After I told my father that I was going to live in Australia, he said that perhaps I could investigate the fate of those bicycles. Some part of him still believed they really had made the journey across the world, their tyres filled with gemstones and precious metals. Perhaps some unsuspecting child or postman was cycling along a dirt road or a suburban street, crunching on diamonds and rubies.
He never had much luck with jewellery: in the lead-up to my twenty-first birthday, relations between us were at a new low, so I was surprised when Papa called a temporary ceasefire with a showy box of red leather tooled with gold, which I immediately recognised as the livery of Cartier.
When I opened it, my heart sank. Inside was what could only be described as a manacle: a single wide band of yellow gold, fixed with two impossibly fiddly screws. A little leaflet explained that this was ‘A Love Bracelet’ and the symbolic act of bolting it on expressed eternal devotion. Looking at the small gold screwdriver nestling in the satin lining of the box, I could only think of a handcuff or fetter symbolising bondage and servitude. I loathed it. My father evidently attributed no such sinister meaning to this showy status piece.
Anxious by nature, my mother found a new reason to worry; she fretted about a trend she had heard of on television: hit-and-run motorcycle thieves. If they found that their simple snatch-and-grab technique did not work, might they not slice off my hand to get at the gold? I promised to wear it tucked inside my sleeve whenever I was outside. My father insured it for a hefty sum. I screwed the cuff on dutifully. At any of our encounters, my father would examine it closely to see if I was taking proper care of his precious gift as if it were an investment.
Once I was out of sight in Australia, I took off what I thought of as a shackle—the symbolic irony of doing so in a land settled by convicts was not lost on me. I told my father I had placed it in a bank vault for security reasons as we had no safe at home.
As the price of gold soared, I wondered about selling it, thinking that I could buy something far more practical with its considerable worth. But guilt at ridding myself of his gilt made me hesitate, until one day I decided to take it to Cartier in Sydney to have it valued. The saleswoman greeted with me with deference. But the look on her face changed abruptly when I handed her the bracelet. Examining it with a magnifying glass held in her eye socket, she looked suddenly affronted, as if the gold band had emitted an unpleasant smell.
‘Just one moment,’ she said with abrupt rudeness before disappearing into a back room for a considerable length of time. She emerged with a look of contempt.
‘Where did you buy this?’ Her tone was bristling and brusque, not normally associated with luxury brand customer service.
‘It was a gift—’ I replied, summoning all the haughty dignity I could muster to add ‘—from my father,’ as if the provenance would silence all doubt.
‘We don’t think it’s ours. We’ll have to send it away for verification,’ she said, walking me to the door as if trying to evict a drunk and disorderly vagrant.
Out on the pavement, I felt disoriented by shock. My father never, but never, knowingly bought copies or knock-offs from markets; he was not interested in those kinds of bargains. He preferred the snob value of flagship stores, where his status was burnished with fawning and fussing, savouring the accoutrements and accessories that went with his purchases: the stiff cardboard boxes stamped with luxury brand logos, elaborate wrapping rituals and occasional little extras offered to regular patrons. There must be some mistake.
Six weeks later I received a peremptory letter from Cartier HQ in Paris. The bracelet was guilty as charged: a fake. In passing sentence, the company informed me that it had the legal right to impound and destroy it but had chosen not to, accepting that it had been given to me as a gift by a family member in good faith and had sentimental worth. I was to sign a contract guaranteeing that I would not offer it for sale as a Cartier Love Bracelet, or have it valued or insured as such. Doing so would result in prosecution.
Clearly, my status-symbol-conscious father had been royally scammed. But where? And how? He had bought me the bracelet on a trip to Rio and New York, where Cartier had two of their most prominent stores. Could this be an inside job, part of some elaborate criminal network? My father had been taken for a ride before. Shopping was one of his few hobbies and forms of relaxation. Protective of his dignity, I dared not ask him for details and risk humiliating him.
While we were waiting for the verdict on my father’s care, my mother collapsed in on herself. She slept all day to keep the world at bay, hardly touching food. The air in the apartment became at first stale with misery and then sour, like the smell of curdled milk. It was the stench of grief, oozing from my mother’s pores like a sweat of sadness. Afraid to leave her alone, as she hinted at contemplating suicide, I stayed on, drifting between hospital visits. In an effort to create order, I cleaned and ironed: I needed visible results. On the rare occasions my mother got up for an hour or two in the afternoons, I distracted her with cupboard-sorting projects, but she was too lethargic to make decisions and too anxious to part with a single item, whether it was out-of-date spices or broken buttons. Overwhelmed by my parents’ hoarding habits, I attempted to declutter. I wanted one task that would absorb and distract me, and make me feel that I was making tangible progress.
I went upstairs to my father’s desk, the no-go sanctum he never allowed anyone to interfere with. I started to sort through his copious papers to see if there were outstanding bills to be paid, and to look for the instructions and guidelines he was always drafting about what to do ‘in the event of my death’. As I sifted through files marked ‘Insurance’, ‘Health Care’, ‘Car Records’, other papers fell out covered in lurid graphics and noisy headlines.
Following the failure of the rösti venture, my father had signed up to several US-based gambling schemes and, despite pleading from my mother, was sending them money regularly. These proliferated, mushrooming out of control, so that he was receiving multiple appeals to win his life’s fortune every day. Eventually recognising that he had got himself into a pickle, my father took himself off to a local meeting of Gamblers Anonymous. He found it so helpful that he attended for a further three nights in a row before declaring himself cured. That lasted six weeks. He had then relapsed, resorting to secrecy to hide his shameful habit, concealing the lottery correspondence.
The volume of it was staggering: I filled three large green garbage bags with it in a matter of hours. The quantity of paper was bad enough, the promises of imminent wealth patently ludicrous, but there was more. Among the pseudo cheques and the fake certificates of winnings there was a new twist: letters from clairvoyants with exotic names.
One was called Dame Antineas de Phénicée. Describing herself as ‘Spiritualist, Numerologist, and Internationally Sworn Expert’, she looked like a benign elderly maiden aunt in the black-and-white photograph on her letterhead. Dame Antineas congratulated my father on his discernment, ‘and for your will to rid yourself of the burdens that have been weighing so heavily on you for such a long time’. In that, she showed rare insight into his state of mind—at least he must have thought so. She promised to reveal to him the secrets of golden numbers of luck and fortune that would enable him to win really big sums in games of chance. Once he had done that, she vowed to send him more information on a ‘fabulous gold piece’ to use to win scratch games, a coin charged with a power to fight bad luck and to protect against failure.
Another called herself Princess Zahia, a slave girl who apparently became a princess and lived in a non-specific Desert Emirate. Her photograph made her look like a middle-of-the-range escort, her dark hair cascading wildly, her feline eyes heavily kohled, her long neck emphasised by a broad choker of diamanté strands. Zahia’s promises were couched in far more lavish and exotic terms. She introduced herself as a gorgeous bird living in a gilded cage: ‘I am forbidden from going far from my Golden Palace where I have lived for several years. Consequently, I have m
any hours carefully chosen to bring you two gifts in my Princess hands which are among the most precious in the world: Love and Wealth.’
She continued somewhat breathlessly: ‘My sumptuous magical residence has the incredible capacity of constantly reinforcing my supernatural powers of clairvoyance. I am writing to you in absolute secrecy, because during the last night of the Full Moon, three cards detached themselves from Nkonde’s statuette [whatever that is]. They scattered your name in Golden Dust on my glass table and have shown three Directions of Life which are extremely precious for you.’
She became more intimate with each paragraph: ‘I have to warn you, Harry, that from now on your first name and your surname are engraved in the pink granite wall in my bedroom. From now on I am living in total spirituality with you and with your mind.’
Then she reminded him of her own modest origins and the hardships she had endured: ‘Often elements of my life as a little girl come back to me, when we lived with my very poor parents, on the banks of the Wadi Allaqi in Ethiopia … Like you, I have suffered. Like you, pain was imposed on me which was not mine. I did not have the choice to live the life that I wanted to. The overwhelming misfortune of which you are a victim, troubles of all kinds, are the source of intense frustration and a feeling of failure which emerges slyly in each of your thoughts. Yet I feel that you refuse to see yourself as a defeated person. I sense that deep down inside there is a rage to conquer, to elevate yourself above your current situation, to succeed.’
Zahia, is, at this point, truly telepathic.
Some of these letters came with gifts that purported to be talismans of magic and good fortune. There was a bingo pebble, meant to maximise winnings if you rubbed it before playing. Dame Antineas helpfully sent a bottle of oil, called Golden Fluid and containing glitter, which you were supposed to rub onto your hands. Its magic extract would, she wrote, attract luck and winning game numbers: ‘It is a very special potion of grand occult powers having the ability to attract luck like a magnet. I suggest you reserve the Fluid for big jackpots.’ On the side of the bottle the contents were listed as liquid paraffin, triglyceride, perfume, polyethylene and prunus amygdalus dulcis (otherwise known as sweet almond oil). The label said the stuff was made by the Laboratoire Eliane, which listed its address as 140 Avenue des Champs-Elysées, no less.
Another self-styled clairvoyant and expert in divinatory sciences calling herself Maria Sarah had a more homely, almost rent-a-granny appearance, her smiling face appearing above a photograph of druids in a ceremony at a circle of monoliths next to the headline: ‘Mr Baum, You have personally been granted a unique favour of prosperity and fortune so you are certain to receive in a very short time one hundred and eighty five thousand pounds.’
Maria Sarah continued in finer print: ‘My dear Harry, place your hand on your heart and prepare to jump for joy!’
She went on to report that she was just recently back from a gathering in Brittany at a sacred circle for the ritual of ‘Lunasad’, which allowed three lucky people to benefit from a powerful magic gift of prosperity, at which my father’s name was chosen and witnessed by hundreds of extra-talented mediums. Over the next six pages she described the cult of the ‘oracle of Ogham’, illustrated with pictures of leaves from magic trees, before urging my father to spin a magic wheel of cardboard she had enclosed that would determine secret predictions for his future well-being, to be revealed in her next letter on receipt, naturally, of a cheque for thirty-two pounds (payable in two smaller monthly instalments if preferred, presumably to make it easier for pensioners on a limited budget).
To top it off, a fortune-teller named Julie Haley claimed to be able to marshal the precise number of clairvoyants required to help my father to win fabulous sums of money, saying: ‘You need massive help … you need the total investment on not just one clairvoyant, 10 or 25 clairvoyants, but well and truly 57 clairvoyants, mediums and astrologists working in unison.’
Apparently the failure of an earlier attempt by a single medium had been blocked by my father’s ‘Nadis canal’, which paralysed his ‘Ener Chakral’ when a detestable person cast a harmful influence over him creating a vast energy field filled with negative waves. Julie promised to do some Karmic work and in the meantime would send him a free ‘Energital Captor’ to ensure more financial wins when harmonised to his energies. All this in return for a modest donation, with options to tick a box for anything between thirty-five and twenty pounds. A bargain, wouldn’t you say?
The small print at the bottom of all the payment forms is illuminating: ‘The writer of this message may not be as per the photo and identity shown’ and ‘Due to the very nature of the proposal, where the user’s conviction is essential, we are not bound by any absolute obligation.’
I find the bingo pebble and the magic oil at the back of a desk drawer together with several strings of plastic fake pearls, charms, shells, amulets and other dross my father had been sent as free gifts. As if it were not bad enough that my father had not automatically binned this garbage, most heart-rending of all is a file of his handwritten draft replies to some of these clairvoyants:
My dear Maria Sarah,
I think that both my hand and my heart would function much better if I placed my hand on YOUR HEART.’
He continues in a somewhat disturbing and threatening vein:
It is unlikely that you will escape from being put across my knee … there will come a time when it will be necessary and appropriate for you to ask (even BEG) for a ministration upon your derriere. Girls cannot be expected to administer one hundred and eighty five thousand pounds without.
He then changes gear to complain about his recent frustration when attempting to bank two previous cheques issued by Maria Sarah only to be declined by a bank clerk who told my father they were ‘a joke’. One minute I am flooded with revulsion at his pathetic threat of a playful beating, the next I ache while visualising my father’s confusion. I picture him taking the bus along Wandsworth High Street, wearing the cap he has adopted to keep his bald head warm but that is so at odds with his former dandyish aesthetic. He has become just another old fella with a bus pass going up to the shops. I imagine him stooping to present his cheque to the teller, only to be dismissed, a pathetic elderly man who has been taken for a ride he does not understand.
Addressing an Australian lottery outfit, he fights back in a more familiar professional tone as an aggrieved consumer who recognises he has been exploited: During the last few months I became the victim of your almost daily mailings and due to your promotional pressure came close to a nervous breakdown. Over the same period I allowed myself to be taken for a rather expensive ride by a total of approximately fifty Yanks … then you and your crew intensified your barrage to such an extent that I didn’t and don’t know whether I’ve won minus zero or not even that.
He pleads to be removed from their mailing list. Of course they ignored his request, bombarding him with literature.
I am dumbfounded. To me, my father was still a rational man with a formidable analytical brain. But here, now, on the page, a stranger reveals himself to me: someone who was filled with doubts, seeking reassurance and certainty, asking for further details about the clairvoyants and their promises. How had they got his name? How did they know the troubles he had? When would the money come? Into which account? By when? He had sent several cheques already and had still not received anything: could there have been some mistake? His gullibility makes me feel ashamed and embarrassed on his behalf, but also amazed at how he had been able to hide his befuddled ramblings from us and maintain a façade of normality. It is disturbing to think that half the time when he was at his desk purportedly putting his affairs in order, he was clandestinely scrambling them into a further mess, as if a scrim of dementia had descended like a fine gauze over his consciousness.
He mentioned his upcoming cancer surgery in a lame appeal for sympathy that also betrayed his fear at facing the ordeal. I did not recognise my father. How long had he be
en like this? How much money had he actually sent to these people? The correspondence from them was ominously large, and my mother estimated that he was receiving forty or fifty envelopes a week from lotteries in various states. No wonder she was beside herself about it.
When she first became alarmed, she rang the British Consumers’ Association, which told her there was nothing they could do to protect people against these sorts of scams; they were commonplace but did not fall within the jurisdiction of the European Union. The association pointed out that while many of the lotteries appeared to originate in the US, they were in fact based in other countries, including Australia, where the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) was aware of their existence but powerless to stop them. I make a mental note to find out more when I get home. In the meantime, I decide to Google Dame Antineas, just for the hell of it. Perhaps she has her own website where she offers more personalised predictions.
I find no such thing, but her name does come up on something called ‘The Database of Scammers’, which is where I read the following:
Posted by maxwellsteer:
Jan 8 2007
My mother was addicted to scammery and probably gave away 40–50 thousand pounds in the preceding six years. She was certainly shelling out around 800 pounds a month when I and my siblings decided the situation was intolerable. There was no surface in her house on which anything could be put down. All were covered with foot-high piles of ‘scamvelopes’. Way ahead was a conglomeration we think is called Black Tacos who either operate through 12 aliases or otherwise are a mailing house selling suckers’ addresses to both lottery and psychic fraudsters such as ‘the High Commission of International Games’ or the preposterously named Dame Antineas de Phenicie. (sic)
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