She stood on the landing, naked. I never did any science at school, she thought, any chemistry or physics, so I can’t advise these people about the likelihood of aliens or rabies or uranium or knotweed or anything at all really. Imagine, she said to herself, Morris let loose in a laboratory, all his friends trapped in a test tube, amalgamating and reacting against each other and causing little puffs and whiffs. Then she said to herself, don’t imagine, because it is imagining that gives them the door to get in. If you were thinner they would have less space to live. Yes, Colette was right and right again.
She knelt down, leaned forward, and tucked her head down by her knees. “Boom!” she said softly. “Boom!” She crunched herself down as small as she could go and said to herself a phrase she did not know she knew: Sauve qui peut.
She rocked her body, back and to, back and to. Presently she felt stronger: as if a shell, as if the back of a tortoise, might have grown over her spine. Tortoises live for many years, she thought, they outlive human beings. No one really loves them for they have no lovable qualities, but they are admired just for lasting out. They don’t speak, they just don’t utter at all. They are okay as long as no one turns them upside down and shows their underside, which is their soft bits. She said to herself, when I was a child I had a tortoise for a pet. The name of my tortoise was Alison, I named it after me because it is like me, and with our slow feet we walk in the garden. With my tortoise at week-ends I have many enjoyable times. The food of my tortoise is bollocks grass and blood.
She thought, the fiends are on their way, the question is how fast and who is first. If I cannot enjoy a nice childhood thought about a tortoise I might have had but didn’t, then I can expect Morris will shortly be limping in my direction though I believed he had gone on to higher things. Unless I am the higher things. After all, I tried to do a good action. I try to be a higher thing myself, but why does something inside me always say, but? Thinking but, she squashed herself down hard. She tried to put her chin onto the carpet, so she could look up, as if she were emerging from her shell. To her surprise—she had not tried this sort of thing before—she found it anatomically impossible. What came naturally was to tuck her head into her shielding spine, her plaited fingers protecting her fontanel.
In this position Colette found her, as she scampered lightly up the stairs, coming back from a meeting with their tax advisor. “Colette,” she said to the carpet, “you were right all along.”
These were the words that saved her; protected her from the worst of what Colette could have said, when she extended a cool hand to help her up and finally, admitting the task beyond her, brought a chair upon which Alison could place her forearms, and from there, lever herself into a position that seemed like an undignified sexual invitation, and from there, upright. One hand was spread across her heaving diaphragm, another crept down to cover her private parts—“which I’ve seen, already, once this week,” Colette snapped, “and once too much, thank you, so if you don’t mind getting dressed—or at least covering yourself up decently, if the idea of getting dressed is too challenging—you might come down when you’re ready and I’ll tell you what Mr. Colefax has to say about short-term savings rates.”
For an hour, Alison lay on her bed to recover. A client called for a tarot reading, and she saw her cards so clearly in her mind that really, she might as well have jumped up and done it and earned the money, but she heard Colette making tactful excuses, taking the client into her confidence and saying that she knew she would understand, the unpredictable demands placed on Alison’s talent meant that she couldn’t always give of her best, so when she said she needed rest that must be respected … she heard Colette book the woman in for a callback, and impress on her the fact that she must be standing to attention when it came, ready for Alison, even if her house were on fire.
When she felt able, she sat upright; she ran a tepid bath, dipped herself in and out of it, and felt no cleaner. She didn’t want hot water, which would make her scars flare. She lifted her heavy breasts and soaped beneath them, handling each one as if it were a weight of dead meat that happened to adhere to her chest.
She dried herself, put on the lightest dress she owned. She crept down-stairs and, by way of the kitchen, into the garden. The weeds between the paving had withered, and the lawn was rock-hard. She looked down; snaky cracks crossed the ground.
“Ali!” came the cry. It was Evan, out poisoning his own weeds, his spray gun slung like a bandolier across his bare chest.
“Evan!” She moved stiffly, patiently, towards the fence. She was wearing her fluffy winter slippers, because her swollen feet wouldn’t go into any other shoes; she hoped Evan wouldn’t notice, and it was true he didn’t notice much.
“I don’t know,” he said, “why did we ever pay the extra five K for a garden due south?”
“Why did we?” she said heartily, buying time.
“Personally I did it because I was told it would boost the resale value,” Evan said. “And you?”
“Oh, the same,” she said.
“But we couldn’t have known what climate change had in store, eh? Not the most of us. But you must have known?” Evan giggled. “What’s tomorrow, eh? Ninety-eight and rising?”
She stood in the doorway of Colette’s room, where she did not usually intrude: she stood and watched Colette, who was gazing into her computer screen, and talked to her, in a good-humoured, light sort of way. She said, the neighbours seem to think I have supernatural knowledge of what the weather’s going to be, and some of them are ringing me up to search for uranium and dangerous chemicals. I’ve had to say I don’t do that, I’ve handed them on to Raven, but today’s been quite good and quite busy, I’ve got lots of repeat telephone business, I know I always say to you I prefer face-to-face, but you always said, it limits you, it really limits you geographically and basically you can do it fine over the phone if you learn to listen hard, well you’re right, Colette, I have learned to listen hard and in a different way, you were right about that as you have been right about everything. And thank you for protecting me today from my client, I will phone her back, I will, you did the right thing, you always do the right thing, if I took notice of you, Colette, I would be thin and rich.
Colette saved her screen, and then, without looking at Al, she said, “Yes, all that is true, but why were you naked and curled into a ball at the top of the stairs?”
Al padded downstairs in her furry slippers. Another red, blazing evening had come; when she went into the kitchen, it was filled with a hellish light. She opened the fridge. To her knowledge, she had not eaten that day. Can I please have an egg? she asked herself. In Colette’s voice, she said, yes, just one. There was a sound behind her, a little tapping noise. Painfully—every bit of her was stiff and aching—she moved herself around, to look behind her; around again, to take in the whole room. “Colette?” she said.
Tap-tap. Tap-tap. It was coming from the window. No one was there. She crossed the room. She looked out into the garden. It was empty. Or seemed so.
She unlocked the back door and stepped out. She heard the train rumbling through Brookwood, the distant background roar of Heathrow, Gatwick. A few drops of rain fell, hot swollen drops. Lifting her head, she called out, “Bob Fox?”
The rain plopped onto her face and ran backwards into her hair. She listened. There was no reply.
“Bob Fox, is that you? “She gazed out into the milky darkness; there was a fugitive movement, towards the back fence, but that could be Mart, seeking shelter from some civic catastrophe. I could have imagined it, she thought. I don’t want to be premature. But.
eleven
You can understand it, Al thought. Fiends would be attracted to any site where there’s diggings, workings, companies of men going about men’s business, where there’s smoking, betting, and swearing; where there are vans running around, and trenches dug where you could conceal things.
She lay on the sofa; the tarot cards slid from her hands and fanned out on
the carpet. She levered herself upright, dabbing at her face, to see how the cards had fallen. The two of pentacles is the card of the self-employed, indicating uncertainty of income, restlessness, fluctuation, an unquiet mind, and an imbalance between the output of energy and the inflow of money. It is one of those cards so doubled and ambivalent in its meanings that if you draw it reversed it hardly matters much; it then suggests mounting debt, and the swing between paralyzed despair and stupid overconfidence. It’s not a card you want to draw when you’re making next year’s business plan.
Colette had got her online these days, e-mailing predictions around the globe and doing readings for people in different time zones. “I’d like to make you a global brand,” Colette said. “Like …” Her sentence had tailed off. She could only think of fat things, like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. In Al’s belief, the four of swords governed the Internet. Its colour was electric blue and its influence bore on people in a crowd, on the meetings of groups, on ideas that had mass appeal. Not all the psychics agreed; some backed the claims of the four, five, and six of cups, which govern secret areas of knowledge, recycled concepts, and work pursued in windowless rooms such as cellars or basements. As read by Mrs. Etchells, the four of swords indicated a short stay in hospital.
The weather broke; it thundered, then rained hard. The water ran down the patio doors in scallops and festoons. Afterwards, the gardens steamed under a whitening sky. Then the sun struggled through and the cycle began again, the buildup of unbearable heat. But if you looked into the crystal ball you could see shifting cloudbanks, as if it were making its own weather.
I don’t understand it, Colette said, peering in. I cleaned it yesterday.
She read for Colette and said, oh, look, the two of cups. Colette said, wait, I know that one, that means a partner, that means a man for me. Her optimism was endearing, Al supposed. The spread was short on the major arcana, as if Fate wasn’t really bothered about Colette.
Colette yelled. “Silvana on the phone. Are you up for team psychics?” Al picked up the phone by her own computer. “Oh, Silvana,” she said. “What’s team psychics then?”
Silvana said. “It’s a way to keep the excitement going, we thought. Up on the stage, twenty minutes, in and out, no time to get into anything deep and sticky; you’re on, you’re off, you leave them asking for more. Six times twenty minutes with shortest possible changeover is two hours, add in twenty minutes interval, and you’re away by ten-thirty, which means everybody can get home the same night, nice hot chocolate and a cheese toastie, tucked up in your own bed by midnight, which means you’re fresh the next day and up with the lark and manning the phones. Which looks to me like a good deal all round.”
“Sounds all right,” Al said, cautiously.
“We’d have come to you first off, except woss-name—Colette—she’s always so offhand and snotty.”
Yes, I’m afraid she is, Al thought, which is why I was last pick—
“Which is why you were last pick for the hen parties,” Silvana said. “But anyway, no hard feelings, Mandy said I should try you. She said one thing about Al, she’s nobody’s fool but she is the forgiving type, she says, there’s no malice or harm in her anywhere. So our problem is, we’ve advertised Six Sensational Psychics, but Glenora’s dropped out.”
“Why?”
“She had a premonition.”
“Oh, she’s always having those. She should get over herself. Where is it?”
“The Fig and Pheasant. You know. The steak house.”
Oh, dear. Not one of Colette’s favourite venues. “So it’s who?”
“Me, Cara, Gemma, Mrs. Etchells, Mandy, and then you.”
“You’re a bit light on men. Can’t you phone Merlyn?”
“We did. But his book came out, and he’s gone to Beverly Hills.”
It put Colette in a temper, the whole thing: the news about Merlyn, the insult of being called up last, and the fact that they would be performing at short notice in a so-called banqueting suite, cleared for the occasion, where beyond the wall a mega sports screen in the bar would be roaring with football chants, and in the “family area” a bunch of low-rent diners would be grimly hacking their way though honey-basted chicken kebabs.
She made her feelings known.
Alison drew the Papessa, with her veiled lunar face. She represents the inward world of women who love women, the pull of moods and gut feelings. She represents the mother, especially the widowed mother, the bereft feme sole, the one who is uncovered and abject and alone. She represents those things which are hidden and slowly make their way to the surface: she governs the virtue of patience, which leads to the revelation of secrets, the gradual drawing back of the velvet cloth, the pulling of the curtain. She governs temperature fluctuation and the body’s deep hormonal tides, besides the tide of fortune which leads to birth, stillbirth, the accidents and freaks of nature.
Next morning, when Colette came downstairs, her temper had not improved. “What’s this? A fucking midnight feast?”
There were crumbs all over the worktop, and her precious little omelette pan lay across two rings of the hob, skidded there as if by some disdainful hand which had used and abused it. Its sides were encrusted with brown grease and a heavy smell of frying hung in the air.
Alison didn’t bother to make excuses. She didn’t say, I believe it was the fiends that were frying. Why protest, only to be disbelieved? Why humiliate yourself? But, she thought, I am humiliated anyway.
She rang up Silvana. “Silvy, love, you know at the Fig and Pheasant, will there be a space to set up beforehand, you know, my easel and my picture?”
Silvana sighed. “If you feel you’ve got to, Al. But frankly, darling, a few of us have remarked that it’s time you retired that photo. I don’t know where you got it done.”
Oh, you wish, Al thought, you wish you did, you’d be round there like a shot, getting yourself flattered. “It will have to do me for this week,” she said, good-humoured. “Okay, see you tomorrow night.”
Next day when they came to pack the car, they couldn’t find her silk, her apricot silk for draping the portrait. But it’s always, always, she said, in just the same place, unless it’s in the wash, and to prove to herself it wasn’t she turned out her laundry basket, and then turned out Colette’s.
Her heart wasn’t in it, she knew it had vanished or been filched. For a week she had noticed the loss of small objects from her bathroom and dressing table.
Colette came in. “I looked in the washing machine,” she said.
“And? It’s not there, is it?”
Colette said, “No. But you might like to look for yourself.”
In the kitchen, Colette had been running the extractor fan, and spraying room freshener. But the odour of burst fat still hung in the air. Al bent down and looked into the washing machine. Her hand shrank from it, but she picked out the object inside. She held it up, frowning. It was a man’s sock, grey, woolly, the heel gone into holes.
So this is what it’s led to, she thought; Morris going on a course. It’s led to him sucking away my silk and my nail scissors and my migraine pills, and taking eggs out of the fridge and frying them. It’s led to him intruding his sock into Colette’s sight: and soon, perhaps, his foot. She looked over her shoulder, as if he might have materialized entirely; as if he might be sitting on the hob and taunting her.
Colette said, “You’ve had that vagrant in.”
“Mart?” How wrong can you be?
“I’ve seen him hanging around,” Colette said, “but I draw the line at his actual admission to the premises, I mean his using the cooking facilities and our utilities. I suppose that would account for the lavatory seat left up, which I have found on several occasions over the last few days. You have to decide who’s living here, Alison, and if it’s him or me, I’m afraid it won’t be me. As for the frying, and the bread that was obviously brought in somehow, that will have to rest with your own conscience. There isn’t a diet on this earth th
at allows the wholescale consumption of animal fats and burning another person’s pan. As for the sock—I suppose I should be glad I didn’t find it before it was washed.”
The Fig and Pheasant, under a more dignified name, had once been a coaching inn, and its frontage was still spattered with the exudates of a narrow busy A-road. In the sixties it had stood near-derelict and draughty, with a few down-at-heel regulars huddled into a corner of its cavernous rooms. In the seventies it was bought out by a steak-house chain and Tudorized, fitted with plywood oak-stained panels and those deep-buttoned settles covered in stain-proof plush of which the Tudors were so fond. It offered the novelty of baked potatoes wrapped in foil, with butter or sour cream, and a choice of cod or haddock in bread crumbs, accompanied by salad or greyish and lukewarm peas. With each decade, as its ownership had changed, experiments in theming had suceeded each other, until its original menu had acquired retro-chic, and prawn cocktails had reappeared. Plus there was bruschetta. There was ricotta. There was a Junior Menu of pasta shapes and fish bites, and tiny sausages like the finger that the witch tested for plumpness. There were dusty ruched curtains and vaguely William Morris wallpaper, washable but not proof against kids wiping their hands down it, just as they did at home. In the Sports Bar, where smoking was banned, the ceilings were falsely yellowed, to simulate years of tobacco poisoning; it had been done thirty years ago, and no one saw reason to interfere with it.