“I’m not doing a reading for you.”
“You do have the cards, though,” Drew sneered. He was laying the deck out in four piles – the way he shuffled Magic.
“Yeah,” I said, “but only ‘cause they’re dads.”
“And you know how to do it.” He conjoined the sets, his thumbs bending around the feathered edges at first, joking like he wanted to riffle them. I shot him evils and he shot back worse, his nose and eyes scrunching up to mock me. He was like a girl.
“Sort of,” I said. I’d never done it for anyone but myself.
“‘Cause of your dad,” he reiterated. He positioned the deck on the carpet ceremonially to suggest my position of seer, as if innate.
“Go on.” There was a leering satisfaction that flashed on his mouth belonging specifically to the curious and the cruel. “Why not? ‘Cause you can’t or what?”
“I don’t appreciate that,” he knew how I was about challenges.
In tarot, dad said that the trick is all in the pictures; never to use a book because it makes you look stupid.
I laid his old deck the way I remembered: two precise strokes, spreading the cards like butter in two neat lines. I did a halfhearted flourish with my hands after and flushed with embarrassment. I’d performed my little show quite well.
Drew told me to wait, got up to lower the dimmer-switch before settling back down, then told me he was ready. I halted him with one hand. I wasn’t. Still seated and without a word I leaned to the side, stretching to root around the rubbish under my bed for a stick of incense. I rarely had a use for the incense I stole from mum, so I never thought to also steal a holder. I balanced the stick in an empty cup and dug up a dirty plate for ashes. Her lighter was already in my blazer. I didn’t smoke. I had it because the idea of being able to provide fire for the kids at school who lit up on their lunch break gave me a bit of a rush.
Drew pulled out an inhaler from his own pocket and took a hard-eyed protest puff as the first little flame died off into a steady white plume of patchouli smoke. Ashes started to curve over the plate as the warm curl of orange slowly made its descent. I scrunched up my nose and eyes at Drew like a girl. I told him he had to pick three cards and put them face down and he did. The problem with this game was that I was honestly still too scared to touch dad’s deck, so I also told him that it wouldn’t go right if he wasn’t the one to turn them over. He scoffed.
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“What do you mean? It’s tradition.” I lied.
“Well, ok, but it’s not like it’s going to change the outcome,” he said and flicked the crazy pattern on the back, “the pictures are already in there, aren’t they..? A bit silly, really.”
I said if he’s going to be pedantic I wasn’t going to play. Drew flipped his first card, and on it was a drawing of a sweet little pink-nosed cat, all white and sat aside a golden cup with a fish peeking out. The cat was upright for me, which meant its meaning was reversed for Drew. It wasn’t one of the major arcana so I honestly had no fucking idea about it. The title said this cat was the page of chalices. What was cups again? Oh well.
“Do I turn the other ones over now or do you do them one by one?” Another quest for the measure of my answer. The mystique relied on the build-up, but I would have seriously preferred to read them all at once. Things never make sense in bits. I thought I might hurt dads feelings if I didn’t do well.
“All will be revealed,” I intoned obliquely, and nodded for him to overturn another. Looking up at me was a bent-eared cat pawing the top of a prize-wheel that was dressed in its own strange symbols. This too was reversed.
“You’re such a crap fortune teller if you aren’t going to do it one-by-one.”
Finally, he turned his last card. It was upright, a tabby falling from a great stone tower in the midst of a raging storm, the deathbound cries seeming to blow from the picture – they echoed and twisted like a banshee around my dark little bedroom.
“Fuck my life.”
“Fuck your life.”
“So what does it mean?” He was looking at the cards instead of me, small eyes seeking, searching. I packed away this expression to keep and open later. I knew it was something he hadn’t meant to do.
The essentials were bare. The tower was the only up-facing card, things were not looking up but he knew that, I knew that. Drew was a man of equations and the solutions don’t make themselves. Here we had a science that I had studied. His fate determined an emptied cup and some noxious roulette to spin him to death – possibly. Much of a reading’s meaning was in the dressing of it. I thought of the way I was taught these things and placed my hand over Drew’s, where I found it was pressed hard into the carpet. He was as afraid of the mystic as everyone else. With my eyes serious as lit matches and the law in my voice, my finger moved over the cards one by one:
“Bad news, bad changes, bad outcome,” I put my face to his. “I’ve just seen into your future. Now you know what’s coming, you know you can change it.”
“Bullshit,” he laughed, looking boyish in this low light, “you have not read my future, Liz. It’s a stupid predetermined game made to make money off idiots. Like Ouija boards. It’s confirmation bias, it’s a psychological trick.” He swept that sallow, sweating hand over his lot and adjusted his glasses, “That’s just bad luck, that’s what that is.”
“Sure,” I teased, “fine,” and I prodded him on the nose.