Chapter 65

Accuracy has always mattered to me. As a child I often corrected teachers when they made mistakes. I thought I was being helpful, but my teachers were rarely grateful. The opposite.

“Did I ask your opinion, Cheryl?”

I’d say, “It’s Cherry, and no you didn’t ask my opinion, but you switched the nine and the six, sir.”

It perplexed me. Didn’t they want to get it right?

Accuracy is what made me, “the Death Lady,” go “viral.”

The same thing happened on a slower, more local scale to my mother when she transformed herself from ordinary Mae Hetherington to Madame Mae, the fortune teller.

Mum refused to touch a single penny of the life insurance money. She wanted nothing to do with it. She behaved as though it was somehow ill-gotten, as if Dad had robbed a bank, not insured his life.

People behave oddly when they are grieving.

Auntie Pat arranged for the money to be deposited in a bank account for “my future.” It wasn’t a life-changing amount. Even if Mum had used the money she still would have needed to find a way to support us. I guess she made a decision at some point, but she never actually said out loud: I’m going to become a fortune teller. It just happened.

She stopped borrowing romance novels from the library. Instead she came home with piles of books about “connecting with spirits,” “accessing your occult gifts,” and “interpreting tarot.” She studied them, as though for an important exam, taking copious notes.

She transformed the closed-off back veranda of our house into her “office.” She pinned cloth over the windows and set up three soft-lit lamps.

Mum knew the power of appearances. She created a “look”: shiny scarves, jangling bracelets, and dangling earrings along with bright red lipstick and plenty of black eyeliner.

Then she did what would now be called a “soft launch.”

She offered “half-price” readings to a select group of chatty, not too churchy but very influential women in our neighborhood. “Influencers,” they would be called now.

The most successful of these turned out to be Mrs. Shaw, who worked at Shaw’s Cake Shop on George Street. Mrs. Shaw was a widow, with seven children and three grandchildren. Her vanilla slices were to die for.

Mum told Mrs. Shaw that she saw these things in her future: an odd illness from which she would quickly recover as long as she rested, a small financial windfall, and an extraordinarily beautiful new baby.

In quick succession: Mrs. Shaw was struck by an odd illness from which she quickly recovered; she found twenty quid hidden in an old pair of her husband’s socks at the back of a drawer; and her second daughter announced her first pregnancy.

Mrs. Shaw was amazed. She told the story to every single person who walked through the door of her cake shop. She was the sixties’ version of a viral meme.

I couldn’t believe people were so easily fooled. It was simple probability! Mrs. Shaw was a hypochondriac who was always suffering odd illnesses, everyone knew that! We also knew that ever since her husband died she’d been finding his hidden cash, and finally, three out of the six Shaw daughters had recently married so there was every reason to expect a new baby in the family soon, and of course all first grandchildren are “extraordinarily beautiful.”

Word spread. (Word always spreads, it just happens faster these days.)

People began to travel long distances for a reading with Madame Mae.

Mum sat on the imposing high-backed leather winged armchair that had once belonged to my dad’s dad. Her customers sat on a soft floral armchair, so that they were both comfortable and forced to look up at my mother as she spoke in her Madame Mae voice: deeper and slower than normal, and oooh, so spooky. I couldn’t stand it. I found it ridiculous.

Some customers caught the train to Hornsby and walked from the station up the steep hill to our house, arriving nervous and breathless and in need of a glass of water. Others came by bicycle, car, and taxi. People began to waylay me at the shops to tell me my mother was remarkable, gifted, her readings were so accurate, she had changed their lives, even saved their lives!

My grandfather was horrified. Grandma wasn’t pleased either. This was a big leap forward from Grandma’s secret palm-reading. This was her daughter openly establishing an actual business.

Grandma and Grandpa believed Mum had lost her mind because of her grief, which I guess in a way she had. They asked the new parish priest to call on Mum to set her straight.

Over tea and a Shaw’s Cake Shop vanilla slice (Mrs. Shaw brought along freshly baked vanilla slices whenever she came for a reading), Father O’Malley gently suggested that Mum lean on our Lord in her hour of need.

Mum said, “Father, I see a forbidden love in your future.”

Father O’Malley got out of there fast.

He left the priesthood three years later, after he scandalously fell in love with a married red-haired woman, a respected member of the Parish Liturgy Committee. They went on to have six redheaded children, one of whom is now an MP I occasionally see on the news, nodding along in the background of more important politicians’ press conferences.

You may be impressed by the accuracy of Mum’s prediction, but I put it to you that perhaps my mother sensed Father O’Malley’s eyes on her legs and intuited that celibacy was going to be tricky for him.

(My mother had beautiful legs.)

I was always looking for a more logical explanation. I believed logic was the answer to every question, the solution to every argument. Mum would say, “Sometimes there is no logical explanation, Cherry.”

I still love logic, but I understand its limitations. I was nineteen when I first learned about G?del’s “incompleteness theorem,” which states that in any reasonable mathematical system there will always be true statements that cannot be proved.

I was so disappointed!

I thought: Dammit, Mum.