CHAPTER 1
I should have been happy. It had been a hot summer day, but the air was now cooling to a pleasant temperature, as it usually did at this time of year in this region of Australia. I was sitting on an old iron seat in my walled garden, looking at the huge sulphur-crested cockatoos and vibrant red and green king parrots at my bird feeder. The only sound was the crunch of the cockatoos hungrily cracking the black sunflower seeds. My two cats, Possum and Lily, glared at me from my living room window. They silently protested that I was denying them a snack.
It had been two whole weeks since I had seen Levi, two weeks in which I had been haunted by his last words: “I’m not dead.”
What did he mean by that? Was it his way of saying goodbye, telling me that he was going on to a life after death? Or was it a philosophical statement? Levi had never shown any interest in philosophy—he’d never even so much as quoted Heidegger—but then again, we hadn’t spoken as much as a normal couple.
Couple. There was that word again. We weren’t a couple, for he was a ghost and I was a living human being. Sure, I was attracted to him, and I was fairly certain he was attracted to me, but to think that there could be any future between a living person and a dead person was an exercise in futility.
I watched as the two largest cockatoos pushed an old cockatoo from the feeder. The old cockatoo in turn pushed some native pigeons away from the birdseed that had fallen on the ground. The heady scent of the violet trees carried to me on the breeze, and I sighed. The sunset was spectacular, the sky a luminous rose gold in juxtaposition with the tall eucalyptus trees on the horizon. Had circumstances been different, I would have taken in its beauty. Now it was simply a source of irritation, a reminder of what might have been.
A mother duck, a wild wood duck, complained loudly that there was now no birdseed left in the feeder. She waddled over to within a few feet of me, but her seven ducklings were not quite so brave. I stood up carefully so as not to frighten her, and went into my kitchen to fetch more birdseed. I returned and poured it into the feeder that was on the ground. The seven little ducklings threw themselves into the feeder and ate hungrily, their heads bobbing furiously, while I returned to my seat. Once more, my thoughts turned to Levi.
Would I ever see him again? I shook my head. I felt silly focusing so intently on him, but this was hardly a normal situation. I was used to ghosts. After all, I was a professional clairvoyant medium, travelling around Australia giving readings and doing shows. Yet Levi was the first ghost I had ever seen with my own eyes. I normally only tuned into sensations from the spirits of the departed. But when Levi had appeared to me just before Christmas in the middle of one of my shows, he had changed my whole world. I could see him and hear him as clearly as I could hear and see a living person.
So if he wasn’t dead, what was he? It was doing my head in. The only explanation I could think of was that he meant he was crossing over, going into the light, or any other of those clichés. Yet why hadn’t he said, “Prudence, I’m going into the light”? I had no idea. Who knows what would be going through someone’s mind at that point, and Levi wasn’t around for me to ask.
I supposed I’d have to face facts and realise that I would never see him again. A single tear rolled down my cheek, and I brushed it away in a fit of irritation. What was wrong with me?
