Even Stranger

by Marilyn Messik

  Somewhere in the audience, a woman had begun to quietly sob. She was a plant, one of the women who’d been selling books in the foyer, fairly unrecognisable now, with tee shirt replaced by lavender twinset and pearls. Her soft sobbing, on cue, set off several other women in the charged and changed atmosphere. Of course it did. Others laugh, we laugh, others cry and give our own griefs, permission to surface. Martha was speaking again, higher, breathier, more urgent, pacing slowly, first one way then the other, across the small stage, arms outstretched to all of us.

  “My friends, what is it that’s troubling you, causing you pain? What is it you most fear? What is it that’s colouring your life black? How may I and those who work through me, help you? Will you let us in?” The atmosphere intensified and altered yet again, owing nothing this time to cleverly lowered lighting or louder music, it was that word she’d planted – fear. At one end of the scale, it encompassed the universals; health, finance, relationships, the future, but there were a lot of people in that room, sending out far sharper, more specific emotional spikes, painful to hear. Martha was speaking again a sing-song cadence.

  “There’s a young lady here, whose distress and pain I’m feeling, so strongly.” She pointed suddenly, “Yes, you, my dear child.” She was indicating a row, about three back from the stage, and an assistant was instantly there with a microphone, passed, hand to hand to a now ashen-faced girl.

  The girl was young, nineteen or twenty, clutching a tie-die material shoulder bag defensively in front of her and looking like a rabbit caught in the headlights, as indeed she might, with around 300 people craning to catch sight of her. I could feel what was emanating from her, as could the woman on the stage. I also felt the thump and shock of the sea change in Martha. What she’d been doing, up until this point, was a highly professional job; increasing her income; nurturing her reputation; gaining fans; giving them their money’s worth; a demonstration they’d remember, long after the evening ended. Now it felt completely different, much more personal, her full attention was engaged, she was enjoying this far more. Too much more. The girl in the third row had the mic in her hand now, it was mercilessly amplifying and broadcasting the sound of her rapid, hitched breathing. Martha moved to a point on the stage so they were directly opposite each other.

  “Take your time honey,” she’d dropped her voice to a more normal speaking tone, although her own mic ensured everything she said, reached everyone in the room. “There’s not a single one of us here, who isn’t with you, we’re all giving you our strength and our support in a time of obvious distress. Isn’t that right, my friends?” A firm murmur of assent passed through the audience, and someone in another part of the room called out,

  “God bless you!” We were all waiting for the girl to speak, but before she could, the woman on the stage had closed her own eyes, swaying a little with fingertips of one hand to her temple, massaging gently.

  “It was a watery death, wasn’t it?” Martha asked softly. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for the girl to turn any paler, but waxen now, she nodded silently, unconsciously moving her own head fractionally, in time with the rhythmic movements of the woman on the stage. “I’m not sure of her name, my dear, there’s so much distress and confusion.” Martha now had both set of fingers to the sides of her head, “Help me my dear, can you help me?” The girl, fat tears sliding unhindered, licked her lips then leaned them onto the mic.

  “Elizabeth… Lizzie, we always called her Lizzie.”

  “Ah, yes, yes, indeed, that’s what she’s trying to tell me, she’s Lizzie. My dear, your friend Lizzie is here with us.” She opened her eyes for a moment to look directly at the girl,

  “Your name?”

  “Diane.”

  “Yes, of course, Diane, I wasn’t sure whether she was telling me Diane or Diana. My connection isn’t strong, there’s too much sadness, so much terrible fear. Diane can you help me just a little? What happened to Lizzie? How did she pass?”

  “She… she drowned.”

  “Yes my dear, I know that and I’m seeing blue, a lot of blue water. The sea?” The girl shook her head, the movement magnified and underlined by the brushing of her lips against the microphone.

  “It’s blue, because she was under the cover.” She said. I could see exactly what she meant. A swimming pool in the garden of a family home. Winter. A jaunty, bright blue tarpaulin, wind-rippled, fastened with hooks clipped into concrete-set iron rings, at intervals around the rectangular pool. Lizzie would have had to unfasten at least two of those hooks, to enable her to slip under the cover and lower herself into the painfully freezing water. Once in, she would have had no chance for second thought – numbed by misery and cold, brain blurred by vodka and the unliveable-with despair of a boyfriend’s betrayal.

  “Diane,” Martha was more urgent now, her face flushed, “Lizzie’s calling out to you, can you hear her?”

  “Yes, well… not sure… maybe.”

  “Diane, she’s telling you she’s so very sorry. She wants me to tell you how sorry she is.”

  “No, no!” Diane, had risen from her chair, “God, no, it’s me who’s sorry. It’s my fault. Don’t you understand, I didn’t listen to her, didn’t believe her. It’s me, it was my fault.” I could feel the weight of the massive guilt this poor girl was hauling around with her. She hadn’t listened. Had been tied up with so many of her own concerns. And Lizzie, a friend yes, but one with so many needs. Always a crisis of one kind or another, that’s just how it was with Lizzie, how it’d always been. Best friends through school, less so later on, even though at the same university. It had been both a great revelation and a huge relief for Diane, to discover that not all friends required such hand or head holding. They still saw each other, of course they did, you can’t break ties just like that, though they both knew it wasn’t quite the same. But Lizzie had told her, had called and told her. Brian had finished with her, started seeing someone else, indeed had been seeing the someone else while she and he were still together, and she just couldn’t and wouldn’t bear it.

  Diane had said all the right things, naturally she had, she was still very fond of Lizzie. So she’d said, far better to find out now rather than later and lots of other fish in the sea and Lizzie deserved far better. But she knew full well, although she hoped Lizzie didn’t, she hadn’t been really and truly, emotionally engaged. To be brutally honest, she’d heard it all before through the years, all the ‘I can’t go ons’ and the ‘Really don’t know what I might do nexts’. But then she hadn’t even known that Lizzie had gone missing, nobody did, until her parents returned from a cruise. They’d found Lizzie quickly, but by then she’d been in the water, under the blue, for going on two weeks.

  Martha had picked up instantly and easily on Diane’s intense emotion, had caught brief flashes of the image constantly in her head – white reaching arms, death-dulled gaze, hair swaying with the rhythm of the wind and water. The rest was all pertinently clever questioning and guesswork, information that was just waiting to come flooding out. But that didn’t diminish, one jot, the effect this was having on Diane, not to mention everyone else. The atmosphere was electric and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one with a shiver up my spine, as the story was drawn out, although my shiver was because I could see what Martha was doing, which the rapt rest couldn’t. She was drawing in, all the emotion Diane was giving out – the grief and the almost overwhelming guilt; magnifying it and reflecting it back to her. At the same time, she was smoothly reinforcing what she was doing, with what she was saying.

  “Diane, Diane my dearest child, please listen to me. Lizzie wants you to know that she loves you, she always did and your friendship was more important to her than anything.” The girl was sobbing deeply now, the mic picking up every wet, ragged breath. Martha continued,

  “You mustn’t ever, ever blame yourself. She says, it wasn’t your fault, of course it wasn’t, you mus
t never think that. She loves you and needs you to go on and live your own life, but she says, live for her as well. She says you must relish every single second, just don’t ever forget her.”

  Martha closed her eyes again, and what she did next, rocked me back in my seat. She pushed, and she planted a phrase. It was such a strong push, that it felt physical and I must have jerked and exclaimed, because Youth Dew diverted her attention from what was going on, to touch my arm in concern. She silently pushed a tissue into my hand, from a pack she was holding. I nodded thanks.

  What Martha had planted, with surgical precision, directly into the mind of the vulnerable young woman before her, was rock-solid, completely destructive, full of spite and exceedingly simple. She’d re-used the one phrase that had been echoing, guilt-laden, over and again. Endorsed and infinitely strengthened it,

  “It was your fault.” It was so blatant and so loud in my head, for a moment, I couldn’t believe nobody else had reacted, but of course nobody would and they were completely transfixed by the emotion, the drama and the messages coming through from Lizzie on the other side.

  Well, I certainly couldn’t be doing with this. Enough was more than enough. Rachael and Glory had not been wrong at all. I wasn’t worried how people spent their money or their time, if they wanted to jump on the Martha Vee bandwagon and be taken for a ride, jolly good luck to them, if it gave them what they needed. But what I’d just witnessed was pure, unadulterated viciousness, and someone’s state of mind wasn’t to be played with – although I was prepared to make an exception in this case. I shoved back, fast, hard and harsh,

  “Stop. That. Immediately.” I bellowed into Martha’s head, and saw the shock register. She jerked as if she’d been slapped, which metaphorically, I suppose she had. Her eyes sprang open and she quite forgot all about the swinging, swaying, hand to temple business. She was totally confused, which I found a little surprising; you’d have thought, she more than anyone, would have had an open mind to voices no-one else could hear. She recovered remarkably quickly, as I’ve said, the woman was a pro. Everyone watching would simply have assumed she was receiving more messages, as indeed she was, just from a different direction.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Maybe, I should have left it there. I will admit, I have a tendency to over-egg the pudding. But this was a woman deliberately sending an intensely vulnerable, already damaged girl away with a ticking time-bomb in her head, tipping her, in all probability, right over a dangerous edge. And for what? This had nothing whatsoever to do with building a business and earning a living, honest or otherwise. This bit was purely for fun. So, as Martha seemed to have established such a strong line of communication, I saw no reason why that shouldn’t continue. Lizzie, poor drowned Lizzie, had more to say.

  “How dare you speak in my name?” I thundered in Martha’s head, and saw her flinch again. “How dare you use me to hurt her? I know you now, Martha Vee. I know you. And I’ll be watching and listening for you.” And I transferred, unedited and in full colour, the dreadful floating image from Diane’s head directly to Martha’s – and not just as a brief flash. Then I remembered Hank, the late lamented husband, whose violent demise by bullet, may or may not have been something to do with Martha’s manipulations. I only had to drop his name into her mind, for a very clear image of the dear departed to form – an unappetising, bald, glower of a man. I took that and shot it right back at her and again felt her recoil and her fear.

  Right, I thought to myself, with a metaphorical pat on the back. That should have put the wind right up her – gale force! And sure enough, for a long moment, it did. She turned almost as colourless as Diane and then, against all the odds, she hauled herself together.

  I’d underestimated her, she may have had only limited abilities, but she was as sharp as a tack and now she was angry. If there’s one thing a trickster loathes more than anything, it’s being taken for a sucker by someone else. She was truly appalled, not because she really thought a dead girl had turned on her, nor because her ex had returned to snarl – she believed in messages from the other side, about as much as I did – but because the only realistic explanation was that someone in that audience, knew what was going on and was fighting back.

  As so often happens, under stressful circumstances, and I make no excuses for myself here, self-preservation and a certain amount of alarm kicked in. And, I thought, maybe now wasn’t a bad time for a distraction or two. To one side of the stage, cardboard cut-out Martha, still presided smugly over a glossy pile of books, primed for purchase at the end of the session. I hate to treat books badly, but desperate times – I lifted the top volume off the pile and floated it a little way, before letting it smack hard to the floor. Then another and more. Several people shrieked and clutched each other in fright. The very bottom book in the pile, I reserved for Martha and it whacked her firmly in the chest, before rebounding off to join its fellows on the carpet.

  I then briefly levitated cardboard Martha, so for a short while, she hovered fetchingly, above and behind the original, who was temporarily transfixed by all this sudden, unplanned activity. More people were screaming now, and a fair number were hurriedly leaving their seats and trying to scramble over those who hadn’t yet. For good measure, I floated the flip chart and easel, danced them around a bit, then up-ended the small table holding the tray, still with all the objects on it. The tray hit the ground first, before the table crashed onto it, causing treasured items to bounce and shoot off in various directions. A tin pig money-box smashed hard into one of the lights lining the side of the stage and the heated glass shattered instantly with a rather alarming flash and a bang.

  By this time I wasn’t in the least concerned about standing out, because the spikes of emotion – fright, fear and shock – were coming thick and fast from the crowd, the majority of whom were now on their feet, holding on to whoever was nearest. There was a lot of shouting. Youth Dew had grabbed my hand on one side and Frankie’s on the other. Frankie, I noted, had abandoned sulkiness and eye-rolling and was veering towards hysterical, though still mouthy,

  “Why’d you bring me mum?” She wailed, “Mum, I don’t like this. Are you listening? I hate you, I said I didn’t wanna come. Why’d you bloody make me?” From the back of the room, the security-sized guy had materialised, and was making his way rapidly towards the stage, along with a couple of assistants. They were just as alarmed as the audience, who still weren’t quite sure whether this was all part and parcel of what was supposed to happen. The staff knew it wasn’t, and hadn’t the faintest idea why or how it was.

  Martha meanwhile, was beyond livid, struggling to make herself heard above the escalating racket. She was holding forth on poltergeists and other unquiet spirits and appealing for calm, but nobody was paying much attention. The audience seemed fairly equally divided, the whole thing turning out way too strong for some stomachs, whilst there was an equal number of thrilled-to-bits die-hards, who thought all their Christmases had come at once.

  I wasn’t sure whether I’d achieved anything near what I’d been sent in to do and indeed, was no longer too clear as to what exactly that had been. But I thought the time might have come, to join those who were gathering belongings and leaving the party. I disentangled myself from the sweaty grasp of Youth Dew, who seemed to have quite forgotten we were holding hands, and moved from my seat. I immediately barged into the over-flowered pedestal, which swayed and toppled dramatically, spraying water and blooms indiscriminately. Still, when it comes to distractions, I’m of the more-the-merrier school of thought, so I didn’t let that worry me unduly.

  As I followed others, jostling each other up the side of the room, I turned briefly, to look back at the stage and caught Martha’s eye. Her fury and confusion washed over me, soured saccharine scented. And in that instant, she recognised me. Well, not me, but what I was. For a moment I felt her trying to push in, before I shut her out. It was unpleasant, like blunt, b
lind fingers, fumbling over my face. It was the first time I’d experienced anything at all like that and nothing like being read by Glory or the Peacocks. That was quick, honest, incisive and direct, everything this wasn’t. I hurriedly continued, excusing my way between those who weren’t moving fast enough in front of me.

  “Stella, don’t go out through the main entrance.” Rachael in my head, for once I was delighted to hear from her, although, as usual, where had she been when I could have done with a bit of input and advice? “Carry on, past the bar, beyond reception. There’s a side door, not locked, it’ll take you out onto the service road. Follow that round the lake, we’ll pick you up the other side.” As I saw the door ahead of me, I realised I’d left my duffel coat draped over my chair – too bad, wasn’t going back for it. Emerging into the chilly night and heading swiftly along the road, as instructed, I could see the lake stretching to one side of me. It seemed an awfully long way, to go all the way round and I did feel, the quicker I got out of there, the better.

  “Rachael,” I said, “I’m going over, not round, will you help?” It wasn’t really that I expected to see the elegantly coiffed and costumed Martha, wearing down her stilettos, belting after me, down the gravelled road, but I hadn’t liked the look of that security chap and didn’t want to take any chances. I hadn’t flown in ages and in fact, as Rachael, who insisted on labelling it levitating, had told me it would, it had become far less easy with the passing of years, something to do with body weight.