I am, I am, she said; but she couldn’t remember what she ought to be sorry for. It had gone woolly in her mind, the way things do when they happen in the night.
The men said, she don’t look sorry, Em! It’s a wonder nobody’s dead. We’re going to take her down the back, and teach her a lesson she won’t forget.
They didn’t say what the lesson was. So after that she always wondered, have I had it? Or is it still to come?
By the time Al was ten, she had begun sleepwalking. She walked in on her mum, rolling on the sofa with a squaddie. The soldier raised his shaven head and roared. Her mother roared too, and her thin legs, blotched with fake tan, stood straight up into the air.
Next day her mum got the squaddie to fix a bolt on the outside of Al’s bedroom door. He did it gladly, humming as he worked. You’re the first man was ever handy around here, her mum said, is that right, Gloria?
Alison stood behind her bedroom door. She heard the bolt shunt into its bracket, with a small tight thud. The squaddie hummed, happy in his work. “I wish I was in Dixie, hooray, hooray”—tap-tap—“In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand … .” Mum, she said, let us out. I can’t breave. She ran to the window. They were walking down the road, laughing, the soldier swigging from a can of lager.
A few nights later she woke suddenly. It was very dark outside, as if they had been able to shut off the streetlamp. A number of ill-formed greasy faces were looking down on her. One of them seemed to be in Dixie, but she couldn’t be sure. She closed her eyes. She felt herself lifted up. Then there was nothing, nothing that she remembers.
ALISON: So what puzzles me, and the only thing that makes me think it might have been a dream, was that darkness—because how did they switch the streetlamp off?
COLETTE: You slept in the front, did you?
ALISON: Initially in the back, because the front was the bigger bedroom so Mum had it, but then she swapped me, must have been after the dog bite, probably after Keef, I get the impression she didn’t want me getting up in the night and looking out over the waste ground, which is possible because—
COLETTE: Al, face up to it. You didn’t dream it. She had you molested. Probably sold tickets. God knows.
ALISON: I think I’d already been—that. What you say. Molested.
COLETTE: Do you?
ALISON: Just not in a group situation.
COLETTE: Alison, you ought to go to the police.
ALISON: It’s years—
COLETTE: But some of those men could still be at large!
ALISON: It all gets mixed up in my mind. What happened. How old I was. Whether things happened once or whether they just went on happening—so they all rolled into one, you know.
COLETTE: So did you never tell anybody? Here. Blow your nose.
ALISON: No … . You see, you don’t tell anybody because there’s nobody to tell. You try and write it down, you write My Diary, but you get your legs slapped. Honestly … . It doesn’t matter now, I don’t think about it, it’s only once in a while I think about it. I might have dreamed it, I used to dream I was flying. You see, you wipe out in the day what happens in the night. You have to. It’s not as if it changed my life. I mean I’ve never gone in for sex much. Look at me, who’d want me, it’d need an army. So it’s not as if I feel … it’s not as if I remember … .
COLETTE: Your mother should have protected you. If she were my mum I’d kill her. Don’t you sometimes think about it, going over to Aldershot and killing her?
ALISON: She lives in Bracknell now.
COLETTE: Wherever. Why does she live in Bracknell?
ALISON: She went off with a man who had a council house over there, but it never lasted, anyway, he went over into Spirit and somehow or other she ended up with the tenancy. She wasn’t so bad. Isn’t. I mean, you have to feel sorry for her. She’s the size of a sparrow. In her looks, she’s more like your mother than mine. I walked past her once in the street and didn’t recognize her. She was always dyeing her hair. It was a different colour every week.
COLETTE: That’s no excuse.
ALISON: And it never came out what she intended. Champagne Hi-Life, and she’d end up ginger. Chocolate Mousse, and she’d end up ginger. Same with her pills. She used to swap other people’s prescriptions. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. I wondered how she kept going.
COLETTE: These men—could you still identify them, do you think?
ALISON: Some of them. Maybe. If I saw them in a good light. But they can’t arrest them after they’re passed.
COLETTE: If they’re dead I’m not worried. If they’re dead they can’t do any more damage.
When Al was twelve or so, she got cheeky. She said to her mum, “That one last night, what was his name then? Or don’t you know?”
Her mum tried to slap her around the head but she overbalanced and fell on the floor. Al helped her up.
“Thank you, you’re a good girl, Al,” her mum said, and Al’s cheeks burned, because she had never heard that before.
“What you on, Mum?” she asked. “What you taking?”
Her mum took a lot of Librium and a lot of Bacardi, which does make you fall over. Every week, though, she gave something else a try; it usually worked out, like the hair dye, to have a result she had not foreseen but should have.
Al had to go to the chemist for her mum’s prescriptions. “Are you here again?” said the man behind the counter, and because she was going through her brusque phase she would say, it’s me or somebody else, what’s your opinion? “My God,” he said. “I can’t believe she gets through this. Is she selling it on? Come on, you’re a bright girl, you must know.”
“She swallows it all,” she said. “I swear it.”
The man sniggered. “Swallows, does she? You don’t say.”
This remark mocked her; but still, when she left the pharmacy she felt ten feet tall. You’re a bright girl, she said to herself. She stared at herself in the next shop window: which was Ash Vale Motor Sport. The window was crammed with all the stuff you need for hacking across country with crappy old cars: sump guards, fog lamps, snow chains, and the latest model in a hi-lift jack. Swimming above this equipment was her own face, the face of a bright girl—a good girl, too—swimming in the oily glass.
By this time she had spent years pretending she was normal. She was never able to judge what other people knew and what they didn’t know. Take Gloria: Gloria had been clear enough to her mother, but not to her. Yet her mother hadn’t seen Mrs. McGibbet, and she’d almost skated across the attic, putting her foot on one of Brendan’s toy cars. And then one day—was it after Keith got mashed, was it after she got her scissors, was it before Harry cleaned his bowl?—one day she’d caught a glimpse of a red-haired lady with false eyelashes, standing at the foot of the stairs. Gloria, she thought, at last; she said, “Hi, are you all right?” but the woman didn’t reply. Another day, as she was coming in at the front door, she had glanced down into the bath, and didn’t she see the red-haired lady looking up at her, with her eyelashes half pulled off, and no body attached to her neck?
But that was not possible. They wouldn’t just leave a head on full view for passersby. You kept things under wraps; wasn’t that the rule?
What else was the rule? Was she, Alison, seeing more or less than she ought? Should she mention it, when she heard a woman sobbing in the wall? When should you shout up and when should you shut up? Was she stupid, or was that other people? And what would she do when she left school?
Tahera was going to do social studies. She didn’t know what that was. She and Tahera went shopping on Saturdays, if her mother let her out. Tahera shopped while she watched. Tahera was size six. She was four foot ten, brown, and quite spotty. Al herself was not much taller than that, but she was size eighteen. Tahera said, “You would be welcome to my castoffs, but—you know.” She looked Alison up and down, and her tiny nostrils flared.
When she asked her mother for money, her mother said, “What you want you got to earn,
is that right Gloria? You’re not so bad, Al, you’ve got that lovely complexion, okay you’re fleshy but that’s what a lot of men like. You’re what we call two handfuls of bubbly fun. Now you didn’t ought to hang around with that Indian bint, it puts the punters off, they don’t like to think some Patel’s after ’em with a Stanley knife.”
“Her name’s not Patel.”
“All right, young lady! That’s enough from you.” Her mother hurtled across the kitchen in a Librium rage. “How long you expect me to keep you fed and housed, how long, eh? Lie on your back and take it, that’s what I had to do. And regular! Not just Oh-it’s-Thursday-I-don’t-feel-like-it. You can forget that caper, miss! That sort of attitude will get you nowhere. Make it regular, and start charging proper. That’s what you’ve got to do. How else you think you’re going to make a living?”
COLETTE: So how did you feel, Alison, when you first knew you had psychic powers?
ALISON: I never … I mean I never really did. There wasn’t a moment. How can I put it? I didn’t know what I saw, and what I just imagined. It—you see, it’s confusing, when the people you grow up with are always coming and going at night. And always with hats on.
COLETTE: Hats?
ALISON: Or their collars pulled up. Disguises. Changing their names. I remember once, I must have been twelve, thirteen, I came in from school and I thought the house was empty for once; I thought, thank Christ for that; I thought I might make some toast then do a bit of cleaning while they were all gone out. I walked through to the lean-to, and I looked up and this geezer was standing there—not doing anything, just standing there leaning against the sink—and he had a box of matches in his hand. Christ, he was evil-looking! I mean, they all were, but there was something about him, his expression … . I can tell you, Colette, he was in a league of his own. He just stared at me and I stared back at him, and I thought I’d seen him before, and you have to make conversation, don’t you, even if you suddenly feel as if you’re going to throw up? So I said, are you the one they call Nick? He said, no, love, I’m a burglar, and I said, go on, you are Nick. He flew into a temper. He rattled the matchbox and it was empty. He threw it down. He went, can’t even get a light around here, I’m going to sack the flaming lot of them, they’re not worth a bench in hell. He whipped his belt out of his trousers and lashed out at me.
COLETTE: What happened then?
ALISON: I ran out into the street.
COLETTE: Did he follow you?
ALISON: I expect so.
Al was fourteen. Fifteen perhaps. No spots still. She seemed immune to them. She had grown a bit, all ways, up and out. Her tits came around the corner before she did; or that’s what one of the men remarked.
She said to her mother, “Who’s my dad?”
Her mother said, “What you want to know that for?”
“People ought to know who they are.”
Her mother lit another cigarette.
“I bet you don’t know,” Al said. “Why did you bother to have me? I bet you tried to get rid of me, didn’t you?”
Her mother exhaled, blowing the smoke down her nose in two disdainful and separate streams. “We all tried. But you was stuck fast, you silly bitch.”
“You should have gone to the doctor.”
“Doctor?” Her mother’s eyes rolled up. “Listen to her! Doctor! Bloody doctor, they didn’t want to know. I was five, six months gone when MacArthur buggered off, and then I’d have shifted you all right, but there wasn’t any bloody shifting.”
“MacArthur? Is that my dad?”
“How should I know?” her mother said. “What you bloody asking me for? What you want to know for anyway? What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Mind your own bloody business.”
Seeing Gloria’s head in the bath was more worrying to her, somehow, than seeing Gloria entire. From the age of eight, nine, ten, she told Colette, she used to see disassembled people lying around, a leg here, an arm there. She couldn’t say precisely when it started, or what brought it on. Or whether they were bits of people she knew.
If you could understand what those years were like, she told Colette, you’d think I’m quite a triumph really, the way I keep myself together. When I walk out onstage I love it, when I’ve got my dress, my hair done, my opals, and my pearls that I wear in the summer. It’s for them, for the audience, but it’s for me too.
She knew there was this struggle in a woman’s life—at least, there had been in her mum’s—just to be whole, to be clean, to be tidy, to keep your own teeth in your head; just to have a clean tidy house and not fag ash dropped everywhere and bottle tops underfoot: not to find yourself straying out into the street with no tights on. That’s why nowadays she can’t bear fluff on the carpet or a chip in her nail polish; that’s why she’s a fanatic about depilation, why she’s always pestering the dentist about cavities he can’t see yet; why she takes two baths a day, sometimes a shower as well; why she puts her special scent on every day. Maybe it’s an old-fashioned choice, but it was the first grown-up scent she bought for herself, as soon as she could afford one. Mrs. Etchells had remarked at the time, “Oh, that’s lovely, it’s your signature perfume.” The house at Aldershot smelled of male farts, stale sheets, and something else, not quite identifiable. Her mother said the smell had been there ever since they took the floorboards up: “Keith and them, you know, that crowd what used to drink down the Phoenix? What did they want to do that for, Gloria? Why did they want to take the floorboards up? Men, honestly! You never know what they’ll be up to next.”
Al told Colette, “One day I saw an eye looking at me. A human eye. It used to roll along the street. One day it followed me to school.”
“What, like ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’?”
“Yes, but it felt more like a dog.” Al shivered. “And then one day, one morning when I was leaving the house … .”
One day—she was in her school-leaving year—Al came out in the morning and saw a man watching her from the door of the chemist’s shop. His hands were plunged into his trouser pockets and he was jiggling an unlit cigarette between his lips.
COLETTE: It wasn’t this Nick character? The one in the kitchen, the one who chased you with the belt?
ALISON: No, it wasn’t Nick.
COLETTE: But you had seen him before?
ALISON: Yes, yes, I had. But can we switch the tape off, please? Morris is threatening me. He doesn’t like me talking about the early days. He doesn’t want it recorded.
That same afternoon, she came out of school with Lee Tooley and Catherine Tattersall. Tahera herself was close behind, linking arms with Nicky Scott and Andrea Wossname. Tahera was still rich, small, and spotty—and now be-spectacled, since her dad, she said, had “read me the riot act.” Catherine had ginger curls and she was the girl who was most far behind in every subject, even farther behind than Alison. Lee was Catherine’s friend.
Morris was on the other side of the road, leaning against the window of the launderette. His eyes travelled over the girls. She went cold.
He was short, a dwarf nearly, like a jockey, and his legs were bowed like a jockey’s. She learned later he’d been more like normal height, at least five foot six, till his legs had been broken: in one of his circus feats, he’d said at first, but later he admitted it was in a gang feud.
“Come on,” she said. “Come on, Andrea. Hurry up. Come on, Lee.”
Then, because she was cold, she zipped up her jacket, her cherry-red jacket that only just covered her chest. “Ooh, spastic!” Lee said, because it was not the style to fasten your jacket. The whole group began its shuffling, swaying sideways procession down the street; there seemed nothing she could do to hurry them. The girls walked with their arms folded, hugging themselves. Lee, in a spirit of mockery, did the same. A radio played somewhere, it was playing an Elton John song. She remembered that. The kids began to sing. She tried, but her mouth was dry.
COLETTE: So was he—I feel I’m a bit in the dark here—this man who was watch
ing you outside the school: are we talking about Morris? And was he the man with the yellow face?
ALISON: Yes.
COLETTE: The man you saw behind you, through the mirror? The low hairline?
ALISON: His tie not on straight.
Next day, when she came out, he was there again. I’ll go on the aggressive, she thought. She nudged Tahera. “Look at that pervert.”
“Where?”
Alison nodded across the road to where Morris leaned, just as he had the day before. Tahera attracted Nicky Scott’s attention by kicking her lightly on the back of her calf. “Gerroff me, you bloody bhaji!” Nicky bellowed.
“Can you see any pervert?” Tahera asked.
They looked around them. They followed where Alison pointed and then they swivelled their heads from side to side in an exaggerated fashion. Then they turned in circles, crying out, “Where, where?”—except for Catherine, who hadn’t caught on, and just started singing like yesterday. Then they lolled their tongues out and retched, because they confused a perv with a sicko, then they ran off and left her alone in the street.
Morris lurched away from the wall and came limping towards her. He ignored the traffic, and a van must have missed him by inches. He could limp very fast; he seemed to scuttle like some violent crab, and when he reached her he fastened his crab hand onto her arm above the elbow. She flinched and twisted in his grasp, but he held her firmly. Get off me, she was crying, you horrible pervert, but then, as so often, she realized that words were coming out of her mouth but no one could hear them.
After Al’s first meeting with Morris, he waited for her most days. “I’m a gentleman, I am,” he would boast, “and I am here to escort you. A growing girl like you, you don’t want to be out walking the streets on your own. Anything could happen.”