anyone and everyone. She’s always giving away our money
and our belongings: to strangers in the park; to people
she gets talking to in queues at the bank or down the
shops; to weird, dead-eyed Jehovah’s Witnesses with greasy
hair who come looking for converts and end up converted
themselves to The Way of Joanne. She always says that
every single life is a struggle against pre-determination,
and she has the proof; case after case, chart after chart,
annotated with strange hieroglyphs in her own delicate
half-hand. ‘If you let it,’ she always tells people sternly, ‘it
will happen. Only the strong-willed can change what’s in
the stars. It’s always, and only ever, up to you.’
She’s persuasive, Mum. People see the big blue doll’s
eyes and the long, white-blonde hair worn with a pokerstraight centre part, and don’t realise at first what they’re
dealing with. She’s iron and velvet in human form. She’s
a magus.
Everywhere we go, word gets around that she’s good,
that she never gets it wrong. When she says it will happen,
it will; like white water, it will suck you down if you let it.
Maybe things don’t pan out the way the person hearing it
expects them to, but her readings always fit, always. When
people look back at what’s just hit them like a semi bearing
down on them standing helpless in the road