Beyond Black

‘It was leukaemia,’ her mother said.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Al said, swiftly agreeing, as if she had thought of it first: so that the woman would go home and say, she told me Lisa had leukaemia, she knew. All she could feel was the weakness and the heat, the energy of the last battle draining away: the flickering pulse at the hairless temple, and the blue eyes, like marbles under translucent lids, rolling into stillness. Dry your tears, Alison said. All the tears of agony you’ve shed, the world doesn’t know, the world can’t count them; and soberly, the woman agreed: nobody knows, she said, and nobody can count. Al, her own voice trembling, assured her, Lisa’s doing fine airside, the next world’s treated her well. A beautiful young woman stood before her – twenty-two, twenty-three – wearing her grandmother’s bridal veil. But whether it was Lisa or not, Al could not say.

Eight fifty, by Colette’s watch. It was time for Al to lighten up. You have to start this process no less than eight minutes before the end of the first half. If the interval catches you in the middle of something thrilling and risky, they simply don’t want to break; but she, Al, she needed the break, to get back there, touch base with Colette, gulp a cold drink and redo her face. So she would begin another ward round now, picking up a few aches and pains. Already she was homing in on a woman who suffered from headaches. Don’t we all? Colette thought. It was one of the nets Al could safely cast. God knows, her own head ached. There was something about these summer nights, summer nights in small towns, that made you feel that you were seventeen again, and had chances in life. The throat ached and clogged then; there was tightness behind her eyes, as if unshed tears had banked up. Her nose was running, and she hadn’t got a tissue.

Al had found a woman with a stiff left knee, and was advising her on traditional Chinese medicine; it was a diversion, but they’d go away disappointed if she didn’t throw in some jargon about meridians and ley lines and chakras and feng shui. Gently, soothingly, she was bringing the first part of the evening to a close; and she was having her little joke now, asking about the lady standing at the back, leaning against the wall there, the lady in beige with a bit of a sniffle. It’s ridiculous, Colette thought, she can’t possibly see me, from where she’s standing. She just, somehow, she must just simply know that at some point in the evening I cry. ‘Never mind, my dear,’ Al said. ‘A runny nose is nothing to be ashamed of. Wipe it on your sleeve. We’re not looking, are we?’

You’ll pay for it later, Colette thought, and so she will; she’ll have to regurgitate or else digest all the distress that she’s sucked in from the carpet and the walls. By the end of the evening she’ll be sick to her stomach from other people’s chemotherapy, feverish and short of breath; or twitching and cold, full of their torsions and strains. She’ll have a neck spasm, or a twisted knee, or a foot she can hardly put on the floor. She’ll need to climb into the bath, moaning, amid the rising steam of aromatherapy oils from her special travel pack; and knock back a handful of painkillers, which, she always says, she should be allowed to set against her income tax.

Almost nine o’clock. Alison looked up, to the big double doors marked EXIT. There was a little green man above the door, running on the spot. She felt like that little green man. ‘Time to break,’ she said. ‘You’ve been lovely.’ She waved to them. ‘Stretch your legs and I’ll see you in fifteen.’

Morris was sprawled in Al’s chair when she came into her dressing room. He had his dick out and his foreskin pushed back, and he’d been playing with her lipstick, winding it up to the top of the tube. She evicted him with a dig to his shin from her pointed toe; dropped herself into the vacated chair – she shuddered at the heat of it – and kicked off her shoes.

‘Do yourself up,’ she told him. ‘Button your trousers, Morris.’ She spoke to him as if he were a two-year-old who hadn’t learned the common decencies.

She eased off the opals. ‘My hands have swelled up.’ Colette watched her through the mirror. Al’s skin was bland and creamy, flesh and fluid plumping it out from beneath. ‘Is the air conditioning working?’ She pulled at bits of her clothing, detaching them from the sticky bits of herself.

‘As if carnations were anybody’s favourite!’ Colette said.

‘What?’ Al was shaking her hands in the air, as if they were damp washing.

‘That poor woman who was just widowed. You said roses, but she said carnations, so then you said carnations.’

‘Colette, could you try to bear in mind, I’ve talked to about thirty people since then?’

Alison held her arms in a ‘U’ above her head, her naked fingers spread. ‘Let the fluid drain,’ she said. ‘Anything else, Colette? Let’s have it.’

‘You always say, oh, keep a note, Colette, keep your eyes open, listen out and tell me what goes right and what goes wrong. But you’re not willing to listen, are you? Perhaps it’s you who’s got the hearing problem.’

‘At least I haven’t got a sniffle problem.’

‘I can never understand why you take your shoes off, and your rings off, when you’ve got to force them back on again.’

‘Can’t you?’ Al sipped her blackcurrant juice, which she brought with her in her own carton. ‘What can you understand?’ Though Al’s voice was lazy, this was turning into a nasty little scrap. Morris had lain down across the doorway, ready to trip up anyone who came in.

‘Try thinking yourself into my body,’ Al suggested. Colette turned away and mouthed, no thank you. ‘It’s hot under the lights. Half an hour and I’m fit to drop. I know you’ve been running around with the mike, but it’s easier on the feet to be moving than standing still.’

‘Is it really? How would you know that?’

‘It’s easy, when you’re thin. Everything’s easier. Moving. Thinking. Deciding what you’ll do and what you won’t. You have choices. You can choose your clothes. Choose your company. I can’t.’ Al drank the end of her carton, with a little sound of sucking and bubbling. She put it down, and squashed the tip of the straw, judiciously, with her forefinger.

‘Oh, and the kitchen units,’ Colette said.

‘What’s your problem? I was right.’

‘It’s just telepathy,’ Colette said.

‘Just?’

‘Her granny didn’t tell you.’

‘How can you be sure?’

She couldn’t, of course. Like the punters out there, she could entertain simultaneously any number of conflicting opinions. They could believe in Al, and not believe in her, both at once. Faced with the impossible, their minds, like Colette’s, simply scuttled off in another direction.

‘Look,’ Alison said, ‘do we have to go through this every time? I would have thought we’d been on the road together for long enough now. And we’ve been making the tapes, haven’t we? Writing this book you say we’re writing? I’d have thought I’d answered most of your questions by now.’

‘All except the ones that matter.’

Al shrugged. A quick dab of Rescue Remedy under the tongue, and then she began to repaint her lips. Colette could see the effort of concentration needed; the spirits were nagging in her ear, wanting to stake out their places for the second half.

‘You see, I’d have imagined,’ she said, ‘that sometimes, once in a while, you’d feel the urge to be honest.’

Alison gave a little comic shiver, like a character in a pantomime. ‘What, with the punters? They’d run a mile,’ she said. ‘Even the ones with the blood pressure would be up and charging out the door. It’d kill them.’ She stood up and pulled down her clothes, smoothing the creases over her hips. ‘And what would that do but make more work for me?’

‘Your hem’s up at the back,’ Colette said. Sighing, she sank to her knees and gave the satin a tug.

‘I’m afraid it’s my bottom that does it,’ Al said. ‘Oh dear.’ She turned sideways to the mirror, resettled the skirt at what passed for her waistline. ‘Am I OK now?’ She held up her arms, stamped her feet in her high heels. ‘I could have been a flamenco dancer,’ she said. ‘That would have been more fun.’

‘Oh, surely not,’ Colette said. ‘Not more fun than this?’ She nudged her own head at the mirror, and smoothed down her hair; damp, it lay on her head like strings of white licqorice.

The manager put his head around the door. ‘All right?’ he said.

‘Will you stop saying that?’ Colette turned on him. ‘No, not all right. I want you out there for the second half, that girl from the bar is useless. And turn the bloody air conditioning up, we’re all melting.’ She indicated Alison. ‘Especially her.’

Morris rolled lazily on to his back in the doorway and made faces at the manager. ‘Bossy cow, ain’t she?’

‘So sorry to disturb your toilette,’ the manager said, bowing to Alison.

‘OK, OK, time to move.’ Colette clapped her hands. ‘They’re out there waiting.’

Morris grabbed Al’s ankle as she stepped over him. She checked her stride, took a half-pace backwards, and ground her heel into his face.

The second half usually began with a question-and-answer session. When Colette first joined Al she had worried about this part of the evening. She waited for some sceptic to jump up and challenge Al about her mistakes and evasions. But Al laughed. She said, those sort of people don’t come out at night, they stay at home watching Question Time and shouting at the TV.

Tonight they were quick off the mark. A woman stood up, wreathed in smiles. She accepted the microphone easily, like a professional. ‘Well, you can guess what we all want to know.’

Al simpered back at her. ‘The royal passing.’

The woman all but curtsied. ‘Have you had any communication from Her Majesty the Queen Mother? How is she faring in the other world? Has she been reunited with King George?’

‘Oh yes,’ Alison said, ‘she’ll be reunited.’

In fact, the chances are about the same as meeting somebody you know at a main-line station at rush hour. It’s not 14 million to one, like the National Lottery, but you have to take into account that the dead, like the living, sometimes like to dodge and weave.

‘And Princess Margaret? Has she seen HRH her daughter?’

Princess Margaret came through. Al couldn’t stop her. She seemed to be singing a comic song. Nothing derails an evening so fast as royalty. They expect to make the running, they choose the topic, they talk and you’re supposed to listen. Somebody, perhaps the princess herself, was pounding a piano, and other voices were beginning to chime in. But Alison was in a hurry; she wanted to get to a man, the evening’s first man, who’d got his hand up with a question. Ruthless, she gave the whole tribe the brush-off: Margaret Rose, Princess Di, Prince Albert, and a faint old cove who might be some sort of Plantagenet. It was interesting for Al that you got so many history programmes on TV these days. Many a night she’d sat on the sofa, hugging her plump calves, pointing out people she knew. ‘Is that really Mrs Pankhurst?’ she’d say. ‘I’ve never seen her in that hat.’

The man had risen to his feet. The manager – pretty quick round the room now Colette had given him a rocket – had got the mike across the hall. Poor old bloke, he looked shaky. ‘I’ve never done this before,’ he said.

‘Take it steady,’ Al advised. ‘No need to rush, sir.’

‘Never been to one of these,’ he said. ‘But I’m getting on a bit myself, now, so…’ He wanted to know about his dad, who’d had an amputation before he died. Would he be reunited with his leg, in spirit world?

Al could reassure him on the point. In spirit world, she said, people are healthy and in their prime. ‘They’ve got all their bits and whatsits. Whenever they were at their happiest, whenever they were at their healthiest, that’s how you’ll find them in spirit world.’

The logic of this, as Colette had often pointed out, was that a wife could find herself paired with a pre-adolescent for a husband. Or your son could, in spirit world, be older than you. ‘You’re quite right, of course,’ Al would say blithely. Her view was, believe what you want, Colette: I’m not here to justify myself to you.

The old man didn’t sit down; he clung, as if he were at sea, to the back of the chair in the row ahead. He was hoping his dad would come through, he said, with a message. Al smiled. ‘I wish I could get him for you, sir. But again it’s like the telephone, isn’t it? I can’t call them, they have to call me. They have to want to come through. And then again, I need a bit of help from my spirit guide.’

It was at this stage in the evening that it usually came out about the spirit guide. ‘He’s a little circus clown,’ Al would say. ‘Morris is the name. Been with me since I was a child. I used to see him everywhere. He’s a darling little bloke, always laughing, tumbling, doing his tricks. It’s from Morris that I get my wicked sense of humour.’

Colette could only admire the radiant sincerity with which Al said this: year after year, night after bloody night. She blazed like a planet, the lucky opals her distant moons. For Morris insisted, he insisted that she give him a good character, and if he wasn’t flattered and talked up, he’d get his revenge. ‘But then,’ Al said to the audience, ‘he’s got his serious side too. He certainly has. You’ve heard, haven’t you, of the tears of a clown?’

This led on to the next, the obvious question: how old was she when she first knew about her extraordinary psychic gifts?

‘Very small, very small indeed. In fact, I remember being aware of presences before I could walk or talk. But of course it was the usual story with a sensitive child – sensitive is what we call it, when a person’s attuned to spirit – you tell the grown-ups what you see, what you hear, but they don’t want to know, you’re just a kiddie, they think you’re fantasising. I mean, I was often accused of being naughty when I was only passing on some comment that had come to me through Spirit. Not that I hold it against my mum, God bless her, I mean, she’s had a lot of trouble in her life – and then along came me!’ The trade chuckled, en masse, indulgent.

Time to draw questions to a close, Alison said; because now I’m going to try to make some more contacts for you. There was applause. ‘Oh you’re so lovely,’ she said. ‘Such a lovely, warm and understanding audience, I can always count on a good time whenever I come in your direction. Now I want you to sit back, I want you to relax, I want you to smile, and I want you to send some lovely positive thoughts up here to me…and let’s see what we can get.’

Colette glanced down the hall. The manager seemed to have his eye on the ball, and the vague boy, after shambling about aimlessly for the first half, was now at least looking at the trade instead of up at the ceiling or down at his own feet. Time to slip backstage for a cigarette? It was smoking that kept her thin: smoking and running and worrying. Her heels clicked in the dim narrow passage, on the composition floor.

The dressing-room door was closed. She hesitated in front of it. Afraid, always, that she’d see Morris. Al said there was a knack to seeing spirit. It was to do with glancing sideways, not turning your head: extending, Al said, your field of peripheral vision.

Colette kept her eyes fixed in front of her; sometimes, the rigidity she imposed seemed to make them ache in their sockets. She pushed the door open with her foot, and stood back. Nothing rushed out. On the threshold she took a breath. Sometimes she thought she could smell him; Al said he’d always smelled. Deliberately, she turned her head from side to side, checking the corners. Al’s scent lay sweetly on the air: there was an undernote of corrosion, damp and drains. Nothing was visible. She glanced into the mirror, and her hand went up automatically to pat her hair.

She enjoyed her cigarette in the corridor, wafting the smoke away from her with a rigid palm, careful not to set off the fire alarm. She was back in the hall in time to witness the dramatic highlight; which was always, for her, some punter turning stroppy.

Al had found a woman’s father, in spirit world. ‘Your daddy’s still keeping an eye on you,’ she cooed.

The woman jumped to her feet. She was a small aggressive blonde in a khaki vest, her cold bluish biceps pumped up at the gym. ‘Tell the old sod to bugger off,’ she said. ‘Tell the old sod to stuff himself. Happiest day of my life when that fucker popped his clogs.’ She knocked the mike aside. ‘I’m here for my boyfriend that was killed in a pile-up on the sodding M25.’

Al said, ‘There’s often a lot of anger when someone passes. It’s natural.’

‘Natural?’ the girl said. ‘There was nothing natural about that fucker. If I hear any more about my bastard dad I’ll see you outside and sort you out.’

The trade gasped, right across the hall. The manager was moving in, but anyone could see he didn’t fancy his chances. Al seemed quite cool. She started chatting, saying anything and nothing – now, after all, would have been a good time for a breakthrough ditty from Margaret Rose. It was the woman’s two friends who calmed her; they waved away the vague boy with the mike, dabbed at her cheeks with a screwed-up tissue, and persuaded her back into her seat, where she muttered and fumed.

Now Alison’s attention crossed the hall, rested on another woman, not young, who had a husband with her: a heavy man, ill at ease. ‘Yes, this lady. You have a child in spirit world.’

The woman said politely, no, no children. She said it as if she had said it many times before; as if she were standing at a turnstile, buying admission tickets and refusing the half-price.

‘I can see there are none earthside, but I’m talking about the little boy you lost. Well, I say little boy. Of course, he’s a man now. He’s telling me we have to go back to, back a good few years, we’re talking here thirty years and more. And it was hard for you, I know, because you were very young, darling, and you cried and cried, didn’t you? Yes, of course you did.’

In these situations, Al kept her nerve; she’d had practice. Even the people at the other side of the hall, craning for a view, knew something was up and fell quiet. The seconds stretched out. In time, the woman’s mouth moved.

‘On the mike, darling. Talk to the mike. Speak up, speak out, don’t be afraid. There isn’t anybody here who isn’t sharing your pain.’

Am I? Colette asked herself. I’m not sure I am.

‘It was a miscarriage,’ the woman said. ‘I never, I never saw. It wasn’t, they didn’t, and so I didn’t – ’

‘Didn’t know it was a little boy. But,’ Al said softly, ‘you know now.’ She turned her head to encompass the hall: ‘You see, we have to recognise that it wasn’t a very compassionate world back then. Times have changed, and for that we can all be thankful. I’m sure those nurses and doctors were doing their best, and they didn’t mean to hurt you, but the fact is, you weren’t given a chance to grieve.’

The woman hunched forward. Tears sprang out of her eyes. The heavy husband moved forward, as if to catch them. The hall was rapt.

‘What I want you to know is this.’ Al’s voice was calm, unhurried, without the touch of tenderness that would overwhelm the woman entirely; dignified and precise, she might have been querying a grocery bill. ‘That little boy of yours is a fine young man now. He knows you never held him. He knows that’s not your fault. He knows how your heart aches. He knows how you’ve thought of him,’ Al dropped her voice, ‘always, always, without missing a day. He’s telling me this, from spirit. He understands what happened. He’s opening his arms to you, and he’s holding you now.’

Another woman, in the row behind, began to sob. Al had to be careful, at this point, to minimise the risk of mass hysteria. Women, Colette thought: as if she weren’t one. But Alison knew just how far she could take it. She was on form tonight; experience tells. ‘And he doesn’t forget your husband,’ she told the woman. ‘He says hello to his dad.’ It’s the right note, braced, unsentimental: ‘Hello, Dad.’ The trade sighed, a low mass sigh. ‘And the point is, and he wants you to know this, that though you’ve never been there to look after him, and though of course there’s no substitute for a mother’s love, your little boy has been cared for and cherished, because you’ve got people in spirit who’ve always been there for him – your own grandma? And there’s another lady, very dear to your family, who passed the year you were married.’ She hesitated. ‘Bear with me, I’m trying for her name. I get the colour of a jewel. I get a taste of sherry. Sherry, that’s not a jewel, is it? Oh, I know, it’s a glass of port. Ruby. Does that name mean anything to you?’

The woman nodded, again and again and again: as if she could never nod enough. Her husband whispered to her, ‘Ruby, you know – Eddie’s first wife?’ The mike picked it up. ‘I know, I know,’ she muttered. She gripped his hand. Her fluttering breath registered. You could almost hear her heart.

‘She’s got a parcel for you,’ Al said. ‘No, wait, she’s got two.’

‘She gave us two wedding presents. An electric blanket and some sheets.’

‘Well,’ Al said, ‘if Ruby kept you so warm and cosy, I think you could trust her with your baby.’ She threw it out to the audience. ‘What do you say?’

They began to clap: sporadically, then with gathering force. Weeping broke out again. Al lifted her arm. Obedient to a strange gravity, the lucky opals rose and fell. She’d saved her best effect till last. ‘And he wants you to know, this little boy of yours who’s a fine young man now, that in spirit he goes by the name you chose for him, the name you had planned to give him…if it, if he, if he was a boy. Which was,’ she pauses, ‘correct me if I’m wrong, which was Alistair.’

‘Was it?’ said the heavy husband: he was still on the mike, though he didn’t know it. The woman nodded. ‘Would you like to answer me?’ Al asked pleasantly.

The man cleared his throat, then spoke straight into the mike. ‘Alistair. She says that’s right. That was her choice. Yes.’

Unseeing, he handed the mike to his neighbour. The woman got to her feet, and the heavy man led her away, as if she were an invalid, her handkerchief held over her mouth. They exited, to a fresh storm of applause.

‘Steroid rage, I expect,’ Al said. ‘Did you see those muscles of hers?’ She was sitting up in her hotel bed, dabbing cream on her face. ‘Look, Col, as you quite well know, everything that can go wrong for me out there, has gone wrong at sometime. I can cope. I can weather it. I don’t want you getting stressed.’

‘I’m not stressed. I just think it’s a landmark. The first time anybody’s threatened to beat you up.’

‘The first time while you’ve been with me, maybe. That’s why I gave up working in London.’ Al sat back against the pillows, her eyes closed; she pushed the hair back from her forehead, and Colette saw the jagged scar at her hairline, dead white against ivory. ‘Who needs it? A fight every night. And the trade pawing you when you try to leave, so you miss the last train home. I like to get home. But you know that, Col.’

She doesn’t like night driving, either; so when they’re outside the ring of the M25, there’s nothing for it except to put up somewhere, the two of them in a twin room. A bed and breakfast is no good because Al can’t last through till breakfast, so for preference they need a hotel that will do food through the night. Sometimes they take pre-packed sandwiches, but it’s joyless for Al, sitting up in bed at 4 a.m., sliding a finger into the plastic triangle to fish out the damp bread. There’s a lot of sadness in hotel rooms, soaked up by the soft furnishings: a lot of loneliness and guilt and regret. A lot of ghosts too: whiskery chambermaids stumping down the corridors on their bad legs, tippling night porters who’ve collapsed on the job, guests who’ve drowned in the bath or suffered a stroke in their beds. When they check into a room Alison stands on the threshold and sniffs the atmosphere, inhales it: and her eyes travel dubiously around. More than once, Colette has shot down to reception to ask for a different room. ‘What’s the problem?’ the receptionists will say (sometimes adding ‘madam’) and Colette, stiff with hostility and fright, will say, ‘Why do you need to know?’ She never fails in her mission: challenged, she can pump out as much aggression as the girl in the khaki vest.

What Alison prefers is somewhere new-built and anonymous, part of some reliable chain. She hates history: unless it’s on the television, safe behind glass. She won’t thank you for a night in a place with beams. ‘Sod the inglenooks,’ she once said, after an exhausting hour tussling with an old corpse in a sheet. The dead are like that; give them a cliché, and they’ll run to it. They enjoy frustrating the living, spoiling their beauty sleep. They enjoyed pummelling Al’s flesh, and nagging at her till she got earache; they rattled around in her head until some nights, like tonight, it seemed to quiver on the soft stem of her neck. ‘Col,’ she groaned, ‘be a good girl, rummage around in the bags and see if you can find my lavender spray. My head’s throbbing.’