‘IS THE NAME John important to anyone here?’
Ashley Whitelam let her gaze flicker out across the audience. It was one of the smaller nights at the working men’s club, only around sixty punters or thereabouts, so it didn’t take long. She saw a handful of faces brighten, eyebrows raising, hands clutching handbags. Ashley felt as though she really could read their minds: Does she mean my John? Surely not my own John? Thanks to her brother Aidan’s quiet voice in her ear, she already knew who she was looking for.
‘Now, what I get when John is coming through is a sense of tightness here.’ Ashley pressed one hand to her chest, her eyes half closed. She wasn’t focused directly on the audience, but she could see hands rising hesitantly into the air. ‘This John, perhaps he had problems with his heart, or his lungs, later in life. John, who are you coming through for?’
Aidan’s voice came through in her earpiece. ‘Green scarf in the third row.’
Ashley let her head nod forward slightly, her long silvery-blond hair falling over her shoulders like a length of silk. She pictured in her mind how the audience saw her: a thin, frail figure, pale skin and hair, half a ghost herself. She was wearing one of the blouses her mother insisted on – cream with slightly puffy shoulders, buttoned up to the neck – with a pair of stonewashed jeans and a sober pair of white flats on her feet. Altogether, it gave the impression of someone only half of this world, a faded apparition, a soul in transit, a half-developed photograph. Only her eyes were dark, surrounded by expertly applied eyeliner and kohl pencil. Ashley insisted on the eye makeup; she wanted the punters drawn to her eyes so they could look into them and believe they were not being lied to. Her mother said she looked like God’s own angel, but then, she would say that.
Ashley moved down the left side of the stage until she was facing the woman in the green scarf, whose hand hung in the air, trembling slightly.
‘It’s you, my love, isn’t it?’ she said to the woman in the third row. She was older, in her sixties, and her face was pinched around the eyes and mouth. There was sagging skin on her neck and arms, and apart from her green scarf, the rest of her outfit was black. There was a gold wedding band on her ring finger. He’s gone recently, thought Ashley. And it was a shock to her. Not her dad then, that wouldn’t have been so surprising at her age, but her husband. The woman was nodding, her eyes already moist.
‘What’s your name, my love?’
‘Sandra.’ At first, her voice came out as a squeak, and she cleared her throat. ‘Sandra. John was my husband.’
Ashley smiled and nodded. It was always nice when they volunteered information, although it took some of the fun out of it.
‘John is here with me, Sandra. He’s looking out for you from the spirit world. He says he’s sorry to have left you with so much to deal with, but he knows you can handle it.’ Everyone always had a lot to deal with when someone passed away unexpectedly, so this was a relatively safe guess. ‘He had a problem with his chest, is that right?’
Sandra nodded tearfully. ‘His heart.’
‘That’s right, my love, his heart. And he’s sorry that he didn’t go to the doctor when you told him to, okay? John says he’s very sorry about that. Does that make sense to you, Sandra?’ This was another safe bet: men were always ignoring advice from their wives, especially when it came to doing something they didn’t want to do.
Sandra wrestled a hankie from her bag and dabbed it under her eyes. She let out a slightly strangled yes.
Aidan’s voice murmured again, and Ashley resisted the temptation to touch a finger to her ear. The new earpieces were expensive and nearly impossible to spot if you wore your hair long over your ears, like she did, but they also tickled slightly whenever her brother spoke.
‘Three kids according to her Facebook page,’ said Aidan. ‘Two boys, and a girl. Eldest son built like a brick shit house.’
‘John says – and he’s right here with me, Sandra, standing on this stage – John says that he’s proud of your boys and his special girl. Does that make sense to you, Sandra?’ Men always doted on their daughters. An image of her own father wandered into Ashley’s mind, and she fought against a grimace. ‘He was the stoic type, your John, never liked to make a fuss, but they do say still rivers run deep – he knew when to relax and have a laugh too, didn’t he?’ Sandra nodded into her hankie, and Ashley smiled warmly. These kinds of contradictory statements always went down well. Everyone wanted to believe that they or their loved ones were strong and resilient as well as the life of the party. ‘He wants you to know, Sandra, that he’s doing well in the spirit world, and that he’s here with … It’s faint, much fainter, but there’s another older man here who’s keeping John company. I can’t quite make him out … Who could that be, Sandra?’
‘My brother?’ Sandra looked a little less weepy. ‘My brother, Stan, he died … oh, eight years ago now.’
‘That’s right, it’s Stanley. John wants you to know that he has Stan with him and they’re having a fine time.’
‘Because they didn’t really get on, not when they was alive.’ Sandra sounded uncertain now. ‘John always said Stan was a flash git.’
‘They want you to know they’ve put all that behind them now,’ Ashley said smoothly, still smiling. ‘Thank you, Sandra. John and Stan are fading now, and someone else is coming forward.’
In her ear, Aidan was laughing quietly. Ashley moved away up the stage again, her head bowed slightly, and an expectant hush settled over the audience. In many ways, this was her favourite bit of the show. All eyes were on her, and for a while, the silence was all hers. No one would dare to break it, in case it shattered the spell – except Aidan.
‘Next one up is a real shit show.’
Ashley raised her head and looked towards the back of the room, a carefully cultivated faraway expression on her face.
‘The spirit that is with me now is someone who left us very young, when she’d barely even started in the world.’ Ashley held out one of her hands at waist height, as though she were about to take the hand of a child. A murmur of something – pain, excitement – moved through the audience. ‘Every loss is a source of great agony for those of us left on the mortal plane, but this girl’s passing was especially hard.’
Several people in the audience were tearful at this point. Ashley let the moment hang suspended in the air while Aidan whispered his next packet of info.
‘This one was easy to find; the poor woman has a memorial website set up. The kid was Marian Brooks – the mum is Jackie. Second row from the back, hair the colour of a bus, big gold cross. Can’t miss her.’
Ashley let her eyes wander to the back two rows. And there Jackie was. She even had a small soft toy clutched on her lap, a pale-pink bunny rabbit. Oh, this is too easy, thought Ashley.
‘The spirit – she only knows you as Mum, of course – but I’m getting a J name. Jenny? Jacqueline?’ The red-haired woman jumped as though she’d been pinched. ‘No, Jackie. Everyone calls you Jackie.’ Ashley settled her gaze on the woman with the rabbit. ‘Isn’t that right, Jackie love?’
The woman leaned forward, and one of the bar people skittered down the row with the microphone.
‘Is she all right? Is my little girl in heaven?’
Ashley nodded, still smiling, but inside it felt like her heart was contracting around a long sliver of ice. These were the hard ones, when the subject was a child, when the bereavement was still very fresh. When the parent was still carrying around some beloved toy, as though that kept some tiny link between them alive. It was the desperation that Ashley found hard to take. She could tell this woman anything, any tiny scrap of information, and she’d take it and hold it as close as she was holding that bunny.
‘What are you doing?’ Aidan hissed in her ear. ‘You’re losing them.’
‘Jackie, my love, your little girl is in the spirit world, and for her, it’s all playtimes and ice cream, I promise. She’s with the angels now. You’ll forgive me, but she had quite an old-fashioned name, didn’t she? Was she named after someone?’
Jackie’s eyebrows disappeared under her post-box red fringe. ‘Yes! My mother. We named her after my mum, and she died long before she was born. Marian, her name was Marian. But we … we called her Marie.’
If she loved the old woman enough to name a child after her, Ashley thought it likely she’d be happy to know that little Marie had company in heaven.
‘That’s right, and Marie wants you to know that she’s happy in the spirit world. She gets to spend all her sunny days with the granny she never knew. Does that make sense to you, Jackie?’
The woman squeezed the toy bunny with her fingers and nodded rapidly. There were no wedding rings on her fingers, and the extreme dye job suggested she was beginning to pick the pieces of her life back up again. She had come alone, no husband and no teary-eyed friends to hold her hand. There had been a marriage, probably, and it hadn’t survived the tragedy of Marie’s death. Except you never used the D word, not in this place.
‘Jackie, it’s been so hard on you, all of this, and Marie says – she’s very insistent about this – that you will find love in your life again. Does that make sense to you? She wants you to be happy.’
‘That’s laying it on a bit thick, don’t you think?’ Aidan’s voice almost sounded bored, but Ashley knew better than that. He loved when she couldn’t answer back. ‘Fortune-telling is on Wednesdays.’
And that was the moment everything went to shit. Technically, it was Aidan’s job to properly vet the audience list, but usually Ashley would give it the once-over herself too. Not today though; she had been too hungover from a night propping up an anonymous hotel bar. Which meant she couldn’t entirely blame him when a very familiar figure stood up in the back row.
‘That’s not what you told our Joe!’
David Wagner was in his late sixties, with an old-fashioned, faintly sinister haircut and broad shoulders. Despite his grey hair and the lines at the corner of his mouth, the hands with which he grabbed the back of the seat in front of him were large and strong, and Ashley felt her stomach drop at the sight of him. Quickly, she sought out the bar staff, who had been warned about people potentially getting out of hand. She dropped them a quick nod, and they began making their way towards him. In her ear, Aidan was swearing.
‘Please bear with us a moment,’ Ashley said smoothly, smiling warmly at the rest of the audience, who were looking a little put out.
‘What about our Joe?’ Wagner was shouting. He’d clearly seen the staff approaching his aisle from either side, but that had never stopped him before. Ashley knew from experience that Wagner would still be shouting the odds as they dragged him through the fire exit. ‘Where was his “you will find love in your life again”, aye? My boy was grieving, and you stuck the knife in and twisted it! You’re a monster, a vulture – all of you people are the same.’ Wagner’s face had gone pink, his eyes bulging slightly from their sockets. ‘Preying on grieving people! You should be ashamed.’
Two of the bar staff had reached Wagner by that point. Taking his arms, they began to try to shift him back down the row of seats. Ashley could see from their lips that they were talking to him, trying to calm him down perhaps. She could have told them it wasn’t worth the effort. Eventually, they got him into the aisle, and at that point he seemed to go slack, energy spooling out of him as they pulled him towards the back of the room. Ashley wondered if his little campaign against her was running out of steam – every time he snuck into an audience or turned up in the queue at a trade fair, he looked a little thinner, a little frailer.
‘I’m sorry about that.’ She turned back to the audience, beaming. ‘What we do here, connecting you with your loved ones in the spirit world, can be very hard for people to take. It’s a brave thing, facing your grief and looking for answers.’ Confused and angry faces softened, and she saw people glancing at each other, small smiles on their lips. People liked to be told they were brave and special. ‘Now, let’s get back to it. I’ve lots more spirits here waiting to come through.’