Five fingers impatiently rest on the upturned London Gin glass.
Five young women are ready to summon the spirits.
“Is there anybody out there?”
There is no response.
Nothing.
Deadly silence.
“Are you in the room with us tonight, Peter?” continues Joy.
She is taking this seance seriously, dressed like Siouxsie Sioux from the Banshees. Her voice sounds as if she’s auditioning for Salem’s Lot. Everything about her is suitably dark and atmospheric.
Suddenly the glass starts to move, as if by its own accord. The jingling noise of the colourful wrist bangles, knocking against each other as the hands glide across the uneven wooden board, raises both the tension and hopes of contacting the deceased.
They all want Joy to have one last conversation with her boyfriend, after he’d died in such a tragic accident.
The glass pushes out towards the letter Y. Then on to the E, followed by the S.
“Jeepers creepers,” says Carol, to no one in particular, while she nervously strokes through her feathered hair.
All eyes are now focussed on their own stretched out hands. Five fingers remain evenly spaced around the foot of the glass.
Andrea muffles a scream when it suddenly comes alive again.
The glass shifts slowly from letter to letter.
Belinda dramatically calls out each one, touched by the glass.
A M H E R E I M I S S Y O U J O E
“Am here. I miss you…” Carol says, stopping before she gets to the name.
Joy grabs the glass and throws it straight at the stereo console.
“Joe,” Joy yells. “I knew there was somebody bloody else. I bet it was that Josephine girl at Athena’s. He was always down there looking at the posters. Especially of that tennis woman, shoving those balls up her knickers.”
She pauses to take a deep breath and wipes away the tears running down her face, preventing them from reaching her choker.
“If my damn Peter was still alive, it wouldn’t be his damn moped that’d kill him, it’d be me.”
She aggressively swipes the board off the table, snatches the photograph from the top of the bureau, tears at it violently and scatters the pieces, as if it’s confetti, over the Formica top. Like a professional drama queen, she flops into a chair and blubbers loudly.
Joy’s friends’ hands reach out to comfort her, as if to move her to a happier place. Andrea pours out more Black Tower into the patterned tumblers and passes the tallest one to Joy.
Sheila makes her way over to the bay window and pulls open the heavy, orange curtains. She looks over her shoulder at the girls and wonders whether this is a good time to remind them about her dyslexia. They’ve probably forgotten that her atrocious spelling was the reason she left school at fifteen. Sheila pushes the guilty finger into her mouth and bites down painfully, to punish herself.
Published: Past Times, Westword
