Beyond Black: A Novel (4 page)

Colette thought, you are a size 26 and you 
are
 ashamed of it. The thought was so loud, inside her own head, that she was amazed it didn’t jump out into the hall.

“No,” Al was saying, “please give the mike back to this lady, I’m afraid I’ve embarrassed her and I want to put it right.” The woman was reluctant, and Al said to her neighbour, “Just hold that mike steady under her chin.” Then Alison told the fat woman several things about her mother, which she’d often thought but not liked to admit to. “Oh, and I have your granny. Your granny’s coming through. Sarah Anne? Now she’s an old soul,” Al said. “You were five when she passed, am I right?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Speak up, my love.”

“Small. I was small.”

“Yes, you don’t remember much about her, but the point is she’s never left you, she’s still around, looking after the family. And she likes those cabinets you’ve got—I can’t quite make this out—a new kitchen, is it?”

“Oh, my God. Yes,” the woman said. “Yes.” She shifted in her seat and turned bright red.

Al chuckled, indulging her surprise. “She’s often with you in that kitchen. And by the way, you were right not to go for the brushed steel, I know they tried to talk you into it, but it’s so over and done with, there’s nothing worse than a dated kitchen when you come to sell, and besides it’s such a harsh look at the heart of the home. Sarah Anne says, you won’t go wrong with light oak.”

They burst into applause: the punters, the trade. They are deeply appreciative of information about their kitchen fittings; they marvel at your uncanny knowledge of where they position their bread bin. This is how you handle them; you tell them the small things, the personal things, the things no one else could really know. By this means you make them drop their guard; only then will the dead begin to speak. On a good night, you can hear the scepticism leaking from their minds, with a low hiss like a tyre deflating.

Someone in uniform was trying to get through. It was a policeman, young and keen, with a flushed face; he was eager for promotion. She worked the rows, but no one would own him. Perhaps he was still earthside, employed at the local station; you did get these crossed wires, from time to time. Something to do with radio frequencies, perhaps?

“This lady, have you got ear trouble? Or ear trouble somewhere in the family?” Slowly, the barmaid lurched across the hall in her platform shoes, the mike held out at arm’s length.

“What?” the woman said.

“Ear trouble.”

“The boy next door to me plays football,” the woman said. “He’s done his knee up. He was getting in trim for the World Cup. Not that he’s playing in it. Only in the park. Their dog died last year, but I don’t think it had ear trouble.”

“No, not your neighbour,” Al insisted. “You, someone close to you.”

“I haven’t got anyone close to me.”

“What about throat trouble? Nose trouble? Anything in the ENT line at all? You have to understand this,” Al said, “when I get a message from Spirit World, I can’t give it back. I can’t pick and choose. Think of me as your answering machine. Imagine if people from Spirit World had phones. Now your answering machine, you press the button and it plays your messages back. It doesn’t wipe some out, on the grounds that you don’t need to know them.”

“And it records the wrong numbers, too,” said a pert girl near the front. She had her friends with her; their sniggers ruffled adjacent rows.

Alison smiled. It was for her to make the jokes; she wouldn’t be upstaged. “Yes, I admit we record the wrong numbers. And we record the nuisance calls, if you like to put it that way. I sometimes think they have telesales in the next world, because I never sit down with a nice cup of coffee without some stranger trying to get through. Just imagine—double glazing salesman … debt collectors …”

The girl’s smile faded. She tensed.

Al said, “Look, darling. Let me give you a word of advice. Cut up that credit card. Throw away those catalogues. You can break these spending habits—well, you must, really. You have to grow up and exercise some self-control. Or I can see the bailiffs in, before Christmas.”

Al’s gaze rested, one by one, on those who had dared to snigger; then she dropped her voice, whipped her attention away from the troublemaker, and became confidential with her audience.

“The point is this. If I get a message I don’t censor it. I don’t ask, do you need it? I don’t ask, does it make sense? I do my duty, I do what I’m here for. I put it out there, so the person it applies to can pick it up. Now people in Spirit World can make mistakes. They can be wrong, just like the living. But what I hear, I pass on. And maybe, you know, what I tell you may mean nothing to you at the time. That’s why I sometimes have to say to you, stay with that: go home: live with it. This week or next week, you’ll go, oh, I get it now! Then you’ll have a little smile, and think, she wasn’t such a fool, was she?” She crossed the stage; the opals blazed.

“And then again, there are some messages from Spirit World that aren’t as simple as they seem. This lady, for example—when I speak about ear trouble, what I may be picking up is not so much a physical problem—I might be talking about a breakdown in communication.” The woman stared up at her glassily. Al passed on.

“Jenny’s here. She went suddenly. She didn’t feel the impact, it was instantaneous. She wants you to know.”

“Yes.”

“And she sends her love to Peg. Who’s Peg?”

“Her aunt.”

“And to Sally, and Mrs. Moss. And Liam. And Topsy.”

Jenny lay down. She’d had enough. Her little light was fading. But wait, here’s another—tonight she picked them up as if she were vacuuming the carpet. But it was almost nine o’clock, and it was quite usual to get onto something serious and painful before the interval. “Your little girl, was she very poorly before she passed? I’m getting—this is not recent, we’re going back now, but I have a very clear—I have a picture of a poor little mite who’s really very sick, bless her.”

“It was leukemia,” her mother said.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Al said, swiftly agreeing, as if she had thought of it first: so that the woman would go home and say, she told me Lisa had leukemia, she knew. All she could feel was the weakness and the heat, the energy of the last battle draining away: the flickering pulse at the hairless temple, and the blue eyes, like marbles under translucent lids, rolling into stillness. Dry your tears, Alison said. All the tears of agony you’ve shed, the world doesn’t know, the world can’t count them; and soberly, the woman agreed: nobody knows, she said, and nobody can count. Al, her own voice trembling, assured her, Lisa’s doing fine airside, the next world’s treated her well. A beautiful young woman stood before her—twenty-two, twenty-three—wearing her grandmother’s bridal veil. But whether it was Lisa or not, Al could not say.

Eight-fifty, by Colette’s watch. It was time for Al to lighten up. You have to start this process no less than eight minutes before the end of the first half. If the interval catches you in the middle of something thrilling and risky, they simply don’t want to break; but she, Al, she needed the break, to get back there, touch base with Colette, gulp a cold drink and redo her face. So she would begin another ward round now, picking up a few aches and pains. Already she was homing in on a woman who suffered from headaches. Don’t we all, Colette thought. It was one of the nets Al could safely cast. God knows, her own head ached. There was something about these summer nights, summer nights in small towns, that made you feel that you were seventeen again, and had chances in life. The throat ached and clogged then; there was tightness behind her eyes, as if unshed tears had banked up. Her nose was running, and she hadn’t got a tissue … Al had found a woman with a stiff left knee and was advising her on traditional Chinese medicine; it was a diversion, but they’d go away disappointed if she didn’t throw in some jargon about meridians and ley lines and chakras and feng shui. Gently, soothingly, she was bringing the first part of the evening to a close; and she was having her little joke now, asking about the lady standing at the back, leaning against the wall there, the lady in beige with a bit of a sniffle.

It’s ridiculous, Colette thought, she can’t possibly see me from where she’s standing. She just, somehow, she must just simply know that at some point in the evening I cry.

“Never mind, my dear,” Al said, “a runny nose is nothing to be ashamed of. Wipe it on your sleeve. We’re not looking, are we?”

You’ll pay for it later, Colette thought, and so she will; she’ll have to regurgitate or else digest all the distress she’s sucked in from the carpet and the walls. By the end of the evening she’ll be sick to her stomach from other people’s chemotherapy, feverish and short of breath; or twitching and cold, full of their torsions and strains. She’ll have a neck spasm, or a twisted knee, or a foot she can hardly put on the floor. She’ll need to climb in the bath, moaning, amid the rising steam of aromatherapy oils from her special travel pack, and knock back a handful of painkillers, which, she always says, she should be allowed to set against her income tax.

Almost nine o’clock. Alison looked up, to the big double doors marked EXIT. There was a little green man above the door, running on the spot. She felt like that little green man. “Time to break,” she said. “You’ve been lovely.” She waved to them. “Stretch your legs, and I’ll see you in fifteen.”

Morris was sprawled in Al’s chair when she came into her dressing room. He had his dick out and his foreskin pushed back, and he’d been playing with her lipstick, winding it up to the top of the tube. She evicted him with a dig to his shin from her pointed toe; dropped herself into the vacated chair—she shuddered at the heat of it—and kicked off her shoes. “Do yourself up,” she told him. “Button your trousers, Morris.” She spoke to him as if he were a two-year-old who hadn’t learned the common decencies.

She eased off the opals. “My hands have swelled up.” Colette watched her through the mirror. Al’s skin was bland and creamy, flesh and fluid plumping it out from beneath. “Is the air-conditioning working?” She pulled at bits of her clothing, detaching them from the sticky bits of herself.

“As if carnations were anybody’s favourite!” Colette said.

“What?” Al was shaking her hands in the air, as if they were damp washing.

“That poor woman who was just widowed. You said roses, but she said carnations, so then you said carnations.”

“Colette, could you try to bear in mind, I’ve talked to about thirty people since then?”

Alison held her arms in U above her head, her naked fingers spread. “Let the fluid drain,” she said. “Anything else, Colette? Let’s have it.”

“You always say, oh, make a note, Colette, keep your eyes open, listen and tell me what goes right and what goes wrong. But you’re not willing to listen, are you? Perhaps it’s you who’s got the hearing problem.”

“At least I haven’t got a sniffle problem.”

“I can never understand why you take your shoes off, and your rings off, when you’ve got to force them back on again.”

“Can’t you?” Al sipped her black-currant juice, which she brought with her in her own carton. “What 
can
 you understand?” Though Al’s voice was lazy, this was turning into a nasty little scrap. Morris had lain down across the doorway, ready to trip up anyone who came in.

“Try thinking yourself into my body,” Al suggested. Colette turned away and mouthed 
no, thank you
. “It’s hot under the lights. Half an hour and I’m fit to drop. I know you’ve been running around with the mike, but it’s easier on the feet to be moving than standing still.”

“Is it really? How would you know that?”

“It’s easy, when you’re thin. Everything’s easier. Moving. Thinking. Deciding what you’ll do and what you won’t. You have choices. You can choose your clothes. Choose your company. I can’t.” Al drank the end of her carton, with a little sound of sucking and bubbling. She put it down, and squashed the tip of the straw, judiciously, with her forefinger.

“Oh, and the kitchen units,” Colette said.

“What’s your problem? I was right.”

“It’s just telepathy,” Colette said.

“
Just
?”

“Her granny didn’t tell you.”

“How can you be sure?”

She couldn’t, of course. Like the punters out there, she could entertain simultaneously any number of conflicting opinions. They could believe in Al and not believe in her, both at once. Faced with the impossible, their minds, like Colette’s, simply scuttled off in another direction.

“Look,” Alison said, “do we have to go through this every time? I would have thought we’d been on the road together for long enough now. And we’ve been making the tapes, haven’t we? Writing this book you say we’re writing? I’d have thought I’d answered most of your questions by now.”

“All except the ones that matter.”

Al shrugged. A quick dab of Rescue Remedy under the tongue, and then she began to repaint her lips. Colette could see the effort of concentration needed; the spirits were nagging in her ear, wanting to stake out their places for the second half.

“You see, I’d have imagined,” she said, “that sometimes, once in a while, you’d feel the urge to be honest.”

Alison gave a little comic shiver, like a character in a pantomime. “What, with the punters? They’d run a mile,” she said. “Even the ones with the blood pressure would be up and charging out the door. It’d kill them.” She stood up and pulled down her skirt, smoothing the creases over her hips. “And what would that do but make more work for me?”

“Your hem’s up at the back,” Colette said. Sighing, she sank to her knees and gave the satin a tug.

“I’m afraid it’s my bottom that does it,” Al said. “Oh, dear.” She turned sideways to the mirror and resettled the skirt at what passed for her waist-line. “Am I okay now?” She held up her arms, stamped her feet in her high heels. “I could have been a flamenco dancer,” she said. “That would have been more fun.”

“Oh, surely not,” Colette said. “Not more fun than this?” She nudged her own head at the mirror and smoothed down her hair. Damp, it lay on her head like strings of white licorice.