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“Now, Cal, I know you don’t believe in this stuff, but I’m just asking you to open your mind a little. Tarot can help tell what’s going on in your life at the present and what your future possibilities may be, but this isn’t fortune telling. There’s no point doing this if you don’t at least try to suspend the scepticism.”
“Okay, but I already know what’s going on in my life at the present. I don’t need to conjure a mystic force to tell me that.”
“Cal!”
“Okay, okay.”
I sit down on Sofia’s bed.
“Why did we need to do this on the bed when there’s a table in the living room?”
Sofia glances at me as she arranges the cards on the bed.
“Because I want enough space to arrange the cards.”
I’m getting a weird vibe here. There are little glances going off between us, intermittent eye contact. I try to focus on the cards she is setting out on the bed but something feels strange. The last time I lay on this bed with another person was when Ellie was here, the time before that was Kara. Now Sofia is doing a tarot-card reading for me on the bed, although I didn’t ask for it, and she knows I don’t take this sort of stuff anywhere near the vicinity of the word ‘serious’.
She lights a joint and inhales deeply before passing it over to me.
“To get you in the right frame of mind before we start,” she says while exhaling.
I’m not altogether sure that smoking a joint is included in the How to Learn Tarot books? This isn’t going to help my paranoia but I inhale the smoke anyway.
“Now you may see the same card reappearing during the reading, but you don’t need to read too much into this. The same with what is commonly known as the death card, it doesn’t actually mean death but...”
I’m not even listening. The joint has made me tune in to only my thoughts, which are heading towards the same question, why has she got me through here on the bed? We’re only a foot apart; we’re never this close.
Is this something to do with her question the other night about whether I still loved my ex?
“....so that means a new beginning is coming your way. Cal, are you even listening to me?”
“Yes, of course I am, a new beginning.”
“If you’re not going to take this seriously, there’s no point doing it.”
“I am taking it seriously. I’m seriously listening to you, seriously.”
“Right, okay, turn over your next card.”
I could make a lunge at her. No, lunge is not the word I’m looking for. Make a move, is that better? Has everything been leading up to this? Christ, I wish I’d had a drink before agreeing to come through here and sit on the bed with her. She’s reading something into these meaningless bits of paper and I’m reading something into this situation, and who knows if any of it is making any sense. I don’t know. I feel stoned and paranoid already. And yet there are no coincidences. She could have easily done this reading in the living room, she chose to do it in the bedroom, on the bed.
“Cal, Cal, what is wrong with you? Are you listening to me?”
She looks me straight in the eyes, dead on. Our faces are barely twelve inches apart.
Why does this all feel planned out? Maybe she read this in her cards...a new beginning. If I kiss her now then this could be a new beginning. Her card reading will have been accurate but I don’t really want a new beginning, do I? My heart is racing, battering inside my chest. She must be able to hear it. My stomach is tight and my paranoia is in full flow. It isn't a trickle of paranoia, it’s a torrent. It’s flooding the banks and drowning innocent bystanders.
“Cal,” she says softly and then she wets her lips with her tongue. “Are you okay?”
“Okay, okay, that’s enough.” I get up off the bed.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, this is just freaking me out a little. This reading, the joint, I don’t know. I’m feeling a bit claustrophobic all of a sudden. I don’t know.”
I head through to the kitchen and pour what’s left of the vodka into a glass. What is wrong with me?
Sofia is already sitting on her sofa when I return to the living room. We are both silent.
“You okay?” I ask.
She shoots me a look combined with a noise which is little more than an internal shrug of the chest. It looks to me like a definite expression of scorn.
We rarely look at each other or speak for the rest of the evening.
Inside my head the word ‘coward’ plays on a loop.