Beyond Black: A Novel (22 page)

“What can I go down in?” she asked. Colette passed her a silk top, which had been carefully pressed and wrapped in tissue for its journey. Her eye fell on the holdall, with her own stuff still rolled up inside it. Maybe Al’s right, she thought. Maybe I’m too old for a casual safari look. She caught her own glance in the mirror, as she stood behind Alison to unfasten the clasp of her pearls. As Al’s assistant, could she possibly benefit from tax allowances on her appearance? It was an issue she’d not yet thrashed out with the Revenue; I’m working on it, she said to herself.

“You know this book we’re doing?” Al was hauling her bosoms into conformity; they were trying to escape from her bra, and she eased them back with little shoves and pinches. “Is it okay to mention it on the platform? Advertise it?”

“It’s early days,” Colette said.

“How long do you think it will take?”

“How long’s a piece of string?” It depended, Colette said, on how much nonsense continued to appear on their tapes. Alison insisted on listening to them all through, at maximum volume; behind the hissing, behind whatever foreign-language garbage she could hear up front, there were sometimes startled wails and whistles, which she said were old souls; I owe it to them to listen, she said, if they’re trying so hard to come through. Sometimes they found the tape running when neither of them had switched it on. Colette was inclined to blame Morris; speaking of which, where—

“At the pub.”

“Are they open tonight?”

“Morris will find one that is.”

“I suppose. Anyway, the men wouldn’t stand for it, would they? Shutting the pubs because of Di.”

“All he has to do is follow Merlin and Merlyn. They could find a drink in …” Al flapped her sleeves. She tried to think of the name of a Muslim country, but a name didn’t readily spring to her lips. “Do you know Merlin’s done a book called 
Master of Thoth?
 And Merlyn with a 
y
, he’s done 
Casebook of a Psychic Detective
?”

“That’s a point. Have you thought about working for the police?”

Alison didn’t answer; she stared through the mirror, her finger tracing the ridge her bra made under the thin silk. In time, she shook her head.

“Only it would give you some sort of—what do you call it?—accreditation.”

“Why would I need that?”

“As publicity.”

“Yes. I suppose so. But no.”

“You mean, no you won’t do it?” Silence. “You don’t ever want to make yourself useful to society?”

“Come on, let’s go down before there’s no food left.”

At nine-thirty Silvana, complaining and darting venomous looks at Al, was parted from her glass of red and persuaded to take Mrs. Etchells back to her lodgings. Once she had been coaxed to it, she stood jangling her car keys. “Come on,” she said. “I want to get back by ten for the funeral highlights.”

“They’ll repeat them,” Gemma said, and Colette muttered, shouldn’t wonder if we have reruns all next Christmas. Silvana said “No, it won’t be the same, I want to watch them live.”

Raven sniggered. Mrs. Etchells levered herself to the vertical and brushed coleslaw from her skirt. “Thank you for your caring spirit,” she said, “or I wouldn’t have slept in a bed tonight, they’d have locked the front door. Condemned to walk the streets of Beeston. Friendless.”

“I don’t know why you don’t just stop here like everybody else,” Cara said. “It can’t cost much more than you’re paying.”

Colette smiled; she had negotiated a group rate for Al, just as if she were a company.

“Thank you, but I couldn’t,” Mrs. Etchells said. “I value the personal touch.”

“What, like locking you out?” Colette said. “And whatever you think,” she said to Silvana, “Aldershot is not close to Slough. Whereas you, you’re just down the road.”

“When I joined this profession,” Silvana said, “it would have been unthinkable to refuse aid to someone who’d helped you develop. Let alone your own grandmother.”

She swept out; as Mrs. Etchells shambled after her, a chicken bone fell from some fold in her garments and lay on the carpet. Colette turned to Alison, whispering, “What does she mean, help you develop?”

Cara heard. “I see Colette’s not one of us,” she said.

Mandy Coughlan said, “Training, it’s just what we call training. You sit, you see. In a circle.”

“Anyone could do that. You don’t need to be trained for that.”

“No, a—Alison, tell her. A development circle. Then you find out if you’ve got the knack. You see if anybody comes through. The others help you. It’s a tricky time.”

“Of course, it’s only for the mediums,” Gemma said. “For example, if you’re just psychometry, palms, crystal healing, general clairvoyance, aura cleansing, feng shui, tarot, I Ching, then you don’t need to sit. Not in a circle.”

“So how do you know if you can do it?”

Gemma said, “Well, darling, you have a feeling for it,” but Mandy flashed her pale blue eyes and said, “General client satisfaction.”

“You mean they don’t come wanting their money back?”

“I’ve never had an instance,” Mandy said. “Not even you, Colette. Though you don’t seem backward at coming forward. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

Al said, “Look, Colette’s new to this, she’s only asking, she doesn’t mean to upset anybody. I think the thing is, Colette, possibly what you don’t quite see is that we’re all—we’re all worn to a frazzle, we’ve all lost sleep over this Di business, it’s not just me—we’re on the end of our nerves.”

“Make-or-break time,” Raven said. “I mean if any of us could give her the opening, just, you know, be there for her, just let her express anything that’s uppermost in her mind, about those final moments … .” His voice died away, and he stared at the wall.

“I think they murdered her,” Colette said. “The royals. If she’d lived, she’d have only brought them into further disrepute.”

“But it was her time,” Gemma said, “it was her time, and she was called away.”

“She was a bit thick, wasn’t she?” Cara said. “She didn’t get any exams at school.”

“Oh, be fair now,” Alison said. “I read she got a cup for being kind to her guinea pig.”

“That’s not an exam, though, is it? Did you—”

“What,” Al said, “me have a guinea pig? Christ, no, my mum would have barbecued it. We didn’t have pets. We had dogs. But not pets.”

“No,” Cara said, her brow crinkling, “I meant, did you get any exams, Al?”

“I tried. They entered me. I turned up. I had a pencil and everything. But there’d always be some sort of disturbance in the hall.”

Gemma said, “I was barred from biology for labelling a drawing in obscene terms. But I didn’t do it myself. I don’t think I even knew half those words.”

There was a murmur of fellow feeling. Alison said, “Colette didn’t have those problems, she’s got exams, I need somebody brighter than me in my life.” Her voice rattled on: Colette, my working partner … my partner, not assistant: she broke off, and laughed uncertainly.

Raven said, “Do you know that for every person on this side, there’s thirty-three on the other?”

“Really?” Gemma said. “Thirty-three airside, for every one earthside?”

Colette thought, in that case, I’m backing the dead.

Merlin and Merlyn came back from the pub: boring on with men’s talk. I use Transit Forecaster, I find it invaluable oh yes, I can run it on my old Amstrad, what’s the point of pouring money into the pockets of Bill Gates?

Colette leaned over to put him right on the matter, but Merlyn caught her by the arm and said, “Have you read
The Truth About Exodus
? Basically it’s how they found this bit of the Bible written on a pyramid, inscribed on the side. And how, contrary to popular belief, the Egyptians actually, they actually paid the Israelis to leave. And they used the money for making the ark of the covenant. Jesus was an Egyptian, they’ve found scrolls, he was actually of pharaoh descent. And it’s why they walk round and round at Mecca. Like they used to walk around the Great Pyramid.”

“Oh, did they? I see,” Colette said. “Well, you’ve put me right, there, Merlyn, I always did wonder.”

“
Mountain K2, Search for the Gods,
 that’s another good one. 
The Lost Book of Enki.
 That’s one you’ve got to get. He’s this god from the planet Nibiru. You see, they were from space, and they needed gold from the earth to enrich the dying atmosphere of their planet, so they saw that it was on earth, gold was, so they needed somebody to mine it for them, so they therefore created man … .”

Al’s eyes were distant; she was back at school, back in the exam hall. Hazel Leigh opposite, working her red ponytail round and round in her fingers till it was like a twist of barley sugar—and peppermints, you were allowed to suck peppermints—you weren’t allowed much, not a fag: when Bryan lit up Miss Adshead was down the hall like a laser beam.

All during the maths paper there was a man chattering in her ear. It wasn’t Morris, she knew it was not by his accent, and his whole general tone and bearing, by what he was talking about, and by how he was weeping: for Morris could not weep. The man, the spirit, he was talking just below the threshold, retching and sobbing. The questions were algebra; she filled in a few disordered letters, 
a
, 
b
, 
x
, 
z
. When she reached question five the man began to break through. He said, look for my cousin John Joseph, tell our Jo that my hands are bound with wire. In Spirit, even now, he had a terrible pain where the bones of his feet used to be, and that’s what he relied on her to pass on to his cousin, the knowledge of this pain: tell our Jo, tell him it was that bastard that drives the Escort with the rusty wing, that cunt that always has a cold, him … and when in the end the crushing of the rifle butts and the men’s boots seemed to drive her own feet through the scuffed vinyl tiles of the exam room, she had let the letters freely intermingle on the page, so that when Miss Adshead came to flick her paper into the pile there was nothing on it but thin pen scrawls, like the traces and loops of the wire with which the hands of this total stranger had been bound.

“Alison?” She jumped. Mandy had taken her by the wrist; she was shaking her, bringing her back to the present. “You all right, Al?” Over her shoulder she said, “Cara, go get her a stiff drink and a chicken leg. Al? Are you back with us, love? Is she pestering you? The princess?”

“No,” Al said. “It’s paramilitaries.”

“Oh, them,” Gemma said. “They can be shocking.”

“I get Cossacks,” Mandy said. “Apologizing for, you know—what they used to do. Cleaving. Slashing. Scourging peasants to death. Terrible.”

“What’s Cossacks?” Cara said, and Mandy said, “They are a very unpleasant kind of mounted police.”

Raven said, “I never get anything like that. I have led various pacific lives. That’s why I’m so karmically adjusted.”

Al roused herself. She rubbed the wounds on her wrists. Live in the present moment, she told herself. Nottingham. September. Funeral Night. Ten minutes to ten. “Time for bed, Col,” she said.

“We’re not watching the highlights?”

“We can watch them upstairs.” She pushed herself up from the sofa. Her feet seemed unable to support her. An effort of will saw her limp across the room, but she had wobbled as she took the weight on her feet, and her skirt flicked a wineglass from a low table, sent it spinning away from her, the liquid flying across the room and splashing red down the paintwork. It flew with such force it looked as if someone had flung it, a fact that did not escape the women; though it escaped Raven, who was slumped in his chair, and hardly twitched as the glass smashed.

There was a silence. Into it, Cara said, “Whoops-a-daisy.”

Alison turned her head over her shoulder, and looked back, her face blank; did I do that? She stood, her head swivelled, too weary to move back to attend to the accident.

“I’ll get it,” Mandy said, hopping up, crouching neatly over the shards and splinters. Gemma turned her large cowlike eyes on Al and said, “All in, poor love,” and Silvana, walking back in at that moment, tut-tutted at them. “What’s this, Alison? Breaking up the happy home?”

“This is the fact,” Al said. She was rocking to and fro on the bed—she was trying to rub her feet but finding the rest of her body got in the way. “I feel used. All the time I feel used. I’m put up onstage for them to see me. I have to experience for them the things they don’t dare.” With a little moan, she gripped her ankle, and lolled backwards. “I’m like—I’m like some form of muck-raker. No, I don’t mean that. I mean I’m in there, in the pockets of their dirty minds. I’m up to my elbows, I’m like—”

“A sewage worker?” Colette suggested.

“Yes! Because the clients won’t do their own dirty work. They want it contracted out. They write me a check for thirty quid and expect me to clean their drains. You say help the police. I’ll tell you why I don’t help the police. First ’cos I hate the police. Then because—do you know where it gets you?”

“Al, I take it back. You don’t have to help the police.”

“That’s not the point. I have to tell you why not. You have to know.”

“I don’t have to.”

“You do. Or you’ll keep coming back to it again and again. Make yourself useful, Alison. Make yourself socially useful.”

“I won’t. I’ll never mention it.”

“You will. You’re that type, Colette, you can’t help mentioning and mentioning things. I’m not getting at you. I’m not criticizing. But you do mention, you are—Colette, you are, one of the world’s great mentioners.” Al uncurled herself with a whimper, and fell back on the bed. “Can you find my brandy?”

“You’ve had too much already.” Alison moaned. Colette added generously, “It’s not your fault. We should have stopped for an early lunch. Or I could easily have brought you in a sandwich. I did offer.”

“I can’t eat when I’m sitting. The cards won’t work if you smudge them.”

“No, you’ve said that before.”

“Not cheeseburgers. I don’t agree with it.”

“Nor me. It’s disgusting.”

“You get fingerprints on your crystals.”

“It’s hard to see how you could help it.”

“Don’t you ever drink too much, Col?”