Beyond Black: A Novel (28 page)

The day their kitchen ceiling fell in, she strode off to the sales caravan, where Suzi was still selling off the last remaining units. She made a scene; punters fled back to their cars, thinking they’d had a lucky escape. But when she left Suzi and began splashing uphill, picking her way between stacked paving slabs and lengths of piping, she found that she was shaking.

The Collingwood stood at the top of a rise; its portholes stared out over the neighbours like blind eyes. Is this my life now? she thought. How will I ever meet a man? At Wexham there were one or two young bachelors she used to glimpse down by the bins. One had never met her eye and only grunted when she greeted him. The other was Gavin to the life and went about swinging his car keys around his forefinger; the sight of him had almost made her nostalgic. But the men who had moved into Admiral Drive were married with two kids. They were computer programmers, systems analysts. They drove minivans like square little houses on wheels. They wore jackets with flaps and zips that their wives chose for them from mail order catalogues. Already the postman could be seen, ploughing across the furrows carrying flat boxes containing these jackets, and splattered white vans bounced over the ruts, delivering gob-ons for their home computers. At weekend they were outside, wearing their jackets, constructing playhouses and climbing frames of primary-coloured plastic. They were hardly men at all, not men as Colette knew them; they were dutiful emasculates, squat and waddling under their burden of mortgage debt, and she despised them with an impartial, all-embracing spite. Sometimes she stood at her bedroom window, as the men drove away in the mornings, each edging his square-nosed vehicle cautiously into the muddy track; she watched them and hoped they got into a pileup on the M3, each folding neatly, fatally, into the back of the vehicle in front. She wanted to see their widows sitting in the road, daubing themselves with mud, wailing.

The Collingwood still smelled of paint. As she let herself in at the front door, kicking off her shoes, it caught in her throat and mingled with the taste of salt and phlegm. She went upstairs to her own room—Bed Two, 15 by 14 feet with en-suite shower—and slammed the door, and sat down on the bed. Her little shoulders shook, she pressed her knees together; she clenched her fists and pressed them into her skull. She cried quite loudly, thinking Al might hear. If Al opened the bedroom door she would throw something at her, she decided—not anything like a bottle, something like a cushion—but there wasn’t a cushion. I could throw a pillow, she thought, but you can’t throw a pillow hard. I could throw a book, but there isn’t a book. She looked around her, dazed, frustrated, eyes filmed and brimming, looking for something to throw.

But it was a useless effort. Al wasn’t coming, not to comfort her: nor for any other purpose. She was, Colette knew, selectively deaf. She listened into spirits and to the voice of her own self-pity, carrying messages to her from her childhood. She listened to her clients, as much as was needful to get money out of them. But she didn’t listen to her closest associate and personal assistant, the one who got up with her when she had nightmares, the friend who boiled the kettle in the wan dawn: oh no. She had no time for the person who had taken her at her word and given up her career in event management, no time for the one who drove her up and down the country without a word of complaint and carried her heavy suitcase when the bloody wheels fell off. Oh no. Who carried her case full of her huge fat clothes—even though she had a bad back.

Colette cried until two red tracks were scored into her cheeks, and she got hiccoughs. She began to feel ashamed. Every lurch of her diaphragm added to her indignity. She was afraid that Alison, after her deafness, might now choose to hear.

Downstairs, Al had her tarot pack fanned out before her. The cards were face down, and when Colette appeared in the doorway she was idly sliding them in a rightward direction, over the pristine surface of their new dining table.

“What are you doing? You’re cheating.”

“Mm? It’s not a game.”

“But you’re fixing it, you’re shoving them back into the pack! With your finger! You are!”

“It’s called Washing the Cards,” Al said. “Have you been crying?”

Colette sat down in front of her. “Do me a reading.”

“Oh, you have been crying. You have 
so
.”

Colette said nothing.

“What can I do to help?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“So I should make general conversation?”

“If you like.”

“I can’t. You start.”

“Did you have any more thoughts about the garden?”

“Yes. I like it as it is.”

“What, just turf?”

“For the moment.”

“I thought we could have a pond.”

“No, the children. The neighbours’ children.”

“What about them?”

“Cut the pack.”

Colette did it.

“Children can drown in two inches of water.”

“Aren’t they ingenious?”

“Cut again. Left hand.”

“I could get some quotes for landscaping.”

“Don’t you like grass?”

“It needs cutting.”

“Can’t you do it?”

“Not with my back.”

“Your back? You never mentioned it.”

“You never gave me the chance.”

“Cut again. Left hand, Colette, left hand. Well, I can’t do it. I’ve got a bad back too.”

“Really? Where did that originate?”

“When I was a child.” I was dragged, Alison thought, over the rough ground.

“I’d have thought it would have been better.”

“Why?”

“I thought time was a great healer.”

“Not of backs.”

Colette’s hand hovered.

“Choose one,” Al said. “One hand of seven. Seven cards. Hand them to me.” She laid down the cards. “And
your
 back, Colette?”

“What?”

“The problem. Where it began?”

“Brussels.”

“Really?”

“I was carrying fold-up tables.”

“That’s a pity.”

“Why?”

“You’ve spoiled my mental picture. I thought that perhaps Gavin had put you in some unorthodox sexual position.”

“How could you have a picture? You don’t know Gavin.”

“I wasn’t picturing his face.” Alison began to turn the cards. The lucky opals were flashing their green glints. Alison said, “The Chariot, reversed.”

“So what do you want me to do? About the garden?”

“Nine of swords. Oh dear.”

“We could take it in turns to mow it.”

“I’ve never worked a mower.”

“Anyway, with your weight. You might have a stroke.”

“Wheel of Fortune, reversed.”

“When you first met me, in Windsor, you said I was going to meet a man. Through work, you said.”

“I don’t think I committed to a time scheme, did I?”

“But how can I meet a man through work? I don’t have any work except yours. I’m not going out with Raven, or one of those freaks.”

Al fluttered her hand over the cards. “This is heavy on the major Arcana, as you see. The Chariot, reversed. I’m not sure I like to think of wheels turning backward … . Did you send Gavin a change-of-address card?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“As a precaution.”

“Sorry?”

“Something might come for me. For forwarding. A letter. A package.”

“A package? What would be in it?”

Al heard tapping, tapping, at the sliding glass doors of the patio. Fear jolted through her; she thought, Bob Fox. But it was only Morris, trapped in the garden; beyond the glass, she could see his mouth moving.

She lowered her eyes, turned a card. “The Hermit reversed.”

“Bugger,” Colette said. “I think you were reversing them on purpose, when you were messing about.
Washing
 them.”

“What a strange hand! All those swords, blades.” Al looked up. “Unless it’s just about the lawn mower. That would make some sense, wouldn’t it?”

“No use asking me. You’re the expert.”

“Colette … Col … don’t cry now.”

Colette put her elbows on the table, her head on her hands, and howled away. “I ask you to do a reading for me and it’s about bloody garden machinery. I don’t think you have any consideration for me at all. Day in, day out I am doing your VAT. We never go anywhere. We never do anything nice. I don’t think you have any respect for my professional skills whatever, and all I have to listen to is you rabbitting on to dead people I can’t see.”

Alison said gently, “I’m sorry if it seems as if I don’t appreciate you. I do remember, I know what my life was like when I was alone. I do remember, and I value everything you do.”

“Oh, stop it. 
Burbling
 like that. Being professional.”

“I’m trying to be nice. I’m just trying—”

“That’s what I mean. Being nice. Being professional. It’s all the same to you. You’re the most insincere person I know. It’s no use pretending to me. I’m too close. I know what goes on. You’re rotten. You’re a horrible person. You’re not even normal.”

There was a silence. Alison picked up the cards, dabbing each one with a damp fingertip. After a time she said, “I don’t expect you to mow the lawn.”

Silence.

“Honest, Col, I don’t.”

Silence.

“Can I be professional for a moment?”

Silence.

“The Hermit, reversed, suggests that your energy could be put to better use.”

Colette sniffed. “So what shall we do?”

“You could ring up a gardening service. Get a quote. For, let’s say, a fortnightly cut through the summer.” She added, smiling, “I expect they’d send a man.”

A thought about the garden had gone through her head: it will be nice for the dogs. Her smile faded. She pushed the thought violently away, seeing in her mind the waste ground behind her mother’s house at Aldershot.

Colette had taken on the task of contacting Al’s regular clients, to let them know about the move. She made a pretty lilac-coloured card, with the new details, which they handed out to contacts at their next big Psychic Fayre. In return they got cards back. “You’ll want a bit of Goddess Power, I expect,” said a nice woman in a ragged pullover, as she unloaded her kit from her beat-up old van. “You’ll want to come into alignment with the Path.” When they saw her next she was wearing a hairpiece and a push-up bra, charging forty pounds and calling herself Siobhan, palms and clairvoyance.

“Shall I come up and do your feng shui?” Mandy Coughlan asked. “It’s nice that you’re nearer to Hove.”

Cara rolled her eyes. “You’re not still offering feng shui? Are you getting any uptake? I’m training as a vastu consultant. It’s five thousand years old. This demon falls to earth, right? And you have to see which way his head comes down and where his feet are pointing. Then you can draw a mandala. Then you know which way the house should go.”

“It’s a bit late,” Al said. “It’s finished and we’ve moved in.”

“No, but it can still apply. You can fit your existing property into the grid. That’s advanced, though. I’ve not got up to that yet.”

“Well, come round when you do,” Al said.

Al said, I don’t want the neighbours to know what we do. Wherever I’ve lived I’ve kept away from the neighbours, I don’t want this lot around asking me to read their herbal teabags. I don’t want them turning up on our doorstep saying, you know what you told me, it hasn’t come true yet, can I have my money back? I don’t want them watching me and commenting on me. I want to be private.

The development progressed piecemeal, the houses at the fringes going up before the middle was filled in. They would look over to the opposite ridge, against the screen of pines, and see the householders running out into the streets, or where the streets would be, fleeing from gas leaks, floods, and falling masonry. Colette made tea for their next-door neighbours in the Beatty when their kitchen ceiling came down in its turn; Al was busy with a client.

“Are you sisters?” Michelle asked, standing in the kitchen and jiggling an infant up and down on her hip.

Colette’s eyes grew wide. “Sisters? No.”

“There, Evan,” she said to her husband. “Told you they couldn’t be. We thought perhaps one of you wasn’t staying. We thought perhaps she was helping the other one settle in.”

Colette said, “Are those boys or girls?”

“One of each.”

“Oh. But which is which?”

“You work at home?” Evan asked. “A contractor?”

“Yes.” He was waiting. She said, flustered. “I’m in communications.”

“British Telecom?”

“No.”

“It’s so confusing now,” Michelle said. “All these different tariffs you can go on. What’s the cheapest for phoning my nan in Australia?”

“That’s not my side of it,” Colette said.

“And what does your—your friend—do?”

“Forecasting,” Colette said. For a moment, she began to enjoy herself.

“Met Office, eh?” Evan said. “Bracknell, aren’t they? Bloody murder, getting onto the M3. Bet you didn’t know that till you moved in, eh? Three-mile tailback every morning. Should have done your research, eh?”

Both infants began to squall. The grown-ups watched as a workman came out of the Beatty, damp to his knees, carrying a bucket. “I’ll sue those fuckers,” Evan said.

Later, Colette said to Al, “How could he ever have thought we were sisters? I would have thought half sisters, at the most. And even that would be stretching a point.”

“People aren’t very observant,” Alison said kindly, “so you mustn’t be insulted, Colette.”

Colette didn’t tell Alison that the neighbours thought she worked for the meteorological office. Word spread, around the estate, and the neighbours would call out to her, “No joke you know, this rain! Can’t you do better than this?” Or simply, with a wave and a grin, “Oi! I see you got it wrong again.”

“I seem to be a personality around here.” Al said. “I don’t know why.”

Colette said, “I should think it’s because you’re fat.”

As Easter approached, Michelle popped her head over the fence and asked Al what she should pack for their holiday in Spain. “I’m sorry,” Al said, aghast, “I simply wouldn’t be able to forecast anything like that.”

“Yes, but unofficially,” Michelle coaxed. “You must know.”