This morning I am just starting to feel better when in comes Nurse Osborne again. At least I was dressed and I was sitting on the bed reading through my notes.
‘What was that all about?’ she demands. What can you say to that?
‘I was sleeping, the situation only escalated when …’
‘We don’t have situations around here, Mr Smythe - at least not on my shift. You’ll learn to behave like everyone else - there are no exceptions. And on my shift you’re my responsibility.’
I put away my writings. Osborne stands there un-blinking, hands on hips. She sighs dramatically.
‘Unfortunately I’m going to have to submit a report.’
Suddenly I see a way to get on her better side.
‘You don’t need to,’ I say. ‘I’m sure I’ll get over it and I can see no good reason to put yourself on report.’
Her mouth falls open.
‘Not me!’ she yells. ‘I’m reporting you and your ob-structive behaviour!’ She stares hard, then huffs and stomps out. No point arguing. But the upshot is that now I have a serious blot against my good name, and all because of a ghost in the passageway.
Debbie was a ‘rocker’; she told us so herself. We used to sit in her lounge and she’d play all the new songs on a little turntable. She had a big stack of singles - 45s they were called. On the first day I told her we’d heard Bill Haley and the Comets on the wireless.
‘You heard of Elvis Presley?’ she said.
‘Course,’ we chimed. ‘We like him, don’t we Kitty?’
‘Yeah he’s great,’ Kitty said.
‘What about Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard?’
‘They’re great,’ I said.
‘Pat Boone?’
‘Yeah, we like him too.’
‘Pat Boone? He’s crap. Booney swoonie. That awful crap is in the past! That’s exactly the kind of crap we want to get away from.’
‘Oh yeah, sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought you meant someone else.’
Debbie was always saying crap. I think it might have been a new word then. Today it’s bullshit.
That aunt of ours was a dynamo, taught us all the music, how to rock ‘n’ roll, how to cook, how to swear. She called a spade a spade, cut through all the nonsense and just got on with the essentials in life. She worked as a tax accountant’s secretary over in Oyster Bay, a job she hated like the living Jesus. ‘It’s a crap job in a crap shop,’ she said. I went there with her once and she was right. I couldn’t imagine anything worse. The office used to be a corner milkbar, stuck on the end of a line of old shops, glass-fronted with brown-coloured venetians down and closed in the window. She said the accountant was hardly ever there so three days a week she used to sit in that little room on her own, doing the books and answering the phone.
‘At least it pays the bills,’ she said, ‘and Alex doesn’t mind me doing my readings at the office - in my own time of course.’
Debbie’s big thing, her preoccupation, the main thrust of her life, revolved around her devotion to the Tarot. Nothing - absolutely nothing - ever got done without first consulting the cards. The day we arrived we’d hardly put the groceries down before Debbie took out the cards and laid them on a square of black cloth edged with embroidered stars. She needed to know what to do with us, she said, and I watched with fascination as she pored over each pulled arcana, our future hanging on the order in which they appeared. Her nimble fingers flicked them out; her long painted nails tapped them flat. She had jewels on several fingers set in gold and I noted the scattered freckles on her long-boned hands. As she pulled the cards I watched her brow furrow then brighten, only to crease again. Her mouth was set and she breathed low throaty sounds; some seemed positive, others less so.
Finally she said, ‘Nothing too surprising here - but I don’t like this one.’ She pointed a pink nail at a card with an angel on it draped in blue and red. I saw a name but it was upside down.
‘Wrong position,’ she said. ‘But I suppose we can’t expect everything.’
And so she let us stay.
‘I only have the one spare room though.’
‘That’s OK,’ we said. ‘We’ve shared the same room since we were born. We prefer it that way.’
I don’t think Debbie particularly liked the arrangement but there was no choice. At first we just lived there free of charge. Well, sort of. We were put to work almost immediately: the garden, the cleaning, repair work, even did some painting and put new flywire on the doors and windows. We actually liked it. We had something to do and as long as we could do it together and then rock ‘n’ roll in the lounge at night it was all OK by us. I think we must have played Blue Suede Shoes a thousand times.
In March Debbie took us to see Love Me Tender and from that day we were Elvis fans. I greased my hair and slicked it back with a ducktail in the front. It wasn’t even 1960 yet at that time, for the average person, life was as ordinary as a brown paper bag and most adults were as straight as the Queen’s flagpole. Women wore short perms and tidy skirts that covered their knees, men wore cardigans, ties and hats. The most original thing for a man was a pink check shirt worn on the outside of his pleated trousers. But me and Kitty and Aunty Deb wore white skin-tight ‘dacks’ and thought of ourselves as right out there on the edge of a brand new scene.
One morning Debbie spread her cards as usual - always before leaving the house - and I saw her body jerk as though she’d been stabbed.
‘I knew it,’ she murmured, ‘I just knew it.’
‘What is it, Deb?’ Kitty asked. Kit had become fascinated with Deb’s devotion to Tarot ever since the day she tried to pick up the pack herself. That day Deb screamed.
‘Don’t touch them! You do not touch my Tarot! Those cards have never experienced any other energy since the day they were made.’ She gasped as though choking and quickly closed the doors of the cabinet. ‘They’ve been magnetised, Kitty, you understand? With my persona. If you touch them you’ll mix in your own energy vibrations’ - a crime it seemed, that might cause a blood-flow from the ears. Kitty was aghast and from that day on made a wide berth around the cupboard that housed Debbie’s persona.
But this day our aunt had seen something in the reading that had alarmed her far more than usual. Kitty and I drew closer.
‘What … what is it Deb?’ I ventured.
‘The Judgment,’ she said. ‘And look where it is!’
We tried to appreciate the precarious position of the card, lying flatly among the others. A card next to it was called The Fool and The Hanged Man lurked nearby.
‘Is someone going to die?’ I said.
‘Of course they are!’ She looked at both of us. ‘Not literally, but I tell you now, I might as well be dead.’
‘Maybe it means someone else,’ Kitty volunteered.
‘Oh, if only. If only that were true!’ She slumped in the chair. ‘I’ll just have to weather it. I’ve got to ride it out.’
That night she came home dark and brooding. We knew that the week before she’d broken up with her boy-friend and no doubt the Tarot reflected some of that, but this was something else.
‘A man