints and worries and confidence issues and all of the other baggage that seems to get worse instead of better if you don’t handle it right. This, of course, was compounded by the fact that I was an actress and my bloke was jealous. He didn’t admit it, but in retrospect I realised he was, and by the time we split up I had shown up at enough auditions looking haggard and argued-out for the rot to have kicked in. This was the price I paid for staying with someone I loved, but who was wrong for me. Now, even though we split up months and months ago, there’s a feeling that acting is taking a rest from me because I let it down.

  Still, being single and out of the loop also means I can drive off to my mam and dad’s house whenever I’ve got a couple of free days, throw my diet in the air by eating white bread fish-finger sandwiches and fall asleep in the room I grew up in, or, better, on my mate Milo’s spare single futon, usually rolling drunk. My parents live in a very cute two up two down (we moved there when I was eleven and they made my brother’s room into a bathroom when he eventually moved out) and they have a fat, but lovely, dog called Zorro. Zorro has so many breeds mixed up in him it’s impossible to guess his lineage, though the black fur around his eyes which makes him look masked and earned him his moniker could well be a German Shepherd thing.

  As soon as I walk through the front door my mam looks up from her newspaper, lips pursed.

  ‘Your nanna’s hurt her leg. Your dad’s had to go along. She’s not been off the phone all day. She only banged it.’

  My mam and my nanna are still vying for who gets the most attention from my dad. Primarily because he doesn’t pay anyone any attention apart from the dog. He has a shed. He really does. He goes out there and closes the door, in between tending his tomatoes in the green house and walking Zorro. What with all of that and his work hours, no one sees him much. I suffer from being in the unfortunate position of ‘exactly in the middle’ of the two feisty northern women in this triangle. My mam feels, rightly, aggrieved that my nanna wanted my dad to marry someone ‘important’ (like a secretary) and made her feel bad when they were courting. My nanna is furious that she’s old and doesn’t get enough visitors. Even though she gets visitors most days. I feel sorry for my nanna because she’s eighty-two, but I also feel sorry for my mam because she’s kind and nice, really. These two have built up such a wall of niggling grievances over the years that all approaches to the subject have to be handled with extreme caution. I hate that it’s the first thing that’s mentioned, so I go for the easiest riposte.

  ‘She always moaning, you know that, Mam. Why are you letting her upset you?’

  I am blatantly ignoring the fact that my mam can moan for England. She could probably represent the Earth in a Universal Grumbling Competition. Sometimes I catch myself complaining about some rubbish or other and I’m mortified. I do not want this to be what I’m remembered for. How many people I sent to sleep, miserable, from listening to my woes. I give my mam a slightly awkward hug. She’s four foot six and was never really one for cuddling. I do it anyway because I convince myself she likes it really, in a spiky, not-into-physical-contact kind of way.

  She asks if I want a cup of tea. I hate tea and haven’t had a cup since I was eight. I used to have a milky one because it was nice to dunk biscuits in. My mam knows this, but it’s a Geordie default to offer a cup of tea. My parents drink about twelve mugs of Tetley’s a day. They even drink it with hot meals which I find utterly perverse. That’s what wine’s for, isn’t it? My mam used to be a cleaner and my dad works in a factory. In their world only alcoholics and unutterably well-to-do folk drink wine with their dinner.

  I look at my mam sitting there with her big eyes and tiny doll’s mouth and suddenly feel sorry for her. She had a very hard childhood, hasn’t got the most romantic marriage and could probably do without continued sniping from an old lady who isn’t even her own mother (who, by the way, wasn’t exactly Mary Poppins either). I go and pour her a cuppa from the pot and make myself an instant coffee. I can’t bear the stuff, but I’ll sip a bit of it black, just to be sociable. I perch on one of the new two-seater sofas that appear to be made of concrete and change the inflammatory subject from nanna to Mystery Pot.

  My mam is very proud of the fact I am an actress and have been on TV and she is still absolutely furious with my ex, Blake, on whom she totally blames my drop in confidence and waning career. The only way to avoid the inevitable diatribe when I speak of my career is to quickly convince her that I love working at the shop. For her, the work ethic is strong, so ultimately she’d rather I was at the shop than nowhere and she listens with interest as I tell her about Sheila.

  ‘She sounds like your Nanna Lily.’

  ‘Nanna who?’

  As far as I know I had a great Nanna Eve, a Nanna Betty, a Great-Nanna Mary and I have my current sole surviving Nanna Marge. I didn’t know anything about a Lily.

  ‘Oh, she was your Nanna Betty’s mam. Your great-grandmother. She died a long time before you were born, when I was young.’

  ‘So how does she sound like Sheila?’

  ‘Did I not tell you? She was a well-known medium in Birtley. People used to come from all over for readings.’

  Cogs whir in my head. I’m sure I have a vague recollection of hearing this before, but I don’t recall any details.

  ‘Your nanna, my mam, didn’t agree with it so we didn’t talk about it. Your nanna saw some very strange things when she grew up. Shadows wandering around the house, a little girl in old-fashioned clothes standing at the top of the stairs… She was terrified to go out to the toilet at night. Said she wet the bed sometimes she was so scared.’

  ‘You never told me this before, Mam. What else did Nanna Betty say?’

  ‘Not a lot, we weren’t exactly close were we?’

  True, we didn’t see much of Nanna Betty when we were growing up. You don’t question it when you’re young. Later on, after she’d passed away, I just assumed she’d been a loner.

  ‘One thing I do remember clearly from when I was three or four was that Lily dressed in
a fitted coat and she smoked like a chimney. And she used to wear a lot of rings. I remember thinking she must be very rich to have so much jewellery. Turns out people gave her stuff in lieu of payment. Jewellery, food vouchers, all sorts. She was a right character. Well that’s what me mam said just before she died, when we were getting on a bit better.’

  Funny how my mam didn’t get on with her mother, but she still gets a lost look when she mentions her being dead. That’s why I try hard with my mam. We’re very different, but she’s done her best and I don’t want her to disappear into the ether thinking I didn’t like her. This is despite the fact she once swung at my head with a packet of oven chips and only missed me by a whisker.

  ‘Mam, have you never seen any ghosts or anything over the years? Isn’t mediumship supposed to be passed down in families?’

  My accent always becomes stronger when I’m with my mother. And I start murdering my grammar, just like she does. She is suddenly uncharacteristically quiet.

  ‘What? What, Mam?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing what?’

  ‘I sometimes have dreams.’

  ‘Eh?’

  My little mam looks distinctly uncomfortable. I can’t believe this. Nobody tells me anything. She said she ‘felt’ things once, but I thought she was talking about ‘mother’s intuition’. I didn’t believe her, anyway. I was fifteen, your parents are nothing but idiots when you’re fifteen. Now I’m all ears.

  ‘You know, when you dream something will happen and then when you wake up it really does?’

  ‘No! No, I don’t know. How come you’re telling me this now, when I’m 35? Why haven’t I always known this? What do you dream?’

  ‘All sorts. I don’t like to talk about it.’

  ‘You don’t like to talk about it? But you have now. You’ve got to give me an example.’