Necessary Separation

“Do you do, like, readings?, the young woman was in her mid twenties, she was dressed in a assortment of ill fitting clothes assembled in an attempt to look bohemian and had a untidy birds nest of dark hair. Her voice rose slightly at the end of every sentence making everything she said into a question.

Did he do readings? Tony rather thought the neatly painted sign on the window of his lock up on the promenade reading: Tony Mars, Tarot, Palmistry, Clairvoyance with the tag line ‘As seen on television’ added on to give it authenticity might have answered her question. Politeness was part of his trade though and so he smiled as he said that yes he did indeed do ‘readings.’

“Because my friend said that I should come to you about Barry,” Tony noticed as the young woman took a seat opposite him that she smelled faintly of cigarette smoke, something the cheap deodorant she had sprayed herself liberally with signally failed to hide. She giggled nervously and fidgeted in her seat as she introduced herself as Carol, there were a lot of bracelets on her wrists and they clattered noisily when she moved.

“How can I help you Carol, is there something you want to know?”, he kept his voice low to encourage her to lean towards him, it was all part of the act, as were the table with a black cloth draped over it and the crystal ball that he hardly ever actually used.

“Like I say my friend came to see you, she’s called Tracy, do you remember her?

Not a chance, thought Tony, there were so many girls of her age, a parade of Susan’s and Claire’s with a good few Tracie’s thrown in for good measure, all down at the coast wanting a good time. Having their fortune told was just another stop on the tour after the amusement arcade and before the pub, a little harmless spookiness to be giggled over when they were back home.

“No? Only she said you were very good, told her all about her Nan and all that.”

“Would you mind if I took your hand?”, Carol nodded nervously and Tony gently took hold of her hand, which was pale and warm. He didn’t say anything for a moment; any good performance depends as much on the silences between the lines as on the lines themselves.

“Are they here now? I mean like dead people,” her voice had become a breathy whisper like that of a child asking whether Santa Claus could really see if she was being good or not.

“They are all around us, all the time. People we have loved and lost, who have passed over. I feel someone close to us now, someone you knew as…”

It happened quite suddenly at the point where, assuming he had got his patter right, Carol would have asked did he mean her Aunt Mary or someone like that, giving him enough of a clue to start fishing around for information that could be fed back to her. What happened was that he began to feel a throbbing sensation behind his eyes like the start of a migraine; this was not going to be a normal ‘reading’ after all.

His perception of the room around him with its dowdy stage prop furniture and tatty carpet seemed to dim, the traffic noises from the street outside distorted into another sound that he could not at first identify, the air was filled with the smell of something earthy and unclean and the rustling of countless unseen forms moving. The noise resolved itself slowly into two words necessary separation, repeated over and over again:

Necessaryseparationneccessaryseparationnecessaryseparationnecessaryseparationnecessaryseparationnecessaryseparationnecessaryseparationnecessarseparationnecess

Then all of a sudden the words faded like an echo heard from the bottom of a well:

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As Tony felt himself falling forward into total nothingness.

When he regained something close to consciousness Tony felt he was looking into a shabby room through the wrong end of a telescope. There was a badly made bed, a wardrobe with a flyblown mirror fixed to its door and a ratty run of carpet that ended a good foot short of the skirting board.

He had been here before, not to this specific room; which he supposed belonged to one of the cheaper hotels in town, the experience of seeing events being played out elsewhere; maybe that hadn’t even happened yet was all too familiar.

It took Tony a moment to realise there was someone lying on the bed half under the tatty pink coverlet; someone he had just met, this, he guessed, wasn’t going to be good news.

The person lying on the bed was Carol, the girl who had asked him if he ‘did like readings’, she was still wearing an odd assortment of thrift shop clothes in an attempt to look bohemian, her hair was artfully untidy, what had changed was her face. She looked older, more tired with dark rings under her eyes as if she hadn’t been sleeping regularly.

On the scarred chest of drawers by the bed stood a drink can that had been used as an ashtray, as Carol swung herself awkwardly out of bed her foot caught against the drawers causing the can to clatter to the floor. She looked down at where the mixture of ash and soda was soaking into the carpet but didn’t bend down to wipe up the mess. There was something else on the floor, the torn fragments of a photograph, too small for Tony to see what the picture had been of, just slivers of a face caught smiling or a hand placed around the shoulder of somebody.

The vision being presented to Tony moved its focus like a cinema camera changing scene, there was a frame of blackness then he was looking at the pebbly stretch of beach next to the pier. It was a grey day, too grey for it to be summer, the beach was deserted and the only sounds were the far off cries of seagulls and the relentless soughing of the water against the palings of the pier.

The water looked cold and grey, where the waves slapped against the pebbles of the beach the water beat itself into grey-white foam. There was something floating in the water, rising and falling with the motion of the waves; coming a little closer to the shore each time. Tony didn’t want to see what was in the water, but the camera lens of his perception moved pitilessly in for the money shot anyway.

There, face down on the uncomfortable bed made by the grey-green water floated Carol, her arms flung out as if she were flying. An impression added to by the way the water had inflated the layers of clothing she was wearing to look like wings. Slowly the motion of the waves brought her inland, a last cheap trick played on someone who had, perhaps, thought that her troubles could be swum away from if only she went far enough out and nobody noticed she was drowning and not waving.

Eventually the waves brought he body up onto the shore and left it lying where they broke against the pebbles like a broken doll dropped by a thoughtless child. There was, Tony noticed, seaweed in her hair; the strands of one indistinguishable from the other as the grey-white foam formed a dirty halo around her head.

The sound of the waves was an unending chorus of sibilance:

ssssnessssssnessscsssnecessarysssnecssesaryssseparationnessicaryseparationneccessaryseparationnececcesaryseparationnecessaryseaparationnecessaryseparationnesss

I
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Tony was back in the shop on the promenade with the painted sign on the window, holding the hand of a living young woman and wondering what to say.

What had he said? Tony wasn’t sure. He could have testified to every other detail of what passed between them, the time she left the shop, how much she had paid even the direction in which she had walked away along the promenade; but what had been said was a mystery.

When he was younger and had, more than once, answered a phone call from the Ship Inn to come and help his father home after an evening propping up the bar the old man had told him about the promise that went along with their family trade. Being able to see things that were shut off from the sight of most people was in no way a licence to tell them the truth.

Quite the reverse in fact, when punters, as his father put it, always with a touch of contempt in his voice, put up their money the very last thing they wanted to be told was the truth. They wanted a prediction of the future that would have all the sharp edged sanded down, where every ticket was a winner and dreams couldn’t help but come true; everything else was just so much mess for someone else to sweep neatly out of sight.

Tony supposed what he had told Carol was that she was going to meet someone who would change her life for the better the day after tomorrow, that all her dreams were going to come true and everything would turn out for the best. He told a variation of the same story to all his customers regardless of what, if anything, he really saw coming towards them and without fail it seemed to make them feel better, that they had had their money’s worth from the unknown.

Had what he said made Carol feel better? Tony hoped so; she had been smiling when she left the shop. Tony stood in the doorway of the shop and watched her walk away along the promenade, past the overflowing rubbish bins and the fish and chip shop, as she passed under the awning of a shop selling cheap tat Carol turned and seeing him watching her waved before going inside.

Tony stood on the doorstep a little longer looking out across the promenade to where the land sloped down the beach. It was late in the day, there would be no more customers now if he wanted to he could lock up the shop, cross the road and go down the slimy steps to the pebbly beach. At this time of year the tide never came all the way into the shore and he would be able to walk around the bay towards the pier listening to the sibilant voice of the waves. Hear it talking quietly about the separation, land from sea; living from not living, that was inescapably necessary.