Colette’s education in the psychic trade was brisk and no-nonsense. Al’s absurd generosity to the waitress in the coffee shop might represent one side of her nature, but she was businesslike in her own way. She wouldn’t be taken for a ride, she knew how to charge out every minute of her time, though her accounts, kept on paper, were a mess. Having been a credulous person so recently, Colette was now cynical and sneery. She wondered how long it would be before Al initiated her into some fraud. She waited and waited. By mid-August she thought, what fraud could there be? Al doesn’t have secret wires tapping into people’s thoughts. There’s no technology in her act. All she does is stand onstage and make weak jokes. You may say Al’s a fake because she has to be, because nobody can do what she claims to do. But there it is; she doesn’t make claims, she demonstrates. And when you come down to it she can deliver the goods. If there is a fraud, it’s a transparent one; so clear that no one can see it.
Al hadn’t even been registered for VAT when Colette had come on board as her business brain. As for income tax, her allowances were all over the place. Colette went to the tax office in person. The official she saw admitted to a complete ignorance of a medium’s trade; she was poised to take advantage of it. “What about her clothes,” she said, “her stage outfits? Her outfits for meeting her clients. She has to look good, it’s a professional obligation.”
“Not one we recognize, I’m afraid,” the young woman said.
“Well, you should! As you ought to know, being the size you are yourself, decent clothes in large sizes don’t come cheap. She can’t get away with the tat you find on the High Street. It’s got to be specialist shops. Even her bras—well, I don’t need to spell it out.”
“I’m afraid it’s all dual purpose,” the woman said. “Underwear, outer-wear, whatever; it’s not just specific to her trade, is it?”
“What? You mean, she could pop to the postbox in it? Do the dusting? In one of her stage outfits?”
“If she liked. I’m trying to envisage—you didn’t bring pictures, did you?”
“I’ll drop some in.”
“That might be a help. So we could work out what sort of class of item we’re dealing with—you see, if it were, well, a barrister’s wig, say, or protective clothing, say, boots with steel toe caps, for example—”
“So are you telling me they’ve made special rules about it? For mediums?”
“Well, no, not specifically for—what you say your partner does. I’m just going by the nearest cases I can envisage. At this stage.” The woman looked restless. “I suppose you might classify it as show business. Look, I’ll pass it up for consideration. Take it under advisement.”
Colette wished—wished very strongly, most sincerely—that she had Al’s powers, just for sixty seconds. So that a whisper, a hiss, a flash, so that something would overtake her, some knowledge, insight, some piece of special information, so that she could lean across the desk and tell the woman at the tax office something about her private life, something embarrassing: or something that would make the hair stand up on the back of her neck. For the moment, they agreed to differ. Colette undertook to keep a complete record of Al’s expenditure on stage outfits. She lost no time, of course, in computerizing their accounts. But the thought nagged at her that a record kept in figures was not quite enough.
Hence her good idea, about writing a book. How hard could it be? Al made tape recordings for her clients, so wasn’t it logical, in the larger world, to tape-record Al? Then all she would need to do would be transcribe, edit, tighten up here and there, make some chapter headings … . Her mind moved ahead, to costings, to a layout, to a photographer. Fleetingly, she thought of the boy in the bookshop, who’d sold her the tarot pack. If I’d been self-employed then, she thought, I could have set those cards against tax. Those days seemed distant now: leaving the boy’s bed-sit at 5 A.M. in the rain. Her life with Gavin had receded; she remembered things he had, like his calculator, and his diver’s watch, but not necessarily the evil things he had done. She remembered her kitchen—the scales, the knives—but not anything she cooked there. She remembered her bed, and her bed linen; but not sex. I can’t keep on losing it, she thought, losing chunks of my life, years at a time. Or who will I be when I’m old? I should write a book for me too. I need a proof of some sort, a record of what goes down.
The tape recorder worked well on the whole, though sometimes it sounded as if Alison had a bag over her head; Colette’s questions, always, were piercingly clear. But when they played the tapes back, they found that, just as Al had foreseen, other items had intruded. Someone speaking, fast and urgent, in what might be Polish. A twittering, like small birds in a wood: nightingales, Alison said unexpectedly.
Once, a woman’s irate voice cut through Alison’s mutter: “Well, you’re in for it now. You’ve started so you may as well finish. It’s no use asking for your money back, sunshine. The trade doesn’t work that way.”
COLETTE: When you were a child, did you ever suffer a severe blow to the skull?
ALISON: Several … Why, didn’t you?
four
COLETTE: It’s Tuesday and I’m just—it’s ten-thirty in the evening and—Al, can you come a bit closer to the mike? I’m just resuming where we left off last night—now, Alison, we’ve sort of addressed the point about the trivia, haven’t we? Still, you might like to put your answer on the tape.
ALISON: I have already explained to you that the reason we get such trivial information from Spirit is—
COLETTE: All right, there’s no need to sound like a metronome. Monotone. Can’t you sound a bit more natural?
ALISON: If the people who’ve passed—is that okay now?
COLETTE: Go on.
ALISON: If the people who’ve passed were to give you messages about angels and, you know, spiritual matters, you’d think it was a bit vague. We wouldn’t have any way of checking on them. But if they give you messages about your kitchen units, you can say if they’re right or wrong.
COLETTE: So what you’re mainly worried about is convincing people?
ALISON: No.
COLETTE: What then?
ALISON: I don’t feel I have to convince anybody, personally. It’s up to them whether they come to see me. Their choice. There’s no compulsion to believe anything they don’t want … . Oh, Colette, what’s that? Can you hear it?
COLETTE: Just carry on.
ALISON: It’s snarling. Somebody’s let the dogs out?
COLETTE: What?
ALISON: I can’t carry on over this racket.
(click)
COLETTE: Okay, trying again. It’s eleven o’clock and we’ve had a cup of tea—
ALISON:—and a chocolate chip cookie—
COLETTE:—and we’re resuming. We were talking about the whole issue of proof, and I want to ask you, Alison, have you ever been scientifically tested?
ALISON: I’ve always kept away from that. You see, if you were in a laboratory wired up, it’s as good as saying, we think you’re some sort of confidence trick. Why should people come through from Spirit for other people who don’t believe in them? You see, most people, once they’ve passed, they’re not really interested in talking to this side. The effort’s too much for them. Even if they wanted to do it, they haven’t got the concentration span. You say they give trivial messages, but that’s because they’re trivial people. You don’t get a personality transplant when you’re dead. You don’t suddenly get a degree in philosophy. They’re not interested in helping me out with proof.
COLETTE: On the platform you always say, you’ve had your gift since you were very small.
ALISON: Yes.
COLETTE: (whispering) Al, don’t do that to me. I need a proper answer on the tape. Yes, you say it, or yes, it’s true?
ALISON: I don’t generally lie on the platform. Well, only to spare people.
COLETTE: Spare them what? (pause) Al?
ALISON: Can you move on?
COLETTE: Okay, so you’ve had
this gift—
ALISON: If you call it that.
COLETTE: You’ve had this ability since you were small. Can you tell us about your childhood?
ALISON: I could. When you were little, did you have a front garden? COLETTE: Yes.
ALISON: What did you have in it?
COLETTE: Hydrangeas, I think.
ALISON: We had a bathtub in ours.
When Alison was young she might as well have been a beast in the jungle as a girl growing up outside Aldershot. She and her mum lived in an old terraced house with a lot of banging doors. It faced a busy road, but there was open land at the back. Downstairs there were two rooms, and a lean-to with a flat roof, which was the kitchen. Upstairs were two bedrooms, and a bathroom, which had a bath tub in it so there was no actual need for the one in the garden. Opposite the bathroom was the steep short staircase that led up to the attic.
Downstairs, the front room was the place where men had a party. They came and went with bags inside which bottles rattled and chinked. Sometimes her mum would say, better watch ourselves tonight, Gloria, they’re bringing spirits in. In the back room, her mum sat smoking and muttering. In the lean-to, she sometimes absently opened cans of carrots or butterbeans, or stood staring at the grill pan while something burned on it. The roof leaked, and black mould drew a drippy wavering line down one corner.
The house was a mess. Bits were continually falling off it. You’d get left with the door handle in your hand, and when somebody put his fist through a window one night it got mended with cardboard and stayed like that. The men were never willing to do hammering or operate a screwdriver. “Never do a hand’s turn, Gloria!” her mother complained.
As she lay in her little bed at night the doors banged, and sometimes the windows smashed. People came in and out. Sometimes she heard laughing, sometimes scuffling, sometimes raised voices and a steady rhythmic pounding. Sometimes she stayed in her bed till daylight came, sometimes she was called to get up for one reason and another. Some nights she dreamed she could fly; she passed over the ridge tiles, and looked down on the men about their business, skimming over the waste ground, where vans stood with their back doors open, and torchlight snaked through the smoky dark.
Sometimes the men were there in a crowd, sometimes they swarmed off and vanished for days. Sometimes at night just one or two men stayed and went upstairs with her mum. Then next day the bunch of them were back again, tee-heeing beyond the wall at men’s private jokes. Behind the house was a scrubby field, with a broken-down caravan on blocks; sometimes there was a light in it. Who lives in there? she asked her mum, and her mum replied, What you don’t know won’t hurt you, which even at an early age Alison knew was untrue.
Beyond the caravan was a huddle of leaning corrugated sheds and a line of lockup garages to which the men had the keys. Two white ponies used to graze in the field, then they didn’t. Where have the ponies gone? she asked her mum. Her mum replied, to the knackers, I suppose.
She said, Who’s Gloria? You keep talking to her. Her mum said, Never you mind.
“Where is she?” she said. “I can’t see her. You say, yes Gloria, no Gloria, want a cuppa, Gloria? Where is she?”
Her mum said, “Never mind Gloria, you’ll be in Kingdom Come. Because that’s where I’m going to knock you if you keep this up.”
Her mum would never stay in the house if she could help it: pacing, smoking, smoking, pacing. Desperate for a breath of air, she would say, “Come on, Gloria,” shrug on her coat and flee down the road to the minimart; and because she did not want the trouble of washing or dressing Alison, or having her underfoot whining for sweeties, she would take her up to the top of the house and lock her in the attic. “She can’t come to any harm up there,” she would reason, out loud to Gloria. “No matches, so she can’t set the house on fire. Too small to climb out the skylight. Nothing sharp up here the like of which she is drawn to, such as knives or pins. There’s really no damage she could come to.”
She put an old rug up there for Alison to sit on, when she played with her blocks and animals. “Quite a little palace,” she said. There was no heating, which again was a safety factor, there being no outlets for Alison to put her fingers into. She could have an extra cardigan instead. In summer the attic was hot. Midday rays streamed fiercely down, straight from the sky to the dusty rug. They lit up the corner where the little lady used to fade up, all dressed in pink, and call out to Alison in a timid Irish voice.
Alison was perhaps five years old when the little lady first appeared, and in this way she learned how the dead could be helpful and sweet. She had no doubt that the little lady was dead, in every meaningful sense. Her clothes were feltlike and soft to the touch, and her pink cardigan was buttoned right up to the first fold of her chin. “My name is Mrs. McGibbet, darlin’,” she said. “Would you like to have me round and about? I thought you might like to have me with you, round and about.”
Mrs. McGibbet’s eyes were blue and round and startled. In her cooing voice, she talked about her son, who had passed over before her, met with an accident. They’d never been able to find each other, she said, I never could meet up with Brendan. But sometimes she showed Alison his toys, little miniature cars and tractors, neatly boxed. Once or twice she faded away and left the toys behind. Mum just stubbed her toe on them. It was as if she didn’t see them at all.
Mrs. McGibbet was always saying, “I wouldn’t want, my darlin’, to come between a little girl and her mother. If that were her mother coming up the stair now, coming up with a heavy tread, no, I wouldn’t want to put myself forward at all.” When the door opened she faded away: leaving sometimes an old doll collapsed in the corner where she had sat. She chuckled as she fell backwards, into the invisible place behind the wall.
Al’s mum forgot to send her to school. “Good grief,” she said, when the man came around to prosecute her, “you mean to say she’s that age already?”
Even after that, Al was never where she should be. She never had a swim-suit, so when it was swimming she was sent home. One of the teachers threatened she’d be made to swim in her knickers next week, but she went home and mentioned it, and one of the men offered to go down there and sort it out. When Al went to school next day she told the teacher, Donnie’s coming down; he says he’ll push a bottle up your bleeding whatnot, and—I don’t think it’s very nice, miss—ram it in till your guts come out your mouf.
After that, on swimming afternoon, she was just sent home again. She never had her rubber-soled shoes for skipping and hopping or her eggs and basin for mixing a cake, her times tables or her poem or her model mosque made out of milk-bottle tops. Sometimes when she came home from school one of the men would stop her in the hall and give her 50 pence. She would run up to the attic and put it away in a secret box she had up there. Her mother would take it off her if she could, so she had to be quick.
One day the men came with a big van. She heard yapping and ran to the window. Three blunt-nosed brindle dogs were being led towards the garages. “Oh, what are their names?” she cried. Her mother said, “Don’t you go calling their names. Dogs like that, they’ll chew your face off. Isn’t that right, Gloria?”
She gave them names anyway: Blighto, Harry and Serene. One day Blighto came to the house and bumped against the back door. “Oh, he’s knocking,” Al said. She opened the door though she knew she shouldn’t, and tried to give him half her wafer biscuit.
A man came shooting out of nowhere and hauled the dog off her. He kicked it into the yard while he got Alison up off the floor. “Emmie, sort it!” he yelled, then wrapped his hands in an old jersey of her mum’s and went out and pummelled the dog’s face, dragging it back to the sheds and twisting its neck as he dragged. He came back in shouting, “I’ll shoot the fucker, I’ll strangle that bastard dog.” The man, whose name was Keith, wept when he saw how the dog had ripped at her hairline. He said, Emmie, she ought to go to Casualty, that needs stitching. Her mum said she couldn’t be sitting in a queue all afterno
on.
The man washed her head at the kitchen sink. There wasn’t a cloth or a sponge so he put his hand on the back of her neck, pressed her down over the plastic bowl, and slapped the water up at her. It went in her eyes, so the bowl blurred. Her blood went in the bowl but that was all right; it was all right because the bowl itself was red. “Stay there, darling,” he said, “just keep still,” and his hand lifted from her nape as he bent to rummage in the cupboard at his feet. Obedient, she bent there; blood came down her nose too and she wondered why that was. She heard the chinking noise as Keith tossed the empties out from under the sink. Em, he said, you not got any disinfectant in here? Give us a rag for Christsakes, tear up a sheet, I don’t know, and her mother said, use your hankie or ain’t you got none? In the end her mother came up behind her with the used dish towel and Keith ripped it out of her hand. “There you go, there you go, there you go,” he kept saying, dabbing away, sighing the words between his teeth.
She felt faint with pain. She said, “Keef, are you my dad?”
He wrung the cloth between his hands. “What you been telling her, Emmie?” Her mother said, “I’ve not been telling her nothing, you ought to know by now she’s a bloody little liar. She says she can hear voices in the wall. She says there are people up in the attic. She’s got a screw loose, Gloria says.”
Keith moved: she felt a sudden sick cold at her back as he pulled away, as his body warmth left her. She reared up, dripping water and dilute pink blood. Keith had crossed the room and pinned her mother up against the wall. “I told you, Emmie, if I told you once I told you a dozen times, I do not want to hear that name spoken.” And the dozen times, Keith reinforced, by the way he gave her mum a little bounce, raising her by her hair near the scalp and bobbing her down again. “Gloria’s buggered off back to Paddyland,” he said [bounce]. “That’s all [bounce] you bloody [bounce] know about it, do you [bounce] understand [bounce] that? Do I bloody [bounce-bounce-bounce-bounce] make myself [bounce] crystal-clear? You just [bounce] forget you ever [bounce] set eyes.”