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and started talking about what we’d have for our dinner.
    First published in
Cara,
February 2004
.
    Au Secours, J’ai Trente Ans
is now available on DVD.

The Real Thing

    You know on some crappy cable channel, there are shows where a load of swizzers stand on a stage and ‘deliver’ messages from the dead to the poor schmucks in the audience? The swizzers spend a lot of time with their hand cupped around their ear as they ‘listen’ to the other-worldly voices and they call everyone ‘my love’ especially when they make people cry. (Example: ‘He forgives you, my love, so you must forgive yourself.’)
    Yes, well, I admit to a certain fascination with them. One half of me is watching with my lip curled scornfully, and the other half is thinking: but what if it’s true?
    Then one day, I read a review in a respected broadsheet of a live show one of these swizzer women – we’ll call herAngela – had done; they reckoned she was the real thing. They also said she did one-to-one readings and, all of a sudden, I was excited.
    Research, see. I was thinking of writing about a woman who can’t stop looking for answers and attends all manner of swizzers. But, handily enough, I was going through a bit of a bad patch myself and I was interested in what messages from beyond the grave Angela might have for me.
    Possibly as a result of the piece in the paper, Angela was very hard to get hold of. I sent an email, which wasn’t replied to for months. When she finally did get in touch, she offered me a half-hour reading over the phone in two months’ time. But first I had to send a cheque for twenty-five euro – which, in all fairness, wasn’t rip-off astronomical.
    So I sent my cheque off, counted down the days and tried to keep a tight rein on my hope.
    Over the years, on and off, I’d gone to tarot readers, as you do. (Or maybe you don’t.)
    I often went when I was having man trouble (most of the time). And then there were the social events, when you got in a load of Chardonnay and a tarot reader came to your house and ‘did’ nine or ten of you, and you all got scuttered and had a good laugh.
    But recently I’d had a bad run. I’d gone to a few (again in the name of research with my personal interest add-on) and they’d been seriously crap. A tiny little voice inside me was suggesting that perhaps they’d always been bad. Maybe I’d wanted so hard to believe that I’d overcompensated for their bollocks. And indeed, years ago, I remember one who’d got so much alarmingly wrong about me that when she said, ‘You’vejust suffered a bereavement?’ I found myself agreeing that I had (although I hadn’t) because I was so embarrassed for her.
    Recently, when I’d asked a tarot reader about my career, she’d said, ‘Don’t worry about your career, love. Let your husband take care of all that. Be there to support him and maybe in a couple of years’ time you can get a part-time job.’
    I’d also been promised two children who’d never arrived. I’d been told I’d be moving house, which I hadn’t. And a dark-haired man would deliver good news and then ask for money – as yet, no sign of him. The accumulated disappointments had stacked up on top of each other and were on the verge of toppling over into cynicism. So I really, really,
really
wanted this Angela person to be good.
    But on the appointed day and hour, when I rang, she said, ‘Who are you? Maureen from Dublin? Look, I can’t talk to you today, I’ve got builders in. Bye.’
    She was about to hang up, but anxiously I said, ‘Wait! When
can
you talk to me?’
    She said impatiently, ‘Oh I dunno. Ring me on Saturday at five,’ and the line went dead.
    So I rang on Saturday at five and even before her answering machine clicked in, I knew she wouldn’t be there. I left a message, then sent another email and after I didn’t hear from her, I decided to forget it. Friends and family got heated about the twenty-five euro I’d been swizzed out