WHEN JOANNA HAD STARTED HIGH SCHOOL, she found another, more practical magic in the dead eye of a Saturday afternoon, just before the sun went down and the dust settled. It was cool enough to walk without shoes, but Joanna hadn’t wanted to expose her feet to the two boys from the hostel. They cut through the McGregor Museum gardens and crossed over into Herlear, the boys smoking cigarette after cigarette, stolen from the Pan-Pan Café. Caspar and Richard made no sound, as if the ground muffled their footsteps. Are there sweat rings under my arms? wondered Joanna. I must remember not to lift them. It was hard; her new haircut kept obscuring her vision. She had to watch out or she would trip over the kerb.
There was a plaster boot at the gate of Sharon’s house. The post box was flaking, orthopaedic, like the plaster polio girl with her charity box at the new Pick n Pay. Joanna wondered whose foot had ever fit inside it. Somewhere there was a giant taking three-and-a-half league strides over the Earth instead of seven, cursing his loss. Her feet were too hot, but she couldn’t wear socks with her white leather deck shoes.
They didn’t have a chance to ring the bell. Sharon – who made them call her Isis – had been waiting, her chin quivering with importance. As she led them down the passage to her bedroom, Joanna concentrated on the fat ridges Sharon’s bra made on her back under her Wham! T-shirt. She had expected more black, more studs and leather bracelets. Sharon didn’t look like a Satanist: she had cheeks like Father Christmas. She was talking and talking, loudly, as they went. Nothing she said needed an answer, so Joanna was quiet. The boys looked bored. Caspar gave Richard a half-hearted lammie on his arm and the other boy screwed his face up and swore at him, then feinted back.
Sharon’s room was like Joanna’s, with its scratched dressing table, a stuffed kitten holding a love-heart, the white walls her mother had never let her paint – Although I could do that now, Joanna thought, and she couldn’t stop me. I could do anything I wanted – the posters of the two Coreys from YOU magazine, with dark triangles at their corners where the sticky tape had bled. Where were the candles? The sticks of incense? The pentagrams? The two boys stood leaning in the doorway, assessing, casual hands in their pockets.
“Now you sit here,” said Sharon fussily, and depressed Joanna at the shoulder so that she was forced cross-legged to the carpet. “And you guys, sit here and here.” She had arranged them in a circle around an upturned waste-paper basket.
Then Sharon squatted, reached under her bed and pulled out a bottle of Malibu. It reminded Joanna of the miniature bottle of Old Spice that had been on her father’s key-ring since she was six. He used it when he had been drinking, as if it covered the smell. With her mother gone, he stayed away much longer, propping up the bar at the Star of the West, telling everyone what a princess he had married. Later, when he came back to the house, reeking like a suitor, Joanna pulled the duvet over her head. She didn’t want to listen to Barbra Streisand warbling “Red roses for a blue lady”.
Sharon opened the Malibu and sniffed the contents. She poured a splash into the tot glass on her dressing table and went over to the window, holding a careful, stagey breath. “For the dead,” she said to the room and smiled. Then she flicked the glass so that the mixture fell through the burglar bars and spattered down onto her mother’s arum lilies below. God, thought Joanna, I hope she’s not in the garden! She listened for the outraged shout but heard only the sprinkler.
Sharon turned back to them and took an ostentatious mouthful straight from the bottle. What’s the big deal? Joanna thought to herself. Then Sharon passed it to her. She furtively wiped the lip of the bottle with her palm and drank. Whatever was in the bottle burned and stank: it was like drinking sunblock. “Island-style!” shrieked Sharon, and held up her hand in the surfer’s horns.
Joanna sputtered, coughed and then cleared her throat. “Went down the wrong way,” she said manfully. “Thanks.” She passed it quickly along to the boys, who swigged without flinching. When it was her turn again she only pretended to drink, throwing her head back fast and bobbing her Adam’s apple up and down.
Sharon waited until the bottle was on its third round. The boys were smoking again, their bottom lips wet.
“I think we’re ready to receive the spirits,” she intoned. Maybe it was the Malibu: Joanna barked a laugh. As soon as it was out, she tried to swallow it back.
Sharon turned on her, angry, blinking.
“Do you think this is a joke?”
“No, Sharon. Isis. Sorry. I’m just nervous.”
“Because it’s not funny. I’ve done this before, you know. It’s a really powerful thing, but you have to believe.” The girl had drawn herself up like a bullfrog. “Do you believe, Joanna?”
Joanna felt like she was back in church, wedged tightly next to her mother’s patchwork-leather handbag, trying not to giggle. “Sorry. Yes, I do. Let’s go on. Please.”
The last word was the catalyst. Sharon reached behind her and retrieved the tot glass with its lick of spirits in the base. She slammed it, rim-down, on the bin.
“Now. You all put your forefingers on the bottom of the glass, like so.” She grabbed their hands and extended the index fingers. “You mustn’t touch each other.” Sharon looked around, expecting questions, but they were waiting for instructions.
“So I’ll, like, call the spirits up and then we see if anyone’s there. Then you can ask them questions and stuff. This is Yes” – Sharon moved the head of a Barbie doll onto the bin – “and this is No.” She hunted around for another object and settled on her wallet. gotcha it said in ragged pink letters. Inside it, Joanna knew, there would be a condom past its sell-by date, a Beechie without its blister pack, and a school photo of a boy – maybe Caspar.
“Whatever you do” – Sharon paused, her eyes all ball, no lid – “don’t call up Esther.”
Joanna shivered with pleasure. She wanted to know. She didn’t want to know.
“Who’s Esther?”
“She’s the Queen of the Underworld. And it’s not safe to call her up, because you can’t always control her. Sometimes she brings other spirits with her. And sometimes – she doesn’t want to go back.”
The boys were sniggering. Sharon, stung, shouted, “It’s true, you dorks! I saw once, this girl called up Esther and ornaments started flying around the room!”
They were suddenly sober. They saw how much she wanted to believe.
Satisfied, Sharon said, “Okay. Does anyone have a dead person they want to call up?” The boys, heavy-lidded, stared at her. They hadn’t lived long enough.
“Me,” said Joanna, in a small voice. Sharon looked at her with renewed interest.
“Who?”
“My mother.”
Sharon waited a beat. Then she leaned forward and put a clammy hand on Joanna’s forearm.
“Joanna. Are you sure?”
“Yes!” Joanna shook the girl off and pushed her fringe out of her eyes. “I mean, she’s my mother.”
Sharon looked carefully at her, resentful at the shift in attention. Joanna was unrepentant.
“Okay.” She drew in a deep breath. “Put your fingers on the glass, guys.”
Sharon closed her eyes and then opened them again quickly. “What’s her name?”
“Noreen.”
She closed her eyes again and spoke, deep and formal. “Noreen. Are you there?”
Silence.
“Noreen, your daughter wants to speak to you. It’s Joanna. Can you hear us, Noreen? Signal yes or no.”
Joanna got the flying feeling very distinctly in the bones of her feet, as if something was coming up from below the carpet, the foundations, the soil under the house with its plaster-boot postbox. The glass rattled, teetering on its rim.
“Jeez!” laughed Caspar. “Richard! Come on!”
“I’m not doing anything, dickweed,” he complained.
“Relax,” ordered Sharon. “Sometimes it takes a while.”
But Joanna knew what she had always known: the glass had moved because her mother was there. Joanna was making it happen.
“Okay,” said Sharon. “Let’s try again, properly this time.” A pause. “Are you there, Noreen?”
The glass moved, slow and explicit, under their fingers.
“Oh, my God,” marvelled Sharon.
I could do anything, thought Joanna spitefully. Inside my body there are a hundred clocks. I’ll show these fuckers. She focused down, thought of her mother and the thick gold cord between them.
The glass shunted over to Yes and then flung itself against the wall. The crack and splintering left a dent in the plaster. The room stank of Malibu.
When the boys stopped staring, Joanna gave her armpits a quick check, but she hadn’t sweated a bit.