Kiss My Name (25 page)

Part Seven

Past, Present & Future

SIMON – December 2010

When I am bored and tired, I get fidgety. I can’t get comfortable, my legs twitch and I get hot and bothered. I took my coat off. No sooner had I taken it off, I wanted to put it back on. I realised
Chorley Little Theatre in December was not the place for such brave theatrics.

“Nicky, it’s freezing in here!”

Nicky gave me a look, the look she reserved solely for me. The one that said I was stupid.

“Simon, it was freezing at home, even with the heating on. There’s six inches of snow outside!”

“I know. We should have heeded that warning about only making emergency journeys.”

“It is an emergency! We’d already paid for the tickets! Anyway, I’m enjoying myself, so will you give it a rest with your moaning and just listen.”

We were at the Theatre for a special psychic evening with the world renowned Doris Meadows. All week, I had been poking fun at Nicky, saying things like, ‘you’d have thought she’d have foreseen this snow!’ On the news, they were saying that it was the worst December on record, but Nicky was insistent that we would battle the elements and make it into town.

“If Doris Meadows can make it here from
London when she’s 82, we can make it two miles up the road!”

Doris Meadows hadn’t been in London, she’d been at Preston Guild Hall the previous night and I am sure she would not have driven to Chorley from Preston herself. Still it wasn’t worth arguing about. I knew as long as the evening was not postponed, we would be there. Nicky had always had what I considered to be an interest in the spirit
world. It probably developed after she lost her Mum. I’m not saying Nicky is gullible, I’m just saying she has a willingness to believe in things that are just not plausible. If a room was unexpectedly cold or a door slammed when you least expected it, according to Nicky strange forces were at work.

Doris Meadows was, in Nicky’s opinion, the Queen of Mediums. She has helped thousands of people connect family members and friends who had crossed over to the other side. Nicky said we were there because she found the whole thing fascinating, but I knew that wasn’t the real reason. I knew that one day Nicky hoped that if she kept going to these psychic evenings, her mother may speak to her. I don’t know what she was hoping her mother would say, I just knew she wanted to make that connection.

Doris had been on stage about an hour and I was ready to go home. That was when I started to get twitchy. Doris herself looked like she’d be quite happy to be wheeled back to her nursing home for a cocoa, as the spritely energy that she had displayed earlier in the evening, now seemed to be wearing off. She was a silver haired, East End of London lady with false teeth, tired eyes and a faltering walk and as far as I could see, based her act on statistical probabilities.

“Is there anyone in the audience tonight called Mary?” she had asked. In a room full of several hundred people, mainly women, mainly over fifty, the likelihood was that there would be a few Marys. Unsurprisingly, several hands were raised.

“Now ladies, the voice I am hearing is mentioning someone called Jack, if any of you know someone called Jack, please keep your hand raised.”

Through a series of questions, Mary after Mary was eliminated, until the final Mary was invited down on to the stage.
Doris would then act as a go between as messages would go back and forth from this world to the one beyond the grave. It struck me that they were very generic messages about family photographs, holidays in Devon and the fact that he or she loved his or her children all the same. If I’d have pretended to be a psychic, I reckon I could have done just as good a job,

“Anyone here called Jane? Someone on the other side called Jack says he misses you. He says he is sorry he didn’t listen to you when the football was on the television and the dog that he had back in the eighties, is with him now!”

As I say, I was bored, the best thing about the evening up until that point, was that I’d bought a box of Fruit Gums in the foyer and had almost managed to suck and chew my way through them. I had a green one stuck in my back teeth and was trying to prise it out with a mixture of tongue and fingers, when I heard Doris announce,

“I am getting a very strong message coming through now, Ladies and Gentlemen! I am feeling this will be the last connection of the evening. Do we have anyone in the audience with the name, Simon?”

When I was at school, I was never one of the brightest kids. I used to live in fear of being asked to read in English or even worse, in French or to offer an answer to a question that I did not understand. Once in a while, teachers would randomly choose a child whose hand was not up. I felt like this now. I was not asking to be chosen. I was trying to keep a low profile, but chosen I was. At that moment, I felt the same sense of dread I used to feel back at Parklands Secondary School. The feeling that someone who knew more than me was about to make a fool out of me in front of an audience.

“Do we not have a Simon in the audience?”

I was happy to let the moment pass. Nicky, unfortunately, did not share my view.

“Simon,” she said euphorically, “someone is calling out to you! Put your hand up!”

“Nicky, leave it. It’s all mumbo jumbo.”

Nicky disregarded my every word, she began to shout and wave towards the front.

“Over here! Over here, Doris! My partner is called Simon!”

Every head turned my way.

“Hello Simon!” said Doris cheerily, “would you like to join me on the stage?”

I looked at Nicky for re-assurance, secretly hoping that she’d tell me to stay with her and not put myself through this. No such luck!

“Go on Simon!” she encouraged.

I was cynical about all this stuff. Thought it was all a mixture of guesswork and set-ups, but what if I was wrong? What if Doris Meadows was a genuine medium with a real window to the other side? I stayed rooted to my seat.

“Simon, what are you waiting for?” Nicky was asking.

I could feel the blood draining out of my face. I had no idea where it was heading though.

“I’m scared, Nicky. What if it isn’t mumbo jumbo? What if it’s who I think it is?”

“Then see what he has to say.”

“What if I don’t like it? What if he blames me?”

“Just go, Simon.”

I stood up and was given a polite round of applause. This was no set up. Doris Meadows knew nothing about me. This was no longer just a pleasant night out away from the kids stuffing Fruit Gums down my throat. My theories about life and death were about to be put to the test.

SIMON – December 2010

I hated being on stage. I don’t like attention. I’m OK on a one to one level, but if I can feel more than a few pairs of eyes on me, at any stage, especially if it’s people I don’t know, I feel uncomfortable. A wave of uneasiness flows up and down through my body. Climbing the steps to join Doris Meadows on the stage of Chorley Little Theatre, this is exactly how I felt, uneasy.

Despite being deluded about her own special talent, Doris Meadows struck me as being a pleasant old lady, her false teeth smiled at me as I took to the stage and she reached out her two thin, wrinkled, bony hands to give mine a re-assuring squeeze. There were two chairs on stage. Doris had barely used her own up until this point, as she had stood at the edge of the stage, interacting with her audience. As she gestured for me to sit, I realised I was probably one of her star victims, as only a select few had actually invited up on to the stage.

“Make yourself comfortable love, and relax, don’t look so nervous, I don’t bite!”

“OK, thanks,” I replied politely, although my fear wasn’t of being bitten, it was of being humiliated or even worse, of being castigated from beyond the grave.

Whilst I sat down, Doris Meadows continued to engage with her audience, as she moved in a frail fashion around the stage. She told a few corny jokes, explained how she had had friends as a child that her parents thought were ‘make believe’ but transpired to be spirits and then in middle age, had taken the job of a spiritualist up as her profession, to allow the voices from the other side to reach the audience they are attempting to reach out to. She was aware that many people were sceptical about this and thought she was crazy but she simply viewed it as a gift. Some voices, she explained, were louder than others and tonight, the young voice wanting to communicate with me was the strongest and most persistent. Once she had explained this, Doris Meadows, turned uneasily away from her audience to address me.

“May I ask, is this your first sitting, Simon?”

“Yes.”

Doris Meadows smiled again.

“I can always tell. You don’t look as though taking part in this is type of thing is something that you would choose to do. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“And for the benefit of the people in the audience, you and I have never met previously, have we? In fact, we have never communicated in any way, have we? Not face to face, not by e-mail, mobile phone, letter or any other way?”

“No.”

“Are you accompanying someone here this evening? Your wife or mother?”

“My girlfriend.
”

“And what is your girlfriend
’s name, love?” Doris asked as she slowly took a seat next to me.

“Nicky.”

“Hello, Nicky!” said Doris waving at Nicky, who waved back from next to my vacant seat.

“And I’m guessing,” Doris continued, “that Nicky believes in the existence of the spirit world, whilst you are a little more sceptical. Am I right?”

“I’m more dubious,” I replied, which was putting it mildly.

“Well, trust me, Simon, I won’t be raising anyone from the dead. There won’t be any ghosts or ghoulies coming on from the side of the stage. As I mentioned in my
introduction earlier, no-one from the other side speaks through me unless they want to and you want them to. OK?”

“Fine.”

I don’t know why I said ‘fine’, as I felt anything but.

“Right, I think I am just about ready,” Doris said, shifting a little in her chair, trying to get her withered old body comfortable, “this persistent voice that has been trying to speak to you all night, Simon, is starting to talk again. Are you ready to have a chat?”

“I think so.”

Frankly, this whole thing was completely bizarre but I had no choice but to run with it. There was only one person this could possibly be. My Mum and Dad were still alive. I had Aunties and Uncles who had died, but none that I had been particularly close to. My four grandparents had either died before I was born or when I was very little. If there was any truth to this spirituality stuff and if Doris Meadows was genuinely gifted, the voice from the other side had to be my brother.

“Now Simon, as you can see, I am an old lady, a very old lady and I struggle to hear so well these days. Sometimes though, I hear voices from the other side very clearly. Tonight, a young man has been speaking to me and he has been very insistent that he needed to speak to Simon? What’s your name, love?”

This seemed like a strange question, given she had only used it herself moments before, but I concluded it must be an age thing. I was just about to repeat that my name was Simon, when I twigged that she was asking the voice inside her head.

“Oh,” she laughed to herself, “he isn’t telling me his name just yet. He says he never liked it! Is he a bit of a rascal?”

This time Doris Meadows looked at me expectantly. I wasn’t buying into this whole concept yet.

“It depends who it is.”

I am not sure if Doris even heard my flippant answer, she was too busy having a conversation with herself. Despite protestations to the contrary, she seemed internally deaf as well as externally. There were lots of comments such as,

‘Say that again, love,’ and ‘I know you’re excited, love, but just speak slowly, clearly and calmly, young man’, followed by a few, ‘I know, I know’ type comments.

Doris quietened the voice down inside her head and once again turned towards me, shifting her chair a little as she did so,

“Simon, he says you know very well who he is. He’s your brother!”

Doris Meadows paused momentarily to allow a few gasps from the audience,

“Is that right, Simon, do you have a brother who has passed over?”

I could feel myself welling up a little, but composed myself. How was I to really know that this was Colin? Doris asked again, softly the second time.

“Simon, has your brother passed over?”

I nodded. The gasps were louder now. I looked for Nicky’s face in the audience, for almost twenty five years we had been through our bereavements together. I caught Nicky’s eye, she had not contained her tears and was wiping them away with a tissue.

“Speak to him,” she was mouthing at me, “be brave, Simon, speak to him.”

SIMON – Decem
ber 2010

I looked blankly at Doris Meadows. What was I expected to say to Colin, my dead brother, who I had not spoken to since the day he died, almost twenty five years earlier? I was thirteen when he died, just a kid. It wasn’t even as though he was stood in front of me, as a ghostly apparition, he was captured inside Doris Meadows head! Whilst I was trying to think of something to say or ask, Doris spoke again,

“Did he like The Beatles, love?”

I tried to think back. I don’t really remember him particularly liking any music. I remember him singing Madonna’s ‘Like A Virgin’, around the house once, prancing about like a seductress on Mum and Dad’s double bed, but I had no recollection of him liking The Beatles.

“No, I don’t think so,” I told her, starting to feel this was probably just some poor old lady randomly clutching at straws, who had benefitted from a few very lucky picks.

“He’s saying something, “she said, contorting her face again as she strained to make it out, “I thought he was saying ‘Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da’, you know, The Beatles song. Is that song familiar to your brother, Simon? Do you ever remember him singing it?”

“No.”

This was heading down a disappointing dead end.

“Hang on! What’s that?” Doris Meadows asked, again not talking to me, but to ‘the voice’.

“La-de-da. Miss La-de-da. He says you’re with Miss La-de-da. He’s saying he never used to like her, but you always did and he realises now that he was wrong. He says he realises now that she’s good for you.”

Immediately I felt faint. I had to gather myself together to stop myself passing out like a teenager girl meeting the poster boy of her desire. I had almost convinced myself that Doris Meadows was just another crank, but that was weird, too weird. How on earth could she possibly know that I had a dead brother who had met my girlfriend and that he didn’t like her and called her ‘Miss La-de-da’. It was virtually impossible for her to have known that.

“My brother’s name is Colin. When we were kids, he used to call Nicky, Miss La-de-da.”

“Did he pass over young?” Doris asked sympathetically, “it is still a child’s voice I hear.”

“Yes, he was ten.”

“Gosh,” Doris said, “that was young....excuse me, he’s still speaking, he’s incessant really, rather a hyperactive young man.”

This was freaking me out. I thought of all the times I had told Nicky she was wasting her time with all this crap and immediately felt guilty.

“He’s saying he’s happy. He’s saying you’ve always felt guilty about his death, but you shouldn’t. He’s also saying he likes the animals where he is, especially the dogs. Was Colin an animal lover?”

“No, not that I remember.”

I remember Colin stamping on ants nests, swatting flies and once knocking a hornets nest off a tree and then sprinting off and laughing hysterically. If there were any ants, flies or hornets wherever he was, I would imagine that they would be giving him a hard time. We had never owned a cat or dog either or any animal for that matter, Mum always had allergies, still has, so they were always out of the question.

“Well, he likes them now,” Doris said with a smile, “he says the animals are important to him....bear with me.”

Doris put her hands up and lowered them, to indicate that she wanted the excited audience and myself to keep quiet, so she could hear more clearly what Colin had to say. Once she had established what he had said, she once again looked in my direction,

“As a child, did Nicky lose someone important to her? A lady?”

I nearly swore out loud. How could she know this? This was unbelievable.

“Yes, her mother. Nicky’s mother died when she was very young.”

The murmuring amongst the audience in Chorley Little Theatre gathered momentum once more.

“Colin is saying she’s lovely, she always checks he’s OK. He says to tell Miss La-de-da that she feels no pain.”

By this stage, I had tears flooding my eyeballs and could see through misty eyes that Nicky was sobbing heartily. I managed to slowly gather myself together as a few minutes of random three way conversations followed that didn’t really mean anything to me, random names were spoken about and hobbies of Colin’s were mentioned, but I didn’t reveal he was into Jiu Jitsu and cricket and Doris Meadows didn’t suggest that he did. It was only once Doris indicated that Colin’s voice was growing fainter, that I felt compelled to ask a question.

“Doris, before you lose him, there’s something I want to ask. Is there still time?”

“I think so, love, what is it you want to know?”

“I want to know how he died.”

“Did you hear that, Colin, love?” she asked, “your brother wants to know how you passed over. Now, I understand this may be upsetting, love, but I am only asking because Simon asked. What happened, my dear?”

There were pauses, much nodding and shaking of Doris’ head, the odd comment like ‘say that again, dear, it’s becoming harder to hear you,’ and eventually she said,

“He’s gone now, love.”

Doris composed herself, before continuing,

“I’m sorry dear, I was trying to get an answer to your question, but what Colin was saying wasn’t very clear. I was finding it more and more difficult to hear his voice. Rest assured, your brother loves you very much, dear.

I think what Colin was trying to do was to explain, but the message was becoming very patchy. All I could make out was the odd word, like ‘matches’, ‘fire’ and he kept referring to a hand pressing downwards and ‘water’. Now, I’m not sure which, but did Colin die in a tragic accident, a fire or an accident in water?”

My reply sent five hundred people home happy that they had had their money’s worth from Doris Meadows.

“He drowned. When he was ten, Colin drowned. The matches and fire may have been a birthday cake, if he’d have lived, he would have been thirty five today. I just wanted to know if anyone was with him when he died.”

“I’m sorry love, I don’t know, although he did mention a hand pressing downwards. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Maybe.”

I said ‘maybe’, because I wasn’t going to start spouting off my theory in front of five hundred people, but, if anything, this bizarre experience only underlined what I had always thought. Luke “Boffin” Booth had murdered my brother and one day, somehow, I owed it to Colin to prove it.