“Good-bye,” Hal said, as the three tipsy girls rolled out the door, shrieking and laughing down the pier towards the bars and clubs. “May fortune favor you,” she added, as she always did, but they were already gone out of earshot. Glancing at her watch, she realized it was 9 p.m., and the pier would be closing soon.
She was tired—exhausted, in fact—and earlier that evening, as the time stretched on, and the pier had stayed empty of visitors, she had thought about giving up, switching the sign off, and going home, but she was glad she had stayed. After almost no clients all day, there had been a mini-rush at seven o’clock—two coworkers came in to ask what they should do about a bullying boss, and then the three drunk girls looking for a laugh around eight. She hadn’t made a lot, but with luck she would cover the rent on the kiosk this week, which was more than she could guarantee in the off season.
With a sigh, she turned off the small space heater at her feet and stood, ready to switch off the little illuminated sign outside her kiosk.
MADAME MARGARIDA it read in flowing, ornate letters, and though the description didn’t really suit Hal, conjuring as it did some kind of Gypsy Rose Lee figure, she had not had the heart to change it.
SPECIALIST IN TAROT, PSYCHIC READINGS, AND PALMISTRY said the smaller letters below, although in truth Hal didn’t really enjoy reading palms. Perhaps it was the physical contact, the warm dampness of the sweaty palm in hers. Or perhaps it was the lack of props—because in spite of her skepticism, she loved the tarot cards as physical objects, the finely drawn images, their soft fragility.
Now, though, as she flicked the switch in her booth and the light clicked off outside, there was a rap at the glass. Her stomach flipped, and for a moment she froze, even her breathing stilled.
“I’ve been waiting,” said a hectoring female voice. “Don’t you want customers?”
Hal sighed, feeling her tension drain away, and she opened the door.
“I’m sorry.” She used the calm, professional voice that somehow became part of her persona the moment she picked up the cards. It was halfway between serene and serious, and a tone deeper than her own, though it was harder to conjure than usual, with her heart still thumping with the aftermath of the sudden rush of fear. “You should have knocked earlier.”
“If you was a real psychic, you would’ve known,” said the woman with a sour triumph, and Hal suppressed another sigh. She was going to be one of those.
It always baffled Hal why skeptics were so drawn to her booth. It wasn’t like she was forcing anyone to come. She wasn’t making any claims for her services—she didn’t pretend to cure anything, or advise dangerous courses of action—she didn’t even say that her readings were anything other than a bit of fun. Weren’t there better people to debunk? And yet they came, and folded their arms and pursed their lips, and refused to be led, and looked grimly delighted at every failure, even while they wanted, desperately, to believe.
But she couldn’t afford to turn a customer away.
“Please come in and sit down, it’s a cold night,” Hal said. The woman drew up a chair, but didn’t speak. She only sat, her herring-bone coat drawn firmly around herself, chapped lips clamped together, eyes narrowed.
Hal settled herself at the table, drew the box of tarot cards towards her, and began to run through the practiced introduction she always used when new clients walked in off the street: a few generalized guesses designed to impress the listener with her insight, a sprinkling of braggadocio, all mixed in with a potted history of tarot, aimed at people who knew little about it and needed a context to understand what she was about to do.
She had only run through a few of the phrases when the woman interrupted.
“You don’t look like much of a psychic.”
She looked Hal up and down, taking in the frayed jeans, the thick-gauge earring, shaped like a thorn, through her right ear, the tattoos peeping out from beneath her T-shirt.
“I thought you’d have a costume, and a veil with dangly bits. Like a proper one. Madame Margarida it says on the sign—you don’t look like much of a madame. More like a twelve-year-old boy.”
Hal only smiled and shook her head, but the words had broken her rhythm, and as she resumed her little speech she found herself thinking of the veil at home in the drawer under the bed, the fine black gauze with the jet drops sewn around the edge. She stumbled over the well-worn phrases and was glad when at last she reached the end of the spiel.
She added, as she always did, “Please, tell me what brings you to consult the cards today.”
“Shouldn’t you know that?” the woman snapped.
“I sense many questions in you,” Hal said, trying not to sound impatient. “But time is short.”
And I want to go home, she thought, but did not say. There was a silence. The wind howled through the struts of the pier, and in the distance Hal could hear the crash of the breakers.
“I got a choice,” the woman said eventually, her voice grudging, as if the words were wrung out of her. She shifted in her seat, making the candle flame gutter.
“Yes,” Hal said carefully, not quite a question. “I sense that you have two roads ahead of you, but they twist and turn, and you can’t see far. You want to know which you should take.”
In other words, a choice. It was pretty pitiful stuff, as well it might be, given how little she had to work with, but the woman gave a grudging nod.
“I will shuffle the cards,” Hal said. She opened the lacquered box where she kept her work cards and shuffled them briefly, then spread them out on the table in a long arc. “Now, hold the question you came to consult me about in your mind, and indicate a card to me. Don’t touch, just point with your finger to the card that calls to you.”
The woman’s jaw was clamped, and Hal sensed a turmoil in her out of all proportion. Whatever had driven her here tonight was no ordinary question; she had come against her will, turning to something she believed in spite of herself. When she leaned forwards, a cross glinted out from behind her buttoned-up cardigan, and she gestured jerkily at a card, almost as if she suspected a trap.
“This one?” Hal said, pushing it out from the deck, and the woman nodded.
Hal placed it facedown in the center of the table and glanced discreetly at the clock positioned behind the woman’s back. Usually she did the Celtic Cross, but she was damned if she’d spend half an hour with this woman when she was tired and cold and her stomach was rumbling. A three-card spread was the very most she was going to do.
“This card”—Hal touched the card the woman had chosen—“represents the current situation, the problem you have come to consult me about. Now choose another.”
The woman flicked her finger towards a second card, and Hal placed it alongside the first, facedown again.
“This card represents the obstacle you face. Now choose one final card.”
The woman hesitated, and then pointed at the first card in the deck, to the far left of the spread. It was one people rarely chose—most people picked towards the middle in a fairly even spread, choosing the cards closest to them, while a very few, the most suggestible types, picked up on the implicit instruction in final and chose a card towards the right of the spread, at the bottom of the original pack.
To pick the first card was unusual, and Hal was surprised. She should have known, she thought. This was someone perverse and contrary, someone who would do the opposite of what they thought you wanted.
“This final card represents the advice the cards are giving you,” Hal said.
She turned the first card, and from the other side of the table she heard a choking sound, as the woman’s hand went to her face, to cover her mouth and smother a name. Looking up, Hal saw that the woman’s eyes were wide and harrowed, and full of tears, and suddenly she knew. She knew why the woman was here, and she knew what the image on the card meant to the woman sitting opposite.