Jean Page’s husband, Barry, had been crushed in an industrial dough mixer. Jean then lost all poor Barry’s compensation money to a confidence trickster who took her to bed, then persuaded her to invest every penny in stocks and shares that didn’t exist. She was desperate to contact Barry so she could apologize for not being able to afford new trainers for the kids or the catalog payments on the color TV that would soon be repossessed.
There was Miss Anderson, a tiny lady with a foreign accent, who always wore odd dresses with laced bodices and frilly collars. These getups might have been the national costume of her homeland, though no one ever bothered to ask where that was. Her face, round and squishy like an unbaked bun, made it hard to guess her age; she could have been anywhere between forty and seventy. She didn’t seem to want to speak to anyone in particular; instead, like a volunteer prison or hospital visitor, she was interested in hearing from the departed who might have no other friends or family who cared enough to try and make contact.
Each week a medium would guide the sessions. Sometimes it was Chris Shelby, a huge, cantankerous woman with cropped platinum hair and flamboyant taste in cardigans who would strut across the floor pinching the bridge of her nose as if the sprits were blocking her sinuses. She always lost her temper if a message came through that no one understood, and Marion was sure that people often lied about knowing, for example, someone called Theodore who had been killed in a skiing accident, just to keep her happy. She once, rather shockingly, told Mother that Dad understood her need for physical love and would forgive her if she found another man to satisfy these needs, confirming Marion’s suspicions she was making it all up.
When Chris didn’t turn up, Bea or Mr. Bevan would attempt to make contact, but usually without much success. Bea would work herself into a trance that involved a lot of swaying to music and pungent incense that gave Marion sneezing fits. Once during a session she collapsed, and Mr. Bevan had to lay her down at the back of the hall with her feet propped up on a stack of yoga mats. Mother maintained this nonsense was all an act designed to get attention and that Bea couldn’t talk to the dead any more than she could make a squirrel understand Chinese.
Marion liked Mr. Bevan best. At break times she helped him pour tea into the white plastic cups and set the bourbon creams out on paper plates. Mother would say, “No more than two biscuits, Marion,” but he always let her have the broken ones at the end of the packet.
When Mr. Bevan took his turn as medium, Marion would wring her hands anxiously, willing him to succeed. The same audience that responded obediently during Chris’s sessions sat in awkward silence when Mr. Bevan took to the stage. While proffering vague, spluttering messages from beyond, the only reaction he got was coughing and scraping of chairs. When finally his energy and confidence were sapped dry, he would admit defeat, muttering feebly, “Nothing seems to be coming through. Perhaps we should call it a day.”
Once he asked if anyone knew someone called Sally. The back of Marion’s neck prickled when she heard the name; perhaps it was Sally, Dad’s secretary who had died with him in the accident. She put her hand in the air, but Mother gave her a good slap on the leg, so she took it down again before Mr. Bevan noticed her.
“I have a girl called Sally here,” he had called out in a voice flimsy as a stray thread. “Does anyone know her? She wants you to know it wasn’t an accident. He did it on purpose.”
Mr. Bevan’s eyes searched the room desperately, but since there was no response, he was forced to give up.
“Oh dear, things don’t seem to be going too well, do they? Maybe I should call it a night, then.”
SALLY
On weekends Dad sometimes took the two siblings on trips to Frank’s Yard, a local wrecking site. The reason for these trips, according to Dad, was educational. He would walk them around the yard, stopping by the gaping wrecks of vehicles, and point out such things as pistons, crankshafts, and carburetors, then explain the workings of the internal combustion engine. If they came across a car that had been smashed in a road accident, Dad would stand looking at it, just whistling and shaking his head.
“That thing must have gone up like dry kindling.”
“D’you think anyone was trapped in it?” John would ask, his eyes shining with excitement.
“Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? Being cooked alive in a burning heap of metal.”
Dad said it was criminal the amount of decent stuff people threw away. He and John found an old movie projector that they took back to the house to repair.
“What have you brought that filthy thing home for?” Mother cried.
They carried it down the cellar. Marion never knew if John and Dad got round to fixing it or not, but if they did, they never asked her to watch films with them.
What Marion liked most about Frank’s Yard were the wrecked fairground attractions: An octopus with only five of its eight legs remaining. Some rusty little bumper cars shaped like mice with big sad eyes. A ghost train that was itself a ghost. Horses from a merry-go-round with big scary teeth.
At some point during the visit, Dad would go and chat to Frank in his cabin. Frank was a skinny little man with a bald head and stubble on his face that looked like dirt. You wouldn’t have thought he was at all the kind of person a smartly suited businessperson like Dad would want to mix with, but Frank and Dad knew each other as boys when Frank’s father managed the fabric warehouse.
He had a grown-up daughter called Sally. She’d sit on a stool in the cabin, dressed in dirty jeans and men’s work boots. Marion didn’t think that Sally was pretty, at least not like a storybook princess; she had this birthmark on her left cheek that resembled the icky patch that forms when a piece of fruit has been left resting in one place for too long. Yet there was something about her that made you want to stare.
Perhaps it was because Sally never stayed still. She was always wiggling her bum from side to side on the stool, taking a puff of cigarette, giggling, then wiping her mouth with the base of her thumb, her little tongue flicking out as she removed a speck of tobacco with her fingertip, then tying and untying her oil slick of black hair with a silver bobble. These tiny movements were mesmerising like those of a thief creating a distraction while they snatch your wallet. Dad was always watching Sally, waiting for an opportunity to light her cigarette or catch her arm if she slipped, giggling, from the stool.
One day they went to the yard and found Sally alone in the cabin doodling love hearts on the margins of a racing paper. She said Frank had gone to Blackpool to pick up some old roller coaster cars. Dad stayed drinking coffee in the cabin with her, while Marion and John played on the fairground equipment.
A while later Dad came over to tell them Sally needed cigarettes, so he was going to take her to buy some in the Bentley. Since they would only be gone half an hour, the two of them should wait here.