Page 3 of Crazy Spooky Love
They can’t argue with this, because any job I’ve held down outside of the family business has always gone spectacularly wrong.
My stint as a solicitor’s assistant ended abruptly because the solicitor in question’s dead mother was in residence and wouldn’t give me a minute’s peace to get any work done.
She badgered him relentlessly with messages, mostly to do with the fact that she didn’t approve of his torrid affair with his secretary.
I can’t say I did either, but unlike his mother I preferred to keep my opinion to myself.
It came to a head when I found myself loudly telling her to knob off, and that the solicitor’s affair with his secretary was neither my business nor hers, which would probably have been okay had it not been for the fact that his wife had just turned up to take him to lunch as a surprise and heard every word.
Suffice to say the solicitor soon needed a solicitor of his own.
Then there was the time I landed a job as a dental nurse and found myself accompanied by the long-deceased dentist who’d opened the practice decades before and couldn’t seem to let go.
He was constantly in my way as I worked, and wholly responsible for the fact that I prepped the wrong set of new enamels for Chapelwick’s MP and inadvertently turned him into a Kardashian.
He still blames me for the fact that he lost his seat in the next election.
“This way I’ll be providing a service to the dead too, just not in the same way you do. Can’t you see that, Gran? You and Mum, you’re like a ghost telephone exchange. What I’m going to be is more of a…” I cast around for a suitable definition.
“Ghost dispatcher?” My mum is not one to be easily won over.
I shrug, exasperated. “If you like, yes. It’s not how I’d choose to put it, but we all know that ghosts get stuck sometimes and need help to move on.”
“So you’re going to meddle. Bittersweets don’t meddle. That’s not our job.”
I take in the stubborn set of my mother’s shoulders. It’s clear that if I hold out for her approval, I’ll never get this business off the ground.
“Gran?”
Both me and Mum look at our family elder. She spears another blueberry, chewing it slowly even though she’s more than aware that we’re both awaiting her verdict. It’s obvious where my mother gets her dramatic bent.
Gran fixes me with her beady eyes and eventually points her fork atme.
“This won’t affect the family firm in any negative way? We do rather depend on the ghosts being around, darling.”
“Not a bit. These would be ghosts who’ve got stuck here or are causing trouble. You won’t even know I’m there. Genuinely. I promise.” I shake my head and hold my breath as I silently draw a cross over my heart.
She pushes another blueberry around her plate while she contemplates, and then lays her fork down carefully.
“Champagne, Silvana. Our baby is going into business.”
I can’t keep the grin from my face and only resist the urge to hug her because Mum has gone silent, and the way she’s staring at me is unnerving.
“Is this because of the twenty-seven thing again?” she asks, soft and perceptive.
I flick my eyes quickly away from hers at the mention of my recent birthday. She really is way too good at this mum stuff for me to be able to fool her.
“Because we’ve been through this,” she says. “It’s just a number, no more, no less.”
Twenty-seven might be just a number to some people, but not to me.
Twenty-seven is the age my mum was when she gave birth to me, and the age my gran was when she gave birth to my mother.
It was also the age my father was on the day he died, his motorbike crushed beneath the wheels of a lorry as he dashed to the hospital to be with my mum when she gave birth.
Turning twenty-seven myself, then, hit me harder than I’d imagined.
I’d got up expecting a pretty normal sort of birthday and found myself hit with the most enormous, lung-crushing case of Oh my God, what am I going to do with my life?
It literally stopped me in my tracks, a great big juggernaut of fear and emotion and actual tears.
I thought of my mother, and how she’d already found her love, her calling, and had a child in her arms by this age.
I thought of my father, the man my mother has never gotten over losing, whose life ended at this point when my life has barely even got off the starting blocks.
Up until the age of twenty-six and three hundred and sixty-four days, I was a child playing at being a grown-up.
But on the afternoon of my twenty-seventh birthday, I metaphorically put away my childish things, and I made a list. I want a life that’s good, a life that’s full and rich with love and pride, to make things happen for myself rather than have them happen tome.
Regardless of the fact that it scares the living daylights out of me, I’m going to start my own agency, and I’d really love to do it with my mum’s blessing.
Gran comes to my rescue with an unexpected suggestion. “She can have Glenda for a couple of hours each morning, Silvana.”
Glenda Jackson is the secretary/center of the universe at Blithe Spirits, a veritable Wonder Woman when it comes to organization.
She’s been at Blithe for as long as I can remember, the kind of woman who could run for prime minister in her spare time if she chose to.
Luckily for us, she concentrates all of her efforts on keeping our ship tight; far too tight to need me as an assistant, which, having given up all attempts at working as a civilian, has been my most recent job.
I was entirely redundant here, to be honest. My mother and Gran are happy to devote their time and energy to individual sittings and group sessions, and Glenda has the admin and organizational side of things stitched up tighter than a kipper.
It smoothes the wheels for us that she is well respected in Chapelwick; she adds an air of normality to our screwball, Let’s talk to the ghosts business.
She’s also the keeper of the Chapelwick jungle drums; if Glenda doesn’t know something, it’s not worth knowing.
It’s a masterstroke by Gran. Offering me Glenda’s services gives my mother a way to keep tabs on what I’m up to and gives me a way to get what I want.
You don’t live in this family for as long as Gran has without developing United Nations–level diplomacy skills.
My mother looks a tiny bit mollified, but anyone who didn’t know her well wouldn’t have been able to spot the thaw.
She huffs her cheeks out and scowls at Gran. “You can’t have champagne. It’s breakfast time.”
Gran shrugs her shoulders delicately, thoroughly unrepentant. “It’s five o’clock somewhere, Silvana.”