by Helen Slavin
I pass the baton. Run with it.
I stayed all night in the Spiritualist Church. It lent itself to our talk. The staff there then, the lovely Marcia who did the caretaking, thought that you couldn’t really argue with the Dead. You needed patience and other things to be getting on with. She waited up that night. The next morning she gave me my own set of keys.
Sidney Colville. The extra large medium.
He wasn’t extra large. He was tall and stockily built and certainly well dressed. He had made a lot of money in his time. He had once owned North Ashton Manor complete with staff and grounds. He had been the Lord of the Manor, running two households: the one with Kitty and the one with his first wife, Edna, and their three kids. Edna and the kids had a new semi-detached in town. Edna’s choice, it must be allowed. Sidney had bought North Ashton Manor House with a view to having all his family under the one roof but with rooms enough to keep them apart. Edna was having none of it, she hated the old house and wanted a new one. The minute the villas went up in Bartlett Avenue she was in there. Kitty enjoyed the Manor House.
Sidney never abandoned Edna. She was kept in a manner to which she quickly became accustomed and she had freedom. Mind you, this is his version and he was trying to impress me that first night. He wanted to be the mentor, passing on his knowledge, his expertise.
He admitted that as a kid he’d been able to see people that were invisible to others. Those people always wore chocolate brown clothing. I was interested that he too saw the Dead as I did. He said he had not had an ‘open frequency’—the first time anyone had used a technical-seeming term for what I could do.
‘I could shut up shop. Do they nosey in, then? Sit around and watch what you’re up to?’
I had to admit then that they didn’t. I was allowed some privacy. In bed with Sam. With Evan, spreadeagled on the kitchen table.
I can imagine what Mrs Berry would have said encountering me like that. ‘I’ve just scrubbed that down. You’ll get splinters.’
Or was it just that I was so embroiled in passion that I didn’t see them or hear them? Maybe they were always there watching. Perhaps that was a subconscious reason to stick with Sam, he was a brief escape route. Then I remembered the sleepless nights with Hal or Aunt Mag tugging at my sleeve.
‘I’d get on with it if I were you. You’re never going to be settled doing anything else. You have to accept that you don’t have a choice. This is a given. Some people are meant to be opera singers or concert pianists but it never bothers them because they never start to sing or they don’t ever sit at a piano. They take up teaching or open a travel agency and they are none the wiser. You’re always going to have to work round this.’
He had lovely eyes, my Great-uncle Sidney. They were warm and they never let you go. He never cast sidelong glances to see if there was something more interesting than your face. I like those kind of eyes. Plus I knew he was making sense. That I had in a way been avoiding the obvious.
I wasn’t a waitress or a zookeeper. I was a medium. A translator. Get on with it.
Sidney Says: the Extra Large Medium
I haven’t told her the truth. I haven’t told her because I think she already knows it and won’t admit it. Yet. Let her work it through at the Spiritualist Church. She’s going to shock them, I think. She steps back and lets them in, whereas I was always too scared. Where would I go if they stepped in? I was nearer to the Dark Ages I suppose. The first electric-lightbulb century was just switching on. I thought I’d end up possessed. Which I was in a way, because Kitty took me over. Nowadays there’s all sorts of jiggery pokery.
I always had an open frequency. I just chose to ignore it. I wandered along through life thinking it would go away. When I was fourteen there were so many soldiers. In khaki brown. I was a lad. I thought if I ignored it, laughed hard enough. Which works up to a point. If you’re sitting in a room you don’t listen to all the conversations.
I shunned them. I was a coward. I let them go away disappointed. But I always had bad dreams about strange people telling me all manner of rubbish.
Edna was mortified when it all came out. Not just about Kitty, that she could live with. She didn’t like sex and it meant that was one less chore to be done around the house. I think it was babies that put her off. How we managed three I’ll never know. I don’t know what happened, something went wrong in that department for her after the first baby. I was never going to find out what because you just didn’t talk about such matters. But fair play to the woman, she kept with me. She let me.
No, the sex she could do away with and she always got on all right with Kitty. Who didn’t? It was the mediumship she had a struggle with. In the end the only way to make it everyday was to turn it into a parlour trick. To come up with that name, the Extra Large Medium. I was like a fire eater or a juggler instead of a candidate for the asylum.
This girl, she’s got more than I had. She’s the one who can inherit my title although I’d be happier for her if she could find her Kitty, someone for her to hold onto in the Land of the Living. A lifeline.
Don’t take me the wrong way though, I enjoyed it all in the end. I liked being of use. I made money. I had my family. Love and usefulness. What more could a man ask?
To let
I ARRIVED AT the Spiritualist Church late. There was a delay at the bed and breakfast with Mrs Harkness. She was growing rather tired of me but finding it hard to reconcile that with being not at all tired of my regular cheques. We had these occasional ‘chats’ where she dropped broad hints about my possible plans and I cruelly and heartlessly refused to give her the answers she wanted, or admit I had long ago taken the hint. It was getting more bitter as she realised that I did indeed get the message but wasn’t shifting.
That day she had let my room and packed my bags. I could have really frightened her and moved my belongings into her shed. As it was I returned to the salvation of Zion Chapel. Anyway, that made me late.
‘…easier if you take my tights off.’ I stepped in on the end of a rudish joke.
I looked at the medium on the platform. A woman, tall and well built, wearing an unsmart red jacket in a man-made fibre. It was a size too small and crackled with static as she moved her arms. She had a microphone, I noticed, not a device I’d seen here before. She was moving across the platform now, like a stand-up comedian.
The jokes became, well, pornographic. Bernard Manning would have blushed at a couple. I thought perhaps she’d come in the wrong building. There was a comedians’ night at the pub, the Claybank across the road. She had clearly got off the bus on the wrong side of the road.
‘So. I have a Joe here. Joe wants to talk. Anyone here fancy claiming Joe?’ She had a gruff manner, like someone announcing a special offer over a supermarket tannoy. I couldn’t see Joe. I could see quite a queue of people standing beside the platform, all in chocolate brown, and they were whispering and chatting amongst their ranks, shaking heads and looking puzzled. I was puzzled too. There was no Joe.
I had been ignorant until then. I had thought that there were people who spoke to me, and other people who spoke to other mediums. I had thought that Alan Carney’s confusion over the Jims was because he simply saw different Jims. I thought there was a restriction on who came to see you. I had imagined there was an order to it.
Now I stood, and it was a revelation. There was no Joe. She didn’t hear anyone. She was making it up. The rude jokes were not her misguided attempt to put everyone at ease and win them over. The rude jokes were filler. Making a little dent in the time she was going to have to stand there and try and get something out of the audience, something she could start her story with.
There was no Joe.
She didn’t stop speaking into the microphone the whole time. Not even after I walked up onto the platform. I was wearing my grown-up’s outfit, the jacket and the skirt. Very smart. Very sane. As I stepped up she looked a bit askance but kept on.
‘…I’m sorry Joe, whoever it is you want to talk
to isn’t here tonight…do you have a name for me, Joe? Can you tell me who it is you want to talk to?…Eileen. Do we have an Eileen here?’
I could see a woman in the fourth row flinch slightly but she didn’t own up. Obviously she was called Eileen. The Microphone Medium picked up this wavelength straight off. She pointed at Eileen.
‘You are called Eileen.’ Eileen nodded in terror. Which made this seem like an impressive performance. The Microphone Medium, who was in fact called Maureen, had her mark and was on a roll.
‘I have Joe here…is it Joe?…I might be hearing this wrong. Sounds like Joe. Do you know a Joe? Might be someone in the family, not close…Have a think love…’ While Eileen sat and shook her head with the look on her face of a schoolgirl caught out not knowing her eight-times table, Maureen made as if to talk to the imaginary Joe.
‘Is that right love? You’re…you’re not Joe…Say again, I’ve got a fuzzy line tonight…no love, it was that last Guinness yesterday evening…I think it might be a Jerry. Is that right love, Jerry?’
Maureen turned back to Eileen, who looked even more puzzled and said, ‘Harry.’
Like a tenpenny fortune teller Maureen read Eileen’s reactions. Eileen, unconsciously, did her own reading and Maureen filled in a message, something bland and loving and coverall, something that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a greeting card from the market hall. Ha, I even managed to rhyme it. Maureen shied just short of that.
But I was still standing there. Every now and again she shot me a challenging look as if she was unwilling to give up her spot. Eventually she had to. They called for tea and biscuits. I was nervous standing up there and the queue of chocolate-brown-clad people was getting restive. Not that they were going anywhere in any great hurry. But old habits die hard. Get on with it.
So I did. Forget the tea break. As they all stood around or queued for their refreshment I just got on with it. It felt easier because they weren’t all sitting there listening. Half of them weren’t paying any attention. Eileen was recovering her composure with her little group of friends and others were chatting and moaning together about the narrow choice of biscuits and the lack of really juicy messages from the Great Beyond.
‘Who’s first?’ I asked. First up was a smartly dressed old man in what looked like his de-mob suit. He had clearly had his wear out of it. He smiled.
‘I want to speak to Michael. He’s up at the back there blowing his nose.’
I looked up at the back there and indeed, there was a dark-haired man with a moustache blowing his nose into a cotton handkerchief.
‘What do you want to say to him?’
‘I want that money to go to Deirdre. The house. The lot. Just like it says in my will and if he doesn’t do it I’m going to come back and haunt him and his missus.’
He said it in a matter of fact way, very polite.
‘Michael,’ I said. Without the benefit of the microphone. Michael couldn’t quite hear me. He was laughing pompously at something that a friend was saying. I shouted.
‘MICHAEL.’
There was a moment’s silence. I was the intermission. They turned with their tea and their half-dunked biscuits. There were two Michaels, it seemed. A shorter, red-haired bloke looked up at me. Mouthed, ‘Me?’ and pointed at his chest. I shook my head and pinched a bit of business from Maureen. I pointed at my mark.
‘You,’ I said. ‘I have a message from…’
‘Dad. Harvey if he wants proof,’ interjected Harvey from beside me. He was looking towards Michael.
‘…your dad, Harvey.’
I repeated the message word for word, extremely specific and to the point. Harvey smiled thanks and left. Next up.
‘Hannah. Your mum says to tell you that you must look in the cardboard suitcase that is in the back of the airing cupboard.’
‘Mrs Willis. Sandra says put up or shut up.’
‘Alison. He’s a liar.’
That was quite a good one. It was personal and direct and seemed to have nothing to do with anything that anyone except Alison could know about. Alison it turned out was not even there for herself, she had simply accompanied her gran for the evening.
‘Bridget, I can’t believe you’ve chopped down that clematis when all it needed was a bit of pruning.’
I rattled along in this vein. Shed keys. Garage contents. Attic treasures and enough Crown Derby, Royal Doulton, Minton and Wedgwood to start a small antiques shop. No one came back to their seats. They all simply stood about in the raggle taggle of the tea break letting their cups get cold, their biscuits dunked to destruction, watching and waiting as message after message came through.
The queue of chocolate-brown-clad people shortened. I felt…I felt…Free. Like something bottled up finally unstoppered. A genie.
‘Arthur.’
There didn’t appear to be an Arthur. Still the name kept on in my head. Maureen looked very smug at this point. However, my success rate had been so huge that evening that everyone wanted to hear about Arthur’s message and attempt to find an Arthur in the neighbourhood that might be the Arthur. But no message came. I couldn’t see anyone connected to the voice I heard. I just heard ‘Arthur’. Then it stopped. There was no queue. I was finished for the evening. There were smiles. There were stares. There was a snub from Maureen who got her coat and headed off very swiftly. Comment was made that she hadn’t left her donation for the tea and biscuits.
Marcia sat me down. Brewed tea. Offered me her secret stash of fruitcake. Rich with lemon zest and sultanas. Slivered almonds. And we wondered, who was Arthur?
Dig Deep with Arthur: editing the lowlifes
It isn’t hard to rationalise. I think the scientific people who dismiss all this don’t look at the simple facts. We don’t use something like ninety percent of our brain power. Our minds have resources that simply don’t show up on scans of any kind. If you want to know if God exists, look at a brain, preferably one that is functioning. You watch the fireworks, the engineering and you tell me there isn’t a God. The way I see it Annie’s brain is just wired up a different way. She’s like a satellite dish.
I’m not afraid of this skill. It is a skill, a given. What scares me is how people have shut her off. They use her like a telephone, an object to get them what they want and then be left on a worktop, a sideboard.
What does Annie want? Don’t think they’d ever ask themselves. She’s learnt to be afraid of herself and has not learnt how to handle this easily. It has taken her all this time to work it through and find out how to shut down the system.
And her problem is not that she can speak to the Dead, her problem is that she cares about them all. She can’t stand there reeling off the information. She wants a purpose. She wants to be useful.
Out
AFTER THAT, people came to be fed as much as to find solace. I brokered a deal with The Glade and Atalanta to supply the meetings with refreshments. I started to get a crowd. People would come specifically to my meetings. I started off on Mondays and Thursdays at first but after three months I offered my services every night of the week.
It made things easier. Somehow the chocolate brown brigade worked out that they’d get the best of the deal if they tackled me on the platform at the Spiritualist Church; that really there wasn’t much point haranguing me in the street or disturbing me at the library, because I couldn’t carry the messages then. Not unless they happened to be for the librarian or the caretaker or the woman on the checkout.
You have to be careful. You can’t just blurt it out in the supermarket or at the cigarette kiosk. One minute they’re there, packing up someone’s groceries with a ‘can I help you’ customer service smile and the next they’re hearing, from a perfect stranger, that their Uncle Neville was actually their dad. The world tilts sideways. They might fall off.
Which is why I started to use the suggestion box at the supermarket and the noticeboard at the library. I took out small ads in the local newspaper. I would just write out the message o
n a slip of paper, addressed to the right person and then put it in the suggestion box, pin it to the noticeboard. I always used the names and I signed it simply ‘Messenger’.
Coward. Pretender. Cheat. I got my comeuppance.
A Tuesday night. I have never much cared for Tuesday. Tuesday. Night. Raining. I had been lying awake enjoying the sound the rain made as it drummed on the roof and battered down the new plastic guttering. It splattered against the window, the tempo altering slightly with the movement of the storm, thicker cloud, heavier rain, thinner cloud, it petered out, like some complicated dance or a Harrison Birtwistle symphony. He would simply have called it Rain and had an orchestra filled entirely with drums and triangles.
There was fierce knocking then, at the door. Someone was banging and banging and banging. I hadn’t realised anyone knew I was here. I didn’t think there was anyone who would want to see me. Sam had Beth now and didn’t bother. My Mother was dead. Brian was the night fox, no doubt gone to earth on a night like this.
Evan Bees. My God. It is Evan Bees.
Which of course is the single most stupid thought that ever entered my head. It can only be excused by the fact that I was half asleep, warm with the sound of the drumming rain, my brain only half there. I didn’t even pull on my jacket for warmth. I started out of the room, down the little creaky wooden stairs with my track suit bottoms and my T-shirt on and nothing on my feet even. I forgot to slip my feet back into my shoes. I left them, humming, under the bed.
The knocking came again and I heard a voice shout out. I shouted too, ‘I’m coming. Wait. I’m coming.’ Only it wasn’t my voice that came out.
Preacher’s. He stepped right through me on the stairwell. I felt the numbness as he stepped inside and the tingling as he hurried on out again, off down the stairs ahead of me to answer the door.