Beyond Black: A Novel (25 page)

Move on, she thought: it might baffle them for a bit. Even a temporary bewilderment could keep them off your back. It might cause them to disperse, lose each other again in those vast tracts the dead inhabit.

“Oi, oi, oi oi!” Morris called, yelling right in her ear. “Bob’s your uncle!”

“Is he?” she’d said, surprised. “Bob Fox? I always wanted a relative.”

“Blimey, Emmie,” Morris said, “is she simple, or what?”

That night, when they got home, Morris crept in with them; the others, his friends, seemed to have melted away, somewhere in Bedfordshire between Junctions 9 and 10. To check for them, she lifted the carpet in the boot of the car, peered into the cold metal well; no one was there, and when she dragged out her case she found it was no heavier than it had been when she packed it. So far so good. To keep them out permanently—that would be another matter. Once inside she was solicitous to Colette, recommending a hot bath and the
Coronation Street
 omnibus edition.

“If it’s on,” Colette said. All she could summon up was funeral coverage. “For God’s sake. I wish they’d give it a rest. They’ve buried her now. She’s not going to get up again.” She slumped on the sofa with a bowl of breakfast cereal. “We ought to get a satellite dish.”

“We can when we move.”

“Or cable. Whatever.”

She’s resilient, Al thought, as she climbed the stairs—or maybe she’s just forgetful? At the stop back in Leicestershire, Colette had turned the shade of porridge, when it was broken to her about the menagerie riding in the back seat of the car. But now she was her usual self, carping away, always with some petty grievance. You couldn’t say her colour had come back, because she never had any colour; but when she was frightened, Al had noticed, she sucked her lips inwards so that they seemed almost to disappear; at the same time, her eyes seemed to shrink back in her skull, so you noticed their pink rims even more.

In her own room, Al sank down onto the bed. Hers was the master bedroom; Colette, when she moved in, had squeezed into what even the estate agent, when he’d sold the flat to Al, had the grace to describe as a 
small
double. It was a good thing she had few clothes and no possessions; or, to put it as Colette did, a capsule wardrobe and a minimalist philosophy.

Al sighed; she stretched her cramped limbs, checking out her body for spirit aches and pains. Some entity was tweaking her left knee, some desolate soul was trying to hold her hand; not now, kids, she said, give me a break. I need, she thought, to give Colette more of a stake in life. Get her name on the house deeds. Give her more reason to stick around, so she’s less inclined to take off in a sulk or on a whim, or under the pressure of unnatural events. For we all have our limits; though she’s brave—brave with the true-blue staunchness of those who lack imagination.

I could, she thought, go downstairs and tell her face-to-face how much I appreciate her; I could, as it were, pin a medal on her: Order of Diana (deceased). She levered herself upright. But her resolution failed. No, she thought; as soon as I see her she’ll irritate me, sitting sideways with her legs flung over the arm of the chair, swinging her feet in her little beige ankle socks. Why doesn’t she get slippers? You can get quite acceptable kinds of slippers these days. Moccasins, something like that. Then there will be a bowl half full of milk on the floor by her chair, with a few malted flakes bobbing in it. Why does she drop her spoon into the bowl when she decides she’s finished, so that driblets of milk shoot out onto the carpet? And why should such small things work one up to an extreme level of agitation? Before I lived with Colette, she thought, I supposed I was easy to live with, I thought I would be happy if people didn’t actually vomit on the carpet, or bring home friends who did. I thought it was quite good to have a carpet, even. I thought of myself as quite a placid person. Probably I was mistaken.

She took the tape recorder out of its bag and set it up on her bedside table. She kept the volume low, whizzing the tape backward to find last night.

MORRIS: Run out for five Woodbine, would you? Thanks Bob, you’re a scholar and a gentleman. (
eructation
) Blimey. I should never ’ave ’ad that cheese an’ onion pie.

AITKENSIDE: Cheese an’ onion? Christ, I ’ad that once, it was at the races, remember that time we went up to Redcar?

MORRIS: Ooh, yer, do I? And Pikey had his motorbike with the sidecar? Redcar, sidecar, we was laughing about that?

AITKENSIDE: Bloody crucified me, that pie. Repeating on me for three bloody weeks.

MORRIS: ’Ere, Dean, they don’t make pies like that these days. I remember Pikey Pete, he kept saying, fanks, Donnie, fanks for the memory. Oh, he were a right laugh! ’Ere, Bob, are you going for them fags?

AITKENSIDE: They don’t make Woodbine no more.

MORRIS: What, they don’t make Woodies? Why not? Why don’t they?

AITKENSIDE: And you can’t buy five. You’ve got to buy ten these days.

MORRIS: What, buy ten, and not even Woodies?

BOY’S VOICE: Where’ve you been, Uncle Morris?

MORRIS: Dead. That’s where I bloody been.

BOY’S VOICE: Have we got to stay dead, Uncle Morris?

MORRIS: Well, it’s up to you, Dean lad, if you can find some way to bloody recycle yourself you get on and do it, san-fairy-ann, no skin off my blooming nose. If you’ve got the contacts, you bloody use ’em. I give a hundred pounds, one hundred nicker in notes to a bloke I met that said he could get me restarted. I said to him, I don’t want borning in bloody wogland, you hear what I’m saying, I don’t want to come back as some nig, and he swore he could get me born in Brighton—or Hove which is near as dammit—born in Brighton and free, white, and twenty-one. Well, not twenty-one, but nar what I mean. And I thought, not bad, Brighton’s near the course, and when I’m a tiddler I’ll be getting the sea air and all, grow up strong and healthy, besides I always had mates in Brighton, show me the bloke wiv no mates in Brighton and I’ll show you a tosser. Anyway, he took my readies and he scarpered. Left me high and dry, dead.

Alison switched off the tape. It’s so humiliating, she thought, so crushing and shameful to have Morris in your life and to have lived with him all these years. She put her arms across her body, rocked herself gently. Brighton—well, naturally. Brighton and Hove. The sea air, the horse racing. If only she’d thought about it earlier. That was why he was trying to get inside Mandy, back at the hotel. That was why he kept her up all night, pawing and pulling at her—not because he wanted sex, but because he was plotting to be born, to be carried inside some unknowing hostess … the filthy, dirty little sneak. She could imagine him, in Mandy’s hotel room, whining, slobbering, abasing himself by crawling across the carpet, slithering towards her on his chin with his pitiful haunches in the air: born me, born me! Dear God, it didn’t bear thinking about.

And clearly—at least it was clear to her now—it wouldn’t be the first time Morris had tried it on. She well remembered Mandy’s pregnancy test, was it last year? She’d been on the phone that very night, I was feeling strange, Al, really queasy, well I don’t know what made me but I went out to the chemist, I tested my wee and the line’s gone blue. Al, I blame myself, I must have been extremely careless.

In Mandy’s mind the solution was straightforward; she had it done away with. So that was the end of Morris and his hundred pounds. For months afterwards she would say, whenever they met, do you know I’m baffled about that episode, I can’t think who or where—I think it must have been when we went to that café bar in Northampton, somebody must have spiked my drink. They’d blamed Raven—though not to his face; as Mandy said, you didn’t want to push it, because if Raven denied it categorically, that would more or less mean it must have been Merlin or Merlyn.

Those speculations were hard enough and distasteful; she admired the way Mandy faced them, the putative fathers, at every Psychic Fayre, her chin tilted up, her eyes cold and knowing. But she’d be sick to her stomach if she knew what Al was thinking now. I won’t tell her, she decided. She’s been a good friend to me over the years and she doesn’t deserve that. I’ll keep Morris under control, somehow, when I’m in her vicinity; God knows how, though. A million pounds wouldn’t be enough—it wouldn’t be enough of a bribe to make you carry Morris or any of his friends. Imagine your trips to the antenatal clinic. Imagine what they’d say at your play group.

She clicked the tape back on. I have to make myself do it, she thought, I have to listen right through: see if I get any insight, any grip on other furtive schemes that Morris might come up with.

MORRIS: So what ciggies 
can
 I ’ave?

DEAN: You can have a roll-up, Uncle Morris.

UNKNOWN VOICE: Can we have a bit of respect, please? We’re here on a funeral.

DEAN: (
timid
) It is all right if I call you Uncle Morris?

SECOND UNKNOWN VOICE: This sceptered isle, this precious stone set in the silver sea … .

MORRIS, AITKENSIDE: Oi oi oi oi! It’s Wagstaffe!

MORRIS: Mended the bloody hole in your bloody pantaloons yet, Wagstaffe?

WAGSTAFFE: There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

She recognized voices from her childhood; she heard the clink of beer bottles, and the military rattle, as bone clicked into joint. They were reassembling themselves, the old crew: root and branch, arm and leg. Only Wagstaffe seemed baffled to be there; and the unknown person who had called for respect.

She remembered the night, long ago in Aldershot, when the streetlight shone on her bed. She remembered the afternoon when she had come into the house and seen a man’s face looking through the mirror, where her own face ought to be.

She thought, I should phone my mum. If they’re breaking through like this, she ought to be tipped off. At her age, a shock could kill her.

She had to scrabble through an old address book, to find Emmie’s number in Bracknell. A man answered. “Who is that?” she asked, and he said, “Who’s asking?”

“Don’t come that with me, matey,” she said, in Aitkenside’s voice.

The man dropped the receiver. She waited. A static crackle filled her ear. A moment later her mother spoke.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s me. Alison.” She added, she couldn’t think why, “It’s me, your little girl.”

“What do you want?” her mother said. “Bothering me, after all this time.”

“Who’s that you’ve got there, in your house?”

“Nobody,” her mother said.

“I thought I knew his voice. Is it Keith Capstick? Is it Bob Fox?”

“What are you talking about? I don’t know what somebody’s been telling you. There’s some filthy tongues about, you should know better. You’d think they’d mind their own bloody business.”

“I only want to know who answered the phone.”

“I answered it. God Almighty, Alison, you always were a bit soft.”

“A man answered.”

“What man?”

“Mum, don’t encourage them. If they come round, you don’t let them in.”

“Who?”

“MacArthur. Aitkenside. That old crowd.”

“Must be dead, I should think,” her mother said. “I haven’t heard them names in years. Bloody Bill Wagstaffe, weren’t he a friend of theirs? That Morris, and all. And there was that gypsy fella, dealt in horses, what did they call him? Yes, I reckon they must all be dead by now. I wouldn’t mind it if they did come round. They was a laugh.”

“Mum, don’t let them in. If they come knocking, don’t answer.”

“I remember Aitkenside, drove a heavy lorry, always got a wodge in his wallet. Used to do favours, you know. Drop off loads, this and that, he’d say one stiff more or less it don’t hardly make no difference to the weight. This gypsy fella—Pete, they called him—now he had a trailer.”

“Mum, if they turn up, any of them, you let me know. You’ve got my number.”

“I might have it written down somewhere.”

“I’ll give it you again.”

She did so. Emmie waited till she finished and said, “I haven’t got a pencil.”

Al sighed. “You go and get one.”

She heard the receiver drop. A buzzing filled the line, like flies around a dustbin. When Emmie returned she said, “Found up my eyebrow pencil. That was a good idea, wasn’t it?”

She repeated the number.

Emmie said, “Wagstaffe always had a pen. You could rely on him for that.”

“Have you got it now?”

“No.”

“Why not, Mum?”

“I haven’t got a paper.”

“Haven’t you got anything you can write on? You must have a writing pad.”

“Oh, la-di-dah.”

“Go and get a bit of toilet paper.”

“All right. Don’t get shirty.”

She could hear Emmie singing, as she moved away; “I wish I was in Dixie, hurrah, hurrah …”; then, again, the buzzing occupied the line. She thought, the men came into the bedroom and looked down at me as I lay in my little bed. They took me out of the house by night, into the thick belt of birch trees and dead bracken beyond the pony field. There on the ground they operated on me, took out my will and put in their own.

“Hello?” Emmie said. “That you, Al? I got the toilet paper, you can tell me again now. Oops, hang on, me pencil’s rolled off.” There was a grunt of effort.

Alison was almost sure she could hear a man, complaining in the background.

“Okay, I got it now. Fire away.”

Once again, she gave her number. She felt exhausted.

“Now tell me again,” her mother said. “What have I got to ring you, when and if what?”

“If any of them come around. Any of that old crowd.”

“Oh yes. Aitkenside. Well, I should hear ’is lorry, I should think.”

“That’s right. But he might not be driving a lorry anymore.”

“What’s happened to it?”

“I don’t know. I’m just saying, he might not. He might just turn up. If anybody comes knocking at your window—”

“Bob Fox, he always used to knock on the window. Come around the back and knock on the window and give me a fright.” Emmie laughed. “‘Caught you that time,’ he’d say.”

“Yes, so … you ring me.”

“Keith Capstick,” her mother said. “He were another. Keef, you used to call him, couldn’t say your tee-haitches; you was a stupid little bugger. Keef Catsick. ’Course, you didn’t know any better. Oh, it used to make him mad, though. Keef Catsick. He caught you many a slap.”