Beyond Black

six

As they drove north, Colette said to Alison, “When you were a little girl, did you ever think you were a princess?”

“Me? God, no.”

“What did you think then?

“I thought I was a freak.”

And now? The question hung in the air. It was the day of Diana’s funeral, and the road was almost empty. Al had slept badly. Beyond the bedroom wall of the flat in Wexham, Colette had heard her muttering, and heard the deep groan of her mattress as she turned over and over in bed. She had been downstairs at seven-thirty, standing in the kitchen, bundled into her dressing gown, her hair straggling out of its rollers. “We may as well get on the road,” she said. “Get ahead of the coffin.”

By ten-thirty, crowds were assembling on the bridges over the M1, waiting for the dead woman to pass by on her way to her ancestral burial ground just off Junction 15A. The police were lining the route as if waiting for disaster, drawn up in phalanxes of motorcycles and cordons of watching vans. It was a bright, cool morning—perfect September weather.

“S’funny,” Colette said. “It’s only a fortnight ago, those pictures of her in the boat with Dodi, in her bikini. And we were all saying, what a slapper.”

Al opened the glove box and ferreted out a chocolate biscuit.

“That’s the emergency Kit-Kat,” Colette protested.

“This is an emergency. I couldn’t eat my breakfast.” She ate the chocolate morosely, finger by finger. “If Gavin had been the Prince of Wales,” she said, “do you think you’d have tried harder with your marriage?”

“Definitely.”

Colette’s eyes were on the road; in the passenger seat Alison twisted over her shoulder to look at Morris in the back, kicking his short legs and singing a medley of patriotic songs. As they passed beneath a bridge policemen’s faces peered down at them, pink sweating ovals above the sick glow of high-visability jackets. Stubble-headed boys—the type who, in normal times, heave a concrete block through your windscreen—now jabbed the mild air with bunches of carnations. A ragged bedsheet, grey-white, drifted down into their view. It was scrawled in crimson capitals, as if in virgin’s blood: DIANA, QUEEN OF OUR HEARTS.

“You’d think they’d show more respect,” Alison said. “Not flap about with their old bed linen.”

“Dirty linen,” Colette said. “She washed her dirty linen … . it comes back on you in the end.”

They sped a mile or two in silence.

“I mean it’s not as if it’s exactly a surprise. You didn’t expect it to last, did you? Not as if she was exactly stable. If she’d been in real life, she’d have been just the sort of slag who’d end up with her arms and legs in left-luggage lockers and her head in a bin bag in Walthamstow.”

“Shh!” Al said. “She might be listening. She’s not gone yet, you know, not as far as I—as far as we’re concerned.”

“Do you think you might get a message from Dodi? No, I forgot, you don’t do ethnics, do you?”

At each bridge they glanced up. The crowds thickened. As they crossed the border into Northamptonshire, a leather-jacketed man was waving the Stars and Stripes. The hitchhikers lurking by the slip roads had tied black bands around their sleeves.

Alison hummed along with Morris, who was doing “Land of Our Fathers.” She struggled to find loyalty within herself: loyalty, compassion, something other than mere fatigue at the thought of the trouble Diana was going to cause her. “Of course,” she said, “she was against land mines.”

“That doesn’t seem much to be against,” Colette said. “Not exactly sticking your neck out, is it? Not like being against … dolphins.”

Silence within the car: except that Morris, in the back, had progressed to “Roll Out the Barrel.” A helicopter whirled overhead, monitoring the near-empty road.

“We’re much too early,” Colette said. “Our room won’t be ready. Do you want to stop for a wee? Or a proper breakfast? Could you manage a fry-up?”

Al thought, when I was awake in the night, I was so cold. Being cold makes you feel sick; or does feeling sick make you cold? Nothing to be hoped for from days like these, except nausea, cramps, shortness of breath, acceleration of the pulse, gooseflesh, and a leaden tinge to the skin.

Colette said, “Five miles, shall I pull in? Make your mind up, yes or no?”

Morris, at once, stopped singing and began agitating for his comfort stop. He showed an unhealthy interest in gents’ toilets: when he swarmed back into the car after a break at a service area, you could catch the whiff of piss and floral disinfectant from the crepe soles of his shoes. He liked to creep around the parked cars, pulling off hubcaps and bowling them like hoops among the feet of their returning owners. He would double up with laughter as the punters stood jaw dropped at the sight of the metal discs, spinning of their own volition, clattering to rest amid the overspill of polystyrene from the litter bins. Sometimes he would go into the shop and pull the newspapers from their racks, tossing top-shelf magazines into the wire baskets of respectable dads queuing with their families for giant packs of crisps. He would plunge his paw into the pick ’n’ mix sweets and stuff his bulging jaw. He would snatch from the shelves of travellers’ supplies a tartan box of choc-chip shortbread or traditional motorway fudge; then munching, spitting, denouncing it as ladies’ pap, he would head for the lorry park, for the caff where men’s men swigged from mugs of strong tea.

He hoped, always, to see somebody he knew, Aitkenside or Bob Fox or even bloody MacArthur, “though if I see MacArthur,” he’d say, “the ruddy swindler’ll wish he’d never been born, I’ll creep up on his blind side and twist his head off.” He would sneak around the parked-up rigs, bouncing himself on the bumper bars to snap off windscreen wipers; through the gaps in frilled curtains, he would peep in at the private interiors where tattooed drivers snored against flowered cushions, where hands rubbed lonely crotches: ooh, sissy-boy, Morris would jeer, and sometimes a man stirred from his doze and jolted awake, thinking for a moment that he had seen a yellow face staring in at him, lips drawn back in a grimace to show yellow fangs, like those of an ape behind toughened glass. I was dreaming, the man would tell himself: I was dreaming, what brought that on?

Truth was, he longed for a friend; it was no life, holed up with a bunch of women, always squawking and making leaflets. “Oh, what shall we have,” he mimicked, “shall we have a flower, a rose is nice, a dove of peace is nice, shall we have a dove of peace with a flower in its mouf?” Then would come Colette’s higher, flatter voice. “Beak, Alison, a beak’s what birds have.” Then Alison, “It doesn’t sound so nice, bill’s nicer, doesn’t a dove have a bill?” and Colette’s grudging, “You could be right.”

Bill’s nice, is it, he would jeer, from his perch on the back of the sofa: “bill’s nice, you should see the bloody bills I’ve mounted up, I could tell you about bills, Aitkenside owes me a pony, bloody Bill Wagstaffe, he owes me. I’ll give him Swan of bloody Avon, I put him on a florin at Doncaster only to oblige, goo-on, he says, goo-on, I’ll give you ’alf Morris he says if she romps home, romp, did she bloody romp, she ran like the clappers out of hell, dropped dead two hours after in her trailer, but san-fairy-ann, what’s that to me, and where’s my fiver? Then he’s explainin, ooh Morris, the trouble is I’m dead, the trouble is there’s a steward’s enquiry, the trouble is my pocket got frayed, the trouble is it must of fallen out me pocket of me pantaloons and bloody Kyd snapped it up, I say, then you get after Kyd and break his legs or I will, he says the trouble is he’s dead he ain’t got no legs, I says William old son don’t come that wiv me, break him where ’is legs would be.”

When he thought of the debts he had incurred, of the injuries done and what was rightfully owed him, he would run after Alison, agitated: after his hostess, his missus. Al would be in the kitchen making a toasted sandwich. He was eager to press on her the weight of his injustices, but she would say to him, get away, Morris, get your fingers out of that lo-fat cheddar. He wanted a man’s life, men’s company, and he would creep around the lorry park waving, gesturing, looking for his mates, making the secret signal that men make to other men, to say they want a chin-wag and a smoke, to say they’re lonely, to say they want company but they’re not like that. Bloody Wagstaffe were like that, if you ask me, he would tell Alison, but she would say, who? Him in pantaloons, he’d say. Come on, I wasn’t born yesterday, anybody showing his legs like that ’as got to be of the fairy persuasion. And again she’d say, who? dabbing up a shaving of cheese with her finger, and he’d say, Wagstaffe, he’s bloody famous, you must have heard of him, he’s coining it, he’s got his name in bloody lights and what do I get? Not even me stake money back. Not even me florin.

So in the caff at the lorry park he would roll between the tables, saying, “’scuse me mate, ’scuse me mate”—because he wanted to be polite—“have you seen Aitkenside around here? Cos Aitkenside he used to drive a forty-two-tonner, and he ’ad this belly dancer tattooed on his back, he got it when he were in Egypt, he were in the forces, he were stationed overseas, Aitken-side. And he’s a mermaid on his thigh, not that I seen his thigh, I’m not of that persuasion, don’t get me wrong.” But much as he tried to engage them, much as he thrust his face into theirs, much as he interposed himself between them and their All Day breakfasts, so much did they ignore him, freeze him, give him the elbow and the old heave-ho. So he would wander out, disconsolate, into the open air, sucking up from between his fingers a sausage he had snatched—call this a sausage, it’s not what I call a sausage, bleeding yankee-doodle pap, how can you have a sausage wiv no skin?—and around the tankers and the trucks he would slide on his crepe-soled feet, calling, “Aitkenside, MacArthur, are you there, lads?”

For in truth he intended to cripple them but after he had crippled them he meant to make his peace. For they were dead too and in the halls of the dead they were in different halls. And in the lorry parks of the dead they had not coincided yet. He would rub his chin, contemplating his sins, then slide among the trucks, scrambling up to unhook tarpaulins, dragging up the crinkled covers to see what was stowed beneath. Once eyes looked back at him, and those eyes were alive. Once eyes looked back at him and those eyes were dead, swivelled up in their sockets and hard like yellow marbles. When he saw eyes he hooked back the tarp double-quick. Unless the cable had zinged out of his hand. That could happen.

And them silly tarts who was now in the LADIES titivating, he would think of them with contempt: ooh Colette, do you want a gherkin with your toastie? I’ll give you gherkin, gel, he would think. But then if he had dallied too long among the men, if he thought they might drive off without him, his heart would hammer at his dried ribs: wait for me! And he would sprint back to the public area, as far as sprint was in him, his legs being, as they were, multiply fractured and badly set: he would sprint back and swish in—bloody central locking!—through the air vent, roll into the back seat, and collapse there, puffing, panting, wrenching off his shoes, and Colette—the stringy one—would complain, what’s that smell? It came to his own nostrils, faintly: petrol and onions and hot dead feet.

If his owners were still in the LADIES, he would not sit alone and wait for them. He would insinuate himself into other cars, loosening the straps of baby seats, wrenching the heads off the furry animals that dangled from the back windows: spinning the furry dice. But then, when he had done all the mischief he could think of, he would sit on the ground, alone, and let people run over him. He would chew his lip, and then he would sing softly to himself:

The missus don’t like it when I sing that, he would mutter to himself. She don’t like reminding, I suppose. Thinking of the old Aldershot days, he’d sniffle a little. Course she don’t like reminding, course she don’t. He looked up. The women were approaching, his missus rolling towards him, her pal skipping and yattering and twirling her car keys. Just in time, he slid into the back seat.

Alison’s spine tensed as he settled himself, and Colette’s nostrils twitched. Morris laughed to himself: she thinks she don’t see me, but in time she’ll see me, she thinks she don’t hear me but she’ll come to hear, she don’t know if she smells me, she hopes she don’t, but she don’t want to think it’s herself. Morris lifted himself in his seat and discharged a cabbagey blast. Colette swung them through the EXIT sign. A flag flew at half mast over the Travelodge.

At Junction 23 a lorry carrying bales of straw cut in ahead of them. The wisps blew back towards them, back down the empty grey road, back towards the south. The morning clouded up, the sky assumed a glacial shimmer. The sun skulked behind a cloud, smirking. As they turned off the M1 onto the A52, the bells peeled out to mark the end of the National Silence. Curtains were drawn in the Nottingham suburbs.

“That’s nice,” Alison said. “It’s respectful. It’s old-fashioned.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Colette said. “It’s to keep the sun out, so they can see the TV.”

They pulled into the hotel car park, and Colette jumped out. A spirit woman slid into her place in the driver’s seat. She was little, old, and poor, and she seemed overwhelmed to find herself behind the wheel of a car, dabbing her hands at the indicators, saying, ee, this is a novelty, do you pedal it, miss? Excuse me, excuse me, she said, do you know Maureen Harrison? Only I’m looking for Maureen Harrison.

No, Al said kindly, but I’ll tell you if I bump into her.

Because Maureen Harrison were friends with me, the little woman said, aye, she were an’ all. A complaining note entered her voice, faint and nostalgic, like the moon through mist. Maureen Harrison were me friend, you know, and I’ve been searching this thirty year. Excuse me, excuse me, miss, have you seen Maureen Harrison?

Al climbed out. “That’s Mandy’s car, she’s early too.” She looked around. “There’s Merlin. And there’s Merlyn with a y. Dear God, I see his old van has got another bash.” She nodded towards a shiny new minivan. “That’s those white witches from Egham.”

Colette lugged the bags out of the boot. Alison frowned.

“I’ve been meaning to say something. I think we should go shopping for you, if you’ve no objection. I don’t feel a nylon holdall gives quite the right message.”

“It’s designer!” Colette bellowed. “Nylon holdall? I’ve been all around Europe with this. I’ve been in Club Class.”

“Well, it doesn’t look designer. It looks like market stall.”

They checked in, squabbling. Their room was a box on the second floor, overlooking the green paladins that received the back-door rubbish. Morris strolled around making himself at home, sticking his fingers with impunity into the electrical sockets.

There was a tapping from beyond the wall, and Alison said, “That’ll be Raven, practicing his Celtic Sex Magic.”

“What happened to Mrs. Etchells, did she get a lift in the end?”

“Silvana went for her. But she’s asked to be dropped off at some bed and breakfast in Beeston.”

“Feeling the pinch, is she? Good. Cheating old bat.”

“Oh, I think she does all right, she does a lot of postal readings. She’s got regulars going back years. No, it’s just she finds a hotel impersonal, she says, she prefers a family home. You know what she’s like. She reads the tea cups and leaves her flyer. She tries to sign up the landlady. Sometimes they let her stop for nothing.”

Colette pulled a sheaf of Al’s new leaflets out of their box. They had chosen lavender, and a form of wording that declared her to be one of the most acclaimed psychics working in Britain today. Al had objected, modestly, but Colette said, what do you want me to put? Alison Hart, Slightly Famous Along The A4?

The schedule was this: a Fayre this evening, Saturday, to be followed next day by a Grand Fayre, where a group of them would have their forty-minute slots on the platform; meanwhile, whoever was not onstage could carry on with private readings in the side rooms.

The venue was an old primary school, the marks of violence still chipped into its red brick. As Al stepped inside she shuddered. She said, “As you know, my schooldays weren’t what you call happy.”

She put a smile on her face, and lollopped among the trestles, beaming from side to side as her colleagues set out their stalls. “Hi Angel. Hi Cara, how are you? This is Colette, my new assistant and working partner.”

Cara, setting down her Norse Wisdom Sticks, lifted her sunny little face. “Hi, Alison. I see you’ve not lost any weight.”

Mrs. Etchells staggered in, a box of baubles in her arms. “Oh, what a journey! What a day after the night before!”

“You got a toy boy, Mrs. Etchells?” Cara asked, giving Al a wink.

“If you must know, I was up all night with the Princess. Silvana, love, help me dress my table, would you?”

Silvana, raising her pencilled brows and hissing between her teeth, dumped down carrier bags and unfurled Mrs. Etchell’s fringed crimson cloth into air laden already with the smell from oil burners. “Personally,” she said, “I never heard a squeak from Di. Mrs. Etchells reckons she was with her, talking about the joys of motherhood.”

“Imagine that,” Mandy said.

“So this is your assistant, Alison?” Silvana ran her eyes over Colette; then ran them over Alison, with insulting slowness, as if they had to feel their way over a large surface area.

They hate it, Al thought, they hate it; because I’ve got Colette, they think I’m coining it. “I thought—you know,” she said. “A bit of help with the—with the secretarial, the bookkeeping, the driving, you know. Lonely on the road.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” Silvana said. “Mind you, if you wanted company on the motorway you could have run over to Aldershot and collected your granny, instead of leaving it to me. This your new flyer?” She picked it up and held it close to her eyes; psychics don’t wear glasses. “Mm,” she said. “Did you do this, Colette? Very nice.”

“I shall be setting up a Web site for Alison,” Colette said.

Silvana tossed the leaflet down on Mrs. Etchells’s table and passed her hands around Colette to feel her aura. “Oh dear,” she said, and moved away.

Seven o’clock. The scheduled finish was at eight, but tonight they would be lucky to get them out by half-past; the caretaker was already banging about, kicking his vacuum cleaner up and down the corridor. But what could you do with the punters: lever them, sodden and sobbing, into the streets? There was hardly one customer who had not mentioned Di; many broke down and cried, putting their elbows on the trestles, edging up the lucky pisky figurines and the brass finger cymbals so they could sob their hearts out in comfort. I identified with her, she was like a friend to me. Yes, yes, yes, Al would say, like her you are drawn to suffering, oh yes, I am I am, that’s me. You like to have a good time, oh yes I have always loved dancing. I think of those two boys, I would have had two boys, except the last one was a girl. Diana was Cancer like me, I was born under Cancer, it means you are like a crab, inside your shell you are squidgy, I think that’s where her nickname came from, don’t you? I never thought of that, Al said, but you could be right. I think they made her a scrapegoat. I dreamed of her last night, appearing to me in the form of a bird.

There was something gluttonous in their grief, something gloating. Al let them sob, agreeing with them and feeding them their lines, sometimes making little there-there noises; her eyes travelled from side to side, to see who was conspiring against her; Colette stalked between the tables, listening in. I must tell her not to do that, Al thought, or at least not to do it so conspicuously. As she passed, ill will trailed after her; let them not cold-shoulder me, Al prayed.

For it was usual among the psychics to pass clients to each other, to work in little rings and clusters, trading off their specialties, their weaknesses and strengths: well, darling, I’m not a medium personally, but you see Eve there, in the corner, just give her a little wave, tell her I’ve recommended you. They pass notes to one another, table to table—titbits gleaned, snippets of personal information with which to impress the clients. And if for some reason you’re not on the inside track, you can get disrecommended, you can get forced out. It’s a cold world when your colleagues turn their backs.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she sighed, patting the mottled palms she had just read. “It will all work out for the best. And I’m sure young Harry will look more like his daddy as time goes by.” The woman wrote her a cheque for three services—palms, crystal, and general clairvoyance—and as she detached it a final fat tear rolled out of her eye and splashed on her bank sort code.

As the woman rose, a new prospect hesitated in passing. “Do you do Vedic palmistry or ordinary?”

“Just ordinary, I’m afraid,” Alison said. The woman sneered and started to move on. Alison began, “You could try Silvana over there—” but she checked herself. Silvana, after all, was a fraud; her mother used to manage a newsagent in Farnborough, a fact at odds with her claim to be a Romany whose family origins were lost in the mists of occult tradition. Sometimes the punters would ask “What’s the difference between a clairaudient and an aura reader, a whatsit and a thing?” and Al would say, “No great difference, my dear, it’s not the instrument you choose that matters, it’s not the method, it’s not the technique, it’s your attunement to a higher reality.” But what she really wanted to do was lean across the table and say, you know what’s the difference, the difference between them and me? Most of them can’t do it, and I can. And the difference shows, she tells herself, not just in results, but in attitude, in deportment, in some essential seriousness. Her tarot cards, unused so far today, sat at her right hand, burning through their wrap of scarlet satin: priestess, lover, and fool. She had never touched them with a hand that was soiled, or opened them to the air without opening her heart; whereas Silvana will light a fag between customers, and Merlin and Merlyn will send out for cheeseburgers if there’s a lull. It isn’t right to smoke and eat in front of clients, to blow smoke at them over your crystals.

It’s this she must teach Colette, that a casual approach won’t do: you don’t shove your stuff in a nylon holdall and wrap your rose quartz in your knickers. You don’t carry your kit around in a cardboard box that used to contain a dozen bottles of lavatory cleaner, you don’t clear up at the end of a fayre by bundling your bits and pieces into a supermarket carrier bag. And you control your face, your expression, every moment you’re awake. She had sometimes noticed an unguarded expression on a colleague’s face, as the departing client turned away: a compound of deep weariness and boredom, as the lines of professional alertness faded and the face fell into its customary avaricious folds. She had made up her mind, in the early days, that the client would not like to see this expression, and so she had invented a smile, complicit and wistful, which she kept cemented to her face between readings; it was there now.

Meanwhile Colette moved scornfully on her trajectory, helpfully clearing an ashtray or righting an upturned hobbit: anything to allow herself to lean in close and listen. She evesdropped on Cara, Cara with her cropped head, her pointy ears, her butterfly tattoo: Your aura’s like your bar code, think of it that way. So your husband’s first wife, could that be the blonde I’m seeing? I sense that you are a person of great hidden drive and force of will.

“Would you like a cuppa from the machine, Mrs. Etchells?” Colette called, but Al’s grandmama waved her away.

“Have you known the joys of motherhood, dear? Only I’m seeing a little boy in your palm.”

“A girl, actually,” said her client.

“It may be a girl I’m seeing. Now, dear, and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, and I don’t want to alarm you, but I want you to look out for a little accident that could happen to her, nothing serious, I’m not seeing a hospital bed, it’s more as if—as if she might just fall over and cut her knee.”

“She’s twenty-three,” said the woman coldly.

“Oh, I see.” Mrs. Etchells tittered. “You must have been very young, dear, when you knew the joys of motherhood. And just the one, is it? No little brothers or sisters? You didn’t want, or you couldn’t have? Am I seeing a little op, at all?”

“Well, if you call it little.”

“Oh, I always call an op little. I never say a big op. It doesn’t do to upset people.”

You daft old beggar, Colette says to herself. What is this joy, what is this word and what does it mean? The psychics say, you’re not going to find joy in the external world, you’ve got to go looking for it inside, dear. Even Alison goes along with the theory, when she’s in public mode; privately, back in Wexham, she often looks as if it’s a hopeless task. Rummaging in your heart for joy? May as well go through the bins for it. Where’s God? she had said to Al. Where’s God in all this? And Al had said, Morris says he’s never seen God, he doesn’t get out much. But he says he’s seen the devil; he says he’s on first-name terms with him; he claims he beat him at darts once.

And you believe that? Colette asked her, and Al said, no, Morris, he drinks too much, his hand shakes, he can barely hit the board.

For Saturday night the hotel had put on a late buffet for the psychic party: crinkled chicken legs stained the colour of old walnut, a wheel-sized quiche with a thick cardboard base. There was a cold pasta salad and a bowl of complicated-looking greenery that Colette turned, without enthusiasm, with the utensils provided. Raven sat with his desert boots on a coffee table, rolling one of his special cigarettes. “The thing is, have you got The Grimoire of Anciara St. Remy? Only it’s got forty spells, with detailed diagrams and conjuring charts.”

“You selling it?” Silvana asked.

“No, but—”

“But you’re on commission for it, am I right?”

Oh, they’re such cynics, Colette thought. She had imagined that when psychics got together they’d talk about—well, things of the psyche; that they would share at least a little of their bemusement and daily fear, the fear that—if she could judge by Alison—was the price of success. But now, a little way into their association, she understood that all they talked about was money. They tried to sell things to each other, they compared their rates, they tried to hear of new stratagems—“Believe me, it’s the new aromatherapy,” Gemma was saying—and to learn about new tricks and fiddles that they could try out. They came to swap jargon, pick up the latest terms: and why do they look so ridiculous? Why all these crystal pendant earrings swinging from withered lobes; why the shrunken busts exposed in daylight, the fringes, the beading, the head scarves, the wraps, the patchwork, and the shawls? In their room—just time, before the buffet, to freshen up—she’d said to Alison, “You criticize my holdall, but have you seen your friends, have you seen the state of them?”

Alison’s silk, the length of apricot polyester, lay folded on the bed, ready to be draped next day; in private life she flinches at its touch—oh yes, she has admitted she does—but somehow it’s necessary, she will claim, as part of her public persona. With the silk around her studio portrait, she loses the sensation that she is shrinking inside her own skin. It blunts her sensitivity, in a way that is welcome to her; it is an extra synthetic skin she has grown, to compensate for the skins the work strips away.

But now Colette moved around the room, grumbling. “Why does everything have to be so tacky? That fairground stuff. They can’t think it impresses anybody. I mean, when you see Silvana, you don’t say, ooh look, here comes a gypsy princess, you say, here comes a withered old slapper with a streak of fake tan down the side of her neck.”

“It’s—I don’t know,” Al said. “It’s to make it, like a game.”

Colette stared. “But it’s their job. A job’s not a game.”

“I agree, I agree completely, there’s just no need these days to dress up as if you were in a circus. But then again, I don’t think mediums should wear sneakers either.”

“Who’s wearing sneakers?”

“Cara. Under her robes.” Al looked perplexed and stood up to take off a layer or two. “I never know what to wear myself, these days.” Suit your outfit to the audience, to the town, had always been her watchword. A touch of Jaeger—their clothes don’t fit her, but she can have an accessory—feels eternally right in Guildford, whereas down the road in Woking they’d mistrust you if you weren’t in some way mismatched and uncoordinated. Each town on her loop had its requirements, and when you head up the country, you mustn’t expect sophistication; the farther north you go, the more the psychics’ outfits tend to suggest hot Mediterranean blood, or the mysterious East, and today maybe it’s she who’s got it wrong, because at the fayre she had the feeling of being devalued, marked down in some way … that woman who wanted Vedic palmistry … .

Colette had told her she wouldn’t go wrong with a little cashmere cardigan, preferably black. But of course there was no little cardigan that would meet Al’s need, only something like a Bedouin tent, something capacious and hot, and as she peeled this garment off, her scent came with it and wafted through the room; the whiff of royal mortification was suppressed now, but she had told Colette, do alert me, I shan’t take offence, if you catch a hint of anything from the sepulchre.

“What can I go down in?” she asked. Colette passed her a silk top, which had been carefully pressed and wrapped in tissue for its journey. Her eye fell on the holdall, with her own stuff still rolled up inside it. Maybe Al’s right, she thought. Maybe I’m too old for a casual safari look. She caught her own glance in the mirror, as she stood behind Alison to unfasten the clasp of her pearls. As Al’s assistant, could she possibly benefit from tax allowances on her appearance? It was an issue she’d not yet thrashed out with the Revenue; I’m working on it, she said to herself.

“You know this book we’re doing?” Al was hauling her bosoms into conformity; they were trying to escape from her bra, and she eased them back with little shoves and pinches. “Is it okay to mention it on the platform? Advertise it?”

“It’s early days,” Colette said.

“How long do you think it will take?”

“How long’s a piece of string?” It depended, Colette said, on how much nonsense continued to appear on their tapes. Alison insisted on listening to them all through, at maximum volume; behind the hissing, behind whatever foreign-language garbage she could hear up front, there were sometimes startled wails and whistles, which she said were old souls; I owe it to them to listen, she said, if they’re trying so hard to come through. Sometimes they found the tape running when neither of them had switched it on. Colette was inclined to blame Morris; speaking of which, where—

“At the pub.”

“Are they open tonight?”

“Morris will find one that is.”

“I suppose. Anyway, the men wouldn’t stand for it, would they? Shutting the pubs because of Di.”

“All he has to do is follow Merlin and Merlyn. They could find a drink in …” Al flapped her sleeves. She tried to think of the name of a Muslim country, but a name didn’t readily spring to her lips. “Do you know Merlin’s done a book called Master of Thoth? And Merlyn with a y, he’s done Casebook of a Psychic Detective?”

“That’s a point. Have you thought about working for the police?”

Alison didn’t answer; she stared through the mirror, her finger tracing the ridge her bra made under the thin silk. In time, she shook her head.

“Only it would give you some sort of—what do you call it?—accreditation.”

“Why would I need that?”

“As publicity.”

“Yes. I suppose so. But no.”

“You mean, no you won’t do it?” Silence. “You don’t ever want to make yourself useful to society?”

“Come on, let’s go down before there’s no food left.”

At nine-thirty Silvana, complaining and darting venomous looks at Al, was parted from her glass of red and persuaded to take Mrs. Etchells back to her lodgings. Once she had been coaxed to it, she stood jangling her car keys. “Come on,” she said. “I want to get back by ten for the funeral highlights.”

“They’ll repeat them,” Gemma said, and Colette muttered, shouldn’t wonder if we have reruns all next Christmas. Silvana said “No, it won’t be the same, I want to watch them live.”

Raven sniggered. Mrs. Etchells levered herself to the vertical and brushed coleslaw from her skirt. “Thank you for your caring spirit,” she said, “or I wouldn’t have slept in a bed tonight, they’d have locked the front door. Condemned to walk the streets of Beeston. Friendless.”

“I don’t know why you don’t just stop here like everybody else,” Cara said. “It can’t cost much more than you’re paying.”

Colette smiled; she had negotiated a group rate for Al, just as if she were a company.

“Thank you, but I couldn’t,” Mrs. Etchells said. “I value the personal touch.”

“What, like locking you out?” Colette said. “And whatever you think,” she said to Silvana, “Aldershot is not close to Slough. Whereas you, you’re just down the road.”

“When I joined this profession,” Silvana said, “it would have been unthinkable to refuse aid to someone who’d helped you develop. Let alone your own grandmother.”

She swept out; as Mrs. Etchells shambled after her, a chicken bone fell from some fold in her garments and lay on the carpet. Colette turned to Alison, whispering, “What does she mean, help you develop?”

Cara heard. “I see Colette’s not one of us,” she said.

Mandy Coughlan said, “Training, it’s just what we call training. You sit, you see. In a circle.”

“Anyone could do that. You don’t need to be trained for that.”

“No, a—Alison, tell her. A development circle. Then you find out if you’ve got the knack. You see if anybody comes through. The others help you. It’s a tricky time.”

“Of course, it’s only for the mediums,” Gemma said. “For example, if you’re just psychometry, palms, crystal healing, general clairvoyance, aura cleansing, feng shui, tarot, I Ching, then you don’t need to sit. Not in a circle.”

“So how do you know if you can do it?”

Gemma said, “Well, darling, you have a feeling for it,” but Mandy flashed her pale blue eyes and said, “General client satisfaction.”

“You mean they don’t come wanting their money back?”

“I’ve never had an instance,” Mandy said. “Not even you, Colette. Though you don’t seem backward at coming forward. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

Al said, “Look, Colette’s new to this, she’s only asking, she doesn’t mean to upset anybody. I think the thing is, Colette, possibly what you don’t quite see is that we’re all—we’re all worn to a frazzle, we’ve all lost sleep over this Di business, it’s not just me—we’re on the end of our nerves.”

“Make-or-break time,” Raven said. “I mean if any of us could give her the opening, just, you know, be there for her, just let her express anything that’s uppermost in her mind, about those final moments … .” His voice died away, and he stared at the wall.

“I think they murdered her,” Colette said. “The royals. If she’d lived, she’d have only brought them into further disrepute.”

“But it was her time,” Gemma said, “it was her time, and she was called away.”

“She was a bit thick, wasn’t she?” Cara said. “She didn’t get any exams at school.”

“Oh, be fair now,” Alison said. “I read she got a cup for being kind to her guinea pig.”

“That’s not an exam, though, is it? Did you—”

“What,” Al said, “me have a guinea pig? Christ, no, my mum would have barbecued it. We didn’t have pets. We had dogs. But not pets.”

“No,” Cara said, her brow crinkling, “I meant, did you get any exams, Al?”

“I tried. They entered me. I turned up. I had a pencil and everything. But there’d always be some sort of disturbance in the hall.”

Gemma said, “I was barred from biology for labelling a drawing in obscene terms. But I didn’t do it myself. I don’t think I even knew half those words.”

There was a murmur of fellow feeling. Alison said, “Colette didn’t have those problems, she’s got exams, I need somebody brighter than me in my life.” Her voice rattled on: Colette, my working partner … my partner, not assistant: she broke off, and laughed uncertainly.

Raven said, “Do you know that for every person on this side, there’s thirty-three on the other?”

“Really?” Gemma said. “Thirty-three airside, for every one earthside?”

Colette thought, in that case, I’m backing the dead.

Merlin and Merlyn came back from the pub: boring on with men’s talk. I use Transit Forecaster, I find it invaluable oh yes, I can run it on my old Amstrad, what’s the point of pouring money into the pockets of Bill Gates?

Colette leaned over to put him right on the matter, but Merlyn caught her by the arm and said, “Have you read The Truth About Exodus? Basically it’s how they found this bit of the Bible written on a pyramid, inscribed on the side. And how, contrary to popular belief, the Egyptians actually, they actually paid the Israelis to leave. And they used the money for making the ark of the covenant. Jesus was an Egyptian, they’ve found scrolls, he was actually of pharaoh descent. And it’s why they walk round and round at Mecca. Like they used to walk around the Great Pyramid.”

“Oh, did they? I see,” Colette said. “Well, you’ve put me right, there, Merlyn, I always did wonder.”

“Mountain K2, Search for the Gods, that’s another good one. The Lost Book of Enki. That’s one you’ve got to get. He’s this god from the planet Nibiru. You see, they were from space, and they needed gold from the earth to enrich the dying atmosphere of their planet, so they saw that it was on earth, gold was, so they needed somebody to mine it for them, so they therefore created man … .”

Al’s eyes were distant; she was back at school, back in the exam hall. Hazel Leigh opposite, working her red ponytail round and round in her fingers till it was like a twist of barley sugar—and peppermints, you were allowed to suck peppermints—you weren’t allowed much, not a fag: when Bryan lit up Miss Adshead was down the hall like a laser beam.

All during the maths paper there was a man chattering in her ear. It wasn’t Morris, she knew it was not by his accent, and his whole general tone and bearing, by what he was talking about, and by how he was weeping: for Morris could not weep. The man, the spirit, he was talking just below the threshold, retching and sobbing. The questions were algebra; she filled in a few disordered letters, a, b, x, z. When she reached question five the man began to break through. He said, look for my cousin John Joseph, tell our Jo that my hands are bound with wire. In Spirit, even now, he had a terrible pain where the bones of his feet used to be, and that’s what he relied on her to pass on to his cousin, the knowledge of this pain: tell our Jo, tell him it was that bastard that drives the Escort with the rusty wing, that cunt that always has a cold, him … and when in the end the crushing of the rifle butts and the men’s boots seemed to drive her own feet through the scuffed vinyl tiles of the exam room, she had let the letters freely intermingle on the page, so that when Miss Adshead came to flick her paper into the pile there was nothing on it but thin pen scrawls, like the traces and loops of the wire with which the hands of this total stranger had been bound.

“Alison?” She jumped. Mandy had taken her by the wrist; she was shaking her, bringing her back to the present. “You all right, Al?” Over her shoulder she said, “Cara, go get her a stiff drink and a chicken leg. Al? Are you back with us, love? Is she pestering you? The princess?”

“No,” Al said. “It’s paramilitaries.”

“Oh, them,” Gemma said. “They can be shocking.”

“I get Cossacks,” Mandy said. “Apologizing for, you know—what they used to do. Cleaving. Slashing. Scourging peasants to death. Terrible.”

“What’s Cossacks?” Cara said, and Mandy said, “They are a very unpleasant kind of mounted police.”

Raven said, “I never get anything like that. I have led various pacific lives. That’s why I’m so karmically adjusted.”

Al roused herself. She rubbed the wounds on her wrists. Live in the present moment, she told herself. Nottingham. September. Funeral Night. Ten minutes to ten. “Time for bed, Col,” she said.

“We’re not watching the highlights?”

“We can watch them upstairs.” She pushed herself up from the sofa. Her feet seemed unable to support her. An effort of will saw her limp across the room, but she had wobbled as she took the weight on her feet, and her skirt flicked a wineglass from a low table, sent it spinning away from her, the liquid flying across the room and splashing red down the paintwork. It flew with such force it looked as if someone had flung it, a fact that did not escape the women; though it escaped Raven, who was slumped in his chair, and hardly twitched as the glass smashed.

There was a silence. Into it, Cara said, “Whoops-a-daisy.”

Alison turned her head over her shoulder, and looked back, her face blank; did I do that? She stood, her head swivelled, too weary to move back to attend to the accident.

“I’ll get it,” Mandy said, hopping up, crouching neatly over the shards and splinters. Gemma turned her large cowlike eyes on Al and said, “All in, poor love,” and Silvana, walking back in at that moment, tut-tutted at them. “What’s this, Alison? Breaking up the happy home?”

“This is the fact,” Al said. She was rocking to and fro on the bed—she was trying to rub her feet but finding the rest of her body got in the way. “I feel used. All the time I feel used. I’m put up onstage for them to see me. I have to experience for them the things they don’t dare.” With a little moan, she gripped her ankle, and lolled backwards. “I’m like—I’m like some form of muck-raker. No, I don’t mean that. I mean I’m in there, in the pockets of their dirty minds. I’m up to my elbows, I’m like—”

“A sewage worker?” Colette suggested.

“Yes! Because the clients won’t do their own dirty work. They want it contracted out. They write me a check for thirty quid and expect me to clean their drains. You say help the police. I’ll tell you why I don’t help the police. First ’cos I hate the police. Then because—do you know where it gets you?”

“Al, I take it back. You don’t have to help the police.”

“That’s not the point. I have to tell you why not. You have to know.”

“I don’t have to.”

“You do. Or you’ll keep coming back to it again and again. Make yourself useful, Alison. Make yourself socially useful.”

“I won’t. I’ll never mention it.”

“You will. You’re that type, Colette, you can’t help mentioning and mentioning things. I’m not getting at you. I’m not criticizing. But you do mention, you are—Colette, you are, one of the world’s great mentioners.” Al uncurled herself with a whimper, and fell back on the bed. “Can you find my brandy?”

“You’ve had too much already.” Alison moaned. Colette added generously, “It’s not your fault. We should have stopped for an early lunch. Or I could easily have brought you in a sandwich. I did offer.”

“I can’t eat when I’m sitting. The cards won’t work if you smudge them.”

“No, you’ve said that before.”

“Not cheeseburgers. I don’t agree with it.”

“Nor me. It’s disgusting.”

“You get fingerprints on your crystals.”

“It’s hard to see how you could help it.”

“Don’t you ever drink too much, Col?”

“No, I hardly ever do.”

“Don’t you ever, ever? Didn’t you ever, ever make a mistake?”

“Yes. Not that kind, though.”

Then Al’s wrath seemed to deflate. Her body collapsed too, back onto the hotel bed, as if hot air were leaking from a balloon. “I do want that brandy,” she said, quietly and humbly.

She stretched out her legs. Over her own rolling contours she saw a distant view of feet. They lolled outwards as she watched: dead man’s joints. “Christ,” she said: and screwed up her face. The cousin of John Joseph was back, and talking in her ear: I don’t want the hospital to take my legs off; I’d rather be dead out there in the field and buried, than alive with no legs.

She lay whimpering up at the dim ceiling, until Colette sighed and rose. “Okay. I’ll get you a drink. But you’d do better with an aspirin and some peppermint foot lotion.” She tripped into the bathroom and took from the shelf above the washbasin a plastic tumbler in a polythene shroud. Her nails punctured it; like a human membrane, it adhered, it had to be drawn away, and when she rubbed her fingertips together to discard it, and held up the tumbler, she felt against her face a bottled breath, something secondhand and not entirely clean, something breathing up at her from the interior of the glass.

She screwed open the brandy bottle and poured two fingers. Al had rolled herself up in the duvet. Her plump pink feet stuck out of the end. They did look hot, swollen. Mischievously, Colette took hold of a toe and waggled it. “This little piggy went to market—”

Alison bellowed, in someone else’s voice, “In the name of Bloody Christ!”

“Sorr-ee!” Colette sang.

Alison’s arm fought its way out of her wrappings, and her fingers took a grip on the tumbler, buckling its sides. She wriggled so that her shoulders were propped against the headboard, and swallowed half her drink in the first gulp. “Listen, Colette. Shall I tell you about the police? Shall I tell you? Why I won’t have anything to do with them?”

“You’re clearly going to,” Colette said. “Look, wait a minute. Just hold on.”

Al began, “You know Merlyn?”

“Wait,” Colette said. “We should get it on tape.”

“Okay. But hurry up.”

Alison swallowed the rest of her drink. At once her face flushed. Her head was tipped back, her shiny dark hair spilling over the pillows. “So are you fixing it?”

“Yes, just a minute—okay.”

COLETTE: So, it’s sixth September 1997, ten thirty-three P.M., Alison is telling me—

ALISON: You know Merlyn, Merlyn with a y? He says he’s a psychic detective. He says he’s helped police forces all over the southeast. He says they call him in regularly. And you know where Merlyn lives? He lives in a trailer home.

COLETTE: So?

ALISON: So that’s where it gets you, helping the police. He doesn’t even have a proper lavatory.

COLETTE: How tragic.

ALISON: You say that, Miss Sneery, but you wouldn’t like it. He lives outside Aylesbury. And do you know what it’s like, when you help the police?

Al’s eyes closed. She thought of reliving—over and over—the last few seconds of a strangled child. She thought of drowning in a car under the waters of the canal, she thought of waking in a shallow grave. She slept for a moment and woke in her duvet, wrapped in it like a sausage in its roll; she pushed up and out, fighting for space and air, and she remembered why she couldn’t breathe—it was because she was dead, because she was buried. She thought, I can’t think about it anymore, I’m at the end of—the end of my—and she released her breath with a great gasp: she heard click.

Colette was at her side, her voice nervous, oh God, Al, bending over her now. Colette’s breath was against her face, polythene breath, not unpleasant but not either quite natural. “Al, is it your heart?”

She felt Colette’s tiny bony hand sliding under her head, lifting it. As Colette’s wrist and forearm took the weight, she felt a sudden sense of release. She gasped, sighed, as if she were newborn. Her eyes snapped open: “Switch on the tape again.”

Breakfast time. Colette was down early. Listening to Alison while the tape ran—Alison crying like a child, talking in a child’s voice, replying to spirit questions Colette could not hear—she had found her own hand creeping towards the brandy bottle. A shot had stiffened her spine, but the effect didn’t last. She felt cold and pale now, colder and paler than ever, and she nearly threw up when she came into the breakfast room and saw Merlyn and Merlin stirring a ladle around in a vat of baked beans.

“You look as if you’ve been up all night,” Gemma said, picking at the horns of a croissant.

“I’m fine,” Colette snapped. She looked around; she couldn’t very well take a table by herself, and she didn’t want to sit with the boys. She pointed imperiously to the coffeepot on its hotplate, and the waitress hurried across with it. “Black is fine.”

“Are you lactose intolerant?” Gemma asked her. “Soya milk is very good.”

“I prefer black.”

“Where’s Alison?”

“Doing her hair.”

“I’d have thought that would have been your job.”

“I’m her business partner, not her maid.”

Gemma turned the corners of her mouth down. She nudged Cara conspiratorially, but Cara was unfolding the papers to see the funeral pictures. Mandy Coughlan came in. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her lips compressed. “Another one who’s had a bad night,” Gemma said. “Princess?”

“Morris,” Mandy said. She rummaged bad-temperedly at the breakfast buffet and slammed a banana down on the table. “I’ve passed the whole night under psychic attack.”

“Tea or coffee?” the waitress said.

“Got any rat poison?” Mandy said. “I wish I’d had some last night for that little bastard. You know, I pity Alison, I really do, I wouldn’t be in her shoes for any money. But can’t she get him under control? I’d hardly got into bed before he was there trying to pull the duvet off me.”

“He always did fancy you,” Cara said, flapping the newspaper. “Ooh, look at poor little Prince Harry. Look at his liddle face, bless him.”

“Pulling and tugging till nearly three o’clock. I thought he’d gone, I got out of bed to go to the loo, and he just jumped out from behind the curtains and put his filthy paw right up my nightie.”

“Yeah, he does that,” Colette said. “Hides behind the curtains. Alison says she finds it very annoying.”

Alison winced in a moment later, looking green.

“Oh, poor love,” Mandy breathed. “Look at her.”

“I see you didn’t manage to do anything with your hair after all,” Cara said sympathetically.

“At least she doesn’t look like a bloody pixie,” Colette snapped.

“Tea, coffee?” the waitress said.

Al pulled her chair well out from the table and sat down heavily. “I’ll get changed later,” she said, by way of explaining herself. “I was sick in the night.”

“Too much of that red,” Gemma said. “You were sozzled when you went up.”

“Too much of everything,” Al said. Her eyes, dull and downcast, rested on the dish of cornflakes Colette had placed before her. Mechanically, she picked up a spoon.

“That’s nice,” Gemma said. “She gets your cereal for you. Even though she’s not your maid, she says.”

“Could you just shut up?” Colette enquired. “Could you just give her a minute’s peace and let her get something inside her?”

“Mandy—” Alison began.

Mandy waved a hand. “Nugh about it,” she said, her mouth full of muesli. “Id nig. Nobbel self.”

“But I do blame myself,” Al insisted.

Mandy swallowed. She flapped a hand, as if she were drying her nail varnish. “We can talk about it another time. We can stay in separate hotels, if we have to.”

“I hope it won’t come to that.”

“You look done up,” Mandy said. “I feel for you, Al, I really do.”

“We were up talking till late, me and Colette. And other people came through, that I used to know when I was a kid. And you know I said, para-militaries were tormenting me? The thing is, they broke through and smashed up my feet. I had to take two Distalgesic. By dawn I was just dropping off to sleep. Then Morris came in. He yanked out the pillow from under my head and started boasting in my ear.”

“Boasting?” Gemma said.

“What he’d done with Mandy. Sorry, Mandy. It’s not that—I mean, I didn’t believe him or anything.”

“If he were mine,” Gemma said, “I’d get him exorcised.”

Cara shook her head. “You could control, Morris, you know, if you were to approach him with unconditional love.”

Colette said, “Could you manage a tomato juice, Alison?”

Alison shook her head, and put down her spoon. “I suppose we’re in for another day of the princess.”

“Another day, another dollar,” Merlin said.

“Snivel, bloody snivel,” Al said. “Do they ever think what it’s like for us? Down I go, whoosh. Plunged head first into their shit. Like a lavatory brush.”

“Well, it’s a living, Al,” Mandy Coughlan said, but Cara, startled, dropped her knife on the Mail’s Full-Colour Tribute and smeared butter on the Prince of Wales.

Last night, Saturday, the first card Al had laid down was the Page of Hearts: significator of her pale companion, the emblem of the woman who appeared in the cards at the Harte and Garter, Windsor, on the morning when Colette first came into her line of vision: white hair, pale eyes, red-rimmed like the eyes of some small scurrying pet you ought to be kind to.

She looked up, at the woman, the client, who was sitting there sniffling. The reading Al was getting was close to home, it was for herself, not for the client before her. You can’t control the cards; they will only give the messages they want to give. Here’s the King of Spades, reversed: probably, what was his name … Gavin. Colette is aching for a man to come into her life. Nighttimes, she can feel it, in the flat at Wexham, the slow drag of desire beyond the plasterboard wall. Colette’s busy little fingers, seeking solitary pleasure … . What turn of fate brought Colette my way? Did I take up with her for my own advantage, for an advantage not yet revealed even to me: for some purpose that is working itself out? She pushed the thought away, along with any guilt that attended it. I can’t help what I do. I have to live. I have to protect myself. And if it’s at her expense … so what if it is? What’s Colette to me? If Mandy Coughlan offered her a better prospect I wouldn’t see her for dust, she’d have her stuff rolled up in that holdall of hers and she’d be on the next train to Brighton and Hove. At least, I hope she would. I hope she wouldn’t steal my car.

Diana is the Queen of Hearts; every time the card turns up in a spread, this week and next, she will signify the princess, and the clients’ grief will draw the card time and time again from the depth of the pack. Already the first sightings of her have been reported, peeping over the shoulder of her ancestor Charles I in a portrait at St. James’s Palace. Some people who have seen the apparition say that she is wearing a dress the colour of blood. All agree that she is wearing her tiara. If you look hard you will see her face in fountains, in raindrops, in the puddles on service station forecourts. Diana is a water sign, which means she’s the psychic type. She’s just the type who lingers and drips, who waxes and wanes, breathes in and out her tides; who, by the slow accretion of tears, brings ceilings down and wears a path into stone.

When Alison had seen Colette’s horoscope (cast by Merlyn as a favour), she had quailed. “Really?” she’d said. “Don’t tell me, Merlyn. I don’t want to know.” Farking air signs, Merlyn had said, what can you bloody do? He had felt for Alison’s hand with his damp Pisces palm.

Sunday morning: she gave readings in a side room, tense, waiting to go on the platform at 2 P.M. From her clients, through the morning, it was more of the same. Diana, she had her problems; I have my problems too. I reckon she had her choice of men, but she was a bad picker. After an hour of it, a feeling of mutiny rose inside her. Mutiny on the Bounty was the phrase that came into her head. She put her elbows on the table, leaned towards the punter and said, “Prince Charles, you think he was a bad pick? So you’d have known better, eh? You’d have turned him down, would you?”

The client shrank back in her chair. A moment, and the little poor woman sat there again, in the client’s lap: “Excuse me, miss, have you seen Maureen Harrison? I’ve been seeking Maureen for thirty year.”

About lunchtime she sneaked out for a sandwich. She and Gemma split a pack of tuna and cucumber. “If I had your problems with the Irish,” Gemma said, “I’d be straight on the phone to Ian Paisley. We all have our crosses to bear, and mine personally tend to be derived from my ninth life, when I went on crusade. So any upheaval east of Cyprus, and frankly, Al, I’m tossed.” A sliver of cucumber fell out of her sandwich, a sliding green shadow on her white paper plate. She speared it artfully and popped it into her mouth.

“It’s not just the Irish,” Al said. “With me, it’s everybody, really.”

“I used to know Silvana, in that life. ’Course, she was on the other side. A Saracen warrior. Impaled her prisoners.”

“I thought that was Romanians,” Al said. “It just goes to show.”

“You were never a vampire, were you? No, you’re too nice.”

“I’ve seen a few today.”

“Yes, Di’s brought them out. You can’t miss them, can you?” But Gemma did not say what signs she looked for in a vampire. She balled up her paper napkin and dropped it on her plate.

Two-twenty P.M. She was on the platform. It was question time.

“Could I get in touch with Diana if I used a Ouija board?”

“I wouldn’t advise it, darling.”

“My gran used to do it.”

And where’s your gran now? She didn’t say it: not aloud. She thought: that’s the last thing we need, Amateur Night, Diana pulled about and puzzled by a thousand rolling wineglasses. The young girls in the audience bounced up and down in their seats, not knowing what a Ouija board was. Being the current generation, they didn’t wait to be told, they yipped at her and whistled and shouted out.

“It’s just an old parlour game,” she explained. “It’s not a thing any serious practitioner would do. You put out the letters and a glass rolls around and spells out words. Spells out names, you know, or phrases that you think mean something.”

“I’ve heard it can be quite dangerous,” a woman said. “Dabbling in that sort of thing.”

“Oh, yes, dabbling,” Al said. It made her smile, the way the punters used it as a technical term. “Yes, you don’t want to go dabbling. Because you have to consider who would come through. There are some spirits that are—I’m not being rude now, but they are on a very low level. They’re only drifting about earthside because they’ve got nothing better to do. They’re like those kids you see on sink estates hanging about parked cars—you don’t know if they’re going to break in and drive them away or just slash the tyres and scratch the paintwork. But why find out? Just don’t go there! Now those sort of kids, you wouldn’t ask them in your house, would you? Well, that’s what you’re doing if you mess about with a Ouija board.”

She looked down at her hands. The lucky opals were occluded, steamy, as if their surfaces were secreting. There are things you need to know about the dead, she wanted to say. Things you really ought to know. For instance, it’s no good trying to enlist them for any good cause you have in mind, world peace or whatever. Because they’ll only bugger you about. They’re not reliable. They’ll pull the rug from under you. They don’t become decent people just because they’re dead. People are right to be afraid of ghosts. If you get people who are bad in life—I mean, cruel people, dangerous people—why do you think they’re going to be any better after they’re dead?

But she would never speak it. Never. Never utter the word death if she could help it. And even though they needed frightening, even though they deserved frightening, she would never, when she was with her clients, slip a hint or tip a wink about the true nature of the place beyond black.

At teatime, when the event was over and they went down in the lift with their bags, Colette said, “Well now!”

“Well now what?”

“Your little outburst at breakfast! The less said about that, the better.”

Al looked sideways at her. Now that they were alone together, and with the drive home before them, Colette was obviously about to say a great deal.

As they stood at the desk, checking out, Mandy came up behind them. “All right, Al? Feeling better?”

“I’ll be okay, Mandy. And look, I really want to apologize about Morris last night—”

“Forget it. Could happen to any of us.”

“You know what Cara said, about unconditional love. I suppose she’s right. But it’s hard to love Morris.”

“I don’t think that trying to love him would get you anywhere. You’ve just got to get clever about him. I don’t suppose there’s anyone new on the horizon, is there?”

“Not that I can see.”

“It’s just that round about our age, you do sometimes get a second chance—well, you know yourself how it is with men, they leave you for a younger model. Now I’ve known some psychics who, frankly, they find it devastating when their guide walks out, but for others, let me say, it’s a blessed relief—you get a fresh start with a new guide, and before you know where you are your trade’s taken an upturn and you feel twenty years younger.” She took Al’s hand. Her pink-frosted nails caressed the opals. “Alison, can I speak frankly to you? As one of your oldest friends? You’ve got to get off the Wheel of Fear. Onto the Wheel of Freedom.”

Al pushed her hair back, smiling bravely. “It sounds a bit too athletic for me.”

“Enlightenment proceeds level by level. You know that. If I had to take a guess, I’d say that thinking was at the source of your problems. Too much thinking. Take the pressure off, Al. Open your heart.”

“Thanks. I know you mean well, Mandy.”

Colette turned from the desk, credit card slip between her fingers, fumbling with the strap of her bag. The nail of Mandy’s forefinger dug her in the ribs. Startled, Colette looked up into her face. Her mouth was set in a grim pink line. She’s quite old, Colette thought; her neck’s going.

“Look after Al,” Mandy said. “Al is very gifted and very special, and you’ll have to answer to me for it if you let her talent bring her to grief.”

In the car park, Colette strode briskly ahead with her holdall. Alison was dragging her case—one of the wheels had come off—and she was still limping, in pain from her smashed-up feet. She knew she should call Colette back to help her. But it seemed more suitable to suffer. I ought to suffer, she thought, though I am not sure why.

“The amount you take away!” Colette said. “For one night.”

“It’s not that I pack too much,” Al said meekly. “It’s that my clothes are bigger.” She didn’t want a row, not just at this minute. There was a quivering in her abdomen which she knew meant that someone was trying to break through from Spirit. Her pulse was leaping. Once again she felt nauseated, and as if she wanted to belch.

Sorry, Diana, she said, I just had to get that wind up, and Colette said—well, she said nothing, really, but Al could see she was annoyed about being told off by Mandy. “She was only advising you,” she said. “She didn’t mean any harm. Me and Mand, we go back a long way.”

“Put your seat belt on,” Colette said. “I’m hoping to get home before dark. You’ll need to stop somewhere to eat, I suppose.”

“Fucking will,” Morris said, settling himself into the rear seat. “Here, don’t drive off yet, wait till we get settled.”

“We?” Al said. She swivelled in her seat; was there a thickening of the air, a ripple and disturbance, a perturbation below the level of her senses? A smell of rot and blight?

Morris was in wonderful spirits, chortling and bouncing. “Here’s Donald Aitkenside hitching a ride. Donnie, what I’ve been trying to meet up wiv. You know Donnie, don’t you? ’Course you do! Donnie and me, we go back a long way. Donnie knew MacArthur. You remember MacArthur, from the old days? And here’s young Dean. Don’t know Dean, do you? Dean’s new at this game, he don’t know nobody—well, he knows Donnie but he don’t know the army crowd nor any of that lot from the old fight game. Dean, meet the missus. That? That’s the missus’s pal. Like a length o’ string, ain’t she? Would you? No, not me, no chance, I like a bit of meat on their bones.”

He laughed raucously.

“Tell you what, gel, tell you what, stop off south of Leicester somewhere, and we might meet up with Pikey Pete. For Pikey Pete,” he told Dean, “he is such a man, if he’s down on his luck you’ll see him picking fag ends off the road, but let him have a win on the dogs and he will see you and slot a cigar in your top pocket, he’s that generous.”

“Should we pull in south of Leicester?” Al asked.

Colette was irritated. “That’s no distance.”

“Look, it’s not worth antagonizing him.”

“Morris?”

“Of course, Morris. Colette, you know the tape, you know those men that were coming through?”

“Paramilitaries?”

“No. Forget them. I mean the fiends, the fiends I used to know.”

“Can we please not talk about it? Not while I’m driving.”

The service stations were quiet, winding down after the weekend trade, though it had been an odd sort of weekend, of course, because of Di. The fiends swarmed out of the back of the car, yipping and squeaking. Inside the building, Al wandered around the food court, an anxious expression on her face. She lifted the lid of a mock-rustic tureen and gazed into the soup, and picked up filled rolls and tugged at their wrappings, turning them up to look at them end on. “What’s in this one, do you think?” she said. The film was misty, as if the lettuce had been breathing out.

“For God’s sake sit down,” Colette said. “I’ll bring you some pizza.”

When she came back, edging among the tables with her tray, she saw that Al had taken out her tarot cards.

She was amazed. “Not here!” she said.

“I just have to—”

The card’s scarlet wrappings flowed over the table, and puddled in Colette’s lap as she sat down. Alison drew out one card. She held it for a moment, flipped it over. She didn’t speak, but laid it down on top of the pack.

“What is it?”

It was the Tower. Lightning strikes. The masonry of the tower is blasted away. Flames shoot out of the brickwork. Debris is thrown into space. The occupants hurtle towards earth, their legs scissoring and their arms outflung. The ground rushes up at them.

“Eat your pizza,” Colette said, “before it goes all flabby.”

“I don’t want it.” The Tower, she thought; it’s my least favourite. The death card I can handle. I don’t like the Tower. The Tower means—

Colette saw with alarm that Al’s eyes had slipped out of focus; as if Al were a baby whom she were desperate to placate, whose mouth she was desperate to fill, she grabbed the plastic fork and plunged it into the pizza. “Look, Al. Try a bit of this.”

The fork buckled against the crust; Al snapped back, smiled, took the fork from her hand. “It may not be so bad,” she said. Her voice was small and tight. “Here, Col, let me. When you get the Tower it means your world blows up. Generally. But it can have a—you know, quite a small meaning. Oh, blast this thing.”

“Pick it up in your fingers,” Colette advised.

“Wrap my cards up, then.”

Colette shrank; she was afraid to touch them.

“It’s all right. They won’t bite. They know you. They know you’re my partner.”

Hastily, Colette bundled them into their red wrappings.

“That’s right. Just drop them in my bag.”

“What came over you?”

“I don’t know. I just had to see. It gets you that way sometimes.” Al bit into a piece of raw-looking green pepper, and chewed it for a while. “Colette, there’s something you ought to know. About last night.”

“Your baby voice,” Colette said. “Talking to nobody. That made me laugh. But then I thought at one point you were having a heart attack.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my heart.”

Colette looked meaningfully at her pizza slice.

“Well, yes,” Alison said. “But that’s not going to finish me off. Nobody perishes of a pizza slice. Think of all those millions of Italians, running round quite healthy.”

“It was a horrible weekend.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know,” Colette said. “I didn’t have any expectations. That card—what do you mean by a small meaning?”

“It can be a warning that the structure you’re in won’t contain you anymore. Whether it’s your job or your love life or whatever it is, you’ve out-grown it. It’s not safe to stay put. The Tower is a house you know. So it can mean just that. Move on.”

“What, leave Wexham?”

“Why not? It’s a nice little flat but I’ve got no roots there.”

“Where would you like to move?”

“Somewhere clean. Somewhere new. A house that nobody’s lived in before. Could we do that?”

“New-build is a good investment.” Colette put down her coffee cup. “I’ll look into it.”

“I thought—well, listen, Colette, I’m sure you’re as tired of Morris as I am. I don’t know if he’d ever agree to—you know—take his pension—I think Mandy was being a bit optimistic there. But our lives would be easier, wouldn’t they, if his friends didn’t come round?”

“His friends?” Colette said blankly.

Oh, Jesus, Al said to herself, it’s all uphill work. “He’s beginning to meet up with his friends,” she explained. “I don’t know why he feels the need, but it seems he does. There’s one called Don Aitkenside. I remember him. He had a mermaid on his thigh. And this Dean, now, he’s new to me, but I don’t like the sound of him. He was in the back of the car just now. Spotty kid. Got a police record.”

“Really?” Colette’s flesh crawled. “In the back?”

“With Morris and Don.” Al pushed her plate away. “And now Morris is off looking for this gypsy.”

“Gypsy? But there won’t be room!”

Alison just looked at her sadly. “They don’t take up room, in the usual way,” she said.

“No. Of course not. It’s the way you talk about them.”

“I can’t think how else to talk. I only have the usual words.”

“Of course you do, but it makes me think—I mean it makes me think they’re ordinary blokes, except I can’t see them.”

“I hope they’re not. Not ordinary. I mean, I hope the standard is better than that.”

“You never knew Gavin.”

“Did he smell?”

Colette hesitated. She wanted to be fair. “Not more than he could help.”

“He’d take a bath, would he?”

“Oh yes, a shower.”

“And he wouldn’t, sort of, undo his clothes and take out private bits of himself in public?”

“No!”

“And if he saw a little girl on the street, he wouldn’t turn around and make comments about her? Like, look at it waggle its little arse?”

“You frighten me, Al,” Colette said coldly.

I know, Al thought. Why mention it now?

“You have a very peculiar imagination. How can you think I would marry a man like that?”

“You might not know. Till you’d tied the knot. You might have had a nasty surprise.”

“I wouldn’t have been married to that kind of a man. Not for an instant.”

“But he had magazines, did he?”

“I never looked at them.”

“It’s on the Internet, these days.”

Colette thought, I should have searched his systems. But those were early days, as far as technology went. People weren’t sophisticated, like they are now.

“He used to call hotlines,” she admitted. “Once I myself, just out of curiosity—”

“Did you? What happened?”

“They kept you hanging on for ages. Just messing you about, basically, while you were running up a bill. I put the phone down. I thought, what will it be? Just some woman pretending to come. Moaning, I suppose.”

“You could do that for yourself,” Al said.

“Precisely.”

“If we moved, we might be able to lose them. I suppose Morris will stick, but I’d like to shake off his friends.”

“Wouldn’t they come after us?”

“We’d go somewhere they don’t know.”

“Don’t they have maps?”

“I don’t think they do. I think it’s more like … they’re more like dogs. They have to pick up the scent.”

In the LADIES, she watched her own face in the mirror, as she washed her hands. Colette must be coaxed towards a house move, she must be made to see the sense. Yet she must not be terrified too much. Last night the tape had frightened her, but how could that have been prevented? It was a shock to me too, she said to herself. If Morris has caught up with Aitkenside, can Capstick be far behind? Will he be bringing home MacArthur, and lodging him in the bread bin or her dressing table drawer? Will she sit down to breakfast one day and find Pikey Pete lurking under the lid of the butter dish? Will she get a sudden fright, as Bob Fox taps at the window?

Move on, she thought: it might baffle them for a bit. Even a temporary bewilderment could keep them off your back. It might cause them to disperse, lose each other again in those vast tracts the dead inhabit.

“Oi, oi, oi oi!” Morris called, yelling right in her ear. “Bob’s your uncle!”

“Is he?” she’d said, surprised. “Bob Fox? I always wanted a relative.”

“Blimey, Emmie,” Morris said, “is she simple, or what?”

That night, when they got home, Morris crept in with them; the others, his friends, seemed to have melted away, somewhere in Bedfordshire between Junctions 9 and 10. To check for them, she lifted the carpet in the boot of the car, peered into the cold metal well; no one was there, and when she dragged out her case she found it was no heavier than it had been when she packed it. So far so good. To keep them out permanently—that would be another matter. Once inside she was solicitous to Colette, recommending a hot bath and the Coronation Street omnibus edition.

“If it’s on,” Colette said. All she could summon up was funeral coverage. “For God’s sake. I wish they’d give it a rest. They’ve buried her now. She’s not going to get up again.” She slumped on the sofa with a bowl of breakfast cereal. “We ought to get a satellite dish.”

“We can when we move.”

“Or cable. Whatever.”

She’s resilient, Al thought, as she climbed the stairs—or maybe she’s just forgetful? At the stop back in Leicestershire, Colette had turned the shade of porridge, when it was broken to her about the menagerie riding in the back seat of the car. But now she was her usual self, carping away, always with some petty grievance. You couldn’t say her colour had come back, because she never had any colour; but when she was frightened, Al had noticed, she sucked her lips inwards so that they seemed almost to disappear; at the same time, her eyes seemed to shrink back in her skull, so you noticed their pink rims even more.

In her own room, Al sank down onto the bed. Hers was the master bedroom; Colette, when she moved in, had squeezed into what even the estate agent, when he’d sold the flat to Al, had the grace to describe as a small double. It was a good thing she had few clothes and no possessions; or, to put it as Colette did, a capsule wardrobe and a minimalist philosophy.

Al sighed; she stretched her cramped limbs, checking out her body for spirit aches and pains. Some entity was tweaking her left knee, some desolate soul was trying to hold her hand; not now, kids, she said, give me a break. I need, she thought, to give Colette more of a stake in life. Get her name on the house deeds. Give her more reason to stick around, so she’s less inclined to take off in a sulk or on a whim, or under the pressure of unnatural events. For we all have our limits; though she’s brave—brave with the true-blue staunchness of those who lack imagination.

I could, she thought, go downstairs and tell her face-to-face how much I appreciate her; I could, as it were, pin a medal on her: Order of Diana (deceased). She levered herself upright. But her resolution failed. No, she thought; as soon as I see her she’ll irritate me, sitting sideways with her legs flung over the arm of the chair, swinging her feet in her little beige ankle socks. Why doesn’t she get slippers? You can get quite acceptable kinds of slippers these days. Moccasins, something like that. Then there will be a bowl half full of milk on the floor by her chair, with a few malted flakes bobbing in it. Why does she drop her spoon into the bowl when she decides she’s finished, so that driblets of milk shoot out onto the carpet? And why should such small things work one up to an extreme level of agitation? Before I lived with Colette, she thought, I supposed I was easy to live with, I thought I would be happy if people didn’t actually vomit on the carpet, or bring home friends who did. I thought it was quite good to have a carpet, even. I thought of myself as quite a placid person. Probably I was mistaken.

She took the tape recorder out of its bag and set it up on her bedside table. She kept the volume low, whizzing the tape backward to find last night.

MORRIS: Run out for five Woodbine, would you? Thanks Bob, you’re a scholar and a gentleman. (eructation) Blimey. I should never ’ave ’ad that cheese an’ onion pie.

AITKENSIDE: Cheese an’ onion? Christ, I ’ad that once, it was at the races, remember that time we went up to Redcar?

MORRIS: Ooh, yer, do I? And Pikey had his motorbike with the sidecar? Redcar, sidecar, we was laughing about that?

AITKENSIDE: Bloody crucified me, that pie. Repeating on me for three bloody weeks.

MORRIS: ’Ere, Dean, they don’t make pies like that these days. I remember Pikey Pete, he kept saying, fanks, Donnie, fanks for the memory. Oh, he were a right laugh! ’Ere, Bob, are you going for them fags?

AITKENSIDE: They don’t make Woodbine no more.

MORRIS: What, they don’t make Woodies? Why not? Why don’t they?

AITKENSIDE: And you can’t buy five. You’ve got to buy ten these days.

MORRIS: What, buy ten, and not even Woodies?

BOY’S VOICE: Where’ve you been, Uncle Morris?

MORRIS: Dead. That’s where I bloody been.

BOY’S VOICE: Have we got to stay dead, Uncle Morris?

MORRIS: Well, it’s up to you, Dean lad, if you can find some way to bloody recycle yourself you get on and do it, san-fairy-ann, no skin off my blooming nose. If you’ve got the contacts, you bloody use ’em. I give a hundred pounds, one hundred nicker in notes to a bloke I met that said he could get me restarted. I said to him, I don’t want borning in bloody wogland, you hear what I’m saying, I don’t want to come back as some nig, and he swore he could get me born in Brighton—or Hove which is near as dammit—born in Brighton and free, white, and twenty-one. Well, not twenty-one, but nar what I mean. And I thought, not bad, Brighton’s near the course, and when I’m a tiddler I’ll be getting the sea air and all, grow up strong and healthy, besides I always had mates in Brighton, show me the bloke wiv no mates in Brighton and I’ll show you a tosser. Anyway, he took my readies and he scarpered. Left me high and dry, dead.

Alison switched off the tape. It’s so humiliating, she thought, so crushing and shameful to have Morris in your life and to have lived with him all these years. She put her arms across her body, rocked herself gently. Brighton—well, naturally. Brighton and Hove. The sea air, the horse racing. If only she’d thought about it earlier. That was why he was trying to get inside Mandy, back at the hotel. That was why he kept her up all night, pawing and pulling at her—not because he wanted sex, but because he was plotting to be born, to be carried inside some unknowing hostess … the filthy, dirty little sneak. She could imagine him, in Mandy’s hotel room, whining, slobbering, abasing himself by crawling across the carpet, slithering towards her on his chin with his pitiful haunches in the air: born me, born me! Dear God, it didn’t bear thinking about.

And clearly—at least it was clear to her now—it wouldn’t be the first time Morris had tried it on. She well remembered Mandy’s pregnancy test, was it last year? She’d been on the phone that very night, I was feeling strange, Al, really queasy, well I don’t know what made me but I went out to the chemist, I tested my wee and the line’s gone blue. Al, I blame myself, I must have been extremely careless.

In Mandy’s mind the solution was straightforward; she had it done away with. So that was the end of Morris and his hundred pounds. For months afterwards she would say, whenever they met, do you know I’m baffled about that episode, I can’t think who or where—I think it must have been when we went to that café bar in Northampton, somebody must have spiked my drink. They’d blamed Raven—though not to his face; as Mandy said, you didn’t want to push it, because if Raven denied it categorically, that would more or less mean it must have been Merlin or Merlyn.

Those speculations were hard enough and distasteful; she admired the way Mandy faced them, the putative fathers, at every Psychic Fayre, her chin tilted up, her eyes cold and knowing. But she’d be sick to her stomach if she knew what Al was thinking now. I won’t tell her, she decided. She’s been a good friend to me over the years and she doesn’t deserve that. I’ll keep Morris under control, somehow, when I’m in her vicinity; God knows how, though. A million pounds wouldn’t be enough—it wouldn’t be enough of a bribe to make you carry Morris or any of his friends. Imagine your trips to the antenatal clinic. Imagine what they’d say at your play group.

She clicked the tape back on. I have to make myself do it, she thought, I have to listen right through: see if I get any insight, any grip on other furtive schemes that Morris might come up with.

MORRIS: So what ciggies can I ’ave?

DEAN: You can have a roll-up, Uncle Morris.

UNKNOWN VOICE: Can we have a bit of respect, please? We’re here on a funeral.

DEAN: (timid) It is all right if I call you Uncle Morris?

SECOND UNKNOWN VOICE: This sceptered isle, this precious stone set in the silver sea … .

MORRIS, AITKENSIDE: Oi oi oi oi! It’s Wagstaffe!

MORRIS: Mended the bloody hole in your bloody pantaloons yet, Wagstaffe?

WAGSTAFFE: There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

She recognized voices from her childhood; she heard the clink of beer bottles, and the military rattle, as bone clicked into joint. They were reassembling themselves, the old crew: root and branch, arm and leg. Only Wagstaffe seemed baffled to be there; and the unknown person who had called for respect.

She remembered the night, long ago in Aldershot, when the streetlight shone on her bed. She remembered the afternoon when she had come into the house and seen a man’s face looking through the mirror, where her own face ought to be.

She thought, I should phone my mum. If they’re breaking through like this, she ought to be tipped off. At her age, a shock could kill her.

She had to scrabble through an old address book, to find Emmie’s number in Bracknell. A man answered. “Who is that?” she asked, and he said, “Who’s asking?”

“Don’t come that with me, matey,” she said, in Aitkenside’s voice.

The man dropped the receiver. She waited. A static crackle filled her ear. A moment later her mother spoke.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s me. Alison.” She added, she couldn’t think why, “It’s me, your little girl.”

“What do you want?” her mother said. “Bothering me, after all this time.”

“Who’s that you’ve got there, in your house?”

“Nobody,” her mother said.

“I thought I knew his voice. Is it Keith Capstick? Is it Bob Fox?”

“What are you talking about? I don’t know what somebody’s been telling you. There’s some filthy tongues about, you should know better. You’d think they’d mind their own bloody business.”

“I only want to know who answered the phone.”

“I answered it. God Almighty, Alison, you always were a bit soft.”

“A man answered.”

“What man?”

“Mum, don’t encourage them. If they come round, you don’t let them in.”

“Who?”

“MacArthur. Aitkenside. That old crowd.”

“Must be dead, I should think,” her mother said. “I haven’t heard them names in years. Bloody Bill Wagstaffe, weren’t he a friend of theirs? That Morris, and all. And there was that gypsy fella, dealt in horses, what did they call him? Yes, I reckon they must all be dead by now. I wouldn’t mind it if they did come round. They was a laugh.”

“Mum, don’t let them in. If they come knocking, don’t answer.”

“I remember Aitkenside, drove a heavy lorry, always got a wodge in his wallet. Used to do favours, you know. Drop off loads, this and that, he’d say one stiff more or less it don’t hardly make no difference to the weight. This gypsy fella—Pete, they called him—now he had a trailer.”

“Mum, if they turn up, any of them, you let me know. You’ve got my number.”

“I might have it written down somewhere.”

“I’ll give it you again.”

She did so. Emmie waited till she finished and said, “I haven’t got a pencil.”

Al sighed. “You go and get one.”

She heard the receiver drop. A buzzing filled the line, like flies around a dustbin. When Emmie returned she said, “Found up my eyebrow pencil. That was a good idea, wasn’t it?”

She repeated the number.

Emmie said, “Wagstaffe always had a pen. You could rely on him for that.”

“Have you got it now?”

“No.”

“Why not, Mum?”

“I haven’t got a paper.”

“Haven’t you got anything you can write on? You must have a writing pad.”

“Oh, la-di-dah.”

“Go and get a bit of toilet paper.”

“All right. Don’t get shirty.”

She could hear Emmie singing, as she moved away; “I wish I was in Dixie, hurrah, hurrah …”; then, again, the buzzing occupied the line. She thought, the men came into the bedroom and looked down at me as I lay in my little bed. They took me out of the house by night, into the thick belt of birch trees and dead bracken beyond the pony field. There on the ground they operated on me, took out my will and put in their own.

“Hello?” Emmie said. “That you, Al? I got the toilet paper, you can tell me again now. Oops, hang on, me pencil’s rolled off.” There was a grunt of effort.

Alison was almost sure she could hear a man, complaining in the background.

“Okay, I got it now. Fire away.”

Once again, she gave her number. She felt exhausted.

“Now tell me again,” her mother said. “What have I got to ring you, when and if what?”

“If any of them come around. Any of that old crowd.”

“Oh yes. Aitkenside. Well, I should hear ’is lorry, I should think.”

“That’s right. But he might not be driving a lorry anymore.”

“What’s happened to it?”

“I don’t know. I’m just saying, he might not. He might just turn up. If anybody comes knocking at your window—”

“Bob Fox, he always used to knock on the window. Come around the back and knock on the window and give me a fright.” Emmie laughed. “‘Caught you that time,’ he’d say.”

“Yes, so … you ring me.”

“Keith Capstick,” her mother said. “He were another. Keef, you used to call him, couldn’t say your tee-haitches; you was a stupid little bugger. Keef Catsick. ’Course, you didn’t know any better. Oh, it used to make him mad, though. Keef Catsick. He caught you many a slap.”

“Did he?”

“He used to say, I’ll skin the hide off her, I’ll knock her to Kingdom Come. ’Course, if it weren’t for Keith, that dog would have had your throat out. What did you want to let it in for?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember now. I expect I wanted a pet.”

“Pet? They weren’t pets. Fighting dogs, them. Not as if you hadn’t been told. Not as if you hadn’t been told a dozen times and Keith give you the back of his hand to drive it through your skull. Not that he did succeeded, did he? What did you want to open the back door for? You was all over Keith after that, after he pulled the dog off you. Couldn’t make enough of him. Used to call him Daddy.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“He said, that’s worse than Catsick, her calling me Daddy, I don’t want to be her daddy, I’ll throttle the little fucker if she don’t leave off.” Emmie chuckled. “He would too. He’d throttled a few, in his time, Keith.”

There was a pause.

Al put her hand to her throat. She spoke. “I see. And you’d like to meet up with Keith again, would you? A laugh, was he? Always got a wodge in his wallet?”

“No, that was Aitkenside,” her mother said. “God help you, girl, you never could keep anything straight in your head. I don’t know if I’d recognize Keith if he come round here today. Not after that fight he had, he was that mangled I don’t know if I’d know him. I remember that fight, I see it as if it were yesterday—old Mac with the patch over his eye socket, and me embarrassed, not knowing where to look. We didn’t know where to put our loyalties, you see? Not in this house we didn’t. Morris said he was putting a fiver on Keith; he said I’ll back a man with no balls over a man with one eye. He had a fiver on Keith, oh, he was mad with him, the way he went down. I remember they said, after, that MacArthur must have had a blade in his fist. Still, you’d know, wouldn’t you? You’d know about blades, you little madam. By Christ, did I wallop you, when I found you with those whatsits in your pocket.”

Al said, “I want to stop you, Mum.”

“What?”

“I want to stop you and rewind you.”

She thought, they took out my will and they paid my mother in notes for the privilege. She took the money and she put it in that old cracked vase that she used to keep on the top shelf of the cupboard to the left of the chimney breast.

Her mum said, “Al, you still there? I was thinking, you never do know, Keith might have got his face fixed up. They can do wonders these days, can’t they? He might have got his appearance changed. Funny, that. He could be living round the corner. And we’d never know.”

Another pause.

“Alison?”

“Yes … . Are you still taking pills, Mum?”

“On and off.”

“You see your doctor?”

“Every week.”

“You been in the hospital at all?”

“They closed it.”

“You all right for money?”

“I get by.”

What else to say? Nothing, really.

Emmie said, “I miss Aldershot. I wish I’d never moved here. There’s nobody here worth talking to. They’re a miserable lot. Never had a laugh since I moved.”

“Maybe you should get out more.”

“Maybe I should. Nobody to go with, that’s the trouble. Still, they say there’s no going back in life.” After a longer pause, just as Al was about to say goodbye, her mother asked, “How are you then? Busy?”

“Yes. Busy week.”

“Would be. With the princess. Shame, innit? I always think we had a lot in common, me and her. All these blokes, and then you get the rough end of it. Do you reckon she’d have been all right with Dido?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t an idea.”

“Never one for the boys, were you? I reckon you got put off it.”

“Do you? How?”

“Oh, you know.”

“No, I don’t,” she was starting to say, I don’t know, but I very much want to know, I find this enlightening, you’ve told me quite a few things—

But Emmie said, “Got to go. The gas is running out,” and put the phone down.

Al dropped the handset on the duvet cover. She lowered her head to her knees. Pulses beat; in her neck, in her temples, at the ends of her fingers. She felt a pricking in the palms of her hands. Galloping high blood pressure, she thought. Too much pizza. She felt a low, seeping fury, as if something inside her had broken and was leaking black blood into her mouth.

I need to be with Colette, she thought. I need her for protection. I need to sit with her and watch the TV, whatever she’s watching, whatever she’s watching will be all right. I want to be normal. I want to be normal for half an hour, just enjoying the funeral highlights; before Morris starts up again.

She opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the small square hall. The sitting room door was closed but raucous laughter was rocking the room where Colette, she knew, kicked up her heels in her little socks. To avoid hearing the tape, Colette had turned the TV volume up. That was natural, very natural. She thought of tapping on the door. But no, no, let her enjoy. She turned away. At once Diana manifested: a blink in the hall mirror, a twinkle. Within a moment she had become a definite pinkish glow.

She was wearing her wedding dress, and it hung on her now; she was gaunt, and it looked crumpled and worn, as if dragged through the halls of the hereafter, where the housekeeping, understandably, is never of the best. She had pinned some of her press cuttings to her skirts; they lifted, in some otherworldly breeze, and flapped. She consulted them, lifting her skirts and peering; but, in Alison’s opinion, her eyes seemed to cross.

“Give my love to my boys,” Diana said. “My boys, I’m sure you know who I mean.”

Al wouldn’t prompt her: you must never, in that fashion, give way to the dead. They will tease you and urge you, they will suggest and flatter; you mustn’t take their bait. If they want to speak, let them speak for themselves.

Diana stamped her foot. “You do know their names,” she accused. “You oiky little grease spot, you’re just being hideous. Oh, fuckerama! Whatever are they called?”

It takes them that way, sometimes, the people who have passed: memory lapses, an early detachment. It’s a mercy, really. It’s wrong to call them back, after they want to go. They’re not like Morris and company, fighting to get back, playing tricks and scheming to get reborn, leaning on the doorbell, knocking at the window, crawling inside your lungs and billowing out on your breath.

Diana dropped her eyes. They rolled, under her blue lids. Her painted lips fumbled for names. “It’s on the tip of my tongue,” she said. “Anyway, whatever. You tell them, because you know. Give my love to … Kingy. And the other kid. Kingy and Thingy.” There was a sickly glow behind her now, like the glow from a fire in a chemical factory. She’s going, Al thought, she’s melting away to nothing, to poisoned ash in the wind. “So,” the princess said, “my love to them, my love to you, my good woman. And my love to him, to—wait a minute.” She picked up her skirts and puzzled over a fan of the press cuttings, whipping them aside in her search for the name she wanted. “So many words,” she moaned, then giggled. The hem of her wedding gown slipped from her fingers. “No use, lost it. Love to all of you! Why don’t you just bog off now and let me get some privacy.”

The princess faded. Al implored her silently, Di, don’t go. The room was cold. With a click, the tape switched itself on.

WAGSTAFFE: This sceptered isle … .

MORRIS: My sceptered—

Colette yelled, “Al, are you playing that tape again?”

“Not on purpose, it just switched itself—”

“Because I don’t think I can face it.”

“You don’t want it for the book?”

“God, no. We can’t put that stuff in the book!”

“So what shall I do with it?”

WAGSTAFFE: This other Eden—

MORRIS: My sceptered arse.

Colette called, “Wipe it.”