Beyond Black: A Novel (30 page)

At first, Morris had mocked the new house. “This is posh, innit? You’re doing very well out of me, ducks.” Then he threatened her. “I can take you over, you cheeky bitch. I can have you away airside. I can chew you up and spit you out. I’ll come for you one night and the next day all they’ll find is your torn knickers. Don’t think I’ve not done it before.”

“Who?” she said, “Who have you taken over?”

“Gloria, for one. Remember her? Tart with red hair.”

“But you were earthside then, Morris. Anybody can do it with knives and hatchets but what can you do with your spirit hands? Your memory’s going. You’re forgetting what’s what. You’ve been kicking around too long.” She spoke to him roughly, man to man, as Aitkenside might: “You’re fading, mate. Fading fast.”

Then he began to coax her. “We want to go back to Wexham. It was a nice area in Wexham. We liked going down Slough, we liked it there because we could go down the dog track, where the dog track used to be. We liked it because you could go out fighting, but here there ain’t the possibility of fighting. There ain’t a bit of land where you can set up a cockfight. Young Dean enjoys nicking cars, but here you can’t nick ’em, these buggers have all got alarms and Dean don’t do alarms, he’s only a kid and he ain’t got trained on alarms yet. Donnie Aitkenside, he says we’ll never meet up with MacArthur if we stay around these parts. He says, we’ll never get Keef Capstick to stick around, Keef he likes a bit of a roughhouse and the chance of a ruckus.” Morris’s voice rose, he began to wheedle and whine. “Suppose I got a parcel? Where’m I going to keep me parcel?”

“What kind of parcel?” Al asked him.

“Suppose I got a consignment? Supposing I got a package? Supposing I had to keep guard on a few packing cases or a few crates. To help out me mates. You never know when your mate is going to come to you and say, Morris, Morris old son, can you keep an eye on these for me, ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies?”

“You? You don’t know anything but lies.”

“And if that happens, where am I going to keep ’em? Answer me that, girl.”

Alison told him, “You’ll just have to say no, won’t you?,” and Morris said, “Say no, say no? Is that a way to treat a mate of yours? If old stringbean asked you, keep this package for me, would you refuse her, would you say, Colette, me old mate, no can do?”

“I might.”

“But what if Nick asked you? What if old Nick himself was to come to you with a proposition, what if he was to say, cut you in on this my friend, trust me and I’ll see you right, what if he was to say, least said soonest mended; what if he was to say, I’d regard it as a special favour?”

“What’s Nick to me? I wouldn’t cross the road for him.”

“Because Nick, he don’t ask you, he tells you. Because Nick, he hangs you from a tree and shoots off your kneecaps, I’ve seen it done. Because you don’t say no to Nick or if you do you’re bloody crippled. I seen him personally poke out a man’s eye with a pencil. Where ’is eye would be.”

“Is that what happened to MacArthur? You said he only had one eye.”

A jeering, incredulous look spread over Morris’s face. “Don’t play the innocent wiv me,” he said. “You evil baggage. You know bloody fine how his eye got took out.” He headed, grumbling, for the French windows and wrapped his head in the curtain. “Tries it on wiv me, plays the innocent, fucking ’ell it won’t wash. Tell it to Dean, try it on some kid and see if it will wash wiv him, it won’t wash wiv me. I was there, girl. You claim my memory’s gone. Nothing wrong with mine, I’m telling you. Could be something wrong with yours. I don’t bloody forget his eye springing out. You don’t forget a thing like that.”

He looked frightened, she thought. Going up to bed, she hesitated outside Colette’s room, Bed Two with en-suite shower. She would have liked to say, I am lonely sometimes, and—the brute fact is—I want human company. Was Colette human? Just about. She felt a yawning inside her, an unfilled space of loss, as if a door in her solar plexus were opening on an empty room, or a stage waiting for a play to begin.

The day Morris said he was going, she could hardly wait to tell people the news. “He’s been called away,” she said. “Isn’t that great?” Smiles kept breaking out. She felt as if she were fizzing inside.

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Mandy said on the phone. “I mean, it’s good news for all of us, Al. Merlin said he was at the limit of his tolerance, and so did Merlyn. Your Morris had a really nasty way with him, he upset me dread-fully that night of Di’s funeral. I never felt clean afterwards. Well, you don’t, do you?”

“You don’t think it’s a trick?” Al said, but Mandy reassured her.

“It’s his time, Al. He’s pulled towards the light. He can’t resist, I bet you. It’s time he broke out of that cycle of criminality and self-destructive behaviour. He’ll be moving upwards. You’ll see.”

Colette was in the kitchen making decaffeinated coffee. Al told her, “Morris is leaving. He’s been called away.”

Colette raised her eyebrows and said, “Called away by who?”

“I don’t know, but he says he’s going on a course. I talked to Mandy, she says it means he’s moving to a higher level.”

Colette stood waiting for the kettle to boil, her fingers tapping. “Does that mean he won’t be bothering us in the future?”

“He swears he’s leaving today.”

“And it’s like, a residential course, is it?”

“I suppose.”

“And how long is it? Will he be coming back?”

“I think it takes as long as it takes. I can’t believe he’ll come back to the Woking area. Spirits don’t generally go backwards. I’ve never heard of that happening. When he’s moved towards the light he’ll be free to—” She stopped, perplexed. “Whatever they do,” she said finally. “Melt. Disperse.”

The kettle clicked itself off. “And all those other people he talks about—Dean, those others we get in the back of the car—will they be melting too?”

“I don’t know about Dean. He doesn’t seemed very evolved. But yes, I think, it’s Morris who attracts them, not me, so if he goes they’ll all go. You see, it might be the end of Morris as we know him. It had to happen one day.”

“Then what? What will it be like?”

“Well, it’ll be—silent. We’ll have some peace. I can get a night’s sleep.”

Colette said, “Could you move, please, so I can get to the fridge? … You won’t be giving up the business, will you?”

“If I gave up, how would I make a living?”

“I just want the milk. Thanks. But what will you do for a spirit guide?”

“Another one could turn up any day. Or I could borrow yours.”

Colette almost dropped the milk carton. “Mine?”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

Colette looked horrified. “But who is he?”

“It’s a she. Maureen Harrison, her name is.”

Colette poured her milk all over the granite-style work surface, and stood watching it stupidly as it dripped. “Who’s that? I don’t know her. I don’t know anyone of that name.”

“No, you wouldn’t. She passed before you were born. In fact, it took me a while to locate her, but her poor old friend kept calling around, asking for her. So I thought I’d do a good action, link them up together. Okay, I should have told you! I should have mentioned it. But what’s your problem? She won’t make any difference to you. Look, relax, she’s not doing you any harm, she’s just one of those grannies who lose the buttons off their cardigans.”

“But can she see me? Is she looking at me now?”

“Maureen,” Al said softly. “You around, love?”

From a cupboard came the chink of a teacup.

“There,” Al said.

“Can she see me in my room at night?”

Alison crossed the kitchen and began to mop up the spilled milk. “Go and sit down, Colette, you’ve had a shock. I’ll make you another cup.”

She boiled the kettle again. Decaf’s not much use for a shock. She stood looking out over the empty garden. When Morris actually goes, she thought, we’ll have champagne. Colette called out to know where Maureen Harrison came from, and when Al called back, “Somewhere up north,” she sounded shocked, as if it would have been more natural to have a spirit guide from Uxbridge.

Al couldn’t help smiling to herself. “Look on the bright side,” she said, bringing the coffee through; she’d put out some chocolate biscuits as the beginning of her celebration. “Look on the bright side, you might have been lumbered with a Tibetan.” She imagined the Collingwood, ringing with temple bells.

There was an unusual calm in their sitting room. She stared hard at the voile panels, but Morris’s form was not bulking them out, nor was he lying, stretched, along the hem. No Aitkenside, no Dean, no Pikey. She sat down. “Here we are,” she said, beaming. “Just the two of us.” She heard a moaning, a scraping, a metallic rattle; then the flap of the letter box, as Morris made his exit.

EIGHT

As the millennium approached, their trade declined. It was nothing personal, no misstep in Colette’s business plan. All the psychics called up to grouch about it. It was as if their clients had put their personal curiosity on pause, as if they had been caught up in some general intake of breath. The new age was celebrated at Admiral Drive with fireworks, released by careful fathers from the raw back plots. The children’s play area, the natural site for the fiesta, had been fenced off and KEEP OUT notices erected.

The local free sheet said Japanese knotweed had been found. “Is that a good thing?” Michelle asked, over the back fence. “I mean, are they conserving it?”

“No, I think it’s noxious,” Al said. She went inside, worried. I hope it’s not my fault, she thought. Had Morris pissed on the plot, on his way out of her life?

Some people didn’t buy into the knotweed theory. They said the problem was an unexploded bomb, left over from the last war—whenever that was. Evan leaned over the fence and said, “Have you heard about that bloke over Reading way, Lower Earley? On a new estate like this? He kept noticing his paint was blistering. His drains filled up with black sludge. One day he was digging in his vegetable plot, and he saw something wriggling on his spade. He thought, hell, what’s this?”

“And what was it?” Colette asked. Sometimes she found Evan entrancing.

“It was a heap of white worms,” he said. “Where you’ve got white worms you’ve got radioactivity. That’s the only thing you need to know about white worms.”

“So what did he do?”

“Called in the council,” Evan said.

“If it were me I’d call in the army.”

“Of course it’s a cover-up. They denied everything. Poor beggar’s boarded the place up and cut his losses.”

“So what caused it?”

“Secret underground nuclear explosion,” Evan said. “Stands to reason.”

At Admiral Drive a few people phoned the local environmental health department, putting questions about the play area, but officials would only admit to some sort of blockage, some sort of seepage, some sort of contamination the nature of which they were unable as yet to confirm. They insisted that the white worm problem was confined to the Reading area and that none of them had made their way to Woking. Meanwhile the infants remained shut out of paradise. They roared with temper when they saw the swings and the slide, and rattled the railings. Their mothers dragged them uphill, towards their Frobishers and Mountbattens, out of harm’s way. Nobody wanted news of the problem to leak, in case it affected their house prices. The populace was restless and transient, and already the first FOR SALE signs were going up, as footloose young couples tried their luck in a rising market.

New Year’s Eve was cold at Admiral Drive, and the skies were bright. The planes didn’t fall out of them, and there was no flood or epidemic—none, anyway, affecting the southeast of England. The clients gave a listless, apathetic sigh and—just for a month or two—accepted their lives as they were. By spring, trade was creeping back.

“They’re coming to take samples from the drains,” Michelle told Alison.

“Who are?”

“Drain officials,” Michelle said fearfully.

After Morris left, their life was like a holiday. For the first time in years, Alison went to bed knowing she wouldn’t be tossed out of it in the small hours. She could have a leisurely late-night bath without a hairy hand pulling out the plug, or Morris’s snake tattoo rising beneath the rose-scented bubbles. She slept through the night and woke refreshed, ready for what the day might bring. She blossomed, her plumped-out skin refining itself, the violet shadows vanishing from beneath her eyes. “I don’t know when I’ve felt so well,” she said.

Colette slept through the nights too, but she looked just the same.

They began to talk about booking a last-minute holiday, a break in the sun. Morris on an aircraft had been impossible, Al said. When she was checking in, he would jump on her luggage, so that it weighed heavy and she was surcharged. He would flash his knuckle-dusters as they walked through the metal detector, causing the security staff to stop and search her. If they made it as far as the plane, he would lock himself in the lavatory or hide in some vulnerable person’s sick bag and come up—
boom!
—into their face when they opened it. On the way to Madeira once, he had caused a cardiac arrest.

“You don’t have to worry about that anymore,” Colette said. “Where would you like to go?”

“Dunno,” Al said. Then: “Somewhere with ruins. Or where they sing opera. It’s night, and you hold candles, and they sing in an arena, an amphitheatre. Or they perform plays wearing masks. If I were an opera singer I’d be quite alluring. Nobody would think I was overweight.”

Colette had been thinking in terms of sex with a Greek waiter. There was no reason, on the face of it, why Alison’s cultural yearnings and her sexual ones shouldn’t be fulfilled within five hundred yards of each other. But she pictured her hot-eyed beau circling their table on the terrace, his sighs, his raised pulse, his fiery breath, his thoughts running ahead: is it worth it, because I’ll have to pay a mate of mine to sleep with the fat girl?

“Besides,” Al said, “it would be nice to have somebody with me. I went to Cyprus with Mandy but I never saw her, she was in and out of bed with somebody new every night. I found it quite squalid. Oh, I love Mandy, don’t get me wrong. People should enjoy themselves, if they can.”