Anybody Out There?

by Marian Keyes

  Nearly in tears from excitement, hope, desperation, I found Morna’s apartment and rang her bell.

  A voice called through the door, “Who is it?”

  “My name is Anna. I rang a few minutes ago.”

  There came the rattle of chains being undone and thunks as keys were turned in heavy locks and finally the door was opened.

  In my state of overblown hope, I’d pictured Morna wearing flowy, beaded layers, with badly cut graying hair and heavy kohl around wise old eyes, living in a dimly lit apartment, full of red velvet throws and fringey lamps.

  But this was an ordinary woman—probably in her midthirties—in a dark blue tracksuit. Her hair could have done with a wash and I couldn’t see how wise and old her eyes looked because she avoided eye contact.

  Her apartment was also a disappointment: a TV in the corner blared Montel, children’s toys were scattered on the floor, and there was a very strong smell of toast.

  Morna turned the sound down on Montel, directed me to a stool at the breakfast bar, and said, “Fifty dollars for fifteen minutes.”

  It was a lot but I was so hyped up that I just said, “Okay.”

  My breath was coming in short, tight gasps and I thought Morna would notice my frantic state and treat me accordingly. But she just clambered onto a stool on the opposite side of the breakfast bar and handed me a pack of tarot cards. “Cut them.”

  I hesitated. “Instead of a card reading, can you try to contact”—what should I say?—“someone who has died.”

  “That’s extra.”

  “How much?”

  She studied me. “Fifty?”

  I hesitated. It wasn’t the money, it was the sudden, unpleasant suspicion that I was being had. That this woman wasn’t really a medium, but simply a swizzer preying on innocent tourists.

  “Forty,” she said, confirming my suspicions.

  “It’s not the money,” I said, on the verge of tears. Hope had spilled over into disappointment. “It’s just that if you’re not a medium, please tell me. This is important.”

  “Sure, I’m a medium.”

  “You get in contact with people who have died?” I stressed.

  “Yeah. You want to go ahead?”

  What was to be lost? I nodded.

  “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “You’re Irish, right?”

  “Right.” In a way I wished I’d said I was Uzbeki; I felt uncomfortable giving her any information that she hadn’t found out psychically, but I didn’t want to do anything to scupper this.

  She cast a sharp eye over my clothes and my scars, and came to rest on my wedding ring.

  “I have someone here.”

  My excitement spiked.

  “A woman.”

  My excitement plummeted.

  “Your grandma.”

  “Which grandma?”

  “She says her name is…Mary?”

  I shook my head. No granny called Mary.

  “Bridget?”

  Another shake of the head.

  “Bridie?”

  “No,” I said apologetically. I hate it when these people get it wrong. I get so embarrassed for them.

  “Maggie? Ann? Maeve? Kathleen? Sinéad?”

  Morna listed every Irish name she’d ever heard of, from watching Ryan’s Daughter and buying Sinéad O’Connor CDs, but didn’t come up with either of my grannies’ names.

  “Sorry,” I said. I didn’t want her getting discouraged and asking me to leave. “Don’t worry about the name. Tell me other stuff, what else are you getting?”

  “Okay, they don’t always give me the correct name, but she’s definitely your grandma. I can see her clearly. She’s telling me she’s very happy to hear from you. She’s a little bitty thing, dancing around, in boots and a flowery apron on over a dirndl skirt. She’s got gray hair in a bun at the back of her neck and small round eyeglasses.”

  “I don’t think that’s my granny,” I said. “I think that’s the granny from The Beverly Hillbillies.”

  I didn’t mean to be snide; I just had too much desperation and hope swilling around in me and all this time-wasting was doing me in.

  And if you’d ever met my granny Maguire, with her black teeth and her pipe and her penchant for setting the dogs on us, or Granny Walsh, with her tendency to growl if you tried to take away her perfume (she drank it whenever they’d found all the other bottles and emptied them down the sink), you’d never confuse them with the granny in Morna’s description.

  Morna looked at me, alert to my sarcasm. “So who do you want to talk to?”

  I opened my mouth, took a big, shuddery breath, which became a sob. “My husband. My husband died.” The tears were suddenly sluicing down my face. “I want to talk to him.”

  I rummaged in my bag for a Kleenex while Morna pressed her fingers to her temples again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m getting nothing. But there’s a reason for that.”

  My head jerked up. What?

  “You have terrible energy. Someone has put something bad on you, this is why all these bad things are happening to you.”

  What? “You mean like a curse?”

  “A curse is a strong word—I don’t want to use that word, but yeah, I guess like a curse.”

  “Oh, fuck!”

  “Don’t worry, baby.” For the first time, she smiled. “I can take it away.”

  “You can?”

  “Sure, I’m not going to give you bad news like that if I can’t help you.”

  “Thank you, oh my God, thank you.” Briefly, I thought I might faint with gratitude.

  “Looks like you were meant to come here today.”

  I nodded, but my blood was running cold. What if I hadn’t come to midtown today? What if I hadn’t been given the flyer? What if I’d put it straight in the bin?

  “So what happens? Can you take it away now?” I could hardly catch my breath.

  “Yeah, we can do it now.”

  “Great! Can we get started?”

  “Sure. But you’ve got to understand that removing a curse as big as the one on you will cost money.”

  “Oh? How much?”

  “A thousand dollars.”

  A thousand dollars? That jolted me out of the bubble and back to reality. This woman was a chancer. What would she do that could cost a thousand dollars?

  “You’ve got to do this, Anna. Your life will only get worse if you don’t deal with this.”

  “My life will definitely get worse if I throw away a thousand dollars.”

  “Okay, five hundred,” Morna said. “Three? Okay, two hundred dollars and I can remove this curse.”

  “How come you can do it for two hundred dollars now and it was a thousand dollars a minute ago?”

  “Because, baby, I’m afraid for you. You need this removed, like now, or something really terrible will happen to you.”

  For a second she got me again, I was frozen with fear. But what could happen? The worst thing I could ever think of had already happened. But what if there was a curse on me? If it was why Aidan had died…?

  Suspended between fear and skepticism, my thoughts seesawed back and forth when we were interrupted by the sounds of children banging on a door somewhere in the apartment and calling, “Mom, can we come out yet?”

  I snapped back to sanity and couldn’t leave that place quick enough. My anger was so immense that on the way down, I kicked the elevator wall. I was raging with Morna and raging with myself for being so stupid and raging with Aidan for dying and putting me in that position. Back on the street, I couldn’t stop walking long enough to hail a cab and I powered all the way to Central Park, fueled by hot, sour fury, shouldering into other pedestrians (at least the short ones), not apologizing, and generally giving New York a bad name.

  I think I must have been crying because at the Times Square intersection a little girl pointed at me and said, “Look, Mom, a crazy lady.” But that might just have been because of my clothes.r />
  By the time I reached the office, I’d calmed down. I understood what had happened: I’d had bad luck. I’d met a charlatan, someone who preyed on vulnerable people—and did it really, really badly because I was as vulnerable as fuck and even I hadn’t fallen for her shit.

  Somewhere out there is a real psychic who’ll put me in touch with you. All I have to do is find them.

  34

  To: Magiciansgirl1@yahoo.com

  From: Thewalshes1@eircom.net

  Subject: Baked Alaska

  Dear Anna,

  I hope you had a “good” weekend. If you see Rachel will you tell her that baked Alaska is a beautiful dessert. The waiters light it with sparklers and turn off the lights and carry it through the room. As you know, I am not a woman who “blubs” easily but when they did it on our last night in Portugal, it looked so beautiful, tears came to my eyes.

  Your loving mother,

  Mum

  I assumed the baked Alaska was wedding related. Rachel wasn’t getting married until next March and already she and Mum were sniping at each other. And no way was I getting involved—wedding-menu cross fire could be very messy.

  However, I almost brought it up that evening, because Rachel appeared unexpectedly at my apartment, which couldn’t have been more inconvenient, as I was just about to start my crying.

  “Hello,” I said cautiously. I should have expected this: I’d given her the slip all weekend.

  “Anna, I’m worried about you, you’ve got to stop working so hard.”

  This was a regular gripe of Rachel’s. She insisted I was using work as an excuse not to see her—or anyone. And she was right: it actually felt harder, not easier, to be with people. The toughest challenge was my face; maintaining a “normal” expression was utterly exhausting.

  And poor Jacqui was so intent on cheering me up that every time we met, she was armed with an arsenal of funny stories from her work and I was knackered from smiling and saying, “God, that’s hilarious.”

  “Working all through the weekend?” Rachel said. “Anna, that’s not good.”

  What could I say? I could hardly tell her the truth, which was that I’d spent most of Saturday and Sunday on the Internet, looking up psychics and asking Aidan for some sort of sign to indicate which one I should use.

  “It was an emergency.”

  “You work with cosmetics, how can it be an emergency?”

  “You’ve obviously never gone out without your lip gloss.”

  “Oh, I see your…look, anyway! I came to talk to you in person,” she said, “because I don’t seem to be getting through to you on the phone. And I mean getting through in an emotional sense, by the way, not getting through in a telephonic sense.”

  Like I’d think anything else. “I know, I know. So tell me, Rachel, how are the wedding plans?” If she badgered me too much, I’d say, “Two words, Rachel. Baked. Alaska.”

  “Christ,” she said. “Wedding plans. Don’t ask.” Resentfully she exclaimed, “Luke and I just wanted a small wedding. With people we liked. With people we knew. Mum wants to invite half of Ireland: several thousand third cousins twice removed and everyone she’s ever nodded to on the golf course.”

  “Maybe they won’t come. Maybe it’ll be too far.”

  “Why do you think we’re getting married in New York?” She laughed darkly. “Anyway, don’t think you’ll distract me. I’m here because I’m concerned about you. You can’t keep hiding in your work, pretending that nothing has happened. You have to feel things. If you feel things you’ll get better. Have you any Diet Coke?”

  “I don’t know. Look in the fridge. Did you do something to your eyebrows?”

  “Got them tinted.”

  “They’re nice.”

  “Thank you. Practice for the wedding, to see if I’m allergic. Don’t want my face puffing up like a puffy puffer fish on the big day.” She stopped moving and cocked her ear to listen. “What’s that racket?”

  In a nearby apartment someone bellowed, “Gooooooooaaaaaald-fin-GAH!” at the top of his voice.

  “It’s Ornesto. He’s practicing.”

  “Practicing what? Scaring the living bejesus out of people?”

  “Singing. He’s taking lessons. His teacher says he’s got a gift.”

  “Heeeza maaaan, maaaan wida Midas TORCH!”

  “Does he do this a lot?”

  “Most nights.”

  “Doesn’t it keep you awake?” Rachel was a bit neurotic about sleep. There was no point telling her I hardly slept anyway.

  “BUT HEEZ TOO MARCHHH!”

  “Any luck with the Diet Coke?”

  “No. There’s almost nothing in here. It’s a wasteland. Anna, you need to see a therapist.”

  “To help me buy Diet Coke?”

  “Using humor is a classic deflection technique. I know a lovely grief counselor. Very professional. She won’t tell me anything that you say, I promise. I won’t even ask.”

  “I’ll go,” I said.

  “You will? Great!”

  “I’ll go when I’m a bit better.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. This is exactly what I’m talking about! I see you putting in all those hours at work, trying to forget—”

  “No, I’m not trying to forget!” That was an awful thought; the last thing I wanted to happen.

  “I’m trying…” How could I put it? “I’m trying to get far enough down the line so that I can remember.” I stopped, then continued: “So that I can remember without the pain killing me.”

  And the days were stacking up. And weeks. And months. It was now almost the middle of June and he’d died in February, but I still felt like I’d just woken from a horrible dream, that I was suspended in that stunned, paralyzed state between sleep and reality where I was grasping for, but couldn’t get a handle on normality.

  “Golden words he will pour in your EA-AH!”

  “Oh God, he’s off again.” Rachel looked anxiously at the ceiling. “I don’t know how you cope, I really don’t.”

  I shrugged. I quite liked it. It was a bit of company without me having to actually see him. He kept knocking on my door but I never answered, and when we met in the hallway I told him I was taking a lot of sleeping tablets, which was why I didn’t hear him. It was better to lie: he was so easily wounded.

  “But his LIES can’t DIZ-GUISE what you FEA-AH!”

  “There’s something I must ask you,” Rachel said. “Are you feeling suicidal?”

  “No.” I studied Rachel’s worried face. “Why? Should I be?”

  “Well…yes. It’s normal to feel like you couldn’t be bothered carrying on.”

  “God, I can’t do a thing right.”

  “Don’t be like that. But have you any idea why you don’t feel suicidal?”

  “Because…because…if I died I don’t know where I’d go to. I don’t know if it would be the same place that Aidan has gone to. While I’m here I feel close to him. Does that make sense?”

  “So you have actually thought about it?”

  The idea of not being alive constantly hovered on the verge of my consciousness. Not to the extent that I’d ever made any hard-and-fast plans, but it was definitely there. “Yes, I suppose I have.”

  “Oh, that’s good. That’s great to hear.” She was visibly relieved. “Thank God for that.”

  “It’s the kissssss of DEATH! From Missss-tah…Gold FINGAH!”

  “Look, would you like me to give you earplugs?”

  “It’s okay, thanks.”

  “This heart is COLD. HELOVESONLYGOLD, HELOVESONLYGOOOLLLLLDDDDD!”

  “God, I’m off. Let’s get together for dinner some night this week.”

  “I’m meeting Leon and Dana on Wednesday night,” I said quickly.

  “Good girl, very good. I won’t be around at the weekend, I’m going on retreat, but let’s get together Thursday night? Yes?”

  She made me nod yes.

  “Good-bye.”

  I lay on the couch,
trying to recover my crying mood. Upstairs, Ornesto continued belting out the tunes and it sparked off a memory: sometimes Aidan and I used to sing. Not serious singing—God, no—but making stuff up, having fun. Like the night we called Balthazar for home delivery and I was in absolute raptures.

  “It’s amazing,” I’d raved. “Balthazar is one of the nicest restaurants in New York—no, scratch that, one of the nicest restaurants in the world—and they’re not too big for their boots to bring their food to your door.”

  “This New York is a great place,” Aidan said.

  “’Tis,” I agreed. “You’d never get this in Ireland.”

  “So why, then, are there so many songs about how sad it is to leave Ireland?”

  “Entre nous, mon ami, I haven’t a clue. I think they’re stone mad.”

  Aidan, belonging to the Boston-Irish diaspora, knew all about the sad emigrant songs and he started singing “‘Last night as I lay dreaming, I dreamed of Spancil Hill.’” He might have been quite a good singer, but it was hard to tell because he was doing it in his Smurf’s voice, even though he wasn’t shaving.

  “‘I dreamed that I was back there and that thought, it made me ill—’”

  “They’re not the words.”

  “‘—I met the tailor Quigley, he’s as bold as ever still. He used to mend my britches when I lived in Spancil Hill.’”

  Abruptly he knocked off the Smurf voice and started really giving it socks.

  “‘But now I don’t need my britches mended.

  When they wear out, I’ve got a good trick.

  I buy myself a brand-new pair

  from Banana Repub-a-lik.’”

  “Hurray!” I said, clapping and trying to whistle. “More!”

  He stood up for the next verse.

  “‘And if Anna tears her britches.’” He extended his arm in dramatic fashion.

  “‘To tailor Quigley she doesn’t go.

  For well-cut britches in cute col-ors,

  She goes to Club Monaco.