Beyond Black

  “Colette? It’s me,” he said.

  “What a nice surprise.”

  “Is it okay to talk to you now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you busy, or something?”

  “Let’s just forget you called me before. Let’s just have another go, and I won’t mention where I last saw you.”

  “If that’s what you want,” Gavin said airily. His tone showed he thought her capricious in the extreme. “But why couldn’t you talk, was it because she was around? You know, Fat Girl?”

  “If you mean Alison, she’s out. She’s gone for a walk.”

  Even as Colette said it, it sounded unlikely to her, but that was what Alison had said she was doing.

  “So you can talk?”

  “Look, Gavin, what do you want?”

  “Just checking up on you. Seeing how you’re doing.”

  “Fine. I’m fine. And how are you doing?” Really, she thought, I’m losing patience with this.

  He said, “I’m seeing somebody. I thought you should know.”

  “It’s no concern of mine, Gavin.”

  But she thought, how odd of him to get it right for once. I may not need to know, but I want to know, of course I want to know. I want her CV, her salary details, and a recent full-length photograph with her body measurements written on the back, so that I can work out what she’s got that’s so much better than me.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Zoë.”

  “That won’t last. Far too classy for you. Is it serious?” It must be, she thought, or he wouldn’t be telling me. “Where did you meet her? Is she in IT?” She must be, of course. Who else did he meet?

  “Actually,” he said, “she’s a model.”

  “Really?” Colette’s voice was cold. She almost said, a model what? She stood up. “Look, I can see Alison coming back. I have to go.”

  She cut off the call. Alison was lumbering up the hill. Colette stood watching her, the phone still in her hand. Why’s she wearing that big coat? Her temperature control must be shot again. She says it’s spirits but I bet it’s just an early menopause. Look at her! The size of her! Fat Girl!

  When Al came in Colette was standing in the hall waiting for her. Her face was savage. “I suppose it’s something, that you’re taking a bit of exercise!”

  Alison nodded. She was out of breath.

  “You were practically on your knees, by the time you got halfway up the hill—you should have seen yourself! How far have you waddled, about a mile? You’ll have to be sprinting that distance, with weights attached to you, before you see any improvement. Look at you, puffing and sweating!”

  Obedient, Al glanced at herself in the hall mirror. There was a flicker of movement; that’s Mart, she thought, scooting out of the side gate.

  Alison went into the kitchen and out of the back door. She unbuttoned her coat, and—listening out all the time for Colette—disentangled herself from the two supermarket carrier bags that were swinging like saddlebags at her sides. She placed her surreptitious groceries behind the wheelie bin, came in, and shrugged off the coat.

  It’s like being a reverse shoplifter, she thought. You get to the checkout with your cart and you pay for everything; then, when you get outside, you open your coat and start concealing the bags about your person. People stare at you, but you stare back. If they asked you why you were doing it, what would you say? You can’t think of a single good reason, except that you want to do a good action.

  It had come to this: either she ate, or Mart did. I’ll have to explain to him, she thought. How Colette checks up on me all the time. How she controls the groceries. How she shouted, the day you came, when she finally stock-taked the fridge and realized two eggs were missing. How she accused me of eating them boiled and made me ashamed, even though I never ate them, you did. How she supervises every minute of my day. How I can’t just go freelance shopping. How, if I took the car, she’d want to know where. And if I drove off by myself, she’d want to know why.

  She thought, on Friday at Sainsbury’s they have twenty-four-hour opening. So I could sneak out when she was asleep. Not ordinary asleep, that wouldn’t do. I’d have to get her drunk. She imagined herself wedging a plastic funnel into Colette’s open throat, and pouring chardonnay through it. I could take the car, she thought, if backing it out of the drive wouldn’t wake her. Probably that would only work if I drugged her. Beat her into insensibility. Come here, she thought: would you like a slap with this shovel?

  But really, he must be gone by weekend. I’ll tell him. Even if she doesn’t form the ambition to rehone the forks and the hoes, those water-feature people will be around again early next week.

  She locked the back door. She crossed the kitchen, stood at the sink and downed a glass of water. All quiet on the shed front; the door was closed, the ground undisturbed. She refilled her glass. Quick, quick, she thought, before she comes in and says tap-water can kill you, quick, before she says drinking too fast is a notorious cause of death in the obese.

  She was aware that the Collingwood was silent.

  She went into the hall. “Colette?”

  No answer. But from above she heard a bleating, a little trail of bleating that grew louder as she followed it upstairs.

  She stood outside Colette’s door. She is lying on her bed sobbing, she thought. But why? Can she have regretted what she said to me, about my personal fatness? Has a lifetime of tactlessness flashed before her eyes? This didn’t seem likely. Colette didn’t think she was tactless. She thought she was right.

  Whatever, Al thought. Now is my opportunity. While her emotions are detaining her, I will just sneak down the garden and distribute my haul to Mart. Or, as he’s gone out, I will leave it inside his door, for him to find as a happy surprise when he returns.

  Yesterday she had taken him three oranges. He had not been impressed when she had explained that she could get away with oranges, by claiming to have juiced them. He had hinted that he preferred a steak, but she couldn’t see her way to setting up cooking facilities. So he was getting tinned tuna, that sort of thing. She hoped he would appreciate that tins were extremely heavy.

  She creaked down the stairs, away from Colette and her grief: whatever that was. At the foot of the stairs, she saw herself, unavoidably, in the glass. Her face looked as pink as a ham. She thought, I could have got him sliced cold meat, I bet that would have been lighter, though of course it being warm weather he’d have to eat it all the same day. At least, this way, I’ve built him up a little store that he can put in his rucksack, when he leaves.

  She opened the back door, tottered out, reached behind the wheelie bin. The bags had gone. Mart must have darted back, crouching low, and swooped them up on his way in. In which case I hope he’s got strong teeth, she thought, as I didn’t buy him a can opener.

  By close of day, Colette had not come down; but all it would take, Al thought, is a casual glance from her bedroom window, as Mart flits across the lawn by moonlight. Why don’t I just give him some money to set him on his way? I can’t afford more than, say, a hundred pounds, or Colette will want to know where I drew it out and what I spent it on. She will be quite pleasant about it, knowing I have the right, but she’ll be curious all the same.

  When it was almost dark, she stepped out of the sliding doors.

  “Alison? Is that you?” Michelle was waving.

  Who else did she think it was? Reluctantly, she moved towards the fence.

  “Lean over,” Michelle said. “I want to whisper to you. Have you heard about this plague of rabbit deaths?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s very strange, you see. Not that I have any time personally for rabbits; I wouldn’t have any pets near my kids because they spread all sorts of toxicosis. But these little ones at the nursery, they’re crying their eyes out. They go down the garden to feed it and it’s keeled over in its hutch with a horrible trickle of black blood coming out of its mouth.”

  I suppose, A
l thought, me keeping Mart in the shed, it’s like being a kid again, doing things behind people’s backs, stealing food, all that stuff I used to do; running to the corner with any money I got. It’s a game really, it’s like that dolls’ tea party I wanted. We have a lot in common, she thought, me and Mart, it’s like having a little brother. She had noticed that Mart was always falling over; that was because of his medication. She thought, my mum, too, she was always falling over.

  “So what do the vets say?” she asked Michelle.

  “They just say, oh, rabbits, what do you expect? They try to put it on what they’ve been eating, a bad diet. They blame you, don’t they, the owner? That’s how they get around it. Evan says personally he has no time for rabbits either, but it’s very worrying, in the light of what’s going down with the playground. And the vets denying it, you see. He wonders if they know something we don’t.”

  Oh dear, she said. They ought to hold postmortems, maybe. She couldn’t think what else to say. Got to go, she said; as she limped away from the fence, Michelle called, will the warm weather last till weekend?

  By eight o’clock Al was beginning to feel very hungry. Colette didn’t show any sign of coming down and supervising her dinner. She crept upstairs to listen. More and more, this evening reminded her of her youth. The need to tip-toe, listen at doors: sighs and groans from other rooms. “Colette?” she called softly. “I need you to do my calories.”

  No reply. She eased the door open. “Colette?”

  “Go and eat yourself to death,” Colette said. “What do I care?”

  She was lying face down on the bed. She looked very flat. She looked very out-of-it. Alison drew the door closed, in a manner so quiet that she hoped it showed her complete respect for Colette’s state of mind, so quiet that it offered condolences.

  She crept down the garden. The moon had not yet turned the corner above the Mountbatten at the curve of the road, and she wasn’t clear where she was putting her feet. She felt she ought to knock, but that’s ridiculous, she thought, knock at your own shed?

  She inched open the door. Mart was sitting in the dark. He had a torch, and batteries, but they were the wrong size; something else for my shopping list, she thought. She could have fixed him up with a candle, but she didn’t trust him not to start a fire.

  “Get your shopping?”

  “What shopping? I’m ravenous in here. Fainting.”

  “I’m giving you fifty quid,” Al said. “Sneak off into Knaphill, will you, and get a takeaway Chinese? Get me a set menu for two, and whatever you want for yourself. Keep the change.”

  When Mart left, diving low under the light sensors, she tried to make herself comfortable in the canvas garden chair. The earth was cooling, beneath their hardstanding; she lifted her feet and tried to tuck them beneath her, but the chair threatened to overbalance; she had to sit up straight, metal digging into her back, and plant her feet back on the ground. She thought, I wonder what happened to the shopping?

  When Mart came back they sat companionably, licking spare ribs and tossing down the bones. “You’ve got to take the cartons away,” she said. “Do you understand that? You mustn’t put them in our wheelie bin. Or Colette will see them. You have to be gone soon. The garden design will be coming. They’ll probably say, take down that shed, it’s an eyesore.” She chewed thoughtfully on a sweet-and-sour prawn. “I knew we should get a better one.”

  “It’s late,” Mart said, consulting his new watch. “You ought to go in.”

  “Oh, just so you can finish everything off by yourself!”

  “I’m more hungry than you,” Mart said, and she thought, that’s true. So in she went. Up to bed. All quiet from Colette’s room. She didn’t dream, for once; or not of being hungry.

  It couldn’t last, of course. Previously there had been an element of camouflage about Mart, his dirty clothes blending into the earth tones of the gardens, but you noticed his feet now, in the big clean navy and white shoes, seeming to come around the corner before him.

  When he saw Colette approaching, he slammed the door of the shed and wedged his rucksack against it; but Colette defeated him with one push. Her yodel of alarm drove him back against the wall.

  Al galumphed down the garden, shouting, “Don’t hit him! Don’t call the police, he’s not dangerous.”

  Mart laughed when Colette said she had seen him on the lawn.

  “I bet you thought I was from space, did you? You said, oops, there goes an extraterrestrial! Or did you think I was a brickie from off the building site?”

  “I didn’t form any opinion,” Colette said coldly.

  “She thought she was dreaming,” Al said.

  “Alison, I’ll deal with this, please.”

  “In fact, my troubles started with an alien encounter,” Mart said. “Aliens give you a headache, did you know that? Plus they make you fall over. When you’ve seen an alien, it’s like somebody’s drilled your middle out.” He made a gesture—a gouge and a twist—like someone plunging a corer into an apple. “Pinto,” he said, “when we was white-lining up near Saint Albans, he got taken up bodily into an alien craft. Female aliens came and pulled off his overalls and palpitated his body all over.”

  “He was dreaming,” Colette said.

  Al thought, she doesn’t know how lucky we are, we could have been playing host to Pinto as well.

  “He wasn’t asleep,” Mart said. “He was carried off. The proof of it is, when he got back, he took his shirt off and they’d erased his tattoo.”

  “You can’t stay here any longer,” Colette said. “I hope that’s perfectly clear to you?”

  “A shed wouldn’t do for everybody,” Mart conceded. “But it’ll do nicely for me. Less bugs in a shed.”

  “I should have thought there’d be more. Though I’m sure you’ll find that it’s perfectly clean.”

  “Not crawling bugs. Listening bugs.”

  “Don’t be silly. Who’d want to listen to you? You’re a vagrant.”

  “And there’s cameras everywhere these days,” Mart said. “Blokes watching you out of control towers. You can’t go anywhere without somebody knows about it. You get post from people that don’t know you, how do you do that? Even I get post, and I don’t have an address. Constable Delingbole says, I’ve got your number, mate.” He added, under his breath, “His is written on him.”

  “I expect you out of here within ten minutes,” Colette said. “I am going back to the house and I shall be counting. Then, whatever you say, Alison, I shall call the police and have you removed.”

  Al thought, I wonder if Delingbole is real, or in a dream? Then she thought, yes, of course he’s real. Michelle knows him, doesn’t she? He gave a talk on shed crime. She wouldn’t have dreamed that.

  It was some hours before Colette was speaking to her again. There were interactions, chance meetings; at one point Colette had to hand her the telephone to take a call from a client, and later they arrived in the utility room at the same time, with two baskets of washing, and stood saying coldly, after you, no, after you.

  But the Collingwood wasn’t big enough to keep up a feud.

  “What do you want me to say?” Al demanded. “That I won’t keep a vagrant again? Well, I won’t, if you feel that strongly about it. Jesus! It isn’t as if there was any harm done.”

  “No thanks to you.”

  “Let’s not start again,” she said.

  “I don’t think you realize the kind of people who are out there.”

  “No, I’m too good,” Al muttered. “You don’t realize half the evil that is in the world,” she told herself under her breath.

  Colette said, “I saw Michelle earlier. She says, guard your shopping.”

  “What?”

  “In the boot of the car. In case it vanishes while you’re unlocking the front door. Don’t leave the boot lid open. There’s been a spate of grocery theft.”

  “I don’t go shopping by myself, do I?”

  Colette said, “Stop mutteri
ng like that.”

  “Truce?” she said. “Peace talks? Cup of tea?”

  Colette did not answer but she took it as a yes, standing at the sink filling the kettle, looking down the garden towards the now-deserted Balmoral. Colette had accused her of harbouring Mart, but not of actually feeding him; not of actually buying supplies and smuggling them in. She had not actually slapped her, but she had screamed in her face, asked her if she was insane, and if it was her intention to bring into the neighbourhood a gang of robbers, child molesters, terrorists, and would-be murderers.

  I don’t know, she’d said, I don’t think so. I didn’t have an intention, I just wanted to do a good action, I suppose I didn’t think; I just felt sorry for him, because he’s got nowhere to go and so he has to go in a shed.

  “Sometimes,” Colette said, “I think you’re retarded as well as fat.”

  But that’s not true, Al thought. Surely not? She knows I’m not stupid. I might be temporarily muddled by the ingress of memory, some seepage from my early life. I feel I was kept in a shed. I feel I was chased there, that I ran in the shed for refuge and hiding place, I feel I was then knocked to the floor, because in the shed someone was waiting for me, a dark shape rising up from the corner, and as I didn’t have my scissors on me at the time I couldn’t even snip him. I feel that, soon afterwards, I was temporarily inconvenienced by someone putting a lock on the door, and I lay bleeding, alone, on newspapers, in the dark.

  She couldn’t see the past clearly, only an outline, a black bulk against black air. She couldn’t see the present; it was muddled by the force of the scene Colette had made, the scene which was still banging around inside her skull. But she could see the future. She’ll be forcing me out for walks, hanging weights—this is what she threatens—on my wrists and ankles. She might drive alongside me, in the car, monitoring me, but probably only at first. She won’t want to spare the time from sending out invoices, billing people for predictions I have made and spirits I have raised: To Your Uncle Bob, ten minutes’ conversation, £150 plus VAT. So perhaps she won’t drive alongside me, she’ll just drive me out of the house. And I’ll have nowhere to go. Perhaps I, too, can take refuge in someone’s outbuilding. First I can go by the supermarket and get a sandwich and a bun, then I can eat them sitting on a bench somewhere, or if it’s wet and I can’t get into a shed I could go to the park and crawl under the band-stand. It’s easy to see how it happens, really, how a person turns destitute.