Lauren feels a small bubble of joy as the two older girls huddle around her. She smells nylon, hair products and something else, a mulchy-sour smoke.

‘Amazing, guys,’ says Diane in a way that is making fun of them or the situation, Lauren can’t quite tell. She always sounds like she is about to lose her voice. ‘Hey, Ann-Marie says you were doing spells, candles and that?’ When she speaks Lauren sees silver flashing out of her mouth, through her tongue.

‘Kind of,’ says Lauren.

‘Can you do one on me?’

‘OK,’ says Lauren, secretly pleased. ‘Sit down. On that chair, there.’

Diane looks at her as though she is wondering how tall she is.

‘Here.’ She grabs Diane’s palm and stretches it out flat. The underside feels dry and chunky silver rings graze Lauren’s own smaller hand. One is coiled like a snake around Diane’s finger. ‘Why are you laughing?’ Lauren asks.

‘Because I’m hungry. Hey, come on. Can you really do this?’ Her breath smells like burnt lemons.

‘Yeah,’ says Lauren. She peers at Diane’s palm. ‘Your heart line has a lot of disruption. You have had a lot of hardships in your life. You fall in love easily.’

Diane looks at Ann-Marie, then back at Lauren, her pupils as big as beetles. ‘Is that it? I already kinda know that stuff.’ She smirks.

‘Hey now,’ says Ann-Marie.

Lauren drops the pale hand. ‘No, I can. I can do it. I can tell you your future.’

Diane frowns with her marker-pen eyebrows.

‘Give me a card deck. I know how to read cards,’ says Lauren.

‘Like a – what? Like a magic trick?’

Ann-Marie cuts in. ‘She means like tarot or something.’

Diane’s face changes. ‘You’ve got tarot cards?’

‘At home, yeah.’ Lauren’s voice is rising like water. ‘But I can do it with playing cards. Have you got some?’

‘Hang on.’ Ann-Marie jumps up and skids in her socks to the games room. She slides back with a battered pack of cards.

Lauren feels their anticipation like energy that wakes her up. She closes her eyes and feels something else, another sense waiting. She picks up the card pack in her left hand, turns it on its side and begins to shuffle with her right, looking from one hesitant teenager to the other. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Let’s start with something simple.’ She always remembers a phrase from the spaewife’s book: You don’t read it, you re-form it. Lauren has memorized the meanings in each number, the emotions and the power of each symbol.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a woman standing in a grey-white robe by the flickering fireplace, but when she turns her head it’s just the shadows dancing.