Mr. Flood's Last Resort(74)

She freezes, and the smile drops off her face. “The Red Queen is coming,” she says, with more than a hint of Irish brogue.

My heart turns over.

Doreen is staring straight ahead with a look of riveted horror. I watch as her hands find her popcorn necklace and begin to turn it, winding it tighter and tighter around her throat. Her face twists too, into a grimace.

The audience begin to whisper amongst themselves. This doesn’t normally happen. They glare at me accusingly. My dead friend and I have conspired to short-circuit Doreen.

Doreen starts to whimper.

Her wild-eyed assistant clambers onto the stage with a look of panic and pulls urgently on Doreen’s sleeve. Doreen grinds into gear again, blinking and looking around her.

“I’ve lost the connection,” she says weakly. “I’ve lost the connection.”

*

SAM LOOKS pale as he slips his hand in mine, and I let him, for I feel oddly chilled. Doreen recovers well. Delivering a swift succession of life-affirming messages and finishing on the upbeat advice of a dead council clerk called Jean who stresses the importance of seizing the day and following your dreams. A woman in the back row says she will, she promises she will, she’ll book a mini cruise.

By the time Doreen leads us into our final song, an uplifting hit from the Carpenters, and the dead shamble back through the wall to the boundless tundra of all eternity, the audience seem to have forgotten her strange aberration.

*

AFTERWARDS THERE are light refreshments and a chance to mingle. The wild-eyed helper starts taking bookings for psychic portrait paintings. Sam is deep in conversation with her as I step out of the hall.

Along a narrow hallway smelling of incense and stagnant mop buckets there’s a door with a cardboard star. I knock once and open it, not giving the occupant a chance to turn me away.

In a room the size of a broom cupboard, Doreen Gouge is leaning out of the window, smoking. She has her shoes off and a quarter bottle of vodka on the windowsill next to her.

“May I have a word?”

She narrows her eyes through the smoke. “I do private readings by appointment, love, every second Thursday. If you step back outside there’s a leaflet.”

I open my bag. “I’m sorry, I can’t wait that long. I need you to take a look at this.”

She frowns at me, her mouth slack and her eyes full of bored venom. She looks a lot younger close up, under the makeup.

I notice a pair of biker’s boots in the corner and a crash helmet. I start to wonder who the real Doreen Gouge is.

“Twenty-odd years ago a woman was investigating the case of a missing schoolgirl when she herself met an untimely death. Just before she died she left this with a neighbor, saying that someone would come looking for her—it was almost as if she had some kind of premonition.” I pull out the notebook. “It has my initials inside and a message.”

Doreen takes another drag on her cigarette and turns back to the window.

“This woman, Mary, kept cuttings on the case she was investigating—I’m sorry, are you even listening?”

Doreen glowers over her shoulder at me.

I try again. “I’m here because I think you could help me find out what this dead woman discovered, and potentially even find the missing girl. What you said tonight—”

“I can’t help you.”

“Doreen, please, if you really saw something . . .”

She turns, balances her cigarette on the edge of the table, and holds her hand out for the notebook. She reads the dedication; she touches the writing.

She hands it back to me. “Nothing. Sorry.”

“But you saw something earlier?”

Doreen picks up her cigarette and takes a deep drag. “I can’t remember. I don’t know what I say half the time. One minute.”

Doreen flicks her cigarette out of the window and pulls her dress up over her head. A cushion is tied around her middle with several woolen scarves. I watch as she unwinds them and lays them one after the other on the back of a chair.

She stands in front of me, a thin young woman in an Iggy Pop T-shirt. “They prefer their mediums with a bit of padding. It lends gravitas. So, how do you know the book is for you?”

“Those are my initials.”

“Plenty of other people with those initials.”

“Are you going to help me or not?”

Doreen Gouge smiles.

*

HER REAL name is Eleanor Kemp, she says, and she struggles with her imagination. She tells me that she is brim-full of voices, songs on a loop. She sees faces daily, and sometimes all day, distorted as if pressed against a window, laughing, sobbing, or just looking in. Like the voices, the faces come and go, ebb and flow. On her worst days the dead are relentlessly real; they stand in front of her scratching their arses, demanding and bickering. On better days they dampen to a whispered word, the faint smell of lilac, then she can buy shoes and pay her gas bill. Eleanor sometimes wonders who is more alive, her or the dead, for she can lose days at the mercy of the dear departed.

Then there are the sudden vivid pictures, memories that don’t belong to her: dappled shade on a veranda, the face of a sleeping baby, the whip and billow of sails against an Aegean blue sea. Or a hand that’s not her own: on a bottle, on a bridge, on a swing, on a knife.

Sometimes she’s medicated, sometimes not. When she’s medicated, she sleeps more; the dead come either way.