Beyond Black

  “I think they murdered her,” Colette said. “The royals. If she’d lived, she’d have only brought them into further disrepute.”

  “But it was her time,” Gemma said, “it was her time, and she was called away.”

  “She was a bit thick, wasn’t she?” Cara said. “She didn’t get any exams at school.”

  “Oh, be fair now,” Alison said. “I read she got a cup for being kind to her guinea pig.”

  “That’s not an exam, though, is it? Did you—”

  “What,” Al said, “me have a guinea pig? Christ, no, my mum would have barbecued it. We didn’t have pets. We had dogs. But not pets.”

  “No,” Cara said, her brow crinkling, “I meant, did you get any exams, Al?”

  “I tried. They entered me. I turned up. I had a pencil and everything. But there’d always be some sort of disturbance in the hall.”

  Gemma said, “I was barred from biology for labelling a drawing in obscene terms. But I didn’t do it myself. I don’t think I even knew half those words.”

  There was a murmur of fellow feeling. Alison said, “Colette didn’t have those problems, she’s got exams, I need somebody brighter than me in my life.” Her voice rattled on: Colette, my working partner … my partner, not assistant: she broke off, and laughed uncertainly.

  Raven said, “Do you know that for every person on this side, there’s thirty-three on the other?”

  “Really?” Gemma said. “Thirty-three airside, for every one earthside?”

  Colette thought, in that case, I’m backing the dead.

  Merlin and Merlyn came back from the pub: boring on with men’s talk. I use Transit Forecaster, I find it invaluable oh yes, I can run it on my old Amstrad, what’s the point of pouring money into the pockets of Bill Gates?

  Colette leaned over to put him right on the matter, but Merlyn caught her by the arm and said, “Have you read The Truth About Exodus? Basically it’s how they found this bit of the Bible written on a pyramid, inscribed on the side. And how, contrary to popular belief, the Egyptians actually, they actually paid the Israelis to leave. And they used the money for making the ark of the covenant. Jesus was an Egyptian, they’ve found scrolls, he was actually of pharaoh descent. And it’s why they walk round and round at Mecca. Like they used to walk around the Great Pyramid.”

  “Oh, did they? I see,” Colette said. “Well, you’ve put me right, there, Merlyn, I always did wonder.”

  “Mountain K2, Search for the Gods, that’s another good one. The Lost Book of Enki. That’s one you’ve got to get. He’s this god from the planet Nibiru. You see, they were from space, and they needed gold from the earth to enrich the dying atmosphere of their planet, so they saw that it was on earth, gold was, so they needed somebody to mine it for them, so they therefore created man … .”

  Al’s eyes were distant; she was back at school, back in the exam hall. Hazel Leigh opposite, working her red ponytail round and round in her fingers till it was like a twist of barley sugar—and peppermints, you were allowed to suck peppermints—you weren’t allowed much, not a fag: when Bryan lit up Miss Adshead was down the hall like a laser beam.

  All during the maths paper there was a man chattering in her ear. It wasn’t Morris, she knew it was not by his accent, and his whole general tone and bearing, by what he was talking about, and by how he was weeping: for Morris could not weep. The man, the spirit, he was talking just below the threshold, retching and sobbing. The questions were algebra; she filled in a few disordered letters, a, b, x, z. When she reached question five the man began to break through. He said, look for my cousin John Joseph, tell our Jo that my hands are bound with wire. In Spirit, even now, he had a terrible pain where the bones of his feet used to be, and that’s what he relied on her to pass on to his cousin, the knowledge of this pain: tell our Jo, tell him it was that bastard that drives the Escort with the rusty wing, that cunt that always has a cold, him … and when in the end the crushing of the rifle butts and the men’s boots seemed to drive her own feet through the scuffed vinyl tiles of the exam room, she had let the letters freely intermingle on the page, so that when Miss Adshead came to flick her paper into the pile there was nothing on it but thin pen scrawls, like the traces and loops of the wire with which the hands of this total stranger had been bound.

  “Alison?” She jumped. Mandy had taken her by the wrist; she was shaking her, bringing her back to the present. “You all right, Al?” Over her shoulder she said, “Cara, go get her a stiff drink and a chicken leg. Al? Are you back with us, love? Is she pestering you? The princess?”

  “No,” Al said. “It’s paramilitaries.”

  “Oh, them,” Gemma said. “They can be shocking.”

  “I get Cossacks,” Mandy said. “Apologizing for, you know—what they used to do. Cleaving. Slashing. Scourging peasants to death. Terrible.”

  “What’s Cossacks?” Cara said, and Mandy said, “They are a very unpleasant kind of mounted police.”

  Raven said, “I never get anything like that. I have led various pacific lives. That’s why I’m so karmically adjusted.”

  Al roused herself. She rubbed the wounds on her wrists. Live in the present moment, she told herself. Nottingham. September. Funeral Night. Ten minutes to ten. “Time for bed, Col,” she said.

  “We’re not watching the highlights?”

  “We can watch them upstairs.” She pushed herself up from the sofa. Her feet seemed unable to support her. An effort of will saw her limp across the room, but she had wobbled as she took the weight on her feet, and her skirt flicked a wineglass from a low table, sent it spinning away from her, the liquid flying across the room and splashing red down the paintwork. It flew with such force it looked as if someone had flung it, a fact that did not escape the women; though it escaped Raven, who was slumped in his chair, and hardly twitched as the glass smashed.

  There was a silence. Into it, Cara said, “Whoops-a-daisy.”

  Alison turned her head over her shoulder, and looked back, her face blank; did I do that? She stood, her head swivelled, too weary to move back to attend to the accident.

  “I’ll get it,” Mandy said, hopping up, crouching neatly over the shards and splinters. Gemma turned her large cowlike eyes on Al and said, “All in, poor love,” and Silvana, walking back in at that moment, tut-tutted at them. “What’s this, Alison? Breaking up the happy home?”

  “This is the fact,” Al said. She was rocking to and fro on the bed—she was trying to rub her feet but finding the rest of her body got in the way. “I feel used. All the time I feel used. I’m put up onstage for them to see me. I have to experience for them the things they don’t dare.” With a little moan, she gripped her ankle, and lolled backwards. “I’m like—I’m like some form of muck-raker. No, I don’t mean that. I mean I’m in there, in the pockets of their dirty minds. I’m up to my elbows, I’m like—”

  “A sewage worker?” Colette suggested.

  “Yes! Because the clients won’t do their own dirty work. They want it contracted out. They write me a check for thirty quid and expect me to clean their drains. You say help the police. I’ll tell you why I don’t help the police. First ’cos I hate the police. Then because—do you know where it gets you?”

  “Al, I take it back. You don’t have to help the police.”

  “That’s not the point. I have to tell you why not. You have to know.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  “You do. Or you’ll keep coming back to it again and again. Make yourself useful, Alison. Make yourself socially useful.”

  “I won’t. I’ll never mention it.”

  “You will. You’re that type, Colette, you can’t help mentioning and mentioning things. I’m not getting at you. I’m not criticizing. But you do mention, you are—Colette, you are, one of the world’s great mentioners.” Al uncurled herself with a whimper, and fell back on the bed. “Can you find my brandy?”

  “You’ve had too much already.” Alison moaned. Colette added generous
ly, “It’s not your fault. We should have stopped for an early lunch. Or I could easily have brought you in a sandwich. I did offer.”

  “I can’t eat when I’m sitting. The cards won’t work if you smudge them.”

  “No, you’ve said that before.”

  “Not cheeseburgers. I don’t agree with it.”

  “Nor me. It’s disgusting.”

  “You get fingerprints on your crystals.”

  “It’s hard to see how you could help it.”

  “Don’t you ever drink too much, Col?”

  “No, I hardly ever do.”

  “Don’t you ever, ever? Didn’t you ever, ever make a mistake?”

  “Yes. Not that kind, though.”

  Then Al’s wrath seemed to deflate. Her body collapsed too, back onto the hotel bed, as if hot air were leaking from a balloon. “I do want that brandy,” she said, quietly and humbly.

  She stretched out her legs. Over her own rolling contours she saw a distant view of feet. They lolled outwards as she watched: dead man’s joints. “Christ,” she said: and screwed up her face. The cousin of John Joseph was back, and talking in her ear: I don’t want the hospital to take my legs off; I’d rather be dead out there in the field and buried, than alive with no legs.

  She lay whimpering up at the dim ceiling, until Colette sighed and rose. “Okay. I’ll get you a drink. But you’d do better with an aspirin and some peppermint foot lotion.” She tripped into the bathroom and took from the shelf above the washbasin a plastic tumbler in a polythene shroud. Her nails punctured it; like a human membrane, it adhered, it had to be drawn away, and when she rubbed her fingertips together to discard it, and held up the tumbler, she felt against her face a bottled breath, something secondhand and not entirely clean, something breathing up at her from the interior of the glass.

  She screwed open the brandy bottle and poured two fingers. Al had rolled herself up in the duvet. Her plump pink feet stuck out of the end. They did look hot, swollen. Mischievously, Colette took hold of a toe and waggled it. “This little piggy went to market—”

  Alison bellowed, in someone else’s voice, “In the name of Bloody Christ!”

  “Sorr-ee!” Colette sang.

  Alison’s arm fought its way out of her wrappings, and her fingers took a grip on the tumbler, buckling its sides. She wriggled so that her shoulders were propped against the headboard, and swallowed half her drink in the first gulp. “Listen, Colette. Shall I tell you about the police? Shall I tell you? Why I won’t have anything to do with them?”

  “You’re clearly going to,” Colette said. “Look, wait a minute. Just hold on.”

  Al began, “You know Merlyn?”

  “Wait,” Colette said. “We should get it on tape.”

  “Okay. But hurry up.”

  Alison swallowed the rest of her drink. At once her face flushed. Her head was tipped back, her shiny dark hair spilling over the pillows. “So are you fixing it?”

  “Yes, just a minute—okay.”

  COLETTE: So, it’s sixth September 1997, ten thirty-three P.M., Alison is telling me—

  ALISON: You know Merlyn, Merlyn with a y? He says he’s a psychic detective. He says he’s helped police forces all over the southeast. He says they call him in regularly. And you know where Merlyn lives? He lives in a trailer home.

  COLETTE: So?

  ALISON: So that’s where it gets you, helping the police. He doesn’t even have a proper lavatory.

  COLETTE: How tragic.

  ALISON: You say that, Miss Sneery, but you wouldn’t like it. He lives outside Aylesbury. And do you know what it’s like, when you help the police?

  Al’s eyes closed. She thought of reliving—over and over—the last few seconds of a strangled child. She thought of drowning in a car under the waters of the canal, she thought of waking in a shallow grave. She slept for a moment and woke in her duvet, wrapped in it like a sausage in its roll; she pushed up and out, fighting for space and air, and she remembered why she couldn’t breathe—it was because she was dead, because she was buried. She thought, I can’t think about it anymore, I’m at the end of—the end of my—and she released her breath with a great gasp: she heard click.

  Colette was at her side, her voice nervous, oh God, Al, bending over her now. Colette’s breath was against her face, polythene breath, not unpleasant but not either quite natural. “Al, is it your heart?”

  She felt Colette’s tiny bony hand sliding under her head, lifting it. As Colette’s wrist and forearm took the weight, she felt a sudden sense of release. She gasped, sighed, as if she were newborn. Her eyes snapped open: “Switch on the tape again.”

  Breakfast time. Colette was down early. Listening to Alison while the tape ran—Alison crying like a child, talking in a child’s voice, replying to spirit questions Colette could not hear—she had found her own hand creeping towards the brandy bottle. A shot had stiffened her spine, but the effect didn’t last. She felt cold and pale now, colder and paler than ever, and she nearly threw up when she came into the breakfast room and saw Merlyn and Merlin stirring a ladle around in a vat of baked beans.

  “You look as if you’ve been up all night,” Gemma said, picking at the horns of a croissant.

  “I’m fine,” Colette snapped. She looked around; she couldn’t very well take a table by herself, and she didn’t want to sit with the boys. She pointed imperiously to the coffeepot on its hotplate, and the waitress hurried across with it. “Black is fine.”

  “Are you lactose intolerant?” Gemma asked her. “Soya milk is very good.”

  “I prefer black.”

  “Where’s Alison?”

  “Doing her hair.”

  “I’d have thought that would have been your job.”

  “I’m her business partner, not her maid.”

  Gemma turned the corners of her mouth down. She nudged Cara conspiratorially, but Cara was unfolding the papers to see the funeral pictures. Mandy Coughlan came in. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her lips compressed. “Another one who’s had a bad night,” Gemma said. “Princess?”

  “Morris,” Mandy said. She rummaged bad-temperedly at the breakfast buffet and slammed a banana down on the table. “I’ve passed the whole night under psychic attack.”

  “Tea or coffee?” the waitress said.

  “Got any rat poison?” Mandy said. “I wish I’d had some last night for that little bastard. You know, I pity Alison, I really do, I wouldn’t be in her shoes for any money. But can’t she get him under control? I’d hardly got into bed before he was there trying to pull the duvet off me.”

  “He always did fancy you,” Cara said, flapping the newspaper. “Ooh, look at poor little Prince Harry. Look at his liddle face, bless him.”

  “Pulling and tugging till nearly three o’clock. I thought he’d gone, I got out of bed to go to the loo, and he just jumped out from behind the curtains and put his filthy paw right up my nightie.”

  “Yeah, he does that,” Colette said. “Hides behind the curtains. Alison says she finds it very annoying.”

  Alison winced in a moment later, looking green.

  “Oh, poor love,” Mandy breathed. “Look at her.”

  “I see you didn’t manage to do anything with your hair after all,” Cara said sympathetically.

  “At least she doesn’t look like a bloody pixie,” Colette snapped.

  “Tea, coffee?” the waitress said.

  Al pulled her chair well out from the table and sat down heavily. “I’ll get changed later,” she said, by way of explaining herself. “I was sick in the night.”

  “Too much of that red,” Gemma said. “You were sozzled when you went up.”

  “Too much of everything,” Al said. Her eyes, dull and downcast, rested on the dish of cornflakes Colette had placed before her. Mechanically, she picked up a spoon.

  “That’s nice,” Gemma said. “She gets your cereal for you. Even though she’s not your maid, she says.”

  “Could you just shut up?” Colette
enquired. “Could you just give her a minute’s peace and let her get something inside her?”

  “Mandy—” Alison began.

  Mandy waved a hand. “Nugh about it,” she said, her mouth full of muesli. “Id nig. Nobbel self.”

  “But I do blame myself,” Al insisted.

  Mandy swallowed. She flapped a hand, as if she were drying her nail varnish. “We can talk about it another time. We can stay in separate hotels, if we have to.”

  “I hope it won’t come to that.”

  “You look done up,” Mandy said. “I feel for you, Al, I really do.”

  “We were up talking till late, me and Colette. And other people came through, that I used to know when I was a kid. And you know I said, para-militaries were tormenting me? The thing is, they broke through and smashed up my feet. I had to take two Distalgesic. By dawn I was just dropping off to sleep. Then Morris came in. He yanked out the pillow from under my head and started boasting in my ear.”

  “Boasting?” Gemma said.

  “What he’d done with Mandy. Sorry, Mandy. It’s not that—I mean, I didn’t believe him or anything.”

  “If he were mine,” Gemma said, “I’d get him exorcised.”

  Cara shook her head. “You could control, Morris, you know, if you were to approach him with unconditional love.”

  Colette said, “Could you manage a tomato juice, Alison?”

  Alison shook her head, and put down her spoon. “I suppose we’re in for another day of the princess.”

  “Another day, another dollar,” Merlin said.

  “Snivel, bloody snivel,” Al said. “Do they ever think what it’s like for us? Down I go, whoosh. Plunged head first into their shit. Like a lavatory brush.”

  “Well, it’s a living, Al,” Mandy Coughlan said, but Cara, startled, dropped her knife on the Mail’s Full-Colour Tribute and smeared butter on the Prince of Wales.