Karen McCombie - In Sarah’s Shadow

Behind her in the doorway is this tall guy I vaguely recognise from the Upper Sixth, in a denim jacket, with shaggy, fawn-coloured hair flopping around his face and a guitar case – the flash guitar Sarah’s borrowed from the music department – slung across one shoulder.

Instantly, I know that something is going on between the two of them. Sarah wouldn’t flush pink and act so flustered if it was just one of the regular boy mates she sometimes hangs around with. And regular boy mates don’t act the gallant hero and offer to carry your guitar home from rehearsal.

And just as instantly, when Conor’s face cracks into a heart-melting smile in my direction, I know that the world is not a fair place.

How else can you explain it when you’ve just set eyes on your soulmate…and realise he’ll never in a million years see you the same way?

“Oh.”

That ‘oh’ doesn’t sound too good. The cards on the table – some face down and some weirdly illustrated and facing up, spread out in some strange cross pattern – tell me precisely nothing. But for the old woman sitting across from me, it’s like she’s deciphering some ancient language or something.

Or maybe she’s just making it all up as she goes along.

“I see conflict with someone,” she mutters, shaking her head as she talks, sending minuscule whorls of peachy powder drifting from her face into still air that smells dusty, musty and Mr Sheen clean at the same time. “A girl. Someone close…close to you, and close in age. Does that make sense to you?”

Two years.

That’s all that separates me and Sarah, but it might as well be two decades or two continents for all we have in common. It’s been like that as far back as I have memories. Actually, my very first memory – when I was around two, which makes Sarah around four – is of being hot and uncomfortable, wriggling around in Mum’s arms in too many layers of knitted clothes and being told off. Why? Because I was distracting her and Dad from watching Sarah doing her one-girl singing sensation show – belting out Kylie Minogue’s I Should Be So Lucky. Ever since then it seems like I’ve had years of being told to shush and be quiet while Sarah has sung, skipped, tap-danced and dazzled her way through life.

Me? I’m a trudger – trudging through shifting sands while Sarah jogs right past me on the pavement towards some bright, shining future, which now includes great boyfriends, if Conor is anything to go by…

“It links in here, with this card that points to a feeling of unrest,” says the old lady, tapping a ridged, yellowish nail on the illustration of a stooped figure. “Almost of being weighted down.”

I’m finding it hard to concentrate – now that I’ve let a thought of Conor into my head I know I won’t be able to shake his face from my mind for hours. I wish I could stop thinking about him. I wish I could stop my hand from doodling his name every time I’ve come into contact with pen and paper over the last week. I even caught myself spelling ‘Conor’ with the alphabet magnets on our fridge door – I only just managed to scramble it (and the ‘Sarah sucks’ thing I’d spelt out a couple of minutes before) when Dad walked in on me.

“This conflict…there seems to be more to it than meets the eye. Am I right?”

Mrs Harrison tears her gaze from the cards and shoots me a look, which is kind of disconcerting. Well, the heavy blue eyeshadow is what’s really disconcerting. That and the peachy layer of powder covering her downy face, like some fuzzy mask. And the coral lipstick. You can’t miss the coral lipstick. Where can you buy make-up like that? Is there some secret, old lady make-up counter at the back of big department stores or something? The freaky make-up – that’s what’s made me (and every other kid in the street) avoid Mrs Harrison like the plague when I was growing up. The batty old mad woman at the house on the corner: she was practically guaranteed to get everyone under the age of twelve’s imagination going. If she was that freaky to look at, what must the inside of her house be like? Full of slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails?

Well, I’m here in Mrs Harrison’s house – a double first, since it’s also the first time in my life I’ve ever given her more that a vague, grunted “hello” as I scurried past her garden gate – and it’s a disappointment to my over-imaginative, eight-year-old self to see that it looks pretty ordinary. Like most old ladies the world over (my gran and my great grandma included) there’s a place for everything and everything in its place. Apart, of course, for the bookshelf that toppled over when she was dusting – the reason she called out to the first person passing (me) to help her lift it up.

Shyness – make that wariness – made me say very little as I followed her inside and lifted the lightweight, flat-pack shelves back upright. Once the job was done, and I’d been in her house just long enough to be surprised by its ordinariness, I thought Mrs Harrison might let me go with a simple thank you, or try and press a Werther’s Original (or whatever other strange sweet old people like) into my hand.

Wrong.

And wrong about the ordinary stuff too. “Would you like me to do a tarot reading for you, as my way of saying thanks? I know you young girls love anything to do with horoscopes and seeing into the future.”

What I don’t like is cliches – that girls my age should be into certain bands or certain TV shows or think certain ways, as if millions and millions of us can be lumped together as one dumb, trivia-obsessed bundle of raging hormones. But in this case, I had to admit Mrs Harrison had a point. Yeah, so maybe I’m the same as so many other people and not as individual as I want to be, but yes, I definitely wanted to see what the future had in store for me. Just as long as please, please, please don’t let it be more of the same…

This conflict…there seems to be more to it than meets the eye. Am I right? I ran what she’d just said through my head again.

“It’s my sister. We don’t get along,” I shrug, finally giving in and helping Mrs Harrison out with a confirmation or two. “My parents think I’m just jealous of her, but that’s not how it is. Not really.”

“I see,” says Mrs Harrison, glancing from me to the cards that are already face up, and back again.

Does she really see? Can those mass-produced, Lord of the Rings-style cards really let her peer into my mind, into my life? Can she tell how hard it is to be around someone who constantly puts you down in the smallest, subtlest, almost-invisible-to-the-human-eye way? A self-satisfied smirk in my direction here, a patronising dig there. A few of those a day add up to a lot of dents to a girl’s self-esteem over the course of weeks, months, years. Maybe that’s what Mrs Harrison is looking at now; not the ordinary, plain me on the outside, but the dented, bruised me on the inside.

Then again, the way her eyes are darting up and down from my face to the cards spread on the table, she might have spotted my scars. Quickly, I pull the sleeves of my fleece down and clutch them tightly in my fists.

An uncomfortable silence suddenly hangs in the air between us, which I realise is her waiting for me to say more about Sarah. But I won’t – if she really can do this stuff, if she really has some kind of a gift, then she doesn’t need me to tell her a thing. And if she’s just some batty old fake, then I’m not going to give her any more clues that she can use to make up some fantasy future for me.

“Let’s take a look at these…” I hear Mrs Harrison say softly as her strong-looking but wrinkled fingers flip over the last three cards that remain unturned.