One thing was clear

Aunt Aurelia wasn’t my aunt’s real name. She was christened Jane. But she’d reinvented herself in her early thirties, swapping jumpers and jeans for long skirts and belted silk jackets. Cropped hair for long curls and head scarves. Plain Jane for mystical Aurelia. Almost overnight, what was a general curiosity about the occult became a business operated from my aunt’s sitting room. Complete with onyx crystal ball.

I can remember sitting on her sagging sofa after school, clumsily shuffling her new pack of slippery tarot cards. The moon. The fool. Death. There were always thick, purple candles burning and I’d dip my fingers in the wax, let it cool and then peel it off in a perfect mould of my finger tip. If a visitor came, I was ushered into the galley kitchen. But I’d silently nudge open the door and squint through a slither of a crack to watch Aunt Aurelia flit about, like an oversized moth, pouring tea for the women and occasional men. I listened carefully, barely breathing. I was suspicious of every word my aunt said, but I liked to observe her visitors’ reactions. I saw their brows crease up when my aunt sensed a change was about to happen in their lives, possibly next Tuesday. I mimicked their wide, thin smiles when my aunt foresaw their good career prospects. Sometimes I even noticed wet cheeks when they were told that, unfortunately, they had very little planetary compatibility with their partners, and this was most likely the cause of the arguments.

When the reading was over, my aunt sat down to write her predictions in a black notebook, and I’d creep back into the room. The table was covered with a blue velvet cloth, and I liked to smooth the fabric backwards and forwards with the side of my hand while I waited for the pen to stop scratching. When I heard the snap of the notebook closing, I took this as my cue to test my aunt’s psychic abilities for myself.

‘Tell me,’ I’d demand. ‘What will I have for lunch tomorrow?’

‘Fish fingers,’ my aunt would reply, airily.

‘What’s my new teacher called?’

‘Mr Wolff.’

But that wasn’t fair, I’d say, because my mother must have told her. Then I’d continue in this manner, asking my aunt everything from the date of my death to what colour my vest was. It thrilled me when she gave the wrong answer. Made my heart prickle when she came close to the truth. I drank in everything she said, then spat it back out at her. Eventually, when my mouth was almost bone dry, my mother would finish work and pick me up.

‘How does Aunt Aurelia know things?’ I often asked on the walk home, kicking stones across the path.

My mother usually shrugged. She’d had her hand grabbed and its palm rolled over and read by her sister more times than she cared to remember. She said that my aunt told people what they wanted to hear, that it was probably all guesswork, and to stop scuffing my school shoes.

I believed my mother. She wore polyester suits and worked in a bank.

***

My aunt died last month. She’d had an allergic reaction in a seafood restaurant. Red snapper. Apparently there wasn’t anything anyone could do.

‘Didn’t see that coming, did you?’ I couldn’t help thinking, when my mother broke the news to me. But it was a shock, and I felt horrid that I hadn’t seen her recently, before she’d dropped down dead. Dramatic, even in death.

I’d moved away from the place I grew up. Once for university and then again for a job in a lab, which was badly paid but the plan was to work my way up. I rarely went back home, but my aunt and I had occasionally spoken on the phone. I’d make safe enquiries into her life, what was the weather like and had she seen my mother lately? But the conversation was always nudged, usually with considerable force, into what was coming for me.

At first I laughed it off: ‘There you go again!’

But then it became like a game, like when I was a child, with my aunt telling me things about my life and me trying to catch her out.

‘Your neighbour,’ she said to me. ‘Anna?’

‘Enya,’ I corrected her, smiling smugly into the mouthpiece of my phone.

‘She’s going to leave.’

Enya was moving away. But she’d posted an update online that morning and I told my aunt that that was how she knew. Then there was the train crash my aunt predicted, which did happen, but it wasn’t the train I commuted to work on that she’d begged me not to get. I was stubborn about proving my aunt wrong, going as far as adopting a patchy-haired cat, when she’d assured me I would soon find myself in possession of a particularly energetic spaniel.

Eventually it all started to annoy me. Especially when children became a repeat prediction. I limited our calls to birthdays and Christmas. My life continued much the same. No sudden death by collision. No romance. No pregnancies.

***

A month or so after my aunt’s funeral, I was about to feed the patchy-haired cat, when a brown package came through my letterbox and landed on my equally patchy door mat. I slit it open, the cat mewing around my ankles. There was a cream-white letter inside, folded around a hard and flat object.

The object turned out to be a black notebook, and the letter was from Hawker Solicitors. They hastened to inform me that my late aunt wanted me to have the enclosed, as a matter of urgency, and that I was to read the notebook’s content before the 12th March. Which was today.

This was so like my aunt: deliberately mysterious. I could just see the solicitors' faces as they carried out her wishes, eyebrows raised, then home to discuss the barking-mad woman at work today over risotto and a glass of wine. Or perhaps, even, they were hooked by my aunt’s low, knowing voice, and had booked appointments for themselves and for their wives. I wouldn’t be surprised.

I knew what the notebook was. I recognised it from all the after-school evenings spent in my aunt’s candle-lit sitting room. This was her Book of Predictions, as confirmed by the title inked across the first page, thin and spidery. As requested, I flicked through, seeing names and future events that I recognised even after all this time. I may not have believed my aunt’s breathless monologues, but as a child I had listened, and children have an uncanny ability of remembering certain things.

Each prediction was paired with the date on which it was supposed to happen, and I read them all, right up to the last one, which was bookmarked by a thin ribbon. It was brief.

12 March 2021 – 29, 13, 09, 36, 17, 04

Six numbers. It didn’t take me long to put aside my skepticism of the occult. Within minutes, I’d bought a lottery ticket for that night’s draw. I told myself I was doing what any sane person would and that, despite what I thought about my aunt’s line of work when she was alive, I could hardly ignore the final prediction she’d penned.

The next morning, unable to stop myself from refreshing my emails over and over, I quickly discovered I wasn’t going to be made a millionaire. But my aunt’s numbers were accurate enough to get me one of the next best prizes, and within a couple of days my bank balance had gone up by twenty thousand.

I waited for the giddiness to set in, but I didn't scream into a cushion, not straight away. Instead I was strangely calm, entirely analytical. Had my aunt known she was about to die? I supposed so; she had made arrangements with Hawker Solicitors. Did this final prediction mean I had underestimated her? Quite likely. Although, even now, a stubborn part of me was calling it all an enormous coincidence. I’d like to have asked my aunt about it. Obviously that wasn’t going to be possible.

One thing was clear though. Crystal clear in fact. I won the money, but my aunt had masterfully won our game.