Beyond Black: A Novel (6 page)

“The first time while you’ve been with me, maybe. That’s why I gave up working in London.” Al sat back against the pillows, her eyes closed; she pushed the hair back from her forehead, and Colette saw the jagged scar at her hairline, dead white against ivory. “Who needs it? A fight every night. And the trade pawing you when you try to leave, so you miss the last train home. I like to get home. But you know that, Col.”

But she doesn’t like night driving, either; so when they’re outside the ring of the M25, there’s nothing for it except to put up somewhere, the two of them in a twin room. A bed-and-breakfast is no good because Al can’t last through till breakfast, so for preference they need a hotel that will do food through the night. Sometimes they take prepacked sandwiches, but it’s joy-less for Al, sitting up in bed at 4 A.M., sliding a finger into the plastic triangle to fish out the damp bread. There’s a lot of sadness in hotel rooms, soaked up by the soft furnishings: a lot of loneliness and guilt and regret. A lot of ghosts too: whiskery chambermaids stumping down the corridors on their bad legs, tippling night porters who’ve collapsed on the job, guests who’ve drowned in the bath or suffered a stroke in their beds. When they check into a room, Alison stands on the threshold and sniffs the atmosphere, inhales it: and her eyes travel dubiously around. More than once, Colette has shot down to reception to ask for a different room. “What’s the problem?” the receptionists will say (sometimes adding 
madam
) and Colette, stiff with hostility and fright, will say, “Why do you need to know?” She never fails in her mission; challenged, she can pump out as much aggression as the girl in the khaki vest.

What Alison prefers is somewhere new-built and anonymous, part of some reliable chain. She hates history: unless it’s on television, safe behind glass. She won’t thank you for a night in a place with beams. “Sod the inglenooks,” she once said, after an exhausting hour tussling with an old corpse in a sheet. The dead are like that; give them a cliché and they’ll run to it. They enjoy frustrating the living, spoiling their beauty sleep. They enjoyed pummelling Al’s flesh and nagging at her till she got earache; they rattled around in her head until some nights, like tonight, it seemed to quiver on the soft stem of her neck. “Col,” she groaned, “be a good girl, rummage around in the bags and see if you can find my lavender spray. My head’s throbbing.”

Colette knelt on the floor and rummaged as directed. “That woman at the end, the couple, the miscarriage—you could have heard a pin drop.”

Al said, “
See a pin and pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck.
 My mum told me that. I never do, though—see a pin. Or find money in the street.”

That’s because you’re too fat to see your feet, Colette thought. She said, “How did you do that thing with the name? When you were going on about mother love I nearly puked, but I have to hand it to you, you got there in the end.”

“Alistair? Well, of course, if he’d been called John, you wouldn’t be giving me any credit. You’d have said it was one of my lucky guesses.” She sighed. “Look, Colette, what can I tell you? The boy was standing there. He knew his own name. People do.”

“The mother, she must have been thinking his name.”

“Yes, yes, I could have picked it out of her head. I know that’s your theory. Mind reading. Oh, God, Colette,” Al slid down inside the covers. She closed her eyes. Her head dropped back against the pillows. “Think that, if you find it easier. But you will admit I sometimes tell people things they’ve yet to find out.”

She hated that phrase of Al’s: 
Think that, if you find it easier.
 As if she were a child and couldn’t be told the truth. Al only seemed dense—it was part of her act. The truth was, she listened to Radio Four when they were on the road. She’d got a vocabulary, though she didn’t use it on the trade. She was quite a serious and complicated person, and deep, deep and sly: that was what Colette thought.

Al seldom talked about death. At first when they started working together, Colette had thought the word would slip out, if only through the pressure of trying to avoid it. And sometimes it did; but mostly Al talked about passing, she talked about spirit, she talked about passing into Spirit World; to that eventless realm, neither cold nor hot, neither hilly nor flat, where the dead, each at their own best age and marooned in an eternal afternoon, pass the ages with sod-all going on. Spirit World, as Al describes it to the trade, is a garden, or to be more accurate, a public place in the open air: litter-free like an old-fashioned park, with a bandstand in a heat haze in the distance. Here the dead sit in rows on benches, families together, on gravelled paths between weedless beds, where heat-sozzled flowers bob their heads, heavy with the scent of eau-de-cologne: their petals crawling with furry, intelligent, stingless bees. There’s a certain nineteen-fifties air about the dead, or early sixties perhaps, because they’re clean and respectable and they don’t stink of factories: as if they came after white nylon shirts and indoor sanitation but before satire, certainly before sexual intercourse. Unmelting ice cubes (in novelty shapes) chink in their glasses, for the age of refrigeration has come. They eat picnics with silver forks, purely for pleasure, because they never feel hunger or gain weight. No wind blows there, only a gentle breeze, the temperature being controlled at a moderate 71 degrees Fahrenheit; these are the English dead, and they don’t have centigrade yet. All picnics are share and share alike. The children never squabble or cut their knees, for whatever happened to them earthside, they are beyond physical damage now. The sun shall not strike them by day nor the moon by night; they have no red skin or freckles, none of the flaws that make the English so uncouth in summer. It’s Sunday, yet the shops are open, though no one needs anything. A mild air plays in the background, not quite Bach, possibly Vaughan Williams, quite like the early Beatles too; the birds sing along, in the verdant branches of the seasonless trees. The dead have no sense of time, no clear sense of place; they are beyond geography and history, she tells her clients, till someone like herself tunes in. Not one of them is old or decrepit or uselessly young. They all have their own teeth: or an expensive set of implants, if their own were unsightly. Their damaged chromosomes are counted and shuffled into good order; even the early miscarriages have functioning lungs and a proper head of hair. Damaged livers have been replaced, so their owners live to drink another day. Blighted lungs now suck at God’s own low-tar blend. Cancerous breasts have been rescued from the surgeons’ bin, and blossom like roses on spirit chests.

Al opened her eyes. “Col, are you there? I was dreaming that I was hungry.”

“I’ll ring down for a sandwich, shall I?”

She considered. “Get me ham on brown. Whole wheat. Dab of mustard—French, not English. Dijon—tell them cupboard on the left, third shelf. Ask them for—do they do a cheese plate? I’d like a slice of Brie and some grapes. And some cake. Not chocolate. Coffee maybe. Walnuts. It has walnuts on top. Two at the rim and one in the centre.”

In the night Al would be out of bed, her large outline blocking the light that leaked in from the hotel forecourt; it was the sudden darkness that woke Colette, and she would stir and see Al outlined, in her chiffon and lace, against the glow from the bedside lamp. “What’s the matter, what do you need?” Colette would murmur: because you didn’t know what was happening, it could be trivial, but then again … .Sometimes Al wanted chocolate out of her bag, sometimes she was facing the pangs of birth or the shock of a car crash. They might be awake for minutes or hours. Colette would slide out of bed and fill the plastic kettle, jerking its cord into its socket. Sometimes the water remained unboiled and Al would break off from her travail and say, “Plug switched on at the socket, Col?” and she would hiss, yes, yes, and shake the bloody thing so that water slapped out of the spout; and quite often, that would make it go: so temper, Al said, was just as good as electricity.

Then, while Al rolled towards the bathroom to retch over the bowl, she would forage for dusty tea bags and eventually they would sit side by side, their hands wrapped around the hotel cups, and Al would mutter, “Colette, I don’t know how you do it. All your patience. These broken nights.”

“Oh, you know,” she’d joke. “If I’d had kids …”

“I’m grateful. I might not show it. But I am, sweetheart. I don’t know where I’d be now, if we’d never met.”

At these times, Colette felt for her; she was not without feeling, though life had pushed her pretty far in that direction. Al’s features would be softened and blurred; her voice would be the same. She would have panda eyes from the night’s makeup, however diligent she’d been with the cotton-wool pads; and there was something childlike about her, as she made her apologies for the way she made her living. For the bad nights Colette carried brandy, to ward off fresh nausea and bouts of pain. Crouching to slide a hand into her overnight bag, she’d think, Al, don’t leave me, don’t die and leave me without a house and a job. You’re a silly cow, but I don’t want to do this world on my own.

So, after a night more or less broken, they would fight back to wakefulness, somewhere around seven-thirty, side by side in their twin beds. Whatever had happened during the night, however many times she had been up and down, Colette’s sheets were still tucked in tight, as if her body were completely flat. Al’s bed looked, more often than not, as if there had been an earthquake in it. On the floor by their slippers they would find last night’s room-service plates, with a pallid half tomato and some crumbled potato crisps; cold sodden tea bags in a saucer, and strange grey-white fragments, like the ghosts of boiled water, floating in the bottom of the kettle. Colette would put on breakfast TV to swamp the traffic noise beyond the window, the sigh of tyres, the rumble of distant aircraft approaching Luton—or Stanstead, if they had headed east. Al would lever herself, groaning, from the wreck of her bed, and begin the complex business of putting her persona in place; then she would go down for her breakfast. Colette would kick the remnants of room service out into the corridor, begin picking up after them and packing their bags. Al brought her own towelling robe, and now it was damp and perfumed after her bath, and bulked out the case; hotel robes didn’t fit her, she would have needed to tie two together in some sort of Siamese twin arrangement. She always travelled with two or three pairs of scissors, and her own sewing kit; as if she were afraid that she might begin to unravel.

Colette would pack these items away; then she would put the lucky opals in the case, count the bracelets, fit the makeup brushes snugly into their tabs and crevices, retrieve the hairpiece from where it was lying; pull from the closet her own insignificant crease-free outfits, flop them over her arm and drop them into her bag. She could not eat breakfast; it was because, when she had been with her husband Gavin, breakfast had been prime time for rows. She would forage for more tea, though often the allocation of room supplies was so mean that she’d be left with the Earl Grey. Sipping it, she would raise the window blind, on Home Counties rain or vapid sunshine. Al would tap on the door to be let in—there was only ever the one key, in these places—and come in looking fat, full of poached eggs. She would cast a critical eye over the packing, and begin, because she was ashamed of it, to haul her bed into some sort of shape, dragging up the blankets from the floor and sneezing gently as she did so.

Colette would reach into her bag and flip over the antihistamines. “Water,” Al would say, sitting down, as if exhausted, among the poor results of her labour. Then, “Steal the shower caps,” she would say, “because you can’t get them these days, you know, and they’re only good for twice.”

So Colette would go back into the bathroom to pocket the shower cap supplies; they left the shampoos and the slivers of soap, they weren’t cheap or petty in that way at all. And her mind would be running, it’s 8:30 A.M. and Morris not here, steal all shower caps, check behind bathroom door, 8:31 and he’s not here, out of bathroom looking cheerful, throw stolen shower caps into bag, switch off TV say are we right then; 8:32 and Al stands up, 8:32 she wanders to the mirror; 8:33 she is dropping the sodden tea bags from the saucer into the used cups, Al she says, what are you doing, can we not get on the road please—and then she will see Al’s shoulders tense. It’s nothing she’s done, nothing she’s said: it’s the banging and cursing, audible only to Al, that tells her they have been rejoined by Morris.

It was one of the few blessings Colette could count, that he didn’t always stay the night when they were away. The lure of strange towns was too much for him, and it was her job to provide him with a strange town. To stray up to a five-mile range from their lodging didn’t seem to bother him. On his bent, tough little legs, he was a good walker. But reservations at room-only motor lodges were not his favourite. He grumbled that there was nothing to do, stranded somewhere along the motorway, and he would sit in the corner of their room being disgusting. Al would shout at him for picking his feet; after that, she would go quiet and look furious, so Colette could only guess what he might be doing. He grumbled also if to get to his evening out he had to take a bus ride or find himself a lift. He liked to be sure, he said, that if need be he could get back to her within twenty minutes of the pubs’ closing. “What does he mean, if need be?” she’d asked. “What would happen if you were separated from Morris? Would you die?” Oh no, Al said; he’s just a control freak. I wouldn’t die, neither would he. Though he has already, of course. And it seemed that no harm came to him on the nights when he would fall in with some other lowlifes and drift off with them, and forget to come home. All next day they’d have to put up with him repeating the beery jokes and catchphrases he had picked up.

When she’d first joined Al, she’d not understood about Morris. How could she? It wasn’t within the usual range of experience. She had hoped he’d just lurch off one night and not come back; that he’d have an accident, get a blow on the head that would affect his memory, so he’d not be able to find his way back to them. Even now, she often thought that if she could get Al out of a place on the dot of 8:30, they’d outsmart him; hurtle back onto the motor-way and leave him behind, cursing and swearing and walking around all the cars in the car parks, bending down and peering at the number plates. But somehow, try as she might, they could never get ahead of him. At the last moment, Al would pause, as she was hauling her seat belt over her bulk. “Morris,” she would say, and click the belt’s head into its housing.