EVERYONE loves a good palm story so here's a true one. A man, who had spent his life believing that his father had died before he was born, recently went to a palm-reader in Hong Kong. In the course of the reading, he was told that his father was alive, a piece of information which he rejected as totally impossible. Some time later, another man at a lunch told him that he bore a remarkable resemblance to an older man now living on another continent.
So strong was the likeness that photographs were exchanged and ... But you have guessed the outcome. The real mystery, of course, is what did that palmist see among all the bumps and striations which made him say such a preposterous thing? How could he know? And would another palmist have made the same deduction? In the spirit of scientific research, I thought I'd visit three palmists and present them with the hands you see photographed here. ('Look at them, you've obviously never done a day's work in your life,' commented this magazine's design director who, may I just say at this point, is clearly unendowed with psychic ability.) The trouble is that all three readers themselves slightly downplayed the notion of palmistry, rating it a poor third behind the significance of birth dates and the reading of cards or faces. It had to be done in conjunction with other things, they said, so please could I bear that in mind. I did my best.
'I DO find I get parents bringing in their children when they're about 10 or so, to choose subjects at school,' Acushla is saying in a room at the back of the New Age Shop. 'And did you know that Dr Charlotte Wolff said that the palms were the visible part of the brain? And that Australians use palmistry for job interviews?' Crikey.
Acushla's real name is Anne Hassett and she's Irish, which means she's already on to a winner because she's got such a nice, beguiling, sympathetic voice. You feel you could tell her all your troubles straightaway, so she wouldn't need to bother with the palm or the tarot at all. Maybe people do exactly that, which is why she makes them feel better. ('You have a way of healing the human heart,' begins one testimonial.) 'The palms are more about character analysis than tools for prediction,' Acushla continued. 'Our hands are our gifts and our talents, they're a bit like your CV. In a tiny baby's hands, the lines are all there and they don't change that much. You know, children with Down's Syndrome don't have separate head and heart lines - they've got one line across the middle, the simian line. You can get someone with a simian line who doesn't have Down's Syndrome but it's very rare. That sort of person is often highly intelligent but obsessive.' According to Western palmistry, if you're right-handed, the left hand is what you're born with and the right hand is what you're making of that potential, and vice versa if you're left-handed. 'Now, in your left hand, you can see you've got a writer's fork at the end of your head line, and it's in both your hands so you are actually doing it. Look at the way you hold your fingers. It shows you're open-handed, you give everything away - time, money, thoughts. Your index finger is held away from the others so you're an individual, you don't have a herd mentality. But your two middle fingers are close together so you're co-operative, you're good as a team player.' (Hmm, covering both options there I'd say.) I knew about six people who had been to see Acushla and who had endlessly discussed what she'd revealed, so when she told me that I had a lovely guardian angel protecting me along my life line and that I was slightly psychic myself, it had a certain ring of familiarity. I suppose it's difficult to vary the patter; also, she was brought up a Catholic and although she said she'd got over the guilt bit, various tribal references have stuck. 'Oh, you wouldn't make a good nun,' she chortled at one point.
'You have a high Mount of Venus which shows you're a very sexy lady, you love a cuddle, you love to live life to the full. The wider the angle of the life line, the more the appetite for life. All those lines branching away are travel lines, you see those a lot in Hong Kong.' In the West, the fingers are named after Jupiter, Saturn, Apollo and Mercury. A long middle finger, for example, indicates a saturnine disposition. 'But you haven't got that. You've got fairly short fingers so you're a quick thinker, but you're a little bit impulsive. The line under your Apollo finger means that you have a high aesthetic appreciation - interior decoration in your home is important - and the ones under your little finger show that you're a good communicator. You've got a waisted thumb, so you're very self-critical, you beat yourself up all the time. I used to have low self-esteem but I worked on it and my thumb changed its shape.' There was head-shaking over the heart line. 'Oh, you haven't always had it easy - these islands are blockages of energy. The marriage lines, we call them lines of commitment nowadays, are down the side here. But I won't go into all that because it's too personal for a magazine.' I said that I'd use a pseudonym but she'd moved on, which was horribly worrying. (Was it too awful to relate?) Later on, she reiterated that palms were really not accurate about the future and shouldn't be used that way, which was some consolation.
NO SUCH constraints hold back Kwong Wai-hung, who sits in an office in Hennessy Road conducting his lucrative business (he's into futures). There's a waiting room with about 16 chairs - he's appeared on television and is popular here - and he wears a suit and a no-nonsense manner. 'Abortion?' he said brightly at one point. Certainly not, I said, aghast, so he amended his analysis to a Caesarean instead.