It was the winter of 2002 when my mother, aunt and I got kicked out of a seance for pissing off the medium.

My aunt Annie is my mother’s eldest sister; a magnified version of my mother with wild hair, grand hand gestures and a hearty laugh where lesser mortals merely smile. Over the years they have developed a relationship delicately built by sharing interests and experiences, and frequently destroyed by their desire to out-do each other in all said interests and experiences.

Specifically, they share a keen interest in all things occult and over the years have played a game of spiritual Top Trumps. At first, both parties were satisfied discussing people’s lives based on their horoscopes and deeming ‘Well! He’s a typical Aquarius’ a sufficient explanation to someone’s wrongdoings. The game was soon raised by the introduction of aura-photographs* and tarot readings, but things escalated when my aunt dismissed my mother’s chakra reader as ‘too superficial’. My mother took personal offense and stated that Annie simply refused to truly investigate the realities of her own personality, and they promptly stopped speaking for months. In that time Annie retaliated by befriending a personal spiritual guide called Sebastian who, as far as I understood it, served both as a spiritual conduit and gay best friend. They would lunch together to discuss, at length, my aunt’s various past lives as if they were reviewing the latest Catherine Cookson adaptations.
“Well, you were a misunderstood, oppressed maid after all, what could you have done? You’ve brought that fear of rejection along with you into this life, sweetheart.”
“You know this aggression is just your French Revolutionary speaking.”

One day, my mother had spent a good hour on the phone to Annie before she hung up and sighed: “That Sebastian told her she is a reincarnated Native American Chief”. Things had gone too far. Unless Native American Chiefs harboured a number of souls, even my mother was sceptical about the amount of reincarnations they seemed to produce. She invited Annie over for coffee to bury the hatchet** and discuss some family problems that had recently come up.

The visit went well, coffee was had and gossip was exchanged, but no solution was found for the problems Annie had come to discuss. The traditional 3-round game of Identify, Analyse and Blame The Usual Suspects just frustrated them both until eventually, Annie voiced their last hope:

“We have to talk to mother.”

My grandmother had been dead for 37 years at this point, so clearly this was going to require some occult interference. Annie knew of a medium who was to hold a seance near our house soon, and plans were made to attend said seance to identify where our family had officially gone wrong once and for all.

Without waiting to be asked I invited myself along and that night, we walked to the mid-18th century town house where a middle-aged woman in a mohair cardigan ushered us in. We were directed to a small room with no windows where a veritable cross-section of modern society had gathered: next to a woman in expensive-looking glasses and khaki leisure pants sat a man in biker boots and oversized bomber jacket, blocking the view for a skinny, worried looking woman whose brown turtleneck jumper hung around her like a Sharpei’s skin. The plastic fold-out chairs all pointed to the front of the room, where a makeshift podium had been built and covered with white sheets. Everyone went quiet as a side door opened and the medium entered.

She was of a certain age in that she was older, but not so old that she had given into the traditional pensioner uniform of sensible shoes, tan knee-highs and polyester garments in inexplicabe pastel hues; instead she looked fairly sensible, with a sporty leather jacket over a black dress and kicky ankle boots, and absolutely no ectoplasm anywhere. As she performed the usual show of stating the obvious and reaffirming people about things they already knew I worried that the whole thing would turn out to be a disappointment, but then she turned to my aunt, who had sat with her hand up for the past 10 minutes.

Without revealing what it was we wanted to know about, my aunt asked the medium to contact mother. The medium went silent before declaring that mother was quite far gone, barely there at all, but that she was looking into the light and happy. My mother linked in.

“I beg your pardon?”
“She isn’t in contact with this world any more.”
“What do you mean? She has to, we’ve come all this way.”
“Sometimes, spirits become too detached from this world for me to interpret their messages.”

My mother turned to Annie who, gesturing wildly, raised her voice at the medium and said:

“Why are we even surprised? It’s not the first time she’s avoided our problems. You’re the medium, you tell her we need her help. We’re her children and she’s still not taking a blind bit of notice. Looking into the light my arse.”

Things had been tense before as people had relived their most painful memories, but now that tension had been lifted as everyone, to a person, turned to the medium to see what she would do next. To her credit she rallied beautifully, going out on a complete limb to save the situation. Not that it helped.

“Your father would like to help you.”
“Our father! Spent his entire life avoiding us and now he wants to help? Over my dead body. You can tell him we don’t want to speak to him and to get mother.”

The medium straightened her jacket and said she would see what she could do while, behind her, the woman in the mohair cardigan who had greeted us at the door came in carrying a tray with pots of tea. By the end of the teabreak Annie, my mother and I were standing outside the building.

My role in the whole affair was pretty much non existent, but I had never been so happy to be anywhere else as I was being there. The moment where the stuffy room full of anxious people with questions they would never find a satisfactory answer to was suddenly awash with the clarity of that down to earth response was utterly beautiful, absurd and hilarious. It began to rain slowly as we walked towards a nearby cafe where we would spend the rest of the evening, gossiping, drinking, and laughing.



* Needless to say I, as an impressionable teenager, happily joined in and was more than a bit miffed that my aura turned out to be yellow and red, the exact colours of our living room at the time. It’s a depressing reality check when even your aura refuses to truly distance itself from parental influences, despite all the efforts you have taken by wearing too much eyeliner.

** As it were.