Linda closed the door on the last clients of the day. The young woman wanted to know when they’d have a baby; he wanted career advice.
She didn’t have the heart to tell them both would soon find love elsewhere. The girl would never be with child, and no matter which job he chose, the young man would end up on an unwelcome path.
Linda used well-practised phrases her eager clients could interpret any which way they wanted, and mentioned – ever-so casually – the rewards of foster parenting to the girl. She felt pity for her but found it hard to mask her dislike of the young man.
Still, you can’t like everyone.
Linda wasn’t even sure the twenty-something, short, balding wannabe knew exactly what he wanted. So much ambition, so much energy, so few options; that was his lot this time around. Some people can’t be helped, and that’s all there is to it.
Seven sittings in one day was too much though, all traipsing in and out of her front living room – arriving with anticipation, leaving with hope.
She looked out the window, the room shielded from passersby with net curtains, and saw the near silhouette of her neighbour – the one who reported her to the tax office last year. Linda pitied her.
A young tax inspector came, looked at Linda’s books, saw everything was in order, got a free reading, and left. With a glimpse of the future he resigned his job and went on to study art.
Her old-school phone was ringing again, and when it stopped she took it off the hook. The desperate, the greedy, the needy – all looking for meaning, for voices from the other side, for a route to health, wealth, and one more word from a loved one.
They’d have to wait their turn for £200 worth of reassuring words and a paper hanky. Everyone different, everyone the same. But seven… too many today.
Linda was exhausted, and it was only four o’clock. Still, food had to be prepared for two.
Living alone by choice, her only company was a ginger tom with a failing liver, a stray that stayed. She blamed herself for feeding it last winter.
She had long decided never to fall in love or have a companion offering benefits she didn’t want nor need. She’d know their life path, their trials and tribulations, their baggage – and whether they told the truth or not (few people did). It would be too hard for her, and impossible for anyone prepared to share her unconventional life.
Living in a so-so street of a coastal town, Linda had the good fortune of inheriting an old terraced house from Grandma Jade.
Like Jade, Linda had a God-given insight into everybody around her, but the personal price had been high. She was simply unable to hold down a conventional job. The voices in her head. The deception of those she met.
Falling into line by ‘playing the game’ at work…she simply couldn’t do it. Grandma Jade had second sight too, some call it ‘the third eye’, a gift of seeing other people’s life paths…Well, the key chapter headings, the main events, like the stops on a road trip, but not always the gaps – those stretches of apparent free-will threaded between moments of inevitability.
“There’s no point you going to university, young lady,” Grandma Jade had said. “Waste of time and of your father’s money. You’ll find your own path without it.”
The last job Linda had ended in court giving evidence against her boss. She knew all about the crime, the who, the when, and the how, and in a foolish moment of civic duty, volunteered a statement to police.
She couldn’t come clean about how she knew of course – everybody lies – and so pointed them in the right direction. She was young and stupid, and as the guilty verdict was read out, vowed never, ever, ever to put her hand up and do a good turn again.
From now on she’d keep her big fat nose out. No good deed goes unpunished. It was a phrase Grandma Jade had drilled into Linda since before her first day at school.
Linda spent the weekend doing the chores most with a home tend to do. She paid a few bills, bought groceries, and read – social and local history mainly. She had no time for fiction, her clients were full of it.
There was no internet in the house, no mobile phone, and no TV so she could avoid the misery of the world, wars; political point scoring… She was willingly blind to it all.
Raining again, Linda shuffled to the corner store. The local ne’er-do-wells let her pass unchallenged, most had met with her at one time or another. They all knew she was a bit special, and that she frequently knew too much.
Always looking less than her best, greying hair that made her appear older than her thirty-four years, shoes scuffed, and an old coat. Always that same old bottle green pure wool coat with huge wooden toggles. She could be spotted a mile away in it. And if locals thought it looked like a vintage sixties number they were right. A gift to Grandma Jade from a gentleman grateful for what turned out to be crucial business advice.
Linda thought nothing of wearing it. It was in the mahogany veneer wardrobe among the rest of Grandma Jade’s clobber – and she wouldn’t need them anymore.
“I’m going to hell, my girl,” she once said. Followed by a wry smile. “Well, only the Devil himself would have cursed me with this life.
“The punters roll in day after day. I’m walking a tightrope, and when they leave their secrets stay with me. Who’d want that?”
Despite everything, Grandma Jade had cut out a bit of a name for herself with people suffering late-onset schizophrenia. She figured out that some people developed two personalities after a life-threatening accident.
Her theory was simple enough. When someone was violently shocked – a car crash, a sudden brush with death, a heart attack – their soul slipped out of the body to avoid the terror. Only for a moment, but long enough for another soul to slip in, something she called the cuckoo.
Then, when the true soul returned, voilà, the person goes on to be diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Grandma Jade’s gift was persuasion. She would sit with the afflicted and speak, not to the flesh and blood in front of her, but to the cuckoo, the squatting soul. She’d explain the rules, the waiting, the order of things. And more often than not, the cuckoo would leave and wait its turn like every other spirit had to.
It was hit and miss though, and there was not enough success to convince the paid-up members of the medical profession who were happier selling mind-numbing pills.
Linda was hoping for more, and thought she could do something a bit more interesting than sharing carefully selected fragments of the future with those desperate for something to cling on to. She wasn’t a counsellor, nor a psychiatrist, she didn’t even like most people.
Monday would bring something different though. A trip to London and almost nothing to wear. She’d have to brush her hair and teeth, make an effort. She even considered dabbling in Grandma Jade’s stale make-up, blue eyeshadow and skiffle pink lipstick. Perhaps not.
A future of ‘helping’ the great unwashed could all change next week. A businessman had called offering an all expenses paid trip to see him in the city.
A fancy Knightsbridge hotel had been arranged, and the prospect of doing something more interesting than telling someone their late uncle was proud of them could soon be behind her.
But first, the cat had to be fed and then it was an early night.
End of chapter one.
