Beyond Black

‘So she came over from beyond?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did she say to you?’

‘She said she’d got a stairlift. It was a lie.’

‘Well, perhaps…she’s got one in spirit?’

Colette considered. Renee had said there was no comfort she lacked. ‘I’m not really bothered about that aspect, about what she said, only that she picked the phone up. That she answered. At first that was what bothered me, about the stairlift – that she didn’t even say the truth – but then when I thought about it, her saying anything seemed to be the most surprising – well, you know.’ Colette’s voice died in her throat. She was not used to speaking her thoughts. Life with Gavin had discouraged her. ‘Nothing like that’s ever happened to me before, but I think it proves I must have a gift. I’m a bit bored with my job and I wouldn’t mind a change. I wondered about this, you know? If there’s much money in it.’

Natasha laughed. ‘Well, if you think you could stand the pace. You have to train.’

‘Oh, do you? It’s not enough to be able to do it?’

‘Look,’ Natasha said, ‘I don’t want to sound hostile, but isn’t it possible that you’re being a bit naive? I mean, you’ve got a good career now, I can see that. So why waste it? You’d need to build up your psychic skills, you can’t expect to start cold at your age.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Colette said. ‘At my age?’

‘I started at twelve,’ Natasha said. ‘You’re not telling me you’re twelve, are you?’ With one hand, she lazily shuffled her cards together. ‘Want me to see what I get?’ She began to lay out a spread, her nails clicking on the back of each card. ‘Look, if you’re going to work with higher powers, it will happen. Nothing will stop it. But you’ll get the here-and-now sorted, if you’ll heed my advice.’ She looked up. ‘Letter “M” comes to mind.’

Colette thought. ‘I don’t know anyone of that letter.’ She thought, M for Man?

‘Someone coming into your life. Not yet. An older bloke. Not too keen on you at first, I must say. ’

‘But then?’

‘All’s well that ends well,’ Natasha said. ‘I suppose.’

She had walked away, disappointed; when she got back to her car, she had been ticketed. After that she had been for crystal healing, and had some reiki sessions. She arranged to meet Gavin in a new bar called Peppermint Plaza. He arrived before her and when she walked in he was sitting on a pale green leather-look banquette, a bottle of Mexican lager planted in front of him, leafing through Thames Valley Autotrader.

‘Renee’s money not come through yet?’ she asked. She slid into the seat opposite. ‘When it does, you could use some of it to buy me out of the flat.’

‘If you think I’m giving up the chance of a decent car, then no way,’ said Gavin. ‘If I don’t get the Porsche this is what I’m getting, I’m getting this Lancia.’ He flopped the magazine down on the table. ‘There’s one here.’ He turned the picture round obligingly so it was the right way up for her. ‘Recarro seats. Full spec. Seriously speedy.’

‘Put it on the market then. The flat. If you can’t buy me out.’

‘You said that. You said it before. I said, yes. I agree. So don’t go on about it. OK?’

There was a silence. Colette looked around. ‘Quite nice here. Quiet.’

‘Bit girly.’

‘That’s probably why I like it. Being a girl.’

Her knees touched his, under the table. She tried to pull her chair away, but it was bolted to the floor. Gavin said, ‘I want fifty per cent of the bills till the flat’s sold.’

‘I’ll pay half the monthly service charge.’ Colette pushed his magazine back across the table. ‘I won’t pay half the utilities.’

‘What’s that, utilities?’

‘Gas and electric. Why should I pay to keep you warm?’

‘I’ll tell you what, you stuffed me with a huge sodding phone bill. You can pay that.’

‘It’s your phone too.’

‘Yeah, but I’m not on it all night, blah-bloody-blah to some bint I’ve sat next to all day and I’ll be seeing again the next morning. And it’s not me phoning premium rate lines to what’s it called, bloody predictionists, bloody psychic lines at a quid a minute.’

‘Actually, sex lines are premium rate too.’

‘Oh well, you would know about that, wouldn’t you?’ Gavin gathered up his car magazine, as if to shield it from her. ‘You’re not normal.’

She sighed. She couldn’t summon up the energy to say, ‘I beg your pardon, not normal, what do you mean?’ Any abstraction, indirection and allusion was wasted on Gavin, and in fact even the most straightforward form of communication – other than a poke in the eye – was a challenge to his attention span. There hadn’t, so far as she’d understood, been any dispute between them about what they did in the bedroom – it had seemed fairly straightforward stuff, though she was fairly ignorant and limited, she supposed, and Gavin, certainly, he was fairly ignorant and limited. But after the marriage is over, maybe that’s what men do, they decide it was the sex that was wrong, because it’s something they can communicate over a drink, something they can turn into a story, snigger over; it’s an explanation they can give themselves, for what would otherwise remain the complete mystery of human relationships. There were other mysteries, which loomed large to her and hardly loomed at all for Gavin: what are we here for, what will happen next? It was no use trying to explain to him that without the fortune tellers she had become afraid to act at all; that she liked to know that things were her fate, that she didn’t like life to be arbitrary. It was no use telling him either that she thought she might be psychic herself. The incident of the posthumous phone call, if it had ever sunk into his mind, had been chemically erased, because of the vodka he had drunk the night she moved out; this was lucky for her, because when next day he found his computer trashed he thought he had only himself to blame.

‘Don’t you want to ask anything?’ she asked. ‘Like where I’m living?’

‘So where are you living, Colette?’ he said sarcastically.

‘With a friend.’

‘Jesus, you’ve got a friend?’

‘But from next week I’ve arranged a house-share in Twickenham. I’ll have to start paying rent, so I need the flat to be sold.’

‘All we need is a buyer.’

‘No, all we need is a seller.’

‘What?’

‘Put it on the market.’

‘I have. Last week. ’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ She slammed her glass down. ‘Why didn’t you just come out and say that?’

‘I would if I could get a word in edgewise. Besides, I thought you’d get a tip-off from the spirits. I thought they’d say, a strange man is walking around your bedroom with a steel measure.’

Colette threw herself back in her seat: but it was strangely curved, and pushed her forward again, so her diaphragm was against the table’s edge.

‘So how much did they suggest?’ He told her. ‘That’s far too low. They must think you’re an idiot. And they could be right. Leave it, Gavin, leave it. I’ll get on to it tomorrow. I’ll phone them myself.’

‘They said, realistic price for a quick sale.’

‘More likely they’ve got a mate lined up, who they’re selling it on to.’

‘That’s your trouble.’ Gavin scratched his armpit. ‘You’re paranoid.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You use words without any idea what they mean. All you know is stupid jargon out of car mags. Recarro seats. Spicy lesbo chicks. That’s all you know.’

Gavin turned down his mouth and shrugged. ‘So. You want anything?’

‘Yes, I want my life back.’

‘From the flat.’

‘I’ll make a list.’

‘Anything you want now?’

‘The kitchen knives.’

‘Why?’

‘They’re good ones. Japanese. You don’t want them. You won’t cook.’

‘I might want to cut something.’

‘Use your teeth.’

He took a pull on his lager. She finished her spritzer.

‘If that’s all?’ she said. She gathered her bag and her jacket. ‘I want everything in writing, about the flat. Tell the agents, that all the paperwork must be copied to me. I want full consultation at every point.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll be ringing every two days to check on progress.’

‘I’ll look forward to that.’

‘Not you. The agent. Have you got their card?’

‘No. Not on me. Come back and get it.’

Alarm flared inside her. Was he intending to mug her, or rape her?

‘Send it to me,’ she said.

‘I don’t have your address.’

‘Send it to the office.’

When she got to the door it occurred to her that it might have been his single, clumsy effort at reconciliation. She glanced back. His head was down, and he was leafing through his magazine again. No chance, anyway. She would rather take out her appendix with nail scissors than go back to Gavin.

The encounter, though, had bruised her. Gavin was the first person, she thought, that I was ever really frank and honest with; at home, there wasn’t much premium on frankness, and she’d never had a girlfriend she was really close to, not since she was fifteen. She’d opened her heart to him, such as it was. And for what? Probably, when she opened her heart, he hadn’t even been listening. The night of Renee’s death she had seen him as he truly was: callow and ignorant and not even ashamed of it, not even asking her why she was so panicked, not even appreciating that his mother’s death wouldn’t, by itself, have affected her like that: but shouldn’t it have affected him? Had he even bothered to go to the crematorium, or had he left it all to Carole? When she thought back to that night, which (she now knew) was the last night of her marriage, a peculiar disjointed, unstrung sensation occurred in her head, as if her thoughts and her feelings had been joined together by a zip, and the zip had broken. She had not told Gavin that in the days after she walked out, she had twice dialled Renee’s home number, just to see what would happen. What happened was nothing, of course. The phone rang in the empty house: bungalow: whatever.

It put a dent in her belief in her psychic powers. She knew, of course – her recollection was sharp if Gavin’s wasn’t – that the woman on the phone had at no point actually identified herself. She hadn’t said she wasn’t Renee, but she hadn’t agreed that she was, either. It was just possible that she had misdialled, and that she had been talking to some irate stranger. If pushed, she would have said it was her main-law, but it was true that she didn’t know her voice all that well, and the woman had lacked the trademark lisp that was caused by Renee’s slipping teeth. Was that significant? It could be. Nothing else of a psychic nature seemed to manifest. She moved into the Twickenham house-share, and discovered that it made her unhappy to live with women younger than herself. She’d never thought of herself as a romantic, God knows, but the way they talked about men was near pornographic, and the way they belched and put their feet on the furniture was like Gavin over again. She didn’t have to sleep with them, but that was the only difference. Every morning the kitchen was strewn with Hägen-Dazs tubs, and lager cans, and polystyrene trays from low-fat microwave dinners, with a scraping of something beige and jellified left in the bottom.

So where was she going in life? What was she for? No man with the initial M had come into her life. She was stagnating, and struck by how quickly a temporary situation can become desolating and permanent. Soon she needed her fortune told more than ever. But her regular clairvoyant, the one she trusted most, lived in Brondesbury, which was a long way for her to travel, and kept cats, to which she developed an allergy. She got herself a train timetable, and began to work her way out, each weekend, from the London suburbs to the dormitory towns and verdant conurbations of Berkshire and Surrey. So it came about that one Saturday afternoon in spring, she saw Alison perform in Windsor, at the Victoria Room in the Harte & Garter.

It was a two-day Psychic Extravaganza. She had not prebooked, but because of her general beigeness and her inoffensive manner, she was good at queue-jumping. She had sat modestly in the third row, her whippy body crouching inside her blouson jacket, her khaki-coloured hair pushed behind her ears. Alison had fingered her right away. The lucky opals flashed fire in her direction. ‘I’m getting a broken wedding ring. It’s this lady here in beige. Is it you, darling?’

Mutely, Colette held up her hand, the tight gold band intact. She had started wearing it again, she hardly knew why; maybe just to spite Natasha in Hove, to show that a man had warmed to her, at least once.

Impatience crossed Alison’s face: then her smile wiped the expression away. ‘Yes, I know you still wear his ring. Maybe he thinks of you; maybe you think of him?’

‘Only with hatred,’ Colette said, and Al said, ‘Whatever. But you’re on your own for now, darling.’ Al had held out her arms to the audience. ‘I see images, I can’t help it. For a marriage, I see a ring. For a separation, a divorce, I see a ring that’s broken. The line of the break is the line of the crack in this young girl’s heart.’

There was a murmur of sympathy from the audience. Colette nodded soberly, acknowledging what was said. Natasha had said much the same, when she held the wedding ring, as if in tweezers, between those dodgy false nails of hers. But Natasha had been a spiteful little slag, and the woman on the platform seemed to have no spite in her; Natasha had implied she was too old for new experiences, but Alison spoke as if she had her life before her. She spoke as if her feelings and thoughts could be mended; she imagined popping into the dry-cleaner’s, and getting the broken zip replaced, the zip that joined her thoughts to her feelings and joined her up inside.

This was Colette’s introduction to the metaphorical side of life. She realised that she hadn’t comprehended half that the fortune tellers had said to her. She might as well have stood in the street in Brondesbury ripping up tenners. When they told you something, you were supposed to look at it all ways up; you were supposed to hear it, understand it, feel all around its psychological dimensions. You weren’t supposed to fight it, but let the words sink into you. You shouldn’t query and quibble and try and beat the psychic out of her convictions; you should listen with your inner ear, and you should accept it, exactly what she said, if the feeling it gave you checked in with your feeling inside. Alison was offering hope and hope was the feeling she wanted to have; hope of redemption from the bathroom bickering of the house-share, and from finding other women’s bras stuffed under a sofa cushion when she flopped down after work with the Evening Standard: and from the sound of her housemates rutting at dawn.

‘Listen,’ Alison said. ‘What I want to say to you is, don’t shed tears. The fact is, you barely started with this man. He didn’t know what marriage was. He didn’t know how to make an equal relationship. He liked – gadgets, am I right, hi-fi, cars, that stuff, that was what he related to.’

‘Oh yes,’ Colette chirped up. ‘But then wouldn’t it be true of most men?’ She stopped herself. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘True of most men?’ Al queried gently. ‘I’ll give you that. The point is, though, was it true of him? Was it true that at the great highlights of your life, he was thinking about sports seats and sound systems? But look, darling, there is a man for you. A man who will be in your life for years and years to come.’ She frowned. ‘I want to say…oh, you know…“for better or worse” – but you’ve been married, chuck, so you know all that.’

Colette took a deep breath. ‘Does he have the initial M?’

‘Don’t prompt me, dear,’ Al said. ‘He’s not in your life yet, but he’s coming into it.’

‘So I don’t know him now?’

‘Not yet.’

Oh good, Colette thought – because she had just done a quick mind-scan of the men she already knew. ‘Will I meet him at work?’

Alison closed her eyes. ‘Sort of,’ she offered. She frowned. ‘More through work, than at work. Through work, is how I’d put it. First you’ll be sort of colleagues, then it’ll get closer. You’ll have a, what’s the word, a long association. It may take a bit of time to get close. He has to warm to you.’ She chuckled. ‘His dress sense is a bit lacking, but I expect you’ll soon fix that, darling.’ Alison smiled around at the audience. ‘She’ll just have to wait and see. Exciting, isn’t it?’

‘It is.’ Colette nodded. She kept up an inner monologue. It is, it is. I have hope, I have hope. I will get a salary rise – no, not that. I will get a place of my own – no, not that. I must, I had better, I ought to look around for a new job, I ought to shake my life up and open myself to opportunities. But whatever I do, something will happen. I am tired, I am tired of taking care of myself. Something will happen that is out of my hands.

Alison did a few other things that night at the Harte & Garter. She told a depressed-looking woman that she’d be going on a cruise. The woman at once straightened her collapsed spine and revealed in an awestruck voice that she had received a cruise brochure by the morning post, which she had sent for because her silver wedding was coming up shortly, and she thought it was time they exported their happiness somewhere other than the Isle of Wight.

‘Well, I want to say to you,’ Alison had told her, ‘that you will be going on that cruise, yes you will.’ Colette marvelled at the way Alison could spend the woman’s money. ‘And I’ll tell you something else; you’re going to have a lovely time. You’re going to have the time of your life.’

The woman sat up even straighter. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you,’ she said. She seemed to take on a sort of glow. Colette could see it even though she was four rows away. It encouraged her to think that somebody could hand over a tenner at the door and get so much hope in return. It was cheap, compared to what she was paying in Brondesbury and elsewhere.

After the event, Colette walked to the Riverside Station in the chilly evening air. The sun made a red channel down the centre of the Thames. Swans were bobbing in the milky water near the banks. Over towards Datchet, outside the pub called the Donkey House, some French exchange students were dipping one of their number in the water. She could hear their excited cries; they warmed her heart. She stood on the bridge, and waved to them with a big sweep of her arm, as if she were bringing a light aircraft in to land.

I won’t come back tomorrow, she thought. I will, I won’t, I will.

The next morning, Sunday, her journey was interrupted by engineering works. She had hoped to be first in the queue but that was not to be. As she stepped out of the station, there was a burst of sunshine. The high street was crammed with coaches. She walked uphill towards the castle and the Harte & Garter. The great Round Tower brooded over the street, and at its feet, like a munching worm, wound a stream of trippers gnawing at burgers.

It was eleven o’clock and the Extravaganza was in full spate. The tables and stands were set up in the hall where the medium had done the demonstration the night before. Spiritual healing was going on in one corner, Kirlian photography in another, and each individual psychic’s table, swathed in chenille or fringed silk, bore her stock-in-trade of tarot pack, crystal ball, charms, incense, pendulums and bells: plus a small tape machine so the client could have a record of her consultation. Almost all the psychics were women. There were just two men, lugubrious and neglected; Merlin and Merlyn, according to their name cards. One had on his table a bronze wizard waving a staff, and the other had what appeared to be a shrunken head on a stand. There was no queue at his table. She wandered up. ‘What’s that?’ she mouthed, pointing. It was difficult to make yourself heard; the roar of prediction rose into the air and bounced around in the rafters.

‘My spirit guide,’ the man said. ‘Well, a model of him.’

‘Can I touch it?’

‘If you must, dear.’

She ran her fingers over the thing. It wasn’t skin, but leather, a sort of leather mask bound to a wooden skull. Its brow was encircled by a cord into which were stuck the stumps of quills. ‘Oh, I get it,’ she said. ‘He’s a Red Indian.’

‘Native American,’ the man corrected. ‘The actual model is a hundred years old. It was passed on to me by my teacher, who got it from his teacher. Blue Eagle has guided three generations of psychics and healers.’

‘It must be hard if you’re a bloke. To know what to put on your table. That doesn’t look too poncey.’

‘Look, do you want a reading, or not?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Colette said. To hear a psychic at all, you would almost have to be cheek to cheek, and she didn’t fancy such intimacy with Blue Eagle’s mate. ‘It’s a bit sordid,’ she said. ‘This head. Off-putting. Why don’t you chuck it and get a new model?’ She straightened up. She looked around the room. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, shouting over a client’s head to a wizened old bat in a shawl, ‘excuse me, but where’s the one who did the dem last night? Alison?’

The old woman jerked her thumb. ‘Three down. In the corner there. Mind, she knows how to charge. If you hang on till I’m finished here, I can do you psychometry, cards and palms, thirty quid all in.’

‘How very unprofessional,’ Colette said coldly.

Then she spotted her. A client, beaming, rose from the red leatherette chair, and the queue parted to let her through. Colette saw Alison, very briefly, put her face in her hands: before raising it, smiling, to the next applicant for her services.

Even Sundays bring their ebb and flow – periods of quiet and almost peace, when sleep threatens in the overheated rooms – and then times of such confusion – the sunlight strikes in, sudden and scouring, lighting up the gewgaws on the velvet cloth – and within the space of two heartbeats, the anxiety is palpable, a baby crying, the incense choking, the music whining, more fortune seekers pressing in at the door and backing up those inside against the tables. There is a clatter as a few Egyptian perfume bottles go flying; Mrs Etchells, three tables down, is jawing on about the joys of motherhood; Irina is calming a sobbing adolescent with a broken engagement; the baby, wound up with colic, twisting in the arms of an unseen mother, is preying on her attention as if he were entangled in her gut.

She looked up and saw a woman of her own age, meagrely built, with thin fair hair which lay flat against her skull. Her features were minimal, her figure that of an orphan in a storm. A question jumped into Al’s head: how would this play if you were a Victorian, if you were one of those Victorian cheats? She knew all about it; after all, Mrs Etchells, who had trained her, almost went back to those days. In those days the dead manifested in the form of muslin, stained and smelly from the psychic’s body cavities. The dead were packed within you, so you coughed or vomited them, or drew them out of your generative organs. They blew trumpets and played portable organs; they moved the furniture; they rapped on the wall, they sang hymns. They offered bouquets to the living, spirit roses bound by scented hands. Sometimes they proffered inconveniently large objects, like a horse. Sometimes they stood at your shoulder, a glowing column made flesh by the eyes of faith. She could see it easily, a picture from the past: herself in a darkened parlour, her superb shoulders rising white out of crimson velvet, and this straight flat creature at her elbow, standing in the halflight: her eyes empty as water, impersonating a spirit form.

‘Would you like to come and sit?’

Not fair! the queue said. Not her turn!

‘Please be patient,’ Alison said sweetly. ‘I think someone’s trying to come through for this lady, and I daren’t keep spirit world waiting.’

The queue fell back, murmuring. She sat down before her, the pallid meek being, like a sacrifice drained of blood. Al searched her for clues. Probably never known the joys of motherhood? Fair bet, with those tits. Oh, wait, didn’t I see her last night? Near the front, third row, left of centre, no? Broken wedding ring. Man with the gadgets. Career girl, of sorts. Not much of a career, though. Drifting. Anxious. Pains in her gut. Tension at the back of her neck; a big dead hand squeezing her spine.