The Extra Large Medium

by Helen Slavin

  The Extra Large Medium

  The Extra Large Medium

  Helen Slavin

  Copyright © 2007 by Helen Slavin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Originally publishged in Australia by The Text Publishing Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Slavin, Helen.

  The extra large medium / Helen Slavin.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9911-9

  1. Women mediums—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6119.L38E97 2007

  823′.92—dc22 2006052630

  Black Cat

  a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For Dad, who started the race,

  and Stephen, who took up the baton.

  I don’t get to see Heaven. Once, there was an unseemly tussle with what I think was an angel. Muscular. Lots of feathers. It was pushing against the other side of a door. That’s what I chiefly see. Doors. Not the huge gothic-style doors hewn from oak that you might imagine. Not Pearly Gates either. Bog standard blank doors. Made from MDF.

  Angels are intimidating. The bouncers of Heaven. At least that is the message I get from a lot of my clients. The angels aren’t keen on dead people communicating with living people. Once you’re dead the angels think you cross a line and that in fact a line should be drawn under you. Or possibly a cross over you.

  You should put up and shut up. You’ve had your time. You’ve said your piece.

  Which brings me to me. I have always been able to hear the Dead speak. That makes it sound very high-flown, as if I am some semi-celestial messenger tap-dancing up and down that staircase they had in A Matter of Life and Death with a series of life or death communications.

  What I should say is that I have always been able to listen to dead people whingeing on, moaning and groaning (without chains) about the myriad petty gripes and grumbles of life. That is the key. If your Aunt Mildred was a sour old bat when she was alive the addition of harp lessons and a cloud is not going to turn her into a philosopher.

  It has been my experience that most dead people who come back to haunt others, or in fact pester me, do so because they’ve got some unfinished business of a particularly tedious sort. Lost cats, squabbles over wills, Crown Derby coffee sets and leather pouffes are about the limits of it. No one has anything earth shattering to say. I exist as a kind of customer service department, running a stream of endless errands just to keep these people quiet.

  I’m on the side of the angels. Shut up is what I say. Or else tell me what it’s like. Tell me something. Anything. Protect me.

  Chocolate brown childhood

  AS A KID I used to see a lot of people who wore chocolate brown clothing. As a kid, I accepted this as the norm. I thought that chocolate brown was a very popular colour for clothing.

  Chocolate brown is the new black. They don’t wear black in Heaven apparently. I don’t know what they wear because, as stated, I get the door in my face. But when you aren’t quite checked into your parking space behind the pearly gates you get to moon about in chocolate brown.

  In Hell they all wear evening gowns. Heavily boned bodices. Dress-shirt collars just that bit too tight. Your forehead just that bit too sweaty and the perspiration running like an itching, infuriating river down from your armpit into the elastic of your knickers. The point where it pinches your waistband.

  So…I imagined that the brown-clothed people could be seen and heard by everyone. When I was five My Mother thought that I had an imaginary friend called, unlikely I know, Mrs Berry. My Mother accepted her existence completely. This was one of those phases that children go through.

  Mrs Berry sat and knitted chocolate brown scarves and mittens and hideous bobbled hats at our kitchen table. She talked to me about household tips and gossip about friends and neighbours who were themselves long dead. She grumbled about being dead not because she missed being alive, or kisses, or the smell of the earth after a summer rainstorm. No, Mrs Berry thought being dead was very inconvenient because she couldn’t bottom the house.

  ‘Bottom the house’. It was her favourite phrase. Her joy was to clean and scour from attic to cellar (if we’d had one). Not for her the fragrances of Chanel or even a bottle of Tweed. No. Mrs Berry liked Ajax and Dolly Blue.

  I suppose it is a measure of My Mother that she did not find it in the least odd that when I talked about Mrs Berry I talked about the war and household chores and the suet pudding recipe in this week’s Woman’s Weekly. It never occurred to her to think ‘Where is Annie getting all this?’ But then we had Patrice staying with us and she pretty much only had eyes for him. He was a student from Toulouse. I don’t remember very much about him except that he taught me to say ‘Bonjour’.

  The things he taught My Mother were many and myriad. As a child I had not realised that there are two worlds that we live in, the world that everyone sees on the outside, Living Room World, and the world that only you see on the inside. The world of closed bedroom doors and wet weekends in Tunbridge Wells. At seven I was being tutored in the fine arts of Brasso and starch by a woman who had been dead for forty years and My Mother, who was supposed to be schooling me in the ways of bedtime stories and the safe castle that should be your home, was being tutored in fellatio by a man probably half her age.

  In fact if I really think about it, and trust me I don’t, she was probably tutoring him. He was after all a student, not more than eighteen. Who knows what My Mother’s sexual history was before my birth? It was chequered as a chess board after me. It would have been psychedelic if I hadn’t happened along to cramp her style.

  You’re not really allowed to say that are you? Not in the Living Room World. You’re supposed to think that your mother, and indeed, if you have one, your father, are next to the angels. They don’t get it wrong. Then you grow up yourself and realise that parents are irrevocably human too. I look back now and wonder at how I ever trusted My Mother with anything. She was, after all, as loopy and dangerous as I am now. If I ever manage to have any children I shall tell them at the outset, ‘Don’t trust me, I’m lost and afraid too. I have NO IDEA.’

  What Patrice did teach her was how to cook. The growth of garlic in our back garden and a herb trough are testament to that. I still cannot smell lemon thyme and not think of him and his soft voice, his strange words. I imagine that My Mother smelt lemon thyme and thought of his kisses, or the touch of his hand, hot and sweaty on the cool marble of her backside.

  For me, however, there was also a third world, no pun intended. This third world was the Waiting Room of Heaven World.

  Things arrived at breaking point when Mrs Berry could no longer keep her rather unkind remarks about My Mother’s housekeeping abilities to herself.

  My Mother had a lot of abilities and quite frankly I have never blamed her for not nurturing that one. My Mother cleaned the bath out with dirty laundry. She did not red raddle steps, clean windows with vinegar and scrim cloths or tur
n her mattresses. Instead she had a good time, giving her mattresses adequate exercise with sweaty sexual excesses.

  I argued with Mrs Berry. She got angry and broke a teapot. Shoved it clean off the worktop. It smashed at my feet.

  My Mother, who was eating pickled beetroot out of the jar at the time, saw the whole thing, saw the teapot lift in the air and smash down without any help from me. I cried, ‘I didn’t do it…it was Mrs Berry…’ And we went to sleep at Aunt Mag’s for the night. Even Patrice. I don’t think there was a three-in-a-bed-and-the-little-one-said situation. Not knowing my Aunt Mag as I did.

  But there, I have foxed my own argument. I did not know my Aunt Mag. I knew the Living Room World of Aunt Mag. The ciggie smoking, grumbling old baggage in too-tight jumpers with too-done, candy floss hair.

  It was an odd night at Aunt Mag’s. I often spent Thursday nights there. More on that later. But those Thursdays were taken up with Aunt Mag smoking and me eating her supply of garibaldi biscuits and blowing the skin off the instant hot chocolate that she always made for me.

  I have to confess that I didn’t much care for instant hot chocolate. It was always chalky and sweet but it was something I did that was different. It was peculiar to Aunt Mag’s and so, even though it was disgusting and coated my teeth with a chocolate brown fuzzy feeling, I enjoyed it. It was part of my tapestry.

  On the night we stayed there with Patrice there was no hot chocolate. Aunt Mag poured My Mother a stiff whisky and they sat in front of the telly with the sound turned down. Their faces were illuminated by the flickering white light as they knocked back the amber coloured liquid from little shot glasses. They looked like women who should have been in a saloon with John Wayne. Only of course he would have put them across his knee for such wanton behaviour.

  I stood at the bottom of the stairs watching them through the glass pane in the living-room door. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, only vague mumbles which seemed all to be scared or anxious—there were no comforting mumbles that night. My Aunt Mag shuddered and shook ash all over her clothes. She swiped at it with her hand. As she did so she caught sight of me out of the corner of her eye and screamed. My Mother looked up and screamed too before they realised it was me.

  My life had become a ghost story. I was a Midwich Cuckoo.

  Mum’s Eye View: sideways on

  Is this on? What do I do? Just talk?…

  She was scary as a kid, Annie. She was scary before she was born. I was young and wild and untamed. Untrained really for anything. No one told me about men. You know, they don’t come with a handbook or an instruction manual. I got what they’d call ‘hands on’ training then. Their hands. On.

  When she…when I was…You didn’t really say the word ‘pregnant’ either. It was like ‘Nazi’ or ‘bum’, you just didn’t use the word.

  It’s always been hard for a single mum except in the war when they were the home front, and even then I get the impression they were expected to be saintly. Not go dancing. How dare you go dancing when your husband is off fighting?

  Go dancing is what I’d’ve said. He’s fighting for your right to dance. Dance because he is fighting.

  I think the Virgin Mary has a lot to answer for myself. But then, what do we really know about her, eh? Only what’s siphoned through the Bible. My God and I think I had a scary kid…

  You’re not born a mum. It’s a trade you have to learn you know, like being a blacksmith. Only I think that a blacksmith eventually works out how to make the horseshoes or the wrought-iron fencing whereas, being a mother, a parent I should say, you’re never finished. You’re always the apprentice and let’s face it, the kid is always your master.

  I don’t believe much in nurture. I believe in love. But I believe you are what you are, ready made, in a parcel. The wrapping just gets torn off as you go. Some people are a diamond tiara. Others are Christmas socks.

  With my girl…she came out a bit like a woolly jumper knitted by your Aunt Alice. You aren’t sure at first but then you put it on and it truly was made for you. It keeps you warm. It smells like home.

  There’s terror and fear and hatred and resentment and all the things they never tell you. But that day when I found out about… when I knew, I thought I’d let her down. I didn’t know how to protect her, how to fix this for her. I felt useless. I thought she’d grow out of it. I hoped.

  Because someone was in our house talking to my daughter. Picking on my daughter. Someone I couldn’t see. An intruder. You can’t sleep for thinking, well what is she saying and doing now? So you go to the single mother of them all and you ask her for advice.

  And after all that talk of Faith—they don’t Believe, you know.

  Bell, book, candle

  MRS BERRY. That was the giveaway. Her name, Mrs Berry. My Mother found out that Mrs Berry had lived in our house some forty years previously. My Mother confessed to my Aunt Mag that a whole series of petty but unexplained events, moving soap, folded tea towels, a rug moving across the room, could all now be put down to Mrs Berry bearing a forty-year housekeeping grudge towards the subsequent mortgagees of her home. For forty years Mrs Berry had denied herself the pleasures of Heaven because no one was putting enough Domestos in the toilet. Small minded doesn’t cover it.

  My Mother decided to have the house exorcised and the priest, Father Tansy, was called in.

  Father Tansy arrived with his bell, book and candle and he droned his way through some prayers sprinkling holy water everywhere, which just about drove Mrs Berry batty. I watched as she followed him around with a chocolate brown dishcloth trying to contain the mess. ‘Priests,’ she grumbled before moving the soap from the left side of the kitchen sink to the right. My Mother and Father Tansy were up in the attic by then, casting demons out of the bric à brac and undiscovered antiquities that were stashed there.

  Lesson Number One. Other people’s junk often comes with other people. It is unfinished business of the first water. Stuff they have left undone and will spend centuries trying to do. Some people cannot leave it alone. It’s like leaving the grill on, they get halfway up that stairway to Heaven and they remember, ‘Oh my God, I’ve left that Picasso in the attic…our Gerard will never find it under the insulation…I’ll just be a minute.’ But a minute is an eternity and no one ever finds the Picasso under the insulation because no one can hear them.

  Except me. I know what is down the back of your sofa. I have been told about the shed keys dropped under the floorboards in the dining room. I have been told about those keys some thirty-five years after that shed has been destroyed to make way for a pre-fab garage.

  My Mother had a lot of sleepless nights after my encounter with Mrs Berry. Already I was being shown the way. I had to keep further encounters from My Mother. I should not worry her like this. I did not want to make her afraid.

  At seven I was in Miss Hadley’s class at school. It was an old school, built in Victorian times with high windows like a prison. On one corridor there was a stock room with a heavy dark blue door that had a grille set into the bottom of it. This room was stacked high with pots of glue and sugar paper, exercise books, pencil erasers, pencils and poster paints. It had its own strange aroma and I did not like it. I did not like to walk past it.

  One afternoon I was sent to fetch some sugar paper and some gummed squares and I found out why I didn’t like the cupboard.

  There was a brown-clad boy in there. Albert. He had been locked in there in 1896 and had suffocated. His teacher, Miss Whitemarsh, had shut him up in there as a punishment for not having boots and she had forgotten about him. It had been raining and she had been offered a lift home by a handsome butcher who was courting her. It was only later over a dinner of pork chops that she remembered Albert. By then it was too late.

  The courts did not look kindly on Miss Whitemarsh for suffocating her pupil. Miss Whitemarsh was hanged by the neck until dead and the Education Authority had a ventilation grille fitted into the heavy blue door. Which explained the brown-clad
lady I had seen walking up and down the corridor every day since I arrived at the school.

  At the age of seven I reminded Miss Whitemarsh where she had left Albert. In letting him out she let them both go. It was the first time I had seen a real ghost, as the two faded from chocolate brown to an ethereal grey before disappearing into a shaft of sunlight and dust motes cast from the high windows.

  My Mother didn’t encourage me at all. My Mother, through her own fears, did not want me chit-chatting with the Dead. It was forbidden. After she had Mrs Berry exorcised, she put it out of her mind as a phase I would grow out of. Her fear made me afraid, although no one ever tried to hurt me. Bore me, possibly.

  And I felt that this strange Waiting Room of Heaven World was something I did wrong. It was a bad naughtiness but I couldn’t rid myself of it. It didn’t matter if I didn’t listen to these people, they kept pushing at me. They woke me in the night shouting into my ear so that I would sit bolt upright amongst the blankets, sweating into the darkness, only to be told some tedious nonsense from Mrs Ordsall about pruning some fruit tree. Or there was the very persistent Mr Knightley. ‘Have they bought that grand piano yet? Did you tell them what I said about Winchley’s and that upright? Did you tell them?’

  I have often wondered whether Mr Knightley’s relatives ever bought that grand piano or if they took his proper advice and plumped for the upright.

  It was Aunt Mag who thought I should be encouraged. She said that being a medium ran in the family. That my Great-uncle Sidney had once rolled out of the snug at the Claybank and into a spiritualist meeting. Him and a group of belching, farting mates spilling out of the pub into the rain, all eager for somewhere to keep warm whilst waiting for the bus.

  The lights from the Spiritualist Church across the road were golden. It was the most golden light that Uncle Sidney had ever seen. And before you get too bowled over and start interpreting Destiny, Fate and the Intervention of Angels, you should remember that my Great-uncle Sidney was, as he put it, ‘Three sheets and a couple of patchwork quilts to the wind.’