Her mother shouted, “You hear that, Gloria? She’s coming over. Better bake a cake, eh? Better get the fancy doilies out.”
“Oh, you’re not on that again, are you?” Al’s voice was weary. “I thought we’d got Gloria out of our lives twenty years ago.”
“So did I, pardon me, till she turned up on me doorstep the other night. I never had such a thunderclap. I says, Gloria! and she says, hello, and I says, you’ve not changed a bit, and she says, I can’t say the same for you, she says, give us a fag, I says, how’d you track me down in Bracknell? She says—”
“Oh, Mum!” Alison yelled. “She’s dead!”
I said it, she thought, I uttered the word no Sensitive ever uses: well hardly ever. I didn’t say passed, I didn’t say gone over, I said dead, and I said it because I believe that when it comes to dead, Gloria is deader than most of us, deader than most of the people who claim to be dead: in my nightmares since I was a child she is cut apart, parcelled out, chewed up.
There was a silence. “Mum? You still there?”
“I know,” said Emmie, in a small voice. “I know she’s dead. I just forget, is all.”
“I want you to remember. I want you to stop talking to her. Because it’s driving me round the twist and it always did. It’s not as if you made a living out of it. So there’s no use fooling yourself. You may as well get it straight and keep it straight.”
“I have.” Emmie sounded cowed. “I have, Alison. I will.”
“So do you want to come to Mrs. Etchells’s service?”
“Why?” Emmie was mystified. “Is she getting married?”
“We’re burying her, Mum. I told you. Cremating. Whatever. We don’t know what her wishes would have been. I was hoping you could shed some light, but obviously not. Then as soon as that’s over, I’m coming to see you, and we’re going to sit down and have a heart-to-heart. I don’t think you’re fit to live on your own. Colette says you should be living in a warden-assisted bungalow. She says we ought to make you a care plan.”
“You hear that, Gloria?” said Emmie. “We’ll have to polish the silver, if Lady Muck is coming to tea.”
For a few days the fiends were faintly present, flickering at the corner of her eye: throughout her whole body, they left their mark. It’s as if, she thought, they’re walking in one by one, and wiping their feet on me. Her temperature dropped; her tongue furred up with a yellow-green coating. Her eyes looked small and bleary. Her limbs tingled and she lost sensation in her feet; they still seemed intent on walking off, leaving the whole mess behind, but though the intention was there, she no longer had the ability.
Morris said, got to get the boys together. We will be wanting a knees-up, seeing as Etchells is fetched away, and we are fully entitled in my opinion, there’s one we can tick off—well done, lads—there weren’t no messing about with Etchells.
“You arranged it?” she said. She had hoped their appearance in the back row of the dem might be coincidental—or rather, the kind of coincidence with unpleasant events that they liked to arrange for themselves.
“’Course we did,” Morris boasted. “What is our mission? It is to track down useless and ugly people and recycle them, and with Etchells we have made a start. I says to Mr. Aitkenside, do you mind if I kick off the project wiv a bit of personal business, and he says, Morris, old son, if I could give you the nod I would, but you know it is more than my skin’s worth, for you know old Nick, his temper when he is roused, and if you don’t go right through the proper procedure and your paperwork all straight he will take a pencil and ram it through your ear hole and swivel it about so your brain goes twiddle-de-dee, he says, I seen it done, and Nick has a special pencil he keeps behind his ear that makes it more painful. I says to him, Mr. Aitkenside, sir, upon my mother’s life I would not ask you to take any such risk of having your brain twiddled, forget I asked, but he says, Morris, old son, we go back, he says, we go back you and me, I tell you what I’ll do for you, when I happen to catch old Nick in a mellow mood—let us say we have had a good session in the back bar at the Bells of Hell, let us say Nick has won the darts, let us say we have had a barbecue on the back lawn and the great man is feeling at ease with himself—I’d say to him, Your ’Ighness, how would it be if my friend and yours Morris Warren were to do a bit of personal business, a bit of tidying up he has left over? For Nick was in the army, you know, and he likes things tidy.”
“What army?” Al said.
“I don’t know.” Morris sounded impatient. “The army, the navy, the forces, innit, bomber command, special boat squadron, there’s only one army, and that’s ours. Will you stop interrupting?”
“Sorry.”
“So it all worked out just like Mr. Aitkenside said it would, and I got leave, and off I go, rounding up a few of the lads as I go, and we pop up there and give the old biddy the fright of her life.”
“What had she ever done to you?”
“Etchells? She put me out in the street. She kicked me off Spirit Guide, she wanted Pikey Paul with his shiny outfits, Poncey Paul as I call him; if he wasn’t the uncle of Pete who is a mate of mine, I could cast aspersions there, I really could. I had to live in a builder’s skip, under an old broken fireplace, till I could happen to move in with you.”
“It’s a long time to hold a grudge.”
“It’s not a long time, when you’re dead and you’ve bugger-all else to do. You can’t treat a guide like that—maltreat him, and it comes back on you. So anyway … we got ourselves down the Fig and Pheasant, we tampered with the optics and nipped the little girls’ bottoms that was serving behind the bar, we strolled into the function room cool as you like and then we lined up on the back row. Etchells, blimey, you should have seen her face.”
“I did.”
“But you didn’t see our modifications.”
“So what are those? Apart from your tattoo?”
“Lifelike, innit?” Morris said. “I got it done when we was on a spot of R and R in the Far East. We got leave halfway through our course. Still, you ain’t seen nothing till you seen young Dean. We oldsters, we’ve got enough to sicken folk as it is, by God have we a collection of scars, there’s Mac with his eye socket and his chewed-off ear and Capstick with his private problem that he don’t like mentioned. Pikey Pete booked in to have his teeth filed, but Dean said, you could get that earthside nowadays, mate, you could get your teeth filed and your tongue slit. Oh, but Dean did rib him! So Capstick says, I’ll show willing, I’ll lay my money out, so he’s had his hair stood on end and his tongue rasped, but the youngsters don’t think nothing of that. They’ve all got these new tongue extensions. You can have it hung further back so it’s retractable, or you can have your palate heightened so your tongue rolls up neatly till required. Now Dean has opted for the last one, it costs you but it’s more neat and tidy, doesn’t slide out when you’re walking, and Mr. Aitkenside is teaching him to take a pride in his appearance. He’s going for the full scroll-out, so he’ll have to wear a guard till he gets used to it, but he claims it’s worth it, I dunno. He’s gone in for his knees swivelled as well, so he’s walking backwards when he’s walking forwards; you have to see it to appreciate it, but I can tell you it’s comical. Mr. Aitkenside has got six legs, so he has got six boots; that’s because he has got made up to management, that’s all the better for kicking them with.”
Colette came in. “Al? Cara’s on the phone—do you think Mrs. Etchells would have liked a woodland burial?”
“I don’t think so. She hated nature.”
“Right,” Colette said. She went out again.
Al said, “Kicking who?”
“Not just kicking, kicking out. We are chasing out all spooks what are asylum seekers, derelicts, vagrants, and refugees, and clearing out all spectres unlawfully residing in attics, lofts, cupboards, cracks in the pavement, and holes in the ground. All spooks with no identification will be removed. It ain’t good enough to say you’ve nowhere to go. It ain’t good enough to sa
y that your documents fell through the hole in your breeches. It’s no good saying that you’ve forgot your name. It’s no good pretending to go by the name of some other spook. It’s no good saying you ain’t got no documents because they ain’t invented printing yet—you got your thumb print, ain’t you, and it’s no good saying they cut off your thumb—don’t come that, they all say that. Nobody is to take up room they ain’t entitled to. Show me your entitlement or I’ll show you the boot—in Aitkenside’s case, six boots. It’s no good trying to bamboozle us because we have got targets, because Nick has set us targets, because we have got a clear-up rate.”
Al said, “Is Nick management?”
“You’re joking me!” Morris said. “Is Nick management? He is the manager of us all. He is in charge of the whole blooming world. Don’t you know nothing, girl?”
She said, “Nick’s the devil, isn’t he? I remember seeing him, in the kitchen at Aldershot.”
“You should have taken more notice. You should have been respectful.”
“I didn’t recognize him.”
“What?” Morris said. “Not recognize a man wiv a leather jacket, asking for a light?”
“Yes, but you see, I didn’t believe in him.”
“That’s where you was under a mistake.”
“I was only a girl. I didn’t know. They kept throwing me out of the RE class, and whose fault was that? I hadn’t read any books. We never got a newspaper, except the ones the blokes brought in, their racing paper. I didn’t know the history of the world.”
“You should have worked harder,” Morris said. “You should have listened up in your history lessons, you should have listened up in your Hitler lessons, you should have learned to say your prayers and you should have learned some manners.” He mimicked her: “‘Is Nick the devil?’ ’Course he’s the devil. We have only been under pupillage with the best. Who have you got to put up against him? Only mincey Mandy and the rest, they’re not worth MacArthur’s fart. Only you and stringbean and that sad bastard used to live in the shed.”
As the week passed, her parade of business-as-usual became less convincing, even to Colette, whom she sometimes caught gazing at her dubiously. “Is something troubling you?” she said, and Colette replied, “I don’t know that I trust that doctor you saw. How about a private health check?”
Al shrugged. “They’ll only talk about my weight again. If I’m going to be insulted, I’m not paying for it. I can get insults on the NHS.” She thought, what the doctors fail to realize is that you need some beef, you need some heft, you need some solid substance to put up against fiends. She had been alarmed, climbing out of the bath, to see her left foot dematerialize. She blinked, and it was back again; but she knew it was not her imagination, for she heard muffled laughter from the folds of her bath towel.
That was the day they were getting ready for Mrs. Etchells’s funeral. They had opted for a cremation and the minimum of fuss. A few elderly practitioners, Mrs. Etchells’s generation, had clubbed together for a wreath, and Merlyn sent a telegram of sympathy from Beverly Hills. Al said, “You can come back to my house afterwards, Colette’s got some sushi in.” She thought, I ought to be able to count on my friends to help me, but they’d be out of their depth here. Cara, Gemma, even Mandy—they’ve had nothing like this in their lives, they’ve never been offered. They’ve sold spirit services; they haven’t been sold, like me. She felt sad, separate, set apart; she wanted to spare them.
“Do you think in Spirit she’ll be at her best age?” Gemma said. “I find it hard to picture what Mrs. Etchells’s best age might have been.”
“Sometime between the wars,” Mandy said. “She was one of the old school, she went back to when they had ectoplasm.”
“What’s that?” Cara said.
“Hard to say.” Mandy frowned. “It was supposed to be an ethereal substance that took on the form of the deceased. But some people say it was cheesecloth they packed in their fannies.”
Cara wrinkled her nose.
“I wonder if she left a will?” Colette said.
“No doubt behind the clock, with the milk money,” Gemma said.
“I hope you’re not looking at me,” Silvana said. She had threatened to boycott the ceremony, and only turned up out of fear that the other Sensitives might talk about her behind her back. “I don’t want anything from her. If she did leave me anything, I wouldn’t take it. Not after those wicked things she said about me.”
“Forget it,” Mandy said. “She wasn’t in her right mind. She said herself, she saw something in the back row she couldn’t stomach.”
“I wonder what it was,” Gemma said. “You wouldn’t have a theory, Al, would you?”
“Anyway,” Mandy said, “somebody ought to see about her affairs. You’ve still got a key, Silvy?” Silvana nodded. “We’ll all come over. Then if there’s no will in the obvious places, we can dowse for it.”
“I’d rather not, myself,” Al said. “I try to steer clear of Aldershot. Too many sad memories.”
“There would be,” Mandy said. “God knows, Al, I don’t think any of us had what you’d call a regular upbringing, I mean when you’re a Sensitive it’s not like a normal childhood, is it? But those kind of old people tend to keep cash lying about. And we’d want a responsible witness. A relative ought to be present.”
“I’m not,” Al said. “A relative. As it turns out.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Colette said. If there were any bundles of fivers to be picked up, she didn’t see why Alison should lose out. “It’s just what her mum’s been putting into her head.”
“Didn’t your mum want to come today?” Gemma asked.
But Alison said, “No. She’s got a house guest.”
Guilty—knowing they’d been fed up with Mrs. Etchells, knowing they were glad to have her off their patch—they let the conversation drift back to discounts, to advertising rates, to Web sites, and to supplies. Gemma had found a place on the North Circular that undercut the Cornwall people on crystal-gazing kits. “Nice cauldrons,” Gemma said. “Very solid. They’re fibre-glass, of course, but as long as they look the business. You don’t want to be lugging cast iron around in the boot of your car. They go from mini to three gallon. Which is going to set you back a hundred quid, but if that’s what you need, you’ve got to invest, haven’t you?”
“I don’t do much with Wicca anymore,” Cara said. “I got bored of it. I’m more interested in personal development, and ridding myself and others of limiting beliefs.”
“And are you still rubbing people’s feet?”
“Yes, if they’ll sign a disclaimer.”
“It can’t be very nice, remembering the womb,” Gemma said.
There was a feeling among them, in fact, that nothing about the day was very nice. Mandy’s nose kept twitching, as if she could smell spirits. Once the sushi and meringues were consumed, they showed no wish to linger. As they parted on the doorstep, Mandy took Al’s arm and said. “If you want a bolt-hole, you know. You can soon be down in Hove. Just pick up the car keys and come as you are.”
She was grateful for Mandy’s tact. She obviously had her suspicions that Morris was back, but she didn’t want to say anything in case he was listening in.
Sometimes Morris’s voice was in her head; sometimes she found it on the tape. Sometimes he seemed to know everything about their past life together; he would talk, reprising the Aldershot days, running them back on a kind of loop, as if, like Mrs. Etchells at the dem, he’d gone on automatic. She tried every means she knew to tune him out; she played loud music, and distracted herself by long phone calls, going through her contacts book for the numbers of psychics she had known years ago, and calling them up to say, “Hi, guess who?”
“Al!” they would say. “Have you heard about Merlyn? He’s gone to Beverly Hills.” Then, “Shame about Irene Etchells. Sudden, wasn’t it? I never quite got it straight. Was she your gran, or not? Did you ever trace your dad? No? What a shame. Yes, Irene d
ropped in. I was just cleaning my crystal, and whoops, there she was, swimming about inside. She warned me I might have to have a little op.”
But, as she chatted, the past was chatting inside her: how’s my darling girl, Mrs. McGibbet, poxy little boxer, Keef are you my dad? If you’re going to chuck up go outside and do it. Fuck, Emmie, I’ve got to wash me hands. Dogmeat, Gloria, Gloria, dogmeat: there’s an evil thing you wouldn’t want to see. Round and round it went: there’s an evil thing you wouldn’t want to see at all. Morris was giving her earache, about the old days: the fight game, the scrap-metal game, the entertainment game. All the same, she felt there was something he wasn’t saying, something that he was holding back, perhaps some memory he was teasing her with. At other times, he seemed to be hazy about whom he was addressing; he seemed to be talking to the air.
He said, “Have you seen MacArthur? He’s the cove that owes me money. If you see him you’ll know him, he’s missing one eye. Have you seen young Dean? He’s got his head shaved and Rule Britannia stamped on it. Have you seen Pikey Pete? I’ve been down the waste ground and Pete ain’t there. Been up the waste tip—civic amenity, they call it now—I expect to see him rummaging but he’s not. Totting you call it, totting’s in his blood, together wiv scrap metal, his uncle were the biggest scrap-metal merchant in the Borders in the old days.”
“The Borders,” she said, “that’s a bit out of the way for you, how did you get up there then?”
Morris said, “Circus used to go up that way, didn’t it? Then in later years when I got kicked out of the circus I got a ride off Aitkenside. Aitkenside and his truck was always very handy, if you wanted picking up, if you want dropping off, post yourself by the side of a major trunk road and Aitkenside will be there. Very handy, a truck like that, when you’ve got boxes, when you’ve got a consignment, a van is very nice for a small consignment but nowadays we are trucking spookies by the score, gel. We bring ’em in by the hundreds, they are migrating from the east for a better life. But we charge, mind, and at the same time as we’re bringing ’em in we are kicking ’em out, it’s all part of the same racket, now you might not understand that but if you’d been on a course with Nick he’d make you understand: Comprenez? he’d say and hang you up by your feet until you answered yes. Now Aitkenside is management we have incentives for good work. We have vouchers to spend on modifications and we have family leisure breaks. We pack off on the weekends to the country, and we make crop circles. We fly over the fields and we make high-pitched whistling sounds, causing alarm to farmers and ramblers. We go on theme parks—that’s what they call a fair these days—and we hang off the rides and lie by night unscrewing the screws to cause fatalities. We go out to golf clubs to dig up the greens and they think we’re moles. Only you don’t want to go on a driving range, a spirit can get tangled up easy in them big nets. That’s how we found young Dean, we had to rescue him. Somebody shouted ‘old Nick’s coming’ and Dean being new, he panicked and run off, he run head first into one of them nets—well, where his head would be. It was Aitkenside what extricated him, using his teef.” Morris cackled. “Old Nick, if he sees you where he didn’t ought, he will spit your bollocks on his toasting fork. He will melt you on a brazier and sip the marrow out your bones.”