Getting Over Mr. Right (14 page)

She was, in so many ways, exactly as I had expected her to be. She was shorter than me. About five feet one. She was wearing a floor-length purple robe that was edged with black lace. Her hair, which was dyed red with a thick gray stripe of roots, was decorated with a black ribbon. Inside, her flat was also exactly as I had imagined. Though it was sunny outside, the place was dark as a cellar. Purple velvet was draped at every window. There was an overwhelming smell of incense and cat pee. It reminded me of the shops that Becky and I had frequented as teens, before emo had its own name.

“Did you bring the money?” Martha got straight to the point.

I nodded.

Martha counted out the thousand pounds in cash onto a table covered in a velvet curtain as though she had been a croupier in a previous existence. She pursed her lips when the first count came to £990 and I waited anxiously as she counted the wad again.

“Good,” she said.

“So, you can get Michael to come back to me now.”

“If it is what the spirits will,” Martha said.

“But …” I gestured to the money.

“Your money only buys my intervention with the spirits,” she explained. “I can guarantee nothing unless it is part of your life’s destined path.”

I was tempted to ask why I had just handed over a grand in
that case. Was she telling me that if Michael was going to come back onto my life’s path, he would return regardless of whether or not I coughed up? And if the spirits didn’t will it, then vice versa? What exactly was her part in the whole thing?

“But I can hurry things along,” said Martha, as though she had sensed that I might be cottoning on to the futility of the transaction.

“Can you?” I asked.

“Yes. But I will need some things from you. I can perform a ‘go away’ spell on this new woman in your lover’s life, but in order to do that, you will need to collect a lock of her hair.”

“How can I do that?”

“You’ll find a way. Just one hair from her head will make the difference. You will add it to this”—she held up what looked like a gray sock—“which contains all the other ingredients you need to make her leave. Once you have all the ingredients, you must bury this talisman beneath the threshold to your lover’s house. She will be unable to step over it and eventually she must give him up for you once more.”

Martha handed me the gray sock. For it was a sock after all. I dared to peer inside it. As I opened the sock, there was a strong whiff of something unpleasant, and it wasn’t just the garden-variety scent of feet. It occurred to me then that perhaps this was an actual dead man’s sock, taken straight from a corpse!

“You want to know what’s inside?” said Martha.

I half shook my head, but she went ahead and told me anyway. “The pouch”—pouch! That was a sophisticated word for it—“contains a small glass bottle, inside which there are nine pins, nine needles, and nine nails to bring discomfort, anger, and pain. There is also the hair of a black dog and the hair of a black cat to make them fight like cat and dog. There is a small bundle of hyssop and hotfoot powder to make your rival run away.”

It sounded pretty serious.

“Are you sure you are ready to unleash the spell’s power?”

I looked at my hand. It was shaking as I held the stinking pouch.

Martha threw her head back and laughed. It was a proper Bond-baddy laugh, which shook her entire body and mine. Her current living cat jumped up from the table and fled for the safety of the curtains. I dropped the pouch on the floor.

“Careful!” Martha shouted. “You don’t want to release the djinn.”

Now I really didn’t want to pick it up. I just stood and stared until Martha had to pick the sock up from the floor and press it into my hand herself. Having done that, she suddenly rubbed at her ear as though she were a cat beginning to clean itself.

“Miaow,”
she said. The spirit cat was back.

“Tiberius?”

“Tiberius says that no harm can come to anyone who follows his advice. When your lover and his new woman part, they will believe that they are doing the right thing. They will be happy they are no longer together. Everything will be as it should be.”

“In that case—”

“But you have to follow the instructions. Get the hair and bury the spell. It must be outside his house. They have to step over it.” Then she hissed. “Tiberius is tired now. You must go.”

I didn’t need to be asked twice. I couldn’t wait to be out of that place. I felt as though the atmosphere in Martha’s house, with all those sickly, smoky smells, had been embalming me from the inside out. I could still smell the scent in my hair as I took the Tube back home.

Back in my flat, I tipped the contents of the pouch out on to a white plate and examined them. There was nothing that
looked obviously harmful, but I still felt a shudder as I put it all back together again.

Part of me wanted it to be hokum, but another part of me wanted it to work very badly indeed. And it wouldn’t work until I got the hair.

How on earth was I going to get the hair?

I knew where to find Miss Well-Sprung, but I couldn’t just walk into her shop and pull a hair straight from her head. I would have to get her to come to me.

I called Becky and told her my plan.

“No,” she said. “Ashleigh, this is nut-job behavior. It
is
stalking. It is illegal. And it probably carries a prison term.”

“So, you’re saying you won’t help me?”

I had asked Becky if she would invite Michael’s new girlfriend over to her house to measure up her sofas for some new soft covers. She would be bound to lose a hair in the process. All I had to do was turn up at Becky’s house right after she left and find the thing. Unfortunately, Becky was not about to “enable me,” as she put it.

“No,” she said right away.

“Come on,” I pleaded. “It’s just half an hour of your time.”

“I don’t understand why you want to see her. I mean, Ashleigh, how is it going to help you? Really?”

I hadn’t even told her about the needing-hair-for-a-voodoo-spell part of the equation. Neither did she know that I had already seen my rival in the flesh twice before.

“I just need to know that there’s nothing I can do to get Michael back. If his new woman and I are completely different from each other, then I will know that it’s a lost cause, won’t I?”

“Stop!” Becky commanded. “You are going insane. It
doesn’t matter what she’s like. It matters what Michael is like. And we’ve established, over the past weeks, that Michael Parker is a Class-A Twat. End of story.”

“You don’t really think it’s that simple. You remember what you were like when you broke up with Rob.”

I heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the phone. Prior to meeting her fiancé, Henry, Becky would have told anyone who asked that Rob Young was the love of her life and always would be. Becky had spilled a lot of tears over Rob Young. She nearly spilled actual blood, as well, when she heard that he’d replaced her with a former friend from teacher-training college.

“I do remember what I was like,” she said softly. “And with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that all that crying was a total waste of time. Rob was right to end our relationship. It was going nowhere. As soon as one of you wants out, it is over. When I think how much happier I am now that I’m with Henry, and how I might never even have met him if Rob hadn’t dumped me and I hadn’t forced myself to go on that singles boating weekend, I shudder to think I might have missed out on meeting the real man of my dreams …” Her voice quavered a little, as though she were actually shuddering. “Benefit from my hard lessons, Ashleigh. Do not attempt to see Michael’s new girlfriend or inveigle your way into her life in any way. If I hear that you have attempted to become her new best friend in order to find out what’s going on, I will call the hospital and have you sectioned.”

“So, you’re really not going to help me …”

“But I am helping you,” said Becky. “I am refusing to enable you in making an utter fool of yourself.”

I didn’t see it. What I saw was Becky being unreasonably squeamish about helping me do whatever it took to get Michael back, or, as far as she was concerned, start moving on. And
hadn’t she spent the past few weeks telling me that move on was exactly what I needed to do?

Had she asked the same of me, I would have done it. In fact, I had done something similar on her behalf! I remembered now that I had hidden in a bush outside Rob Young’s house to get a positive ID on the woman who had replaced Becky in his affections. At Becky’s request! She had conveniently forgotten about that. I called her back and reminded her.

“Ashleigh,” she sighed. “What can I do but apologize for having involved you in my madness? There are still days when I wake up in a cold sweat as I remember the depths that I sank to over that stupid man. I would not wish that feeling on anybody. Especially not you, my best friend. And that is why I am going to save you the misery. You may not thank me now, but you will. Good night.”

I was not very pleased. But she was not my last resort. I could still ask for help from the one person who was contractually unable to refuse. My personal assistant, Ellie. I would give her my instructions first thing the following day.

“You want me to call this upholsterer woman and ask her to come in and look at the company’s sofas?” she repeated as though I were some kind of idiot.

“Yes,” I said. “What’s so funny about that?”

“But they were new last year,” Ellie pointed out. “There’s nothing wrong with them.”

“I know,” I said. “But I can’t help thinking that the black leather and tubular steel combo is a bit flash. A bit eighties. Too Loadsamoney. It’s not very new austerity, is it? Not very ‘credit crunchy.’ ”

“Neither is spending even more money to re-cover a sofa that’s only twelve months old, with no obvious wear to it,” said the clever little cow.

“Ellie,” I said, “don’t worry yourself about it. You’re not expected to know anything about the budgets. Just call the number and make an appointment. It won’t cost anything to get a quote.”

Ellie gave me that weird look again. “If you insist,” she said.

“I do insist,” I told her.

Bloody Ellie. Every day I wondered why I had given Ellie the job rather than any one of the other eight candidates I interviewed for the position. At the time she had seemed the most simpatico. I daresay she reminded me a little of myself. She was quietly spoken. She seemed a little shy. I wanted to give her a leg up. I wanted to help her get ahead, just as my first boss had been kind enough to see potential in me. And for the first month of Ellie’s tenure (her probation month), I thought I had been proved right. She was sweet and deferential and eager to please, but after that, when her probation period was over and she knew I wouldn’t be able to get rid of her without a fight, it was as though she’d had a personality transplant. She became chippy and sarcastic. She did her best to undermine me at every turn. I swear I even overheard her telling another assistant in the company that she thought of me less as her mentor than “plain mental.” “I really don’t know how she got to such a senior position,” Ellie had continued. But the fact was, I was in a senior position to her and I had to remember that. If I asked her to jump, Ellie was only supposed to ask, “How high?” There was to be no questioning of my authority. Right?

About ten minutes later Ellie poked her head around the office door and told me, “They’re sending someone around on Friday at four thirty.”

“Someone?” My ears pricked up. “Didn’t they specify who?”

“No.” Ellie shrugged. “Why would they?”

“I want the woman I asked you to call. Her specifically.”

“So, let me get this straight, you want this woman in particular to come in and quote for re-covering our sofas, which don’t need re-covering. You don’t want to have to deal with her yourself but she has to come in when you’re in the office.”

“What’s so difficult about that?” I asked in exasperation.

“There’s nothing difficult about it,” said Ellie. “I can fix just about anything. But it’s weird.”

“It’s not weird. I’m too busy to deal with the upholstery myself, but I want to be sure that they don’t send some monkey apprentice who’s going to get the measurements wrong. Someone gave me her name and told me she’s the one to use.”

“Have you cleared this with Barry?” Ellie asked. Barry was the managing director. “Only surely there’s no point going through this rigmarole at all if he’s just going to turn around and say that we’re not allowed to spend any money on office furnishings. You remember that meeting we had at the beginning of the year. ‘Careless spending costs jobs’ and all that.”

How could I forget? Barry’s Second World War style of dealing with the credit crunch had caused a great deal of hilarity for us all. He’d tried to set an example by bringing in homemade sandwiches for a week before reverting to using the local Pizza Express as his canteen. Neither did he seem to see the irony in exhorting us all to save money, then wasting a sheaf of A4 by insisting that we all have printed copies of the three-page email memo he sent on the subject, so that we could pin them above our desks and see his ‘Careless spending costs jobs’ slogan every time we looked up.