Mr. Flood's Last Resort(73)

The audience looks glazed: no one wants to bid for the Cypriot.

Doreen closes her eyes and nods again, a little impatiently. “He suffered gastrically, very badly.” She opens her eyes and grabs hold of her large stomach, cradling it in her arms. She points towards the back of the room. “He wants to talk with someone over there. Can anyone take this? I’m hearing the name Tony or Anthony.”

A woman raises her hand hesitantly. “My postman, he was a Tony,” she suggests. “But he was from Blackburn.”

“But he liked a holiday? He was a sun worshipper?”

The woman ponders. “He might have been. I didn’t know him all that well.”

Doreen ignores this and closes her eyes again. “Tony passed very quickly. But he says he lived life to the full.”

“He did, Doreen.”

“Tony is telling me that there’s a Peter, Paul, Pam, Paddy. Now he’s showing me a clock. He’s pointing to the dial.”

The woman shakes her head. “I don’t know, love. I have a neighbor called Pat. She has a carriage clock.”

Doreen closes her eyes again. “She recently had a procedure.”

The woman looks amazed. “She did, last year.”

“Yes . . .” Doreen gives a fruity giggle. “I can’t say that, Tony.” She opens her eyes and looks at the woman. “Tony is showing me legs. Pat had her legs done.”

“She did, her varicose!”

Doreen smiles. “Tony knew her well. He says to tell her to wear the surgical stockings and put her feet up more often. And he says that you’re not to worry about him; he’s gone to a better place.”

The woman in the audience nods, pleased that the postman she hardly knew is in a better place. Later she’ll knock up Pat to give her the message from dead Tony.

Doreen, satisfied, goes back into her trance.

*

I LOOK around the room, at the snaggle-arsed audience bathed in Doreen’s charlatan glow. Over the lectern is a picture of a kneeling angel, painted on Perspex and backlit by fluorescent light. It shines down its benediction on Doreen Gouge as she interprets the senile ramblings of the imaginary dead. I watch Sam. He is engrossed, his hair falling around his face, his lovely gray eyes trained on the podium. He glances over at me and gives me a quick grin. My heart flips. I study his espadrilles.

*

DOREEN HAS earned her money tonight. Standing on her box before the lectern she has mimed a myriad of unfortunate deaths. Tonight, she says, we are at suicide central, with two “accidental” deaths by sleeping pills and a tortured soul called Janet who made a bid for perpetual freedom from the top of a car park in Shepherd’s Bush.

Doreen chillingly mimes Janet’s splayed free fall onto tarmac on a dark February morning ten years ago, which narrowly missed a bread van and a Renault Clio.

The devil is in the detail.

None of us can lay claim to Janet. But we are reassured she feels no pain in the afterlife. We let her story die with her. We let her go. There she’ll be, forever falling from level fifteen, spiraling through the air like a sycamore seed, caught on eddies, her coat flapping. Hitting the deck like a bag of blood.

*

WE SING another song, this time an ABBA one, to top up the energy. In the second half Doreen concentrates on immedicable infections and malingering sicknesses, interspersed by DIY accidents.

Doreen likens the afterlife to the Underground, so that we can get things in perspective. You have your cancer at Oxford Circus and your heart disease at King’s Cross—these stations are always busy. Whereas for something like decapitation with a circular saw you’d need to be heading out of town towards Chesham. Sam smiles and nods; I watch him enjoying this exhibition of dupery. Taking lessons, no doubt.

It takes me a moment or two to realize that Doreen is looking directly at me.

“I’ve a small man wearing built-up shoes. Shifty expression. Standing behind you. Can you take it?”

I stare at her.

Doreen smiles back, unfazed, and talks very slowly. “Built-up shoes, dear. He’s showing me a stage, footlights. I believe he was in show business. Can you take it?”

Several members of the audience turn round in their chairs to look at me.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“A dapper little man in tails and a top hat, pulling something out of his sleeve.” Doreen mimes behind the lectern. “A string of hankies, bunch of flowers, cagey aspect to him.”

And then it comes to me. “Bernie Sparks,” I say with a surge of jubilation.

Doreen narrows her eyes. “Don’t feed me, but that’s him.” She concentrates hard on a point above my head. “He’s showing me a white rabbit.”

“He was a magician.”

She scowls. “I can see that.” She closes her eyes. “He says time is running out for the poor little girl all alone in the dark. It was a long, long way to fall. She’s at the bottom of the rabbit hole and she needs to climb back out, tick-tock.”

Other audience members glance at me with interest. This isn’t the usual kind of message. They purse their lips and wait for Bernie to talk about kidney disease or where he hid the premium bonds.

“Pussy’s in the well,” lisps Doreen, baby voiced, with a malevolent smile on her face. “Ding-dong bell, right down the well, Bernie wants you to know—”