Her teeth are bared in an expression of playful wickedness. Some kind of long-limbed dog, like a greyhound or a whippet, is standing forlornly next to her, his head leaning against her leg as if for balance. Underneath the illustration of her is just one word:
H O U S E K E E P E R
I search the e-book for the term Housekeeper and nothing comes up. I check Google for Housekeeper card and there are no relevant matches.
The longer I look at her, the more unsettled I feel. She’s not the grimmest card in the deck by any means – the Ten of Swords, for example, is a dead guy with ten swords sticking out of his back – but the Housekeeper is different.
My stomach starts to churn with an ill-placed sense of guilt, the kind you get when you’re sure you have upset someone but you don’t know how. The blood in my fingers feels fizzy and electric, and I’m suddenly hyper-aware of my own skin. Each flayed cuticle, the dry corners of lip. I’m stuck in a staring match with this card, one I can only lose.
She is, after all, a drawing. It gives her the competitive edge on staring contests.
“Maeve!” Joanne is calling up the stairs.
“What?”
“Are you coming down for food or what?”
“Coming!” I get up, collect all the splayed cards and put them back into an orderly deck.
Except for her. The Housekeeper, who must be some kind of weird Joker card that has no place in a real reading.
I take her out. I open my desk drawer, wedging her carefully between pages of Abbie’s old French phrasebooks that she sent over.
I head downstairs, eat pad thai, and don’t fight with Jo for the rest of the evening.
CHAPTER FIVE
AFTER A FEW DAYS I’M SO KNACKERED FROM READING PEOPLE’S tarot that I spend every free period lying on the floor of the Chokey while Fiona counts out our earnings.
“Sixteen euro!” she says with glee. “And that’s just today and yesterday.”
Usually I would be delighted at the concept of more money, especially as Mum and Dad haven’t adjusted their allowances for inflation since Abbie was a teenager. I’m too tired to celebrate, though. I keep my eyes closed.
“Cool.”
“You should invest it back into the business,” Fiona says. “There’s a shop in town where you can buy witchy stuff.”
“Witchy stuff?”
“Yeah,” she says. “My tita says the woman in there throws you out if your aura is bad.”
The shop is called Divination, and I head there after school. It’s pokey and fragrant, thick incense filling the room. Crystals, dream catchers and bottles of homemade perfume fill every surface. As I’m waiting for the shopkeeper to finish selling someone a deodorant stone, I start picking up and examining things, trying to be as respectful as possible while simultaneously sure that most of it is bollocks.
“Hello there,” the shopkeeper says brightly. She’s in her mid-fifties and wearing red cotton harem pants, a chunk of amber hanging around her neck. Her hair is bright blonde and tied into a ponytail, a red satin scrunchy making her whole head look strangely girlish.
“Can I help you with something?”
“I need crystals,” I say, and take out the fourteen quid I made today from readings. “How many can I get with this?”
“That depends. What do you need them for?”
“What do you mean?”
“You need different crystals for different jobs, pet.”
I pick up a glittering piece of grey and purple stone the size of a potato. “How much is this one?”
“Thirty-five euro.”
“Wow,” I say, quick to let it drop out of my hands. It lands on the display with a thud.
“Amethysts are a powerful protective stone. Plus, they need to be a certain price if we’re going to source them ethically,” she says. She doesn’t seem too offended by my ignorance, thank God.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s just, I’ve started doing tarot readings lately, and I thought it would be nice to have some stones around to help my … uhh, clients … relax.”
“Congratulations,” she says, smiling. “Tarot readings are a lot to take on. I don’t do them any more. The older you get, the more crowded you get with other people’s energy. After I turned forty, every time I gave a reading I woke up with a crick in my neck. Other people’s bad juju, you know. It’s really a young woman’s game.”
“Oh,” I say, thrown by the idea of ingesting people’s energy. “Is that … a thing that happens?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“Sensitivity. Empathy. The kind of people you read for. They bare their heart to you, uncork all this bottled up junk they’ve been working on for years and years, then they give it to you. And it sticks. That’s why I burn wild sage in here,” she laughs. “It’s less about cleansing the customers. It’s more about protecting me from the customers.”
“I think I know what you mean,” I say. I decide I like her. I stick out my hand. “I’m Maeve Chambers.”
She sticks out her hand, and for some reason, instead of saying her own name, she laughs at mine. “You have three ‘e’s in your name,” she says, with mild interest.
“So?”
“Names are powerful. Three ‘e’s means when you fall in love, it’s for real. My sister Heaven was the same.”
Heaven. Of course someone who owns a witchy shop has a sister called Heaven.
I leave to get the bus twenty minutes later with a pocket full of rose quartz, orange-tipped calcite and tiger’s eyes. She also throws in a few incense sticks for free.
“Remember to cleanse the space you read in regularly,” she says chidingly. “And take care of yourself! Don’t get stuck with other people’s
