Beyond Black: A Novel (24 page)

“I’ve heard it can be quite dangerous,” a woman said. “Dabbling in that sort of thing.”

“Oh, yes, dabbling,” Al said. It made her smile, the way the punters used it as a technical term. “Yes, you don’t want to go dabbling. Because you have to consider who would come through. There are some spirits that are—I’m not being rude now, but they are on a very low level. They’re only drifting about earthside because they’ve got nothing better to do. They’re like those kids you see on sink estates hanging about parked cars—you don’t know if they’re going to break in and drive them away or just slash the tyres and scratch the paintwork. But why find out? Just don’t go there! Now those sort of kids, you wouldn’t ask them in your house, would you? Well, that’s what you’re doing if you mess about with a Ouija board.”

She looked down at her hands. The lucky opals were occluded, steamy, as if their surfaces were secreting. There are things you need to know about the dead, she wanted to say. Things you really ought to know. For instance, it’s no good trying to enlist them for any good cause you have in mind, world peace or whatever. Because they’ll only bugger you about. They’re not reliable. They’ll pull the rug from under you. They don’t become decent people just because they’re dead. People are right to be afraid of ghosts. If you get people who are bad in life—I mean, cruel people, dangerous people—why do you think they’re going to be any better after they’re dead?

But she would never speak it. Never. Never utter the word 
death
 if she could help it. And even though they needed frightening, even though they deserved frightening, she would never, when she was with her clients, slip a hint or tip a wink about the true nature of the place beyond black.

At teatime, when the event was over and they went down in the lift with their bags, Colette said, “Well now!”

“Well now what?”

“Your little outburst at breakfast! The less said about that, the better.”

Al looked sideways at her. Now that they were alone together, and with the drive home before them, Colette was obviously about to say a great deal.

As they stood at the desk, checking out, Mandy came up behind them. “All right, Al? Feeling better?”

“I’ll be okay, Mandy. And look, I really want to apologize about Morris last night—”

“Forget it. Could happen to any of us.”

“You know what Cara said, about unconditional love. I suppose she’s right. But it’s hard to love Morris.”

“I don’t think that trying to love him would get you anywhere. You’ve just got to get clever about him. I don’t suppose there’s anyone new on the horizon, is there?”

“Not that I can see.”

“It’s just that round about our age, you do sometimes get a second chance—well, you know yourself how it is with men, they leave you for a younger model. Now I’ve known some psychics who, frankly, they find it devastating when their guide walks out, but for others, let me say, it’s a blessed relief—you get a fresh start with a new guide, and before you know where you are your trade’s taken an upturn and you feel twenty years younger.” She took Al’s hand. Her pink-frosted nails caressed the opals. “Alison, can I speak frankly to you? As one of your oldest friends? You’ve got to get off the Wheel of Fear. Onto the Wheel of Freedom.”

Al pushed her hair back, smiling bravely. “It sounds a bit too athletic for me.”

“Enlightenment proceeds level by level. You know that. If I had to take a guess, I’d say that thinking was at the source of your problems. Too much thinking. Take the pressure off, Al. Open your heart.”

“Thanks. I know you mean well, Mandy.”

Colette turned from the desk, credit card slip between her fingers, fumbling with the strap of her bag. The nail of Mandy’s forefinger dug her in the ribs. Startled, Colette looked up into her face. Her mouth was set in a grim pink line. She’s quite old, Colette thought; her neck’s going.

“Look after Al,” Mandy said. “Al is very gifted and very special, and you’ll have to answer to me for it if you let her talent bring her to grief.”

In the car park, Colette strode briskly ahead with her holdall. Alison was dragging her case—one of the wheels had come off—and she was still limping, in pain from her smashed-up feet. She knew she should call Colette back to help her. But it seemed more suitable to suffer. I ought to suffer, she thought, though I am not sure why.

“The amount you take away!” Colette said. “For one night.”

“It’s not that I pack too much,” Al said meekly. “It’s that my clothes are bigger.” She didn’t want a row, not just at this minute. There was a quivering in her abdomen which she knew meant that someone was trying to break through from Spirit. Her pulse was leaping. Once again she felt nauseated, and as if she wanted to belch.

Sorry, Diana, she said, I just had to get that wind up, and Colette said—well, she said nothing, really, but Al could see she was annoyed about being told off by Mandy. “She was only advising you,” she said. “She didn’t mean any harm. Me and Mand, we go back a long way.”

“Put your seat belt on,” Colette said. “I’m hoping to get home before dark. You’ll need to stop somewhere to eat, I suppose.”

“Fucking will,” Morris said, settling himself into the rear seat. “Here, don’t drive off yet, wait till we get settled.”

“We?” Al said. She swivelled in her seat; was there a thickening of the air, a ripple and disturbance, a perturbation below the level of her senses? A smell of rot and blight?

Morris was in wonderful spirits, chortling and bouncing. “Here’s Donald Aitkenside hitching a ride. Donnie, what I’ve been trying to meet up wiv. You know Donnie, don’t you? ’Course you do! Donnie and me, we go back a long way. Donnie knew MacArthur. You remember MacArthur, from the old days? And here’s young Dean. Don’t know Dean, do you? Dean’s new at this game, he don’t know nobody—well, he knows Donnie but he don’t know the army crowd nor any of that lot from the old fight game. Dean, meet the missus. That? That’s the missus’s pal. Like a length o’ string, ain’t she? Would you? No, not me, no chance, I like a bit of meat on their bones.”

He laughed raucously.

“Tell you what, gel, tell you what, stop off south of Leicester somewhere, and we might meet up with Pikey Pete. For Pikey Pete,” he told Dean, “he is such a man, if he’s down on his luck you’ll see him picking fag ends off the road, but let him have a win on the dogs and he will see you and slot a cigar in your top pocket, he’s that generous.”

“Should we pull in south of Leicester?” Al asked.

Colette was irritated. “That’s no distance.”

“Look, it’s not worth antagonizing him.”

“Morris?”

“Of course, Morris. Colette, you know the tape, you know those men that were coming through?”

“Paramilitaries?”

“No. Forget them. I mean the fiends, the fiends I used to know.”

“Can we please not talk about it? Not while I’m driving.”

The service stations were quiet, winding down after the weekend trade, though it had been an odd sort of weekend, of course, because of Di. The fiends swarmed out of the back of the car, yipping and squeaking. Inside the building, Al wandered around the food court, an anxious expression on her face. She lifted the lid of a mock-rustic tureen and gazed into the soup, and picked up filled rolls and tugged at their wrappings, turning them up to look at them end on. “What’s in this one, do you think?” she said. The film was misty, as if the lettuce had been breathing out.

“For God’s sake sit down,” Colette said. “I’ll bring you some pizza.”

When she came back, edging among the tables with her tray, she saw that Al had taken out her tarot cards.

She was amazed. “Not here!” she said.

“I just have to—”

The card’s scarlet wrappings flowed over the table, and puddled in Colette’s lap as she sat down. Alison drew out one card. She held it for a moment, flipped it over. She didn’t speak, but laid it down on top of the pack.

“What is it?”

It was the Tower. Lightning strikes. The masonry of the tower is blasted away. Flames shoot out of the brickwork. Debris is thrown into space. The occupants hurtle towards earth, their legs scissoring and their arms outflung. The ground rushes up at them.

“Eat your pizza,” Colette said, “before it goes all flabby.”

“I don’t want it.” The Tower, she thought; it’s my least favourite. The death card I can handle. I don’t like the Tower. The Tower means—

Colette saw with alarm that Al’s eyes had slipped out of focus; as if Al were a baby whom she were desperate to placate, whose mouth she was desperate to fill, she grabbed the plastic fork and plunged it into the pizza. “Look, Al. Try a bit of this.”

The fork buckled against the crust; Al snapped back, smiled, took the fork from her hand. “It may not be so bad,” she said. Her voice was small and tight. “Here, Col, let me. When you get the Tower it means your world blows up. Generally. But it can have a—you know, quite a 
small
 meaning. Oh, blast this thing.”

“Pick it up in your fingers,” Colette advised.

“Wrap my cards up, then.”

Colette shrank; she was afraid to touch them.

“It’s all right. They won’t bite. They know you. They know you’re my partner.”

Hastily, Colette bundled them into their red wrappings.

“That’s right. Just drop them in my bag.”

“What came over you?”

“I don’t know. I just had to see. It gets you that way sometimes.” Al bit into a piece of raw-looking green pepper, and chewed it for a while. “Colette, there’s something you ought to know. About last night.”

“Your baby voice,” Colette said. “Talking to nobody. That made me laugh. But then I thought at one point you were having a heart attack.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my heart.”

Colette looked meaningfully at her pizza slice.

“Well, yes,” Alison said. “But that’s not going to finish me off. Nobody perishes of a pizza slice. Think of all those millions of Italians, running round quite healthy.”

“It was a horrible weekend.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know,” Colette said. “I didn’t have any expectations. That card—what do you mean by a 
small
meaning?”

“It can be a warning that the structure you’re in won’t contain you anymore. Whether it’s your job or your love life or whatever it is, you’ve out-grown it. It’s not safe to stay put. The Tower is a house you know. So it can mean just that. Move on.”

“What, leave Wexham?”

“Why not? It’s a nice little flat but I’ve got no roots there.”

“Where would you like to move?”

“Somewhere clean. Somewhere new. A house that nobody’s lived in before. Could we do that?”

“New-build is a good investment.” Colette put down her coffee cup. “I’ll look into it.”

“I thought—well, listen, Colette, I’m sure you’re as tired of Morris as I am. I don’t know if he’d ever agree to—you know—take his pension—I think Mandy was being a bit optimistic there. But our lives would be easier, wouldn’t they, if his friends didn’t come round?”

“His friends?” Colette said blankly.

Oh, Jesus, Al said to herself, it’s all uphill work. “He’s beginning to meet up with his friends,” she explained. “I don’t know why he feels the need, but it seems he does. There’s one called Don Aitkenside. I remember him. He had a mermaid on his thigh. And this Dean, now, he’s new to me, but I don’t like the sound of him. He was in the back of the car just now. Spotty kid. Got a police record.”

“Really?” Colette’s flesh crawled. “In the back?”

“With Morris and Don.” Al pushed her plate away. “And now Morris is off looking for this gypsy.”

“Gypsy? But there won’t be room!”

Alison just looked at her sadly. “They don’t take up room, in the usual way,” she said.

“No. Of course not. It’s the way you talk about them.”

“I can’t think how else to talk. I only have the usual words.”

“Of course you do, but it makes me think—I mean it makes me think they’re ordinary blokes, except I can’t see them.”

“I hope they’re not. Not ordinary. I mean, I hope the standard is better than that.”

“You never knew Gavin.”

“Did he smell?”

Colette hesitated. She wanted to be fair. “Not more than he could help.”

“He’d take a bath, would he?”

“Oh yes, a shower.”

“And he wouldn’t, sort of, undo his clothes and take out private bits of himself in public?”

“No!”

“And if he saw a little girl on the street, he wouldn’t turn around and make comments about her? Like, look at it waggle its little arse?”

“You frighten me, Al,” Colette said coldly.

I know, Al thought. Why mention it now?

“You have a very peculiar imagination. How can you think I would marry a man like that?”

“You might not know. Till you’d tied the knot. You might have had a nasty surprise.”

“I wouldn’t have been married to that kind of a man. Not for an instant.”

“But he had magazines, did he?”

“I never looked at them.”

“It’s on the Internet, these days.”

Colette thought, I should have searched his systems. But those were early days, as far as technology went. People weren’t sophisticated, like they are now.

“He used to call hotlines,” she admitted. “Once I myself, just out of curiosity—”

“Did you? What happened?”

“They kept you hanging on for ages. Just messing you about, basically, while you were running up a bill. I put the phone down. I thought, what will it be? Just some woman pretending to come. Moaning, I suppose.”

“You could do that for yourself,” Al said.

“Precisely.”

“If we moved, we might be able to lose them. I suppose Morris will stick, but I’d like to shake off his friends.”

“Wouldn’t they come after us?”

“We’d go somewhere they don’t know.”

“Don’t they have maps?”

“I don’t think they do. I think it’s more like … they’re more like dogs. They have to pick up the scent.”

In the LADIES, she watched her own face in the mirror, as she washed her hands. Colette must be coaxed towards a house move, she must be made to see the sense. Yet she must not be terrified too much. Last night the tape had frightened her, but how could that have been prevented? It was a shock to me too, she said to herself. If Morris has caught up with Aitkenside, can Capstick be far behind? Will he be bringing home MacArthur, and lodging him in the bread bin or her dressing table drawer? Will she sit down to breakfast one day and find Pikey Pete lurking under the lid of the butter dish? Will she get a sudden fright, as Bob Fox taps at the window?