by Jess Kidd
It’s a slow, warm smile. It makes my heart gasp for life, despite itself.
Renata glances at me, thin lipped.
“I know how it looked,” Sam ventures.
“You have five minutes,” I say.
Renata squeezes my arm and wanders into the kitchen to put the kettle on, tightening her headscarf against the squalls that lie ahead.
* * *
SAM IS driving me to the spiritualist church in his green Golf with a dented passenger door. This does not mean that I have forgiven him; I make this clear with my testy demeanor. St. Valentine and St. George, perhaps picking up on the tension, are squabbling in the back seat.
Sam takes a wrong turn.
“You should have gone left,” I point out.
We sit in silence behind a red traffic light.
“Look, I’m sorry, Maud, really I am. I should have called, but something came up.”
“Right,” I say.
“I know how it looked.”
“So you said.” I will the light to turn green and it does. “Renata could have done with your support,” I say, my voice flat. “After what happened.”
“You’re right. I should have been there for her.”
“She sleeps with a bread knife under her pillow and carries Bernie’s urn everywhere.”
“I’m sorry.”
There is a skeptical jeer from the back seat. I turn round to see St. Valentine making a derogatory gesture at the back of Sam’s head. St. George has his visor up and is wearing a comprehensive scowl.
I open the window and lean out a bit, avoiding Sam’s smell of wolf in sheep’s clothing: citrus soap and cigarette smoke.
“Can we start again, Maud?”
I glare at him. “Start what?”
“I won’t let you down.” He smiles and glances back at me with his hot gray eyes.
With my resolve weakening I ask myself this: What kind of a man wears espadrilles? Renata didn’t say but surely they are a mark of some horrific variety of deviance.
“I had a great time that night, by the way,” he murmurs.
I wait for wisecracks from the back seat, but none are forthcoming.
“Good for you,” I say. Then I switch on the radio and turn it up.
In the bag at my feet is something more tangible than the vicissitudes of men: a gift from Mary Flood, from beyond the grave.
Don’t be afraid to tell our story.
I won’t, but what is our story, Mary?
Maybe Doreen Gouge, Psychic to the Stars, will tell me tonight.
* * *
I’M NOT hopeful. Doreen Gouge, Psychic to the Stars, stands behind a balustrade, on a wooden box, in front of a lectern. Doreen is as wide as she is tall, the Queen Victoria of the spiritualist world. Her small head, dainty feet, and tiny hands are separated by the expanse of her body, so that she looks like a human kite. She is wearing cheerful pastels in chiffon layers and has a long rope of popcorn-like beads around her neck. Her hair and makeup are just as exuberant as her clothes. A frothy blond halo surrounds her pink face, where her eyes gleam in patches of shimmering blue and her lips shine frosted peach. I wonder if this is all an attempt to offset the morbidity of her profession.
It’s a turnout: at least fifty people, and apart from Sam and me, the audience appear to be regulars. They greet each other with nods and smile at us. Some seem normal, with a kind of worn-down averageness. Others look verifiably strange, as if they are unused to company or hairbrushes. I wonder at the desperate lengths people will go to for solace in the face of death and mortality.
We start by singing a Westlife song, to lift the energy in the room and stir the dead into action. Doreen sings with us, sweetly and enthusiastically. I take a moment to be thankful that the saints are still outside in the car park, most probably where I left them. St. Valentine glaring at St. George with an expression of wall-eyed fury and St. George mouthing expletives back at him over the bonnet of a minivan. Then I wonder what I’m doing here, when Cathal’s world is falling apart, Renata is at home with the door locked and a paring knife up the sleeve of her kimono, and Maggie Dunne is still missing. The singing rises in a crescendo; I follow it on my hymn sheet. Where else would I be?
The woman to my right nudges me. I look up into the rumpled face of a professional smoker with a drawstring bag of a mouth. She is wearing a sweater with a picture of a corgi howling at a moon.
She smiles lugubriously, revealing a tumbledown set of tawny teeth. “Is this your first time?”
“Yes.”
She draws nearer and whispers loudly, “She’s very good, you know. We were lucky to get her. She should be in Woking tonight, but she intuited an accident on the M3.”
“That’s lucky.”
“My uncle came through last time she was here. Big man, Welsh, unusual death in Llanelli.”
“Is that the case?”
“He died of coronary heart failure after being attacked by a flock of seagulls. Doreen got him pegged, even the habit he had of hitching up his trousers before he sat down.” The woman pulls at the knees of her slacks. “Doreen said he didn’t suffer.”
“Sure, that’s the main thing.”
She nods. “He’d been eating biscuits, you see. A digestive had fallen into the hood of his coat and that’s what the seagulls were going for. They hadn’t meant to kill him and that was a relief to know.”
“I’m sure it was.”
The music trails off abruptly. At the lectern, Doreen clears her throat. “I’m very lucky to be here tonight, amongst friends old and new.”
She smiles at Sam, who smiles right back at her. Doreen gives him a cordial wink. She obviously isn’t averse to a man in espadrilles.
“Right now,” she purrs, “the crushed and bleeding wreck of my body should be lying on the intersection between the M3 and the M25. But it’s not. Tonight death by motorway carnage is not my fate, and for that I thank the spirits who walk with me, who have always walked with me.”
Several members of the audience nod and smile, grateful that Doreen isn’t a crushed and bleeding wreck.
Doreen continues, her voice grave. “Since I was a little girl, the spirit world has revealed itself to me in all its myriad glory. This marked me out as different, unusual.” She looks down at her folded hands. “But I was never lonely. Not when my earliest playmates were the dear departed.”
I think of Cathal’s sister, rendered psychic, or just unhinged, by a rake of wasp stings, a belt with a stick, and a dip in a magical horse trough. I wonder if Doreen suffered a similar initiation. Then I think of the pair of martyrs currently brawling in the car park. Then I decide not to think anymore.
Doreen glances around the room. “I am honored to be here tonight to share my gift of mediumship with you and to offer you proof of the continued existence of the spirit in the afterlife.”
She talks like she’s sealing a deal. “Before we start, I want to remind you that I have one rule and one rule alone. You all know what it is, don’t you?”
The audience nod and smile, of course they do.
“I’ll say it again for the sake of our newcomers: Don’t feed me.” She grins and gestures towards her generous flanks. “Heavens, don’t I look as if I’ve had enough to eat?”
Everyone laughs politely and a few idiots shake their heads.
She leans forwards on the lectern. “If I say something you can relate to, or you recognize the presence of a friend or loved one, then raise your hand and I will talk with you. If I talk with you, keep your answers brief, confine yourself to ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’ please, folks. And speak up, loudly and clearly.”
The audience nod obediently, their tissues in their hands, ready for a good cry.
Doreen pulls a serious face. “A conversation with those who have passed is not like a regular chinwag over a cup of tea, such as you or I would have. For the spirit realm both coexists with our own world and lies infinitely beyond it. A good medium can sweep back the curtain separating th
ese domains and gain access to the deepest depths of mystery. As you can imagine this is a difficult, and sometimes unpredictable, undertaking.”
I wonder about this otherworldly curtain. With Doreen it’s likely to be chintz or plush velour. I imagine the spirits of ages, coughing and shuffling behind it, like amateur actors waiting for their scene.
Doreen draws herself to her full tiny height. “Tonight some of you will receive messages and some of you will not. I’m only a conduit, you see; the deceased tell me what they think you need to know. Please be aware that this may not necessarily be what you want to know. And, of course, they may not come at all for you this time.” She smiles coyly. “This is because they are not yet able to communicate or you are not ready for what they want to say to you. Can I have silence now, please.”
A thin, wild-eyed spinster with thick tights and hair that’s a haunt for wildlife dims the lights.
Doreen takes several deep breaths and fixes her eyes on a far-off point just over the top of our heads. She begins to nod and beckon. The audience turn in their seats to look with curiosity at a bookcase and a stack of chairs at the back of the hall, perhaps to witness the legions of the dead, awoken by Westlife, shuffling through the wall.
Doreen folds her hands on top of her chest and closes her eyes. She nods from time to time, listening intently. Sometimes she sways. Then she opens her eyes and steps closer to the lectern. She scans the room.
Her tone is brisk, efficient, like that of an auctioneer. “I have a tall man, brown skin, a Cypriot I think, with a bowel obstruction. Can anyone take this?” Her hand lifts an imaginary gavel.
The audience looks glazed: no one wants to bid for the Cypriot.
Doreen closes her eyes and nods again, a little impatiently. “He suffered gastrically, very badly.” She opens her eyes and grabs hold of her large stomach, cradling it in her arms. She points towards the back of the room. “He wants to talk with someone over there. Can anyone take this? I’m hearing the name Tony or Anthony.”
A woman raises her hand hesitantly. “My postman, he was a Tony,” she suggests. “But he was from Blackburn.”
“But he liked a holiday? He was a sun worshipper?”
The woman ponders. “He might have been. I didn’t know him all that well.”
Doreen ignores this and closes her eyes again. “Tony passed very quickly. But he says he lived life to the full.”
“He did, Doreen.”
“Tony is telling me that there’s a Peter, Paul, Pam, Paddy. Now he’s showing me a clock. He’s pointing to the dial.”
The woman shakes her head. “I don’t know, love. I have a neighbor called Pat. She has a carriage clock.”
Doreen closes her eyes again. “She recently had a procedure.”
The woman looks amazed. “She did, last year.”
“Yes . . .” Doreen gives a fruity giggle. “I can’t say that, Tony.” She opens her eyes and looks at the woman. “Tony is showing me legs. Pat had her legs done.”
“She did, her varicose!”
Doreen smiles. “Tony knew her well. He says to tell her to wear the surgical stockings and put her feet up more often. And he says that you’re not to worry about him; he’s gone to a better place.”
The woman in the audience nods, pleased that the postman she hardly knew is in a better place. Later she’ll knock up Pat to give her the message from dead Tony.
Doreen, satisfied, goes back into her trance.
* * *
I LOOK around the room, at the snaggle-arsed audience bathed in Doreen’s charlatan glow. Over the lectern is a picture of a kneeling angel, painted on Perspex and backlit by fluorescent light. It shines down its benediction on Doreen Gouge as she interprets the senile ramblings of the imaginary dead. I watch Sam. He is engrossed, his hair falling around his face, his lovely gray eyes trained on the podium. He glances over at me and gives me a quick grin. My heart flips. I study his espadrilles.
* * *
DOREEN HAS earned her money tonight. Standing on her box before the lectern she has mimed a myriad of unfortunate deaths. Tonight, she says, we are at suicide central, with two “accidental” deaths by sleeping pills and a tortured soul called Janet who made a bid for perpetual freedom from the top of a car park in Shepherd’s Bush.
Doreen chillingly mimes Janet’s splayed free fall onto tarmac on a dark February morning ten years ago, which narrowly missed a bread van and a Renault Clio.
The devil is in the detail.
None of us can lay claim to Janet. But we are reassured she feels no pain in the afterlife. We let her story die with her. We let her go. There she’ll be, forever falling from level fifteen, spiraling through the air like a sycamore seed, caught on eddies, her coat flapping. Hitting the deck like a bag of blood.
* * *
WE SING another song, this time an ABBA one, to top up the energy. In the second half Doreen concentrates on immedicable infections and malingering sicknesses, interspersed by DIY accidents.
Doreen likens the afterlife to the Underground, so that we can get things in perspective. You have your cancer at Oxford Circus and your heart disease at King’s Cross—these stations are always busy. Whereas for something like decapitation with a circular saw you’d need to be heading out of town towards Chesham. Sam smiles and nods; I watch him enjoying this exhibition of dupery. Taking lessons, no doubt.
It takes me a moment or two to realize that Doreen is looking directly at me.
“I’ve a small man wearing built-up shoes. Shifty expression. Standing behind you. Can you take it?”
I stare at her.
Doreen smiles back, unfazed, and talks very slowly. “Built-up shoes, dear. He’s showing me a stage, footlights. I believe he was in show business. Can you take it?”
Several members of the audience turn round in their chairs to look at me.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“A dapper little man in tails and a top hat, pulling something out of his sleeve.” Doreen mimes behind the lectern. “A string of hankies, bunch of flowers, cagey aspect to him.”
And then it comes to me. “Bernie Sparks,” I say with a surge of jubilation.
Doreen narrows her eyes. “Don’t feed me, but that’s him.” She concentrates hard on a point above my head. “He’s showing me a white rabbit.”
“He was a magician.”
She scowls. “I can see that.” She closes her eyes. “He says time is running out for the poor little girl all alone in the dark. It was a long, long way to fall. She’s at the bottom of the rabbit hole and she needs to climb back out, tick-tock.”
Other audience members glance at me with interest. This isn’t the usual kind of message. They purse their lips and wait for Bernie to talk about kidney disease or where he hid the premium bonds.
“Pussy’s in the well,” lisps Doreen, baby voiced, with a malevolent smile on her face. “Ding-dong bell, right down the well, Bernie wants you to know—”
She freezes, and the smile drops off her face. “The Red Queen is coming,” she says, with more than a hint of Irish brogue.
My heart turns over.
Doreen is staring straight ahead with a look of riveted horror. I watch as her hands find her popcorn necklace and begin to turn it, winding it tighter and tighter around her throat. Her face twists too, into a grimace.
The audience begin to whisper amongst themselves. This doesn’t normally happen. They glare at me accusingly. My dead friend and I have conspired to short-circuit Doreen.
Doreen starts to whimper.
Her wild-eyed assistant clambers onto the stage with a look of panic and pulls urgently on Doreen’s sleeve. Doreen grinds into gear again, blinking and looking around her.
“I’ve lost the connection,” she says weakly. “I’ve lost the connection.”
* * *
SAM LOOKS pale as he slips his hand in mine, and I let him, for I feel oddly chilled. Doreen recovers well. Delivering a swift succession of life-affirming messages and f
inishing on the upbeat advice of a dead council clerk called Jean who stresses the importance of seizing the day and following your dreams. A woman in the back row says she will, she promises she will, she’ll book a mini cruise.
By the time Doreen leads us into our final song, an uplifting hit from the Carpenters, and the dead shamble back through the wall to the boundless tundra of all eternity, the audience seem to have forgotten her strange aberration.
* * *
AFTERWARDS THERE are light refreshments and a chance to mingle. The wild-eyed helper starts taking bookings for psychic portrait paintings. Sam is deep in conversation with her as I step out of the hall.
Along a narrow hallway smelling of incense and stagnant mop buckets there’s a door with a cardboard star. I knock once and open it, not giving the occupant a chance to turn me away.
In a room the size of a broom cupboard, Doreen Gouge is leaning out of the window, smoking. She has her shoes off and a quarter bottle of vodka on the windowsill next to her.
“May I have a word?”
She narrows her eyes through the smoke. “I do private readings by appointment, love, every second Thursday. If you step back outside there’s a leaflet.”
I open my bag. “I’m sorry, I can’t wait that long. I need you to take a look at this.”
She frowns at me, her mouth slack and her eyes full of bored venom. She looks a lot younger close up, under the makeup.
I notice a pair of biker’s boots in the corner and a crash helmet. I start to wonder who the real Doreen Gouge is.
“Twenty-odd years ago a woman was investigating the case of a missing schoolgirl when she herself met an untimely death. Just before she died she left this with a neighbor, saying that someone would come looking for her—it was almost as if she had some kind of premonition.” I pull out the notebook. “It has my initials inside and a message.”
Doreen takes another drag on her cigarette and turns back to the window.
“This woman, Mary, kept cuttings on the case she was investigating—I’m sorry, are you even listening?”
Doreen glowers over her shoulder at me.
I try again. “I’m here because I think you could help me find out what this dead woman discovered, and potentially even find the missing girl. What you said tonight—”