Colette slotted them neatly into the disputed space. She glanced sideways at Al. She didn’t dare question her. They were running late, of course; they did need the space. She said to Al, testing her, “I wish I had done that.” Al didn’t answer.
When they got home that night and had poured a drink, she said, “Al, the man in the car park … .”
“Oh, yes,” Al said. “Of course, I was just guessing.” She added, “About the pornography.”
These days when they travelled there was blissful silence from the back of the car. Didcot and Abingdon, Blewberry and Goring: Shinfield, Wonersh, Long Ditton, and Lightwater. They knew the lives they glimpsed on the road were lives more ordinary than theirs. They saw an ironing board in a lean-to, waiting for its garment. A grandma at a bus stop, stooping forward to pop a biscuit into a child’s open mouth. Dirty pigeons hanging in the trees. A lamp shining behind a black hedge. Underpasses dropping away, lit by dim bulbs: Otford, Limpsfield, New Eltham, and Blackfen. They tried to avoid the high streets and shopping malls of the denatured towns, because of the bewildered dead clustered among the dumpsters outside the burger bars, clutching door keys in their hands or queuing with their lunch boxes where the gates of small factories once stood, where machines once whirred and chugged behind sooty panes of old glass. There are thousands of them out there, so pathetic and lame-brained that they can’t cross the road to get where they’re going, dithering on the kerbs of new arterial roads and bypasses, as the vehicles swish by: congregating under railway arches and under the stairwells of multistorey car parks, thickening the air at the entrance to underground stations. If they brush up against Alison they follow her home, and start pestering her the first chance they get. They elbow her in the ribs with questions, always questions; but never the right ones. Always, where’s my pension book, has the Number 64 gone, are we having a fry-up this morning? Never, am I dead? When she puts them right on that, they want to go over how it happened, trying to glean some sense out of it, trying to throw a slippery bridge over the gap between time and eternity. “I had just plugged in the iron,” a woman would say, “and I was just starting on the left sleeve of Jim’s blue striped shirt … of his … our Jim … his stripes … .” And her voice will grow faint with bafflement until Alison explains to her, puts her in the picture, and “Oh, I see now,” she will say, quite equable, and then, “I get it. These things happen, don’t they? So I’ll not take up your time any further. I’m very much obliged. No thanks, I’ve my own tea waiting for me when I get home. I wouldn’t want to cut into your evening … .”
And so she passes, her voice fading until she melts into the wall.
Even the ones who went over with plenty of warning liked to recall their last hours on the ward, dwelling in a leisurely fashion on which of their family showed up for the deathbed and which of them left it too late and got stuck in traffic. They wanted Alison to put tributes in the newspaper for them—Thanks, sincerely meant, to the staff at St. Bernard’s—and she promised she would, for I’ll do anything, she would say, that will make them lie down, wait quietly and waft to their next abode instead of making themselves at home in mine. They will finish their ramblings with, “Well, that’s all from me for now,” and “Hoping this finds you well,” and “Let me have your family news soon”: sometimes with a quiet, stoical, “I ought to go now.” Sometimes, when they bob back, with a cheery, “Hello, it’s me,” they are claiming to be Queen Victoria, or their own older sister, or a woman who lived next door to them before they were born. It’s not intentional fraud; it’s more that a mingling and mincing and mixing of personality goes on, the fusing of personal memory with the collective. You see, she explains to Colette, you and me, when we come back, we could manifest as one person. Because these last years, we’ve shared a lot. You could come back as my mum. I could come over, thirty years from now, to some psychic standing on a stage somewhere, and claim I was my own dad. Not that I know who my dad is, but I will one day, perhaps after I’ve passed.
But Colette would say, panicked for a moment, stampeded into belief, what if I die? Al, what shall I do, what shall I do if I die?
Al would say to her, keep your wits about you. Don’t start crying. Don’t speak to anybody. Don’t eat anything. Keep saying your name over and over. Close your eyes and look for the light. If somebody says, follow me, ask to see their ID. When you see the light, move towards it. Keep your bag clamped to your body—where your body would be. Don’t open your bag, and remember the last thing you should do is pull out a map, however lost you feel. If anybody asks you for money ignore them, push past. Just keep moving towards the light. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t let anyone stop you. If somebody points out there’s paint on your coat or bird droppings in your hair, just keep motoring, don’t pause, don’t look left or right. If a woman approaches you with some snotty-nosed kid, kick her out of the way. It sounds harsh, but it’s for your own safety. Keep moving. Move towards the light.
And if I lose it? Colette would say. What if I lose the light and I’m wandering around in a fog, with all these people trying to snatch my purse and my mobile? You can always come home, Alison would tell her. You know your home now, Admiral Drive. I’ll be here to explain it all to you and put you on the right path so that you can manage the next bit, and then when I come over in the fullness of time we can get together and have a coffee and maybe share a house again if we think it will work out.
But what if you go before me, Colette would say, what if we go together, what if we’re on the M25 and a wind blows up and what if it’s a mighty wind and we’re blown into the path of a lorry?
Alison would sigh and say, Colette, Colette, we all get there in the end. Look at Morris! We end up in the next world raw, indignant, baffled or furious, and ignorant, all of us: but we get sent on courses. Our spirits move, given time, to a higher level, where everything becomes clear. Or so people tell me, anyway. Hauntings can persist for centuries, for sure, but why wouldn’t they? People have no sense of urgency, airside.
Inside the Collingwood the air was serene. Weekly, Colette polished the crystal ball. You had to wash it in vinegar and water and rub it up with a chamois. Al said, the tools of the trade are what keep you on track. They focus the mind and direct the energy. But they have no magic in themselves. Power is contained in domestic objects, in the familiar items you handle every day. You can look into the side of an aluminium pan and see a face that’s not your own. You can see a movement on the inside of an empty glass.
The days, months, blurred into one. The venues offered a thousand grannies with buttons missing; a thousand hands raised. Why are we here? Why must we suffer? Why must children suffer? Why does God mistreat us? Can you bend spoons?
Smiling, Al said to her questioner, “I should give it a go, shouldn’t I? Give me something to do in the kitchen. Stop me raiding the fridge.”
The truth was—though she never admitted it to anyone—that she had once tried it. She was against party tricks, and generally against showing off and being wasteful, and wrecking your cutlery seemed to come under those heads. But one day at Admiral Drive the urge overcame her. Colette was out: all well and good. She tiptoed into the kitchen and slid out a drawer. It snagged, bounced back. The potato masher had rolled forward spitefully and was catching its rim on the front of the unit. Unusually irritated, she slid in her hand, dragged the utensil out and threw it across the kitchen. Now she was in the mood for spoon-bending, she wasn’t to be thwarted.
Her hand jumped for the knives. She picked one out, a blunt round-edged table knife. She ran her fingers around the blade. She put it down. Picked up a soupspoon. She knew how to do this. She held it loosely, fingers caressing its neck, her will flowing from her spinal column sweetly into the pads of her fingers. She closed her eyes. She felt a slight humming behind them. Her breathing deepened. She relaxed. Then her eyes snapped open. She looked down. The spoon, unaltered, smiled up at her; and suddenly she understood it, she understood the essence of spoonh
ood. Bending it wasn’t the point, anymore. The point was that she would never feel the same about cutlery. Something stirred deep in her memory, as if she had been cross-wired, as if some old source of feeling had been tapped. She laid the spoon to rest, reverently, snug inside a fellow spoon. As she closed the drawer her eye caught the glint of the paring knife, a more worthwhile blade. She thought, I understand the nature of it. I understand the nature of spoon and knife.
Later, Colette picked up the potato masher from where it had fallen. “It’s bent,” she said.
“That’s all right. I did it.”
“Oh. You’re sure?”
“Just a little experiment.”
“I thought for a minute it must be Morris come back.” Colette hesitated. “You would tell me, wouldn’t you?”
But truly, there was no sign of him. Al sometimes wondered how he was doing on his course. It must be that he’s going to a higher level, she reasoned, you wouldn’t get sent on a course to go to a lower level.
“No, not even Morris,” Colette said, when she mentioned it. If Morris were on a lower level, he’d be no good, he’d not even scrape up to standard as an ordinary spirit, let alone get employed anywhere as a guide. He’d be just an agglomeration of meaninglessness, a clump of cells rolling around through the netherworld.
“Colette,” she said, “when you’re sweeping, have a look at the vacuum cleaner bag from time to time. If you find any big lumps you can’t account for, check it out with me, okay?”
Colette said, “I don’t think that sifting through the vacuum cleaner bag was in my job description.”
“Well, write it in, there’s a good girl,” Al said.
There are some spirits, she knew, who are willing to sink: who are so tenacious of existence that they will assume any form, however debased, ridiculous, and filthy. That was why Al, unlike her mother, made sure to keep a clean house. She thought that she and Colette, between them, could keep down the lower sort, who drift in dust rolls under beds and make streaks and finger-prints on windowpanes. They cloud mirrors and sometimes vanish with a chortle, leaving the mirror clear and unkind. They clump in hairbrushes, and when you comb them out, you think, can this thin grey frizz be mine?
Sometimes, when Alison came into a room, she thought the furniture had shifted slightly; but no doubt that was Colette, pushing it around as she cleaned. Her own boundaries seemed invisible, uncertain. Her core temperature tended to fluctuate, but there was nothing new in that. Her extremities drifted, in time and space. Sometimes she thought an hour, an afternoon, a day had gone missing. Less and less did she want to go out; her clients e-mailed her, the phone rang less often; Colette, who was restless, could always be persuaded to shop for them. It was the house’s silence that entranced her, lulled her. Her daydreams and night dreams ran together. She thought she saw two cars—trucks, really—parked outside the Collingwood; it was dark, Colette was in bed, she pulled her coat around her shoulders and went outside.
The carriage lamp flared into life, and the thump of a hi-fi came from a Hawkyns. There was no one around. She looked into the cab of one truck and it was empty. The cab of the other was empty too, but in the back there was a grey blanket tied with twine, covering something irregular and lumpy.
She shivered, and went back inside. When she woke the next morning the trucks had gone.
She wondered about them; whose were they? Had they not looked a bit old-fashioned? She wasn’t good on makes of cars, but there was something about their lines that suggested her childhood. “Colette,” she said, “when you’re at Sainsbury’s, you wouldn’t pick up a car magazine? One of those with lots and lots of pictures of every car anyone might want?” She thought, at least I could exclude all modern makes.
Colette said, “Are you winding me up?”
“What?” she said.
“Gavin!”
“There you are! I told you that you’re always talking about him.”
Later, she was sorry for upsetting Colette. I meant no harm, she said to herself, I just didn’t think. As for the trucks, they were spirit vehicles, probably, but whose? Sometimes she rose in the night to look down from the landing porthole over Admiral Drive. Around the children’s playground, warning lamps shone from deep holes in the ground. Great pipes, like troglodyte dwellings, lay gaping at the landscape; the moon’s single eye stared down at them.
Colette would find her, standing by the porthole, tense and cold. She would find her and draw her back to bed; her touch was like a spirit touch, her face hollow, her feet noiseless. By day or night, Colette’s aura remained patchy, wispy. When she was out and Alison found traces of her about the house—a discarded shoe, a bangle, one of her elastic hairbands—she thought, who ever is she, and how did she get here? Did I invite her? If so, why did I do that? She thought about Gloria and Mrs. McGibbet. She wondered if Colette might disappear one day, just as suddenly as they did, fading into nothingness and leaving behind only snatches of conversation, a faint heat trace on the air.
They had been given a breathing space. Time to reconsider. To pause. To reevaluate. They could see middle age ahead of them. Forty is the new thirty, Colette said. Fifty is the new forty. Senescence is the new juvenility, Alzheimer’s is the new acne. Sometimes they would sit over a bottle of wine and talk about their future. But it was difficult for them to plan in the way other people did. Colette felt that maybe Al was withholding information, information about the future that she could very well part with. Her questions about this life and the next were by no means resolved in a way that satisfied her; and she was always thinking of new ones. But what can you do? You have to make an accommodation. You have to accept certain givens. You can’t waste time every day worrying about the theory of your life, you have to get on with the practice. Maybe I’ll get into Kaballah, Al said. That seems to be the thing now. Colette said, maybe I’ll get into gardening. We could have some shrubs, now Morris isn’t here to hide behind them. Michelle and Evan keep hinting we should do something at the back. Get some flags laid, at least.
“They keep talking to me about the weather,” Al said. “I don’t know why.”
“Just being English, I suppose,” Colette said innocently. She sat brooding over the Yellow Pages. “I might ring up a gardening service. But not the one that sent that idiot last time, the one who couldn’t start the mower.”
“Do the next-doors still think we’re lesbians?”
“I expect so.” Colette added, “I hope it spoils their enjoyment of their property.”
She rang up the gardening service. A few flagstones, so less grass to mow, she thought. Her imagination didn’t stretch beyond an alleviation of her weekly routine. She made sure it didn’t. If she allowed herself to think about her life as a whole she felt an emptiness, an insufficiency: as if her plate had been taken away before she’d finished eating.
Meanwhile Evan leaned on the fence, watching her mow. She wondered if he was wearing an expression of lechery, but when she turned, it was actually an expression of sympathy. “I sometimes think, Astroturf,” he said. “Don’t you? They’re bringing in an auto-mower, one you preprogramme. But I suppose it’ll be a while before they hit the shops.”
His own plot was scuffed up and worn bald by the skirmishing of his two older brats. Colette was amazed at the speed with which they had grown. She remembered Michelle jiggling them on a hip; now they were out at all hours, scavenging and savaging, leaving scorched earth behind them, like child soldiers in an African war. Inside the house, Michelle was training up another one; when they had the French windows open, you could hear its stifled wails and roars.
“What you need there is a shed,” Evan said. “Stop you needing to get your mower out of the garage and walk it round the side.”
“I’m going to hire a man,” Colette said. “It didn’t work out before, but I’m trying somebody different. Going to do some planting.”
“There it is,” Evan said. “You need a man for some things, you see.”
Colette banged into the house. “Evan says we need a man.”
“Oh, surely not,” Alison said. “Or not any man we know.”
“He also says we need a shed.”
Alison looked surprised, a little hesitant. She frowned. “A shed? I suppose that’ll be all right,” she said.
On Sunday they went down the A322 to a shed supplier. Alison wandered around looking at the different kinds. There were some like Regency arbours, and some like miniaturized Tudor houses, and some with cupolas and arabesque cornices. There was one that reminded her of a Shinto shrine; Cara would probably go for that, she thought. Mandy would want the one with the onion dome. She liked the Swiss chalets, with little porches. She imagined hanging gingham curtains. I could go in there, she thought, shrunk (in thought form) to a small size. I could have a doll’s tea set and little cakes with pastel fondant icing and candied fruit on top.
Colette said, “We were hoping, my friend and I, to buy a shed.”
“Nowadays,” the man advised, “we call them garden buildings.”
“Okay, a garden building,” Al said. “Yes, that would be nice.”
“We only need something basic,” Colette said. “What sort of price are we looking at?”
“Oh,” said the man, “before we discuss price, let’s study your needs.”
Alison pointed to a sort of cricket pavilion. “What if our need were that one?”
“Yes, the Grace Road,” the man said. “An excellent choice where space is no object.” He thumbed his lists. “Let me tell you what that comes at.”
Colette peered over his shoulder. “Good God!” Colette said. “Don’t be silly, Al. We don’t want that.”