Crystals

It was one of those jobs that didn't quite fit in with my CV, but was somehow part of the journey. A stint in a shop that sold alternative books, remedies, crystals, salt ionisers.....

The Crystal Gazer

Mildred Moody opened the shop door slowly, hoping to avoid the tomb-creak that usually ensued. She dodged the chimes that somebody insisted on hanging at eye level just inside the doorway. A glance at the notice board told her that somebody had rearranged it again. First of the month, every month, some insistent body reorganised the business cards. Mildred would now have to scour through row upon row of them in search of her own, just in case somebody had decided to shred her this month.

She closed her right eye and screwed up her left one. That way she could make out, eventually, the gold rimmed edges of her own business card, almost obliterated by a brash rainbow offering of Indian Head Massage, Reiki and cellular healing.

“I left yours up, Miss Moody,”  chirped a voice from behind the cash register- Tara, the owner’s teenage daughter, headphones in situ, painting her nails black, tuned to Spin 103, while Terry Oldfield poured tranquillity around the shop floor.

“You should move those chimes,” grunted the little woman in the second-hand Mac and down-at- heel Clarks Springers and clutching a Tesco bag-for-life.

“Magda says the sound of chimes breaks up stagnant energy, Miss Moody.”

“Your mother may be right, but somebody will lose an eye!”

That said Mildred turned towards a shelf arrayed with precious stones and crystals. Glittering amber, carnelian and obsidian winked at her from glass bowls. A particular amethyst caught her eye. In its polished face she could just about make out what might be the head of a hyena God. Anubis weighing hearts at the time of the passing over. Anubis trapped in a crystal time frame!

Mildred felt for the coin in her coat pocket. Her fingers swept the expanse of pocket lining until they encountered an unexpected gap in the seam. Without moving her head Mildred looked sideways at the girl behind the counter. Tara was talking with animation on her mobile.

“Bored - speechless. Two customers- all day. Weirdos! Quess who’s here again?” The voice dropped. “Yeh, the loop. She’s seeing visions, in stones! Says they talk to her. Yeh, I know!”

Mildred’s fingers crooked and burrowed deeper into her coat lining. Just as she reached the edge of a coin the chimes rang out and Mildred lost contact. A young man in a business suit and pink tie blustered in.

The amethyst was winking furiously at her. She turned her back to the counter and reached for the stone. The business suit was checking out the CDs.

“Temple of the Forest? It sounds relaxing, but is there any water sound in it? I hate the sound of water.”

“No idea,” the girl replied.

“Perhaps I could hear a track or two?” the suit persisted.

Mildred heard Tara’s sigh.

“Call you back in a sec,” she said to her friend on the mobile.

“Are these ionisers any use?” he queried.

The business suit was going to be a problem.

“I’ll find you a leaflet.” Tara vacated her perch behind the cash register.

This was Mildred’s chance. With a deft move she bagged the amethyst.

High heels clip clopped behind her.

“Can you put that stone back on the shelf, Miss Moody!”

“I can’t, as a matter of fact. It’s probably stuck in the hem of my coat. Besides it was  an experiment in energy transfer…..”

“I’ve heard it all now!”

“If you attune yourself to the crystal it can be moved along any axis, Tara.”

“Well then, I’d be grateful if you would attune it back to the shelf.”

“Attunement uses up a lot of energy, my dear, and, for the moment, I’m zapped.”

The girl’s painted nails tapped with menace on her hip bones.

“She’ll pay you next time,” came a voice, apparently from Mildred’s pocket.

The tapping stopped. The business suit dropped the salt crystal ioniser that rained orange splinters onto the shop floor.

“You heard Anubis! I’ll pay you next time.” And Mildred, negotiating her Clark Springers through the salt crystal shards, headed for the door. Chimes rang out as the door creaked to a close.

The high heels headed for the notice board, and the black painted nails prised out a gold rimmed business card that read:

Mildred Moody

Ventriloquist and Crystal Gazer

Fortune Teller and Soothsayer.

Holding the card ceremoniously between painted thumb and forefinger, Tara picked her stiletto steps through the glittering glass strewn across the shop floor. At the back of the shop she opened a door and leaned over a toilet bowl. The nails released their prey and the card fluttered into a swirl of flushed foam.

“It’s called Bull shit, Miss Moody!”

On Becoming Picasso

A SEMI-BIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT OF MY PAINTING EFFORTS

ON BECOMING PICASSO

“And a can of hair spray,” I tell the girl with the earphones dangling from her earlobes. 

“It’s for my art class," I add.

 The queue in the shop is building up behind me, but I explain anyway. “To keep the pastels from running into one another.”

 The minute I get home I soak my morning’s effort in a blast of hair spray and stick it on the fridge door. I have already spent a fortune on my Thursday art class and the feedback so far has been a series of warm condolences.

“It’s not bad,” my youngest son reassures me.

“You have to start somewhere,” declares my eldest as she turns my masterpiece upside down in an attempt to decipher it.

 “It is a beginner’s class, love,” says my husband. “You can’t expect to be a Picasso just yet!”

     

But that’s just the problem. 

It isn’t a beginner’s class. 

The beginner’s class was full.

  

“Of course, as I’ve said before, there’s no such thing as white,” announces Vivienne Lensky on our first morning. “White does not exist. If you look with a painterly eye you’ll see that white is actually informed by some other colour, like blue or yellow.”

     

The other six painterly ladies nod knowingly. 

This isn’t their first outing in art class.

They’ve been juggling it with golf, bridge and church coffee mornings for well near a decade. Janet has already progressed to watercolours and spends most of the morning blow drying her elaborately detailed landscape. Josephine has taken up her vibrantly colourful market scene again, after abandoning it over the summer months. Perfectly curved and textured melons and peppers stare up at me from her market stall backdrop.

    

They are all discussing framing, art exhibitions, reasonable price tags to place on their term’s work etc etc while I am set to the task of choosing my favourite pictures from a pile of gallery brochures. “Just to determine your style,” says Vivienne.

“Pastels,” she announces after a cursory glance at my choice and I am assigned a box of chalks. 

Tears are beginning to smart. I had expected a palette and an array of exotic sounding colours to choose from. I had bought a bag of silver tubes and a selection of brush sizes from 2 to 16. They peep out now from my large canvas bag, also purchased for its width, depth and capacity to hold the thinners, the turpentine, the vast stock of supplementary objects that a real painter would require. 

But chalk? I have always hated the smell of it.

Within ten minutes I have smudges of chalk everywhere. The desk, my pale blue shirt, my nose. Vivienne offers a rubber which I use generously to rearrange my sleeping cat figure. But it is all a frantic explosion of dust and smudge. Red has ended up where it was not intended and my tortoiseshell is more ginger than tortoise. 

Meanwhile the other painterly ladies dabble elegantly and stroll from pale canvas to pale canvas admiring the view and talking of texture and perspective until the tears threaten to wash away my morning’s effort.

“I like his pose,” announces Janet looking over my shoulder.

“It’s a cat is it?” says Josephine.

“What else,” I mutter through gritted teeth.

“I think he’s splendid,” declares Vivienne and I want him for the Christmas card set.”

“The what?” I ask.

“The Christmas card designs. Every year we do a set of twelve for the Swahili Tiger Widows. Do you think you could try a snowman next week?”

 I have at last found my level. Three reindeers, four robins, two Santas, three snowmen and one tortoiseshell later and the Thursday morning Redford Painters have put together a set of Charity cards. The Tiger Widows declare a bumper year for revenue from Christmas card sales and I can’t wait until Spring. It seems I am about to embark on another mission that will require a detailed study of tulips, spring chickens, lambs and Easter bunnies. 

And everybody else is too busy creating masterpieces.

Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2016