Beyond Black: A Novel (21 page)

“Feeling the pinch, is she? Good. Cheating old bat.”

“Oh, I think she does all right, she does a lot of postal readings. She’s got regulars going back years. No, it’s just she finds a hotel impersonal, she says, she prefers a family home. You know what she’s like. She reads the tea cups and leaves her flyer. She tries to sign up the landlady. Sometimes they let her stop for nothing.”

Colette pulled a sheaf of Al’s new leaflets out of their box. They had chosen lavender, and a form of wording that declared her to be 
one of the most acclaimed psychics working in Britain today.
 Al had objected, modestly, but Colette said, what do you want me to put? Alison Hart, Slightly Famous Along The A4?

The schedule was this: a Fayre this evening, Saturday, to be followed next day by a Grand Fayre, where a group of them would have their forty-minute slots on the platform; meanwhile, whoever was not onstage could carry on with private readings in the side rooms.

The venue was an old primary school, the marks of violence still chipped into its red brick. As Al stepped inside she shuddered. She said, “As you know, my schooldays weren’t what you call happy.”

She put a smile on her face, and lollopped among the trestles, beaming from side to side as her colleagues set out their stalls. “Hi Angel. Hi Cara, how are you? This is Colette, my new assistant and working partner.”

Cara, setting down her Norse Wisdom Sticks, lifted her sunny little face. “Hi, Alison. I see you’ve not lost any weight.”

Mrs. Etchells staggered in, a box of baubles in her arms. “Oh, what a journey! What a day after the night before!”

“You got a toy boy, Mrs. Etchells?” Cara asked, giving Al a wink.

“If you must know, I was up all night with the Princess. Silvana, love, help me dress my table, would you?”

Silvana, raising her pencilled brows and hissing between her teeth, dumped down carrier bags and unfurled Mrs. Etchell’s fringed crimson cloth into air laden already with the smell from oil burners. “Personally,” she said, “I never heard a squeak from Di. Mrs. Etchells reckons she was with her, talking about the joys of motherhood.”

“Imagine that,” Mandy said.

“So this is your assistant, Alison?” Silvana ran her eyes over Colette; then ran them over Alison, with insulting slowness, as if they had to feel their way over a large surface area.

They hate it, Al thought, they hate it; because I’ve got Colette, they think I’m coining it. “I thought—you know,” she said. “A bit of help with the—with the secretarial, the bookkeeping, the driving, you know. Lonely on the road.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” Silvana said. “Mind you, if you wanted company on the motorway you could have run over to Aldershot and collected your granny, instead of leaving it to me. This your new flyer?” She picked it up and held it close to her eyes; psychics don’t wear glasses. “Mm,” she said. “Did you do this, Colette? Very nice.”

“I shall be setting up a Web site for Alison,” Colette said.

Silvana tossed the leaflet down on Mrs. Etchells’s table and passed her hands around Colette to feel her aura. “Oh dear,” she said, and moved away.

Seven o’clock. The scheduled finish was at eight, but tonight they would be lucky to get them out by half-past; the caretaker was already banging about, kicking his vacuum cleaner up and down the corridor. But what could you do with the punters: lever them, sodden and sobbing, into the streets? There was hardly one customer who had not mentioned Di; many broke down and cried, putting their elbows on the trestles, edging up the lucky pisky figurines and the brass finger cymbals so they could sob their hearts out in comfort. I identified with her, she was like a friend to me. Yes, yes, yes, Al would say, like her you are drawn to suffering, oh yes, I am I am, that’s me. You like to have a good time, oh yes I have always loved dancing. I think of those two boys, I would have had two boys, except the last one was a girl. Diana was Cancer like me, I was born under Cancer, it means you are like a crab, inside your shell you are squidgy, I think that’s where her nickname came from, don’t you? I never thought of that, Al said, but you could be right. I think they made her a scrapegoat. I dreamed of her last night, appearing to me in the form of a bird.

There was something gluttonous in their grief, something gloating. Al let them sob, agreeing with them and feeding them their lines, sometimes making little there-there noises; her eyes travelled from side to side, to see who was conspiring against her; Colette stalked between the tables, listening in. I must tell her not to do that, Al thought, or at least not to do it so conspicuously. As she passed, ill will trailed after her; let them not cold-shoulder me, Al prayed.

For it was usual among the psychics to pass clients to each other, to work in little rings and clusters, trading off their specialties, their weaknesses and strengths: well, darling, I’m not a medium personally, but you see Eve there, in the corner, just give her a little wave, tell her I’ve recommended you. They pass notes to one another, table to table—titbits gleaned, snippets of personal information with which to impress the clients. And if for some reason you’re not on the inside track, you can get disrecommended, you can get forced out. It’s a cold world when your colleagues turn their backs.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she sighed, patting the mottled palms she had just read. “It will all work out for the best. And I’m sure young Harry will look more like his daddy as time goes by.” The woman wrote her a cheque for three services—palms, crystal, and general clairvoyance—and as she detached it a final fat tear rolled out of her eye and splashed on her bank sort code.

As the woman rose, a new prospect hesitated in passing. “Do you do Vedic palmistry or ordinary?”

“Just ordinary, I’m afraid,” Alison said. The woman sneered and started to move on. Alison began, “You could try Silvana over there—” but she checked herself. Silvana, after all, was a fraud; her mother used to manage a newsagent in Farnborough, a fact at odds with her claim to be a Romany whose family origins were lost in the mists of occult tradition. Sometimes the punters would ask “What’s the difference between a clairaudient and an aura reader, a whatsit and a thing?” and Al would say, “No great difference, my dear, it’s not the instrument you choose that matters, it’s not the method, it’s not the technique, it’s your attunement to a higher reality.” But what she really wanted to do was lean across the table and say, you know what’s the difference, the difference between them and me? Most of them can’t do it, and I can. And the difference shows, she tells herself, not just in results, but in attitude, in deportment, in some essential seriousness. Her tarot cards, unused so far today, sat at her right hand, burning through their wrap of scarlet satin: priestess, lover, and fool. She had never touched them with a hand that was soiled, or opened them to the air without opening her heart; whereas Silvana will light a fag between customers, and Merlin and Merlyn will send out for cheeseburgers if there’s a lull. It isn’t right to smoke and eat in front of clients, to blow smoke at them over your crystals.

It’s this she must teach Colette, that a casual approach won’t do: you don’t shove your stuff in a nylon holdall and wrap your rose quartz in your knickers. You don’t carry your kit around in a cardboard box that used to contain a dozen bottles of lavatory cleaner, you don’t clear up at the end of a fayre by bundling your bits and pieces into a supermarket carrier bag. And you control your face, your expression, every moment you’re awake. She had sometimes noticed an unguarded expression on a colleague’s face, as the departing client turned away: a compound of deep weariness and boredom, as the lines of professional alertness faded and the face fell into its customary avaricious folds. She had made up her mind, in the early days, that the client would not like to see this expression, and so she had invented a smile, complicit and wistful, which she kept cemented to her face between readings; it was there now.

Meanwhile Colette moved scornfully on her trajectory, helpfully clearing an ashtray or righting an upturned hobbit: anything to allow herself to lean in close and listen. She evesdropped on Cara, Cara with her cropped head, her pointy ears, her butterfly tattoo: Your aura’s like your bar code, think of it that way. So your husband’s first wife, could that be the blonde I’m seeing? I sense that you are a person of great hidden drive and force of will.

“Would you like a cuppa from the machine, Mrs. Etchells?” Colette called, but Al’s grandmama waved her away.

“Have you known the joys of motherhood, dear? Only I’m seeing a little boy in your palm.”

“A girl, actually,” said her client.

“It may be a girl I’m seeing. Now, dear, and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, and I don’t want to alarm you, but I want you to look out for a little accident that could happen to her, nothing serious, I’m not seeing a hospital bed, it’s more as if—as if she might just fall over and cut her knee.”

“She’s twenty-three,” said the woman coldly.

“Oh, I see.” Mrs. Etchells tittered. “You must have been very young, dear, when you knew the joys of motherhood. And just the one, is it? No little brothers or sisters? You didn’t want, or you couldn’t have? Am I seeing a little op, at all?”

“Well, if you call it little.”

“Oh, I always call an op little. I never say a big op. It doesn’t do to upset people.”

You daft old beggar, Colette says to herself. What is this 
joy
, what is this word and what does it mean? The psychics say, you’re not going to find joy in the external world, you’ve got to go looking for it inside, dear. Even Alison goes along with the theory, when she’s in public mode; privately, back in Wexham, she often looks as if it’s a hopeless task. Rummaging in your heart for 
joy
? May as well go through the bins for it. Where’s God? she had said to Al. Where’s God in all this? And Al had said, Morris says he’s never seen God, he doesn’t get out much. But he says he’s seen the devil; he says he’s on first-name terms with him; he claims he beat him at darts once.

And you believe that? Colette asked her, and Al said, no, Morris, he drinks too much, his hand shakes, he can barely hit the board.

For Saturday night the hotel had put on a late buffet for the psychic party: crinkled chicken legs stained the colour of old walnut, a wheel-sized quiche with a thick cardboard base. There was a cold pasta salad and a bowl of complicated-looking greenery that Colette turned, without enthusiasm, with the utensils provided. Raven sat with his desert boots on a coffee table, rolling one of his special cigarettes. “The thing is, have you got 
The Grimoire of Anciara St. Remy?
 Only it’s got forty spells, with detailed diagrams and conjuring charts.”

“You selling it?” Silvana asked.

“No, but—”

“But you’re on commission for it, am I right?”

Oh, they’re such cynics, Colette thought. She had imagined that when psychics got together they’d talk about—well, things of the psyche; that they would share at least a little of their bemusement and daily fear, the fear that—if she could judge by Alison—was the price of success. But now, a little way into their association, she understood that all they talked about was money. They tried to sell things to each other, they compared their rates, they tried to hear of new stratagems—“Believe me, it’s the new aromatherapy,” Gemma was saying—and to learn about new tricks and fiddles that they could try out. They came to swap jargon, pick up the latest terms: and 
why
 do they look so ridiculous? Why all these crystal pendant earrings swinging from withered lobes; why the shrunken busts exposed in daylight, the fringes, the beading, the head scarves, the wraps, the patchwork, and the shawls? In their room—just time, before the buffet, to freshen up—she’d said to Alison, “You criticize my holdall, but have you seen your friends, have you seen the state of them?”

Alison’s silk, the length of apricot polyester, lay folded on the bed, ready to be draped next day; in private life she flinches at its touch—oh yes, she has admitted she does—but somehow it’s necessary, she will claim, as part of her public persona. With the silk around her studio portrait, she loses the sensation that she is shrinking inside her own skin. It blunts her sensitivity, in a way that is welcome to her; it is an extra synthetic skin she has grown, to compensate for the skins the work strips away.

But now Colette moved around the room, grumbling. “Why does everything have to be so tacky? That fairground stuff. They can’t think it impresses anybody. I mean, when you see Silvana, you don’t say, ooh look, here comes a gypsy princess, you say, here comes a withered old slapper with a streak of fake tan down the side of her neck.”

“It’s—I don’t know,” Al said. “It’s to make it, like a game.”

Colette stared. “But it’s their job. A job’s not a game.”

“I agree, I agree completely, there’s just no need these days to dress up as if you were in a circus. But then again, I don’t think mediums should wear sneakers either.”

“Who’s wearing sneakers?”

“Cara. Under her robes.” Al looked perplexed and stood up to take off a layer or two. “I never know what to wear myself, these days.” Suit your outfit to the audience, to the town, had always been her watchword. A touch of Jaeger—their clothes don’t fit her, but she can have an accessory—feels eternally right in Guildford, whereas down the road in Woking they’d mistrust you if you weren’t in some way mismatched and uncoordinated. Each town on her loop had its requirements, and when you head up the country, you mustn’t expect sophistication; the farther north you go, the more the psychics’ outfits tend to suggest hot Mediterranean blood, or the mysterious East, and today maybe it’s she who’s got it wrong, because at the fayre she had the feeling of being devalued, marked down in some way … that woman who wanted Vedic palmistry … .

Colette had told her she wouldn’t go wrong with a little cashmere cardigan, preferably black. But of course there was no 
little
 cardigan that would meet Al’s need, only something like a Bedouin tent, something capacious and hot, and as she peeled this garment off, her scent came with it and wafted through the room; the whiff of royal mortification was suppressed now, but she had told Colette, do alert me, I shan’t take offence, if you catch a hint of anything from the sepulchre.