Oscar Wilde

‘The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.’

Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

PART ONE

PROLOGUE

A pig of a day.

Afternoon bleeds blackly into evening: big dark shillings of rain tumbling down from slow-moving, pot-bellied clouds.

The land, featureless, beaten down. Flat, in every direction; a green-brown cloth draped across the earth and stamped until the wrinkles are smooth. A visitor here could be forgiven for believing the planet to be a disc.

A long, straight road, heading for the coast.

A copse of trees.

And here, the last house before the water: the final man-made structure before the soil becomes the sand; becomes the sea.

A plume of smoke, emerging from a red-brick chimney like an illustration in a nursery rhyme.

Inside, now. The door isn’t locked.

Here.

A murky little room.

An overhead light throws a yellow glare upon a horseshoe of coloured picture-cards. The cards are encircled by a small henge of different crystals: their glittering stones reflecting fire; a jagged coral reef of serrated edges – each tiny spike sharp as a tooth.

A plump woman, long hair, clever eyes, half lost in a swirl of incense.

This is Dymphna Lowell. She talks to the dead. Sometimes, she gets a reply.

Opposite, a man in a sodden overcoat, dark trousers, boots leaving muddy prints upon the carpet: a triangle of ankle peeking out from between the unlaced tongues and the sodden hems. Upon the skin at his heelbone, an ugly ridge of scar tissue, as if burned by hot iron. In his dark coat, he’s a bundle of kindling: a corn dolly, burned black.

Dymphna is thinking of the money. Telling herself that the smell of him, and the sight of him, and the muddy prints on the floor, are worth enduring for the inch of crisp notes he had placed in her hand. She’s never been the sort to turn somebody away. Would never deny her gifts to those in need. And money’s money. She’s been inconvenienced. Had to deal with a knock on the door on a wet afternoon. Here, at the end of the road, where a person could be forgiven for expecting peace and quiet. Only right she gets what she deserves.

‘It is important not to take these things at face value,’ she says, with an encouraging smile. ‘The widower card, well, it doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily lost somebody, or are about to. It’s about loss. About a sense of bereavement, yes, but that doesn’t mean a life. The other cards inform it, you see.’

A quick glance at his left hand, starfished flat on the wooden table. A gold ring, on the third of his big, pink fingers. It’s a little loose. There’s clear space between gold and the flesh. She hadn’t noticed it at first, having been focused instead on his fingertips. He has no nails. The nails have been bitten down so far that there is virtually no cuticle: each tiny strip of nail a letterbox in a pinkly wrinkled door.