The Psychic of Selfridges

Jayne Wallace, psychic to the stars, and the only medium in the world with her own concession in a department store, is whispering to me, so it’s hard to work out what she’s saying. ‘He’s off the toilet.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Your dad. He wants me to tell you he’s off the toilet.’

We are in her booth, in the basement of Selfridges, just next to the children’s books section. It is lined with grey crushed velvet, and a cheap chandelier with plastic drops hangs from the ceiling. The booth is tiny, like a cupboard, and apparently, per square foot, takes more money than any other concession in Selfridges. Jayne is slender and tanned, and is wearing a black vest with the words ‘Psychic Sisters’ on it. Outside, an Irish girl who’s just had a reading is trying to decide whether to buy the Abundance or the Angel massage oil.

Then I work it out. My father died unexpectedly three years ago, and was found locked in his loo. ‘That’ll be it,’ says Jayne. ‘He’s out of there now. He never got the chance to say goodbye.’

Jayne, who is in her late thirties, was born into a Catholic family in Hertfordshire, and when she was six years old she started seeing ghosts. There was one in particular, a young girl with a star on her forehead, who became her spirit guide. Her mother began taking her to a spiritualist church once a week, and, as she grew older, she found she enjoyed working with tarot cards.

She launched the concession seven years ago, after being spotted doing a reading for a friend in the Selfridges coffee shop by Paul Kelly, the store’s CEO. She now has 14 ‘Sisters’ working with her, offering clairvoyance, tarot, crystal-ball reading and Reiki healing from three rooms in Selfridges, although the concession will be expanding in the new year. Jayne also holds a psychic school on Saturday mornings (‘Everyone has a sixth sense, it just needs to be developed’), and offers email readings, too. She has appeared on This Morning making cryptic pronouncements, is developing a television show in LA, was invited by Tracey Emin to do readings at her recent party (‘That was great. Tracey loves us. Vivienne Westwood was there’) and has had positive reviews from an interesting spread of celebrities including Tulisa, Annie Lennox, Belinda Carlisle, Russell Tovey, Pearl Lowe, Michelle Collins, Sinitta and various members of The Saturdays.

She is also, apparently, often called upon by big companies to scan contracts and CVs, and by five-star London hotels to ‘cleanse’ rooms. But the bedrock of her business is the readings. She sees all types: rich, poor, men, women, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic. The Sisters also see a lot of newly bereaved people, and find that many clients become obsessed with the process, wanting to come again and again. Jayne recommends returning no more than once every six months, and has had to ban people. At £100 for a half-hour reading (with a CD recording of the session to take home and enjoy afterwards), it’s a good business. But back to me.

The reading doesn’t begin with any arcane mystical ritual. ‘Do you want a coffee, a tea? I’m parched, I haven’t stopped all day,’ says Jayne as she thumbs her BlackBerry. The small table between us is also covered in grey crushed velvet, and to one side is a modest pile of coloured crystals. ‘I’ll just pop up to Starbucks for us, shall I?’ she says, leaving me in her upholstered cupboard. It is noisy in here; outside, Selfridges is in full-on, ramped-up, jingle bells-and-whistles festive mode, plinking background Christmas music overlaid by the sound of some poor sales assistant forced to drone out ‘Santa Baby’ on a loop to promote a karaoke set. It feels like being in the middle of a chaotic funfair; the Psychic Sisters and their £15 ‘Love Mist’ atomisers a 21st-century update on the fairground gypsy with her sinister fringed headscarf and crystal ball.

Jayne returns and switches off her BlackBerry. She hands me a deck of tarot cards and asks me to shuffle them. Then she starts laying them out. I notice the Devil. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that, darling, that’s not a bad one,’ she says. One of the first things she says is that she can see my father, just behind my left shoulder. ‘He was a big man, wasn’t he? A lovely man, liked to sit and have a cup of tea, just like we’re doing’ [yes] ‘but he got very small, at the end.’ [No, he didn’t.] ‘He wants me to tell you that he loves you, and he’s really proud of you.’

Jayne talks very fast as she turns over her cards, and there doesn’t seem to be an obvious correlation between what she is seeing and what she is saying. Most of it is so general as to be applicable to anyone. But pleasant nonetheless. ‘Your mum’s great, she knows it all, but mums do, don’t they? We know that.’ ‘Your husband, I love him, but it’s like talking to a brick wall sometimes, isn’t it? His family are nice, yes, I like them, they have very old-fashioned values.’ Interestingly, many of her suggestions seem to be geared to classic middle-class concerns — ‘Your daughter’s very bright, you should send her to private school’ and ‘You need to move, you need more space, the house four doors down the road will be coming up for sale soon, you should buy it’.

She is warm and charismatic, and her easygoing, self-confident scattergun approach means that quite a lot of what she says has to be relevant, even if I can’t help but offer gentle direction when she gets things wrong: ‘You have a boy and a girl, right.’ Two girls actually. ‘That’s right, but one of them I am going to call the boy because she is a tomboy, right, always wants to choose her own clothes’ [yes!]. Like a good astrologer, she knows what people want to hear: ‘There is going to be a lot of changes in your life in the next 18 months.’ ‘Your husband is going to be a very successful novelist, writing crime bestsellers, but he does need to get on with it because you do need to move house.’