Beyond Black

‘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.’

Colette knelt on the floor and rummaged as directed. ‘That woman at the end, the couple, the miscarriage – you could have heard a pin drop.’

Al said, ‘“See a pin and pick it up and all the day you’ll have good luck.” My mum told me that. I never do, though. See a pin. Or find money in the street.’

That’s because you’re too fat to see your feet, Colette thought. She said, ‘How did you do that thing with the name? When you were going on about mother love I nearly puked, but I have to hand it to you, you got there in the end.’

‘Alistair? Well, of course, if he’d been called John, you wouldn’t be giving me any credit. You’d have said it was one of my lucky guesses.’ She sighed. ‘Look, Colette, what can I tell you? The boy was standing there. He knew his own name. People do.’

‘The mother, she must have been thinking his name.’

‘Oh yes, I could have picked it out of her head. I know that’s your theory. Mind-reading. Oh God, Colette.’ Al slid down inside the covers. She closed her eyes. Her head dropped back against the pillows. ‘Think that, if you find it easier. But you will admit I sometimes tell people things they’ve yet to find out.’

She hated that phrase of Al’s: ‘Think that, if you find it easier.’ As if she were a child and couldn’t be told the truth. Al only seemed dense – it was part of her act. The truth was, she listened to Radio 4 when they were on the road. She’d got a vocabulary, though she didn’t use it on the trade. She was quite a serious and complicated person, and deep, deep and sly: that was what Colette thought.

Al seldom talked about death. At first when they started working together, Colette had thought the word would slip out, if only through the pressure of trying to avoid it. And sometimes it did; but mostly Al talked about passing, she talked about spirit, she talked about passing into spirit world; to that eventless realm, neither cold nor hot, neither hilly nor flat, where the dead, each at their own best age and marooned in an eternal afternoon, pass the ages with sod all going on. Spirit world, as Al describes it to the trade, is a garden, or to be more accurate a public place in the open air: litter-free like an old-fashioned park, with a bandstand in a heat haze in the distance. Here the dead sit in rows on benches, families together, on gravelled paths between weedless beds, where heat-sozzled flowers bob their heads, heavy with the scent of eau de Cologne: their petals crawling with furry, intelligent, stingless bees. There’s a certain 1950s air about the dead, or early sixties perhaps, because they’re clean and respectable and they don’t stink of factories: as if they came after white nylon shirts and indoor sanitation, but before satire, certainly before sexual intercourse. Unmelting ice cubes (in novelty shapes) chink in their glasses, for the age of refrigeration has come. They eat picnics with silver forks; purely for pleasure, because they never feel hunger, nor gain weight. No wind blows there, only a gentle breeze, the temperature being controlled at a moderate 71° F; these are the English dead, and they don’t have centigrade yet. All picnics are share and share alike. The children never squabble or cut their knees, for whatever happened to them earth-side, they are beyond physical damage now. The sun shall not strike them by day nor the moon by night; they have no red skin or freckles, none of the flaws that make the English so uncouth in summer. It’s Sunday, yet the shops are open, though no one needs anything. A mild air plays in the background, not quite Bach, possibly Vaughan Williams, quite like the early Beatles too; the birds sing along, in the green branches of the seasonless trees. The dead have no sense of time, no clear sense of place; they are beyond geography and history, she tells her clients, till someone like herself tunes in. Not one of them is old or decrepit or uselessly young. They all have their own teeth: or an expensive set of implants, if their own were unsightly. Their damaged chromosomes are counted and shuffled into good order; even the early miscarriages have functioning lungs and a proper head of hair. Damaged livers have been replaced, so their owners live to drink another day. Blighted lungs now suck at God’s own low-tar blend. Cancerous breasts have been rescued from the surgeons’ bin, and blossom like roses on spirit chests.

Al opened her eyes. ‘Col, are you there? I was dreaming that I was hungry.’

‘I’ll ring down for a sandwich, shall I?’

She considered. ‘Get me ham on brown. Wholemeal. Dab of mustard – French, not English. Dijon – tell them cupboard on the left, third shelf. Ask them for – do they do a cheese plate? I’d like a slice of Brie and some grapes. And some cake. Not chocolate. Coffee maybe. Walnuts. It has walnuts on top. Two at the rim and one in the centre.’

In the night Al would be out of bed, her large outline blocking the light that leaked in from the hotel forecourt; it was the sudden darkness that woke Colette, and she would stir and see Al outlined, in her chiffon and lace, against the glow from the bedside lamp. ‘What’s the matter, what do you need?’ Colette would murmur: because you didn’t know what was happening, it could be trivial, but then again…Sometimes Al wanted chocolate out of her bag, sometimes she was facing the pangs of birth or the shock of a car crash. They might be awake for minutes or hours. Colette would slide out of bed and fill the plastic kettle, jerking its cord into its socket. Sometimes the water remained unboiled and Al would break off from her travail and say, ‘Plug switched on at the socket, Col?’ and she would hiss, yes, yes, and shake the bloody thing so that water slopped out of the spout; and quite often, that would make it go: so temper, Al said, was just as good as electricity. Then while Al rolled towards the bathroom to retch over the bowl, she would forage for dusty tea bags and tubs of UHT; and eventually they would sit side by side, their hands wrapped around the hotel cups, and Al would mutter, ‘Colette, I don’t know how you do it. All your patience. These broken nights.’

‘Oh, you know,’ she’d joke. ‘If I’d had kids…’

‘I’m grateful. I might not show it. But I am, sweetheart. I don’t know where I’d be now, if we’d never met.’

At these times, Colette felt for her; she was not without feeling, though life had pushed her pretty far in that direction. Al’s features would be softened and blurred, her voice would be the same. She would have panda eyes from the night’s make-up, however diligent she’d been with the cotton-wool pads; and there was something childlike about her, as she made her apologies for the way she made her living. For the bad nights Colette carried brandy, to ward off fresh nausea and bouts of pain. Crouching to slide a hand into her overnight bag, she’d think, Al, don’t leave me, don’t die and leave me without a house and a job. You’re a silly cow, but I don’t want to do this world on my own.

So, after a night more or less broken, they would fight back to wakefulness, somewhere around seven thirty, side by side in their twin beds. Whatever had happened during the night, however many times she had been up and down, Colette’s sheets were still tucked in tight, as if her body were completely flat. Al’s bed looked, more often than not, as if there had been an earthquake in it. On the floor by their slippers they would find last night’s room-service plates, with a pallid half-tomato and some crumbled potato crisps; cold sodden tea bags in a saucer, and strange grey-white fragments, like the ghosts of boiled water, floating in the bottom of the kettle. Colette would put on breakfast TV to swamp the traffic noise beyond the window, the sigh of tyres, the rumble of distant aircraft approaching Luton: or Stansted, if they had headed east. Al would lever herself, groaning, from the wreck of her bed, and begin the complex business of putting her persona in place; then she would go down for her breakfast. Colette would kick the remnants of room service out into the corridor, begin picking up after them and packing their bags. Al brought her own towelling robe, and now it was damp and perfumed after her bath, and bulked out the case; hotel robes didn’t fit her, she would have needed to tie two together in some sort of Siamese twin arrangement. She always travelled with two or three pairs of scissors, and her own sewing kit; as if she were afraid that she might begin to unravel. Colette would pack these items away; then she would put the lucky opals in the case, count the bracelets, fit the make-up brushes snugly into their tabs and crevices, retrieve the hairpiece from where it was lying; pull from the closet her own insignificant crease-free outfits, flop them over her arm and drop them into her bag. She could not eat breakfast; it was because, when she had been with her husband Gavin, breakfast had been prime time for rows. She would forage for more tea, though often the allocation of room supplies was so mean that she’d be left with the Earl Grey. Sipping it, she would raise the window blind, on Home Counties rain or vapid sunshine. Al would tap on the door to be let in – there was only ever the one key in these places – and come in looking fat, full of poached eggs. She would cast a critical eye over the packing, and begin, because she was ashamed of it, to haul her bed into some sort of shape, dragging up the blankets from the floor and sneezing gently as she did so. Colette would reach into her bag and flip over the antihistamines. ‘Water,’ Al would say, sitting down, as if exhausted, among the poor results of her labour. Then, ‘Steal the shower caps,’ because, she would say, ‘you can’t get them these days, you know, and they’re only good for twice.’ So Colette would go back into the bathroom to pocket the shower-cap supplies; they left the shampoos and the slivers of soap, they weren’t cheap or petty in that way at all. And her mind would be running, it’s 8.30 and Morris not here, steal all shower caps, check behind bathroom door, 8.31 and he’s not here, out of bathroom looking cheerful, throw stolen shower caps into bag, switch off TV, say are we right then, 8.32 and Al stands up, 8.32 she wanders to the mirror, 8.33 she is dropping the sodden tea bags from the saucer into the used cups, Al, she says, what are you doing, can we not get on the road please…and then she will see Al’s shoulders tense. It’s nothing she’s done, nothing she’s said: it’s the banging and cursing, audible only to Al, that tells her they have been rejoined by Morris.

It was one of the few blessings Colette could count, that he didn’t always stay the night when they were away. The lure of strange towns was too much for him, and it was her job to provide him with a strange town. To stray up to a five-mile range from their lodging didn’t seem to bother him. On his bent, tough little legs, he was a good walker. But reservations at room-only motor lodges were not his favourite. He grumbled that there was nothing to do, stranded somewhere along the motorway, and he would sit in the corner of their room being disgusting. Al would shout at him for picking his feet; after that, she would go quiet and look furious, so Colette could only guess what he might be doing. He grumbled also if to get to his evening out he had to take a bus ride or find himself a lift. He liked to be sure, he said, that if need be he could get back to her within twenty minutes of the pubs closing. ‘What does he mean, if need be?’ she’d asked. ‘What would happen if you were separated from Morris? Would you die?’ Oh no, Al had said; he’s just a control freak. I wouldn’t die, neither would he. Though he has already, of course. And it seemed that no harm came to him on the nights when he would fall in with some other lowlifes and drift off with them, and forget to come home. All next day they’d have to put up with him repeating the beery jokes and catchphrases he had picked up.

When she’d first joined Al, she’d not understood about Morris. How could she? It wasn’t within the usual range of experience. She had hoped that he’d just lurch off one night and not come back; that he’d have an accident, get a blow on the head that would affect his memory, so he’d not be able to find his way back to them. Even now, she often thought that if she could get Al out of a place on the dot of eight thirty, they’d outsmart him; hurtle back on to the motorway and leave him behind, cursing and swearing and walking around all the cars in the car parks, bending down and peering at the number plates. But somehow, try as she might, they could never get ahead of him. At the last moment, Al would pause, as she was hauling her seat belt over her bulk. ‘Morris,’ she would say, and click the belt’s head into its housing.

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 pestered 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 DIY 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 there.’

‘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.’ Colete 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 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.’

Chapter 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 slip roads and the junctions of the M4, over the superstores and out-of-town carpet warehouses, the nurseries and prisons, the gravel pits and sewage works, and the green fields of the Home Counties shredded by JCBs. 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 not 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 empathise 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 timeshare. 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 organisers. 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 with 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 realise 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 under-wires, and boosted by padding which 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.