JENNY [quietly]: You’re overdoing it.

CARMEN: What did you say?

JENNY: Again.

CARMEN [huffing]: It’s drama, darling. It requires voices.

JENNY: It’s Roald Dahl.

Carmen throws down the book and storms out of the room.

Jenny sighs, rolls over, switches her lamp off and goes to sleep.

IN THE WINGS

We were at the Mind Body Spirit show at the Birmingham NEC. I stood behind the partition wall, watching her doing her thing on stage – plucking people from the audience and giving them messages from beyond. I was drinking a cup of lemonade. She was grandstanding. She was majestic.

She says she’ll see you for the dancing, pet, can you accept that?

She said you were there by her side the whole time, and your love let her know she could go. Can you accept that, my love? You can. Thank you. Bless you …

When she’d finished, the applause was deafening. The crowd demanded an encore. At one point she looked to the side and winked at me and I got a thrill so electrifying it made me judder. I blew bubbles into my lemonade. Lemonade spilled over the rim of my cup, onto the grey top of the temporary stage block. The stage manager told me off and sent someone for a cloth, but I didn’t care, I was too busy watching my mother, in mid-flow, bowing and smiling and saying thank you, soaking it all up. I wanted to capture that sight of her, preserve it forever, that scene. I remember thinking that sentence to myself: You are mine, all mine.

When she got off stage, we walked around the festival together. It was a goblin market. We stopped at a stall called ‘The Horned Goddess’ selling dream-catchers, angel cards and gemstones. It stank of joss sticks. My mother was wearing her full regalia. A child jumped away from her. ‘Mummy, that lady’s scaring me!’

My mother affected a look of horror. ‘I’m not a lady!’

We stopped by a small gypsy caravan. MADAME AURACLE: AURA READINGS AND MORE it said on the side.

‘Do you want your aura reading?’ my mother asked.

‘If it’s all right I’d rather have a jacket potato with coleslaw,’ I said.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘After this.’

In the caravan there was a photo studio of sorts set up in the lounge: a Polaroid camera on a tripod. A sectioned-off area under a curtain.

The madame was sitting on a tasselled stool. She was as wide as she was high, and dripping in turquoise. ‘I am Madame Auracle,’ she said.