The clairvoyant lives in a rather smart road. We drive around in my friend’s foxy sunny yellow car looking for a parking space. A monstrous black four wheel drive, constructed for tough country driving rather than manipulating small streets in London, shoots out of a parking space. “There.” I yell. “She of the E Bay party, and Hoxton Market” immediately cuts across the oncoming traffic and reverses into the bay. “Smile” she says. I open the window and smile and wave. Neither the smile, nor the wave, prevents cross white van driver from giving me a mouthful, along with applicable hand gestures.
“I’ve been fired” my girlfriend says calmly. “I don’t mind, I don’t mind at all. In fact I am glad”. I am shocked, she writes brilliant screenplays and award winning work for the theatre. It’s inconceivable she could be fired. “It’s not inconceivable.” She tells me, “and I feel liberated”. “Liberated?” I ask. “Well… Liberated and panicky. I may not ever earn any money again. I can get another job. You did. You make cakes. I will be a gardener!”
“But there’s a recession!”
“Well I’ll garden for myself. Grow my own food and to hell with the lot of them!”
I ask “she of E Bay Parties and Hoxton Market”, if she would mind going in first. I am told, firmly, my need is greater than hers.
We ring the door bell. I have no idea what I was expecting, but a rather large lady swathed in orange with matching orange lipstick and paler orange eye shadow, opened the door. “You will be wanting Claude” she said cheerfully, as she swept out.
“I thought Claude would be a woman.” I whispered.
“I am,” a nice voice replies. I am confronted by a kindly lady. She is French, and rather neatly dressed in a navy suit. She looks more like a bank clerk than a clairvoyant. Somehow this is very comforting.
She conducts my girlfriend into a seemly front room, and me into a small room. I look around. The room seems perfectly normal. There a lot of photographs of landscapes at sunrise and sun set, and rain, and snow. I look for ghostly visitations. There are none.
Claude hands me a pack of cards, I am instructed to shuffle them, and then cut them. I hand them back to her. She arranges them in a circle. I don’t like the look of them. There’s a nasty looking devil, a tower, and some poor bloke with swords stuck in his back, and if that’s not enough there’s a card with three people out in the snow. None of this looks good. Claude confirms my worst fears “You are going through a time of penury. You have no work, well you have some work, but it is not what you want to do.” I am not so sure, I actually rather love my job making patisseries and wedding cakes. “It is not enough money!” Claude tells me firmly. I didn’t need to come all the way across London to be told that. I shuffle the cards again. This time she wants 21 cards. I select them and hand them to her. She sighs. I wonder why, I can see a card called the Lovers, that looks good. “You have three lover. None of them any good.” “I have one lover, and he may be a little derelict when it comes to “being there”, but when he is there, I feel terrific”, I tell Claude. “You have a husband, he has another woman, and you say you have your ‘derelict’ lover…”
Oh God, what is she going to say? What is she going to tell me? This whole thing is stupid. I don’t want to hear that he has another woman!
“He is nothing…. !”
Nothing, the object of my passion is nothing! What does she mean?
“And George Clooney, he has feelings, but he has a wife.”
George Clooney? What the hell is she talking about?
She of the “E Bay parties” is sitting on the sofa. I ask her if she is going in for her reading now.
“No, I am far too scared for anything like that. What if she tells me the truth?”
“Why did you make me come then?”
“You needed cheering up.”
“So do you. You’ve been fired.”
“Yes, but I feel liberated.”
“And you don’t have any debts.”
“I’ve got a lovely husband. And that makes everything easier. Especially when he is working.”
“Well you haven’t got George Clooney”
“What?”
“I, apparently, have George Clooney! And he likes me, a lot! But he’s got a wife.”
“Rubbish. Clooney is not married. He had a pig, but I think it died.”
“This is nuts! George Clooney!”
“Maybe it was a mistake, this tarot business, but at least it got you out. Let’s go and have a glass of cava.”
“I can’t afford cava”
“No, not right now, you can’t but when you can, I will have champagne, Veuve Clicquot Rose! Till then, its my tab.”
What I love about my friend is that she believes in me.
