‘Bluffed,’ he corrects me again, but he looks at me, impressed. He gathers all the cards together, shuffles them, while his eyes don’t move from mine, scanning me as if I’m a card hand he’s trying to decide whether to play or fold.

  He takes a card from the pack and holds it close to him.

  ‘I’m holding a seven of hearts.’

  ‘Lie.’

  ‘Bluff. There’s no lying in cards. Thanks, love,’ he says as Nic places a straight whisky down on the table for him anyway and a water for me. ‘This is Nicola.’

  ‘Everyone calls me Nic.’

  ‘Hi,’ I smile.

  ‘Sure you don’t want something else?’

  ‘I don’t drink.’

  ‘Well now.’

  ‘Every publican’s nightmare,’ he jokes.

  ‘You’re the publican?’

  Nic coughs dramatically.

  ‘She’s the boss,’ he says, smiling.

  He puts down the card and randomly selects another. ‘Three of clubs.’

  I watch the air around him. No flash, no metallic, no tarnished colours.

  ‘True.’

  He reaches for another. ‘Six of diamonds.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Jack of hearts.’

  ‘Bluff.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, how do you know that?’ he says, finally revealing his feelings.

  I shrug. ‘I just know.’

  ‘Is it my face?’

  ‘You can barely see your face.’

  ‘Ha!’ Nic says behind the bar and chuckles an evil one.

  ‘What is it then?’ he asks.

  ‘It’s your energy,’ I say, thinking he’ll laugh, throw me out, call it a night.

  ‘My energy,’ he says, watching me. ‘My father, rest his soul, knew a fella like you. He worked with him. He used to talk about him. The quare fella, he used to say.’

  ‘Quare?’

  ‘Queer, quare.’

  ‘I’m straight. Not that it’s any of your business.’

  ‘No, not that quare. Strange,’ he says, shuffling the cards again, one eye on me, one eye on them, if such a thing was possible. ‘One of those people with a gift. He saw things. Felt things. He had one glass eye that went that way,’ he alters his eyes. ‘At least you don’t have that,’ he says. ‘Or maybe you do – can’t see beneath the glasses.’

  I take off my glasses. Squint a little, even in the dimmed pub light.

  He examines my face and his eyes fill with tears.

  I’m not the only person in the world to have the skillset that I have. No, there are others who are afflicted with the same poison, only unlike me or society in general, others don’t view it as freakishly weird or the poisonous curse that I see it as.

  A mother who knows instinctively when a man is bad for her daughter; a mother can always see what’s behind the charm, sees the face behind the mask. If she doesn’t see it, she feels it. When a police investigator follows their gut on meeting a person, or watching someone, when they hear an alibi and immediately know it’s not right, when their head starts reconstructing the words and pairs them with the truth. Or the women who know not to go down the dark, quiet lane alone at night, when they listen to the hairs that rise on the back of their neck when it looks like they’re alone but they’re not. These natural instincts are there for a reason, we all have them because we need them; since the beginning of time they have been central to our survival. Modern life has made us forget them, but they’re still there, more alive in some than others, dormant and waiting to be tapped into.

  Or a father when he hasn’t seen his daughter since she was seven years old, weeks before her eighth birthday, and sixteen years later when she walks into a room he instinctively knows it’s her.

  ‘Hugh told me there was something special about you,’ he says, dealing the cards, stealing glimpses of me when he can. I leave the glasses off. I want him to see me. I want him to see the time that has passed since we last saw each other.

  I’d known Hugh had kept in contact with him over the years, I’d chosen not to.

  ‘I think Hugh is the special one,’ I say.

  ‘You always did,’ he says, smiling. ‘Followed him around like a pup. Wanted to eat what Hugh was eating, wanted to play with what Hugh was playing. And he’d let you; he was always great with you. So patient and kind with you.’

  ‘He hasn’t changed.’

  ‘Good. I always knew you were in safe hands with him.’

  We leave a long pause, which says what neither of us wants to say. I don’t want to do it, to be that predictable, show up after close to twenty years with bitterness and recriminations. But even I am an earthling, after all.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that to him. Left him to take care of us like that. You knew that she wouldn’t be able to.’

  He looks at me, pained expression like he’d rather talk about absolutely anything else but this.

  ‘I didn’t think she’d be a bad mother, Alice. She was a bad wife, a bad person, but I thought me leaving would mean she’d at least have to be a good mother.’

  ‘That’s an interesting risk to take, but I suppose you are a gambler.’ I don’t say it with spite, it’s just an observation.

  ‘It’s an appalling truth and I’m sorry. I couldn’t spend another minute with her. I think we would have killed each other. It was dark. I was supposed to move away, get set up, take care of myself so I could take care of ye, but … I don’t know, time passed, and nothing I had was ever going to be enough for you. Couldn’t have you sleeping on floors, or couches, couldn’t find a job where I could care for you full-time. I asked her if I could see you during the summers, some weekends. No, no, no – it was always no. I kept sending you what I could. You got the cards and that?’

  I nod.

  ‘She wouldn’t let me speak to you when I rang. It always ended up in an argument with her. So I stopped calling.’ He takes a moment. ‘Hugh stayed in touch. I’m sorry I didn’t try hard enough with you and Ollie.’

  Seamus deals. ‘The idea is to construct your five-card poker hands using the best available five cards out of the seven. The showdown is when the remaining players reveal their holdings to determine a winner. The player with the best hand wins.’

  ‘But you didn’t have the best hand,’ I say.

  ‘If you don’t have the best hand,’ he says, ‘then bluffing will get you there. But it’s always better to have the best hand.’

  We play for hours. Then for hours the following night and the night after that. I lose when he has the best hand, I win when I can call his bluff. Every single time.

  He likes playing with me, not because he likes to beat me but because he knows he can’t rely on his bluffing, which is really his strong point. Playing with me helps him get better at getting a stronger hand. He’s frustrated when I call his bluff. It’s not just his colours that give it away; his strawberry nose speckled with large hairy pores gets irritated.

  He tells me the same thing time and time again. ‘It’s not enough to rely on a person bluffing, you can’t rely on other people’s weaknesses, you’ve got to work on your own strengths.’

  ‘But what if seeing other people’s weaknesses is my strength?’ I say, frustrated.

  He stops and smiles. ‘Hmm. Then you’re ready.’

  ‘Ready for what?’

  I can’t play poker, that much is obvious; all it would take is for everyone to play without bluffing and for my hand not to be as strong as theirs, which it never would be as I can’t get my head around the strategy of play. But I can read people better than Seamus and, while it’s a crime to read cards, it’s not a crime to read people. Maybe there’s a job in reading people’s joy after all.

  I go with him to his next card game. I sit in his eyeline, and when I see that sharp metallic flash of lightning as they call or prepare to call, we have a signal. I take a sip of my drink, put it down to the right of a beer mat for honest, to the left for bluff. We share the winnings.

  The greatest lesson I take away is that, despite the fact Seamus is a master bluffer, that is not enough. I’m a master at reading people, but that too is not enough. I can’t rely on a bluff to win, I need to learn how to play.

  ‘Tomorrow, we’re going to make a fortune,’ he says, a glimpse of his bottom teeth below his large moustache the only sign of his huge grin.

  ‘I thought we’d already made a fortune,’ I say, thinking of the bag full of cash hidden in the bedroom of Nic’s guesthouse that makes me excited and nervous just looking at it. He is giving me half of all his winnings.

  ‘Oh you ain’t seen nothing yet, baby,’ he says, happily rubbing his thick hands together.

  Up until this point we’ve been playing in ‘home games’, which are often played after hours in the back rooms of pubs, or people’s houses, a friend of a friend’s garage. The daughter no one has ever met attending with him didn’t raise eyebrows as I thought it would; maybe they’d have been suspicious if it was his son, but I’m not the kind of person they distrust. Weird maybe, with my sunglasses and gloves, but that’s what makes me blend in; the special girl sitting with Daddy. Only once during a game does somebody suggest I’m cheating: a man who lost a pile of money and blew his lid. But he was quickly quietened by the other players, and his son, who was sitting beside me.

  ‘Da, I can’t even see your cards from here, how can she?’

  He’d apologised to the simple girl, the odd girl.

  ‘Are we cheating?’ I asked Seamus on the drive back to the pub and guesthouse, and where he lives. He doesn’t drink while playing, he likes to have his wits about him.

  ‘Reading cards is cheating. Do you read cards?’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t understand even if I could see the cards.’

  ‘Then we’re not cheating.’

  I stay with him longer than planned. I stay for Christmas, deciding I don’t want to spend my first Christmas away from home alone. Besides, I like the company of my dad and Nic. I like her four children, who help run the business: one a chef, one the pub manager, one who runs the guest house, and the glamorous youngest who works at reception, screwing things up for everyone, and would rather be in Hollywood than there. They don’t need him but they tolerate him, for the sake of their mother’s happiness. He makes her happy, I can see that. And I can also see why he stayed.

  I call Lily on Christmas Day.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m staying with a friend.’

  ‘You don’t have any friends.’

  ‘From school. You don’t know them.’

  ‘Oh. Well, are you coming back?’

  ‘Do you need me to come back?’ I ask, concerned about her.

  ‘You can come back and sort out the mess you made for us,’ she says, with a snap. ‘You didn’t have to cancel the allowance – they wouldn’t have known you weren’t even here anymore. Sure, who’d notice?’

  ‘Tell her not to show her fucking face around here again,’ Ollie yells in the back.

  ‘Call me if you need me. Happy Christmas,’ I say, and end the call.

  Seamus has a game set up at the Leo Casino with some big hitters. I don’t exactly know what that means or what the stakes are, but I can tell it’s big. We’re due to attend at 8 p.m. He’s excited, thinks he’s going to hit the big time, wonders why I don’t seem to have the hunger he has, why using my skills for money-making wasn’t the first thing I thought of. Someone like him is always looking for a fast way to success, spending more money on lottery tickets than bettering himself. Investing in the easy way out.

  I don’t know what my aura-seeing is for, but I know it’s not for this.

  I go to my room, pack my things, leave an envelope with money on the desk, a generous donation towards the cost of my stay. I’m halfway to London by the time we’re supposed to be playing.

  green

  THE NIGHT TRAIN TO London is quiet. I choose an unoccupied table for four so I can put my feet up. A woman gets on the train with a little girl, who I assume is her daughter. The mother practically shoves the little girl away from her and into the chair diagonal to mine, of all the empty seats to use, while she dumps her bag next to her and puts her feet up on the chair in front of her.

  I immediately take mine down.

  The mother’s colours are familiar. So are the child’s. The girl’s face is sullen, dark eyes, light in colour but dead somehow. Sad eyes, black rings beneath. I watch the mother. Her lips are moving as though she’s talking to herself, but no words are coming out. She shakes her head a few times, disagreeing, losing the argument with herself and refusing it. The little girl sees me watching and is embarrassed.

  I smile at her.

  Suspicious, she looks away – and I don’t blame her. She doesn’t need an over-friendly, freaky stranger on a train adding to her list of woes. I look out the window again, and come face to face with my own reflection in the dark sky. I feel her eyes on me. I see them on me in the reflection.

  Her mother reaches across the aisle and whacks her arm. ‘Don’t stare,’ she says, though she too gave me a good long unfriendly look when she sat down.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say. I’m wearing sunglasses, a face mask and gloves, I suppose that’s not normal. They both watch as I take the face mask off, probably expecting to see a monster beneath. The mother’s colours are dark green, sludgy, not an evil black but dark enough to worry about. Inside it swirl red mists of anger, like the eyes of a creature buried in the darkness of a cave, threatening to emerge. She is emotionally unbalanced, that much is clear. I feel for both of them, a sympathy for a woman I never could feel for my own mother. How can she be expected to mother when all of that is going on inside of her? Bored of me and back in her head, the mother picks up the silent conversation with herself.

  There’s so much I want to say to the little girl and I don’t know where to start. I want to ask her if she’s okay. You hanging in there? I wonder if there was ever a stranger who looked at me this way, who may have noticed an atmosphere between me and Lily, but I wasn’t aware of them looking. I always thought we did a good job of keeping it together. All in my head.

  The mother stands suddenly and grabs her bags. I sit up, as does the little girl, perhaps always on tenterhooks. All the things I could have said.

  ‘Be kind to her,’ I say out loud, my heart pounding in my chest.

  Perhaps it’s an odd decision of mine to move to a huge city of almost nine million people, bustling with the very beings I try to avoid every day. Perhaps it’s a kind of exposure therapy. For so long I have avoided people, I have built up a phobia of them. I don’t want to get mixed up in their emotions, I want to be left alone. I don’t want their problems to become mine, but I don’t want to be alone either. I’ve got to find a way to live with people, to be among them. Hugh has told me this for years. I guess in theory it’s what the academy was trying to prepare us all for, but it’s only now that I feel ready. Plus it’s easier to get lost in a crowd than to stand out alone, and I’d like to disappear and begin my own life.

  I’m in a bar in London. The Laughing Bishop. It’s happy hour from 5 to 8 p.m. and it’s filled to the brim, all the way outside and onto the pedestrian street. It’s noisy, people are shouting over the music, over each other, loud laughter that must hurt the backs of their throats. They’ve come straight from work, excited to be free for the weekend, maybe one or two scoops has become a few more. Some colleagues drink together, straight from the office; you can tell from their body language, their look of uniformity, their conversation, a little more restrained than those who have broken away from the office to meet with outsiders.

  I sit in a booth alone. I’ve had to stop so many people from joining me and taking the chairs; in a room this busy I need the space around me.

  ‘There’s somebody sitting there,’ I say of the chair with my bag on it. ‘I’m waiting for someone. She’s in the toilet. They’re on the way. He’s outside smoking.’ Just a few of the excuses I use. It’s okay at first, but as the place gets busier it’s more difficult to keep the wolves at bay. They’re surrounding the table, moving in on my turf, leaning on the backs of the chairs, bums resting on the arms. Coats and bags piling up on empty chairs. They eye up the empty booth in the busy bar, eye me up with a glass of sparkling water before me. I’m not wearing my gloves and face mask here; I’m not that stupid.

  I hold my ground for as long as I possibly can and in that time I watch the interaction of the crowd. I love people-watching and I’m in prime position. The life and soul of the party, the quiet ones, the shy ones, the strategic ones, the excited, hyperactive ones. All grouped together, shooting out colours at their targets like a game of Space Invaders. Colour-wise, I focus on the predominant colour, the main mood being projected. All the other stuff is inner and quieter, the parts nobody wants to share in a busy bar during happy hour. Not with colleagues, anyway. The only exception: two women in the corner of the room, sitting close, heads together and haven’t looked up once, their inner colours becoming brighter and brighter as they share, their moods changing according to what is being shared. Spilling their emotional guts out on each other. I see intestine-like long stringy tubular strands of energies. A woman sits alone on a high stool at the bar, eating peanuts from a bowl, drinking a glass of white wine, scrolling through her phone. She’s wearing a grey pencil skirt and a blouse, a jacket hangs on the back of the high stool. An office job of some sort, I guess, her sleeves are rolled up, her long hair is down and gathered to the side over one shoulder.

  A man who’s part of a group of guys, colleagues I’m guessing, eyes her. He stands with a group of three men, half-listening to what they say but mostly looking around for something better and more interesting. He looks at the women to his left, a good look at them and away again; no, they’re not to his liking. He checks out the woman to his right: no, a little too dorky-looking for him, in my opinion. He’s quite cool. Slick. Handsome. Stylish. He scans the room and our eyes meet. Immediately disinterested, he looks away quickly, sips his drink and joins in the conversation, pretending to know what they’re talking about. Ouch. Then when enough time passes, and his friend talks for too long about something he’s incredibly animated about, his eyes start to wander again. Sends signals out to the woman on his right. She looks at him and away again. Signal blocked, it lingers there around her before dying. Then he sees the woman at the bar. It’s inevitable he’d find her. She’s gotten the most attention in the room and she doesn’t even know it. She’s perfectly happy in her own world, holding court without knowing it. He says something to his friends, downs his bottle of beer and goes to the bar to order another round.

 

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