“Good, good,” she said, pleased. “It ain’t you who’s lost hold of the ground, princess. You never will either. Feet as firmly planted as a big old gum tree. Not even an axe can chop you down. You ain’t one to drift with the tide, which is what our Pappy does. Like a bit of weed at the mercy of the current. You’re the bringer of light to The House, Harriet Purcell, the bringer of light. I’ve been waitin’ for youse for a long time.” She glugged down the last of her brandy and poured another. Then she shuffled the cards properly and began to lay them out.

“Am I still there?” I asked selfishly.

“Large as life and twice as beautiful, princess.”

“Am I ever going to fall in love?”

“Yeah, yeah, but not yet, so hold your horses. There’s tonsa men, but. Ah, here’s the other medical bloke! See? That’s him there, the King of Pentacles I keep seein’ for youse every time. Hur-hur-hur.”

Wait, and all will be answered. I’d wondered what she was on about with her Kings of Pentacles, now I found out.

“This one’s a real posh chap, talks plummier than Harold. A mile of letters after his name. Not in the first flush of youth, as they say.”

My heart did a funny flip inside my chest as I thought of Mr. Duncan Forsythe the orthopod. No, surely not. A senior H.M.O. and a lowly X-ray technician? Not on. But I listened as closely as Chris Hamilton would to the minister supervising her wedding vows.

“There’s a wife and two sons in their teens. Heaps of money in the family—he don’t need to work, but he works like a navvy ‘cos work’s all that keeps him goin’. The wife is as cold as a stepmother’s breast, so he don’t get nothin’ at home except a hot meal. Ain’t in the habit of playin’ around, but he’s hooked on you, the poor fish.”

That, no matter what the cards said, was a fallacy. I’d only seen Mr. Forsythe once. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz gave me a wicked grin, but kept on dealing her cards.

“That’s the lot about you. Now let’s look at the rest of ‘em. Ah! I see a man for Pappy too! This one ain’t in the first flush of youth either, and he’s got as many letters after his name as your bloke does. Jeez! What’s this? Oh, shit!”

She stopped, frowning, and studied the cards, pulled another, grunted, shook her head a little sadly, I thought. But she didn’t volunteer any information. “Toby’s caught in a net he didn’t make,” she said when she resumed her spread, “but he’s gunna break out of it after a while. Good young fella, Toby.” She gave a rumble as she saw the next card. “There I am, the Queen of Swords! Real well placed. Yeah, yeah, I keep shovin’ ‘em back in.”

I was growing a little bored, perhaps, because she didn’t always inform me what each card meant, or how it fitted into the general picture. But about four or five cards after the Queen of Swords, she put down a card showing a figure lying prone with ten separate swords stuck in its back—what sex it was you couldn’t tell. The moment she saw it she jumped, shivered, took a swig of brandy. “Shit!” she hissed. “There’s the fuckin’ Ten of Swords again, with Harold right next to it.”

I was so busy swooning with delight that I hardly heard all she said—she’d used the Great In-And-Out Word without turning a hair! Maybe one day I’d get up the courage to do the same. But as I couldn’t very well comment on that, I asked about the Ten of Swords, what it meant.

“If you’re the Queen of Swords, princess, it’s the death card. If you’re the queen of a different suit—Wands or Pentacles or Cups—then it’s more likely to mean ruin than death. And Harold right next to it. Always Harold right next to it.”

The skin around my mouth went numb, I looked at her in terror. “Are you seeing your own death?” I asked.

She laughed and laughed, genuinely hearty laughter. “No, no! It ain’t that, princess! Youse can never see things like death for yourself! As far as the seer’s concerned, the cards are dumb as mummies in a tomb about the future. I’m discombobulated because I dunno what Harold and the Ten of Swords means. I just keep on turning the pair of them up, have done since New Year’s Eve.”

Harold was upside down. “The King of Wands reversed” was how Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz put it. I gathered that when a card was pulled upside down, it meant that it held the opposite meanings to the ones it had the right way up. But why was this Harold so important? I wasn’t game to ask.

Flo dropped her crayons and came outside to us. As she slid by me she brushed one satiny cheek against my arm, but instead of climbing up for some mother’s milk, she grabbed her mother’s brandy glass and drank from it. I was paralysed with shock.

“Oh, let her have it,” said Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, reading me like a book. “It’s Sunday and she knows what’s comin’.”

“But she might turn into an alcoholic!” I squeaked.

That provoked a tremendous raspberry. “Who, Flo? Nah!” she said with wonderful lack of concern. “Ain’t in her cards or her horoscope, princess. Brandy ain’t just booze, it’s good for the soul.” She leered. “Keeps a man’s pecker up too. If he drinks other spirits—or beer!—limp as a wet sock on the line.”

The next bit happened so quickly that I hardly saw it. Flo jerked and jumped, flung the half-empty glass away in a shower of brandy, then fled as if all hell was after her, into the living room and straight under the couch.

“Ah, shit, here comes Harold.” Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz sighed, getting up to retrieve the unbroken glass. Still shaken by Flo’s frenzy, I followed her from the balcony to the living room.

In he came, daintily, something like a seized-up old ballet dancer. Every step measured, pricked out on some paper pattern of movements. He was a faded, shrunken little chap in his late fifties, and he peered at us over the top of a pair of half-glasses perched on his thin, sharp nose. With utter malevolence. But I inherited the full focus of that terrible gaze, not Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. I don’t quite know how to describe something I’ve never encountered before, even from a demented patient with homicidal tendencies. He glared at me with such hate, such venom! And I suddenly remembered that Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz had said I too was a Queen of Swords. It crossed my mind that maybe it was my death she was looking at in the cards. Or Pappy’s. Or Jim’s.

She didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong, booming out, “This is Harold Warner, Harriet. He’s me live-in lover.”

I bleated something polite which he answered with a frosty nod of his head, then he turned it away as if he couldn’t bear to look at me a moment longer. If I weren’t a healthy five foot ten, I swear I would have joined Flo under the couch. Poor little thing! Harold obviously affected her the way he affected me.

“He’s me live-in lover.” So that was why everybody wanted to know whether I’d met Harold!

The pair of them left the room, he preceding her, she in his wake like a sheepdog rounding up a stray lamb. Presumably they went off to her bedroom. Or perhaps to Harold’s quarters, right above my living room. When I realised that they weren’t coming back I lay flat out on the floor, lifted the tatty edge of the couch skirt and stared at a huge pair of eyes glowing in the gloom like the glass bobbles buried in a road. It took some time to coax Flo out, but in the end she skittled across the lino like a crab and kept on going until she hung by her arms around my neck. I got her weight distributed on my hip and looked at her.

“Well, angel,” I said, stroking her flyaway hair, “how about we go down to my flat and sort out your crayons?”

So she and I picked all of them up off the floor—there must have been over a hundred, and they weren’t cheap children’s crayons, they were German artist’s quality in every hue. Flo could have worn a pretty new dress every day for a week on what they must have cost her mother.

I’ve learned a great deal about Flo this afternoon. That she doesn’t speak, at least in my presence, but that her mind is clear, alert, intelligent. We pleated cardboard into grooved trays, then I asked her to pick out all the green crayons, which she did. Then I told her to arrange them in gradations of colour in a tray, and watched her deciding whether a greeny-yellow one belonged with the greens. We sorted out the reds, the pinks, the yellows, the blues, the browns, the greys, the purples and oranges, and she was never wrong. It wasn’t difficult to tell that she was enjoying herself very much, because after a while she began to hum a shut-mouthed tune, a pretty melody unshaped by lips or tongue. Not once did she try to scribble on my walls, though I had wondered. We sat down on two chairs and ate potato salad and coleslaw and shaved ham, we drank lemonade, then we lay down together on my bed and had a nap. Whenever I moved about, she hung onto my leg and moved with me. I have never been as happy as I was this afternoon, being with Flo, getting the feel of her world. While her mother, that astonishing mass of contradictions, cavorted upstairs on a bed with a very sick man. What did Flo do on other Sunday afternoons? For this tryst with Harold was a weekly event; Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz had indicated that. The Ten of Swords, the Queen of the same suit, the death.