in the reflection of my shiny silver holepunch, as I listened back to the message.
‘Darling, it’s Mum. I need to see you urgently! The tea leaves have scattered a caution for you and they’re always right. Heed my warning. I won’t rest until I see you. You must come over after work, Samantha. I insist. I’ll make you some of that vegetarian bolognese you love and I have a bottle of that alcohol-free red wine that will go perfectly, so don’t bring anything. Oh heed my warning, darling, heed…’
I shook my head as I listened to the recording. Voicemail had cut her off. Maybe they weren’t as friendly as I thought. My mother’s message sounded like a desperate cry for help.
Vegetarian bolognese and alcohol-free wine? Heed my warning? Who says that? That woman needed an injection of reality. She was my mother though, so I neatened up my desk, ready to leave the office at five on the dot.
I worked as an assistant to an advertising executive. He was a volatile beast of a man who smelt of garlic. I answered the phone, made coffee and remembered his appointments. On my worst days, I went shopping for him. He didn’t like shopping for clothes so he sent me instead. You’d think spending hours traversing aisles of clothes and getting paid for it would be fun.
No. I’ll never forget the time he made me buy him swimming briefs. Let me just say, brief is not the right word. You’re lucky you don’t have a job like mine.
I stayed because it wasn’t exactly taxing work. I breezed through my duties and still had plenty of time for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and eBay. Did have to jazz up the Facebook updates though. You know, bend the truth slightly. Instead of saying:
‘I ground down imported coffee beans that I accidentally inhaled like cocaine, giving me a rush of an entirely different sort, for a whole bunch of unappreciative, pompous executives.’ I say something like:
‘The smell of freshly ground coffee awakens my senses and reminds me of the time I visited Colombia and got mixed up with that drug cartel.’
I’ve never been overseas, I’m more of an instant coffee person, and I once snorted some of Columbia’s finest after a small misunderstanding, but keep that to yourself.
One minute to five, my iPhone beeps with a recorded message. ‘Evacuate. Time to get out of jail. I repeat. Evacuate. Time to get out of jail.’ My personalised cue that work is officially over. Before anyone can stop me, I’m out of those automatic double doors in a flash.
Instead of heading for the train, which will take me to my apartment, I walk a few blocks towards leafy suburbia where my mother lives. I just so happen to pass an auction place, that just so happens to be having an auction. The machine-gun voice of the auctioneer hypnotises me and, before I know it, I’m signed up and bidding with one of those cute little paddles.
Unluckily for the deceased, the auction was filled with a lifetime of their belongings. Lucky for me though, the dead can’t argue price. This person had the most eclectic taste. A horse-drawn carriage, minus the horse, decked out with intricately woven wind chimes. A round bed! I’d never seen one of those before. Where you would buy sheets for one of those? A trapeze! I was stuck in fantasyland imagining when and where this person lived. A gypsy who carted their wares from town to town reading palms and juggling. I pictured a gorgeous ebony-haired Indian boy, riding a horse bareback, tanned, taut muscled chest, gleaming with perspiration …
I tried to shake the image of the exotic boy from my mind.
Unfortunately, I was already a little bit in love with him. Kind of depressing since he was a figment of my imagination. With all the daydreaming, I worried that I had a lot of my mother in me. I scanned the room; it was packed like a panic room in an apocalypse.
A hush fell over the crowd as the next lot was introduced. I turned as if in slow motion and saw the reason for the eerie silence. I’d never seen anything so beautiful: a silk antique kimono. It had its own special glow. It was deep ruby red with flashes of emerald, gold, ivory, onyx and sapphire. The colours shone like precious gems and I could almost smell cherry blossoms just by looking at it. I pictured myself at a tea ceremony, getting my geisha on, drinking out of those dainty little ceramic cups. There was a soul inside that kimono.
My left arm seemed to have a life of its own and, without my consent, kept raising that little white paddle with alarming regularity. I kept my eyes on the kimono as the auctioneer roared 9100, 9200, 9300, like he was calling a horse race. I was in a daze imagining what the kimono would feel like wrapped around my body. Coming out of my reverie, I heard, ‘Sold! $10,300 to the girl in the pink suit.’
Oh my God, oh my God. I was the girl in the pink suit. Did he just say $10,300?
***
I arrived at my mother’s house with the kimono delicately wrapped and housed in an unassuming white box, and prepared myself for the inevitable. Lectures on drinking too much A) coffee B) red wine C) San Pellegrino (too much sodium apparently). Then her invariable diatribes on: not eating enough pH-rich foods, the ones designated for my blood type (B Positive, which is also the approach I take to my life, if you must know). Closely followed by a ‘talking to’ about eating too much red meat, because I’m involved in killing an innocent animal, not to mention the carbon emissions it takes to get said animal sufficiently plumped, but also because it’s not good for my digestion.
How could she know all of this? My eyes, of course. She took an iridology course a few years back and can almost see the winning lotto numbers when she holds your head in a vice-like grip and stares at you like she knows the secrets of the universe.
I push open the red door (good feng shui) and walk in. She never locks the door; she says she will ‘see’ intruders entering before they do.
‘Mum, I’m here.’
‘Oh, darling!’ She rushes up to me and grabs my head in that vice-like grip I mentioned. ‘Too much coffee, too much …’
‘Yeah, yeah, too much fun stuff.’
‘Don’t get snooty with me, young lady, you know what they say…’
‘Your body is a temple, I’m just looking out for you.’
‘We can’t all live on coconut serum and birch twigs, Mum.’
‘That serum was very expensive. I still can’t believe you used it as a tanning agent.’ She put on her hurt face and walked over to the rack of faux wine.
‘Wine, darling?’ she asked as she began uncorking the bottle.
‘Grape juice, you mean? Sure, why not?’ I studied her as she bustled around the kitchen. She really did look good. She was nearing sixty but her smooth, unlined face was still made vibrant by her big blue eyes. She ran and did yoga every morning, and I must admit I was a tiny bit jealous her body was in better shape than mine. It’s the genes. I ended up with Dad’s. I was short, raven-haired and, without practically starving myself and living on a red wine diet, prone to chubbiness.
She handed me a glass and sat opposite, clasping her hands.
‘Now, darling, I don’t want to alarm you but, as I said – the tea leaves have issued a dire warning for you. Something has come into your life that is bad luck. It’s a bad spirit. Stuck in the middle of this world, unable to transition to the next place. You must get rid of it.’
‘Get rid of what?’
‘The
