Pete had stripped out the stair carpet, so the creak of each tread carried to the women back in the parlour and, as their pendulums twitched, each tiny impulse registered an answering twitch in Alison, just above her diaphragm. The rooms were bare, but when she opened the wardrobe, a row of garments still hung there, close-covered against moths. She parted their calico shrouds; her hand brushed silk and crepe. They were Mrs. Etchells’s performance gowns, from her days of triumph on distant platforms. Here was a peacock green faded to grey, here a rose-pink faded to ash. She examined them: crystal beads rolled beneath finger and thumb, and a scatter of pewter-coloured sequins drifted to the floor of the wardrobe. She leaned in, breathing the smell of cedar, and began to scoop them into her cupped hand, thinking of Pikey Paul. But as she straightened up, she thought, no, I’ll buy him new. I’m patient for sewing, as long as it’s spirit sewing, and he’ll appreciate something more shiny than these. I wonder why Pete left her frocks? Probably thought they were worth nothing. Men! He had plundered the saggy polyester skirts and the cardigans that Mrs. Etchells usually wore; these, Al supposed, he would be selling onto some poor Iraqi grandma who’d lost everything but what she stood up in, or somebody who’d been bombed out in the Blitz; for in Spirit World, wars run concurrently.
She let the sequins drift, between her fingers, to the bare boards; then picked two empty wire hangers from the wardrobe. She wrenched them out of shape, formed each into a rod with a hook for a handle, and held them in front of her. She followed their guidance into the back room. They bucked and turned in her hand, and while she waited for them to settle she looked out of the uncurtained window onto the site of urban clearance beyond. Probably going to build a mews, she thought. For now, she had a clear view of the back plots of the neighbouring street, with its lean-tos and lockup garages, its yellowed nylon curtains billowing from open windows, its floribundas breaking through the earth and swelling into flagrant blood-dark bloom: a view of basking men throwing sickies, comatose in canvas chairs, their white bellies peeping from their shirts, their beer cans winking and weakly dribbling in the sun. From an upper storey hung a flag—ENGLAND—red on white: as if it could be somewhere else, she thought. Her eye carried to the street beyond, where on the corner stood municipal receptacles for the sorting and storage of waste, disposal bins for glass, others for grass, others for fabrics, for paper, for shoes; and at their feet clustered black sacks, their mouths tied with yellow tape.
The rods in her hands convulsed, and their hooks cut into her palms. She followed them to the corner of the room, and at their direction, laying them down, she tore into a foot of rotting linoleum. Her nails clawed at a seam; she inched two fingers under it and pulled. I should have a knife, she thought, why didn’t I bring a knife? She stood up, took a deep breath, bent again, tugged, tugged. There was a crack, a splintering; floorboards showed; she saw a small piece of paper, folded. She bent painfully to scoop it up. She unfolded it, and as she did so the fibres of the paper gave way, and it fell apart along the folds. My birth certificate, she thought: but no, it was barely six lines. First a blurred rubber stamp—PAID TO—then Emmeline Cheetham was written beneath, in a florid, black hand: THE SUM OF SEVEN SHILLINGS AND SIX-PENCE. Underneath came another stamp, at an angle to the above, RECEIVED WITH THANKS: and then in her mother’s youthful hand, her signature, Emmeline Cheetham: below that, IN WITNESS WHEREOF: Irene Etchells (Mrs.). Beneath the signature, the paper had a brown indentation, as if it had been ironed briefly on a high setting. As the nail of her little finger touched the scorch mark, the paper flaked away, leaving a ragged gap where the mark had been.
She kicked the divining rods away from her feet, and went downstairs; clattering, tread by tread. They were gathered in the kitchen, turned to the foot of the stairs and awaiting her arrival. “Anything?” Mandy said.
“Zilch. Nix.”
“What’s that? That paper?”
“Nothing,” Al said. She crumpled the paper and dropped it. “God knows. What’s seven shillings and sixpence? I’ve forgotten the old money.”
“What old money?” Cara said.
Mandy frowned. “Thirty-three pence?”
“What can you get for that?”
“Colette?”
“A bag of crisps. A stamp. An egg.”
When they went out, pulling the front door behind them, Mandy stood aghast at the sight of her car. “The sneaky bastards! How did they do that? I kept looking out, checking.”
“They must have crawled,” Silvana said. “Unless they ran up on very little legs.”
“Which, sadly, is possible,” Alison said.
Mandy said, “I cancelled a half day of readings to get here for this, thinking I was doing a favour. You try to do a good action, but I don’t know. Dammit, where does it get you?”
“Oh well,” Cara said, “you know what Mrs. Etchells used to say, as you sow shall you reap, or something like that. If you have done harm you’ll get it back threefold. If you’ve never done any harm in your life, you’ve nothing to worry about.”
“I never knew her well,” Mandy said, “but I doubt that, with her long experience, Irene thought it was that simple.”
“But there must be a way out of it,” Al said. She was angry. “There must be a route out of this shit.” She took Mandy’s arm, clung to it. “Mandy, you should know, you’re a woman of the world, you’ve knocked about a bit. Even if you have done harm, if you’ve done really bad harm, does it count if you’ve done it to evil people? It can’t, surely. It would count as self-defence. It would count as a good action.”
Colette said, “Well now, Mandy, I hope you’re insured.”
“I hope I am too,” Mandy said. She freed herself from Al. Tenderly, she passed her fingers over her paintwork. The triple lines were scored deep into the scarlet, as if scraped with a claw.
Tea, tea, tea! said Colette. How refreshing to come into the cleanliness and good order of the Collingwood. But Colette stepped short, her hand on the kettle, annoyed with herself. A woman of my age shouldn’t be wanting tea, she thought. I should be wanting—I don’t know, cocaine?
Alison was rummaging in the fridge. “You’re not eating again, are you?” Colette said. “It’s coming to the point where I’m getting ashamed to be seen with you.”
There was a tap on the window. Alison jumped violently; her head shot back over her shoulder. It was Michelle. She looked hot and cross. “Yes?” Colette said, opening the window.
“I saw that stranger again,” Michelle said. “Creeping around. I know you’ve been feeding him.”
“Not lately,” Alison said.
“We don’t want strangers. We don’t want pedophiles and homeless people around here.”
“Mart’s not a pedophile,” Al said. “He’s scared to death of you and your kids. As anybody would be.”
“You tell him that the next time he’s seen the police will be called. And if you don’t know any better than aiding and abetting him, we’re going to get up a petition against you. I told Evan, I’m not too happy anyway, I never have been, two single women living together, what does that say to you? Not as if you’re two girls starting out in life.”
Colette lifted the steaming kettle. “Back off, Michelle, or I’m going to pour this over your head. And you’ll shrivel up like a slug.”
“I’ll report you for threatening behaviour,” Michelle said. “I’ll call PC Delingbole.” But she backed away. “I’m going round right now to see the chairman of the Neighbourhood Watch.”
“Oh yes?” Colette said. “Bring it on!” But when Michelle had ducked out of sight, she slapped the kettle down and swore. She unlocked the back door, and said, “I’ve had enough of this. If he’s in there again I’m going to call the police myself.”
Alison stood by the kitchen sink, swabbing up the hot water that Colette had spilled from the kettle. Out in the garden there was seething activity, at ankle height. She couldn’t see Morris, but she could see movement behind a shrub. The oth
er spirits were crawling about, prone on the lawn, as if they were on some sort of military exercise. They were hissing to each other, and Aitkenside was gesticulating, as if urging the others forward. As Colette crossed the grass they rolled over and kicked their legs; then they rolled back and followed her, slithering along, pretending to nip her calves and slash at them with spirit sticks.
She saw Colette push at the door of the Balmoral, and step back. Step forward and push again. Her face turned back towards the house. “Al? It’s stuck.”
Al hurried down the garden. The spirits edged away and lay in the verges. Dean was whistling. “Cut that out,” Morris said, speaking from within his bush. “Watch and observe. Watch how she goes now. Now she says to string-bean, well, what’s sticking it? Is it swollen up wiv damp? Stringbean says, what damp, it ain’t rained for weeks. Watch ’em now. Now she pushes. Watch how she breaks out in a sweat.”
“There’s something heavy behind the door,” Al said.
Dean giggled. “If she was any good at predictionating, she’d know, wouldn’t she? What we’ve done?”
Al crouched down and looked in at the window. It was dusty and smeared, almost opaque. Behind the door was an area of darkness, a shadow, which thickened, took on form, took on features. “It’s Mart,” she said. “Stopping the door.”
“Tell him to get away,” Colette said. She banged on the door with her fist, and kicked it. “Open up!”
“He can’t hear you.”
“Why not?”
“He’s hanged himself.”
“What, in our shed?”
There was a spatter of applause from the margins of the lawn.
“I’ll call nine-nine-nine,” Colette said.
“Don’t bother. It’s not an emergency. He’s passed.”
“You don’t know. He might still be breathing. They could revive him.”
Al put her fingertips against the door, feeling for a thread of life through the grain of the wood. “He’s gone,” she said. “Goddammit, Colette, I should know. Besides, look behind you.”
Colette turned. I still forget, Al thought, that—psychically speaking—Colette can’t see her hand in front of her face. Mart was perched on the top of the neighbours’ fence, swinging his feet in their big sneakers. The fiends now roused themselves, and began to giggle. By Al’s feet, a head popped up out of the soil, “Coo-ee!”
“I see you turned up, Pikey Pete,” Al said. “Fresh from that little job of yours at Aldershot.”
“Would I have missed this?” the fiend replied. “Rely on me for a nice noose, don’t they? I had a great-uncle that was an hangman, though that’s going back.”
Dean lay on top of the shed on his belly, his tongue flapping like a roller blind down over the door. Morris was urinating into the water feature, and Donald Aitkenside was squatting on the grass, eating a sausage roll from a paper bag.
“Ring the local station and ask for PC Delingbole,” Al said. “Yes, and an ambulance. We don’t want anybody to say we didn’t do it right. But tell them there’s no need for sirens. We don’t want to attract a crowd.”
But it was school-out time, and there was no avoiding the attention of the mums bowling home in their minivans and SUVs. A small crowd soon collected before the Collingwood, buzzing with shocked rumour. Colette double-locked the front door and put the bolts on. She drew the curtains at the front of the house. A colleague of Delingbole’s stood at the side gate, to deter any sightseers from making their way into the garden. From her post on the landing, Colette saw Evan approaching with a ladder and his camcorder; so she drew the upstairs curtains too, after jerking two fingers at him as his face appeared over the sill.
“We’ll have the media here before we know it,” Constable Delingbole said. “Dear, oh, dear. Not very nice for you two girls. Forensics will be in. We’ll have to seal off your garden. We’ll have to conduct a search of the premises. You got anybody you could go to, for the night? Neighbours?”
“No,” Al said. “They think we’re lesbians. If we must move out, we’ll make our own arrangements. But we’d rather not. You see, I run my business from home.”
Already the road was filling with vehicles. A radio car from the local station was parked on the verge, and Delingbole’s boy was attempting to move back the mothers and tots. The kebab van was setting up by the children’s playground, and some of the tots, whining, were trying to lead their mothers towards it. “This is your fault,” Michelle shouted up at the house. She turned to her neighbours. “If they hadn’t encouraged him, he’d have gone and hanged himself somewhere else.”
“Now,” said a woman from a Frobisher, “we’ll be in the local paper as that place where the tramp topped himself, and that won’t be very nice for our resale values.”
Inside, in the half-dark, Delingbole said. “Do I take it you knew him, poor bugger? Somebody will have to identify him.”
“You can do it,” Al said. “You knew him, didn’t you? You made his life a misery. You stamped on his watch.”
When the forensic team came, they stood thigh-deep in the low, salivating spirits that cluster at the scene of a sudden or violent death. They stood thigh-deep in them and never noticed a thing. They puzzled over the multiple footprints they found by the shed, prints from feet that were jointed to no ordinary leg. They cut Mart down, and the length of apricot polyester from which they found him suspended was labelled and placed carefully in a sealed bag.
“He must have taken a long time to die,” Alison said, later that night. “He had nothing, you see, Mart, nothing at all. He wouldn’t have a rope. He wouldn’t have a high place to hang himself from.”
They sat with the lamps unlit, so as not to attract the attention of the neighbours; they moved cautiously, sliding around the edges of the room.
“You’d have thought he could have jumped on the railway track,” Colette said. “Or thrown himself off the roof of Toys ‘R’ Us; that’s what they mostly do round Woking, I’ve seen it in the local paper. But oh no, he would have to go and do it here, where he would cause maximum trouble and inconvenience. We were the only people who were ever kind to him, and look how he repays us. You bought him those shoes, didn’t you?”
“And a new watch,” Al said. “I tried to do a good action. Look how it ended up.”
“It’s the thought that counts,” Colette said. But her tone was sarcastic, and—as far as Alison could discern her expression in the gloom—she looked both angry and bitter.
In spirit, Mart had looked quite chipper, Al thought, when she saw him perched on the fence. When she sneaked into the kitchen, in search of supper, she wondered if she should leave him out a plate of sandwiches. But I suppose I’d sleepwalk in the night, she thought, and eat them myself. She believed she caught a glimpse of him, behind the door of the utility room; livid bruising was still fresh on his neck.
Later, as she was coming out of the bathroom, Morris stopped her. “I suppose you think we was out of order?” he said.
“You’re an evil bastard, Morris,” she said. “You were evil when you were earthside, and now you’re worse.”
“Oh, come on!” Morris said. “Don’t take on! You’re worse than your bloody mother. We wanted a laugh, that’s all. Not as if the cove was doing much good this side, was he? Anyway, I’ve had a word with Mr. Aitkenside, and we’re going to take him on to clean our boots. Which is currently young Dean’s job, but with Mr. Aitkenside getting fitted with the sets of false feet, Dean could do with some assistance. He has to start at the bottom, you know, that’s the rule. I reckon he’ll shape up. He’s no more gormless than Dean was when we picked him out of the golf net. If he shapes up, in about fifty years he might get to go on Spirit Guide.”
“Don’t expect me to thank you,” said Al.
“That’s just like you, innit?” Morris said. His features convulsed with spite, he bounced up and down on the landing. “No bloody gratitude. You talk about when I was earthside, you give me the character of an evil bastard,
but where would you be if it weren’t for me? If it hadn’t been for me, the boys would have cut you up a bloody sight worse. You’d be disfigured. Aitkenside said, she has to learn respect for what a knife can do, and they all said, all the boys, quite right, she has to learn, and your mum said, fine, you carve her, but don’t go carving her face, the punters won’t like it. She said, it’s all very well your squabbles, but when you gentlemen have all got bored of her, I’ve still got to sell her on, ain’t I? And I supported her, didn’t I? I backed her up. I said to Aitkenside, quite right, show her what’s what by all means, but don’t make her into a bloody liability.”
“But Morris, why did they do it?” Al cried. “What did I ever do to you? I was a child, for pity’s sake, who would want to take a knife and slice up a child’s legs and leave her scarred?” I must have screamed, she thought, I must have screamed but I don’t remember. I must have screamed but no one heard me.
“There was nobody to hear,” Morris said. “That’s why you have to have an outbuilding, innit? You have to have an outbuilding or a shed, or a caravan if you can’t manage that, or at least a trailer. You never know when you need to show some little shaver what’s what or hang some bugger what’s getting on your nerves.”
“You haven’t answered me,” Al said. She stood in his path, fingering the lucky opals as if they were weapons. He tried to swerve past her, but her aura, welling out and smothering him, forced him back. Gibbering with frustration, he condensed himself, and slid under the carpet, and she stamped on him hard saying, “Morris, if you want to keep your job, I want some answers. If you don’t give me answers I’m going to give up this game. I’ll go back and work in a cake shop. I’ll work in the chemist like I used to. I’ll scrub floors if I have to. I’m going to give it up, and then where will you be?”
“Ho,” said Morris, “you don’t frighten me, gel, if you go and work in the chemist I shall make myself into a pill. If you get a job in a cake shop I shall roll myself into a Swiss roll and spill out jam at inopportune moments. If you try scrubbing floors, I will rise up splosh! out of your bucket in a burst of black water, causing you to get the sack. Then you will be wheedling me around like you used to, oh, Uncle Morris, I’ve no spending money, oh Uncle Morris I’ve no money for me school dinners, I’ve no money for me school trip. And all the time going behind my back with the same sob story to MacArthur, and whining for sweeties to Keith. Too generous by half, that’s Morris Warren. The day I was taken over, there wasn’t five bob in my pocket. I was taken over and I don’t know how, taken over wiv money owing to me.” Morris began to whimper. “MacArthur owes me. Bill Wagstaffe owes me. I’ve got in my black book who owes me. Bloody spirits is devious, innit? Always some reason they can’t pay. ‘My pocket vapourized. Holy Bloody Ghost got my wallet.’ So there I was turning up airside, they says, turn out your pockets, and when they saw that was all the money I had to my name they bloody laughed. They said, you don’t work you don’t drink, me old mate. That’s the rule here. Then I got put on Spirit Guide. First I got Irene Etchells, and then you, God help me. I say God help me but the bugger never does. That’s why I bother wiv Nick, wiv Nick you get a career opportunity. You get sent on courses.”