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Kim nodded.
‘Ask away and I promise I won’t be offended.’
‘Are you a fraud? Do you take people’s money and tell them what they want to hear?’
Eloise laughed. ‘Enough small talk, Kim – just get to the point.’
Kim smiled and took a sip of her coffee.
Eloise continued. ‘I’m going to start at the very beginning. I heard and felt nothing until I was eight years old. I was an only child and my parents and I were holidaying in North Wales. I was swimming in a lake.
‘Just a couple of minutes was all it took. Some kind of weed wrapped itself around my ankle. I was being pulled under. I struggled to release it; the panic made my breathing worse. I was terrified and I kept trying to pull myself free. It just kept tightening. And then through all the noise in my head I heard one single, calm voice telling me to stop struggling, to just let go. That’s what I did and lost consciousness. Apparently the weed unattached itself and my parents pulled me out.’
‘So your gift came to you that day?’ Kim asked.
Eloise shrugged. ‘I don’t know if it had always been there, but that was the first time I heard the voice inside my head.’
‘And after that?’
Eloise smiled. ‘The next time I frightened the life out of my mum, who was baking while I was colouring at the kitchen table. She muttered to herself, “Where’s that eight-inch cake tin?” and straight away I said, “Bottom cupboard, top shelf.” I don’t know where the words came from but they just came out of my mouth. That happened more and more over the next couple of years. I just found that I knew stuff. Knowledge was in my head and I hadn’t put it there.’
‘Were you scared?’ Kim asked.
‘No, the first experience I had with the voice, it saved my life. I never saw it as anything other than a friend.’
‘Were your parents worried?’
Eloise shook her head. ‘They accepted that I knew things but my dad advised me it was best not to tell anyone else, that not everyone could do what I could.’
‘Did it progress?’ Kim asked.
‘It changed over time. I remember once at the end of a school day, my teacher was packing away everything on her desk. I had the urge to tell her that she didn’t need to do that, and as I left the classroom, I was besieged by this overwhelming sadness. I just wanted to cry. I said nothing but I wasn’t as shocked as others to learn the next morning that she’d been killed in a car accident. Obviously I was distraught. I felt like it was my fault, that I’d been given a message and that I should have warned her.’
‘Of what?’ Kim asked.
‘That’s what my parents said. I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen; I only felt that something was going to happen.
‘That kind of thing happened for many years. One time, in high school, my best friend finally started going steady with the boy she’d fantasised over for months. It got to the time they were talking about sex. I broke my own rule and told her he was going to leave her as soon as he got what he wanted. She called me jealous, we fell out and he did exactly what I said he’d do. She hated me even more after that, and I learned a valuable lesson.’
‘Which was?’
‘Don’t offer the truth to someone who isn’t ready to receive it.’
‘How does that work with readings?’
‘I do very few now, and only for people who are desperate for my help, and if I can’t help, I tell them that.’
‘How can you not help everyone?’ Kim asked, trying to understand.
‘Because it doesn’t work that way. I don’t know everything about everyone, and I can’t dial in to the voices as and when I choose. Anyone that can do that has a different kind of gift to me. To explain, yesterday I went shopping at Asda. I passed a man picking some tomatoes. I knew that his debit card was going to be declined. When I got to the checkout, I knew the girl that served me was going to get a call to confirm she’d been accepted at Aston University, but I passed dozens of other people with no premonitions at all.’
Eloise regarded her silently for a minute. ‘I can see the doubt in your face, and I’m not going to do any party tricks to convince you. Like I said, I occasionally offer my gift, free of charge, to people who want to receive it or who really need it.’
‘Who really needs it?’ Kim asked.
‘I visit a hospice in Netherton every Tuesday and Thursday. I offer comfort.’
‘But you just said that sometimes you don’t feel anything.’
