Beyond Black: A Novel (34 page)

“Still,” Al said. She eased herself into her seat. “Some years have passed. Since you were together. They might be—I don’t know—frayed? His neck might have grown.”

“Oh yes,” Colette said. “He looks porky, all right. But he never did up his top button. So. Anyway. Plenty shirts.”

“But a new tie? Socks, underpants?” She felt shy; she’d never lived with a man.

“Knickers?” Colette said. “Car shops every time. Halfords. Velour for the proles, but leather for Gavin, top spec. They stock them in six-packs, shouldn’t wonder. Or else he buys them mail order from a rescue service.”

“A rescue service?”

“You know. Automobile Association. Royal Automobile Club. National Breakdown.”

“I know. But I didn’t think Gavin would need rescuing.”

“Oh, he just likes to have a badge and a personal number.”

“Have I got a personal number?”

“You are in all the major motoring organizations, Alison.”

“Belts-and-braces approach?”

“If you like.” Colette swung them out of the shed sellers’ compound, carelessly scattering a party of parents and children who were clustering about the hot-dog stand. “That’s done their arteries a favour,” Colette said. “Yes, you have several, but you don’t need to know them.”

“Perhaps I do,” Al said. “In case anything happened to you.”

“Why?” Colette was alarmed. “Are you seeing something?”

“No, no, nothing like that. Colette, don’t drive us off the road!”

Colette corrected their course. Their hearts were beating fast. The lucky opals had paled on Alison’s fists. You see, she thought. That’s how accidents happen. There was a silence.

“I don’t really like secrets,” Alison said.

“Bloody hell!” Colette said. “It’s only a few digits.” She relented. “I’ll show you where I keep them. On the computer. Which file.” Her heart sank. Why had she said that? She’d just bought an elegant little laptop, silver and pleasingly feminine. She could perch it on her knees and work in bed. But when Al loomed up with a cup of coffee for her, the keyboard started chattering and scrambled itself.

“So what about when you lived with Gavin, did he tell you his personal number?”

Colette tilted up her chin. “He kept it secret. He kept it where I couldn’t access it.”

“That seems a bit unnecessary,” Alison said, thinking, now you know how it feels, my girl.

“He wouldn’t put me on joint membership. I think he was ashamed, to phone them up and mention my car. It was all I could afford, at the time. I used to say, what’s your problem, Gavin? It gets me from A to B.”

Alison thought, if I were a great enthusiast for motoring, and somebody said “It gets me from A to B,” I think I would sneak up on them and smash their skull in with a spanner—or whatever’s good to smash skulls in, that you keep in the back of a car.

“We’d have rows.” Colette said. “He thought I should have a better car. Something flash. He thought I should run up debt.”

Debt and dishonour, Al thought. Oh dear. Oh dear and damnation. If somebody said to me, “What’s your problem?” in that tone of voice, I would probably wait till they were snoring and drive a hot needle through their tongue.

“And as it worked out, I was putting so much into the household—his ironing and so on—I went through a whole winter without cover. Anything could have happened. I could have broken down in the middle of nowhere—”

“On a lonely road at night.”

“Exactly.”

“On a lonely motorway.”

“Yes! You stop on the hard shoulder, if you get out—Jesus,” Colette slapped the wheel, “they just drive into you.”

“Or suppose a man stopped to help you. Could you trust him?”

“A stranger?”

“He would be. On a lonely road at night. He wouldn’t be anyone you knew.”

“You’re advised to stay put and lock your doors. Don’t even put your window down.”

“By the rescue services? Is that what they say?”

“It’s what the police say! Alison, you drove yourself around, didn’t you? Before me? You must know.”

She said, “I try to imagine.”

For think of the perils. Men who wait for you to break down just so they can come and kill you. Men hovering, monitoring the junctions. How would you know a sick car, to follow it? Presumably, smoke would come out of it. She herself, in her driving days, had never thought of such disasters; she sang as she drove, and her engine sang in tune. At the least whine, stutter, or hiccough, she sent it her love and prayers, then stuffed it in the garage. She supposed they were fleecing her, at the garage; but that’s the way it goes.

She thought, when me and Colette bought the car, soon after we got together, it was quite easy, a good afternoon out, but now we can’t even buy a Balmoral without Colette nearly driving us off the road, and me thinking of ways to stove her skull in. It shows how our relationship’s come on.

Colette careered them to a halt in the Collingwood’s drive, and the handbrake groaned as she hauled at it. “Bugger,” she said. “We should have food-shopped.”

“Never mind.”

“You see, Gavin, he didn’t care if I was raped, or anything.”

“You could have been drugged with date-rape drugs, and taken away by a man who made you live in a shed. Sorry. Garden building.”

“Don’t laugh at me, Al.”

“Look, the man back there asked us a question. Have we given a thought to our hardstanding?”

“Yes! Yes! Of course! I got a man out of the local paper. But I got three quotes!”

“That’s okay then. Let’s go in. Come on, Colette. It’s okay, sweetheart. We can have a cheese omelette. I’ll make it. We can go back. We can shop later. For God’s sake, they’re open till ten.”

Colette walked into the house, and her eyes roamed everywhere. “We’ll have to replace that stair carpet,” she said, “in under a year.”

“You think so?”

“The pile’s completely flattened.”

“I could avoid wearing it, if I jumped down the last three steps.”

“No, you might put your back out. But it seems a shame. Only been here two minutes.”

“Three years. Four.”

“Still. All those marks rubbed along the walls. Do you know you leave a mark? Wherever your shoulders touch it, and your big hips. You smear everything, Al. Even if you’re eating an orange, you slime it all down the wall. It’s a disgrace. I’m ashamed to live here.”

“At the mercy of shed merchants,” Al said. “Ah dear, ah dear, ah dear.”

At first she didn’t recognize who was speaking, and then she realized it was Mrs. McGibbet. She urged Colette towards the kitchen by slow degrees and consoled her with a microwaved sponge pudding, with hot jam and double cream. “You seriously think I’m going to eat this?” Colette asked; then gulped it down like a hungry dog.

They went to bed all tucked up safe that night. But she dreamed of snapping jaws, and temporary wooden structures. Of Blighto, Harry and Serene.

NINE

It was about 2 A.M.; Colette woke in darkness, to the screeching of garden birds. She lay suffering under her duvet, till birdsong was replaced by the long swish of waves against a shingle beach. Then came some twitters, scrapes, and squeaks. What’s it called? Oh yes, rain forest. She thought, what is rain forest anyway? We never had it when I was at school.

She sat up, grabbed her pillow, and beat it. Beyond the wall the croaking and chirping continued, the twittering of strange night fowl, the rustling of the undergrowth. She lay back again, stared at the ceiling: where the ceiling would be. The jungle, she thought, that’s what we had; but they don’t call it the jungle now. A green snake looped down from a branch and smiled into her face. It unravelled itself, falling, falling … she slept again. A need to urinate woke her. Al’s sodding relaxation tapes had reached the waterfall track.

She stood up, dazed, passing her hand over her hair to flatten it. Now she could see the outlines of the furniture; the light behind the curtains was brilliant. She crept into her en-suite and relieved herself. On her way back to bed she pulled aside the curtain. A full moon silvered the Balmoral, and frosted its pent.

There was a man on the lawn. He was walking around it in circles, as if under an enchantment. She pulled back, dropped the curtain. She had seen him before, perhaps in a dream.

She lay down again. The waterfall track was finished, and had given way to the music of dolphins and whales. In the cradle of the deep she swayed, slept, and slept more deeply still.

It was 5 A.M. when Al came down. Her guts were churning; this happened. She could eat quite an ordinary meal, but her insides would say no-no, not for you. She raised the kitchen blind, and while her bicarb fizzed in a glass at her elbow she looked out over the larch-lap fences swathed in pearly light. Something moved, a shadow against the lawn. In the distance, a milk truck hummed, and nearer at hand an early businessman slammed with a metallic clatter his garage’s Georgian door.

Alison unlocked the kitchen door and stepped out. The morning was fresh and damp. From across the estate a car alarm whooped and yodelled. The man on the lawn was young, and had a dark stubble and a blueish pallor. He wore a woolly hat pulled down over his brow. His big sneakers bruised his footprints into the dew. He saw Alison, but hardly checked his stride, simply raising two fingers to his forehead in acknowledgement.

What’s your name? she asked him silently.

There was no reply.

It’s all right, you can tell Al, don’t be shy. The creature smiled shyly and continued to circle.

She thought, you can go under a false name if you like. Just as long as I have something to call you by, to make our life together possible. Look at him, she thought, look at him! Why can’t I get a spirit guide with some dress sense?

Yet there was something humble in his manner, that she liked. She stood shivering, waiting for him to communicate. A train rattled away in the distance, up from Hampshire, London bound. She noticed how it gently shook the morning; the light broke up around her, flaking into creamy fragments edged with gold, then settling again. The sun was creeping around the edge of a Rodney. She blinked, and the lawn was empty.

Colette, pouring her orange juice at eight-thirty, said, “Al, you cannot have two pieces of toast.” Colette was making her diet; it was her new hobby.

“One?”

“Yes, one. With a scrape—no more than a scrape, mind—of low-fat spread.”

“And a scrape of jam?”

“No. Jam will play havoc with your metabolism.” She sipped her orange juice. “I dreamed there was a man on the lawn.”

“Did you?” Alison frowned, holding the lid of the bread bin before her like a shield. “On the lawn? Last night? What was he like?”

“Dunno,” Colette said. “I almost came and woke you.”

“In your dream?”

“Yes. No. I think I was dreaming that I was awake.”

“That’s common,” Al said. “Those sorts of dreams, people who are Sensitives have them all the time.”

She thought, I dreamed there were trucks outside the house, and a blanket in the back of one, and under that blanket—what? In my dream I came inside and lay down again, and dreamed again, within my dream; I dreamed of an animal, tight and trembling inside its skin, quivering with lust as it wolfed human meat from a bowl.

She said, “I wonder if you’re becoming a Sensitive, Colette.” She didn’t say it aloud.

Colette said, “When I agreed to one slice of bread, I meant one normal-sized one, not one slice two inches thick.”

“Ah. Then you should have said.”

“Be reasonable.” Colette crossed the kitchen and barged into her. “I’ll show you what you can have. Give me that bread knife.”

Al’s fingers yielded it, unwillingly. She and the bread knife were friends.

It was gardening day. The new contractors had brought plans and costed out the decking. They were going to build a water feature; it would be more like a small fountain than a pond. By the time Colette had beaten down their estimate by a few hundred pounds, she had forgotten all about her disturbed night, and her mood, like the day, was sunny.

As the men were leaving, Michelle beckoned her to the fence. “Glad to see you’re doing something with it, at last. It was a bit of an eyesore, lying all bare like that. By the way—I don’t know if I should mention—when Evan got up this morning he saw a man in your garden. Evan thought he was trying the shed door.”

“Oh. Anyone we know?”

“Evan had never seen him before. He rang your doorbell.”

“Who, the man?”

“No, Evan. You must have been in the land of dreams, both of you. Evan said, they’re not hearing me. He said, all right for some.”

“The advantages,” Colette said, “of the child-free lifestyle.”

“Evan said, they’ve got no lock on their side gate. And them two women alone.”

“I’ll get a lock,” Colette snapped. “And seeing as the blessed gate is all of five feet high, and anybody but a midget could vault over it, I’ll get some barbed wire on top, shall I?”

“Now that would be unsightly,” Michelle said. “No, what you should do, come to our next meeting with community policing and get some advice. This is a big time of year for shed crime. Police Constable Delingbole gave us a talk on it.”

“I’m sorry I missed that,” Colette said. “Anyway, the shed’s empty. All the stuff’s still locked in the garage, waiting for me to move it. By the way, has Evan found any of those white worms?”

“What?” Michelle said. “White worms? Yuk. Are they in your garden?”

“No, they’re in Reading,” Colette said. “At the last sighting. A man was digging in his garden and there they were on the end of his spade, huge writhing clusters of them. Did Constable Wossname not mention it?”

Michelle shook her head. She looked as if she might throw up.

“I can’t think why he didn’t. It’s been in all the papers. The poor man’s had to board his property up. Now he’s asking for an investigation. Thing with worms is, they travel underground, they’ll be heading out in search of a food source, and of course being radioactive they won’t hang about, they’ll be scorching along like buggery. Excuse my language, but being the police he ought to have warned you really.”

“Oh God,” Michelle said. “Evan didn’t mention it either. Didn’t want to scare me, I suppose. What can we do? Shall I ring the council?”