‘They seem to work for me, Grumps.’
‘Not, apparently, very well: Zillah saw the changes coming and she has already decided on her rooms in the new house.’
If Zillah knew and approved, then really, there was no more to be said: it looked like the Lyons were on the move.
A thought struck me. ‘When Mum finally decides to stop playing dead and comes back, how will she find us?’
‘Like a bad penny,’ he said bleakly.
On the way back to the flat, with a lot to think about and a chapter of Satan’s Child and three letters to type up, I found Zillah still in the kitchen stirring something savoury-smelling in a large pot. The cat, Tabitha, was draped around her neck like a black fur wrap, her tail practically in the stew.
Hygiene was possibly not Zillah’s strong point but neither she nor Grumps (nor even Tabitha) ever seemed to suffer ill effects. Nor did Jake and I, come to that, because although I did some of our own cooking in the flat, we shared quite a lot of meals. We must all have been immune.
‘Zillah, if you have time, maybe you had better read my cards,’ I suggested. ‘Grumps just told me that we’re on the move.’
Zillah silently turned down the heat and put a lid on the pot, then fetched her Tarot pack and handed the cards to me to shuffle. Under my fingers they felt cool, snakily smooth and almost alive.
‘You could read them yourself,’ she grumbled as I gave them back, but she began to lay them out in a familiar pattern on the table. The cat, bored, disentwined herself and stalked off, holding up a tail like a bottlebrush that has seen better days.
‘You know I’ve given up reading them, especially for myself, because there never seemed to be good news. I simply don’t think I could bear it if I saw yet another dark stranger scheduled to enter my life bringing change, because it never turns out well,’ I added gloomily.
It would have been really useful if the cards had ever given me some helpful hints about whether the changes would be good or bad too, especially regarding my ex-fiancé, David.
‘It’s all in the reading and how you interpret it, Chloe, you know that,’ Zillah said. ‘You don’t have to make a self-fulfilling prophecy.’
While I puzzled over that one, she looked at the cards that showed what was currently going on in my life.
‘Hmm…no surprises there, or in what will happen if you continue on your current course.’ She turned over more cards and pondered.
‘But my course is about to be changed, isn’t it? Not only are we moving, but Jake will be off to university later this year.’
I’d had the maternal role for my half-brother thrust upon me and I’d done my best, torn between love and resentment, but although I adore Jake, I couldn’t say I wasn’t relishing the idea of being my own woman again.
That my own childhood had been a happy and secure one was entirely due to Granny but, though kindly and affectionate, Zillah seemed to have been born without a maternal gene and could not take her place. That hadn’t stopped Mum from thinking Zillah could quite easily assume Granny’s role as mother substitute when she was off with her latest lover, though – but then, she didn’t have the maternal gene either.
At least Zillah loved us in her own unique way, even if, like Grumps, she didn’t find children terribly interesting until they were capable of holding a conversation.
‘It doesn’t say anything about Mum turning up again, does it?’ I asked, following this train of thought. ‘Only it would be just like her to walk back in, now there aren’t any responsibilities for her to shoulder, what with Grumps having paid her bills and Jake an adult.’
My mother had spent less and less time at the flat until she had finally vanished altogether from a Caribbean cruise six years previously and was currently presumed by everyone except the family to be dead. We presumed her to be fornicating in sunnier climes, even if this time her absence had been inordinately prolonged. Her disappearance had coincided with David jilting me, too: cause and effect.
Zillah ignored me, turning over the cards showing what was happening with my relationships, which was not a lot apart from a platonic and fraternal one with my old friend Felix Hemmings, the bookseller of Sticklepond.
Through the thin spiral of smoke from her latest cigarette I automatically began to read the meanings upside down, and groaned. ‘Oh, no, please don’t tell me another man really is coming into my life? I can’t bear it!’
‘Maybe more than one person,’ she said, frowning. ‘Perhaps there’s unfinished business with someone you knew before?’
‘No way! Now I’ve realised I’m stuck in some endless Groundhog Day cycle of love and rejection, I’m not even going to look at another man.’
‘You can’t call two failed relationships an endless cycle, Chloe.’
‘Two? Have you forgotten Cal, or Simon or—’ I stopped, unable to remember the faces, let alone the names, of some of my more fleeting boyfriends.
‘I did not mention men, but in any case they were obviously unmemorable. And can we help ourselves if love strikes?’ She thoughtfully fingered the card depicting a tower struck by lightning.
‘We can if it strikes twice,’ I snapped. ‘But even if I’d been tempted to take any boyfriend seriously after David jilted me, they weren’t prepared to take on Jake too. He’s the ultimate love deterrent.’
I shuddered, recalling some of the hideous pranks my inventive half-brother had got up to over the years in order to get rid of my boyfriends. I was sure Grumps had had a hand in some of the more fiendish tricks.
‘He was, but he’s now an adult, and once he’s at university he’ll have other things to think about.’
‘So he will…and it seems like only five minutes since I went off to university, too,’ I said with a sad sigh, for that had been my one, abortive bid for independence, the year after Jake was born. It had been all too easy for Mum to absent herself for longer and longer periods, leaving me literally holding the baby, but I’d thought if she didn’t have me to fall back on, then she would be forced to stay at home and behave like other mothers.
How wrong I was! I got back at the end of the first term to find she had dumped the baby in Zillah’s unwilling hands, leaving me a scribbled note with no idea of when she would return. Jake was touchingly happy to see me, making me guilty that I had been so engrossed in my love affair with Raffy that I had hardly thought of him for weeks. Grumps and Zillah were also happy to have me back, in their way, but I was the one who could have done with a mother’s tender care just then, rather than have to take on the role myself.
But surprisingly, in the end, Zillah proved to be a tower of strength when I most needed one…
I looked at the spread of cards again and asked hopefully, ‘Can the future be altered, Zillah?’
‘People can change, and then the future also changes. Or perhaps the true future remains fixed, the other is merely a warning to put us on the right path to our fate.’ Her gnarled hand reached out and flipped over the final cards. ‘Your future has interesting possibilities.’
‘What, you mean interesting in the Chinese curse sort of way?’
‘Well, what are the angels telling you?’ she asked acerbically.
‘That change is coming, but it will all turn out right in the end.’
‘Whatever “right” means,