Beyond Black: A Novel (7 page)

If Morris were earthside, she had once said to Al, and you and he were married, you could get rid of him easily enough; you could divorce him. Then if he bothered you, you could see a solicitor, take out an injunction. You could stipulate that he doesn’t come within a five-mile radius, for example. Al sighed and said, in Spirit World it’s not that simple. You can’t just kick out your guide. You can try and persuade him to move on. You can hope he gets called away, or that he forgets to come home. But you can’t leave him; he has to leave you. You can try and kick him out. You might succeed, for a while. But he gets back at you. Years may go by. He gets back at you when you’re least expecting it.

So, Colette had said, you’re worse off than if you were married. She had been able to get rid of Gavin for the modest price of a do-it-yourself divorce; it had hardly cost more than it would to put an animal down. “But he would never have left,” she said. “Oh, no, he was too cosy. I had to do the leaving.”

The summer they had first got together, Colette had said, maybe we could write a book. I could make notes on our conversations, she said. You could explain your psychic view of the world to me, and I could jot it down. Or I could interview you, and tape it.

“Wouldn’t that be a bit of a strain?”

“Why should it be? You’re used to a tape recorder. You use one every day. You give tapes of readings to clients, so what’s the problem?”

“They complain, that’s the problem. There’s so much crap on them.”

“Not your predictions?” Colette said, shocked. “They don’t complain about those, surely?”

“No, it’s the rest of the stuff—all the interference. People from Spirit, chipping in. And all the whizzes and bangs from airside. The clients think we’ve had a nice cosy chat, one to one, but when they listen back, there are all these blokes on the tape farting and spitting, and sometimes there’s music, or a woman screaming, or something noisy going on in the background.”

“Like what?”

“Fairgrounds. Parade grounds. Firing squads. Cannon.”

“I’ve never come across this,” Colette said. She was aggrieved, feeling that her good idea was being quashed. “I’ve listened to lots of tapes of psychic consultations, and there were never more than two voices on them.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” Al had sighed. “My friends don’t seem to have this problem. Not Cara, or Gemma, or any of the girls. I suppose I’ve just got more active entities than other people. So the problem would be, with the tapes, could you make the words out?”

“I bet I could if I stuck at it.” Colette thrust her jaw out. “Your pal Mandy’s done a book. She was flogging it when I went down to see her in Hove. Before I met you.”

“Did you buy one?”

“She wrote in it for me. Natasha, she put. 
Natasha, Psychic to the Stars
.” Colette snorted. “If she did it, we can.”

Al said nothing; Colette had already made it clear she had no time for Mandy, and yet Mandy—Natasha to the trade—was one of her closest psychic sisters. She’s always so smart, she thought, and she’s got the gift of the gab, and she knows what I go through, with Spirit. But already Colette was tending to push other friendships out of her life.

“So how about it?” Colette said. “We could self-publish. Sell it at the Psychic Fayres. What do you think? Seriously, we should give it a go. Anybody can write a book these days.”

THREE

Colette joined Alison in those days when the comet Hale-Bopp, like God’s shuttlecock, blazed over the market towns and dormitory suburbs, over the playing fields of Eton, over the shopping malls of Oxford, over the traffic-crazed towns of Woking and Maidenhead: over the choked exit roads and the junctions of the M4, over the superstores and out-of-town carpet ware-houses, the nurseries and prisons, the gravel pits and sewage works, and the green fields of the Home Counties shredded by diggers. Native to Uxbridge, Colette had grown up in a family whose inner workings she didn’t understand, and attended a comprehensive school where she was known as Monster. It seemed, in retrospect, a satire on her lack of monster qualities; she had in fact no looks at all, good or bad, yes or no, pro or con. In her school photographs, her indefinite features seemed neither male nor female, and her pale bobbed hair resembled a cowl.

Her shape was flat and neutral; fourteen passed, and nothing was done in the breast department. About the age of sixteen, she began to signal with her pale eyes and say, I’m a natural blonde, you know. In her English classes she was praised for her neat handwriting, and in maths she made, they told her, consistent progress. In religious studies she stared out of the window, as if she might see some Hindu deities squatting on the green mesh of the boundary fence. In history, she was asked to empathize with the sufferings of cotton mill operatives, plantation slaves, and the Scots foot soldiers at Flodden; it left her cold. Of geography, she had simply no idea at all; but she learned French quickly, and spoke it without fear and with the accent native to Uxbridge.

She stayed on after sixteen, because she didn’t know what she would do or where she would go once she left the classroom; but once her virginity was lost, and her elder sister moved out, leaving her with a room and a mirror of her own, she felt more definite, more visible, more of a presence in the world. She left school with two indifferent A-levels, didn’t think of university. Her mind was quick, shallow, and literal, her character assertive.

She went to a secretarial college—there were still secretaries then—and became competent in shorthand, typing, and simple bookkeeping. When the PC came along, she adjusted without difficulty, assimilating successively WordStar, WordPerfect, and Microsoft Word. To her second job, in marketing, she brought her spreadsheet skills (Microsoft Excel and Lotus 1-2-3), together with PowerPoint for her presentation packages. Her third job was with a large charity, as an administrator in the fund-raising section. Her mail-merging was beyond reproach; it was indifferent to her whether she used dBase or Access, for she had mastered both. But though she had all the e-skills necessary, her telephone manner was cold and faintly satirical. It was more appropriate, her supervisor noted in her annual review, for someone selling time-shares. She was hurt; she had meant to do some good in the world. She left the charity with excellent references, and took a post with a firm of event organizers. Travel was involved, usually at the back of the plane, and fourteen-hour days in cities she never got to see. Sometimes she had to think hard: had she been to Geneva? Was Barcelona the place where her travel iron blew up, or was that Dundee?

It was at an event she met Gavin. He was an itinerant software developer whose key card wouldn’t work, standing at the reception desk of a hotel in La Défense, entertaining the staff by his sad efforts in Franglais. His tie was in his pocket; his suit hanger, slung over his left shoulder, skewed his jacket away from his shirt and tugged his shirt away from his skin. She noticed the black chest hairs creeping out of the open top button, and the beads of sweat on his forehead. He seemed the very model of a man. She stood at his elbow and chipped in, sorting out the problem. At the time he seemed grateful. Only later did she realize it was the worst thing she could have done: introducing herself at the moment of his humiliation. He would rather have slept in the corridor than be rescued by some bint wearing a photograph of herself pinned over her left tit. All the same, he asked her to meet him after he’d showered and have a drink in the bar. “Well, Colette”—he read her name off her badge. “Well, Colette, you’re not a bad-looking girl.”

Gavin had no sense of humour about himself, and neither did she. So there was a thing, a thing they had in common. He had relatives in Uxbridge, it turned out, and like her he had no interest in getting beyond the hotel bar and into the city. She didn’t sleep with him till the final night of the conference, because she didn’t want to seem cheap; but she walked back in a daze to her own room, and stared at herself in the full-length mirror, and said, Colette, you’re not a bad-looking girl. Her skin was a matt beige. Her beige hair flipped cheekily at chin level, giving her a surrogate smile. Her teeth were sound. Her limbs were straight. Her hips were small. Straight-cut silk trousers covered her tough cyclist’s legs. Her bosom was created by a garment with two curved underwires, and boosted by padding that slid into a pocket so you could remove it; but why would anyone want to do that? Without taking her eyes from her own image, she cupped her hands beneath her breasts. Gavin would have the whole of her: all that was hers to give.

They saw a converted flat in Whitton, and thought it might be a good investment. It was leasehold, of course; otherwise, Colette would have done the conveyancing herself, from a DIY guide. As it was, she rang around the solicitors and beat them down to a price, making sure she got their best offers in writing. Once they had moved into the flat, Gavin said, let’s split the bills. Kids, he said, were not his priority at this time in his life. She got an IUD fitted, as she didn’t trust the Pill; against the workings of nature, some mechanical contrivance seemed called for. Later he would say, you’re unnatural, you’re cold, I wanted kids but you went off and got this lump of poisoned plastic stuck up you, and you didn’t tell me. This was not strictly true; she had cut out an article about the topic from a trade mag passed to her by an ex-colleague who worked for a medical supplies company, and she had put it in the back pocket of his briefcase, where she had thought he might see it.

They got married. People did. It was the tag end of the Thatcher/Major years and people held a wedding to show off. They didn’t have friends, so they invited everybody they knew. The wedding took six months to plan. When she woke up on the day, she had an urge to run downstairs, and howl in the streets of Whitton. Instead she pressed her frock and climbed into it. She was alone in the flat; Gavin was on his stag night, and she wondered what she would do if he didn’t turn up: marry herself? The wedding was designed to be exhausting, to wring value from each moment they had paid for. So they could recover, she had booked ten days in the Seychelles: sea view, balcony, private taxi transfer, and fruit in room on arrival.

Gavin turned up just in time, his eyes pouched and his skin grey. After the registrar, they went out to a hotel in Berkshire with a trout steam running through the grounds and fishing flies in glass cases on the walls of the bar, and French windows leading onto a stone terrace. She was photographed against the stone balustrade, with Gavin’s little nieces pawing her skirts. They had a marquee, and a band. They had gravlax with dill sauce, served on black plates, and a chicken dish that tasted, Gavin said, like an airline dinner. The Uxbridge people on both sides came, and never spoke to each other. Gavin kept belching. A niece was sick, luckily not on Colette’s dress, which was hired. Her tiara, though, was bought: a special order to fit her narrow skull. Later she didn’t know what to do with it. Space was tight in the flat in Whitton, and her drawers were crammed with packets of tights, which she bought by the dozen, and with sachets and scent balls to perfume her knickers. When she reached in amongst her underwear, the faux pearls of the tiara would roll beneath her fingers, and its gilt lattices and scrolls would remind her that her life was open, unfolding. It seemed mercenary to advertise it in the local paper. Besides, Gavin said, there can’t be two people with a head shaped like yours.

The pudding at their wedding breakfast was strawberries and meringue stacked up in a tower, served on frosted glass platters sprinkled with little green flecks, which proved to be not chopped mint leaves but finely snipped chives. Uxbridge ate it with a stout appetite; after all, they’d already done raw fish. But Colette—once her suspicion was verified by a tiny taste at the tip of her tongue—had flown out in her tiara, cornered the duty manager, and told him she proposed to sue the hotel in the small claims court. They paid her off, as she knew they would, being afraid of the publicity; she and Gavin went back there gratis for their anniversary dinner, and enjoyed a bottle of house champagne. It was too wet that night to walk by the trout stream: a lowering, misty evening in June. Gavin said it was too hot, and walked out onto the terrace as she was finishing her main course. By then the marriage was over, anyway.

It was no particular sexual incompatibility that had broken up her marriage: Gavin liked it on Sunday mornings, and she had no objection. Neither was there, as she learned later, any particular planetary incompatibility. It was just that the time had come in her relationship with Gavin when, as people said, she could see no future in it.

When she arrived at this point, she bought a large-format softback called 
What Your Handwriting Reveals
. She was disappointed to find that your hand-writing can’t shed any light on your future. It only tells of character, and your present and your past, and her present and her past she was clear about. As for her character, she didn’t seem to have any. It was because of her character that she was reduced to going to bookshops.

The following week she returned the handwriting book to the shop. They were having a promotional offer—bring it back if it doesn’t thrill. She had to tell the boy behind the counter why, exactly, it didn’t; I suppose, she said, after so many years of word processing, I have no handwriting left. Her eyes flickered over him, from his head downwards, to where the counter cut off the view; she was already, she realized, looking for a man she could move on to. “Can I see the manager?” she asked, and amiably, scratching his barnet, the boy replied, “You’re looking at him.” “Really?” she said. She had never seen it before: a manager who dressed out of a dumpster. He gave her back her money, and she browsed the shelves, and picked up a book about tarot cards. “You’ll need a pack to go with that,” the boy said, when she got to the cash desk. “Otherwise you won’t get the idea. There are different sorts, shall I show you? There’s Egyptian tarot. There’s Shakespeare tarot. Do you like Shakespeare?”

As if,
 she thought. She was the last customer of the evening. He closed up the shop and they went to the pub. He had a room in a shared flat. In bed he kept pressing her clit with his finger, as if he were inputting a sale on the cash machine: saying, Helen, is that all right for you? She’d given him a wrong name, and she hated it, that he couldn’t see through to what she was really called. She’d thought Gavin was useless: but honestly! In the end she faked it, because she was bored and she was getting cramp. The Shakespeare boy said, Helen, that was great for me too.