Beyond Black

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 fag 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 registry, they went out to a hotel in Berkshire with a trout stream running through the grounds and fishing flies in glass cases on the walls of the bar, and French windows leading on to a 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 gravadlax with dill sauce, served on black plates, and a chicken dish which 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 among 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 on to 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 handwriting 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 realised, 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 skip. 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.

It was the tarot that started her off. Before that she had been just like everybody, reading her horoscope in the morning paper. She wouldn’t have described herself as superstitious or interested in the occult in any way. The next book she bought – from a different bookshop – was An Encyclopedia of the Psychic Arts. ‘Occult’, she discovered, meant hidden. She was beginning to feel that everything of interest was hidden. And none of it in the obvious places; don’t, for example, look in trousers.

She had left that original tarot pack in the boy’s room, inadvertently. She wondered if he had ever taken it out and looked at the pictures; whether he ever thought of her, a mysterious stranger, a passing Queen of Hearts. She thought of buying another set, but what she read in the handbook baffled and bored her. Seventy-eight cards! Better employ someone qualified to read them for you. She began to visit a woman in Isleworth, but it turned out that her speciality was the crystal ball. The object sat between them on a black velvet cloth; she had expected it to be clear, because that’s what they said, crystal clear, but to look into it was like looking into a cloud bank, or into drifting fog. ‘The clear ones are glass, dear,’ the sensitive explained. ‘You won’t get anything from those.’ She rested her veined hands on the black velvet. ‘It’s the flaws that are vital,’ she said. ‘The flaws are what you pay for. You will find some readers who prefer the black mirror. That is an option, of course.’ Colette raised her eyebrows.

‘Onyx,’ the woman said. ‘The best are beyond price. The more you look – but you have to know how to look – the more you see stirring in the depths.’

Colette asked straight out, and heard that her crystal ball had set her back five hundred pounds. ‘And then only because I have a special friend.’ The psychic gained, in Colette’s eyes, a deal of prestige. She was avid to part with her twenty pounds for the reading. She drunk in everything the woman said, and when she hit the Isleworth pavement, moss growing between its cracks, she was unable to remember a word of it.

She consulted a palmist a few times, and had her horoscope cast. Then she had Gavin’s done. She wasn’t sure that his chart was valid, because she couldn’t specify the time of his birth. ‘What do you want to know that for?’ he’d said, when she asked him. She said it was of general interest to her, and he glared at her with extreme suspicion.

‘I suppose you don’t know, do you?’ she said. ‘I could ring your mum.’

‘I very much doubt,’ he’d said, ‘that my mother would have retained that piece of useless information, her brain being somewhat overburdened in my opinion with things like where is my plastic washball for my Persil, and what is the latest development in bloody EastEnders.’

The astrologer was unfazed by her ignorance. ‘Round it up,’ he said, ‘round it down. Twelve noon is what we use. We always do it for animals.’

‘For animals?’ she’d said. ‘They have their horoscope done, do they?’

‘Oh, certainly. It’s a valuable service, you see, for the caring owner who has a problem with a pet. Imagine, for instance, if you kept falling off your horse. You’d need to know, is this an ideal pairing? It could be a matter of life or death.’

‘And do people know when their horse was born?’

‘Frankly, no. That’s why we have a strategy to approximate. And as for your partner – if we say noon, that’s fine, but we then need latitude and longitude – so where do we imagine hubby first saw the light of day?’

Colette sniffed. ‘He won’t say.’

‘Probably a Scorpio ascendant there. Controls by disinformation. Or could be Pisces. Makes mysteries where none needed. Just joking! Relax and think back for me…his mummy must have dropped a hint at some point. Where exactly did the dear chap pop out, into this breathing world scarce half made up?’

‘He grew up in Uxbridge. But you know, she might have had him in hospital.’

‘So it could have been anywhere along the A40?’

‘Could we just say, London?’

‘We’ll put him on the meridian. Always a wise choice.’

After this incident, she found it difficult to regard Gavin as fully human. He was standardised on zero degrees longitude and twelve noon, like some bucking bronco, or a sad mutt with no pedigree. She did call his mum, one evening when she’d had a half-bottle of wine and was feeling perverse.

‘Renee, is that you?’ she said.

Renee said, ‘How did you get my name?’

‘It’s me,’ she said, and Renee replied, ‘I’ve got replacement windows, and replacement doors. I’ve got a conservatory and the loft conversion’s coming next week. I never give to charity, thank you, and I’ve planned my holiday for this year, and I had a new kitchen when you were last in my area.’

‘It’s about Gavin,’ she said. ‘It’s me, Colette. I need to know when he was born.’

‘Take my name off your list,’ her mother-in-law said. ‘And if you must call me, could you not call during my programme? It’s one of my few remaining pleasures.’ There was a pause, as if she were going to put the receiver down. Then she spoke again. ‘Not that I need any others. I’ve had my suite re-covered. I have a spa bath already. And a case of vintage wine. And a stairlift to help me keep my independence. Have you got that? Are you taking notice? Bugger off.’

Click.

Colette held the phone. Daughter-in-law of fourteen months, spurned by his mother. She replaced the receiver, and walked into the kitchen. She stood by the double sink, mastering herself. ‘Gavin,’ she called, ‘do you want peas or green beans?’

There was no answer. She stalked into the sitting room. Gavin, his bare feet on the sofa arm, was reading What Car? ‘Peas or green beans?’ she asked.

No reply. ‘Gavin!!!!’ she said.

‘With wot?’

‘Cutlets.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Lamb. Lamb chops.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Whatever. Both.’

‘You can’t.’ Her voice shook. ‘Two green veg, you can’t.’

‘Who says?’

‘Your mother,’ she said; she felt she could say anything, as he never listened.

‘When?’

‘Just now on the phone.’

‘My mother was on the phone?’

‘Just now.’

‘Bloody amazing.’ He shook his head, and flicked over a page.

‘Why? Why should it be?’

‘Because she’s dead.’

‘What? Renee?’ Colette sat down on the sofa arm: later, when she told the story, she would say, well, at that point, my legs went from under me. But she would never be able to recapture the sudden fright, the weakness that ran through her body, her anger, her indignation, the violent exasperation that possessed her. She said, ‘What the hell do you mean, she’s dead?’

‘It happened this morning. My sis rang. Carole. ’

‘Is this a joke? I need to know. Is this a joke? Because if it is, Gavin, I’ll kneecap you. ’

Gavin raised his eyebrows, as if to say, why would it be funny? ‘I didn’t suggest it was,’ she said at once: why wait for him to speak? I asked if it was your idea of a joke.’

‘God help anybody who made a joke around here.’

Colette laid her hand on her ribcage, behind which something persistently fluttered. She stood up. She walked into the kitchen. She stared at the ceiling. She took a deep breath. She came back. ‘Gavin?’

‘Mm?’

‘She’s really dead?’

‘Mm.’

She wanted to hit him. ‘How?’

‘Heart.’

‘Oh God! Have you no feeling? You can sit there, going peas or beans – ’

‘You went that,’ he said reasonably.

‘Weren’t you going to tell me? If I hadn’t said, your mother was on the phone – ’

Gavin yawned. ‘What’s the hurry? I’d have told you.’

‘You mean you might just have mentioned it? When you got around to it? When would that have been?’

‘After the food.’

She gaped at him. He said, with some dignity, ‘I can’t mention when I’m hungry.’

Colette bunched her fingers into fists, and held them at chest height. She was short of breath, and the flutter inside her chest had subdued to a steady thump. At the same time an uneasy feeling filled her, that anything she could do was inadequate; that she was performing someone else’s gestures, perhaps from an equivalent TV moment where news of a sudden death is received. But what are the proper gestures when a ghost’s been on the phone? She didn’t know. ‘Please. Gavin,’ she said. ‘Put down What Car?. Just…look at me, will you? Now tell me what happened.’

‘Nothing.’ He threw the magazine down. ‘Nothing happened.’

‘But where was she? Was she at home?’

‘No. Getting her shopping. In Safeway. Apparently.’

‘And?’

Gavin rubbed his forehead. He seemed to be making an honest effort. ‘I suppose she was pushing her trolley.’

‘Was she on her own?’

‘Dunno. Yes.’

‘And then?’

‘She fell over.’

‘She didn’t die there, did she? In the aisle?’

‘Nah, they got her to the hospital. So no worries about the death certificate.’

‘What a relief,’ she said grimly.

Carole, it seemed, was proposing to get the bungalow on the market as soon as possible, with Sidgewick & Staff, who for sole agency charged 2 per cent on completion, and promised unlimited colour advertising and national tie-ins. ‘There should be a good payout,’ he said, ‘the place is worth a few quid.’

That was why, he explained, he was reading the new edition of What Car? ; Renee’s will would bring him nearer to what he most coveted in life, which was a Porsche 911.

‘Aren’t you upset?’ she asked him.

He shrugged. ‘We’ve all got to go, haven’t we? What’s it to you? It’s not as if you ever bothered with her.’

‘And she lived in a bungalow, Renee?’

‘Course she did.’ Gavin picked up his magazine and rolled it up in his hand, as if she were a wasp and he were going to swat her. ‘We went over for our lunch, that Sunday.’

‘No we didn’t. We never went.’

‘Only because you kept cancelling us.’

It was true. She’d hoped she could keep Renee at arm’s length: the wedding reception had proved her to have a coarse joke habit, and slipping false teeth. The teeth weren’t all that was false. ‘She told me,’ she said to Gavin, ‘that she had a stairlift installed. Which, if she lived in a bungalow, she couldn’t have.’

‘When? When did she tell you that?’

‘On the phone just now.’

‘Hello? Hello? Anyone at home?’ Gavin asked. ‘Are you ever stupid? I told you she’s dead.’

Alerted by the mutiny on her face, he rose from the sofa and slapped her with What Car?. She picked up the Yellow Pages and threatened to take out his eye. After he had slunk off to bed, hugging his expectations, she went back into the kitchen and grilled the cutlets. The peas and green beans she fed to the waste disposal; she hated vegetables. She ate the lamb with her fingers, her teeth scraping the bone. Her tongue came out, and licked the last sweetness from the meat. She couldn’t work out what was worst, that Renee had answered the phone after she was dead, or that she had answered the phone on purpose to lie to her and tell her to bugger off. She threw the bones down the waste disposal too, and rejoiced as the grinder laboured. She rinsed her fingers and wiped them on a kitchen roll.

In the bedroom, she inspected Gavin, spreadeagled across the available space. He was naked and snoring; his mag, rolled, was thrust under his pillow. That, that, she thought, is how much it means to him, the death of his only mother. She stood frowning down at him; her toe touched something hard and cold. It was a glass tumbler, lolling on its side, melted ice dribbling from its mouth on to the carpet. She picked it up. The breath of spirits hit her nostrils, and made her flinch. She walked into the kitchen and clicked the tumbler down on to the draining board. In the dark, tiny hall, she hauled Gavin’s laptop from its case. She lugged it into the sitting room and plugged it into the mains. She copied the files she thought might interest her, and erased his crucial data for tomorrow. In terms of life documentation, Gavin was less than some animal. He routinely misled her: but was it any wonder? What sort of upbringing could he have had, from a woman with false teeth who told lies after she was dead?

She left the machine humming, and went back into the bedroom. She opened the wardrobe and went through Gavin’s pockets. The word ‘rifled’ came to her: ‘she rifled through his pockets’. He stirred once or twice in his sleep, reared up, snorted, collapsed back on to the mattress. I could kill him, she thought, as he lies here; or just maim him if I liked. She found a bunch of credit-card receipts in his knicker drawer; her index finger shuffled through them. She found newspaper ads for sex lines: spicy lesbo chicks!

She packed a bag. Surely he would wake? Drawers clicked, opening and shutting. She glanced over her shoulder. Gavin stirred, made a sort of whinny, and settled back again into sleep. She reached down to unplug her hairdryer, wrapped the flex around her hand and stood thinking. She was entitled to half the equity in the flat; if he would embrace the car loan, she would continue paying off the wedding. She hesitated for a final moment. Her foot was on the wet patch the ice had left. Automatically, she plucked a tissue from an open box and blotted the carpet. Her fingers squeezed, the paper reduced itself to wet pulp. She walked away, brushing her hands together to jettison it.

Gavin’s screensaver had come up. Colette slotted a floppy into his drive, and overwrote his programs. She had heard of women who, before departing, scissored up their husband’s clothes. But Gavin’s clothes, in their existing state, were punishment enough. She had heard of women who performed castration; but she didn’t want to go to jail. No, let’s see how he gets on without his bits and bytes, she thought. With one keystroke, she wrecked his operating system.

She went down to the south coast to see a noted psychometrist, Natasha. She didn’t know then, of course, that Natasha would figure in her later life. At the time, it was just another hope she grappled with, a hope of making sense of herself; it was just another item in her strained monthly budget.

The flat was two blocks back from the sea. She parked with difficulty and at some distance. She wasted time looking for the street numbers. When she found the right door she rang the bell and spoke into the intercom: ‘I’m your eleven thirty.’

Without a word, the psychic buzzed her up; but she thought she had heard a cough, stifling a little laugh. Her cheeks burned. She ran up three flights and as soon as Natasha opened the door she said, ‘I’m not late.’

‘No, dear. You’re my eleven thirty.’

‘You really ought to tell your clients where to park.’

The psychic smiled tightly. She was a sharp little bleached-blonde with a big jaw, common as a centrefold. ‘What,’ she said, ‘you think I should exercise my powers and keep a space free?’

‘I meant you should send a map.’

Natasha turned to lead the way: tight high bottom in those kind of jeans that act as a corset. She’s too old, Colette thought, for denim; shouldn’t somebody tell her?

‘Sit there,’ Natasha said precisely, dipping her false nail.

‘The sun’s in my eyes,’ Colette said.

‘Diddums,’ said Natasha.

A sad-eyed icon drooped at her, from a cheap gilt frame on the wall; a mist washed up from the sea. She sat, and flipped open her shoulder bag: ‘Do you want the cheque now?’

She wrote it. She waited for the offer of a cup of herb tea. It didn’t come. She almost had hopes of Natasha; she was nasty, but there was a businesslike briskness about her that she’d never found in any psychic so far.

‘Anything to give me?’ Natasha said.

She dived into her bag and passed over her mother’s wedding ring.

Natasha twirled it around her forefinger. ‘Quite a smiley lady.’

‘Oh, smiley,’ Colette said. ‘I concede that.’

She passed over a pair of cuff-links that had belonged to her dad.

‘Is that the best you can manage?’

‘I don’t have anything else of his.’

‘Sad,’ Natasha said. ‘Can’t have been much of a relationship, can it? I sense that men don’t warm to you, somehow.’ She sat back in her chair, her eyes far away. Colette waited, respectfully silent. ‘Well, look, I’m not getting much from these.’ She jiggled the cuff-links in her hand. ‘They’re definitely your dad’s, are they? The thing is, with cuff-links, with dads, they get them for Christmas and then it’s, “Oh, thanks, thanks a bunch, just what I always needed!”’

Colette nodded. ‘But what can you do? What can you get, for men?’

‘Bottle of Scotch?’

‘Yes, but you want something that will last.’

‘So he stuffs them in a drawer? Forgets he’s got them?’

She wanted to say, why do you think men don’t warm to me? Instead she opened her bag again. ‘My wedding ring,’ she said. ‘I suppose you didn’t think I’d been married?’

Natasha held out a flat, open palm. Colette placed the ring on it. ‘Oh dear,’ Natasha said. ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ve already left.’

‘Sometimes you’ve got to cut your losses,’ Natasha agreed. ‘Well, sweetie, what else can I tell you?’

‘It’s possible I might be psychic myself,’ Colette said casually. ‘Certain, really. I dialled a number and a dead person answered.’

‘That’s unusual.’ Natasha’s eyes flitted sideways, in a calculating way. ‘Which psychic line offers that service?’

‘I wasn’t calling a psychic line. I was calling my mother-in-law. It turned out she was dead.’

‘So what gave you the idea?’

‘No – no, look, you have to understand how it happened. I didn’t know she was dead when I rang. I didn’t know till afterwards.’

‘So she was dead when you called? But you didn’t realise?’

‘Yes.’