You Knew, You Witch

I wouldn’t say I’m psychic.

I don’t see things before they happen. I don’t speak to spirits. I’ve never had a vision of the future.

But sometimes I know things.

Or perhaps I notice things before I consciously understand what I’ve noticed.

Or perhaps it’s coincidence.

Or witchery, as my friend Emily likes to call it.

Years ago, I was walking into Tesco.

Nothing mystical about that.

I had hold of a shopping trolley and, for some reason, looked down at my hand.

At my engagement ring and my wedding ring.

And I remember having this sudden, unusually deep appreciation for them.

I love these rings.

I love what they mean.

That I am loved. That I am cared for. That someone chose me and I chose them. That Ste and I belong to one another in this strange little life we’ve built together.

I pushed the trolley towards Tesco still looking at them.

And then, completely out of nowhere, I thought:

I need to phone Trish.

It wasn’t I haven’t spoken to Trish for a while.

It wasn’t I wonder what Trish is doing.

It was a pull.

Phone Trish.

And somehow, in my head, my wedding ring and Trish felt connected.

So I got my phone out and rang her.

She answered practically screaming.

“Oh my God. It’s happened! It’s just happened!”“What has happened?”“Emily! Emily’s got married!”

One of my oldest friends — someone I’d known for more than twenty-five years — had just married her partner.

Nobody had told me it was happening.

I didn’t even know there was a wedding planned.

Yet there I was, walking into Tesco, staring lovingly at my own wedding ring at almost exactly the moment my friend was putting one on hers.

I remember standing there thinking:

How did I know to phone?

Later that evening the photographs started arriving through WhatsApp.

Emily looked beautiful.

They were living abroad at the time, so there wasn’t really a wedding present I could easily send. Instead, I took all the photographs from the day and made them into a little film.

Two or three minutes of their wedding day stitched together with Spanish guitar playing underneath.

Her husband was Peruvian and a musician, and somehow the guitar seemed to pull the whole thing together — her, him, Peru, music, love, marriage.

That little film became my wedding gift.

And I might have put the Tesco moment down as one of those strange coincidences life occasionally hands you.

Except it keeps happening.

Emily turned fifty recently.

Her sister Katie lives abroad in Palma and works on yachts, and for months there had been secret plans to try to get her home for the birthday.

I knew none of this.

One evening I was walking the girls to their hoops and silks class when I suddenly stopped.

Katie’s here.

Not I wonder whether Katie might come home for Emily’s birthday.

I knew.

Katie was nearby.

And immediately came the familiar thought:

Phone Trish.

So I did.

She answered in her usual way.

“What do you want, darling? How are you, darling?”

And I didn’t even bother with hello.

“Katie’s here, isn’t she?”

There was a pause.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“She’s here.”

“No. Katie isn’t here.”

Trish had apparently been practising this lie for months.

There had been endless uncertainty about whether Katie could get away from the yacht. Whether she could get time off. Whether the whole surprise would happen at all.

And poor Trish had been guarding the secret the entire time.

But there was something in her voice.

I knew.

That night, just before I went to sleep, I looked at my phone.

There was a photograph.

Emily and Katie.

Together in Emily’s living room.

Underneath it were the words:

You knew, you witch.

And perhaps my strangest connection of all is with Trish herself.

Over the years, particularly while Emily has been off travelling the world, Trish and I have grown incredibly close.

She lives about fifteen minutes’ walk from my house. Two minutes in the car.

My girls call her Nanna Trish.

And every so often, Trish will decide entirely on a whim that she’s going to Spain.

No announcement.

No great planning.

She’ll just go.

And almost without fail, whenever she does, I phone her.

I never know she’s away.

I just suddenly decide that I desperately need to ask Trish something.

Usually something extremely important like:

“How do I cook this?”

or

“What was that recipe?”

or

“What do I put in this sauce?”

Because so much of what I know about cooking came from standing beside Trish over the years.

She’ll answer the phone and I’ll hear voices, clinking glasses or Spanish sunshine happening somewhere behind her.

“Where are you?”

“Palma.”

“Of course you are.”

Every bloody time.

Maybe there are completely sensible explanations for all of this.

Perhaps we unconsciously collect thousands of tiny pieces of information about the people we love — changes in tone, pauses in conversation, dates mentioned months before, patterns we don’t consciously realise we’ve stored.

And every so often our brains quietly assemble them before our conscious mind catches up.

Perhaps intuition is simply noticing without knowing that you’ve noticed.

Or perhaps human beings are more connected than we understand.

Perhaps friendship leaves invisible threads between us.

Perhaps somewhere in Lancashire a woman can look down at her wedding ring and feel, for no obvious reason, that something has shifted thousands of miles away.

I don’t really need to know.

I quite like the mystery.

At Emily’s fiftieth birthday party, the theme was hats.

Any hat. Any kind of headgear.

I arrived carrying mine.

Emily spotted me almost immediately.

She walked over, looked at me and said:

“There she is. The witch.”

And right on cue, I put on my witch’s hat.