THE DEAD ARE WAITING TO SPEAK TO YOU
Mediumship and open circle ￡2.
Private Consultations with the dead by
RICHARD LATHAM
(As seen on TV)
Why not come along and join us at
Bickley Spiritualist Church, Fridays 7 p.m.
Free tea and biscuits.
ALL WELCOME
Anna touched the words as if she could glean more meaning through her fingertips than through her eyes. She wasn’t stupid; she guessed that ‘free tea and biscuits’ was a sign of desperation on the part of the church, not generosity. And yet somehow they tempted her. She imagined dunking free biscuits into free tea, while someone who’d been seen on TV gave her all the answers to every question …
Daniel’s not dead, she told herself fiercely. I would feel it. I would know.
Except that she didn’t know.
Feeling and knowing were two different things, and not knowing was the rat that gnawed at her heart in the dark early hours of the morning, before the buses started to rumble.
Was he cold? Was he hungry? Scared? Was somebody hurting him? Did he miss her? Did he wonder where she was and why she wasn’t coming to get him?
Did he think she didn’t love him any more?
That last thought was the worst, and had the power to make her twist in physical pain.
On Bickley Bridge she’d planned an end to the daily torture of not knowing, and only the lies of a passing stranger had saved her.
But saved her for what?
For more pain? For more guilt? For more agony?
She stared at the flyer. If she’d been prepared to end her torture that irreversibly, wasn’t this worth trying? Wouldn’t it bring some kind of relief to know something? – even if that something was that Daniel really was dead?
For the first time since he had disappeared, the thought did not bring tears tingling into her eyes, only a deep, dull ache in her chest.
THE DEAD ARE WAITING TO SPEAK TO YOU.
Anna felt the words tugging at her in an insistent and seductive undertow.
Quickly she folded the leaflet again – once, twice, three times – and put it with the other junk mail. Then she pushed the whole bundle so far down into the kitchen bin that she had to scrub her arm with Dettol.
6
AFTER WORK ON Fridays, the lads from Pigeon’s MoT & Diagnostics all went for a drink at the King’s Arms.
They were a motley crew. Tall, silent Pavel – always with an exotic black cigarette in his mouth that made him look like an angry poet; Mikey – as pale as a pint of milk, with ice-blue eyes, and hair of almost pure white on his head, brows, lashes and legs. His negative was Ang, with his tan skin, and jet-black hair and eyes.
Ang couldn’t buy a proper drink; he swore he was twenty, but he had no ID to support his claim, and it would be years before he looked more than sixteen, so they’d long ago stopped trying to con the barman and just got drunk without him.
Every time they did, Mikey got louder and Pavel got darker, while Ang joined in by laughing at jokes he didn’t understand – even if they were at his expense.
James got drunk too. With every beer he could do a better impression of a young man whose wife still loved him, and who hadn’t lost his son. Sometimes, through the blur of the beer, he could barely see his own cracks.
But it took a lot of blurring.
Mikey had his leg propped on a chair and was showing his curly white shins to two giggling women.
‘Is it white everywhere?’ one of them said, predictably, and they both giggled like mad at their own daring.
‘White as ice cream,’ leered Mikey. ‘If you’re lucky I’ll show you my 99.’
They shrieked and clutched each other and swigged their vod-bombs.
‘You girls are gorgeous,’ said Mikey. ‘Specially you.’ He pointed at both of them and they roared with laughter.
He’d take them both home tonight; James would have put his next paypacket on it. Mikey was no oil painting – hell, he was barely a finger painting – but he had the swagger of a man twice his age, and girls were putty in his fluffy white hands. The kind of girls who drank vod-bombs, anyway.
James stared down into the dregs of his third pint and wondered whether it was worth going on, or if he should just stop and save the money. Take Anna to the movies, maybe.
He snorted into the glass. They hadn’t been to the movies since before Daniel was born. So he finished his drink and got up to get another.
It had been a bad week, and he needed the blur.
The bar was three people deep, all waving their twenties at the sweaty staff. James stood and waited, letting the noise and the heat fill his head, pushing out any thinking he might do, any guilt.
Slowly he became aware of Mikey’s voice above the hubbub – ‘… and him over there, so feck you too if you think you’re hard enough!’
James turned slowly to look over his shoulder. Mikey could start a fight in an empty room, but on this occasion he was still in his chair, pointing him out to three clean-cut young men. They were in good shoes and neat-but-casual shirts, but James could see that the leader had a tattoo on his neck, low enough to be hidden by a collar and tie. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought it was a swastika.
Although Mikey and Pavel hadn’t got up, James noticed that Mikey had placed his pint on the window-sill, out of harm’s way, and Pavel had rested his cigarette on the edge of the table, which for him was tantamount to loading an Uzi.
Ang was on the edge of his seat, his dark eyes drawing rapid triangles between Mikey, the men and the door. He twitched, as if to get up, and Pavel put a big hand on his forearm, forcing him to stay put.
James couldn’t blame him for wanting to run; Ang had been beaten up a couple of times. Only a few months ago Brian had sent him off to Fryer Tuck’s for lunch and he’d returned with a split lip, a swollen eye and the tattered remains of cod and chips five times, with extra gravel.