Despite what my agent clearly thinks, I’m not desperate to meet someone. Not now and possibly not ever. I refuse to marry anyone just for the sake of getting married. I’m content doing what I do. My books make people happy.
Writing is really the only career I’ve had since uni. It hasn’t even occurred to me to do anything else with my anthropology degree. I’ve always looked at my education as training in how to do background research for my novels.
Or as my parents like to call them, “Isla’s wild and wacky imaginings.”
At least my father has read a couple of my books. They are too tame for my mum. “Isla, I have an idea for you,” she’s always saying. Said ideas usually involve a threesome (or more), a murder, and someone dying via autoerotic asphyxiation. My mum’s books, were she inclined to sit down long enough to pen them, would absolutely get a movie deal. She would look impeccable at the premiere, a rented man on each arm. And she would be on the cover of magazines and at the top of bestseller lists. Until she got bored. And then she’d take up another pastime. Something expensive and pointless that I’d end up paying the bill for eventually.
I didn’t choose to be a writer, any more than I chose to be psychic. Both things just sort of happened to me – like my red hair. These traits are the manifestation of a particular brand of spiritual and creative sensitivity that’s been bundled into my DNA, bound to and intertwined with the fabled Fairfax curse. I’m hardly the first in the family to possess the sight. Although it’s been known to skip over the male generations. It missed my father and grandfather, jumping directly from my paternal great-grandmother to me.
Sometimes, I just know things. I might be sitting at a takeaway lunch in the market, minding my own business, and eating a beautiful chip butty while I scroll through social. Then suddenly I will “see” a vase full of flowers in my mind’s eye. There it is - plain as day, like a photo. In that brief flash of a moment, I will also know that the man sitting at the next table was the one who bought the flowers and set them on his dying mother’s nightstand when he visited her this morning. Then poof! The vision evaporates, leaving me wondering whether I imagined it, ate some bad chips, or really feltsomething.
It’s almost always something.
It can be overwhelming at times, knowing things you’re not supposed to know. Things you didn’t ask to know or evenwantto know. They just show up on the switchboard of your senses, like radio signals from a foreign tower.
Once upon a time, I would have been in real danger of being burned as a witch.
Legend has it that the Fairfax curse goes back to my tenth great-grandfather's first wife, who was accused of witchcraft. The family was wealthy enough to buy her safe passage abroad. But once she was spirited away, they abandoned her. They left her in the West Indies to live out her days alone while her husband returned to England to make a more advantageous second marriage.
The witch-wife waited in vain for her beloved husband to return. When he did not and news of his second wife eventually reached her, the witch was broken-hearted. She cursed my ancestor and all his progeny, warning she would not be forgotten so easily. Henceforth, no Fairfax man could ever truly love another woman. And no Fairfax woman or bride could truly be loved.
The red hair, creativity, and second sight that seem to pop up every few generations were the witch’s parting gifts.
Of course, my father has always insisted this is foolish nonsense. He asserts that no such witch ever existed, except in his crazy grandmother’s tall tales.
Anything I ever thought I intuited as a child was swiftly dismissed by my parents as a figment of my overly-active imagination. But I know better. I don’t claim to understand it all. But I believe there is some truth to the stories.
When I was a child, there were “incidents.” For example, there was a time I told my mum’s friend that her recently deceased husband liked to watch her swimming laps in her backyard pool. I was four. We were having a proper tea party in the Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon at Fortnum & Mason, but I could barely eat my pastel-colored petit fours or drink my sugary strawberry tea.
I’d had the distinct sense that there was a strange man, sitting next to the piano player. He was there, but not there. Just sitting on the bench, slightly overlapping with the musician, and watching us drink our tea. And then suddenly he was beside me, speaking softly but insistently in my ear. “Tell her about the pool,” he said. “And please tell her the red bikini suits her.”
“What I don’t get,” I’d overheard my mum whispering to my father later that night, “is how she knew about the red bikini, let alone that Petra had put in the lap pool?”
“Oh, she just has a wild imagination,” my father said. “Gets it from my side, I fear. You know what a crackpot my nan is.”
When we went to see my great-grandmother at the care home, I’d shyly tell her about my visions. She hadn’t dismissed me. She’d taken me seriously, and she’d encouraged me to write all my visions down. “It makes the ghosts rest easier. They just want to be acknowledged, so they can move on,” she’d explained.
My stories made Granny Fairfax smile, and I’d loved that. It made me feel less alone.
Once, I’d asked my granny how to lift the curse, but she’d sighed deeply before telling me that only the sound of a returning lover’s sacred horn blown over the water has the power to travel across the centuries. Granny had shrugged as if this formula was an even greater mystery than the most complex equation in my maths class. The sound had to be a signal, shared by two lovers, deeply in love. Also, it had to be loud - loud enough to rouse the witch from her eternal slumber where she still waits for her lover’s return.
“Were she to hear that sound,” Granny insisted, “she would finally be able to rest in peace.”
“Has anyone tried a trumpet?” I’d asked hopefully.
“Trumpets, trombones, you name it. I once made a suitor serenade me with a full brass band,” my spry great-grandmother had laughed. “But clearly he didn’t love me enough. Or the brass wasn’t sacred. Who knows? All I know is we’re still cursed. I’m sorry, Child.”
I started writingThe Mystic Matchmakerseries shortly after she passed. She was 103 and had outlived her own children. She was the inspiration for my series.
Unlike me, my fictional matchmakerhas a simple, explicit way to release her family curse. All it takes is one hundred true love matches, then the curse will be lifted. Perhaps when I started writing it, I thought my writing could somehow break the curse. Then I wouldn’t have to be alone, or worse, doomed to a loveless marriage like my parents.
Ten years later, I now realize that was just wishful thinking. There are no horns blowing for me on either side of the Atlantic. And even if there were, it wouldn’t matter. I couldn’t return the sentiment. I have never actually been in love.
To be fair, my parents’ platonic relationship doesn’t seem to bother them all that much.
“Do you know what the divorce rate is, Isla? We’re just lucky to be good enough friends to put up with each other’s foibles.” So my mum’s argument goes.
While not in love with each other, my parents do share a grand passion. They are both committed to frittering away whatever’s left of the Fairfax family fortune on ridiculous ventures. Everything from miniature horse farming to selling NFTs of said horses. It cannot go on forever, and it doesn’t take a psychic to see that. My parents are out of money. I’d promised Granny Fairfax I’d do my best to hold on to the family estate, and it’s taking all of my literary creativity to do so.
