The Extra Large Medium Read online

  ‘We could hole up in there for half an hour,’ he said, and made to twist the brass doorhandle. A golden, glittering orb. Down to the polishing endeavours of Mrs Berry as it happened.

  ‘Not going in there,’ Hugh shivered into his elder brother’s best jacket, brought out for funerals and pub crawling. ‘Full of old bags. Bunch of table tappers. My mam says to keep away.’

  The others turned at this.

  ‘Your mam?’ Gerald sniggered, blowing a ribbon of snot from his nose.

  ‘It’s dabbling in the occult. Steer clear. They’ll have you stripped naked and sacrificed to virgins…’

  Recommendation enough to Sidney and Gerald.

  Inside the church was cold and damp. A huge patch of mildew marked the wall between the two tall leaded windows at the front end. It looked like a map of some distant country. The country of the Dead. A continent strewn with black mildew forests and long, silver rivulets of effervescence. On the dais, against a backdrop of folded chairs and a collapsible ping-pong table, a man in a dark blue suit appeared to be asleep in a hard-backed chair. The rest of the hard chairs had been set out in the hall. A handful of people were parked across them. At least that’s what everyone else saw.

  My Great-uncle Sidney had not been up for a spiritual encounter. If anything, he was up for a laugh at the expense of these sad gits waiting to find out about Crown Derby coffee sets and shed keys. But one of the first things he noticed about the church was how many people were wearing chocolate brown clothing. It struck him so much he mentioned it to a blowsy-looking woman sitting nearby. She didn’t mind his beer breath and smiled when he asked if chocolate brown was the uniform.

  ‘Jim,’ the man onstage, that evening’s medium, seemed to jolt awake, ‘I’ve a Jim here, or possibly he’s looking for a Jim?’ He looked to his audience for answers. There was a nervous tensing of shoulders but no definite response. The medium onstage pushed on, determined. ‘Might be a Tim. I’ve got a crackly line tonight…it must be the weather…Tim or a Jim?’

  The man in the chocolate brown suit beside Sidney tapped him on the shoulder then.

  ‘Why don’t you help the bugger out?’ he said gesturing wearily at the medium. Sidney was mellow with pale ale. Happy to oblige.

  ‘How can I help?’

  Another brown-clad man with a frustrated expression stood up at the front and looked back at Sidney. ‘Well for a start it isn’t Jim. It’s Viv. I want to speak to Viv and I’ve been waiting hours and not getting anywhere. He isn’t bloody listening.’ The brownclad man at the front was getting very irate.

  ‘Who’s Viv then? This one?’ Sidney moved down a couple of rows and pointed at the woman, touched her shoulder. She stiffened as if her blood had suddenly turned to quick-setting concrete. Everyone else was holding their breath, although Sidney did not notice. The brown-clad man at the front nodded.

  ‘At last. Tell her I knew all along…’

  ‘Why don’t you tell her?’ Sidney asked, not wanting to interfere in a marital tiff.

  ‘You do it…you tell her. I knew, and if she wants him she’s to have him and never mind what your mother says, Viv. Get away from your ma, Viv. Get away. Let him take you.’

  Hugh and Gerald sobered up sharpish as they watched my Great-uncle Sidney talk to the air. Everyone got their message that night. Everyone.

  The blowsy woman beside him did not mind when Uncle Sidney reeled sideways and vomited into her lap. The blowsy woman was Kitty. She was never officially my Great-aunt Kitty because my Great-uncle Sidney never officially married her. He was still officially married to my Great-aunt Edna. But you don’t get a ceremony and a certificate for being the true love of someone’s life.

  Kitty convinced him when he sobered up.

  Sidney woke up next morning to the fizzing of Andrews Liver Salts and the sight of Kitty in a Japanese kimono that had actually come from Japan. It was celadon green with a golden dragon embroidered onto the back. His tail trailed down one sleeve and he breathed silver wire and gold-leaf fire down the other. Sidney drank the liver salts and ate bacon and eggs as Kitty laughed at him.

  Sidney had no idea what fairy story he might have to concoct to cover this absence from home. He was not in love with his wife but he had never stayed away or been with another woman. Sidney was a man of promises. You keep them.

  ‘You haven’t a clue, have you, what we did last night?’

  Sidney shook his head, put his knife and fork neatly together on the empty plate.

  ‘Good,’ she said leaning into him, ‘I’ll always be able to hold it against you.’ Her bosom seemed to inflate before him like a lifejacket. He never wanted to let go.

  ‘Call in sick,’ Kitty told him.

  She took him to the museum after he called in sick to work. He was against calling in sick. He was an honest, hard-working bloke of a man. Kitty simply laughed. Sidney didn’t think it would be very funny when he got the sack but Kitty just laughed again. ‘I’m going to show you the way,’ she said, and for the bus journey into town Great-uncle Sidney thought he’d been kidnapped by a Jesus freak.

  She took him into the upper gallery of the museum building so he could look down on the main concourse. It was a grand Gothic building, a gift to the city from local boy made millionaire Sir Charles Whitworth. It was called the Alice Museum after his wife.

  Kitty simply stood there with Sidney and asked him who he could see. Sidney looked down on a party of schoolkids drawing on worksheets as they sat and sprawled on the Victorian tiled flooring. Then he saw the brown-clad Sir Charles bustling about in and out of the offices and up and down the stairwells.

  Sir Charles never fulfilled his plans. The museum was never finished to the drawings. He was doomed now to spend his eternity trying to finish it his way. There was a brown-clad workman who had died whilst fitting the roof bosses in the vaulted ceiling. He was up a ladder still. Sir Charles chided him from the bottom of it, left a bit, right a bit…you’re going to chip it doing that.

  Not that Sidney believed this until Kitty sat him down in the library with some documentary evidence. Photographs of Sir Charles, his obituary in the local paper.

  Sidney got the sack from the inkworks. But he made his million as Sidney Colville, the Extra Large Medium.

  STOP.

  Hail fellow well met on the highway to madness. Madness is a small town not very far away. Most of us, at some point, find we could probably walk there. Others have the road cave in and dump them there.

  Sidney was a grown-up when he first tuned in. He had to make the effort and alcohol let him do that. He could tune out. He had to ask them. Me, I had an open frequency right from the start.

  No one believes in magic anymore. If you hear voices in your head then it is simply cost effective to address the imbalances in your brain with a concoction from the chemical companies. I learnt that voices are not in your head if what they say leads you into real life. If what they tell you is a true story. If what they tell you is the ending to their true story. If they send you messages that match up, you are not mad. You are a messenger.

  I didn’t tell My Mother about the chocolate brown brigade after Mrs Berry. I, like all children, did not want to worry her. I loved her, I did not want her to be afraid. I did not want her to be afraid of me. I could dream in nightmares but I wouldn’t tell. I learnt quickly to adjust responses so that I wasn’t ever caught out talking to someone who effectively wasn’t there.

  School became a safer haven after I helped Miss Whitemarsh. She and Albert disappeared, said their goodbye. The everyday streets were more of a problem. We lived in a town that had been begun by the Romans. A walk to McNab’s to buy shoes was a living history experiment. I longed to live in a purpose-built town where I imagined there would be no history. No unfinished business.

  History. Be interested. It is where we come from, it is where we are, it is where we are going. I learnt Latin from a Roman soldier.

  Aunt Mag and her encouragement nearly finished me be
fore I had begun.

  Thursdays

  ON THURSDAYS I always stayed with Aunt Mag. She was My Mother’s eldest sister and lived closest. There were two other sisters. One, Lorna, had a farm in the Lake District (no, I never got to talk to Wordsworth or Beatrix Potter). Another, Marjorie, lived in America. We all imagined she lived a Hollywood style of life with chocolate malteds, ballgames and Buicks. It transpired she lived like Davy Crockett only not quite so civilised.

  So I stayed with Aunt Mag. I enjoyed this at first. She let me off the leash more than My Mother. She had a bigger house. A piano-shaped jewel box filled with glittering finds that flashed and burned.

  Thursday was the day Mr Bentley came to visit, you see. I did not know Mr Bentley although he knew more than he wanted to about me. At an early stage in my life there was a rumour that he might have been My Father. A rumour he scotched by showing people his vasectomy scars.

  Mr Bentley sold soap around the country. He travelled in a company car and on Thursdays he visited My Mother. They did not discuss soap. Mr Bentley was one of her earlier sexual excesses. He put the first ten thousand miles on My Mother’s new mattress. He gave her bars of soap as love tokens. She had a cupboard under the stairs which was stocked with seemingly never-ending bars of soap. Even twenty years after Mr Bentley’s departure we were still using up his soaps. Lily of the valley, lavender, bergamot…

  Mr Bentley’s penis. The starting pistol.

  Aunt Mag didn’t buy a ouija board. She made one. It made it more sinister eventually. If it had been bought from a shop with ‘Made in China’ typed on the underside, it would have seemed fake and destructible. A board game. A joke. But it was indestructible. Wherever I hid it, however I damaged it or burnt it or screwed it up, Aunt Mag could always get out her pen and draw another.

  They got cross. I was too slow. I was a child after all. I didn’t understand some of the things I was told. They were not people we knew, which Aunt Mag found very hard to take. She had an idea that my open frequency ‘gift’ was restricted to family members only, and when her own mother didn’t care to speak with her but some strange ex-librarian popped up to say hello she got shirty. Then it occurred to her that there might be a bit of pin money to be made from these communications with other people’s relatives.

  Not to be disrespectful to my Aunt Mag but the woman had a serious smoking habit that sometimes ran to Havana cigars and one eye, at all times, on the horses. Horses were the love of my Aunt Mag’s life. She never loved anything as much as racehorses. She loved their names, her two all-time favourites being Red Rum and a lesser-known nag by the name of Cherish the Day. Red Rum did his share of winning. Cherish the Day did just cherish all his days, and spent the greater part of his existence eating and standing about, occasionally plucking up the energy to sit a silk-clad jockey on his back and put a shift on at Little Roodee.

  Cherish the Day was a handsome horse and my Aunt Mag loved him. I don’t know, because I never asked her, but looking back I don’t doubt for a moment that she was ‘in love’ with Cherish the Day. She took taxi rides out to the stables to see him train and at one point was having an affair with his owner. Val Hartman was a big, meaty bloke. Would probably have styled himself as a stallion. I have often wondered if, when she was between the sheets with Val Hartman, she was imagining rolling in the hay with Cherish the Day.

  She got a hare-brained scheme. It was one of those schemes like the things we think up as kids. You will save up really hard and travel to London to see the Queen. Or perhaps you’ll save up really hard and buy an aeroplane and a parachute and you’ll watch a lot of films about flying and pick up tricks and read some handbooks about being a pilot so that you’ll have a good basic knowledge and before the grown-ups know anything about it you’ll be skimming over the rooftops in a Cessna. Only of course, being a kid you get utterly distracted and the following month you’re saving up to buy a lifetime’s supply of Hubba-Bubba bubble gum.

  Aunt Mag’s scheme was like that. She would hold séances at her house every Thursday and she would make enough money to buy herself a racehorse. Then, with the continuation of the séances she would be earning enough, tax free, to keep the racehorse in the manner to which it would become accustomed. Racehorses like a luxury lifestyle. Woolly blankets, rolled oats, only the finest home-grown carrots and Cox’s orange pippins.

  She had a large network of friends which spread through the bingo club and the local pubs where she was a regular, the Freemasons, the Claybank, the Robin Hood and the Hark to Towler to name but a few. Then there was a second wave of pals who she knew through her job at the textile factory. She was the floor supervisor in the machining department. They sewed odd-shaped bits of things. A consignment of sleeves here, a shipment of left legs there. The brims of rain hats, the quilting for sleeping bags.

  I think Aunt Mag was a hard taskmistress because no one we met from her workplace ever seemed pleased to see her. Then again it could simply have been that the factory affected the people that worked there in that way. It could also have been that they came to work at that factory because they were like that. Cause and effect. Symptom and cure.

  Aunt Mag had her little side office on the factory floor which reeked of cigarettes and mints. If she wasn’t sucking on a cigarette she was sucking on a mint. She ate the huge extra strong ones that were like pieces of chalk and burned your mouth. She was brisk and efficient at best; mean and bullying at worst.

  The very first Thursday she charged everyone fifty pence. Seven of her workmates rolled up at the house and were a bit taken aback at the sight of me. They hadn’t expected a kid, it seemed.

  ‘I hadn’t expected a kid,’ said a dark-haired woman with tightly coiled hair. It was oiled in some way, slicked and shiny in a car-grease sort of way. She looked as if she’d had a bath and combed her hair and washed her face and then just absent mindedly headed out. As if she had forgotten some vital part of herself, her face. She was washed out and greasy. Her name I remember was Bar. Short for Barbara.

  There was also Kaz (short for Karen), Al (Alison) and Dot. They all had shortened names as if they couldn’t be bothered being the whole person. Then there was Gail. Gail with eyes like a sheep. Hair like a sheep too, in rough-looking tight curls around her head. She played with her earrings a lot, twirling and twirling at the gold loop as if it was an aerial and she couldn’t quite get the picture.

  It was very successful. We didn’t need to draw the curtains and pitch ourselves into darkness that day. We just sat down after some tea and biscuits and Mr Kipling cakes and straight away there was a queue of people. Trace and Al started off giggling and joking around and lost interest very quickly. I think this was chiefly because they couldn’t spell. Bar seemed very anxious. Her already strained face seemed to get tighter, as if her skull was trying to push out through the skin and get on with the job. But no one wanted to talk to Bar.

  There was someone looking for Jim. There is always someone looking for Jim. More on that later.

  Then Dot’s brother declared his love for her and suddenly everyone was interested. Trace and Al shut up sharpish. Bar slackened up a bit and looked into the middle distance. I was too young to notice it then, but Bar could not look at Dot. She wanted to absent herself, to save Dot the embarrassment. And there was a fair bit of embarrassing information. It was like some other-worldly soap opera. Dot sat and sobbed quietly as her brother spoke of how he missed her, the touch of her skin, the kiss of her lips…and how he had loved her so very much.

  Dot had always lived with her brother, it seemed. No one had thought much about it; if anything they had considered that Dot and Dan were a couple of sad sacks who couldn’t break out of the family home. All the time people pitied them buying their small tins of beans and their white tin loaf in the bakers, and it turned out that one of the greatest passions of all time was happening in their house.

  Now her workmates were being told intimate details of their relationship. Daniel didn’t hold back that eve
ning. He said what he felt and he said it straight from his no-longer-beating heart. Dot didn’t seem to care at the time, what she cared about was being able to tell her brother, Daniel, what she was feeling and how she missed him and to make him a promise, that she’d never find anyone else.

  ‘Promise you’ll remember me, Dorothy?…You’ll never go looking for someone else…’

  Even at my tender age I thought this was a bit harsh and he was very insistent. ‘I’ll be waiting for you. You know that. However long it takes I’ll be here,’ he promised.

  He extracted that promise from a weeping Dorothy. She didn’t hear what anyone else said, it was as if it was just her and Daniel in my Aunt Mag’s back room. They all sat and took in the information.

  Later Gail would use it against Dot. Dot had applied for a job at the library and an unknown informant wrote a letter saying that Dot was a reprobate who had spent a lifetime shagging her brother. It was the use of the word ‘shagging’ that gave the game away really. Everyone knew it was Gail. It wasn’t even revenge for there was nothing that Dot had done to get on Gail’s bad side. It was pleasure. It was evil.

  I don’t think you can say that Gail’s life made her evil, her hard times made her do things that were less than nice. I think that she was just like that. She was hard like a stone. A woman with granite for a skeleton. If she had been the Duchess of Argyll or suddenly been made Queen of the Netherlands she would still have had that mean streak.

  Our Thursday sessions strengthened and Aunt Mag took to drawing the curtains and lighting candles for atmosphere. I didn’t really need the ouija board and it slowed things down but she kept it for effect. She began charging a whole pound but several people got their money back when they didn’t get a personal message.