A Cast of the Left Hand

by Palmistry, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The man came on a Tuesday at ten past four, when the light along Rock-a-Nore had already gone the colour of weak tea and the last boat was being winched up the shingle on its cable. He had not booked. Most people book now, through the girl at the café on the corner who keeps my diary on her phone, and they arrive with their question rehearsed and their rings already off. This one stood in my doorway holding a shoebox against his chest with both arms, and said, "Are you the one who does hands?"

I said I was, that it was twenty-five pounds, and that I did not do the future.

"That's all right," he said. "It isn't my hand."

I keep the front room warm for readings. Cold hands go white and the lines sink into them, and a cold person sits with the fingers curled, which hides the heart line altogether. So there is a two-bar heater that ticks as it warms, a lamp with a daylight bulb I bought in Bexhill for the purpose, and a card table with green baize gone bald at the corners where forty years of elbows have rested. He sat where people sit. He put the shoebox on the baize, lifted the lid, and unwrapped a tea towel printed with the lighthouses of Britain.

Inside was a hand. A left hand in white plaster, cut off clean at the wrist and set on a little square plinth, the palm turned slightly upward and the fingers a little apart, as if it had been waiting for change.

"It's my mother's," he said.

I have been asked to read a good many things that were not hands. Photographs, mostly, which flatten the mounts and lie about the depth of everything. A print in biro ink on the back of a Chinese menu. Once, a hand described down the telephone by a woman in Leeds, line by line, while I drew it on a pad and asked her to press here and tell me if the flesh came back quickly. I have read for twins who swapped seats to catch me out, and I caught them, though not by their palms: one of them laughed at the wrong moment. I had never been asked to read plaster.

"She had it done at a class," he said. "In Rye. There's a sticker." He tilted the plinth to show me the underneath: a printed label, yellowed and lifting at one corner, Rother Community Arts · Life Casting · Spring 2009, and below it, in blue biro, June.

"She died in March. A solicitor in Tenterden sent me this, and a building society book with four hundred and twelve pounds in it. There wasn't a letter." He had put his own hands flat on his knees, under the edge of the table, where I could not see them. "I haven't seen her since I was six. She left. I'm fifty-three." He said these things as if he were reading them off a form for the council. "I'm not after anything spooky. I just thought, you look at a hand, you see what someone was like. Somebody might as well look at hers."

His name was Owen Tickner. He told me that later, at the door, when he paid.

---

I took the cast under the lamp and turned it slowly, the way you turn a shell to find which way the spiral runs.

Whoever ran that class in Rye knew the business. The alginate had been mixed right and she had held still in it. The plaster had kept everything: the creases over the knuckles, the whorls of each fingertip, the short straight nails, a small white scar at the root of the thumb shaped like a grain of rice. The lines were cut into it as clean as an engraving and whiter than any living palm, so that for a moment it was easier to read than flesh. Then it was harder. There was no colour in it, no warmth, and when I put my thumb to the mount of Venus nothing gave and nothing came back. A living mount tells you as much by its spring as by its height. This was only a height.

"I'll tell you how I go about it," I said, "and you stop me when you like. I look at the shape of the whole hand first. Then three lines. Then the pads under the fingers, which the old books name after the planets, and which you needn't take seriously. What I can give you is a character. Leanings. It isn't a science, Mr Tickner, whatever anyone tells you on the pier. It's an old way of looking at a person, and some people find it useful to think with."

"Fine," he said.

The shape first. A square palm, as broad across the base of the fingers as across the wrist. Fingers short for the palm, the tips blunt. The knuckles were large, the joints of the first two fingers thickened, and the hand had set very slightly crooked toward the little finger, in the way of hands that have done a lot of wringing out.

"The books call this an earth hand," I said. "Square palm, short fingers. It's the commonest there is. They say it belongs to a practical person. Someone who trusts what she can lift and carry. Who'd rather mend a thing than talk about it."

He nodded, slowly, twice. I noticed the nod. I always notice the nod; that is half of what twenty-five pounds buys.

"Her knuckles are big," he said. "My dad's went like that, at the end. Is that arthritis? Does it show if she was in pain?"

"I don't read illness in a hand," I said. "Not in a living one and not in this. That's a doctor's work and I'd be lying to you if I did it. I can tell you the joints are thick. Anyone could tell you that." I touched the first knuckle. "What I'd say is that this hand used itself. It wasn't kept for best."

Then the heart line, because I always take it first of the three. It ran high under the fingers from the outer edge of the palm, straight, and cut deep: the plaster had kept it as a clean groove with a hard edge, sharper than it can ever have been in her. A straight heart line is not a cold one, whatever the fairground says. It belongs to people who love in a level way, by doing: the meal kept warm, the school shoes taken to be soled, the thing said once and not again. Under the first finger, at its end, the line forked. One branch rose onto the mount of Jupiter. The other dropped down toward the head line and nearly touched it.

"This is the line for how she loved," I said. "It's straight. It's not a showy line. I'd say she loved by doing, not by saying. And here, at the end, it forks, and the old reading is that the person is pulled two ways in her affections, between what she wants for herself and what—"

His jaw moved. It was a small thing, the muscle at the hinge of it tightening and letting go, and I heard my sentence turn before I had decided to turn it.

"—or that she meant to give more than she managed," I said. "That it was hard for her."

He looked at the cast and not at me. I took my hands away from it and put them in my lap.

The head line, then. It came out from the edge of the palm above the thumb, tied to the life line for the first half-inch, which is the sign of someone careful when young, slow to leave the shelter. Then it pulled free and ran long across the palm, sloping a little toward the mount of the Moon on the outer edge, which is where the books put imagination. About two-thirds of the way along, the line split into two thin strands for perhaps a quarter of an inch and then joined again, making a small closed loop, like an eye.

"That's an island," I said. "Some readers make a great deal of islands. I'd say it marks a stretch where her thinking had to work harder than usual. Where she was divided, perhaps. Then it closes and the line goes on, and goes on clear, look, right out to the edge."

"My dad said she had nerves," he said. "That was the word. Was she ill? In her head?"

"I can't tell you that," I said. "I won't. That's two things I don't do, and they're the same thing really: I don't put a diagnosis on anyone from the creases of their hand." I thought about whether to say the next part. "I can tell you the line doesn't stop. It goes the whole way across."

He breathed out through his nose.

The life line came last, as it always does for me. It swung out wide from between the thumb and first finger in a good full arc round the mount of Venus, which is a sign, in the books, of warmth and appetite. Then, a little more than halfway down, it thinned and stopped. Just inside it, a few millimetres closer to the thumb, a second line began, overlapping the end of the first for perhaps half an inch, and ran on down to the wrist, fainter than the first but unbroken.

Owen Tickner had seen it before I said anything. He leaned in.

"It's short, isn't it," he said. "It stops. Is that where she — does it say when?"

"No." I said it louder than I meant to, and the heater ticked into the space after it. "Listen to me. That line has nothing to do with how long anybody lives. It never has. It's about energy, how a person's vigour runs, where it's strong and where it changes. People have been frightened by that line for two hundred years and it has never once been right about a death, because it isn't about death. I've never read one in a hand and I won't start with this one."

"But it breaks."

"It breaks and it starts again. Overlapping. Do you see? It doesn't stop and leave a gap. The new line starts before the old one's finished." I took a pencil from the jar and held it above the plaster, not touching. "The old reading is a change in the way someone lives. A clean break with one way of going on, and a start on another. Some readers would put an age on it. They measure from the wrist and they'll tell you thirty-one, thirty-two. I don't do that."

He was quiet for a while.

"I was six," he said. "She'd have been thirty-two."

I did not say anything to that. There was nothing in my art that could say anything to it that he had not already said himself, and I had told him I did not do ages, and I had told him how the people who do ages do them, and he had done the sum. I sat with that. Forty years I have been doing this, in this room and before it in a room over the amusements on the front, and I could not have told you, at that moment, whether I had just given a grieving man a fact or a weapon.

Then the fate line, which runs up the middle of the palm from the wrist toward the middle finger, and which the books say is your direction, your work, the road you are on. In many hands there is none. In hers it began low and faint, a scratch hardly deeper than the fine creases of the skin, and wandered, and was crossed twice by small lines from the mount of the Moon; and then, above the head line, in the last inch before the middle finger, it suddenly deepened and ran straight and clear into the mount of Saturn.

"That's late," I said. "A person who found her road late. Who had her work, or her place, or whatever it was, only toward the end. The line's stronger at the top than anywhere else on it."

"She ran a stall," he said. "The solicitor said. Rye market. Second-hand books and records. Twenty years."

"Well," I said.

"Did you get that from the hand?"

---

That is the question, and I owe it a true answer, and I do not have one.

He had a shoebox, and a tea towel with lighthouses on it, and the cardboard was soft at the corners from being carried. He had kept his own hands hidden under the table the whole time, and when I said the word love he set his jaw, and when I said it goes the whole way across he breathed out. I heard the word nerves in his father's voice, through his. I saw the mother as he had built her, out of forty-seven years of not knowing, and I could see where the plaster fitted that building and where it didn't. Everything I said, I said looking at a hand; but I said it in a room with a man in it.

"I'll tell you the truth," I said, "since you've paid for it. I don't know. When I said she loved by doing and not by saying, you nodded, and I went on down that road. When I started on the fork you didn't like it, and I changed what I was saying in the middle of the sentence. I've done that for forty years. I don't always know I'm doing it. So I can't swear to you whether that line told me she found her place late, or whether you did, by the way you've been sitting there waiting for me to say something kind."

"So it's rubbish."

"It may be," I said. "People cleverer than me think so. But the lines are there. That much isn't me." I turned the cast toward him under the lamp so that the light came across it low, the way you light a carving, and every line threw a shadow. "You can see them yourself. Nobody put those in her for my benefit."

He looked at it for a long time. The heater had warmed the room through by now and the windows were running at the corners. Outside a gull was standing on the bonnet of my neighbour's van, shouting at nobody.

"Show me your hands," I said.

He did not want to. People with something to lose never do; they bring a photograph or a friend, or, I suppose, their mother in plaster. But he took his hands off his knees and put them on the baize, palms down, the way you show a schoolteacher your nails.

"Both of them," I said. "Turn them over. Which do you write with?"

"Right."

"Then the old rule is that the right is what you've made, and the left is what you were given. What you were born with. I don't promise you it's true. It's only the rule." I moved the cast across the baize until it stood beside his left hand, plaster wrist to living wrist, and turned the lamp onto both.

His hand was long where hers was square; the fingers were a man's fingers, longer than his palm, an air hand by the books, a thinker's, restless. The head line was quite different: short, and it never touched the life line at all, but started out on its own from the very edge, which is the mark of somebody who left home early and made his own decisions young, perhaps before he had any business to. The life line ran round unbroken. There was hardly any fate line to speak of. Nothing in the shape of it was hers.

But the heart line ran high under the fingers from the outer edge, straight, deep, the way a line is when it has been cut into the hand all at once; and under the first finger it forked, one branch climbing onto the mount of Jupiter, the other dropping down toward the head line until it nearly touched.

I did not say what that meant. I had already said what the books said it meant, and he had heard me say it, and he had watched me change it.

He looked from one to the other. The plaster fork was a crisp white cut with the lamp's shadow lying in it; his own was the same shape in softer stuff, a fold in skin, pink at the edges, with the shine of a little sweat in it.

"That's the same," he said.

"That part is."

He sat without moving for perhaps a minute. Then he lifted his right hand off the table and laid it over the plaster one, palm to palm, the way you would put your hand against someone's on the other side of a window. His fingers went past the ends of hers by a knuckle. He closed them a little, carefully, as if the plaster might mind, and kept them there, and I sat back out of the light and let the heater tick, and watched the white hand under his take the warmth out of it.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Chīromantīā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Palmistry, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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