Crouched in her cardboard Delphi, Belinda Silbert, the television psychic, fits in somewhere between psychotherapist and faded hippie living on a small-holding with some chickens, a shotgun and a lover called Bart. Each week she gazes deep into the eyes of the bereaved, the beleaguered, the easily bamboozled, and counsels them in the ways of the bleeding obvious.
‘How did he die? I feel that it was a dignified passing.”
‘An engine off a DC-10 fell on him while he was mowing the lawn.”
‘Yes, from the energy you’re giving off I sense that this was an unexpected death.”
Belinda’s second sight is terrific. For instance, if your 96-year-old father passed away at home, she will sense that he died of natural causes and not, in fact, of bullet-wounds sustained in a gangland drive-by.
If your five-packs-a-day baritone tar-pit of a maiden-aunt crossed over in her sixties, Belinda will divine lung problems, deftly discarding the possibility of a failed crampon on Everest’s Khumbu Ice Fall.
Tapping into the eternal currents of Gaelic Kabbalistic Hindu mysticism, she can sense that mothers loved their lost children, that bereaved fiancées are in some sort of pain, and that smelly cretins wearing brown paper bags are keen for news of an upturn in their finances.
This week her show at a Cape Town theatre was interrupted by heckling Christian fundamentalists. Apparently this was one she didn’t see coming, a peculiar oversight considering how easy Christian fundamentalists are to spot: unalarmed by the earnest cheerfulness of ditties in C-major arranged for keyboard and tambourine, and oblivious to the shushing of old corduroys between emaciated thighs, Belinda walked blithely into the beak of the Dove of Peace.
A greater civilisation than ours would have known exactly what to do, locking the exits before introducing some lions to the proceedings, but these are limp times and the show was merely suspended, leaving that tantalising foretaste of the Nouveau Medieval world of the 21st century, a globe replete with its own Crusades and Black Death. If only said Blacks would eat more garlic — But I digress (D. Bristow-Bovey, 2003).
South Africans tolerate hucksters and con men more than most, so it seems unlikely that Silbert will be exposed as an audience-rigging phony, a fate that befell the fraudulent John Edward in the United States (a fate, incidentally, that the SABC failed entirely to report to its credulous viewers as it paved the psychic way for its own fey Jerry Springer). But should it all go south for her, there will always be a need for her talents in South African sport.
It’s nice work if you can get it, being a sport psychic. Two months ago Rian Oberholzer’s reading would have been a real eye-opener.
‘I see a World Cup in which a ball is used. I see many countries competing. The winner is — not South Africa!” (Pause for astonished gasps.) ‘The Springboks are beset by allegations of racism, but a coloured wing is picked out at an awards ceremony as the star of the team and the race issue goes away for a while. His name is Chester, no, Breyten, er, hang on — Ashwin!”
So much to predict, so little chance of being wrong! Talking with the dead is fine if you’re into monologues, but you don’t get a company car or a parking bay at the gym.
What greater thrill for a peddler of general knowledge to reveal that the next Springbok coach will be a former Springbok coach? Indeed, not only that, but he will introduce a new style of fast-paced rugby, whip Fiji 90-3, and then inexplicably hurl himself and the team down a slope of petulance, secrecy and insular chaos, while the senior administrators light their cigars with burning wads of cash.
Ah, the things Belinda would see in her visions. Wayne Ferreira chucking his racquet; Danny Jordaan vowing to clean up South African football once and for all; one goal scored in the first five weeks of the Premier Soccer League (a ricochet off a half-brick lying on the pitch); Herschelle Gibbs nicking a wide half-volley as his team cling desperately to hopes of a draw; Mfuneko Ngam pulling up lame in his comeback Test; boxing promoters with agitated mullets expressing their outrage that their junior bantamweight contender has been ruled a junior featherweight and is thus ineligible for the fight against Who Cares in Whatever.
On second thought, maybe dead people are more fun.