Beyond Black: A Novel (53 page)

Al smiles. “I’m sure I couldn’t say.”

Before they reach Guildford, they pull into an out-of-town shopping centre. The exchange takes place in front of PC World. Mandy clip-clips towards the white van: high-heeled pastel pumps in pistachio green, tight pale jeans, fake Chanel jacket in baby pink. She is smiling, her big jaw jutting. She looks quite lined, Al thinks; it is the first time in years she has seen Mandy in full daylight. It must be Hove that’s aged her: the sea breezes, the squinting into the sun. “Got the consignment?” says Mandy, breezy herself, and Delingbole opens the back door and gives Al his arm to help her out of the van. She tumbles to the ground, her sore feet impacting hard.

The soft-top stands by, lacquered once again to a perfect hard scarlet. “There’s a new nail bar at the end of our road,” Mandy says. “I thought after we’ve had some lunch we could pop in and treat ourselves.”

For a moment Al sees her fist, dripping with gore; she sees herself, bloody to the elbows. She sees, back at Admiral Drive, the tape unspooling in the empty house; her past unspooling, back beyond this life, beyond the lives to come. “That will be nice,” she says.

MORRIS: And another thing you can’t get, you can’t get a saveloy.

CAPSTICK: You can’t get tripe like you used to get.

DEAN: When I get my tongue guard off, I’m going for a curry.

MORRIS: You can’t get a decent cuppa tea.

DEAN: And then I’m going to get a swastika studded into it. I can hang it over walls and be a mobile graffiti.

MART: Tee-hee. When Delingbole comes you can wag it at him and then bugger off.

AITKENSIDE: Etchells could make a good cuppa.

CAPSTICK: She could. I’ll give her that.

MORRIS: By the way, Mr. Aitkenside.

AITKENSIDE: Yes? Speak up.

MORRIS: I only mention it.

AITKENSIDE: Spit it out, lad.

MORRIS: It’s a question of fundage.

AITKENSIDE: Warren, you have already tapped me for a sub. When I look in my wages book I find it ain’t the first time either. You are spending in advance of your entire income, as far as I can see. It can’t go on, me old mate.

MORRIS: I don’t want a sub. I only want what’s due.

MACARTHUR: He’s right, Mr. Aitkenside. It ain’t fair that Pete should keep all the money he got from Etchells’s personal effects, seeing as we all helped to frighten her to death, and especially me rising up with my false eye rolling.

AITKENSIDE: Pete! What you got to say about this? (
pause
) Pete? … Where is he?

CAPSTICK: Bugger me. Taken to the road. His wodge of cash wiv him.

MORRIS: Ain’t that his sort all over?

BOB FOX: What can you expect, Mr. Aitkenside, taking on pikeys?

AITKENSIDE: Don’t you tell me how to do my job, lad! I’ve got a diploma in Human Resources from Nick himself. We are working towards equal opportunities for all. Don’t tell me how to recruit, or you’ll be knocking on windows for all eternity.

CAPSTICK: We’ll have to contact the missus, then. If we want our cut. She’ll nail down Pikey for us. He likes her. He can’t keep away.

AITKENSIDE: Pardon me, but I don’t know if you’ll see your missus again.

DEAN: You’ve pissed her off good and proper.

CAPSTICK: What, not see her? Who we going to mediumize, then?

BOB FOX: Morris? Morris, speak up. It’s you in charge of this fiasco.

MORRIS: You can’t get decent vinegar, neither. You go in for vinegar, there’s bloody shelves and shelves of the stuff. There’s only one sort of proper vinegar, and that’s brown.

CAPSTICK: Morris? We’re talking to you.

AITKENSIDE: It was you, Warren, according to my ledger, what requested to have that crustie hanged, that lived in her shed.

MORRIS: He was on my manor! Only just got a proper outbuilding, where I can put me feet up evenings, and some geezer with an ’at moves in.

AITKENSIDE: But what did you fail to see, my son? You failed to see he was her good deed.

WAGSTAFFE: A good deed in a naughty world.

AITKENSIDE: That you, Wagstaffe? Bugger off, we’re talking.

MORRIS: Besides, you was all agreeable. Oooh, Morris, you said, let’s have an ’anging, haven’t had a good ’anging in years, it’ll be a right laugh when the little bugger kicks his feet!

AITKENSIDE: You failed to see that little bugger was her good deed. And what’s the result? She’s looking to commit a few others. They get the habit … see? They get the habit. It’s sad. But they get the taste for it.

MORRIS: So she don’t want to know us no more?

AITKENSIDE: I very much doubt it, old son.

MORRIS: But we go back, me and the missus. (
pause
) I’ll miss her. Be on my own. Won’t be the same.

CAPSTICK: Oh, leave off, do! Bring on the bloody violins! You wouldn’t think so well of her if she’d had away your balls.

MACARTHUR: You wouldn’t think so well of her if you’d seen your eye on her spoon.

DEAN: You can get another place, Uncle Morris.

MORRIS: (
sniffs
) Won’t be the same, Dean lad.

AITKENSIDE: Not the bloody waterworks! Pull yourself together, Warren, or I’ll demote you. (
Morris sobs
.) Look … Morris, old son, don’t take on. Oh, blast it, ain’t nobody round here got a bleeding hankerchief?

WAGSTAFFE: Any handkerchief in particular?

AITKENSIDE: Wagstaffe? Put a sock in it. Listen, lads, I’ve an idea. Maybe she’ll come back if her dad asks for her.

(
pause
)

MACARTHUR: Who 
is
 her dad, then?

CAPSTICK: I always thought it was you, MacArthur. I thought that’s why she took your eye out.

MACARTHUR: I thought it were you, Keef. I thought that’s why she took your bollocks off.

AITKENSIDE: Don’t look at me! She’s not my daughter, I was in the forces.

MORRIS: She can’t be mine because I was still in the circus.

PIKEY PETE: She can’t be mine—

MORRIS: Oh, there you are, Pete! We thought you’d scarpered. Give a dog a bad name and hang him! We thought you had made off with the emoluments.

PIKEY PETE: I say, she can’t be mine, because I was in jail for painting horses.

CAPSTICK: Painting horses?

PIKEY PETE: You paint one racehorse to look like another, innit?

MORRIS: Don’t the paint run off, Pikey, when there’s a downpour?

PIKEY PETE: It’s an old Romany skill. Anyway, she ain’t mine.

CAPSTICK: She ain’t mine, because I was in the nick too.

MACARTHUR: And me. Serving five.

AITKENSIDE: So who’s left? Bob Fox?

BOB FOX: I never did nothing but tap on the window.

(
pause
)

MACARTHUR: Got to be that Derek bloke. Innit.

AITKENSIDE: Couldn’t have been. Bloody errand boy? He never had no money. Emmeline Cheetham, she didn’t do it for free.

MACARTHUR: True. You made sure of that.

CAPSTICK: Not like these girls you get these days, eh Dean?

MORRIS: So who’s left?

(
pause
)

MACARTHUR: Oh, blimey.

MORRIS: Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Only the great man himself!

CAPSTICK: Well, knock me down with a feather.

MORRIS: I never had such a thunderclap.

PIKEY PETE: You don’t want to mess with the fambly of Nick. Because Nick he is a fambly man.

(
pause
)

CAPSTICK: What would he do?

AITKENSIDE: Dear oh dear.

MORRIS: The worst thing that can befall a spirit is to be eaten by old Nick. You can be eaten and digested by him and then you’ve had your chips.

BOB FOX: You can’t get chips like you used to. Not fried in proper lard.

AITKENSIDE: Shut it, Bob, there’s a good lad.

CAPSTICK: What, you get et? You get et by Nick? And you don’t get another go round?

MORRIS: If he pukes you up you can reform and have another go, but otherwise you’re et and that’s all.

MACARTHUR: And that’s all?

MORRIS: El finito, Benito.

PIKEY PETE: Here, shall we do the share-out of these notes? It’s the proceeds from Etchells’s furniture. Lads? Where you going? Lads? Wait for me … .

October: Al is travelling, in the autumn’s first foul weather. There are mud slips and landslides, there are storm drains burst, a glugging and gurgling in sumps, conduits, and wells. There are fissures in the riverbeds, there are marshes, swamps, and bogs, there are cracked pipes and breached seawalls, and outswells of gas on the bubbling floodplain. There is coastal erosion, crumbling defences, spillage and seepages; where the saline and swift-rushing tide meets the viscid slime of swollen sewers, there the oceans are rising, half a metre, half a metre, half a metre onwards. On the orbital road the hazard lights of collided cars flash from the hard shoulder. Cameras flash on the bridges, there is the swish of the wipers against drenching rain, the mad blinking eyes of the breakdown trucks. “On we go!” Alison calls. “Sevenoaks, here we come.”

They are singing, Alison and the two little women: a few music hall favorites, but hymns, mostly, for it’s what the little women like. She didn’t know any of the words, but they have taught her.

Show pity, Lord! For we are frail and faint:
We fade away, O list to our complaint.
We fade away, like flowers in the sun;
We just begin, and then our work is done.

Maureen Harrison says, “Have we been to Sevenoaks?” and Alison says, “Not with me, you haven’t.”

Maureen says, anxious, “Will we get our tea there?” Alison says, “Oh yes, I hear in Sevenoaks you get a very good tea.”

“Just as well,” says Maureen’s friend from the back, “because I could have brought my own Eccles cakes.”

“Cakes,” says Maureen, “we’ve had some lovely cakes. Do you remember that one you bought me once, with a walnut on top? You can’t get cakes like that these days. Here, lovie, I’ll make you one. On your birthday. I always made you a cake on your birthday.”

“That would be nice,” says Maureen’s friend. “And 
she
 can have some too.”

“Oh, yes, we’ll give 
her
 some. She’s a lovely girl.”

Alison sighs. She likes to be appreciated; and before these last weeks, she never felt she was. They can’t do enough for her, the two old ladies, so happy they are to be together again, and when they are talking in the evening, from under a rug and behind the sofa they praise her, saying that they never had a daughter, but if they had, they would have wanted a bonny big girl just like Al. Whenever they set off in the car, they are so excited she has to make them wear incontinence pads. She cries, “Are your seat belts fastened, girls? Are your buttons all sewn on tight?” And they shout, “Yes, miss!” They say, “Look at us, riding in a motor vehicle, a private car!” They will never get tired of the orbital road, no matter how many times they go around it. Even if some image from her former life washes up—the fiends escaping Admiral Drive, vestigial heads trapped under the fences, multiple limbs thrashing, feet entangled in their tongues—even if some moment of dismay fades her smile, chills her, tightens her grip on the wheel or brings a shiny tear to her eye—even if she misses a junction, and has to cross the carriageway—the little women never complain.

They say, “Look at her hair, and look at her lovely rings, look at her frock and look at how she pedals the car—you’d think it would tire her out, but you can’t tire her out. Oh, I tell you, Maureen Harrison, we’ve landed on our feet here.” And Maureen adds, “Where our feet would be.”

Her cell phone rings. It’s Gemma. “How’s tricks? … Staines on the twenty-seventh? I doubt it, but I’ll check my diary when we pull in … . 
We?
 Did I say we? … No, not Colette. God forbid. I meant me and my new guides. Colette’s gone back to her husband. Near Twickenham. He used to be a, you know, what do they call it, one of those men who sets traps. Sort of gamekeeper.”

“Near Twickenham?” Gemma says, surprised, and Al says, “No, in a former life.” He was a man, she thought, who kept dogs, but not for pets. A terrier man. Digs out the earths, lays down poisons for hapless small creatures trying to earn a living. “I didn’t care for him,” she says, “when I ran into him in Farnham.” You shouldn’t leave bait about for it attracts entities, the slow grub and creep of legless things, feral crawlers looking for wounds to suck or open minds to creep inside. You shouldn’t leave traps, for you don’t know what will spring them: severed legs, unclaimed and nameless feet, ghouls and spectres looking to stitch themselves together, haunting the roads looking for a hand, an ear, for severed fingers and dislocated thumbs.

She has been, herself, of course, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. She doesn’t remember, really, if she saw MacArthur’s eye in a dish, though she’s been trying to remember, just to keep the record straight. It might not have been in a dish; it might have been on a plate, a saucer, a dog bowl. She remembers she had her spoon in her hand, her fork. “Business?” she says. “Business is booming, thanks for asking, Gemma. Give or take the odd quiet midweek, I’m booked out till next Feb.”

There are terrorists in the ditches, knives clenched between their teeth. There are fundis hoarding fertilizer, there are fanatics brewing bombs on brown-field sites, and holy martyrs digging storage pits where fiends have melted into the soil. There are citadels underground, there are potholes and sunken shafts; there are secret chambers in the hearts of men, sometimes of women too. There are unlicensed workings and laboratories underground, mutants breeding in the tunnels; there are cannibal moo-cows and toxic bunnikins, and behind the drawn curtains of hospital wards there are bugs that eat the flesh.

But today we are going to Sevenoaks, by way of Junction 5: to see whom fortune favours today. Will it be the brave, or is it the turn of the bloody? Will they be queuing to have their palm prints taken, the legion of the unbowed? Softly the cards are shuffled, whispering to the crimson cloth. A knight in armour is galloping from the battle—or to it. A dog climbs the wheel of fortune, while a monkey descends. A naked girl pours water into a pool, and seven stars shine in the evening sky.

“When is it teatime, miss?” the little woman enquires; and then, “Pedal faster, miss, see if you can beat that one!”