A routine developed; Bridget booked shows monthly: a slot for Blue in the late afternoon, as she was still just a kid, and Devlin in the evening to give the glamour certain audiences craved. Leaflets were handed out after each.
The private tarot slots filled up. At sixteen, Blue gave three readings a week, and in between, she studied for the five GCSEs the council said she had to take, home-schooled or not. Devlin gave one a day; any more than that, he said, would drain him. Bridget looked after the diary, the advertising, the money and, when Devlin suffered his first heart attack, the role of medicine woman. Meditation, Bridget assured them all, was the key to physical health; no amount of medication or healthy diet could match up to the power of one’s mind.
Bridget bought a lot of crystals that year, carved a lot of candles, and they reminded Blue of the old flat in Preston, their life before. Her dreams became staccato bursts of long-buried memory: Bridget’s cheek on the melamine tabletop, the smell of the old futon, the queue for the giro cheque, the absence of anyone telling Blue they were ‘right proud’, the lack of that warm hand on the base of her back.
Money was still always wanting. Blue watched from her window as the neighbours left for shops or factory floors, left dead early and returned at teatime. She saw them pack their cars for holidays, saw their computers light up their windows, heard their mobile phones ring, saw the shop-bought gifts they hauled into the house each Christmas. Bridget said they were trifles compared to the liberty their own lifestyle provided. Devlin said he was sorry he lacked the fitness to do more.
Ten hours of work a week and two monthly stage shows were insufficient to keep a family, but it wasn’t until Devlin’s second heart attack that Blue discovered how little they had. He fell at home, a fat starfish of a man laid out on the kitchen floor, and the paramedics had to use a special machine to haul him up and into the ambulance.
When they heard his fate in the hospital corridor, Bridget wailed so loudly, so keenly, that Blue felt she had exhausted all the soundwaves and the air couldn’t cope with one more cry. Bridget clung on to Blue’s arm, begged her seventeen-year-old daughter to tell her it wasn’t true, asked her who would look after Bridget now, who would love her like that. Blue swallowed hard. ‘I’ll always look after you, Mother,’ she said.
A doctor who witnessed the scene gave Blue a glossy green pamphlet from the psychiatry services that offered grief counselling. When Blue brought it out, showed her mother, Bridget screwed up the paper and burned it on the gas hob. ‘They’ll stuff your mouth with pills,’ she explained, her eyes wide and her long grey hair unplaited and unbrushed, ‘they’ll turn your own head against you.’
There were no savings. Her mother had no pension. Devlin had left the house to Bridget and Blue, so there was little fear of returning to that small, old flat, but still the bills piled up. When Blue turned eighteen, the child benefit her mother relied on stopped.
‘They say I should get a job, but you’re my job,’ Bridget said. A visit to the benefits office had left her catatonic for a week. ‘They wanted to see my business records, to prove that we’re gainfully self-employed, that if I can prove I work a certain number of hours, I may be entitled to something.’
And so Blue discovered that her mother hadn’t kept a single record of their fees, bookings, expenses. If someone paid in cash, the money was spent on sundries. If someone paid a cheque, the money was spent on bills. Even the amount of money charged per session couldn’t be determined for sure: Bridget decided how much to charge based on the direction her candle flames slanted.
The sense of imminent doom shook Bridget. Blue couldn’t let it shake her too, or all would fall apart. She took to the library. Her exam results had been impressive for a girl who had never set foot in a classroom – a C in Maths and English. The librarian helped; found books on setting up a small business, showed Blue how to use the computer to register herself as a sole trader, didn’t ask why Blue needed to know this so young, or why it was her and not Devlin who now checked the emails weekly, or why Blue hadn’t just stayed at home and cried her small, broken heart out. The librarian let Blue get on with it, and stayed quiet.
This new determination brought legitimacy and organisation to their lives. It helped her focus on something other than the hole left by Devlin, which she did not think about. If she fell into that hole, if she let herself sit awhile in the velvet-swagged room, if she remembered the warm humour, the shows of patience, let herself miss the soft touch on her shoulder or the ruffling of her hair or the reassurance Devlin had given, she would never claw her way out. She did not think about it.
Blue standardised the fees and gave two readings a day and two shows a month, though she kept to the afternoon slot because, no matter how hard she tried, she just didn’t have Devlin’s pizazz. She discovered she was entitled to some financial help and took it, told herself it was for the short term; the end goal would be to become self-sufficient.
Blue hoped Mother would be proud, but she doubted Bridget noticed. Bridget spent days on the sofa, her long grey plait curled around and around her fingers. She wore the bejewelled black kaftan Devlin had died in and her collarbones jutted like girders.
Arlo kept her company, and the company was not the kind Blue would want. The baby sat in her stained romper at Bridget’s feet, cried and pulled at her wet curls. Bodhi lurked in the doorway with his bitter-lemon scowl, as though it was Bridget’s fault Devlin was dead, and if she hadn’t brought him into their lives in the first place, they wouldn’t all be in so much pain now. At least, that’s what Bodhi’s scowl looked like to Blue.
Blue stepped over Arlo when she had to, dodged around Bodhi, didn’t look at either. There was too much to do. On top of the readings and admin, she’d discovered that the house and clothes didn’t clean themselves. Mother had no clue as to how to work the washing machine and little inclination to learn. The mention of it brought back memories of Devlin, and the black dog pounced on her back.
Blue’s readings changed, too; they were tainted by experience, the blithe innocence gone. She still felt people, felt their pain, shame, and delight, but she was also aware of Mother’s. Less inclined to brutal honesty, Blue swayed towards repeat business, held on to snippets of information for ‘next time’. Folk left reassured; their pleasure made Blue’s mother smile, and Blue thought maybe that would be the key to her happiness. Keep this up – the business, the housekeeping, the bookkeeping, the cooking, the laundry, the advertising, the shopping, the readings, the shows, the studying, the bill-paying, the admin – and it would all be OK. She just had to keep it up.
The show at the working men’s club between Thornton and Fleetwood was the third Blue had done in as many weeks, and because of this, perhaps, it hadn’t sold out. Maybe weekly shows were too frequent; people lost their thirst for it if their thirst was readily quenched. Of the ten tables, only six were occupied. Blue barely noticed the couple at the back.
No ghostly forms haunted them, no victims at their side, only sadness. It smothered them, impenetrable and murky as pea soup and so distinct that Blue knew, in an instant, what caused it. The sorrow was hopeless, the grief sour and unjust, the mark of a lost child. Blue thought of the people she had consoled, right back to the woman and her dead father. She remembered how happy her mother had been when Blue had helped those people. How easier life would be if Bridget were well.
From the side, Bridget watched. Her hands worried at her waist, her bottom lip pinched between her teeth. Bodhi stood in the place Devlin should be, waved at Blue but didn’t smile. Arlo was in the bathtub at home.
Blue warmed up her act on a thin black man in his fifties, spread the cards in the Mars Retrograde formation. The trials of his eldest daughter’s poor choice in men, pride at a son’s employment, uncertainty over his own job and fearing he was too old to start anew, all masked a more profound fear: that his wife no longer respected him. Nothing Blue hadn’t seen before. She sent the man away with instructions to be patient with his children, to retrain in his current job rather than search for a new one (Blue saw in the cards what would happen if the man chose otherwise; a financial disaster that could so easily be avoided).
‘I know I’m only young and not yet married,’ Blue said, in her final quip, ‘but I can see that your Tilda feels the same about you; she loves you fiercely but has changed in many ways over the years. She worries you’ve lost interest in her; you worry she’s lost interest in you – one of you needs to reach out to the other, and all will be well. You must come back and let me know how you’ve got on.’
‘Ha, how did you know her name?’ the man said, and Blue smiled, kept schtum, was pleased to see Mother’s eyes light up as the audience clapped.
Next, she chose the bereaved couple, invited them both up. A hush fell over the small audience as they climbed the few steps to the stage and sat opposite Blue. Loss had drawn lines across their faces: brow creases, crow’s feet, wrinkles at the neck.
The woman held her husband’s hand across the table, said, ‘We’re here—’
‘I know why you’re here.’ Blue reached out to her, squeezed her other hand. ‘I know.’ Blue pushed the deck of cards to the man, asked him to shuffle whilst Blue purified the cleansing pile with a sprig of sage. All for the show of it; another trick of Devlin’s.
To bring back a dead child was more than Blue could do, but also more than was required. The bereaved came for reassurance that their loved ones were safe, at peace, in a better place and, as her fingers touched the hands of the father, Blue knew they needed closure most of all.
It came in a flash that passed through Blue quick as a memory.
‘You’re here because of your son, John. No, sorry, not John, but Jean.’ The subtle change in pronunciation made the mother’s eyes widen, and the father blinked back tears.
‘Aye, Jean-Paul, but we just called him Jean,’ the mother said.
In the wings, Bridget pressed her palms and held them to her lips in prayer.
The mother turned over the first card at Blue’s instruction and the Queen of Pentacles stared back, upside down.
‘There were arguments, before he left you. You argued about money, about his role in the household now that he was older.’
‘That’s right, Mike wanted him to pay his way.’ The woman turned slightly away from her husband, who winced at the mention of money.
‘he’d left school.’ The man leant towards Blue. ‘He was old enough to get a job—’
Blue held her hand up for silence and turned the next card. ‘The Seven of Swords. There was mistrust at the time of his … He took something from you, didn’t he? You were angry with him—’
‘He stole money. Took it right out of—’
‘And there was no chance to make it up.’ Blue’s hand hovered over the third card – the Moon. ‘It’s this lack of resolution that’s troubled you. Jean left under a cloud that couldn’t be cleared before he died, and you’re under this cloud even now. But there is light; the moon is lit by the sun—’ Blue reached across for the mother’s hand, but she pulled back, face pale.
‘He’s dead?’ the man said.
‘You didn’t know?’ Blue looked at the cards again to make sure she hadn’t read them wrong. She knew what she’d felt – grief, loss, despair. ‘He is at peace, though. He’s rested and his soul is full of forgiveness and—’
‘I knew it.’ The woman’s face was ashen. ‘I knew he was gone, I felt it. We haven’t seen him in nigh on two years – the police have given up; we’ve searched every street and corner of every town in the northwest. I knew he was gone.’
Her husband hugged her shoulder, and Blue put her hand on the man’s other arm, tried to catch something, anything, that she might have missed, but there was only the same anger, the deep-rooted rage the man pointed at himself for an argument about money with his son.
The boy was so far gone that Blue couldn’t discern what had happened to him, where or why.
‘How do you know he’s at peace? Was there any pain, did he … did he miss—’ The woman couldn’t say anymore. The red tablecloth scrunched under her grip.
‘He missed you and loved you, and he would have come home if he could have.’ Blue hoped to heaven that it was true.
‘It was the drugs that got him in the end, wasn’t it?’ the man said and Blue couldn’t answer him, didn’t know, felt the hotness of shame flush her neck. She didn’t know. This had not happened before. She couldn’t backtrack, couldn’t risk her reputation even if this audience were small.
The council tax was late, the water bill was due next week, and Mother had bought a new set of witching candles that cost nearly forty quid.
‘The moon gets its light from the sun,’ Blue touched the final card, determined not to falter, ‘but never sees the sun head-on. You can’t see or touch your child, but he sends you his light from beyond. And his forgiveness.’ Blue squeezed the man’s upper arm in what she hoped was a gesture of comfort.
Offstage, Bridget wiped her eyes. Bodhi smirked. A woman in the audience stifled a sob. Blue felt the absence of a hand on her lumbar spine. You all right, lass?
She pinched that thought from her mind, apologised to the couple for her lack of tact. They were calm, resigned to the news that they had feared for so long. Their son was dead.
For the first time Blue could remember, the cards hadn’t told her the whole truth. Nor had her intuition. It knotted inside her, made her doubt her insight, readings, ability. Was she too complacent?
‘You were marvellous,’ Bridget said in the dressing room after the show. ‘My little god.’
‘Playing God isn’t the same as being one,’ Blue said to her image in the black-spotted mirror.
‘I had a word with the owner; we’ll come back in two weeks. The shows will go on.’ Bridget laughed a hoarse little laugh, her throat not used to the sound.
Blue looked at the reflection of her mother’s smile. She tried to believe that things would get better.