Beyond Black

Colette released her breath from the tight space where she held it.

Alone, spotlit, perspiring slightly, Alison looked down at her audience. Her voice was low, sweet and confident, and her aura was a perfectly adjusted aquamarine, flowing like a silk shawl about her shoulders and upper arms. ‘Now, Lee, I want you to sit back in your seat, take a deep breath, and relax. And that goes for all of you. Put on your happy faces – you’re not going to see anything that will frighten you. I won’t be going into a trance, and you won’t be seeing spooks, or hearing spirit music.’ She looked around, smiling, taking in the rows. ‘So why don’t you all sit back and enjoy the evening? All I do is, I just tune in, I just have to listen hard and decide who’s out there. Now if I get a message for you, please raise your hand, shout up – because if you don’t it’s very frustrating for the spirits trying to come through. Don’t be shy, you just shout up or give me a wave. Then my helpers will rush over to you with the microphone – don’t be afraid of it when it comes to you, just hold it steady and speak up.’

They were all ages. The old had brought cushions for their bad backs, the young had bare midriffs and piercings. The young had stuffed their coats under their chairs, but their elders had rolled theirs and held them on their knees, like swaddled babies. ‘Smile,’ Al told them. ‘You’re here to enjoy yourselves, and so am I. Now, Lee my love, let me get back to you – where were we? There’s a lady here called Kathleen, who’s sending lots of love in your direction. Who would that be, Leanne?’

Leanne was a dud. She was a young lass of seventeen or so, hung about with unnecessary buttons and bows, her hair in twee little bunches, her face peaky. Kathleen, Al suggested, was her granny: but Leanne wouldn’t own it because she didn’t know her granny’s name.

‘Think hard, darling,’ Al coaxed. ‘She’s desperate for a word with you.’

But Lee shook her bunches. She said that she didn’t think she had a granny; which made some of the audience snigger. ‘Kathleen says she lives in a field, at a certain amount of money. Bear with me. Penny. Penny Meadow, do you know that address? Up the hill from the market – such a pull, she says, when you’ve got a bagful of potatoes.’ She smiled at the audience. ‘This seems to be before you could order your groceries online,’ she said. ‘Honestly, when you think how they lived in those days – we forget to count our blessings, don’t we? Now, Lee, what about Penny Meadow? What about Granny Kathleen walking uphill?’

Leanne indicated incredulity. She lived on Sandringham Court, she said.

‘Yes, I know,’ Al said. ‘I know where you live, sweetheart, but this isn’t anywhere around here, it’s a filthy old place, Lancashire, Yorkshire, I’m getting a smudge on my fingers, it’s grey, it’s ash, it’s something below the place you hang the washing – could it be Ashton-under-Lyne? Never mind,’ Alison said. ‘Go home, Leanne, and ask your mum what Granny was called. Ask her where she lived. Then you’ll know, won’t you, that she was here for you tonight?’

There was a patter of applause. Strictly speaking, she hadn’t earned it. But they acknowledged that she’d tried; and Leanne’s silliness, deeper than average, had brought the audience over to her side. It was not uncommon to find family memory so short, in these towns where nobody comes from, these south-eastern towns with their floating populations and their car parks where the centre should be. Nobody has roots here; and maybe they don’t want to acknowledge roots, or recall their grimy places of origin and their illiterate foremothers up north. These days, besides, the kids don’t remember back more than eighteen months – the drugs, she supposed. She was sorry for Kathleen, panting and striving, her wheezy goodwill evaporating, unacknowledged; Penny Meadow and all the terraced rows about seemed shrouded in a northern smog. Something about a cardigan, she was saying. A certain class of dead people was always talking about cardigans. The button off it, the pearl button, see if it’s dropped behind the dresser drawer, that little drawer, that top drawer, I found a threepenny bit there once, back of the drawer, it gets down between the you-know, slips down the whatsit, it’s wedged, like – and so I took it, this threepence, and I bought me friend a cake with a walnut on top. Yes, yes, Al said, they’re lovely, those kind of cakes: but it’s time to go, pet. Lie down, Kathleen. You go and have a nice lie-down. I will, Kathleen said, but tell her I want her mum to look for that button. And by the way, if you ever see my friend Maureen Harrison, tell her I’ve been looking for her this thirty year.

Colette’s eyes darted around, looking for the next pickup. Her helpers were a boy of seventeen, in a sort of snooker player’s outfit, a shiny waistcoat and a skewed bow tie; and, would you believe it, the dozy little slapper from the bar. Colette thought, I’ll need to be everywhere. The first five minutes, thank God, are no guide to the evening to come.

Look, this is how you do it. Suppose it’s a slow night, no one in particular pushing your buttons; only the confused distant chit-chat that comes from the world of the dead. So you’re looking around the hall and smiling, saying, ‘Look, I want to show you how I do what I do. I want to show you it’s nothing scary, it’s just, basically, abilities that we all have. Now can I ask, how many of you,’ she pauses, looks around, ‘how many of you have sometimes felt you’re psychic?’

After that it’s according to, as Colette would say, the demographics. There are shy towns and towns where the hands shoot up, and of course as soon as you’re on stage you can sense the mood, even if you weren’t tipped off about it, even if you’ve never been in that particular place before. But a little word, a word of encouragement, a ‘don’t hold back on me’; sooner or later the hands go up. You look around – there’s always that compromise, between flattering stage lighting, and the need to see their faces. Then you choose a woman near the front, not so young as Leanne but not so old she’s completely buggered up: and you get her to tell you her name.

‘Gillian.’

Gillian. Right. Here goes.

‘Gill, you’re the sort of woman – well,’ she gives a little laugh and a shake of her head, ‘well, you’re a bit of a human dynamo, I mean, that’s how your friends describe you, isn’t it? Always on the go, morning, noon and night, you’re the sort of person, am I right, who can keep all the plates spinning? But if there’s one thing, if there’s one thing, you know, all your friends say, it’s that you don’t give enough time to yourself. I mean, you’re the one everybody depends on, you’re the one everybody comes to for advice, you’re the Rock of Gibraltar, aren’t you, but then you have to say to yourself, hang on, hang on a minute, who do I go to when I want advice? Who’s there for Gilly, when it comes to the crunch? The thing is, you’re very supportive, of your friends, your family, it’s just give give give, and you do find yourself, just now and then, catching yourself up and saying, hang on now, who’s giving back to me? And the thing about you, Gillian – now stop me if you think I’m wrong – is that you’ve got so much to give, but the problem is you’re so busy running round picking up after other people and putting their lives to rights, that you haven’t hardly got any opportunity to develop your own, I mean your own talents, your own interests. When you think back, when you think back to what made you happy as a young girl, and all the things you wanted out of life – you see, you’ve been on what I call a Cycle of Caring, and it’s not given you, Gill, it’s not given you the opportunity to look within, to look beyond – you really are capable, now I’m not telling you this to flatter you, but you really are capable of the most extraordinary things if you put your mind to it, if you just give all those talents of yours a chance to breathe. Now am I right? Say if I’m not right. Yes, you’re nodding. Do you recognise yourself?’

Gillian has of course been nodding since the first time Al paused for breath. In Alison’s experience there’s not a woman alive who, once past her youth, doesn’t recognise this as a true and fair assessment of her character and potential. Or there may be such a woman, out in some jungle or desert: but these blighted exceptions are not likely to be visiting Alison’s Evening of Psychic Arts.

She is now established as a mind-reader; and if she can tell Gillian something about herself, her family, so much the better. But she’s really done enough – Gillian’s brimming with gratification – so even if nobody comes through from spirit, she can just move right on to whoever is her next target. But long before this point Alison has become conscious of a background mutter (at times rising to a roar) situated not there in the hall but towards the back of her skull, behind her ears, resonating privately in the bone. And on this evening, like every other, she fights down the panic we would all feel, trapped with a crowd of dead strangers whose intentions towards us we can’t know. She takes a breath, she smiles, and she starts her peculiar form of listening. It is a silent sensory ascent; it is like listening from a stepladder, poised on the top rung; she listens at the ends of her nerves, at the limit of her capacities. When you’re doing platform work, it’s rare that the dead need coaxing. The skill is in isolating the voices, picking out one and letting the others recede – making them recede, forcing them back if need be, because there are some big egos in the next world. Then taking that voice, the dead voice you’ve chosen, and fitting it to the living body, to the ears that are ready to hear.

So: time to work the room. Colette tensed, forward on her toes, ready to sprint with the mike. ‘This lady. I feel some connection with the law here. Do you have to see a solicitor?’

‘Constantly,’ the woman said. ‘I’m married to one.’

There was a yell of laughter. Al joined it. Colette smirked. She won’t lose them now, she thought. Of course she wanted Al to succeed; of course I do, she told herself. They had a joint mortgage, after all, financially they were tied together. And if I quit working for her, she thought, how would I get another job? When it comes to ‘your last position’, what would I put on my CV?

‘Who’s got indigestion at the back?’ Al’s forehead was damp, the skin at the nape of her neck was clammy. She liked to have clothes with pockets so she could carry a folded cologne tissue, ready for a surreptitious dab, but you don’t usually get pockets in women’s clothes, and it looks stupid taking a handbag out there on stage. ‘This lady,’ she said. She pointed; the lucky opals winked. ‘This is the one I’m speaking to. You’re the one with the heartburn, I can feel it. I have someone here for you who’s very happy in spirit world, a Margo, Marje, can you accept that? A petite woman wearing a turquoise blouse, she was very fond of it, wasn’t she? She says you’ll remember.’

‘I do remember, I do,’ the woman said. She took the mike gingerly, and held it as if it might detonate. ‘Marje was my aunt. She was fond of turquoise and also lilac.’

‘Yes,’ and now Al softened her voice, ‘and she was like a mother to you, wasn’t she? She’s still looking out for you, in spirit world. Now tell me, have you seen your GP about that indigestion?’

‘No,’ the woman said. ‘Well, they’re so busy.’

‘They’re well paid to look after you, my love.’

‘Coughs and colds all around you,’ the woman said. ‘You come out worse than you went in – and you never see the same doctor twice.’

There was an audible smirk from the audience, a wash of fellow feeling. But the woman herself looked fretful. She wanted to hear from Marje; the dyspepsia she lived with every day.

‘Stop making excuses.’ Al almost stamped her foot. ‘Marje says, why are you putting it off? Call the surgery tomorrow morning and book yourself in. There’s nothing to be frightened of.’

Isn’t there? Relief dawned on the woman’s face; or an emotion that would be relief, when it clarified; for the moment she was tremulous, a hand on her ribs, folded in on herself as if to protect the space of the pain. It would take her a while to give up thinking it was cancer.

Now it’s the glasses ploy. Look for a woman in middle age who isn’t wearing glasses and say: have you had your eyes tested recently? Then the whole world of optometry is at your command. If she had an eye test last week, she’ll say, yes, as a matter of fact I have. They’ll applaud. If she says no, not recently, she’ll be thinking, but I know I ought to…As for the woman who says she wears no glasses ever: oh, my love, those headaches of yours! Why don’t you just pop along to Boots? I can see you, a month from now, in some really pretty squarish frames.

You could ask them if they need to see the dentist, since everybody does, all the time; but you don’t want to see them flinch. You’re giving them a gentle nudge, not a pinch. It’s about impressing them without scaring them; softening the edges of their fright and disbelief.

‘This lady – I see a broken wedding ring – did you lose your husband? He passed quite recently? And very recently you planted a rose bush in his memory.’

‘Not exactly,’ the woman said, ‘I placed some – in fact it was carnations – ’

‘ – carnations in his memory,’ said Al, ‘because they were his favourite, weren’t they?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said the woman. Her voice slid off the mike; she was too worried to keep her head still.

‘You know, aren’t men funny?’ Al threw it out to the audience. ‘They just don’t like talking about these things, they think it means they’re oversensitive or something – as if we’d mind. But I can assure you, he’s telling me now, carnations were his favourite.’

‘But where is he?’ the woman said: still off the mike. She wasn’t going to quarrel about the flowers; she was pressed against the back of her seat, almost hostile, on the verge of tears.

Sometimes they waited for you afterwards, the punters, at the back exit, when you were running head down for the car park. In the ghastly lights behind the venue, in the drizzle and the rain, they’d say, when you gave me the message I didn’t know, I didn’t understand, I couldn’t take it in. ‘I know it’s difficult,’ Al would say, trying to soothe them, trying to help them, but trying, for God’s sake, to get them off her back; she would be sweating, shaking, desperate to get into the car and off. But now, thank God, she had Colette, to manage the situation; Colette would smoothly pass over their business card, and say, ‘When you feel ready, you might like to come for a private reading.’

Now Alison fished around in the front rows for somebody who’d lost a pet and found a woman whose terrier, on an impulse three weeks ago, had dashed out of the front door into the traffic. ‘Don’t you listen,’ she told the woman, ‘to people who tell you animals have no souls. They go on in spirit, same as we do.’

Animals distressed her, not cats, just dogs: their ownerless whimper as they padded through the afterlife on the trail of their masters. ‘And has your husband gone over too?’ she asked, and when the woman said yes, she nodded sympathetically but pulled her attention away, throwing out a new question, changing the topic: ‘Anybody over here got blood pressure?’

Let her think it, that dog and master are together now; let her take comfort, since comfort’s what she’s paid for. Let her assume that Tiddles and his boss are together in the Beyond. Reunion is seldom so simple; and really it’s better for dogs – if people could just grasp it – not to have an owner waiting for them, spiritside. Without a person to search for, they join up in happy packs, and within a year or two you never hear from them individually: there’s just a joyful, corporate barking, instead of that lost whine, the sore pads, the disconsolate drooping head of the dog following a fading scent. Dogs had figured in her early life – men, and dogs – and much of that life was unclear to her. If you knew what the dogs were up to, she reasoned, if you knew what they were up to in spirit world, it might help you work out where their owners were now. They must be gone over, she thought, most of those men I knew when I was a child; the dogs, for sure, are in spirit, for years have passed and those kind of dogs don’t make old bones. Sometimes in the supermarket she would find herself standing in Pets, eyeing up the squeaky toys, the big tough chews made for big friendly jaws; then she would shake herself, and move slowly back towards organic vegetables, where Colette would be waiting with the trolley, cross with her for vanishing.

She will be cross tonight, Al thought, smiling to herself: I’ve slipped up again about the blood pressure. Colette has nagged her, don’t talk about blood pressure, talk about hypertension. When she’d argued back – ‘they might not understand me’ – Colette lost her temper and said, ‘Alison, without blood pressure we’d all be dead, but if you want to sound like something from the remedial stream, don’t let me get in your way.’

Now a woman put her hand up, admitted to the blood pressure.

‘Carrying a bit of weight, aren’t we, darling?’ Al asked her. ‘I’ve got your mum here. She’s a bit annoyed with you – well, no, I’m pitching it a bit high – concerned, would be more like it. You need to drop a stone, she’s saying. Can you accept that?’ The woman nodded: humiliated. ‘Oh, don’t mind what they think.’ Al swept her hand over the audience; she gave her special throaty chuckle, her woman-to-woman laugh. ‘You’ve no need to worry about what anybody here’s thinking, we could most of us stand to lose a few pounds. I mean, look at me, I’m a size twenty and not ashamed of it. But your mum now, your mum, she says you’re letting yourself go, and that’s a shame, because you know you’re really, look at you, you’ve got such a lot going for you, lovely hair, lovely skin – well, excuse me, but it seems to me your mum’s a plain-spoken lady, so excuse me if I offend anybody, she’s saying, get up off your bum and go to the gym.’

This is Al’s public self: a little bit jaunty and a little bit crude, a bit of a schoolmistress and a bit of a flirt. She often speaks to the public about ‘my wicked sense of humour’, warning them not to take offence; but what happens to her sense of humour in the depth of the night, when she wakes up trembling and crying, with Morris crowing at her in the corner of the room?

Colette thought, you are a size twenty-six. And you are ashamed of it. The thought was so loud, inside her own head, that she was amazed it didn’t jump out into the hall. ‘No,’ Al was saying, ‘please give the mike back to this lady, I’m afraid I’ve embarrassed her and I want to put it right.’ The woman was reluctant, and Al said to her neighbour, ‘Just hold that mike steady under her chin.’ Then Alison told the fat woman several things about her mother, which she’d often thought but not liked to admit to. ‘Oh, and I have your granny. Your granny’s coming through. Sarah-Anne? Now she’s an old soul,’ Al said. ‘You were five when she passed, am I right?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Speak up, my love.’

‘Small. I was small.’

‘Yes, you don’t remember much about her, but the point is she’s never left you, she’s still around, looking after the family. And she likes those cabinets you’ve got – I can’t quite make this out – a new kitchen, is it?’

‘Oh my God. Yes,’ the woman said. ‘Yes.’ She shifted in her seat and turned bright red.

Al chuckled, indulging her surprise. ‘She’s often with you in that kitchen. And by the way, you were right not to go for the brushed steel, I know they tried to talk you into it, but it’s so over and done with, there’s nothing worse than a dated kitchen when you come to sell, and besides it’s such a harsh look at the heart of the home. Sarah-Anne says, you won’t go wrong with light oak.’

They burst into applause: the punters, the trade. They are deeply appreciative over information about their kitchen fittings: they marvel at your uncanny knowledge of where they position their bread bin. This is how you handle them; you tell them the small things, the personal things, the things no one else could really know. By this means you make them drop their guard: only then will the dead begin to speak. On a good night, you can hear the scepticism leaking from their minds, with a low hiss like a tyre deflating.

Someone in uniform was trying to get through. It was a policeman, young and keen, with a flushed face; he was eager for promotion. She worked the rows, but no one would own him. Perhaps he was still earthside, employed at the local station: you did get these crossed wires, from time to time. Something to do with radio frequencies, perhaps?

‘This lady, have you got ear trouble? Or ear trouble somewhere in the family? Slowly, the barmaid lurched across the hall in her platform shoes, the mike held out at arm’s length.

‘What?’ the woman said.

‘Ear trouble.’

‘The boy next door to me plays football,’ the woman said, ‘he’s done his knee up. He was getting in trim for the World Cup. Not that he’s playing in it. Only in the park. Their dog died last year, but I don’t think it had ear trouble.’

‘No, not your neighbour,’ Al insisted. ‘You, someone close to you.’

‘I haven’t got anyone close to me.’

‘What about throat trouble? Nose trouble? Anything in the ENT line at all? You have to understand this,’ Al said, ‘when I get a message from spirit world, I can’t give it back. I can’t pick and choose. Think of me as your answering machine. Imagine if people from spirit world had phones. Now your answering machine, you press the button and it plays your messages back. It doesn’t wipe some out, on the grounds that you don’t need to know them.’

‘And it records the wrong numbers, too,’ said a pert girl near the front. She had her friends with her; their sniggers ruffled adjacent rows.

Alison smiled. It was for her to make the jokes; she wouldn’t be upstaged. ‘Yes, I admit we record the wrong numbers. And we record the nuisance calls, if you like to put it that way. I sometimes think they have telesales in the next world, because I never sit down with a nice cup of coffee without some stranger trying to get through. Just imagine – double-glazing salesmen…debt collectors…’

The girl’s smile faded. She tensed. Al said, ‘Look, darling. Let me give you a word of advice. Cut up that credit card. Throw away those catalogues. You can break these spending habits – well, you must, really. You have to grow up and exercise some self-control. Or I can see the bailiffs in, before Christmas.’

Al’s gaze rested, one by one, on those who had dared to snigger; then she dropped her voice, whipped her attention away from the troublemaker and became confidential with her audience. ‘The point is this. If I get a message I don’t censor it. I don’t ask, do you need it? I don’t ask, does it make sense? I do my duty, I do what I’m here for. I put it out there, so the person it applies to can pick it up. Now people in spirit world can make mistakes. They can be wrong, just like the living. But what I hear, I pass on. And it may happen, you know, what I tell you may mean nothing to you at the time. That’s why I sometimes have to say to you, stay with that: go home: live with it. This week or next week, you’ll go, oh I get it now! Then you’ll have a little smile, and think, she wasn’t such a fool, was she?’ She crossed the stage; the opals blazed. ‘And then again, there are some messages from spirit world that aren’t as simple as they seem. This lady, for example, when I speak about ear trouble, what I may be picking up is not so much a physical problem – I might be talking about a breakdown in communication.’

The woman stared up at her glassily. Al passed on. ‘Jenny’s here. She went suddenly. She didn’t feel the impact, it was instantaneous. She wants you to know.’

‘Yes.’

‘And she sends her love to Peg. Who’s Peg?’

‘Her aunt.’

‘And to Sally, and Mrs Moss. And Liam. And Topsy.’

Jenny lay down. She’d had enough. Her little light was fading. But wait, here’s another – tonight she picked them up as if she were vacuuming the carpet. But it was almost nine o’clock, and it was quite usual to get on to something serious and painful before the interval. ‘Your little girl, was she very poorly before she passed? I’m getting – this is not recent, we’re going back now, but I have a very clear – I have a picture of a poor little mite who’s really very sick, bless her.’