Beyond Black: A Novel (29 page)

“Off the record,” Evan said, wheedling.

Colette ran her eyes over Michelle. Was she pregnant again, or just letting herself go? “Cover up, would be my advice,” she said.

The weather affects the motorway as it affects the sea. The traffic has its rising tides. The road surface glistens with a pearly sheen, or heaves its black wet deeps. They find themselves at distant service stations as dawn breaks, where yellow light spills out into an oily dimness and a line of huddled birds watches them from above. On the M40 near High Wycombe, a kestrel glides on the updraught, swoops to pluck small squealing creatures from the rough grass of the margins. Magpies toddle amid the roadkill.

They travel: Orpington, Sevenoaks, Chertsey, Runnymede, Reigate, and Sutton. They strike out east of the Thames barrier, where travellers’ encampments huddle beneath tower blocks and seagulls cry over the floodplains, where the smell of sewage is carried on the cutting wind. There are flood-lights and bunkers, gravel pits and pallet yards, junctions where traffic cones cluster. There are featureless hangars with TO LET signs pinned to them, tyres spun away into shabby fields. Colette puts her foot down; they pass vehicles mounted on the backs of vehicles, locked in oily copulation. They pass housing developments just like theirs—“Look, portholes,” Al says—their dormers and their Juliet balconies staring out over low hills made of compacted London waste. They pass Xmas tree farms and puppy farms, barnyards piled with scrap. Pictures of salivating dogs are hung on wire fences, so that those who don’t read English get the point. Crosswinds rock them; cables lash across a fast sky. Colette’s radio is tuned to traffic reports—trouble at Trellick Tower, an insurmountable blockage afflicting the Kingston bypass. Al’s mind drifts, across the central reservation. She sees the walls of warehouses shining silver like the tinny armour of the tarot knights. She sees incinerators, oil storage tankers, gas holders, electricity substations. Haulage yards. Portakabins, underpasses, subways, and walkways. Industrial parks and science parks and retail parks.

The world beyond the glass is the world of masculine action. Everything she sees is what a man has built. But at each turnoff, each junction, women are waiting to know their fate. They are looking deep inside themselves, into their private hearts, where the foetus forms and buds, where the shape forms inside the crystal, where fingernails click softly on the backs of the cards, and pictures flutter upwards, towards the air: Justice, Temperance, The Sun, The Moon, The World.

At the motorway services, there are cameras pointing, watching the queues for fish and chips and tepid jellified cheesecake. Outside there are notices affixed to poles, warning of hawkers, peddlers, itinerant sellers, and illegal traders. There are none that warn against the loose, travelling dead. There are cameras guarding the exits, but none that register the entrances of Pikey Pete.

“You don’t know what will trigger them,” Al says. “There’s a whole pack of them, you see. Accumulating. It worries me. I’m not saying it doesn’t worry me. The only thing is, the only good thing—Morris doesn’t bring them home. They fade away somewhere, before we turn into Admiral Drive. He doesn’t like it, you see. Says it’s not a proper home. He doesn’t like the garden.”

They were coming back from Suffolk—or somewhere, at any rate, where people still had an appetite—because they were behind a van that said WRIGHT’S FAMOUS PIES, SAVORIES, CONFECTIONERY.

“Look at that,” Al said, and read it out, laughing. At once she thought, why did I do that? I could kick myself. They’ll claim they’re hungry now.

Morris gripped the passenger seat and rocked it, saying, “I could murder a Famous Pie.” Said Pikey Pete, “You can’t beat a Savoury.” Said young Dean, with his customary politeness, “I’ll have a Confectionery, please.”

Colette said, “Is that headrest rocking again, or is it you fidgetting? God, I’m starving, I’m going to pull in at Clacket Lane.”

When Colette was at home she lived on vitamin pills and ginseng. She was a vegetarian except for bacon and skinless chicken breasts. On the road they ate what they could get, when they could get it. They dined in the theme pubs of Billaricay and Egham. In Virginia Water they ate nachos and in Broxborne they ate fat pillows of dough that the baker called Belgian Buns. In laybys they ate leaking seafood sandwiches and when spring came, in the pedestrianized zones of small Thameside towns they sat on benches with warm Cornish pasties, nibbling daintily around the frills. They ate broccoli and three-cheese bake straight from the cash-and-carry, and wholesaler’s quiche Lorraine with sinewy nuggets of ham as pink as a scalded baby, and KrispyKrum Chickettes, and lemon mousse that reminded them of the kind of foam you clean carpets with.

“I have to have something sweet,” Alison said. “I have to keep my energy levels up. Some people think it’s glamorous having psychic powers. They’re dead wrong.”

Colette thought, it’s hard enough keeping her tidy, never mind glamorous. She served her time with Al, in the shopping precincts of small towns, standing outside fitting rooms the size of sentry boxes, with curtains that never pulled straight across. There were creaks and sighs from the other sentry boxes; the thin smell of desperation and self-hatred hung in the air. Colette had made a vow to take her upmarket, but Al was uncomfortable in posh shops. She did have some pride, though. Whatever she bought, she decanted into a carrier bag from a shop that catered to normal-sized women.

“I have to keep body and mind receptive and quiet,” she said. “If carrying a bit of flesh is the price I have to pay, so be it. I can’t tune in to Spirit if I’m bouncing around in an aerobics class.”

Morris said, have you seen MacArthur, he is a mate of mine and Keef Capstick, he is a mate of Keef ’s too. Have you seen MacArthur, he is a mate of mine and he wears a knitted weskit. Have you seen MacArthur, he has only one eye, have you seen him, he has one earlobe ripped off, a sailor ripped it off in a fracas, that’s what he tells people. How did he lose his eye? Well, that’s another story. He blames that on a sailor too, but round here, we know he’s lying. And Morris gave a dirty laugh.

When spring came, the gardening service sent a man. A truck dropped him, and his mower, then rattled off. Colette went to the door to administer him. No use waiting for Al to do it.

“It’s only I don’t know how to start it?” he said. He stood pushing a finger under his woolly hat, as if, Colette thought, he were making some sort of secret sign to her.

She stared at him. “You don’t know how to start the mower?”

He said, “What do I look like, in this hat?”

“I can’t imagine,” she said.

“Do you think I look like a brickie?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“You can see ’em all over the place, they’re building walls.” He pointed. “Down there.”

“You’re soaked through,” Colette said, noticing this.

The man said, “No, it’s not up to much, is it, this cardigan, parka, jacket? I could do with a fleece.”

“A fleece wouldn’t keep the rain out.”

“I could get a plastic, a plastic to put over it.”

“Whatever you think best,” Colette said coldly.

The man trudged away. Colette shut the door.

Ten minutes later the doorbell rang. The man had pulled his hat over his eyes. He was standing on the doormat, dripping under the porch. “So, starting it? Could you?”

Colette’s eyes swept him, up and down. She saw with disgust that his toes were poking out of his shoes, waggling the cracked leather up and down. “Are you sure you’re qualified for this job?”

The man shook his head. “I’ve not been trained on a mower,” he said.

“Why did they send you?”

“I suppose they thought you could train me on it.”

“And why would they think that?”

“Well, you look a lovely girl.”

“Don’t try it on,” Colette said. “I’m ringing your manager.” She slammed the door.

Al came to the head of the stairs. She had been having a lie-down, after seeing a bereaved client. “Col?”

“Yes?”

“Was that a man?” Her voice was vague, sleepy.

“It was the gardening service. He was crap. He couldn’t start the mower.”

“So what happened?”

“So I told him to bugger off and I’m ringing them to complain.”

“What sort of man was he?”

“An idiot.”

“Young, old?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t look. He was wet. He had a hat on.”

In summer, they drove through countryside perfumed by the noxious vapours of pesticides and herbicides, and by the sweet cloud that lay over the golden fields of oil-seed rape. Their eyes streamed, their throats dried and tightened; Al groped in her bag for antiseptic lozenges. Autumn: she saw the full moon snared in the netting of a football field, caught there bulging, its face bruised. When a traffic snarl-up brought them to a halt, she noticed the trudging shopper with her grocery bags, leaning into the wind. She noticed the rotted wood of a balcony, London brick weeping soot, winter mould on a stack of garden chairs. A curve in the road, a pause at traffic lights, brings you close to another life, to an office window where a man leans on a filing cabinet in a crumpled shirt, as close as some man you know; while a van backs into the road, you halt, you are detained, and the pause makes you intimate with a man stroking his bald head, framed in the lighted cavity of his garage beneath the up-and-over door.

At journey’s end comes the struggle with randomly arriving trivia, zinging through the ether. You are going to get a new sofa. You are a very tenacious person. Morris was supposed to act as a sort of doorman, ushering the spirits and making them queue up, threatening them so they don’t all talk at once. But he seemed to have fallen into a prolonged sulk, since they moved to Admiral Drive. Nothing suited him, and he left her to be teased and tormented by Diana imitators, Elvis imitators, the petty dead purveying misinformation, working tricks and setting riddles. From her audiences, the same old questions: for example, is there sex in Spirit World?

She would answer, giggling, “There’s an elderly lady I know who’s very psychic, and I’ll tell you what she says: she says, there’s a tremendous amount of love in Spirit World, but there’s none of that funny stuff.”

It would get a laugh. The audience would relax. They didn’t really suppose there could be an answer to this question. But once when they got home, Colette had said, “Well, is there sex in Spirit World? I don’t want to know what Mrs. Etchells says, I want to know what you say.”

“Mostly, they don’t have body parts,” Al said. “Not as such. There are exceptions. There are some really low spirits that are—well, just genitals, really. The others, they just … they like to watch us doing it.”

“Then we can’t provide them with much entertainment,” Colette said.

Winter: from the passenger seat Al turns her face towards the lighted windows of a school. Children’s drawings are pinned up, facing away from her: she sees the backs of triangular angels, with pointing frosted wings. Weeks after Christmas, into the new year, the cardboard stars still hang against the glass, and polyester snowflakes fall dryly, harmlessly down the inside of the panes. Winter and another spring: on the A12 towards Ipswich the lamps overhead burst into flower, their capsules splitting; they snap open like seedpods, and from their metal cups the rays of light burst out against the sky.

One day in early spring Alison looked out over the garden, and saw Morris squatting in the far corner, crying—or pretending to. Morris’s complaint about the garden was that, when you looked out the window, all you could see was turf, and fence, and him.

They had paid extra for a plot backing south. But that first summer the light beat in through the French windows, and they were forced to hang voile panels to protect themselves. Morris spent his time sequestered in these drapes, swathed in them; he did not care for the light of the sun or the unshaded moon. After the idiot from the gardening service, they had bought their own mower, and Colette, complaining, had trimmed the lawn; but I’m not grubbing about in flower beds, she said, I’m not planting things. Al was embarrassed at first, when the neighbours stopped her and offered her magazine articles about garden planning, and recommended certain television programmes with celebrity horticulturalists, that they felt sure she would enjoy. They think we’re letting the side down, she thought; as well as being sexual deviants, we don’t have a pond or even decking. Morris complained there was no cover for his nefarious activities. His mates, he said, were jeering at him, crying “Hup! Hup! Hup! Morris on parade! By the left, quick march; by the right, quick march … . Fall out! Morrr-iisss, report for special fucking kitchen duties and licking ladies’ shoes.”

Al sneered at him. “I don’t want you in my kitchen.” No chance, she thought; not amongst our hygienic granite-look worktops. There is no crack or corner and there is no place to hide in our stainless-steel double oven, not without the risk of being cooked. At her mum’s house in Aldershot the sink had an old-style wooden draining board, reeking, mouldy, sodden to the touch. For Morris, after he passed, it had been his natural home. He insinuated himself through the spongy fibres and lay there breathing wetly, puffing through his mouth and snorting through his nose. When this first happened she couldn’t bear to do the washing up. After she had left it for three days in a row her mother had said, “I’ll have you, young lady,” and came after her with a plastic clothesline. Emmie couldn’t decide whether to lash her, or tie her up, or hang her: and while she was deciding, she wobbled and fell over. Alison sighed and stepped over her. She took one end of the clothesline and drew it through her mother’s half-closed hand until Emmie yielded the last foot, the last inch. Then she took it outside and hung it back, between the hook driven into the brickwork and the sloping post that was sunk into the grass.

It was twilight, a moon rising over Aldershot. The line was not taut, and her amateurish, womanly knots slipped away from their anchors. Some spirits fluttered down onto the line, and fluttered away again, squawking, when it dipped and swayed under their feet. She threw a stone after them, jeering. She was only a girl then.