I felt the need for an hour of Gertrude. Her scrabbling dog, her electronic cigarettes, her wheatgrass and her crème de menthe. She was mixing it in a blender with ice, into a pale-green-coloured smoothie, and she asked me if I wanted some. I shook my head and asked for water.
You should try these, she said, as she puffed on her tubular thing, works wonders for the nicotine crave.
I don’t smoke, I told her.
Or only other people’s. And only lately.
And I had smoked, I remembered, that morning, by the ambulance bay.
Tell me about the dead, I asked her.
I know nothing about them. I am fake, like I told your colleague, charlatan.
My wife, I began.
Ah, she said, you still have one? Things are looking optromistic.
Optimistic, I corrected her.
Yes, she said. Look on the bright side. The dead can’t.
She is working on a dig, I said. She’s uncovered a body, from centuries ago. It’s causing riots.
Maybe it has unfinished business, and she exhaled a billow of smoke. She must have known how mysterious it made her. Those painted lips, those Slavic cheekbones.
Don’t you get it, you damn rationista?
What’s a rationista? I asked her.
You are. With that English thing you call logic. The dead can cause more trouble than the living. In fact, they invariably do.
How?
That business. Unfinished. They want us to finish it for them.
She inhaled some more and drank the green stuff.
How do you think I make my living?
You just said you were a charlatan.
Doesn’t stop the requests. The need. The palm read, the ouija board. All the best psychics are charlatans. It just depends, she said and smiled, how good a charlatan you can be.
She took a pack of cards and began to shuffle them, expertly.
I used to be a croupier. Same thing.
Where?
I asked her.
Monte Carlo, she said. So, you want to play blackjack now or you want your cards read?
Neither, I said. I just wanted to talk.
You went to see her again, she said quietly. With the parents. And don’t ask me how I knew. It is that English thing, logic. Deduction. Is your job.
I said nothing. And her eyebrows arched.
And? she said. Tell me, Jonathan.
Ahhh. So that’s why Jonathan is here.
She hears her playing cello.
The way my darling Jonathan did.
Maybe.
And that is – what is the word? Begins with F.
I think you mean fucked.
Fucked, she said. Interesting word.
An English word, I told her.
Not Latin? Not romance?
No, I said. Pure Anglo-Saxon.
The dog leapt suddenly, from an embroidered chair on to my lap.
How do I stop this? I asked her.
I can hear the pain there, Jonathan. Just tell yourself it’s your imagination.
I can’t.
Then finish that business, whatever it is.
I don’t know what you mean.
The dead business. Otherwise they whisper, they murmur, they don’t know they’re dead.