Beyond Black: A Novel (38 page)

When Mart came back they sat companionably, licking spare ribs and tossing down the bones. “You’ve got to take the cartons away,” she said. “Do you understand that? You mustn’t put them in our wheelie bin. Or Colette will see them. You have to be gone soon. The garden design will be coming. They’ll probably say, take down that shed, it’s an eyesore.” She chewed thoughtfully on a sweet-and-sour prawn. “I knew we should get a better one.”

“It’s late,” Mart said, consulting his new watch. “You ought to go in.”

“Oh, just so you can finish everything off by yourself!”

“I’m more hungry than you,” Mart said, and she thought, that’s true. So in she went. Up to bed. All quiet from Colette’s room. She didn’t dream, for once; or not of being hungry.

It couldn’t last, of course. Previously there had been an element of camouflage about Mart, his dirty clothes blending into the earth tones of the gardens, but you noticed his feet now, in the big clean navy and white shoes, seeming to come around the corner before him.

When he saw Colette approaching, he slammed the door of the shed and wedged his rucksack against it; but Colette defeated him with one push. Her yodel of alarm drove him back against the wall.

Al galumphed down the garden, shouting, “Don’t hit him! Don’t call the police, he’s not dangerous.”

Mart laughed when Colette said she had seen him on the lawn.

“I bet you thought I was from space, did you? You said, oops, there goes an extraterrestrial! Or did you think I was a brickie from off the building site?”

“I didn’t form any opinion,” Colette said coldly.

“She thought she was dreaming,” Al said.

“Alison, I’ll deal with this, please.”

“In fact, my troubles started with an alien encounter,” Mart said. “Aliens give you a headache, did you know that? Plus they make you fall over. When you’ve seen an alien, it’s like somebody’s drilled your middle out.” He made a gesture—a gouge and a twist—like someone plunging a corer into an apple. “Pinto,” he said, “when we was white-lining up near Saint Albans, he got taken up bodily into an alien craft. Female aliens came and pulled off his overalls and palpitated his body all over.”

“He was dreaming,” Colette said.

Al thought, she doesn’t know how lucky we are, we could have been playing host to Pinto as well.

“He wasn’t asleep,” Mart said. “He was carried off. The proof of it is, when he got back, he took his shirt off and they’d erased his tattoo.”

“You can’t stay here any longer,” Colette said. “I hope that’s perfectly clear to you?”

“A shed wouldn’t do for everybody,” Mart conceded. “But it’ll do nicely for me. Less bugs in a shed.”

“I should have thought there’d be more. Though I’m sure you’ll find that it’s perfectly clean.”

“Not crawling bugs. Listening bugs.”

“Don’t be silly. Who’d want to listen to you? You’re a vagrant.”

“And there’s cameras everywhere these days,” Mart said. “Blokes watching you out of control towers. You can’t go anywhere without somebody knows about it. You get post from people that don’t know you, how do you do that? Even I get post, and I don’t have an address. Constable Delingbole says, I’ve got your number, mate.” He added, under his breath, “His is written on him.”

“I expect you out of here within ten minutes,” Colette said. “I am going back to the house and I shall be counting. Then, whatever you say, Alison, I shall call the police and have you removed.”

Al thought, I wonder if Delingbole is real, or in a dream? Then she thought, yes, of course he’s real. Michelle knows him, doesn’t she? He gave a talk on shed crime. She wouldn’t have dreamed that.

It was some hours before Colette was speaking to her again. There were interactions, chance meetings; at one point Colette had to hand her the telephone to take a call from a client, and later they arrived in the utility room at the same time, with two baskets of washing, and stood saying coldly, after you, no, after you.

But the Collingwood wasn’t big enough to keep up a feud.

“What do you want me to say?” Al demanded. “That I won’t keep a vagrant again? Well, I won’t, if you feel that strongly about it. Jesus! It isn’t as if there was any harm done.”

“No thanks to you.”

“Let’s not start again,” she said.

“I don’t think you realize the kind of people who are out there.”

“No, I’m too good,” Al muttered. “You don’t realize half the evil that is in the world,” she told herself under her breath.

Colette said, “I saw Michelle earlier. She says, guard your shopping.”

“What?”

“In the boot of the car. In case it vanishes while you’re unlocking the front door. Don’t leave the boot lid open. There’s been a spate of grocery theft.”

“I don’t go shopping by myself, do I?”

Colette said, “Stop muttering like that.”

“Truce?” she said. “Peace talks? Cup of tea?”

Colette did not answer but she took it as a yes, standing at the sink filling the kettle, looking down the garden towards the now-deserted Balmoral. Colette had accused her of harbouring Mart, but not of actually feeding him; not of actually buying supplies and smuggling them in. She had not actually slapped her, but she had screamed in her face, asked her if she was insane, and if it was her intention to bring into the neighbourhood a gang of robbers, child molesters, terrorists, and would-be murderers.

I don’t know, she’d said, I don’t think so. I didn’t have an intention, I just wanted to do a good action, I suppose I didn’t think; I just felt sorry for him, because he’s got nowhere to go and so he has to go in a shed.

“Sometimes,” Colette said, “I think you’re retarded as well as fat.”

But that’s not true, Al thought. Surely not? She knows I’m not stupid. I might be temporarily muddled by the ingress of memory, some seepage from my early life. I feel I was kept in a shed. I feel I was chased there, that I ran in the shed for refuge and hiding place, I feel I was then knocked to the floor, because in the shed someone was waiting for me, a dark shape rising up from the corner, and as I didn’t have my scissors on me at the time I couldn’t even snip him. I feel that, soon afterwards, I was temporarily inconvenienced by someone putting a lock on the door, and I lay bleeding, alone, on newspapers, in the dark.

She couldn’t see the past clearly, only an outline, a black bulk against black air. She couldn’t see the present; it was muddled by the force of the scene Colette had made, the scene which was still banging around inside her skull. But she could see the future. She’ll be forcing me out for walks, hanging weights—this is what she threatens—on my wrists and ankles. She might drive alongside me, in the car, monitoring me, but probably only at first. She won’t want to spare the time from sending out invoices, billing people for predictions I have made and spirits I have raised: To Your Uncle Bob, ten minutes’ conversation, £150 plus VAT. So perhaps she won’t drive alongside me, she’ll just drive me out of the house. And I’ll have nowhere to go. Perhaps I, too, can take refuge in someone’s outbuilding. First I can go by the supermarket and get a sandwich and a bun, then I can eat them sitting on a bench somewhere, or if it’s wet and I can’t get into a shed I could go to the park and crawl under the band-stand. It’s easy to see how it happens, really, how a person turns destitute.

“So who’s stealing the shopping?” she asked: thinking, it could soon be me.

“Illegal immigrants, Evan says.”

“In Woking?”

“Oh, they get everywhere,” Colette said. “Asylum seekers, you know. The council is taking the benches out of the park, so that no one can sleep on them. Still, we’ve had our warning, haven’t we? With the shed.”

She drank the tea Alison had made her, leaning against the work surface as if she were in a station buffet. I moved him on smartly, she thought, he knew better than to mess with me, one look at me and he knew I wasn’t a soft touch. She felt hungry. It would have been easy enough to dip into the clients’ biscuit tin, when Al wasn’t looking, but she denied herself. Michelle had said their wheelie bin had been crammed with takeaway cartons, and she now realized the homeless person must have been responsible for these. Food is over, as far as I’m concerned, she thought. Pictures of Zoë were gnawing at her brain, like rats in a cage with no door.

TEN

That summer, black slime came up through the drains of a Frobisher just down the hill. There was a heat wave, with temperatures creeping toward the upper nineties. Animals crawled into the shade. Children turned lobster-red inside their playsuits. Fragile citizens bought charcoal masks to protect against the excess ozone. Sales of ice cream and lager doubled, as did sales of cold and flu remedies. The lawns at Admiral Drive baked until they cracked, and the grass turned to patchy straw. Colette’s water feature had to be turned off: as all water features were turned off, by order. Fountains dried, reservoirs dwindled. Hospitals filled. The elderly expired. A plague of psychic shows broke out on TV, crawling all over the schedules.

Colette sat watching them with a sullen expression, denouncing the transparent cheating, the collusion, the simplemindedness of the studio audiences. It’s totally irresponsible, she said, to encourage people to think that’s the way you go about dealing with the dead. In the days when she and Al first got together, the days when the princess passed, the punters squirmed when they were fingered; they twitched in their seats, desperate to foist the message off on the person next to them or the person in front or just behind. But now, when they came to a dem, the TV shows had tuned up their expectations, they couldn’t wait for their messages. When a Sensitive asked, “Who’s got a Mike in Spirit World?” fifty hands would shoot into the air. They yelled, cheered, embraced each other, made faces for the camera even though there wasn’t one. They shouted, “Oh, my gahhd!” when a message came though, and burst into grating sobs and doggy howls.

I find it exhausting, Al said, just to watch. And I couldn’t do television myself, she said. If I were there in the studio something would malfunction. The picture would blank out. The network would go down. Then they’d sue me.

And you’re too fat for television, Colette said.

To think I used to blame so much on Morris! Al said. If the lightbulbs started flickering I’d shout, “Oi, Morris!” and if the washing machine over-flowed I would just give him a piece of my mind. But even now, your computer goes on the blink whenever I come near it, and we’re still not getting anywhere with the recordings, are we? The machine plays back tapes that aren’t even in it; we get material coming through from the year before last. All the tapes are speaking on top of each other, it’s like a compost heap.

And you’re too fat, Colette said.

So I think it’s my electromagnetic field. I think it’s hostile to modern technology.

They had got all the satellite channels, because Alison liked to home-shop; she often felt shy when she was out, and she complained that people looked at her in a funny way, as if they knew what she did for a living. “It’s not shameful,” she said. “Not like being a sex worker.” Still, it was a comfort to be able to buy some chunky gold chains and glittery earrings, low-taste stuff she could wear onstage.

Once, when they switched on their TV, Cara’s pixie face appeared on-screen; another time, Mandy’s sharp foxy features bobbed up. Colette said, “Natasha, huh! She doesn’t look a bit Russian.”

“She’s not.”

“They could have made her up to look Russian, that’s all I’m saying.”

When the credits came at the end of the show, the producers put a disclaimer notice on the screen, to say that the programme was “For entertainment purposes only.” Colette snorted and stabbed the OFF switch. “You should tell them straight, at your next dem. Tell them what it’s really like in Spirit World. Why do you have to be so soft on them? Tell them what Morris used to do to you.” She sniggered. “I’d like to see their faces then. I’d like to see Mandy’s face, when she’s on camera and Morris puts his hand up her skirt. I’d like to see them burbling on about the world beyond, if Morris came back and he was in one of his moods.”

“Don’t say that,” Al begged. “Don’t say you’d like to see Morris.”

She had never been able to teach Colette the art of self-censorship; never been able to make her understand how simple and literal-minded the organizers of Spirit World could be. You had to guard the words that came out of your mouth and even the words as they formed up in your mind. Wasn’t that simple enough? Sometimes she thought Colette couldn’t be such a slow learner. Surely she was doing it on purpose, tormenting her?

Gavin rang. He asked for Colette, and Al passed the phone over without speaking to him. She hung about, overhearing; though proximity wasn’t really necessary to her. She could tune in to Gavin any time she liked, but the thought tired her. Quite clearly she heard him say, “How’s the fat lesbian?”

Colette said, “I’ve told you, Alison is not a lesbian. In fact, there are several men in her life.”

“Who?” Gavin demanded.

“Let me see.” Colette paused. “There’s Donnie. There’s Keith … she and Keith go way back.”

Al stood in the doorway. “Colette … don’t.”

Colette gestured to her angrily, to go away.

Don’t make a joke out of the fiends, Al pleaded; but not out loud. She turned and left the room. You should know better, Colette, but how can you know better? You believe and you half-believe, that’s the trouble with you. You want the frisson and you want the money, but you don’t want to alter your dumb view of the world. She heard Colette say to Gavin, “There’s Dean. Dean really fancies me. But he’s quite young.”

“What do they do, these blokes?” Gavin said. “Are they fortune-tellers as well?”

“There’s Mart,” she said “Oh, and our neighbour, Evan. Plenty of men in our lives, you see.”

“You’re carrying on with a neighbour?” Gavin said. “Married, is he?”

“That’s my business.”

Colette had that fizzing, crawling feeling you get when you’re lying. When she heard what was coming out of her mouth she was frightened. It was quite natural that she should want to put the best face on things, with Gavin, but stop, stop, she said to herself, Donnie and Keith aren’t real and Evan is a wanker and Mart lives in the shed. Or used to.