Tempting Fate

Celia Pacquola tackles clairvoyance in her current show, but she's no sceptic. Ed Ballard gives her a reading

feature (edinburgh) | Read in About 7 minutes
Published 15 Aug 2014
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You shouldn't really need to book a session with a psychic. A psychic should come knocking before you even know you need one. But for whatever reason (maybe August delivers a surge of work in the form of ten thousand anxious creatives), Edinburgh's clairvoyants are all booked up till the end of the week. So it's impossible to recruit an experienced professional who can help me interview Celia Pacquola, the Melbourne-born comic who has written a show about her fondness for fortune-tellers and tarot readings.

But as far as I know, there are chancers far less psychic than me telling fortunes on the Royal Mile for a pound a pop. I find a blog that says you only need intuition to read the tarot (I ignore the ones that say you need to memorise the primary and secondary meanings of all 78 cards of the minor and major arcana) and set out to buy a deck. I reject the first I find because that it’s covered with pictures of druids. “I bet Celia hates druids,” I say to myself, wondering if this might be a premonition.

It’s crucial to create a relaxing atmosphere before the reading begins, but when the time comes, circumstances are not ideal. Outside it is miserable, spitting rain, while the noisy bar in which I meet Pacquola is a far cry from how I imagine a psychic’s parlour (cups of tea, frilly cushions, moulting cat).

Moreover, Pacquola has the slightly wired cheerfulness of somebody who has been burning the mystic candle at both ends. She has had no performance today, but to get here she had to rush from a lengthy BBC Three broadcast at the Caves. “My body is refusing to keep up with my will,” she laments. “I want to stay up and have fun and I want to get up early and do things. What I need is to stay in a dark room for a day.”

Disappointingly, the bar staff don’t have access to a drawerful of healing crystals and incense, so the best we can do, relaxation-wise, is alcohol. Once we're both set up with a pint, I ask Celia to select three cards.

THE STAR: THE PAST

I feel confounded by this strange image—the jugs, the mid-day stars, the bird perching on the branch—but Celia is breezily confident.

"So this is my past in Australia," she declares. “These are the stars of the Southern Cross. She should not be wasting water like that in the outback. She could do with some sunscreen. And she’s me. My star-sign is Aquarius, the water-carrier. She's naked, and I am also sometimes naked.”

She reflects for a minute.

“Maybe it's about learning? This is me toiling, learning how to do things. Like, 'Don't pour the water on the ground, you idiot.' And maybe she’s learning she should put some clothes on – I was quite slutty in the past.”

What about the bird, I wonder.

"That's this terrifying bird we have near us called an ibis. If you got a flamenco—flamenco? flamingo—and turned it into a zombie, that's an ibis. I still have nightmares about them. So that's my early childhood."

Pacquola saw a psychic for the first time when she was 19, travelling in California with her mother. He told her she was cursed. Despite the fact that this is apparently a common ruse—I can lift the curse, but it’ll cost you—Pacquola stuck with it. She’s not somebody who feels she has that much control over her life (she began her career eight years ago when a boyfriend entered her in a competition which she proceeded to win), and a palm reading or tarot session can be reassuring.

“My life's extremely coincidental. It feels good to have somebody tell you that everything's going to be fine, and that’s not something you can do for yourself – that's the service they give you.”

SEVEN OF PENTACLES: THE PRESENT

Orthodox interpretations of Pacquola’s first card leave out the zombie birds (its primary meaning is to do with fertility – as fate would have it, something that crops up in Pacquola’s show) but the way she reads her second card squares with the internet’s clairvoyant community.

"This one's about looking at the big pile of work I’ve done and thinking, ‘Look how far I’ve come’.

"I'm proud of this show," she says. "I've written a show about a subject that I haven’t heard anyone talk about before. It's a risk. Before this I wouldn’t normally tell people I see psychics – let alone on stage. People have actually told me that they think less of me because I do it.”

She understands where those people are coming from. Pacquola derides psychics who get everything wrong—the line that gives the show its title, Let Me Know How It All Works Out, was uttered to her by one particularly guileless and shortsighted seer—but she's no sceptic. The crystal she sometimes carries in her bra is a good indicator of her position on the credulity spectrum. She scoffs at the idea of washing it under the moonlight, as crystal experts suggest. But she’s still got a crystal in her bra.

The show’s theme sets it apart from Pacquola’s previous effort, an hour of straight standup with lots of material about making a long-distance relationship work. The relationship in question ended not long after; now she can't bring herself to watch the performance on DVD.

"I even used his real name," she says. "That's how sure I was." I ask Pacquola whether a psychic told her that he was The One. She shrugs. Some did, some said otherwise.

What about the way the peasant on the card is leaning on his spade? He’s got the look of somebody pausing for a breather. He's dug up a good few cabbages, or something, but the harvest isn't finished.

Pacquola says: "You're only as good as your last show. There are still days when I wonder whether this is what I should be doing. All you can do is make a living and keep improving. There’s never a point when somebody says, ‘Well done, you’ve won comedy.’"

THE FOOL: THE FUTURE

"It bugs me that you don't get to know what’s going to happen," Pacquola says. She veers off on an entertaining tangent, observing that few people would have predicted that the Newton's Cradle, the desk ornament with the clicky balls, would outlive the fax machine, then moves on to the possibility that her career could go tits up.

"I could be a waitress again in five years," she declares cheerfully. She reckons that flitting between Australia and Britain might have slowed her progress down a little. When she left after her Fringe show last year, she was conscious of leaving behind a number of people in the UK comedy world who were saying nice things about her. “Comedy’s all about momentum, and I’ve never really followed through on the momentum.”

She’ll stick around this year, but she doesn’t know for how long. The Fool, with his blithe expression and his little bundle of belongings, seems similarly footloose. But Pacquola reckons that this card, with its burning heat, is a sign that when she does put down roots, it’ll be in Australia.

“And there's a little tiny happy dog, so I'll have a companion in the future,” she adds.

Then I observe, perhaps insensitively, that the Fool has his eyes closed.

“Oh no! I'm going to walk off a cliff! Does this mean I'm blindly approaching a disaster and the dog's trying to warn me? Well, we'll see. I am cursed, after all.”

She brightens up.

“But maybe it’s like Indiana Jones, where he walks off the cliff but there's actually a secret bridge? Is it a leap of faith? I think it's a leap of faith."