Should Laura Beesley trade in her six-year-old hatchback? Most certainly and soon is the guidance from the “astral plane” (the vehicle’s on-board computer is aware of several expensive faults that are about to trigger).
Make an offer on that house in Shoreham-by-Sea? Collette Rowe is counseled to look elsewhere; what the vendor won’t mention—but his mobile phone will—is that it’s riddled with dry rot.
Which family member took a valuable diamond brooch from the dressing table of Edwina Baldwin’s recently deceased mother? Well, it wasn’t diamond, it was paste, she is gently informed. Would it have helped to reveal it was Edwina’s own boyfriend who obtained the disappointing valuation? Time will doubtless reveal him for the no-goodnik (covert gambler and porn enthusiast) he unquestionably is.
The only punter we cannot instantly assist is Monica, who has left home without her mobile phone, although once she divulges her address, all sorts of fun facts come to light: her kleptomania, her eight cats, and the novel she is writing about artificial intelligence. Keep going, we tell her. Parts of it are really quite good. Someone is sure to publish it!
It’s with a final feeling of relief that the only male face to emerge from beyond the curtain today is that of Endrit from Whetstone Wheels (ask for an airport quote). Summoned by myself when the chaos started, he now explains to Chloe he’s taking her back to London—via the Brighton Police station to collect Clive—and perhaps there will be time for a spot of lunch along the way.
“Thank fuck for that,” she roars. “You are truly a knight in shining armor.”
It’s hard to tell for sure in the gloom of the fortune teller’s booth, but I rather think he blushes.
nine
On a Saturday in late summer, me and Mark, plus Mum and her chap traveled down to Brighton together. We worried about taking the train again in case it stirred up bad memories, but we needn’t have bothered. Mum seemed to have forgotten the chaos of her previous trip and although a few “facts” have come out in dribs and drabs—some nonsense about how she became a fortune teller on the sea front!—none of us will ever really know what happened. Mark says he envies his demented patients occasionally—the ones who are not too far gone, obvs—living in a perpetual present of pure awareness, a state that yogis and Zen masters take a lifetime to achieve. He’s fond of a quotation by Ingrid Bergman: Happiness is good health and a bad memory. Forgetting being a form of healing, he says.
We strolled through Brighton’s Laines, enjoying the colorful flea markets and retro shops, Mark and I wondering what it might be like to live by the sea, now that we’d decided to sell our respective flats and buy a house together.
Just a small one. Small being all we could afford. Perhaps one of those brightly painted terraced cottages, with a second bedroom for the baby.
Oops!
Wonder how that happened!
Yes, it had just got to the point where it was no longer bad luck to start telling people, but still too soon to know for sure whether it was a B or a G. I thought I’d want to know, but Mark said he didn’t really.
“All through human history, until the invention of ultrasound, the gender of the child has been a surprise. I’m happy to connect with that ancient tradition.”
I told him that ancient history had little to recommend it—that people died from tooth abscesses in AH—and I was happy to connect with a modern teaching hospital with access to the latest drugs and forecasting techniques.
It was our first “argument.”
Mum, meanwhile, kept forgetting that I was expecting.
“What baby?” she’d say, over tea and biscuits in Whetstone, by no means the first time we’d had this conversation.
“Mine, Mummy. Well, ours.”
“Who? You and Dr. Eggstain?”
“Yes, Mummy.”
A killer pause while she tried to process the information.
“Don’t be ridiculous, darling. This man is here to look after my boiler. I mean my memory.”
“We’re in love, Mummy.”
We joined hands, Eggstain and I, to underscore the point visually.
She frowned. “And you know about all this, do you?” she asked Mark.
He smiled. “Very much so, Chloe. We’re excited. You’re going to be a grandmother.”
“Really?” A massive sigh. “Oh, fuck. I suppose that means I’ll have to learn how to knit.”
“Mummy!”
“Actually, one good thing about tiny babies is you can make them wear hats with rabbit ears. They don’t realize it! It’s awfully funny.”
Brighton was busy, Mummy and her gentleman friend holding hands as they strolled ahead of us, crowds thronging the jolly streets that led down toward the sea. I nudged Mark, touched to see the old people so obviously fond of one another. They drew up outside a shop called Vegetarian Shoes.
“Does that say what I think it says?” said Mummy.
“Indeed, I fear it does,” said Mr. Gupta. “This is footwear for the hipster community. They are strongly represented in this city.”
“They don’t eat them?”
“That would be most unwise. As well as being hard to digest, there would be few nutritional benefits.”
I still didn’t know what to think about Mum and Mr. Gupta, especially as we had been under the impression that her fancy man was Clive Percival, a white-haired “officer type” whose eyes had glittered and back teeth flashed with gold the one time I met him in the immediate aftermath of the previous Brighton debacle. But Mum said that Clive wasn’t for her in the end, being bossy and unreliable, as things had turned out. Apparently there had been a second “date,” a sailing trip on the Welsh Harp, an episode that ended disastrously when the wind got up and Clive began yelling commands—including things like, “Tack starboard, woman, are you deaf?!”—before panicking altogether and they had to be
