“What? In your room?”
“Mm-hmm.”
That would never have happened when I was living at home. I wasn’t even allowed to sit at the same end of the sofa as my boyfriend if Mum and Dad were around. I tried not to be bothered by the fact that it seemed so unfair. After all, at age thirty-two, it was a long time since I’d had to answer to anyone with regard to who shared my bed at night.
“Is she your girlfriend?” I asked.
Lucas look horrified. “Why do you people have to label everything?” he asked me.
You people? I felt incredibly old.
“And what have you done to your hair? It looks horrible.”
“Thank you very much,” I said.
“I hope that’s a wash in, wash out,” said my mother.
Dad was in the kitchen that day. Mum had bought him a cookery course for his sixtieth birthday, since she was determined that things would change before my father retired. She told me she wanted him to be able to cook because she had no intention of spending the rest of her life chained to the kitchen. When she retired, she was going to write a book and learn to fly. Dad would have to make his own toast.
Dad cottoned on at once to Mum’s plan but he had gone ahead and taken the course with good grace and discovered, to his surprise (and mine), that he really rather enjoyed it. Ever since, it had been hard to keep him out of the kitchen. That day he was doing something complicated with beef. Though Mum joined me for an aperitif (Cinzano and lemonade) in the living room, I could tell that she was itching to be in the kitchen, overseeing what was bound (in her eyes) to be a disaster.
It wasn’t. Even Lucas managed to grunt his approval as he shoveled his food away in record time.
Now that Dad was doing the cooking, Mum had to do the washing up. This was a part of the deal she hadn’t bargained for, and she pulled the rubber gloves on with a hint of disdain. She’d forgotten that the best part of cooking Sunday lunch was getting to slob out in the conservatory afterward, while Dad and Lucas cleared away. I sensed she was wondering if delegating lunch was worth the sacrifice.
I joined Mum at the sink. They didn’t have a dishwasher. It was something to do with the lecture they’d received from the vicar who married them. He’d told them that the glue that held marriages together was making sure that you washed up together. As far as the vicar was concerned, there was nothing that couldn’t be resolved when you had to stand side by side for at least fifteen minutes a day. One washing, one wiping. It was for that reason that Mum and Dad didn’t have a dishwasher installed when they renovated the kitchen. Mum refused to budge on the matter, though I argued that when the vicar delivered his lecture, dishwashers had yet to be invented. Surely they could substitute going for a walk with the dog. The elderly family dog, called Ben, was a very fat spaniel and would have benefited enormously from that.
The washing up did, however, provide the opportunity for me to have a conversation with my mother. It was the first time I had managed to get her on her own. Dad was snoozing under the newspaper. Lucas was upstairs doing course work, or rather playing some zombie game on the ’Net.
“I don’t know what possessed you to dye your hair brown,” she said. She had been tutting about my new look all lunchtime. “You always had such nice hair.”
“I wanted a change, you know. After Michael.”
“For God’s sake, don’t go letting him ruin your life now that he’s left you. Have it dyed back how it was. Have you heard from him?”
“No.”
Mum had been remarkably kind and sensitive since the breakup, never once suggesting to me that time was running out if I ever hoped to have a husband and children. In fact, she once said to me that had she her time again, she would like to try out a life like mine. No responsibilities. No one to tell you that you can’t have a satin frill around the dressing table. I suggested to her that the very fanciest frill around the dressing table couldn’t, in my view, compare with having someone to come home to.
“Ha! The dog acts more pleased to see me than your father does. Unless your brother has already fed him.”
Ben the dog was in love with Lucas, which was only right, I supposed, since the dog had been bought to make up for the fact that after I left for college, when Lucas was just six and a half, he was effectively an only child. Their bond was unbreakable. When Lucas was upstairs, Ben would position himself at the bottom of the stairs, as if to keep guard over his master. I knew that everyone dreaded the day when the smelly old mutt finally passed on.
“You know we’ll always do our best to help you,” said Mum then.
And that’s when I had a very bad idea.
“Mum,” I began, “do you really mean that?”
“Yes,” Mum answered cautiously.
“Because you know how I’ve always said that I wanted to get ahead on my own and would never consider asking you for anything more than your love?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it turns out I need a little more than love right now.”
Mum whirled around to face me. Her hands were still in the washing-up bowl.
“I need to borrow some money.”
“How much?”
“A thousand pounds.” I said it quickly, as if that might make the amount seem smaller.
“Are you in trouble?” Mum asked. Her eyes widened hopefully as she asked me, and I noticed that her gaze had drifted down to my stomach. After all those years spent lecturing me on how not to get into trouble, I knew that she wanted nothing more than for me to announce that Michael had left me with child. “Because you don’t have to do anything rash, sweetheart. You know that your father and I would be delighted—”
“I’m not pregnant,” I said quickly.
“Oh.” Mum’s eyes lost their grandma glow. “Then what do you need a thousand pounds for?”
“I want to do a course,” I lied.
“A course on what?”
“On … er …” I had to think on my feet. Rather stupidly, I hadn’t planned for this very obvious question. As I hesitated, Ben nudged the back of my knee in the hope of a tidbit, and it came to me. The perfect answer. “Dog grooming,” I said.
“Dog grooming?”
“Yes.”
I hoped that would be the end of it, but of course it wasn’t.
“What do you want to do a course in dog grooming for?”
“For my career.”
“But you work in advertising. You’ve got a good job. A proper career.”
“Yes,” I said. “But it’s tough out there. People are talking redundancies all the time.”
“Is your firm talking about redundancies?” my mother asked. She still had her hands in the washing-up bowl. “Phil! Ashleigh’s firm is talking about redundancies!” she yelled to my father, who was snoozing beneath the business pages. My father spluttered awake.
“They’re not talking about redundancies,” I said, “but I don’t think that anyone can really afford to be complacent right now. That’s all. I’m just trying to make sure that if anything were to go wrong, I would be in the best possible position to look for work elsewhere.”
“Then why don’t you take a course in cake decorating?” said my mother. “You’d find that more interesting. And you already know you have a talent! People will always want wedding cakes. You get a qualification in cake making and you could charge the earth for three tiers. That cake you did for your grandma’s eightieth birthday was a triumph.”
“Thanks, Mum.”
“That’s what you ought to be doing if you’re worried about your job. Cake making. There are courses all over the place, and I’m sure they don’t cost anything like a thousand pounds. A thousand pounds for a course in dog grooming!” She raised her eyebrows.
I could see the money I needed slipping away from me. I wished I hadn’t started it.
“I understand what you’re saying, Mum, but I don’t think I’ll be able to make anywhere near as much money in cakes.”
“But I should thin
k that dog grooming is the first thing to go when people trim their household budgets.”
“Not necessarily. You know how much people love their pets,” I said, indicating Ben with a nod of my head. Mum always bought Ben birthday and Christmas presents. “There are lots of lonely people who treat their dogs like children. They’re not going to cut back on them. So I think my idea, to do the dog-grooming course, is the best one for now. Can you help me?”
“I’ll have to ask your father.”
Thankfully, though he was officially the breadwinner, Dad deferred to Mum on all matters financial. When she gave her consent, he merely shrugged and said, “Dog grooming,” with a shake of the head, as though it were some obscure branch of psychology he had never previously heard of.
Mum wrote the check.
“I’ll pay you back as soon as I can,” I promised her. “Thank you so much. I can’t tell you what this means to me.”
That much was true.
That night I put the check in the middle of the kitchen table and looked at it guiltily. Was I going mad? I was planning to hand over a thousand pounds to a voodoo priestess in an attempt to win back Michael’s heart. Would I have been better advised to take a grand out of the bank in fifty-pound notes and toss them off Battersea Bridge and into the Thames?
I should have handed the check back and told Mum that she was right. It would be more sensible for me to do a cake course. But I thought of the promises that Martha/Tiberius had made to me over the phone. To get Michael back, a thousand pounds seemed a very small price to pay. Practically peanuts. And I was sure that if Martha did manage to work her magic and Michael and I eventually married, Mum would be only too pleased and amused to hear how she had made her contribution to my happiness.
The following morning I took the check to the bank and made an appointment to see Martha four days later, by which time the check should have cleared.
With that appointment in my diary, I actually managed to make it into the office for the next four days and did some useful work between looking at the Well-Sprung Interiors website and checking Michael’s updates on Facebook. (He seemed to think that “Kevin” had told him Alex was a boy for a joke.) Oh, Facebook. Source of such agony and comfort. Each time I logged on I held my breath and hardly dared open my eyes beyond a squint until I could be sure that Michael hadn’t changed his relationship status again, to engaged.
Back before Michael broke up with me, back when my brain was still working (just), I would have turned and fled home the minute I emerged from the Tube station nearest to the address that Martha the cat psychic had given me. I was carrying a thousand pounds in cash through a part of London that even the hardest character Clint Eastwood ever played would not have chanced to walk through alone. And I was carrying my one and only real designer handbag: a Prada number I’d found on eBay. Though I doubted that any of the local footpads would have believed that anyone who ventured into their hood would be so daft as to carry real Prada, I didn’t want to lose it.
I walked quickly, praying that I could get to Martha’s door without incident. I was on such high alert that when a twenty-something lad opened his mouth to say something (like Gimme your handbag, I assumed), I barreled on past him at high speed, so that he had to shout after me to tell me that my shoelace was undone, right as I tripped over it. Then I managed to get lost. The battery on my iPhone had died and I had to call Martha from a phone box while another fierce-eyed boy-man waited outside. A drug dealer arranging a drop-off, I was sure. When he opened the door, I handed my bag straight over.
“What are you doing?” he asked, giving the bag back to me. “I only want to know how long you’re going to be. I need to call my mum to remind her to record Britain’s Got Talent.”
When he’d finished calling his mum, he directed me to the block where Martha lived. I had been standing right in front of it.
Martha opened the door.
“I knew the Great Ceiling Cat would help you find your way here,” she said as she ushered me inside.
She was, in so many ways, exactly as I had expected her to be. She was shorter than me. About five feet one. She was wearing a floor-length purple robe that was edged with black lace. Her hair, which was dyed red with a thick gray stripe of roots, was decorated with a black ribbon. Inside, her flat was also exactly as I had imagined. Though it was sunny outside, the place was dark as a cellar. Purple velvet was draped at every window. There was an overwhelming smell of incense and cat pee. It reminded me of the shops that Becky and I had frequented as teens, before emo had its own name.
“Did you bring the money?” Martha got straight to the point.
I nodded.
Martha counted out the thousand pounds in cash onto a table covered in a velvet curtain as though she had been a croupier in a previous existence. She pursed her lips when the first count came to £990 and I waited anxiously as she counted the wad again.
“Good,” she said.
“So, you can get Michael to come back to me now.”
“If it is what the spirits will,” Martha said.
“But …” I gestured to the money.
“Your money only buys my intervention with the spirits,” she explained. “I can guarantee nothing unless it is part of your life’s destined path.”
I was tempted to ask why I had just handed over a grand in that case. Was she telling me that if Michael was going to come back onto my life’s path, he would return regardless of whether or not I coughed up? And if the spirits didn’t will it, then vice versa? What exactly was her part in the whole thing?
“But I can hurry things along,” said Martha, as though she had sensed that I might be cottoning on to the futility of the transaction.
“Can you?” I asked.
“Yes. But I will need some things from you. I can perform a ‘go away’ spell on this new woman in your lover’s life, but in order to do that, you will need to collect a lock of her hair.”
“How can I do that?”
“You’ll find a way. Just one hair from her head will make the difference. You will add it to this”—she held up what looked like a gray sock—“which contains all the other ingredients you need to make her leave. Once you have all the ingredients, you must bury this talisman beneath the threshold to your lover’s house. She will be unable to step over it and eventually she must give him up for you once more.”
Martha handed me the gray sock. For it was a sock after all. I dared to peer inside it. As I opened the sock, there was a strong whiff of something unpleasant, and it wasn’t just the garden-variety scent of feet. It occurred to me then that perhaps this was an actual dead man’s sock, taken straight from a corpse!
“You want to know what’s inside?” said Martha.
I half shook my head, but she went ahead and told me anyway. “The pouch”—pouch! That was a sophisticated word for it—“contains a small glass bottle, inside which there are nine pins, nine needles, and nine nails to bring discomfort, anger, and pain. There is also the hair of a black dog and the hair of a black cat to make them fight like cat and dog. There is a small bundle of hyssop and hotfoot powder to make your rival run away.”
It sounded pretty serious.
“Are you sure you are ready to unleash the spell’s power?”
I looked at my hand. It was shaking as I held the stinking pouch.
Martha threw her head back and laughed. It was a proper Bond-baddy laugh, which shook her entire body and mine. Her current living cat jumped up from the table and fled for the safety of the curtains. I dropped the pouch on the floor.
“Careful!” Martha shouted. “You don’t want to release the djinn.”
Now I really didn’t want to pick it up. I just stood and stared until Martha had to pick the sock up from the floor and press it into my hand herself. Having done that, she suddenly rubbed at her ear as though she were a cat beginning to clean itself.
“Miaow,” she said. The spirit cat was back.
“Tiberius?”
“In that case—”
“But you have to follow the instructions. Get the hair and bury the spell. It must be outside his house. They have to step over it.” Then she hissed. “Tiberius is tired now. You must go.”
I didn’t need to be asked twice. I couldn’t wait to be out of that place. I felt as though the atmosphere in Martha’s house, with all those sickly, smoky smells, had been embalming me from the inside out. I could still smell the scent in my hair as I took the Tube back home.
Back in my flat, I tipped the contents of the pouch out on to a white plate and examined them. There was nothing that looked obviously harmful, but I still felt a shudder as I put it all back together again.
Part of me wanted it to be hokum, but another part of me wanted it to work very badly indeed. And it wouldn’t work until I got the hair.
How on earth was I going to get the hair?
I knew where to find Miss Well-Sprung, but I couldn’t just walk into her shop and pull a hair straight from her head. I would have to get her to come to me.
I called Becky and told her my plan.
“No,” she said. “Ashleigh, this is nut-job behavior. It is stalking. It is illegal. And it probably carries a prison term.”
“So, you’re saying you won’t help me?”
I had asked Becky if she would invite Michael’s new girlfriend over to her house to measure up her sofas for some new soft covers. She would be bound to lose a hair in the process. All I had to do was turn up at Becky’s house right after she left and find the thing. Unfortunately, Becky was not about to “enable me,” as she put it.
“No,” she said right away.
“Come on,” I pleaded. “It’s just half an hour of your time.”
“I don’t understand why you want to see her. I mean, Ashleigh, how is it going to help you? Really?”
Getting Over Mr. Right Page 9
