Inside Reg’s kiosk it was warm, and smelled strongly of bacon from the grill at the back. Reg’s stock-in-trade was bacon sandwiches and cups of tea in the winter months, and Mr. Whippy ice cream and cans of Coke in the summer.
“Won’t be a minute,” Reg said. “How are you anyway, my dear old mucker?”
“I’m all right,” Hal said, though it was not really the truth. Those two typewritten sheets of paper on the coffee table at home were giving her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, and she was half afraid of finding another envelope when she opened up the booth this morning. If only. If only Mr. Treswick’s letter had been really meant for her.
The urn was up to temperature now, and she watched Reg as he expertly manipulated the spigot and mug with one hand, while flipping the bacon with the other. Somehow talking to the back of his head felt easier than addressing his face. She did not have to see the concern in his eyes.
“Actually . . .” she said, and then swallowed, and forced herself on. But the words, when they came, were not the ones she had been intending to say. “Actually, I might be better than all right. I got a letter last night, telling me I might be heir to a secret fortune.”
“You what?” Reg turned, mug in his hand, open astonishment in his face. “What did you say?”
“I got a letter last night. From a solicitor. Saying I might be due a substantial bequest. ”
“You winding me up?” Reg said, his eyebrows almost up to his nonexistent hairline. Hal shook her head, and seeing that she was serious, Reg echoed her shake of the head, and handed the tea across.
“You be careful, love. There’s a lot of these scammers about. My trouble got one the other day, telling her she won the Venezuelan lottery or some nonsense. Don’t you be handing over no money. Not that I need to tell you that.” He gave her a wink. “No flies on you.”
“I don’t think it’s a scam,” Hal said honestly. “More like a mistake, if anything. I think they might have got me mixed up with someone else.”
“You think it’s one of these heir-hunter things, where someone’s died and they’re trying to track down the long-lost rellies?” He was frowning again, but it was not with worry now, more as if considering a conundrum.
“Maybe,” Hal said. She gave a shrug and sipped cautiously at the scalding tea. It was hot and bitter, but good. The cold, clammy thought of the notes on the coffee table was starting to recede, and she felt a flicker of some old memory stir inside her—the sensation of what it had been like to wake in the morning and not worry about every bill, not think about where the next rent payment would come from, not worry about the knock on the door. God, what she wouldn’t give to get that security back again. . . .
She felt something harden inside her—a kind of steely resolve.
“Well,” Reg said at last, “if anyone deserves a break, it’s you, my darlin’. You take any money they offer you and run, that’s my advice. Take the money and run.”
CHAPTER 6
* * *
“Good-bye,” Hal said, as the three tipsy girls rolled out the door, shrieking and laughing down the pier towards the bars and clubs. “May fortune favor you,” she added, as she always did, but they were already gone out of earshot. Glancing at her watch, she realized it was 9 p.m., and the pier would be closing soon.
She was tired—exhausted, in fact—and earlier that evening, as the time stretched on, and the pier had stayed empty of visitors, she had thought about giving up, switching the sign off, and going home, but she was glad she had stayed. After almost no clients all day, there had been a mini-rush at seven o’clock—two coworkers came in to ask what they should do about a bullying boss, and then the three drunk girls looking for a laugh around eight. She hadn’t made a lot, but with luck she would cover the rent on the kiosk this week, which was more than she could guarantee in the off season.
With a sigh, she turned off the small space heater at her feet and stood, ready to switch off the little illuminated sign outside her kiosk.
MADAME MARGARIDA it read in flowing, ornate letters, and though the description didn’t really suit Hal, conjuring as it did some kind of Gypsy Rose Lee figure, she had not had the heart to change it.
SPECIALIST IN TAROT, PSYCHIC READINGS, AND PALMISTRY said the smaller letters below, although in truth Hal didn’t really enjoy reading palms. Perhaps it was the physical contact, the warm dampness of the sweaty palm in hers. Or perhaps it was the lack of props—because in spite of her skepticism, she loved the tarot cards as physical objects, the finely drawn images, their soft fragility.
Now, though, as she flicked the switch in her booth and the light clicked off outside, there was a rap at the glass. Her stomach flipped, and for a moment she froze, even her breathing stilled.
“I’ve been waiting,” said a hectoring female voice. “Don’t you want customers?”
Hal sighed, feeling her tension drain away, and she opened the door.
“I’m sorry.” She used the calm, professional voice that somehow became part of her persona the moment she picked up the cards. It was halfway between serene and serious, and a tone deeper than her own, though it was harder to conjure than usual, with her heart still thumping with the aftermath of the sudden rush of fear. “You should have knocked earlier.”
“If you was a real psychic, you would’ve known,” said the woman with a sour triumph, and Hal suppressed another sigh. She was going to be one of those.
It always baffled Hal why skeptics were so drawn to her booth. It wasn’t like she was forcing anyone to come. She wasn’t making any claims for her services—she didn’t pretend to cure anything, or advise dangerous courses of action—she didn’t even say that her readings were anything other than a bit of fun. Weren’t there better people to debunk? And yet they came, and folded their arms and pursed their lips, and refused to be led, and looked grimly delighted at every failure, even while they wanted, desperately, to believe.
But she couldn’t afford to turn a customer away.
“Please come in and sit down, it’s a cold night,” Hal said. The woman drew up a chair, but didn’t speak. She only sat, her herring-bone coat drawn firmly around herself, chapped lips clamped together, eyes narrowed.
Hal settled herself at the table, drew the box of tarot cards towards her, and began to run through the practiced introduction she always used when new clients walked in off the street: a few generalized guesses designed to impress the listener with her insight, a sprinkling of braggadocio, all mixed in with a potted history of tarot, aimed at people who knew little about it and needed a context to understand what she was about to do.
She had only run through a few of the phrases when the woman interrupted.
“You don’t look like much of a psychic.”
She looked Hal up and down, taking in the frayed jeans, the thick-gauge earring, shaped like a thorn, through her right ear, the tattoos peeping out from beneath her T-shirt.
“I thought you’d have a costume, and a veil with dangly bits. Like a proper one. Madame Margarida it says on the sign—you don’t look like much of a madame. More like a twelve-year-old boy.”
Hal only smiled and shook her head, but the words had broken her rhythm, and as she resumed her little speech she found herself thinking of the veil at home in the drawer under the bed, the fine black gauze with the jet drops sewn around the edge. She stumbled over the well-worn phrases and was glad when at last she reached the end of the spiel.
She added, as she always did, “Please, tell me what brings you to consult the cards today.”
“Shouldn’t you know that?” the woman snapped.
“I sense many questions in you,” Hal said, trying not to sound impatient. “But time is short.”
And I want to go home, she thought, but did not say. There was a silence. The wind howled through the struts of the pier, and in the distance Hal could hear the crash of the breakers.
“I got a choice,” the woman said eventually, her voice grudging, as if the words were wrung out of her. She shifted in her seat, making the candle flame gutter.
“Yes,” Hal said carefully, not quite a question. “I sense that you have two roads ahead of you, but they twist and turn, and you can’t see far. You want to know which you should take.”