Beyond Black: A Novel (13 page)

As she lay in her little bed at night the doors banged, and sometimes the windows smashed. People came in and out. Sometimes she heard laughing, sometimes scuffling, sometimes raised voices and a steady rhythmic pounding. Sometimes she stayed in her bed till daylight came, sometimes she was called to get up for one reason and another. Some nights she dreamed she could fly; she passed over the ridge tiles, and looked down on the men about their business, skimming over the waste ground, where vans stood with their back doors open, and torchlight snaked through the smoky dark.

Sometimes the men were there in a crowd, sometimes they swarmed off and vanished for days. Sometimes at night just one or two men stayed and went upstairs with her mum. Then next day the bunch of them were back again, tee-heeing beyond the wall at men’s private jokes. Behind the house was a scrubby field, with a broken-down caravan on blocks; sometimes there was a light in it. Who lives in there? she asked her mum, and her mum replied, What you don’t know won’t hurt you, which even at an early age Alison knew was untrue.

Beyond the caravan was a huddle of leaning corrugated sheds and a line of lockup garages to which the men had the keys. Two white ponies used to graze in the field, then they didn’t. Where have the ponies gone? she asked her mum. Her mum replied, to the knackers, I suppose.

She said, Who’s Gloria? You keep talking to her. Her mum said, Never you mind.

“Where is she?” she said. “I can’t see her. You say, yes Gloria, no Gloria, want a cuppa, Gloria? Where is she?”

Her mum said, “Never mind Gloria, you’ll be in Kingdom Come. Because that’s where I’m going to knock you if you keep this up.”

Her mum would never stay in the house if she could help it: pacing, smoking, smoking, pacing. Desperate for a breath of air, she would say, “Come on, Gloria,” shrug on her coat and flee down the road to the minimart; and because she did not want the trouble of washing or dressing Alison, or having her underfoot whining for sweeties, she would take her up to the top of the house and lock her in the attic. “She can’t come to any harm up there,” she would reason, out loud to Gloria. “No matches, so she can’t set the house on fire. Too small to climb out the skylight. Nothing sharp up here the like of which she is drawn to, such as knives or pins. There’s really no damage she could come to.”

She put an old rug up there for Alison to sit on, when she played with her blocks and animals. “Quite a little palace,” she said. There was no heating, which again was a safety factor, there being no outlets for Alison to put her fingers into. She could have an extra cardigan instead. In summer the attic was hot. Midday rays streamed fiercely down, straight from the sky to the dusty rug. They lit up the corner where the little lady used to fade up, all dressed in pink, and call out to Alison in a timid Irish voice.

Alison was perhaps five years old when the little lady first appeared, and in this way she learned how the dead could be helpful and sweet. She had no doubt that the little lady was dead, in every meaningful sense. Her clothes were feltlike and soft to the touch, and her pink cardigan was buttoned right up to the first fold of her chin. “My name is Mrs. McGibbet, darlin’,” she said. “Would you like to have me round and about? I thought you might like to have me with you, round and about.”

Mrs. McGibbet’s eyes were blue and round and startled. In her cooing voice, she talked about her son, who had passed over before her, met with an accident. They’d never been able to find each other, she said, I never could meet up with Brendan. But sometimes she showed Alison his toys, little miniature cars and tractors, neatly boxed. Once or twice she faded away and left the toys behind. Mum just stubbed her toe on them. It was as if she didn’t see them at all.

Mrs. McGibbet was always saying, “I wouldn’t want, my darlin’, to come between a little girl and her mother. If that were her mother coming up the stair now, coming up with a heavy tread, no, I wouldn’t want to put myself forward at all.” When the door opened she faded away: leaving sometimes an old doll collapsed in the corner where she had sat. She chuckled as she fell backwards, into the invisible place behind the wall.

Al’s mum forgot to send her to school. “Good grief,” she said, when the man came around to prosecute her, “you mean to say she’s that age already?”

Even after that, Al was never where she should be. She never had a swim-suit, so when it was swimming she was sent home. One of the teachers threatened she’d be made to swim in her knickers next week, but she went home and mentioned it, and one of the men offered to go down there and sort it out. When Al went to school next day she told the teacher, Donnie’s coming down; he says he’ll push a bottle up your bleeding whatnot, and—I don’t think it’s very nice, miss—ram it in till your guts come out your mouf.

After that, on swimming afternoon, she was just sent home again. She never had her rubber-soled shoes for skipping and hopping or her eggs and basin for mixing a cake, her times tables or her poem or her model mosque made out of milk-bottle tops. Sometimes when she came home from school one of the men would stop her in the hall and give her 50 pence. She would run up to the attic and put it away in a secret box she had up there. Her mother would take it off her if she could, so she had to be quick.

One day the men came with a big van. She heard yapping and ran to the window. Three blunt-nosed brindle dogs were being led towards the garages. “Oh, what are their names?” she cried. Her mother said, “Don’t you go calling their names. Dogs like that, they’ll chew your face off. Isn’t that right, Gloria?”

She gave them names anyway: Blighto, Harry and Serene. One day Blighto came to the house and bumped against the back door. “Oh, he’s knocking,” Al said. She opened the door though she knew she shouldn’t, and tried to give him half her wafer biscuit.

A man came shooting out of nowhere and hauled the dog off her. He kicked it into the yard while he got Alison up off the floor. “Emmie, sort it!” he yelled, then wrapped his hands in an old jersey of her mum’s and went out and pummelled the dog’s face, dragging it back to the sheds and twisting its neck as he dragged. He came back in shouting, “I’ll shoot the fucker, I’ll strangle that bastard dog.” The man, whose name was Keith, wept when he saw how the dog had ripped at her hairline. He said, Emmie, she ought to go to Casualty, that needs stitching. Her mum said she couldn’t be sitting in a queue all afternoon.

The man washed her head at the kitchen sink. There wasn’t a cloth or a sponge so he put his hand on the back of her neck, pressed her down over the plastic bowl, and slapped the water up at her. It went in her eyes, so the bowl blurred. Her blood went in the bowl but that was all right; it was all right because the bowl itself was red. “Stay there, darling,” he said, “just keep still,” and his hand lifted from her nape as he bent to rummage in the cupboard at his feet. Obedient, she bent there; blood came down her nose too and she wondered why that was. She heard the chinking noise as Keith tossed the empties out from under the sink. Em, he said, you not got any disinfectant in here? Give us a rag for Christsakes, tear up a sheet, I don’t know, and her mother said, use your hankie or ain’t you got none? In the end her mother came up behind her with the used dish towel and Keith ripped it out of her hand. “There you go, there you go, there you go,” he kept saying, dabbing away, sighing the words between his teeth.

She felt faint with pain. She said, “Keef, are you my dad?”

He wrung the cloth between his hands. “What you been telling her, Emmie?” Her mother said, “I’ve not been telling her nothing, you ought to know by now she’s a bloody little liar. She says she can hear voices in the wall. She says there are people up in the attic. She’s got a screw loose, Gloria says.”

Keith moved: she felt a sudden sick cold at her back as he pulled away, as his body warmth left her. She reared up, dripping water and dilute pink blood. Keith had crossed the room and pinned her mother up against the wall. “I told you, Emmie, if I told you once I told you a dozen times, I do not want to hear that name spoken.” And the dozen times, Keith reinforced, by the way he gave her mum a little bounce, raising her by her hair near the scalp and bobbing her down again. “Gloria’s buggered off back to Paddyland,” he said [
bounce
]. “That’s all [
bounce
] you bloody [
bounce
] know about it, do you [
bounce
] understand [
bounce
] that? Do I bloody [
bounce-bounce-bounce-bounce
] make myself [
bounce
] crystal-clear? You just [
bounce
] forget you 
ever
 [
bounce
] set eyes.”

“She’s all right, is Gloria,” said her mum, “she can be a good laugh,” and the man said, “Do you want me to give you a slap? Do you want me to give you a slap and knock your teeth out?”

Alison was interested to see this happen. She had had many kinds of slap, but not that kind. She wiped the water from her eyes, the water and blood, till her vision cleared. But Keith seemed to get tired of it. He let her mother go and her legs went from under her; her body folded and slid down the wall, like the lady in the attic who could fold herself out of sight.

“You look like Mrs. McGibbet,” Al said.

Her mother twitched, as if her wires had been pulled; she squeaked up from the floor. “Who’s speaking names now?” she said. “You wallop 
her
, Keith, if you don’t want names spoken. She’s always speaking names.” Then she screamed a new insult that Al had never heard before.

“You poxy little poxer, you got blood on your chin. Where’ve you got that from? You poxy little poxer.”

Al said, “Keef, does she mean me?”

Keith wiped his sweating forehead. It made you sweat, bouncing a woman a dozen times by the short hair of her head. “Yes. No,” he said. “She means to say poxy little boxer. She can’t talk, sweetheart, she don’t know who she’s talking to; her brain’s gone, what she ever had of it.”

“Who’s Gloria?” she asked. Keith made a hissing through his teeth. He tapped one fist into his opposite palm. For a moment she thought he was going to come after her, so she backed up against the sink. The cold edge of it dug into her back; her hair dripped, blood and water, down her T-shirt. Later she would tell Colette, I was never so frightened as then; that was my worst moment, one of the worse ones anyway, that moment when I thought Keef would knock me to Kingdom Come.

But Keith stepped back. “Here,” he said. He thrust the dish towel into her hand. “Keep at it,” he said. “Keep it clean.”

“Can I stay off school?” she said, and Keith said, yes, she’d better. He gave her a pound note and told her to yell out if she saw a dog loose again.

“And will you come and save me?”

“Somebody’ll be about.”

“But I don’t want you to strangle it,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “It’s Blighto.”

The next time she recalled seeing Keith was a few months later. It was night, and she should have been in bed as nobody had called her out. But when she heard Keith’s name she reached under her mattress for her scissors, which she always kept there in case they should be needed. She clutched them in one hand; with the other she held up the hem of the big nightie that was lent her as a special favour from her mum. When she came scrambling down the stairs, Keith was standing just inside the front door; or at least some legs were, wearing Keith’s trousers. He had a blanket over his head. Two men were supporting him. When they took off the blanket she saw that every part of his face looked like fatty mince, oozing blood. (“Oh, this mince is fatty, Gloria!” her mother would say.) She called out to him, “Keef, that needs stitching!” and one of the men swooped down on her and wrenched the scissors out of her hand. She heard them strike the wall, as the man flung them; looming above her, he pushed her into the back room and slammed the door.

Next day a voice beyond the wall said, “Hear Keef got mashed up last night. Tee-hee. As if he ain’t got troubles enough.”

She believed she never saw Keith again, but she might have seen him and just not recognized him; it didn’t seem as if he’d have much left by way of original features. She remembered how, the evening of the dog bite, once her head had stopped bleeding, she had gone out to the garden. She followed the furrows dug by the dog’s strong hind legs, as Keith dragged him away from the house, and Blighto twisted to look back. Not until it rained hard did the ruts disappear.

At that time Alison was saving up for a pony. One day she went up to the attic to count her money. “Ah dear,” said Mrs. McGibbet, “the lady your mother has been up here, darlin’, raiding your box that was your own peculiar property. The coins she’s tipped into her open purse, and the one single poor note she has tucked away in her brassiere. And not a thing I could do to stop her, my rheumatics being aggravated by the cold and damp, for by the time I was up and out of my corner, she had outstripped me.”

Alison sat down on the floor. “Mrs. McGibbet,” she said, “can I ask you a question?”

“You surely can. And why should you have to ask if you can ask, I ask myself?”

“Do you know Gloria?”

“Do I know Gloria?” Mrs. McGibbet’s eyelids fell over her bright blue eyes. “Ah, you’ve no business asking.”

“I think I saw her. I think I can see her these days.”

“Gloria is a cheap hoor, what else should she be? I never should have given her the name, for it put ideas in her head that was above her station. Go on the boat then, heedless and headstrong, she would go on the boat. Get off at Liverpool with all its attendant vices and then where will she go but via a meat lorry to the dreadful metropolis with its many occasions of sin. End up dead, dead and haunting about in a British army town, in a dirty house with a bath in the front garden, and her own mother a living witness to every hoor’s trick that she can contrive.”

After that, when she got 50 pence from the men, she took it straight down to the minimart and bought chocolate, which she ate on the way home.

When Alison was eight years old, or maybe nine or ten, she was playing outside one day, a greyish sticky day in late summer. She was alone, of course: playing horses, neighing occasionally, and progressing at a canter. The rough grass of their back plot was worn in patches, like the pile on the rug that made the attic into a little palace.