Beyond Black: A Novel (32 page)

At Admiral Drive the early bulbs pushed through, points of light in the lush grass. The brick of the Mountbatten and the Frobisher was still raw, the tiled roofs slicked by April rain. Al was right when she said that the people down the hill would have a problem with damp. Their turf squelched beneath their feet, and a swampish swelling and bubbling lifted their patios. At night the security lights flittered, as if all the neighbours were creeping from house to house, stealing each other’s game consoles and DVD players.

Gavin never called, though his monthly payment for his share of the flat in Whitton continued to arrive in her bank account. Then one day, when she and Al were shopping in Farnham, they ran straight into him; they were coming out of Elphicks department store, and he was going in.

“What are you doing in Farnham?” she said, shocked.

Gavin said, “It’s a free country.”

It was just the sort of inane reply he always used to make when you asked him why he was doing anything, or why he was wherever he was. It was the kind of reply that reminded her why she had been right to leave him. He couldn’t have done much better if he’d pre-meditated it for a week.

Al’s glance took him in. When Colette turned to introduce her, she was already backing away. “I’ll just be …” she said, and melted in the direction of cosmetics and perfume. Tactfully, she averted her eyes, and stood spraying herself with one scent and then another, to distract herself from tuning in to what they were saying.

“That her? Your friend? Gavin said. “Christ, she’s a size, isn’t she? That the best you could do?”

“She’s a remarkably sound businesswoman,” Colette said, “and a very kind and thoughtful employer.”

“And you live with her?”

“We have a lovely new house.”

“But why do you have to live in?”

“Because she needs me. She works twenty-four/seven.”

“Nobody does that.”

“She does. But you wouldn’t understand.”

“I always thought you were a bit of a lezzie, Col. I’d have thought so when I first saw you, only you came down the bar—that hotel, where was it, France—you walked straight up to me with your tongue hanging out. So I thought, could be wrong on this one.”

She turned her back and walked away from him. He called, “Colette …” She turned. He said, “We could meet up for a drink, sometime. Not her, though. She can’t come.”

Her mouth opened—she stared at him—a lifetime of insults swallowed, insults swallowed and digested, gushed up from deep inside her and jammed in her throat. She hauled in her breath, her hands formed claws; but the only words that came out were “Get stuffed.” As she dived into the store, she caught sight of herself in a mirror, her skin mottled with wrath and her eyes popping, and for the first time she understood why when she was at school they had called her Monster.

The following week, in Walton-on-Thames, they got into a parking dispute with a man in a multistorey car park. Two cars nosing for the same space; it was just one of those crude suburban flare-ups, which men easily forget but which make women cry and shake for hours.

Nine times out of ten, in these spats, Al would put her restraining hand on Colette’s hand, as it tightened on the wheel, and say, forget it, let him have what he wants, it doesn’t matter. But this time, she whizzed down her window and asked the man, “What’s your name?”

He swore at her. She was inured to bad language, from the fiends; but why should you expect it from such a man, an Admiral Drive sort of man, a mail-order-jacket sort of man, a let’s-get-out-the-barbecue sort of man?

She said to him, “Stop, stop, stop! You should have more on your mind than cursing women in car parks. Go straight home and boost your life insurance. Clean up your computer and wipe off those kiddie pictures, that’s not the sort of thing you want to leave behind you. Ring up your GP. Ask for an early appointment and don’t take no for an answer. Tell them, left lung. They can do a lot these days, you know. If they catch these things before they spread.” She whizzed up the window again. The man mouthed something; his car squealed away.

Colette slotted them neatly into the disputed space. She glanced sideways at Al. She didn’t dare question her. They were running late, of course; they did need the space. She said to Al, testing her, “I wish I had done that.” Al didn’t answer.

When they got home that night and had poured a drink, she said, “Al, the man in the car park … .”

“Oh, yes,” Al said. “Of course, I was just guessing.” She added, “About the pornography.”

These days when they travelled there was blissful silence from the back of the car. Didcot and Abingdon, Blewberry and Goring: Shinfield, Wonersh, Long Ditton, and Lightwater. They knew the lives they glimpsed on the road were lives more ordinary than theirs. They saw an ironing board in a lean-to, waiting for its garment. A grandma at a bus stop, stooping forward to pop a biscuit into a child’s open mouth. Dirty pigeons hanging in the trees. A lamp shining behind a black hedge. Underpasses dropping away, lit by dim bulbs: Otford, Limpsfield, New Eltham, and Blackfen. They tried to avoid the high streets and shopping malls of the denatured towns, because of the bewildered dead clustered among the dumpsters outside the burger bars, clutching door keys in their hands or queuing with their lunch boxes where the gates of small factories once stood, where machines once whirred and chugged behind sooty panes of old glass. There are thousands of them out there, so pathetic and lame-brained that they can’t cross the road to get where they’re going, dithering on the kerbs of new arterial roads and bypasses, as the vehicles swish by: congregating under railway arches and under the stairwells of multistorey car parks, thickening the air at the entrance to underground stations. If they brush up against Alison they follow her home, and start pestering her the first chance they get. They elbow her in the ribs with questions, always questions; but never the right ones. Always, where’s my pension book, has the Number 64 gone, are we having a fry-up this morning? Never, am I dead? When she puts them right on that, they want to go over how it happened, trying to glean some sense out of it, trying to throw a slippery bridge over the gap between time and eternity. “I had just plugged in the iron,” a woman would say, “and I was just starting on the left sleeve of Jim’s blue striped shirt … of his … our Jim … his stripes … .” And her voice will grow faint with bafflement until Alison explains to her, puts her in the picture, and “Oh, I see now,” she will say, quite equable, and then, “I get it. These things happen, don’t they? So I’ll not take up your time any further. I’m very much obliged. No thanks, I’ve my own tea waiting for me when I get home. I wouldn’t want to cut into your evening … .”

And so she passes, her voice fading until she melts into the wall.

Even the ones who went over with plenty of warning liked to recall their last hours on the ward, dwelling in a leisurely fashion on which of their family showed up for the deathbed and which of them left it too late and got stuck in traffic. They wanted Alison to put tributes in the newspaper for them—
Thanks, sincerely meant, to the staff at St. Bernard’s
—and she promised she would, for I’ll do anything, she would say, that will make them lie down, wait quietly and waft to their next abode instead of making themselves at home in mine. They will finish their ramblings with, “Well, that’s all from me for now,” and “Hoping this finds you well,” and “Let me have your family news soon”: sometimes with a quiet, stoical, “I ought to go now.” Sometimes, when they bob back, with a cheery, “Hello, it’s me,” they are claiming to be Queen Victoria, or their own older sister, or a woman who lived next door to them before they were born. It’s not intentional fraud; it’s more that a mingling and mincing and mixing of personality goes on, the fusing of personal memory with the collective. You see, she explains to Colette, you and me, when we come back, we could manifest as one person. Because these last years, we’ve shared a lot. You could come back as my mum. I could come over, thirty years from now, to some psychic standing on a stage somewhere, and claim I was my own dad. Not that I know who my dad is, but I will one day, perhaps after I’ve passed.

But Colette would say, panicked for a moment, stampeded into belief, what if I die? Al, what shall I do, what shall I do if I die?

Al would say to her, keep your wits about you. Don’t start crying. Don’t speak to anybody. Don’t eat anything. Keep saying your name over and over. Close your eyes and look for the light. If somebody says, follow me, ask to see their ID. When you see the light, move towards it. Keep your bag clamped to your body—where your body would be. Don’t open your bag, and remember the last thing you should do is pull out a map, however lost you feel. If anybody asks you for money ignore them, push past. Just keep moving towards the light. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t let anyone stop you. If somebody points out there’s paint on your coat or bird droppings in your hair, just keep motoring, don’t pause, don’t look left or right. If a woman approaches you with some snotty-nosed kid, kick her out of the way. It sounds harsh, but it’s for your own safety. Keep moving. Move towards the light.

And if I lose it? Colette would say. What if I lose the light and I’m wandering around in a fog, with all these people trying to snatch my purse and my mobile? You can always come home, Alison would tell her. You know your home now, Admiral Drive. I’ll be here to explain it all to you and put you on the right path so that you can manage the next bit, and then when I come over in the fullness of time we can get together and have a coffee and maybe share a house again if we think it will work out.

But what if you go before me, Colette would say, what if we go together, what if we’re on the M25 and a wind blows up and what if it’s a mighty wind and we’re blown into the path of a lorry?

Alison would sigh and say, Colette, Colette, we all get there in the end. Look at Morris! We end up in the next world raw, indignant, baffled or furious, and ignorant, all of us: but we get sent on courses. Our spirits move, given time, to a higher level, where everything becomes clear. Or so people tell me, anyway. Hauntings can persist for centuries, for sure, but why wouldn’t they? People have no sense of urgency, airside.

Inside the Collingwood the air was serene. Weekly, Colette polished the crystal ball. You had to wash it in vinegar and water and rub it up with a chamois. Al said, the tools of the trade are what keep you on track. They focus the mind and direct the energy. But they have no magic in themselves. Power is contained in domestic objects, in the familiar items you handle every day. You can look into the side of an aluminium pan and see a face that’s not your own. You can see a movement on the inside of an empty glass.

The days, months, blurred into one. The venues offered a thousand grannies with buttons missing; a thousand hands raised. Why are we here? Why must we suffer? Why must children suffer? Why does God mistreat us? Can you bend spoons?

Smiling, Al said to her questioner, “I should give it a go, shouldn’t I? Give me something to do in the kitchen. Stop me raiding the fridge.”

The truth was—though she never admitted it to anyone—that she had once tried it. She was against party tricks, and generally against showing off and being wasteful, and wrecking your cutlery seemed to come under those heads. But one day at Admiral Drive the urge overcame her. Colette was out: all well and good. She tiptoed into the kitchen and slid out a drawer. It snagged, bounced back. The potato masher had rolled forward spitefully and was catching its rim on the front of the unit. Unusually irritated, she slid in her hand, dragged the utensil out and threw it across the kitchen. Now she was in the mood for spoon-bending, she wasn’t to be thwarted.

Her hand jumped for the knives. She picked one out, a blunt round-edged table knife. She ran her fingers around the blade. She put it down. Picked up a soupspoon. She knew how to do this. She held it loosely, fingers caressing its neck, her will flowing from her spinal column sweetly into the pads of her fingers. She closed her eyes. She felt a slight humming behind them. Her breathing deepened. She relaxed. Then her eyes snapped open. She looked down. The spoon, unaltered, smiled up at her; and suddenly she understood it, she understood the essence of spoonhood. Bending it wasn’t the point, anymore. The point was that she would never feel the same about cutlery. Something stirred deep in her memory, as if she had been cross-wired, as if some old source of feeling had been tapped. She laid the spoon to rest, reverently, snug inside a fellow spoon. As she closed the drawer her eye caught the glint of the paring knife, a more worthwhile blade. She thought, I understand the nature of it. I understand the nature of spoon and knife.

Later, Colette picked up the potato masher from where it had fallen. “It’s bent,” she said.

“That’s all right. I did it.”

“Oh. You’re sure?”

“Just a little experiment.”

“I thought for a minute it must be Morris come back.” Colette hesitated. “You would tell me, wouldn’t you?”

But truly, there was no sign of him. Al sometimes wondered how he was doing on his course. It must be that he’s going to a higher level, she reasoned, you wouldn’t get sent on a course to go to a lower level.

“No, not even Morris,” Colette said, when she mentioned it. If Morris were on a lower level, he’d be no good, he’d not even scrape up to standard as an ordinary spirit, let alone get employed anywhere as a guide. He’d be just an agglomeration of meaninglessness, a clump of cells rolling around through the netherworld.

“Colette,” she said, “when you’re sweeping, have a look at the vacuum cleaner bag from time to time. If you find any big lumps you can’t account for, check it out with me, okay?”

Colette said, “I don’t think that sifting through the vacuum cleaner bag was in my job description.”

“Well, write it in, there’s a good girl,” Al said.

There are some spirits, she knew, who are willing to sink: who are so tenacious of existence that they will assume any form, however debased, ridiculous, and filthy. That was why Al, unlike her mother, made sure to keep a clean house. She thought that she and Colette, between them, could keep down the lower sort, who drift in dust rolls under beds and make streaks and finger-prints on windowpanes. They cloud mirrors and sometimes vanish with a chortle, leaving the mirror clear and unkind. They clump in hairbrushes, and when you comb them out, you think, can this thin grey frizz be mine?