“Yes, yes, yes,” she sighed, patting the mottled palms she had just read. “It will all work out for the best. And I’m sure young Harry will look more like his daddy as time goes by.” The woman wrote her a cheque for three services—palms, crystal, and general clairvoyance—and as she detached it a final fat tear rolled out of her eye and splashed on her bank sort code.
As the woman rose, a new prospect hesitated in passing. “Do you do Vedic palmistry or ordinary?”
“Just ordinary, I’m afraid,” Alison said. The woman sneered and started to move on. Alison began, “You could try Silvana over there—” but she checked herself. Silvana, after all, was a fraud; her mother used to manage a newsagent in Farnborough, a fact at odds with her claim to be a Romany whose family origins were lost in the mists of occult tradition. Sometimes the punters would ask “What’s the difference between a clairaudient and an aura reader, a whatsit and a thing?” and Al would say, “No great difference, my dear, it’s not the instrument you choose that matters, it’s not the method, it’s not the technique, it’s your attunement to a higher reality.” But what she really wanted to do was lean across the table and say, you know what’s the difference, the difference between them and me? Most of them can’t do it, and I can. And the difference shows, she tells herself, not just in results, but in attitude, in deportment, in some essential seriousness. Her tarot cards, unused so far today, sat at her right hand, burning through their wrap of scarlet satin: priestess, lover, and fool. She had never touched them with a hand that was soiled, or opened them to the air without opening her heart; whereas Silvana will light a fag between customers, and Merlin and Merlyn will send out for cheeseburgers if there’s a lull. It isn’t right to smoke and eat in front of clients, to blow smoke at them over your crystals.
It’s this she must teach Colette, that a casual approach won’t do: you don’t shove your stuff in a nylon holdall and wrap your rose quartz in your knickers. You don’t carry your kit around in a cardboard box that used to contain a dozen bottles of lavatory cleaner, you don’t clear up at the end of a fayre by bundling your bits and pieces into a supermarket carrier bag. And you control your face, your expression, every moment you’re awake. She had sometimes noticed an unguarded expression on a colleague’s face, as the departing client turned away: a compound of deep weariness and boredom, as the lines of professional alertness faded and the face fell into its customary avaricious folds. She had made up her mind, in the early days, that the client would not like to see this expression, and so she had invented a smile, complicit and wistful, which she kept cemented to her face between readings; it was there now.
Meanwhile Colette moved scornfully on her trajectory, helpfully clearing an ashtray or righting an upturned hobbit: anything to allow herself to lean in close and listen. She evesdropped on Cara, Cara with her cropped head, her pointy ears, her butterfly tattoo: Your aura’s like your bar code, think of it that way. So your husband’s first wife, could that be the blonde I’m seeing? I sense that you are a person of great hidden drive and force of will.
“Would you like a cuppa from the machine, Mrs. Etchells?” Colette called, but Al’s grandmama waved her away.
“Have you known the joys of motherhood, dear? Only I’m seeing a little boy in your palm.”
“A girl, actually,” said her client.
“It may be a girl I’m seeing. Now, dear, and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, and I don’t want to alarm you, but I want you to look out for a little accident that could happen to her, nothing serious, I’m not seeing a hospital bed, it’s more as if—as if she might just fall over and cut her knee.”
“She’s twenty-three,” said the woman coldly.
“Oh, I see.” Mrs. Etchells tittered. “You must have been very young, dear, when you knew the joys of motherhood. And just the one, is it? No little brothers or sisters? You didn’t want, or you couldn’t have? Am I seeing a little op, at all?”
“Well, if you call it little.”
“Oh, I always call an op little. I never say a big op. It doesn’t do to upset people.”
You daft old beggar, Colette says to herself. What is this joy, what is this word and what does it mean? The psychics say, you’re not going to find joy in the external world, you’ve got to go looking for it inside, dear. Even Alison goes along with the theory, when she’s in public mode; privately, back in Wexham, she often looks as if it’s a hopeless task. Rummaging in your heart for joy? May as well go through the bins for it. Where’s God? she had said to Al. Where’s God in all this? And Al had said, Morris says he’s never seen God, he doesn’t get out much. But he says he’s seen the devil; he says he’s on first-name terms with him; he claims he beat him at darts once.
And you believe that? Colette asked her, and Al said, no, Morris, he drinks too much, his hand shakes, he can barely hit the board.
For Saturday night the hotel had put on a late buffet for the psychic party: crinkled chicken legs stained the colour of old walnut, a wheel-sized quiche with a thick cardboard base. There was a cold pasta salad and a bowl of complicated-looking greenery that Colette turned, without enthusiasm, with the utensils provided. Raven sat with his desert boots on a coffee table, rolling one of his special cigarettes. “The thing is, have you got The Grimoire of Anciara St. Remy? Only it’s got forty spells, with detailed diagrams and conjuring charts.”
“You selling it?” Silvana asked.
“No, but—”
“But you’re on commission for it, am I right?”
Oh, they’re such cynics, Colette thought. She had imagined that when psychics got together they’d talk about—well, things of the psyche; that they would share at least a little of their bemusement and daily fear, the fear that—if she could judge by Alison—was the price of success. But now, a little way into their association, she understood that all they talked about was money. They tried to sell things to each other, they compared their rates, they tried to hear of new stratagems—“Believe me, it’s the new aromatherapy,” Gemma was saying—and to learn about new tricks and fiddles that they could try out. They came to swap jargon, pick up the latest terms: and why do they look so ridiculous? Why all these crystal pendant earrings swinging from withered lobes; why the shrunken busts exposed in daylight, the fringes, the beading, the head scarves, the wraps, the patchwork, and the shawls? In their room—just time, before the buffet, to freshen up—she’d said to Alison, “You criticize my holdall, but have you seen your friends, have you seen the state of them?”
Alison’s silk, the length of apricot polyester, lay folded on the bed, ready to be draped next day; in private life she flinches at its touch—oh yes, she has admitted she does—but somehow it’s necessary, she will claim, as part of her public persona. With the silk around her studio portrait, she loses the sensation that she is shrinking inside her own skin. It blunts her sensitivity, in a way that is welcome to her; it is an extra synthetic skin she has grown, to compensate for the skins the work strips away.
But now Colette moved around the room, grumbling. “Why does everything have to be so tacky? That fairground stuff. They can’t think it impresses anybody. I mean, when you see Silvana, you don’t say, ooh look, here comes a gypsy princess, you say, here comes a withered old slapper with a streak of fake tan down the side of her neck.”
“It’s—I don’t know,” Al said. “It’s to make it, like a game.”