It’s all Covid, Covid, Covid. I can’t let it stop me living the dream

A reunion with the psychic who helped her get together with Alex proves unsettling for Charlotte Cripps

(Amara May)

It’s 2021. I’m now on first-name terms at my local walk-in Covid test centre in North Kensington; I’ve been so many times. It’s a hell of a place; not a yummy mummy in sight as they all do it privately. It reminds me of lining up outside a nightclub with bouncers at the door keeping you in order. Those were the days when I had a social life – before kids and Covid.

I know they spray it all down when you leave a cubicle, but I wonder if hanging out here is why the NHS Test and Trace app caught up with me and told me to isolate for four days after Christmas? Or was it when I went into Tesco and passed somebody in the cheese aisle? 

I didn’t get clean and sober 21 years ago to be trapped in my flat like a reclusive addict climbing the walls

I’m having to be careful because I’m looking after my dad, 88. It’s going to change my life when he gets the second dose of the coronavirus vaccine next week; he can go out and do my shopping for me.

But it’s been one scare after another. I thought that five of Liberty’s nursery teachers and two of Lola’s classmates getting Covid was the closest we would get to the virus. But then the kids’ new nanny Majlinda – pronounced my-leen-dah – tells me she has it; we dodged a bullet there. Had it not been the Christmas holidays, she would have been working at mine most of that week. I’m starting to think we have a guardian angel? Just to be on the safe side, I drag Lola and Liberty off for another test; we are negative.  

It’s all Covid, Covid , Covid. I can’t let it stop me living the dream. I didn’t get clean and sober 21 years ago to be trapped in my flat like a reclusive addict climbing the walls. 

My new year’s resolution is to try and claw back all this cash I’ve spent over Christmas. Not only that – but to think bigger.  How am I going to move up to the next financial tier? All this living hand to mouth doesn’t work. I need cash – lots of it.  

That’s when my phone rings. It’s my psychic lady. “Good God! This is a bit out of the blue,” I think, considering she vanished off the face of the planet two years ago. I get goosebumps; has she picked up on the fact I need guidance?

She wants to talk about a new project she’s got up her sleeve. Could this be my Del Boy moment – “this time next year we’ll be millionaires”? While I’m talking to her, there’s a very loud thud from my hallway. “Hang on, what’s that?” I tell her. I see a pair of flip-flops lying on the floor that I had left on top of the chest of drawers so that Muggles didn’t eat them. How strange?  

She hands them each a magic bubble wand like she’s a fairy godmother… Without her I might have been childless

“That’s Alex”, she says knowingly. Is it really? I’m not so sure. But when I experiment later by pushing them off the cupboard, they just don’t make the same dramatic noise. I’m not quite sure what to make of it, but there’s no harm in meeting up with her.

I take Lola and Liberty to meet her for a socially distanced walk in Kensington Gardens. It’s profound. Not only had she had a premonition 20 years ago that I would have Alex’s children in the days when I couldn’t even get him to respond to a text message – let alone take me on a date – but here I am with them.  She hands them each a magic bubble wand like she’s a fairy godmother. “Without her I might have been childless,” I think to myself. We get down to business. It turns out she wants to co-write a book with me. “About Ghislaine Maxwell?” I say. “Are you sure?” Yes, she can see that it will be a money-spinner; we just need to find the right source.  

I’m hoping she will use her physic abilities to muster one up rather than expect me to trawl through my contacts. I think it’s an intriguing idea but not one that I think I would seriously drop the day job for.  The real question for me is “can you see dollar signs all over this project?” I haven’t got time to waste for the fun of it.  What I need is a figure. She looks pensive and then suddenly says: “£30k each.” Kerching.  

I don’t doubt she can get inside the head of our subject matter but when she rings me a few days later saying she wants me to sign a legal contract, that if I write a book with her, we split it 50/50, I’m taken aback.

Hang on, she is going to sit at home pondering psychic premonitions – not lift a finger and just tap into the source – while I churn out a book? “How many words per minute do you type?” she asks me. I’m having palpations thinking about it.  

“What if your dad gets ill midway through the book?” she asks? “Do I get another writer in?” I’m on super-alert. “Is she giving me a clue to my future without realising it?” I’m reading into her every word; it’s analysis paralysis. I can’t think straight as I’m working it all out.

A dead pigeon falls out of the nearby tree and lands with a bang at my feet. Oh my god, is this an omen?

“This all needs to go in the contract,” she continues. “If you die, do the royalties go to your children?” Stop! I can’t believe what I am hearing. Not only that but a dead pigeon falls out of the nearby tree and lands with a bang at my feet. Oh my god, is this an omen?

“It’s bad energy,” my friend Chloe tells me. She goes on a lot of energy retreats and advises me to “cut contact”. “These people don’t realise their power and you don’t want somebody thinking these things for you,” she says. “It’s negative.”  

I call off the book: I’m too busy juggling work and childcare; it’s true anyway.  

I never hear back. It’s nothing unusual. Considering she lives locally in Notting Hill Gate, I never see her when she vanishes: never walking down the road, at the park with her dog, or in the supermarket, and she never answers the phone. Is she actually a ghost?

It’s all too weird. I haven’t seen her in two years since she met Liberty as a newborn – then she vanishes again.  Will the big reveal be that she is like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense – she’s actually dead? I’ve known her for more than 15 years but I’m no closer to getting a grip on who the hell she is. It’s hard to separate fact and fiction: how was she so accurate about Alex?  

Before she left she did say a few things: she didn’t see me needing to sell my flat and she saw me in a big house in Holland Park without steps going up to the door – which is unusual for that area. But, lo and behold, I saw one – and my friend lives there. Is a new romance on the cards? Or will I end up writing a bestseller after all?