Beyond Black: A Novel (43 page)

It put Colette in a temper, the whole thing: the news about Merlyn, the insult of being called up last, and the fact that they would be performing at short notice in a so-called banqueting suite, cleared for the occasion, where beyond the wall a mega sports screen in the bar would be roaring with football chants, and in the “family area” a bunch of low-rent diners would be grimly hacking their way though honey-basted chicken kebabs.

She made her feelings known.

Alison drew the Papessa, with her veiled lunar face. She represents the inward world of women who love women, the pull of moods and gut feelings. She represents the mother, especially the widowed mother, the bereft
feme sole
, the one who is uncovered and abject and alone. She represents those things which are hidden and slowly make their way to the surface: she governs the virtue of patience, which leads to the revelation of secrets, the gradual drawing back of the velvet cloth, the pulling of the curtain. She governs temperature fluctuation and the body’s deep hormonal tides, besides the tide of fortune which leads to birth, stillbirth, the accidents and freaks of nature.

Next morning, when Colette came downstairs, her temper had not improved. “What’s this? A fucking midnight feast?”

There were crumbs all over the worktop, and her precious little omelette pan lay across two rings of the hob, skidded there as if by some disdainful hand which had used and abused it. Its sides were encrusted with brown grease and a heavy smell of frying hung in the air.

Alison didn’t bother to make excuses. She didn’t say, I believe it was the fiends that were frying. Why protest, only to be disbelieved? Why humiliate yourself? But, she thought, I am humiliated anyway.

She rang up Silvana. “Silvy, love, you know at the Fig and Pheasant, will there be a space to set up beforehand, you know, my easel and my picture?”

Silvana sighed. “If you feel you’ve got to, Al. But frankly, darling, a few of us have remarked that it’s time you retired that photo. I don’t know where you got it done.”

Oh, you 
wish
, Al thought, you wish you did, you’d be round there like a shot, getting yourself flattered. “It will have to do me for this week,” she said, good-humoured. “Okay, see you tomorrow night.”

Next day when they came to pack the car, they couldn’t find her silk, her apricot silk for draping the portrait. But it’s always, always, she said, in just the same place, unless it’s in the wash, and to prove to herself it wasn’t she turned out her laundry basket, and then turned out Colette’s.

Her heart wasn’t in it, she knew it had vanished or been filched. For a week she had noticed the loss of small objects from her bathroom and dressing table.

Colette came in. “I looked in the washing machine,” she said.

“And? It’s not there, is it?”

Colette said, “No. But you might like to look for yourself.”

In the kitchen, Colette had been running the extractor fan, and spraying room freshener. But the odour of burst fat still hung in the air. Al bent down and looked into the washing machine. Her hand shrank from it, but she picked out the object inside. She held it up, frowning. It was a man’s sock, grey, woolly, the heel gone into holes.

So this is what it’s led to, she thought; Morris going on a course. It’s led to him sucking away my silk and my nail scissors and my migraine pills, and taking eggs out of the fridge and frying them. It’s led to him intruding his sock into Colette’s sight: and soon, perhaps, his foot. She looked over her shoulder, as if he might have materialized entirely; as if he might be sitting on the hob and taunting her.

Colette said, “You’ve had that vagrant in.”

“Mart?” How wrong can you be?

“I’ve seen him hanging around,” Colette said, “but I draw the line at his actual admission to the premises, I mean his using the cooking facilities and our utilities. I suppose that would account for the lavatory seat left up, which I have found on several occasions over the last few days. You have to decide who’s living here, Alison, and if it’s him or me, I’m afraid it won’t be me. As for the frying, and the bread that was obviously brought in somehow, that will have to rest with your own conscience. There isn’t a diet on this earth that allows the wholescale consumption of animal fats and burning another person’s pan. As for the sock—I suppose I should be glad I didn’t find it before it was washed.”

The Fig and Pheasant, under a more dignified name, had once been a coaching inn, and its frontage was still spattered with the exudates of a narrow busy A-road. In the sixties it had stood near-derelict and draughty, with a few down-at-heel regulars huddled into a corner of its cavernous rooms. In the seventies it was bought out by a steak-house chain and Tudorized, fitted with plywood oak-stained panels and those deep-buttoned settles covered in stain-proof plush of which the Tudors were so fond. It offered the novelty of baked potatoes wrapped in foil, with butter or sour cream, and a choice of cod or haddock in bread crumbs, accompanied by salad or greyish and lukewarm peas. With each decade, as its ownership had changed, experiments in theming had suceeded each other, until its original menu had acquired retro-chic, and prawn cocktails had reappeared. Plus there was bruschetta. There was ricotta. There was a Junior Menu of pasta shapes and fish bites, and tiny sausages like the finger that the witch tested for plumpness. There were dusty ruched curtains and vaguely William Morris wallpaper, washable but not proof against kids wiping their hands down it, just as they did at home. In the Sports Bar, where smoking was banned, the ceilings were falsely yellowed, to simulate years of tobacco poisoning; it had been done thirty years ago, and no one saw reason to interfere with it.

To get to the function room you had to push through the bar, past the winking fruit machines. Colette got a round in, counting on her fingers: Gemma, Cara, Silvana, Natasha—four large vodka tonics, include me in and make that five, sweet sherry for Mrs. Etchells, and a fizzy water for Alison. The internal walls were thin, porous; at the noisy reenactment of early evening goals the rooms seemed to rock, and cooking smells crept into the nostrils of the Sensitives as they gathered in an airless hutch behind the stage. The mood was militant. Mandy read out the order.

“I’ll only do twenty minutes because of my arthritis,” Mrs. Etchells said, and Mandy said, “Look, love, you were only doing twenty minutes anyway, that’s the whole idea, it’s like a tag team, or passing the baton.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do anything like that,” Mrs. Etchells said.

Mandy sighed. “Forget I spoke. You just do your usual. You can have a chair on stage if you want. Colette, do you think you could find her a chair?”

“That’s not my job.”

“Perhaps not, but couldn’t you show a bit of team spirit?”

“I’ve already agreed to do the microphone. That’s enough.”

“I’ll get Mrs. E a chair,” Al said.

Mrs. Etchells said, “She never calls me granny, you know.”

“We can go into that another time,” Al said.

“I could tell you a story,” Mrs. Etchells said. “I could tell you a thing or two about Alison that would knock your socks off. Oh, you think you’ve seen it all, you young ’uns. You’ve seen nothing, let me tell you.”

When the card Papessa is reversed, it hints that problems go deeper than you think. It warns you of the hidden hand of a female enemy, but it doesn’t oblige by telling you who she is.

“Let’s kick it off, shall we?” said Cara. From beyond the wall came a long roar of 
Go-o-o-al!

It’s raw, this kind of work, and near the knuckle: unsupported by music, lighting, video screen, it’s just you and them, you and them and the dead, the dead who may oblige or may not, who may confuse and mislead and laugh at you, who may give you bursts of foul language very close up in your ear, who may give you false names and lay false trails just to see you embarrassed. There’s no leeway for a prolonged course of error and no time to retrieve a misstep, so you must move on, move on. The punters all think they are talented now, gifted. They’ve been told so often that everyone has dormant psychic powers that they’re only waiting for the opportunity for theirs to wake up, preferably in public. So you have to suppress them. The less they get to say, the better. Besides, the psychics need to avoid any charge of complicity, of soliciting information. Times have changed and the punters are aggressive. Once they shrank from the psychics, but now the psychics shrink from them.

“Don’t worry,” Gemma said, “I won’t stand for any nonsense.” Her face grim, she stepped out to begin.

“Go, girl!” Cara said defiantly. “Go, go, go!”

It was a low platform; she was only a step above her audience. Her eyes scoured them as if they were a bunch of criminals. “When I come to you shout up. Do not say your name, I don’t want to know your name. I want no information from you but yes or no. I need a minute. I need a minute of hush please; I need to attune; I need to tune in to the vibrations of Spirit World.” Time was she would have told them to hold hands, but these days you don’t want them to strike up alliances.

“I have it, I have it,” Gemma said. Her face was strained, and she tapped the side of her head, which was a mannerism of hers. “You, have I ever seen you before, madam?”

“No,” mouthed the woman.

Colette stuck the mike under her nose. “Can you give us that again, loud and clear?”

“No!” the woman roared.

Gemma was satisfied. “I’m going to give you a name. Answer yes or no. I’m going to give you the name Margaret.”

“No.”

“Think again. I’m going to give you the name Margaret.”

“I did know a girl called—”

“Answer yes or no!”

“No.”

“I’m going to give you the name Geoff. Can you take that?”

“No.”

“Geoff is standing here by my side. Can you take that?”

“No,” the woman whimpered.

Gemma looked as if she were going to fly from the stage and slap her. “I am going to give you a place. I am going to give you Altrincham, Cheshire, that is to say Greater Manchester. Can you take Altrincham?”

“I can take Wilmslow.”

“I am not interested in Wilmslow. You, can you take Altrincham?” She jumped from the stage, gestured to Colette to hand her the microphone. She paced the aisle between them throwing out names; Jim, Geoff, Margaret. She spun a series of questions that dizzied the punters; she tied them in twisting knots with her yes or no, yes or no?; before they could think or draw breath, her fingers were clicking at them, “no need to think it over, darling, just tell me, yes or no.” Yes breeds further yes and no breeds yes too. They haven’t come out for the evening to say no. People aren’t going to go on and on refusing her offers, or with a contemptuous hitch of her shoulders she will move on to the next prospect. “Yes? No. No? Yes.”

A loud humming began inside Al’s head; it was the brush of skin as a thousand dead people twiddled their thumbs. God, it’s boring, this, they were saying. Her mind wandered. Where’s my silk? she wondered. Whatever has Morris done with it? Her photograph on its easel looked bare without it. In the picture her smile looked thinner, almost strained, and her glowing eyes seemed to stare.

Gemma swished past her, coming off to a spatter of applause. “On you go, take your time,” Silvana said to Mrs. Etchells.

Mrs. Etchells toddled forward. As she passed Alison, she muttered again, “Never called me granny.”

“Get out there, you batty old witch,” Gemma breathed. “You next, Cara.”

“What a joy to see your faces,” Mrs. Etchells began. “My name is Irene Etchells, I have been gifted with second sight from an early age, and let me tell you there has been a great deal of joy in my life. There is no place for gloom when we reach out to Spirit World. So before we can see who’s with us tonight, I would like you all to join hands, and join me in a little prayer … .”

“She’s up and running,” Silvana said, satisfied.

A moment or two, and she was eliciting symptoms from a woman in the second row left: palpitations, light-headedness, a feeling of fullness in her abdomen.

Gemma stood in the wings, prompting, “Yes or no, answer yes or no.”

Alison sighed. “Let her do it in her own sweet way.”

“Oh, I can’t do with that yes-no malarkey,” Mrs. Etchells said, apparently to no one. The woman with the fullness paused, and looked offended. “There’s a gentleman coming through from Spirit who’s trying to help me,” Mrs. Etchells said. “He begins with a K, can you take a K?”

They began negotiations. Kenneth? No, not Kenneth. Kevin? Not Kevin.

“Think, dear,” Mrs. Etchells urged. “Try and think back.”

In the house before Al left that evening, there had been further signs of a creeping male presence. There had been a whiff of tobacco and meat. As she was getting changed she had stepped on something with her bare foot, something rolling, round and hard. She had picked it up from the carpet; it was the gnawed stump of a pencil, the kind of pencil someone used to wear behind his ear. Aitkenside? Or Keef?

“It’s Keith,” Mrs. Etchells said. “K for Keith. Do you know a Keith, dear?”

I used to know one, Al thought, I used to know Keef Capstick, and now I’ve re-created him, brought him to mind, his pals can’t be far behind. She stood up, her breathing tight, wanting to get out. The room had a close smell, damp and medicinal, like mould under a box lid.

Onstage Mrs. Etchells was smiling. “Keith is suggesting an answer to your problem, dear. About your swollen tummy. He says, well madam, are you in the pudding club?”

There was a yelp of laughter from the audience: of indignation, from the woman in the second row left. “At my age? You must be joking.”

“Chance would be a fine thing, eh?” said Mrs. Etchells. “Sorry, dear, but I’m only passing on what the spirits tell me. That’s all I can do, and what I’m bound to do. Keith says, miracles can ’appen. Those are his exact words. Which I have to agree with, dear. Miracles can happen, unless of course you’ve had a little op?”

“Dear God,” Gemma whispered, “I’ve never known her like this.”

“Been at the cooking sherry,” Mandy said. “Before she came out.”