CLICK TO PLAY Comeback Special
Read by Lin Sagovsky
Mediumship isn’t something you do for the money. It’s something you can’t help doing, and frankly, the pay’s crap. That’s why I work out of my flat above the Paradise Nail Bar on New Cross Road: I can’t afford a proper office. Besides, most of my clientele come to me by word-of-mouth, just like Marina. Marina was younger than my average client, and extremely earnest. She was also very eager to speak to Elvis Presley.
I guessed this because she showed up at 10pm in a copy of Priscilla’s wedding dress, clutching two hundred quid in wrinkled twenties. She mentioned the name of a fellow psychic who’d recommended her to me (or the other way round, I suppose) so I sighed, and let her in. Princess Di’s more my speciality, but I like a challenge.
“Cup of tea?” I suggested, as she slunk timidly into my receiving room. (It’s the spare-room really, but done out with lamps and scarves and all the tat people expect). She slipped through the rainbow plastic bead-curtain, subsiding onto the clients’ chair with a sigh. Unlike Elvis, Marina wasn’t one of nature’s superstars: whereas the King had exuded a confident charm tempered with appealing vulnerability, poor Marina was a nightmare of nerves and nibbled cuticles even the Paradise Nail Bar couldn’t have saved.
Like so many of my clients, Marina had lost someone close to her: in this case her mum, who’d had a colourful youth in America, including a stint as a Las Vegas showgirl in the 70s. Marina had never known her father and never particularly minded, until with her dying breath, Mum told her his name: Elvis Presley. She even had the birth certificate to prove it, sort of. It was from a Vegas hospital, dated 18 February 1978, seven months to the day after the King’s death, but the father’s name was conspicuously absent. Marina’s Mum claimed they’d had a fling in the heady summer of ’77, when Elvis was playing the casinos, and this had resulted in Marina.
Imagine! One minute your dad’s Nowhere Man: the next he’s a rock legend, pop-culture icon and 35 years dead. But that last detail wasn’t going to stop Marina tracking down her new daddy. Marina lived in Croydon, worked in Peacocks, didn’t sing, didn’t dance, and had always preferred Johnny Cash. But now, when she looked in the mirror, she sometimes saw the ghost of a sneer on her lips, the hint of a quiff in her thick dark hair, and wondered.
“Since Mum passed, I’ve read everything I could find,” she said earnestly. “I’ve got all the books, all the documentaries, everything, but I still … it’s possible, that’s all I know. I just got to know if it’s true. You’re my last hope.” She turned pleading brown eyes on me and I thought, oh shit.
You see, despite being a fan, I’ve never actually managed to contact Mr. Presley: Princess Diana I’m quite friendly with, but not Elvis. Marina had been vague over the phone: just talked about getting in touch with her deceased father. Dead parents are usually an easy gig: unless they’ve got a grudge, they’re always keen to hear from the kids. But when she told me the story of the King and the showgirl: well, it was lucky she was paying in cash because otherwise, with my luck, I wouldn’t even’ve tried. Still, for a fistful of twenties … well, even spiritualists have to eat.
I dimmed the lights, took her thin hand, closed my eyes and put my head back. I can’t really describe what it’s like, calling into the beyond with my mind; probing the ether with psychic tendrils. It’s sort of frightening and familiar all at once; like walking round your house in the dark. The buzz varies a lot, too. Sometimes it’s like a cocktail party over there, and sometimes it’s as packed and lonely as a graveyard: plenty of people around but nobody to talk to. We don’t call the dead “the silent majority” for nothing.
Anyway, I hadn’t hardly started calling out for Elvis, feeling a right idiot and knowing I’d fail as I always had before, when I felt … well, it’s hard to describe. It was like my body was a suit and someone was putting me on. Normally spirits are extremely polite about physical possession: like sensitive lovers or high-end estate agents, they handle you gently, ask permission to enter, then slip in expertly, with minimum fuss. They don’t just batter down the door and wipe their boots on the carpet, metaphorically speaking. However, with a spirit you’ve been trying to contact for years, beggars certainly cannot be choosers.
So I went with it: I let him all the way in.
A kind of gleaming warmth spread through me as he settled into my chair. I felt his desire to speak to Marina almost matched hers to hear him. And I felt something else, too: my upper lip, sneering; my hips snaking in the chair, my toes tapping. I’d never been taken over so completely by a presence before: the King’s charm and force of personality worked just as well post-mortem as in life. You can forgive a girl for being starstruck.
“Honey?” he said. His Tennessee-honey accent coming out of my mouth felt strange and wonderful.
“D-daddy?” stammered Marina.
Have you ever watched those shows, you know, the ancestry ones and the ones where they reunite adopted children and birth-parents, the happy ones and the sad ones? Because let me tell you, this reunion was a real tearjerker. Elvis spoke in glowing, tender terms of Marina’s mother; her blue eyes, her long legs, her big heart (“How could he know?” she gasped). It was all the usual stuff, I suppose, but it seemed special, somehow.
He said he wished he could’ve been there for her, and he sent her all his love from the beyond, where he and her grandmother Grace and uncle Jesse were safe and happy too.
Then he signed off with love, asked her not to take a DNA test because it would break Priscilla’s heart to know he’d cheated on her, and wished her happiness. Marina went away glowing and I collapsed, excited and exhausted, staring at the sheaf of twenties on the table. I almost didn’t want to take her money, given what a thrill it had been to have the King visit, but catfood doesn’t buy itself, so I reached to pocket the notes.
Resistance; my hand skirted around the cash, spidering away.
Like that, is it? I thought. Sick of being bled dry by the Colonel in life, maybe Elvis was hoping to save his daughter the price of a psychic phonecall. I willed my hand forward, again; it worked this time, but the spirit hiding in my body had already given himself away.
“You’re still in there, aren’t you?” I said, loudly. My own head nodded, then hung in shame. What on earth was Elvis doing hijacking me? Didn’t he have better things to do in the afterlife than wander round a South London flat? Or was he (as I was starting to suspect) not who he said he was after all? Wasn’t Elvis’s Mum called Gladys, not Grace? Had I, in fact, been possessed by an Elvis impersonator?
I clenched my fists, forcefully unhitched my lip, and marched myself to the mirror, where I stared hard into my own narrowed eyes, seeking out whoever was in there, wrestling me for control.
“Oi you,” I said sternly, “out! I don’t like uninvited guests, especially under false names.” Identity theft is surprisingly common in the spirit world. Usually a bored or lonely presence poses as someone popular and loved: and who’s more beloved than Elvis?
“But Ma’am, I’m the man you want!” he protested, in an accent that was starting to sound more Middlesbrough than Memphis. This cheeky bastard had fooled poor Marina, but he wasn’t deceiving me.
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Sing me something.”
My lips in the mirror quivered as he launched into Love Me Tender. I stopped him with a single finger laid across my mouth.
“Everybody knows that one,” I said, “Sing my favourite. Sing Never Been to Spain.”
Now, despite being a great song, this isn’t a common part of the average person’s Elvis repertoire: only serious fans know he recorded it. As a connoisseur of the King’s back-catalogue I know the words – but whoever was squatting in my body clearly didn’t. Never been to Spain; he’d probably never even been to Southampton. Just another dead wannabe: and they’re the saddest kind, because if anything buggers up someone’s lifelong ambitions, it’s death.
“All right, you’ve got me.” A Northern accent now, broad Yorkshire, full of defeat and regret.
“I think you owe me an explanation.” I folded my arms and waited.
“I’m sorry, love,” he said at last. “It’s been such a bloody long time without a peep. Nobody I knew, even knew I was dead for years, and then … well, nobody cared. I never even knew I had a daughter out there – can you imagine? And then when Jean passed over, well, I recognised her at once(you don’t forget legs like those) but I couldn’t let her see me, in case – I heard she’d told Marina who her dad was with her dying breath. That’s why I had to jump in. Talk to Marina first. So she’d never find out.”
“What?” I said. “Her Mum ean had a fling with Elvis. Are you calling her a liar, or am I supposed to believe Elvis came from Yorkshire?”
“Neither,” he said. “And both, sort of … Colonel Tom spotted me in a lookalike contest, took me on as a backing singer and used me as a double after shows, so the King could get away. Jean really did think I was him, all the time we were together. Then he died, and I had to break it off, of course; disappear. Always regretted that; Jean was a wonderful girl. Couldn’t show my face at the casino again after doing a runner; didn’t have the heart to sing any more. Ended up working at a gas-station in Texas. Never had a wife or a family. Never had anything much, outside music. What could I do?”
“You could not lie to people,” I suggested.
“Come on, the King’s too busy to take calls. All us impersonators who’ve passed over, we take ‘em instead; we’re happy to, and the fans love it. He’s like Princess Diana, you know? Hounded all his life, now he just wants to be left alone. You won’t tell her, will you? Marina, I mean. She really is my daughter. I just wanted to talk to her; just once. But if she finds out her old man was nothing but a tribute act, you’ll break her heart.”
Dark, sad eyes stared into mine in the mirror. The cocky Elvis strut had sagged into an apologetic slump. No wonder people still wanted to be him: even I’d been under the spell, for an hour or so. How could I burst Marina’s bubble? Who could it hurt, to let her believe?
“God,” I said, annoyed with myself for swallowing a sob-story, and even more annoyed that I’d been entertaining fake Dianas all these years, “all right then. Piss off and I won’t tell Marina the truth.”
My head jerked up. My nostrils flared. A lazy, lopsided grin tugged at my mouth. I threw my shoulders back and struck a pose, for all the world as if I were wearing a slightly too-tight jumpsuit, gold sunglasses and a cape. I pointed at myself in the mirror and snapped off a confident wink, full of confidence, promise, personality; magic. And just for a moment, I saw him in my eyes: what Marina’s Mum had seen. I saw the King.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thangyou ver’much.”
And then Elvis left the building.
© E. P. Henderson, 2013
E. P. Henderson started writing stories years ago, stopped for ages, and has just started again. Stories are forthcoming in MTM and Error 404, and have been read live by Liars' League in London, Hong Kong and New York. She’s a Londoner by adoption rather than by birth, and is working on a novel.
Lin Sagovsky’s credits include talking books, TV narrations and BBC R4/World Service programmes aplenty. She’s equally passionate about taking her actor/playwright background to all corners of the business world via her consultancy Play4Real, helping businesspeople use voice and body to create presence and fun in their working lives.
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