Kharma

I want to tell you about Kharma, because she charmed me, and she changed me, and now she’s gone.

Cross Beach, Mayo, where we would walk and talk and swim and smoke and laugh …

She was so young - less than forty years old. She had challenges that she met with humour, but also by undermining the system. She would not be controlled. I loved her for that, even though I know the moonlight flit is only funny if you’re not the landlord. I have a problem with a world that crushes the creativity of those who refuse to fit. But I also know that petty scams and small dishonesties cause fracture lines that potentially shatter the fragile fabric of fairness we rely on. Put simply, I’m ambivalent about my loyalty to the social network I’m embroiled in. Charmaine, however, was not: all was fair game. 

She was dark haired with twinkling eyes, usually made up with mascara, but subtly, a kind of leopard’s yawn to the gaze that slipped behind your answering smile . She had a cupid’s bow lip, and dimples, though they were understated. She wore black. She said that it was the easiest thing not to have to think about what she would wear, just to buy a nice black top and black leggings. She dyed her hair black too, a lustrous mane of shining black, straight as a curtain. Her hands were beautiful, fingers well shaped. She had no pretensions about her figure, but she kept herself  in excellent shape, taut and lithe, encouraging her friend to take long walks with her huge, exuberant, but remarkably well behaved dogs. 

She worked as a clairvoyant, contacting the dead, on one of those premium lines. She would have to encourage people to stay on the call. She had a gift for connection. She knew that what she was doing was potentially abusive, people desperate to talk to their loved ones asking, what’s she doing now? What does she look like? Can she see me? Can you tell her that I was asking?

I’d practise yoga and smoke a spliff while she talked, and she would watch me, and smile. I would hear her laughing, and soothing, and listening to the outpourings of pain and grief, and holding space, and I would think, no, she’s not ripping anyone off, because this is just as important as a therapist. The cost of the calls, though: that shocked me. I hated the patient sighs as she waited for them to agree to another twenty minutes. 

She had the lightest touch. I felt as though she really did part the veil between this existence and the next - I’m an atheist. I know that’s not possible. But she could convince you of a stone’s aliveness. She wanted you to know that you needed to take yourself seriously. That you needed to look after yourself. That you let fun into your life: have you thought of joining a gambling club? She could feel the air around a person, probe it for the places where there was a softness, and ease herself in so that the person felt intimately known, and held, just for now, in the embrace of a compassionate professional. 

Most people would have called it a con. I called it kindness, albeit besmirched by mischievous humanity. How I delighted in her big smile. She attracted controversy and drama in the brief few years she lived in Erris. And then, like a spell of unexpectedly fine weather that lulls you into expecting to be able to see the sun, she was gone.

Kharma was born in South Africa, the daughter of a woman who lived on the streets of Johanesberg. She never knew her father, though she had been told he was Scottish, and liked to party. 

Her mother carried her around as she went from place to place, from group to group, drinking and smoking and listening to music and telling stories. The other people on the street were mainly ‘coloured’, as they were then called. Kharma’s mother was white. The police frequently stopped to check on her and eventually, she found herself of interest to social services. She hid Kharma when the patrol came round and managed that way until, Kharma remembered, aged three, being hidden in a garbage bin, and found. 

She never saw her mother, who died young, again. Within a few months, she had been adopted by a stupendously wealthy Afrikaans couple who, despite having three biological children, decided to adopt her. They had no idea what they had taken on. 

Kharma was rebellious from the start. She had left school early. But she had appreciated them, and they had treated her well. They helped her to train and start a kindergarten, to which their wealthy friends sent their young children. It was a huge success, initially at least. She employed good, reliable staff, she had a wonderful venue, and they took the children to the sea, and played endless games with them. Business was booming. But Kharma was bored. She had boyfriend issues. She was restless.

She decided to look for her father in Scotland. She started a new relationship and together, they left everything, sold up the business, and went to Glasgow. 

Inevitably, they didn’t find him. But they enjoyed living in a flat in Glasgow, and to entertain themselves, they bought two guinea pigs. They lined the floor of the flat with newspaper rather than buy a cage. They guineapigs bred. And bred. They ended up with 23. Her boyfriend played endless Texas Hold’Em. He made good money. They found the city depressing after a while. They didn’t like the landlord and he didn’t like them. They gave away the guineapigs and left one night on the boat to Belfast. 

The gambling kept them going, but they were curious: what else could you do to make money online? They started experimenting with the premium lines. Clairvoyancy suited Kharma. She started intuitively, without training. But she had a knack with people. She knew people. She knew what to say. She knew when to just listen. She was hired. 

They headed west. I think they just liked wild places. They brought a lot of luggage: those African wooden carved animals you see. Why they thought they’d be a hit in Belmullet is anyone’s guess. More appropriate, slightly, were their surfboards, though they were long boards, hard to handle in the surf off Erris. 

We met them through friends who had rented them their house. They wanted contacts in the area, and were asking to be introduced to people. Sure, we said. We had two young children. We had almost no money. But we bought a surfboard on a whim. Maybe one of the children would appreciate it when they were older. 

Kharma smiled. She loved children. She was good with them. 

Our friends had been a bit nervous about renting the house to them, but we reassured them that we thought they were going to be good tenants. I visited the house with my daughter to take her some vegetables from the garden: it was immaculately clean. 

Primarily, we were lonely. They were kind to our children, and to our untrainable rescue dog. And they were fun. We went picnicking with them on the beach and built a big fire. We were the only people on the beach. It was summer, but the west of Ireland is very rarely hot, and after we had splashed around with the children in the water, we ran back to sit by the fire, drink beer, and cook sausages. 

We smoked, we laughed, we told stories, and the fire burned down. We walked along the beach with the children while Kharma and her boyfriend covered the fire with sand and dispersed the few remaining blackened logs along the shore to be carried out by the next high tide. 

When we came back, our daughter, who was barefoot, must have run over a patch of still hot sand. She burned her feet. She screamed in pain, and Kharma grabbed her and waded into the water. She held our girl’s legs in the cold sea for what seemed like an age while our daughter writhed and cried. 

When we got home, however, our daughter was still miserable, complaining of the pain, although we’d put on lotions and gels. 

It was months later that I noticed our daughter’s toenails were thicker, and yellower. She had got an infection. The doctors tried for years to find a cure. They never did. 

We had a large garden, and somehow, Kharma had got hold of a huge garden swimming pool, the kind with a metal frame and thick blue plastic, complete with chemical cleaners that smelled of tropical fruit. They came around and erected it. Obviously, the children were delighted. We had a pool party. We had bought a little sauna from eBay on one of the rare occasions we’d been given some money, so that summer, we made a game of running from sauna to pool and back, until rain stopped play. 

One day, at the end of the summer, I confessed that my marriage was under pressure.  The chaos and clutter in the house was depressing me. My husband didn’t seem to notice. Constant money worries were grinding me down. I worked part time but my dream was to be a writer. I was frustrated. The weather in the winter caused me to become seriously depressed. And I had few, if any, friends. 

Kharma had the answer: we would declutter and we would paint all the rooms. This we did. We got some pieces of furniture, too, a mirror, and a chair. Curtains. It took three days, and we fuelled ourselves on coffee and cigarettes. The place was transformed. We sat by the fire at the end of it all and drank a lot of wine, and I confided in Kharma that I also had a long-term eating disorder. I didn’t say that this was accompanied by depression, but I didn’t really need to. She offered no advice, as such, except perhaps to hint that I might need to undo the huge tangle of anger, despair, guilt, trauma very slowly, thread by thread, and that this could take a long time, but that I must not give up, because little by little, it would be possible to heal. I nodded, sagely. It gave me hope and now, nearly twenty years later, I’m nearly there. 

Almost overnight, they left. We had known them for about three years but there was a shock shaped hole where their laughter and companionship had been. 

Our old friends came round and told us, very annoyed with us for having said that we could trust them. They’d done a moonlit flit. We apologised for our naivety but said we were surprised: they had been honourable with us. Secretly we may have been pleased: there were some tensions with our old friends, who had plenty of property, and were known to be a little righteous, and tight with funds. 

Our lives moved on. One by one, we left: me first, then the children. To say it was difficult is to put it very mildly. It was a dark time for us and only very slowly did things begin to improve for us, individually, and then in repairing our damaged relationships. Things are still raw, and sometimes painful, but we all talk, often, and see each other whenever we can. 

I didn’t expect to hear from them again, but years later, while I was living in Dublin, I happened to look her up. Kharma was on Facebook! I said hello. She replied. She had married (not the boyfriend we’d known: someone else) and returned to South Africa. She looked happy, beautiful, and relaxed. I was so glad for her. She had always said that she wanted a daughter and I thought, perhaps, that she might be settled enough to start a family now, belatedly. 

And then I heard hat she had died. Someone else she had befriended who had relations in South Africa told my husband. It had been all over the news. At Christmas. A head-on collision with a truck. Kharma the only occupant. 

Strange, isn’t it, how people come into your life, completely unexpectedly, and act like mentors, or even like creatures from another realm? I still recall with gratitude and love the bright flash of her smile, her wit and wickedness, her exuberant refusal to play by the rules, her huge, elaborate schemes and dreams. 

Kharma went from street urchin to the daughter of millionaires. She gambled it all on a whim, and won, and then lost, spectacularly, as always. Kharma was as wild as a wave, and as self knowingly impermanent. This is my heartfelt thank you. You came into my life like a being from another realm, and brought me the possibility of healing, so if you can hear me wherever you are now, may you know the good you did, and may it return to you as endless, sparkling, joy.