A psychic flower reading

I sat behind a table piled high with home-made bouquets of flowers, the sappy crushed-petal smell making me slightly sick. There were single-stemmed roses and branches torn from overhanging trees, and carefully constructed posies of colourful flowers, all jumbled together. I stared at them in fear.

It was my first public performance as a clairvoyant. The setting was the city’s Spiritualist Church which was not, in fact, a church at all, but a community hall. Every second Sunday, 60 or so people sat in the audience for the spiritualist ‘service’, which included a smattering of prayers and a reading or two from some more or less inspiring book; the less inspiring texts came from one of the church members, who transcribed every single word his spirit guide said. Whenever he could get the podium, he would bore us all with extracts from his spiral-bound notes. His spirit guide was one of those tedious souls who seemed to prefer a career in cosmic administration to passing on to Nirvana, and who would issue memos from on high, reminding us all to be kind to one another and to use our white light powers regularly.

“White light will clear away any spiritual blockages,” intoned the medium, as though we were all in danger of Interdimensional Bowel Disorder.

The reason that everyone put up with this was because immediately the pieties had finished, the main event began: a clairvoyant would roam the room looking at auras, and then fasten on a particular individual and give them an impromptu reading. These could range from the obscure (“Spirit is sending me a name with three ‘As’ in it – do you have an Agatha in the family? Or an Arabella?”) to the riveting, like when a spirit would come through with a strong warning about something. (“Get rid of that anger! You’re forging heavy karmic chains for yourself!”.)

Because of time constraints, only three or four people would ever receive a reading at one time, but the mere possibility of one kept everyone coming back.

The occasional ‘flower reading’ services were even more popular, because they guaranteed everyone a reading.

Flower readings work like this: you, the readee, pick a flower or plant of some kind. The theory goes that when you pick your flower, you’re magically drawn to the ‘right’ flower for you; as flowers are said to have nice energies, they’re supposed to be a particularly powerful way to tap into somebody clairvoyantly. All the flowers would be put on the central table and the clairvoyants rostered on that day would pick the flowers that ‘spoke’ to them and interpret them.

The reader at the podium that day certainly seemed more than capable of tuning into flowers. The clairvoyant was small and dark, with a turquoise wool dress dating from sometime in the early 1970s, with glasses hanging on a chain around her neck. She could have been a teacher and she fingered her flower as though it were an interesting school project.

“I’m getting the number three,” she said. “The number three is very important in this person’s life – you were probably one of three children and may have three children yourself. Whose flower is this, please?”

A mousy woman put up her hand.

“I’m only one of two children,” said the woman.

“Ask your mother,” said the clairvoyant with confidence. “Perhaps she lost one and you don’t know about it. Anyway, just remember to use the number three, because it’s important for you.”

This was very powerful information. Mrs Mouse now knew that if she wanted anything, she had only to invoke the power of three – e.g. marry the third boyfriend, take the third job offer, invest in anything that had a strong three influence.

What was so deeply impressive about this particular clairvoyant is that whenever she picked a flower, she would soon have a whole crowd of spirits thronging in the aisle, queuing up to speak to the flower’s owner. This was so far beyond my own poor abilities that I could only watch in admiration as she wrangled her ghostly crowd.

“Not all at once,” the clairvoyant said on her next flower, as though the spirits were a group of unruly children who needed discipline. “That’s better. Now, there is a spirit woman here who says the owner of this flower has lost something.”

Another middle-aged woman rose from the audience to identify herself. “You’re talking to my mother,” she said. “Tell her I’m sorry I lost one of her rings.”

“You can tell her yourself,” said the clairvoyant. “She’s right here, smiling at you. You can talk to her in your head, if you like. Those in spirit don’t need words.”

The woman closed her eyes and moved her lips, before sitting down to a round of applause. And then the reading was over and it was my turn to choose a flower and step up to the microphone. I looked at the heap of flowers in front of me, before trusting to fate and putting my hand in to grab something at random. What I got wasn’t a flower at all, but something wrapped carefully in aluminium foil. I rose to my feet and walked as slowly as I could to the microphone.

And to think, I’d put myself in for this. For several months, I’d been going to the psychic development circle run by the Spiritualist Church president, honing my clairvoyant skills, like a window washer wiping away the dirt to reveal the view. After a couple of particularly good ‘hits’ in the circle, I’d offered to be a flower reader next time an opportunity came up.

So there was the microphone. There was the expectant audience, all focused on me. And there was me. I looked down at the foil package in my hands and unwrapped it as slowly as I could, hoping to be struck by inspiration. Inside was a single white rose of great beauty, which had been crushed because it had been wrapped too tight. Its perfumed petals were brown with bruises and falling off. To wrap such a beautiful flower so tightly in foil seemed an odd thing, especially as the foil was smoothed down, like someone had made a punishing metal envelope to put the flower in. Even more oddly, the leaves had been stripped off the stem, leaving the thorns prominently displayed.

For all its weirdness, the package did not give off a single vibe. Not one. There were no spirits lining up to speak to me, no spectral voices at my ear, offering me messages to pass on and no intuition forming in my gut. I was about to fail my first public psychic test.

So I cheated.

If the flower was meant to be a symbol of the person who picked it, then I figured that describing the flower would describe the person.

“You are a beautiful soul,” I said. “This is a very beautiful flower you’ve picked. But you’re hurting.”

I raised the aluminum foil envelope and showed it to the audience.

“It’s like you’re in prison, separated from the real world,” I said, knowing was a reckless claim to make. Although I personally thought it odd that someone would imprison a rose into a neat metal envelope, the owner of the flower could be a happy neat freak who just liked folding things, for all I knew. But I ploughed on.

 “You’re feeling battered and bruised, like you’re falling apart. And you feel you have no protection from the thorns in your life.”

And that’s all I said. Having done the bare minimum, I beat a hasty retreat and sat down, feeling like a total fraud. The feeling increased as I picked up flower after flower and used the same trick every time it was my turn at the microphone. I just couldn’t compete with the other two clairvoyants, who could not only see legions of the dead swarming about the room, but who could also read auras, divine futures and hand out lucky numbers.

Finally, the whole ordeal was over and there were no flowers left. The audience immediately split into two camps, the first stampeding towards the tea and biscuits down the back and the second converging on us clairvoyants, hoping to wring some more information out of us.

When I say they converged on ‘us’ clairvoyants, I mean everyone headed for the other two. Nobody seemed interested in hearing my opinion.

Except this one woman, of blonde hair and anxious face, who stopped me as I headed to the tea urn.

“That was my flower you picked,” she said, putting her hand on my arm. “The one in the foil.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

And poured out her terrible story. About how she had recently moved to the city, but was all alone, without a job or any money. How her new husband, now that he was in his home town and she was isolated, had begun to beat her and how the beatings were getting worse. How she had thought that if she stayed calm and in control, she could talk him out of it, but it hadn’t worked, and nor had her attempts to be a perfect housewife.

She gripped my arm as she told me her story, her clasp getting tighter and tighter. I stood there, all of 19 years old, with not a clue what to say to this woman. Somehow, I’d discovered the same thing that Freud had talked about almost a century earlier – the idea that we all betray ourselves by our gestures. I had read the offering correctly: folding a beautiful white rose into a tinfoil prison so hard that it fell apart was a symbolic act that told a story about the person who had done it. She was tense, nervous, upset. That she had taken such care in the hope of getting a good clairvoyant reading was a clear signal that she needed help – and the worst thing was, she thought she’d found it. She thought that because I used the words ‘battered and bruised’, I’d divined her situation with spirit help – and that those same spirits might offer her advice as to how to get out of her situation.

Which, of course, I couldn’t offer.

I honestly don’t remember what I said to her, but I do remember fleeing the hall at the first opportunity and vowing never to read publicly ever again – a promise I broke several years later, of course, when I got a job as a tarot reader at The Orb.

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