Beyond Black: A Novel (42 page)

The phone rang, making her jump. She sat down, naked, to take the call.

“Alison Hart, how may I help you today?”

“Oh, Miss Hart … is that you in person?”

“Yes.”

“So you are real? I thought you might be a call centre. Do you offer dowsing?”

“It depends what for. I do missing jewellery, old insurance policies, concealed wills. I don’t do lost computer files or any type of electronic recovery. I charge a flat-rate call-out fee, which depends on your area, and then after that I work on a no-find no-fee basis. I do indoor work only.”

“Really?”

“I’m not suited to distances, or rough terrain.”

“But it’s the outside that’s worrying us.”

“Then you need my colleague Raven, who specializes in earth energies, neolithic burials, mounds, caverns, burrows, and henges.”

“But you’re in my area,” the woman said. “That’s why I rang. I’m going by your telephone code in your ad.”

“What is it you’re actually looking for?”

“Actually, uranium,” the woman said.

Al said, “Oh, dear. I do think it’s Raven you want.” I expect he’ll be branching out, she thought, if these poisonings continue: knotweed, the bad drains. He’ll be branching out into sludge and toxic seepages, and detecting the walls of underground installations. If there were walls beneath my feet, she thought, if there were occult silos and excavations, cavities blasted in the earth, would I know? If there were secret chambers and bricked-in cul-desacs, would I sense them?

“Are you still there?” she asked the client. She imparted Raven’s details: his e-mail, and so on. It was hard to get the woman off the phone; she seemed to want some sort of free extra, like, I’ll throw you in a tarot reading, pick one card of three. It’s a while since I unwrapped the cards, Al thought. She said to the woman, “I really ought to go, because I have, you know, another client coming in—well, fifteen minutes, and—oh, dear, what is that smell? Oh, dear, I think I’ve left something on the stove … .” She held the phone away from her ear, and still the woman talked, and she thought, Colette, where are you, get this woman off the line … . She threw the receiver down on the bed and ran out of the room.

She stood on the landing, naked. I never did any science at school, she thought, any chemistry or physics, so I can’t advise these people about the likelihood of aliens or rabies or uranium or knotweed or anything at all really. Imagine, she said to herself, Morris let loose in a laboratory, all his friends trapped in a test tube, amalgamating and reacting against each other and causing little puffs and whiffs. Then she said to herself, don’t imagine, because it is imagining that gives them the door to get in. If you were thinner they would have less space to live. Yes, Colette was right and right again.

She knelt down, leaned forward, and tucked her head down by her knees. 
“Boom!”
 she said softly. 
“Boom!”
She crunched herself down as small as she could go and said to herself a phrase she did not know she knew:
Sauve qui peut.

She rocked her body, back and to, back and to. Presently she felt stronger: as if a shell, as if the back of a tortoise, might have grown over her spine. Tortoises live for many years, she thought, they outlive human beings. No one really loves them for they have no lovable qualities, but they are admired just for lasting out. They don’t speak, they just don’t utter at all. They are okay as long as no one turns them upside down and shows their underside, which is their soft bits. She said to herself, when I was a child I had a tortoise for a pet. The name of my tortoise was Alison, I named it after me because it is like me, and with our slow feet we walk in the garden. With my tortoise at week-ends I have many enjoyable times. The food of my tortoise is bollocks grass and blood.

She thought, the fiends are on their way, the question is how fast and who is first. If I cannot enjoy a nice childhood thought about a tortoise I might have had but didn’t, then I can expect Morris will shortly be limping in my direction though I believed he had gone on to higher things. Unless I am the higher things. After all, I tried to do a good action. I try to be a higher thing myself, but why does something inside me always say, but? Thinking
but
, she squashed herself down hard. She tried to put her chin onto the carpet, so she could look up, as if she were emerging from her shell. To her surprise—she had not tried this sort of thing before—she found it anatomically impossible. What came naturally was to tuck her head into her shielding spine, her plaited fingers protecting her fontanel.

In this position Colette found her, as she scampered lightly up the stairs, coming back from a meeting with their tax advisor. “Colette,” she said to the carpet, “you were right all along.”

These were the words that saved her; protected her from the worst of what Colette could have said, when she extended a cool hand to help her up and finally, admitting the task beyond her, brought a chair upon which Alison could place her forearms, and from there, lever herself into a position that seemed like an undignified sexual invitation, and from there, upright. One hand was spread across her heaving diaphragm, another crept down to cover her private parts—“which I’ve seen, already, once this week,” Colette snapped, “and once too much, thank you, so if you don’t mind getting dressed—or at least covering yourself up decently, if the idea of getting dressed is too challenging—you might come down when you’re ready and I’ll tell you what Mr. Colefax has to say about short-term savings rates.”

For an hour, Alison lay on her bed to recover. A client called for a tarot reading, and she saw her cards so clearly in her mind that really, she might as well have jumped up and done it and earned the money, but she heard Colette making tactful excuses, taking the client into her confidence and saying that she knew she would understand, the unpredictable demands placed on Alison’s talent meant that she couldn’t always give of her best, so when she said she needed rest that must be respected … she heard Colette book the woman in for a callback, and impress on her the fact that she must be standing to attention when it came, ready for Alison, even if her house were on fire.

When she felt able, she sat upright; she ran a tepid bath, dipped herself in and out of it, and felt no cleaner. She didn’t want hot water, which would make her scars flare. She lifted her heavy breasts and soaped beneath them, handling each one as if it were a weight of dead meat that happened to adhere to her chest.

She dried herself, put on the lightest dress she owned. She crept down-stairs and, by way of the kitchen, into the garden. The weeds between the paving had withered, and the lawn was rock-hard. She looked down; snaky cracks crossed the ground.

“Ali!” came the cry. It was Evan, out poisoning his own weeds, his spray gun slung like a bandolier across his bare chest.

“Evan!” She moved stiffly, patiently, towards the fence. She was wearing her fluffy winter slippers, because her swollen feet wouldn’t go into any other shoes; she hoped Evan wouldn’t notice, and it was true he didn’t notice much.

“I don’t know,” he said, “why did we ever pay the extra five K for a garden due south?”

“Why did we?” she said heartily, buying time.

“Personally I did it because I was told it would boost the resale value,” Evan said. “And you?”

“Oh, the same,” she said.

“But we couldn’t have known what climate change had in store, eh? Not the most of us. But you must have known?” Evan giggled. “What’s tomorrow, eh? Ninety-eight and rising?”

She stood in the doorway of Colette’s room, where she did not usually intrude: she stood and watched Colette, who was gazing into her computer screen, and talked to her, in a good-humoured, light sort of way. She said, the neighbours seem to think I have supernatural knowledge of what the weather’s going to be, and some of them are ringing me up to search for uranium and dangerous chemicals. I’ve had to say I don’t do that, I’ve handed them on to Raven, but today’s been quite good and quite busy, I’ve got lots of repeat telephone business, I know I always say to you I prefer face-to-face, but you always said, it limits you, it really limits you geographically and basically you can do it fine over the phone if you learn to listen hard, well you’re right, Colette, I have learned to listen hard and in a different way, you were right about that as you have been right about everything. And thank you for protecting me today from my client, I will phone her back, I will, you did the right thing, you always do the right thing, if I took notice of you, Colette, I would be thin and rich.

Colette saved her screen, and then, without looking at Al, she said, “Yes, all that is true, but why were you naked and curled into a ball at the top of the stairs?”

Al padded downstairs in her furry slippers. Another red, blazing evening had come; when she went into the kitchen, it was filled with a hellish light. She opened the fridge. To her knowledge, she had not eaten that day. Can I please have an egg? she asked herself. In Colette’s voice, she said, yes, just one. There was a sound behind her, a little tapping noise. Painfully—every bit of her was stiff and aching—she moved herself around, to look behind her; around again, to take in the whole room. “Colette?” she said.

Tap-tap. Tap-tap.
 It was coming from the window. No one was there. She crossed the room. She looked out into the garden. It was empty. Or seemed so.

She unlocked the back door and stepped out. She heard the train rumbling through Brookwood, the distant background roar of Heathrow, Gatwick. A few drops of rain fell, hot swollen drops. Lifting her head, she called out, “Bob Fox?”

The rain plopped onto her face and ran backwards into her hair. She listened. There was no reply.

“Bob Fox, is that you? “She gazed out into the milky darkness; there was a fugitive movement, towards the back fence, but that could be Mart, seeking shelter from some civic catastrophe. I could have imagined it, she thought. I don’t want to be premature. But.

ELEVEN

You can understand it, Al thought. Fiends would be attracted to any site where there’s diggings, workings, companies of men going about men’s business, where there’s smoking, betting, and swearing; where there are vans running around, and trenches dug where you could conceal things.

She lay on the sofa; the tarot cards slid from her hands and fanned out on the carpet. She levered herself upright, dabbing at her face, to see how the cards had fallen. The two of pentacles is the card of the self-employed, indicating uncertainty of income, restlessness, fluctuation, an unquiet mind, and an imbalance between the output of energy and the inflow of money. It is one of those cards so doubled and ambivalent in its meanings that if you draw it reversed it hardly matters much; it then suggests mounting debt, and the swing between paralyzed despair and stupid overconfidence. It’s not a card you want to draw when you’re making next year’s business plan.

Colette had got her online these days, e-mailing predictions around the globe and doing readings for people in different time zones. “I’d like to make you a global brand,” Colette said. “Like …” Her sentence had tailed off. She could only think of fat things, like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. In Al’s belief, the four of swords governed the Internet. Its colour was electric blue and its influence bore on people in a crowd, on the meetings of groups, on ideas that had mass appeal. Not all the psychics agreed; some backed the claims of the four, five, and six of cups, which govern secret areas of knowledge, recycled concepts, and work pursued in windowless rooms such as cellars or basements. As read by Mrs. Etchells, the four of swords indicated a short stay in hospital.

The weather broke; it thundered, then rained hard. The water ran down the patio doors in scallops and festoons. Afterwards, the gardens steamed under a whitening sky. Then the sun struggled through and the cycle began again, the buildup of unbearable heat. But if you looked into the crystal ball you could see shifting cloudbanks, as if it were making its own weather.

I don’t understand it, Colette said, peering in. I cleaned it yesterday.

She read for Colette and said, oh, look, the two of cups. Colette said, wait, I know that one, that means a partner, that means a man for me. Her optimism was endearing, Al supposed. The spread was short on the major arcana, as if Fate wasn’t really bothered about Colette.

Colette yelled. “Silvana on the phone. Are you up for team psychics?” Al picked up the phone by her own computer. “Oh, Silvana,” she said. “What’s team psychics then?”

Silvana said. “It’s a way to keep the excitement going, we thought. Up on the stage, twenty minutes, in and out, no time to get into anything deep and sticky; you’re on, you’re off, you leave them asking for more. Six times twenty minutes with shortest possible changeover is two hours, add in twenty minutes interval, and you’re away by ten-thirty, which means everybody can get home the same night, nice hot chocolate and a cheese toastie, tucked up in your own bed by midnight, which means you’re fresh the next day and up with the lark and manning the phones. Which looks to me like a good deal all round.”

“Sounds all right,” Al said, cautiously.

“We’d have come to you first off, except woss-name—Colette—she’s always so offhand and snotty.”

Yes, I’m afraid she is, Al thought, which is why I was last pick—

“Which is why you were last pick for the hen parties,” Silvana said. “But anyway, no hard feelings, Mandy said I should try you. She said one thing about Al, she’s nobody’s fool but she is the forgiving type, she says, there’s no malice or harm in her anywhere. So our problem is, we’ve advertised Six Sensational Psychics, but Glenora’s dropped out.”

“Why?”

“She had a premonition.”

“Oh, she’s always having those. She should get over herself. Where is it?”

“The Fig and Pheasant. You know. The steak house.”

Oh, dear. Not one of Colette’s favourite venues. “So it’s who?”

“Me, Cara, Gemma, Mrs. Etchells, Mandy, and then you.”

“You’re a bit light on men. Can’t you phone Merlyn?”

“We did. But his book came out, and he’s gone to Beverly Hills.”