I was sixteen when I first had my palm read. Can’t remember how I knew about the place, down the old High Street. Maybe someone at school recommended it to me. The palm reader worked from a tiny studio with a big window near the bottom of the road, past the olde worlde sweet shop on the left where you could watch them rolling out seaside rock through the glass; past Milletts on the right with its bomber jackets and DM boots in the window; past Patchouli and its purple haze of hippy trinkets, further down the hill.

I didn’t contemplate for a second that this might be a risky, reckless or foolish thing to do. I was curious. I wanted to hear about me, to have someone tell me its all going to be okay, fear not, you won’t die sad and alone in a small seaside town with nothing going for it since William Harvey blew in off the seafront to discover the circulation of the blood, and Status Quo’s drummer went to the boy’s grammar school, down the road from mine.

I hated school, I hated my parents and I hated myself. Pretty typical small-town teenager, then, feeling suffocated by the dead-endness of the arcades down at the Rotunda and the brittle crunch of home perms on girls who matched their brand of fags to their Dorothy Perkins bag and bangles off the market. Palm-reading seemed like a good idea - I didn’t think twice about going on my own to let a stranger stroke the lines on my hand and tell me about me. At the time it was the right thing to do.

She fascinated me immediately and I wanted her to adopt me. One of her daughters went to my school, apparently. What must that be like? Having a woman with super-powers for a mother? Her husband had a second-hand shop a few doors up the road. He had a twisty waxed moustache and dress-sense that shrieked avant-garde. I loved it and was intimidated by it all at the same time. They’d been married at eighteen and lived with a travelling community of gypsies. She’d been taught her trade by an old gypsy woman who’d spotted her gift. “Anyone can learn it, so long as you have a knack for it”, she’d told me. “Like you, you could pick it up, you’re quite intuitive.” Oh, that was it. She had me at ‘hello’.

I went back to see her five or six times within an eighteen month period. She must have been bored silly, looking into the hands of a sixteen year old girl. Surely there couldn’t have been much to pick up on, with so naive a palm? She was always lovely, always patient and always terrible at spelling. I have the sheets of paper still, which she made notes on as she went along. There are headings like psyche, good years, love life, health, travel, creativity, mind, and so on. I’d get home and lock myself in my room to spend hours dissecting every word she wrote. What did she mean, ‘goat’s cheese and lower back’? Was that about my body or a general tip for good bones? ‘Good with people’? How? In what way? Why? I soaked up every scribble, every word of it and wrung it dry of any and all interpretations.

I went back once, worried that I wasn’t going to live past the age of 42. This was because a smattering of ‘good years’ ended at that age and my friend Jane said that her mum had gone and had her cards read and been told by the tarot reader that she couldn’t see any more and wouldn’t finish the reading because actually what she’d seen was the death of her husband. One-parent Jane and I had sat silently pondering this. The palm reader tried hard not to smirk at my melodramatic tale, which was kind and must have taken great self control. Apparently, its difficult to see so far into the future on young hands because not much life has been led yet to make an impression on the palms. If this was a gentle suggestion that I don’t come back for another twelve years then I didn’t get it. Instead I arrived six months later at her doorstep to find the door locked and the sign gone.

I was panicked. Why hadn’t someone called me? Where had she gone? How could she leave me like this? I loped back up the hill to her husband’s shop and asked for her there, agitated and urgent. He didn’t seem very entertained by my enquiry and was rather brusque, which made me feel foolish and needy. Which I was, so that’s fair. I felt bereft and directionless. Instead of sitting back and hearing every few months what I was going to be doing with my life, I now had to go work it out for myself. This struck me as a huge responsibility and cause for alarm. For weeks I studied those sheets of paper for clues: who was I? Would I be happy? Would I be famous or marry a millionaire with a yacht and his own island? Was I getting married at all? And what about living happily ever after?

After a while I simply forgot about the sheets of paper and psychic snapshots into my future. Other things, like O’levels and Nick Ross not noticing me got in the way. But I can’t throw them away, not after nearly twenty years. They are stuck together with stale old sellotape along the folds for extra protection and every now and again when I re-discover them, I check to see if anything has come true.