Beyond Black: A Novel (27 page)

Suzi enquired, “Which lady is the purchaser?”

“We are both the purchaser.”

Suzi turned away and snatched up the coffeepot from its hotplate. “Coffee? Milk and sugar?” She turned, the pot held defensively before her, and gave them a wide smile. “Certainly,” she said. “Oh, yes, of course. We don’t discriminate. Far from it. Far on the other side. We’ve been away for a training day. We are enthused to play our part to enhance the diversity of the community. The very special kind of community that’s created wherever you find a Galleon Home?”

Colette said, “What do you mean, far on the other side?”

“I mean, no discrimination at all?”

Al said, “No sugar, thanks.”

“But you don’t get a bonus? I mean, if we were lesbians? Which by the way we aren’t? Would you get extra commission?”

Just then a normal couple came up the steps. “Hello?” Suzi called to them, with a warmth that almost scared them down again. “Coffee?” she sang. A few drips from the poised pot leaked onto the plans of the Frobisher, and widened like a fresh fecal stain.

Alison turned away. Her cheeks were plum-coloured.

Colette followed her. “Ignore her. This is Surrey. They don’t get many gays and they’re easily upset.” She thought, if I 
were
 a lesbian, I hope I’d get a woman who wasn’t so bulky.

“Could we come back later?” Alison asked. “When there are houses here?”

Suzi said coldly, “Half of these plots are under offer.”

Colette took Al back to the car and laid the facts before her. This is prime building land, she said. She consulted the literature and read it out. Convenient transport links and first-class health and leisure facilities.

“But there aren’t,” Al said. “It’s a field. There’s nothing here. No facilities of any sort.”

“You have to imagine them.”

“It’s not even on a map, is it?”

“They’ll redraw the map, in time.”

She touched Colette’s arm, conciliatory. “No, what I mean is, I like it. I’d like to live nowhere. How long would it be before we could move in?”

“About nine months, I should think.”

Alison was silent. She had given Colette a free hand in the choice of site. Just nowhere near my old house, she had said. Nowhere near Aldershot. Nowhere near a race course, a dog track, an army camp, a dockyard, a lorry park, or a clinic for special diseases. Nowhere near a sidings or a depot, a customs shed or a warehouse; not near an outdoor market or an indoor market or a sweatshop or a body shop or a bookie’s. Colette had said, I thought you might have a psychic way of choosing—for instance, you’d get the map and swing a pendulum over it. God, no, Al had said, if I did that, we’d probably end up in the sea.

“Nine months,” she said now. “I was hoping to do it quicker.”

She had thought of Dean and Aitkenside and whoever, wondered what would happen if Morris brought them home and they got dug in at Wexham. She imagined them hanging around the communal grounds and making their presence felt: tipping over the bins and scratching the residents’ cars. Her neighbours didn’t know the nature of her trade; she had been able to keep it from them. But she imagined them talking behind her back. She imagined the residents’ meeting, which they held every six months. It was at best a rancorous affair: who moves furniture late at night, how did the stair carpet get frayed? She imagined them muttering, talking about her, levelling spiteful but unspecific accusations. Then she would be tempted to apologize; worse, tempted to try to explain.

“Well, there it is,” Colette sighed. “If you want new-build, I don’t think we can do it any quicker. Not unless we buy something nobody else wants.”

Alison swivelled in her seat. “We could do that, couldn’t we? We don’t have to want what everybody else wants?”

“Fine. If you’re prepared to settle for some peculiar little house next to a rubbish dump. Or a plot next to a main road, with all the traffic noise day and night.”

“No, we wouldn’t want that.”

“Alison, should we give it up for today? You’re just not in the mood, are you? It’s like dealing with a five-year-old.”

“Sorry. It’s Morris.”

“Tell him to go to the pub.”

“I have. But he says there isn’t a pub. He keeps going on about his mates. I think he’s met up with another one, I can’t get the name. Oh, wait. Hush, Col, he’s coming through now.”

Morris came through, loud, clear, indignant: “What, are we going to come and live in the middle of a field? I’m not living here.”

Al said, “Wait. He just said something interesting.” She paused, her hand held above her abdomen, as if she were tuning him in. “All right,” she said, “if you’re going to be like that, you know what you can do. See if you can find a better home to go to. (Not you, Col, I’m talking to Morris.) What makes you think I want you moving in anyway? I don’t need you. I’ve had it up to here! Bugger off!” She shouted the last phrase, staring through the windscreen.

Colette said, “Shh! Keep it down!” She checked over her shoulder that no one was watching them.

Al smiled. “I’ll tell you what, Colette, I’ll tell you what we should do. Go back in there, and tell that woman to put us down for the biggest house she’s got.”

Colette placed a small holding deposit and they returned two days later. Suzi was on duty, but it was a weekday morning and the caravan was empty.

“Hello, again. So you’re not working ladies?” Suzi enquired. Her eyes skittered over them, sharp as scissors.

“Self-employed,” Colette said.

“Oh, I see. Both of you?”

“Yes, is that a problem?”

Suzi took a deep breath. Once again a smile spread over her face. “No problem at all? But you will be wanting our package of personally tailored mortgage advice and assistance?”

“No, thank you.”

Suzi spread out the site map. “The Collingwood,” she said, “is very unique, on this site we shall only be erecting three. Being exclusive, it is in a preferential situation, here on top of the hill? We don’t have a computer-generated image as of this moment, because we’re waiting for the computer to generate it. But if you can imagine the Rodney? With an extra bedroom en suite?”

“But what will it look like on the outside?”

“If you’ll excuse me?” Suzi got on the phone. “Those two ladies?” she said. “That I mentioned? Yes, those ones. Wanting to know about the Collingwood, the exterior elevations? Like the Rodney with different gob-ons? Yes. Mmm. Just ordinary, really … . No, not to look at them. By-eee.” She turned back to Colette. “Now, if you can imagine?” She passed her forefinger over the sales leaflet. “For the Rodney you have this band of decorative plasterwork with the nautical knots motif, but with the Collingwood you will get extra portholes?”

“Instead of windows?”

“Oh no, they will just be decorative.”

“They won’t open?”

“I’ll check that for you, shall I?” She picked up the phone again. “Hi, there! Yes, fine. My ladies—yes, those ones—want to know, do the portholes open? That’s on the Collingwood?”

The answer took some time to find. A voice in Al’s ear said, did you know Capstick was at sea? He was in the merchant navy before he got taken on as a bouncer.

“Colette,” she said. She put her hand on Colette’s hand. “I think Morris has met Keef Catsick.”

“No?” Suzi said. “No! Really? You too? In Dorking? … Well, there must be a plague of them. What can you do? Live and let live, that’s what I say … . Yes, will do. By-eee.”

She clicked the phone down and turned away politely, believing she was witnessing a moment of lesbian intimacy.

Colette said, “Keith who?”

Alison took her hand away. “No. It’s all right. It’s nothing.” Her knuckles looked skinned and darkly bruised. The lucky opals had congealed in their settings, dull and matt like healing scabs.

Al thought you couldn’t bargain with a house builder, but Colette showed her that you can. Even when they had agreed on a basic price, three thousand below Suzi’s target, she kept on pushing, pushing, pushing, until Suzi felt sick and hot and she began to capitulate to Colette’s demands; for Colette made it clear that until she was dealt with, and dealt with in a way satisfactory to herself, she would keep away any other potential customers—which she did, by darting her head at them as they climbed the steps and fixing them with her pale glare; by snapping, “Do you mind, Suzi is busy with me?” When Suzi’s phone rang, Colette picked it up and said, “Yes? No she can’t. Call back.” When Suzi yearned after lost prospects as they stumbled down the steps, following them with her eyes, Colette zipped her bag, stood up and said, “I could come back when you’re more fully staffed—say, next Saturday afternoon?”

Suzi grew frantic then, as she saw her commission seeping away. She became accommodating and flexible. When Suzi agreed to upgrade to a power shower en-suite to Bed Two, Colette signed up for fitted wardrobes. When Colette hesitated over a double oven, Suzi offered to make it a multifunction model including microwave. When Colette—after prolonged deliberation—gave the nod to brass switchplates throughout, Suzi was so relieved she threw in a carriage lamp free. And when Colette—after stabbing at her calculator buttons and gnawing her lip—opted for wood-style flooring to kitchen and utility, Suzi, sweating inside her orange skin, agreed to turf the back garden at Galleon’s expense.

Meanwhile, Alison had plummeted down on the click ’n’ fix korner group seating. I can afford it, she thought, I can probably afford it. Business was booming, thanks in part to Colette’s efficiency and bright ideas. There was no shortage of clients; and it was just as Colette said, one must invest, one must invest against leaner times. Morris sat in the corner, picking at the carpet tiles, trying to lift one. He looked like a toddler, absorbed, his short legs and potbelly thrust out, his tongue between his teeth.

She watched Colette negotiating, small rigid hand chopping the air. At last she got the nod and limped out to the car after her. Colette jumped into the driving seat, whipped out her calculator again, and held it up so that Al could see the display.

Al turned away. “Tell me in words,” she said. Morris leaned forward and poked her in the shoulder. Here’s the lads coming, he shouted. Here’s the cheeky chappies. Knew you’d find me, knew you would, that’s the spirit.

“You could take more of an interest,” Colette snapped. “I’ve probably saved us ten K.”

“I know. I just can’t read the panel. The light’s in my eyes.”

“Plain ceilings or Artex?” Colette said. Her voice rose to a squeak, imitating Suzi. “They think you’ll give them money to stop them making plaster swirls.”

“I expect it’s harder to make plaster smooth.”

“That’s what 
she
 said! I said, smooth should be standard! Silly bitch. I wouldn’t pay her in washers.”

Aitkenside said, we can’t live here. There’s no bleeding accommodation.

Dean said, Morris, are we going camping? I went camping once.

Morris said, how was it, mate?

Dean said, it were crap.

Aitkenside said, call it a porthole and it don’t bleeding open? Won’t do for Keef, you know, it won’t do for Keef.

“Brilliant,” Al said. “Couldn’t be better. What won’t do for Keith will do just fine for me.” She put out her hand and squeezed Colette’s cold bony fingers.

That summer, the birch trees were cut down and the last birds flew away. Their song was replaced by the roaring of road drills, the beeping of the earth movers backing up, the cursing of hod carriers and the cries of the wounded, and scrubland gave way to a gashed landscape of trenches and moats, of mud chutes and standing pools of yellow water; which within a year, in its turn, gave way to the violent emerald of new turf, the Sunday morning roar of mowers and strimmers, the tinkling of the ice-cream vans, the trundling of gas barbecues over paving and the stench of searing meat.

The flat in Wexham had sold to the first people who saw it. Alison wondered, will they sense something: Morris glugging inside the hot-water tank, or murmuring in the drains? But they seemed delighted, and offered the full asking price.

“It seems so unfair,” Colette said, “when our flat in Whitton wouldn’t sell. Not even when we dropped the price.”

She and Gavin had sacked Sidgewicks, tried another agent; still no takers. Eventually, they had agreed Gavin should stay there, and buy her out by installments. “We have hopes the arrangement will be persuasive to Mrs. Waynflete,” his solicitor had written, “as we understand she is now living with a partner.” Colette had scrawled over the letter, 
Not that sort of partner!!!
 It was just for her own satisfaction that she wrote it; it was no business of Gavin’s, she thought, what kind of partnership she was in now.

On the day they moved from Wexham, Morris was fuming and snarling in a corner. “How can I move,” he said, “when I have given out this as my address? How will Nick find me, how will my old mates know where to come?” When the men came to take the pine dresser away, he lay on top of it to make it heavy. He infiltrated Al’s mattress and infused his spirit sulks among the fibres, so that it bucked and rippled in the men’s hands, and they almost dropped it in alarm. When the men slammed the tailgate and vaulted into the driver’s cab, they found their whole windscreen had been spattered with something green, viscid, and dripping. “What kind of pigeons do you have around here?” they said. “Vultures?”

As the Collingwood was Galleon’s top-of-the-range model, it had more gob-ons than any other house type in the development, more twiddles and teases, more gables and spindles; but most of them, Colette predicted, would fall off within the first six months. Down the hill they were still building, and yellow machines picked and pecked at the soil, their stiff bending necks strangely articulated, like the necks of prototype dinosaurs. Trucks jolted up with glue-on timbers of plastic oak, bound together in bundles like kindling. Swearing men in woolly hats unloaded paper-thin panels of false brickwork, which they pinned to the raw building blocks; they disembarked stick-on anchor motifs, and panels of faux pargetting with dolphin and mermaid designs. The beeping, roaring, and drilling began promptly at seven, each morning. Inside the house there were a few mistakes, like a couple of the internal doors being hung the wrong way around, and the Adam-style fireplace being off-centre. Nothing, Al said, that really affected your quality of life. Colette wanted to keep arguing with the builders till she got compensation, but Al said, let it go, what does it matter, just close the door on it. Colette said, I would but the frame’s warped.