I haven’t told many people, but I was a palm reader. It started when I found a book on palmistry. I wanted an escape from my teenage anxiety, wanted to know who I was outside the dictates of my family. Then, when I got older, it became a party trick.
While living in Melbourne, Tony, my Italian boyfriend introduced me to his family. His mother spoke very little English and I was a non-Italian, so she spurned me. I wasn’t the daughter-in-law she wanted.
At a party with Italian friends who had migrated from the same village, Tony, to break the ice, told them I read palms. After that, a queue formed asking if I would look at their hands. The experience opened the door and Tony’s mother saw me in a different light. I had a skill much admired by her friends.
Later, back in Adelaide, I read two palms that made me uncomfortable. A friend of Tony’s who came to visit, and the other, my brother’s best friend Greg.
Tony’s drug dealer friend, happy to put his hand out as a joke, allowed me free range in what I shared. But when he left, I pulled Tony aside and told him I’d seen more than I dared tell. Afraid I was imagining his future, and that palm-reading was just superstition, I’d kept shtum.
Earlier, I’d also not shared all I’d seen in Greg’s hand, and rather than not say anything, I’d couched my insight with lines like, ‘Just be careful. Don’t do anything stupid.’
I didn’t want to believe I had any special gift that allowed me access to the future, or that death hung over them.
A few months later Tony told me that his friend, and girlfriend, had just come home from dinner when there was a knock at the door. When Tony’s friend opened the door, a man in a balaclava raised a shotgun and with a blast, killed Tony’s friend. I was shaken.
Then more news. Greg, a heroin addict, had met a girl who was also on heroin, but when she got pregnant, both cleaned up their act. When the baby was born, Greg, left to look after her while his partner went shopping, was tempted when a friend dropped by and offered a hit. After being clean, and getting his life together, he did something stupid. When his girlfriend came home, she found him dead with the needle in his arm. The heroin’s strength unknown, death was instant.
At Greg’s graveside in Centennial Park, his mother’s grief and guilt needed to apportion blame. She screamed at the young woman already in despair over her loss, that it was she who killed her son. The dramatic public accusation resulted in the girl’s suicide a few days later.
I was overwhelmed by the deaths. While I could laugh about whether a girl was to marry and how many children she would have, the premonition of death was too much, and I stopped reading palms.
Burnside Writers Group 