Mediums with a message — life on the other side is dead boring

I wedged the car between two others. We'd found a park at Jast. It was an orderly suburb. Street lights flickered to life. A boy swished past on a skateboard.

Liz and I joined a drove of middle-'aged women, cardies draped over their shoulders, who were heading for the community hall. They were the sort who worked on themselves with make-up, hair dyes, high heels, beads and handbags.

Although they had gone to so much trouble, nothing could hide the disillusionment in their eyes. The down-turned mouths betrayed a lifestyle few would envy. Too much boredom, too many soap operas and cigarettes. Not enough loving.

They set their jaws and focused on some point on the horizon. They were too excited to talk. I got the feeling that tonight, they hoped something would change. Someone — or thing — would tap them on the shoulder and wash away their sorrow faster than a new brand of bath cleaner.

"You'll have to wait," said the woman who took our $5 ticket money. "We're short of chairs."

The atmosphere tensed. No one was going to be turned back this close to salvation. Before we knew it, Liz and I were being carried. along in a stampede into the auditorium.

Cigarette smoke snaked through the hall. Liz and I split from the herd and made our way across the stiletto-scarred floor to a couple of seats near the front.

The place was packed with the sort of audience I hadn't seen anywhere else — not in a church, or at a concert, or even at a circus. Although most of them were older women, there were elderly couples, solitary teenagers and young women with toddlers on their laps.

If they had anything in common, it was that downtrodden sadness that makes you wonder why humanity bothers.

"Nervous?" Liz said, fixing me with a piercing blue eye.

"Course not," I lied.

A bearded compere escorted the two mediums up some steps to the stage. The mediums sat at a table and eyed the audience — or was it the spaces around the audience? — while the compere delivered a speech about this "voyage of exploration."

I wasn't sure if the audience was reassured or disappointed that the performers looked so ordinary. The famous ex-radio clairvoyant, Mary Fry, was extremely well-groomed in a coral dress. Her golden hair was folded back neatly from her pretty, but unremarkable, face.

Joseph Martin (advertised as an itinerant) was wearing a cream jacket and shirt, nicely set off with a chocolate tie. The compere explained that Mr Martin was a tohunga who had the gift of healing and who could help people understand their relationship with their God.

The audience was longing for some action. At last the compere sat down. Mr Martin stood up and pointed out a woman in the thick of the audience. "Yes, you, dear. With the blue dress and the handbag on your lap." The rest of the crowd, half-envious, half relieved, craned their necks.

"Who was the man who liked drinking?" Mr Martin asked her. She didn't reply, but smiled. "Well, he's brought a flagon with him. He keeps making me want to hold my hand like this…” Mr Martin put one hand behind his back. "He's a bit of a hard case. What?"

The medium addressed the air beside him in an insulted tone. "I can't say that! He's using a lot of bad language. He says have you looked into that piece of land yet? He says all will be well."

As Mr Martin waved his arms like a conductor, the spirits seemed to roll in with vaguely benign messages. One presented a mystified member of the audience with invisible white carnations. Another, who used to play the guitar, told a man he'd get some good mail soon. A cheque for a lot of money in return for something he shouldn't have done. Mr Martin could see the exact amount, but it wasn't his policy to disclose figures.

The ghosts were all there on the other side drinking, playing cribbage, laughing and swearing as much as they always had. It began to sound depressingly like life on this side. I wondered if they had television over there, too. Was there no peace in dying?

Sometimes, a member of the audience would seem to recognise one of these spiritual characters. Other times, they'd look confused and, frankly, spooked.

Mary Fry specialised in more poetic ghosts. She would often clasp part of her body to indicate how the person had died. Heart attacks, stomach pains, childbirth. It got a bit gruelling after a while.

The highlight came just before the interval when Mary Fry turned to a young Maori woman in front of me. A chief in a cloak with a bone ornament on the left shoulder offered the young woman a white dove. He said there had been trouble with a boy in the family and that the boy should go back to the marae.

The young woman seemed to find the message relevant and deeply moving. ' As the night wore on, the spirits seemed to have more gruesome, fatal illnesses. A morose feeling hung over the hall and finally engulfed us.

Maybe it was because most of theaudience realised their spirit had overlooked them that night, or hadn't been pushy enough to get a message through.

Tomorrow, it would be back to the soaps.