Beyond Black

three

Colette joined Alison in those days when the comet Hale-Bopp, like God’s shuttlecock, blazed over the market towns and dormitory suburbs, over the playing fields of Eton, over the shopping malls of Oxford, over the traffic-crazed towns of Woking and Maidenhead: over the choked exit roads and the junctions of the M4, over the superstores and out-of-town carpet ware-houses, the nurseries and prisons, the gravel pits and sewage works, and the green fields of the Home Counties shredded by diggers. Native to Uxbridge, Colette had grown up in a family whose inner workings she didn’t understand, and attended a comprehensive school where she was known as Monster. It seemed, in retrospect, a satire on her lack of monster qualities; she had in fact no looks at all, good or bad, yes or no, pro or con. In her school photographs, her indefinite features seemed neither male nor female, and her pale bobbed hair resembled a cowl.

Her shape was flat and neutral; fourteen passed, and nothing was done in the breast department. About the age of sixteen, she began to signal with her pale eyes and say, I’m a natural blonde, you know. In her English classes she was praised for her neat handwriting, and in maths she made, they told her, consistent progress. In religious studies she stared out of the window, as if she might see some Hindu deities squatting on the green mesh of the boundary fence. In history, she was asked to empathize with the sufferings of cotton mill operatives, plantation slaves, and the Scots foot soldiers at Flodden; it left her cold. Of geography, she had simply no idea at all; but she learned French quickly, and spoke it without fear and with the accent native to Uxbridge.

She stayed on after sixteen, because she didn’t know what she would do or where she would go once she left the classroom; but once her virginity was lost, and her elder sister moved out, leaving her with a room and a mirror of her own, she felt more definite, more visible, more of a presence in the world. She left school with two indifferent A-levels, didn’t think of university. Her mind was quick, shallow, and literal, her character assertive.

She went to a secretarial college—there were still secretaries then—and became competent in shorthand, typing, and simple bookkeeping. When the PC came along, she adjusted without difficulty, assimilating successively WordStar, WordPerfect, and Microsoft Word. To her second job, in marketing, she brought her spreadsheet skills (Microsoft Excel and Lotus 1-2-3), together with PowerPoint for her presentation packages. Her third job was with a large charity, as an administrator in the fund-raising section. Her mail-merging was beyond reproach; it was indifferent to her whether she used dBase or Access, for she had mastered both. But though she had all the e-skills necessary, her telephone manner was cold and faintly satirical. It was more appropriate, her supervisor noted in her annual review, for someone selling time-shares. She was hurt; she had meant to do some good in the world. She left the charity with excellent references, and took a post with a firm of event organizers. Travel was involved, usually at the back of the plane, and fourteen-hour days in cities she never got to see. Sometimes she had to think hard: had she been to Geneva? Was Barcelona the place where her travel iron blew up, or was that Dundee?

It was at an event she met Gavin. He was an itinerant software developer whose key card wouldn’t work, standing at the reception desk of a hotel in La Défense, entertaining the staff by his sad efforts in Franglais. His tie was in his pocket; his suit hanger, slung over his left shoulder, skewed his jacket away from his shirt and tugged his shirt away from his skin. She noticed the black chest hairs creeping out of the open top button, and the beads of sweat on his forehead. He seemed the very model of a man. She stood at his elbow and chipped in, sorting out the problem. At the time he seemed grateful. Only later did she realize it was the worst thing she could have done: introducing herself at the moment of his humiliation. He would rather have slept in the corridor than be rescued by some bint wearing a photograph of herself pinned over her left tit. All the same, he asked her to meet him after he’d showered and have a drink in the bar. “Well, Colette”—he read her name off her badge. “Well, Colette, you’re not a bad-looking girl.”

Gavin had no sense of humour about himself, and neither did she. So there was a thing, a thing they had in common. He had relatives in Uxbridge, it turned out, and like her he had no interest in getting beyond the hotel bar and into the city. She didn’t sleep with him till the final night of the conference, because she didn’t want to seem cheap; but she walked back in a daze to her own room, and stared at herself in the full-length mirror, and said, Colette, you’re not a bad-looking girl. Her skin was a matt beige. Her beige hair flipped cheekily at chin level, giving her a surrogate smile. Her teeth were sound. Her limbs were straight. Her hips were small. Straight-cut silk trousers covered her tough cyclist’s legs. Her bosom was created by a garment with two curved underwires, and boosted by padding that slid into a pocket so you could remove it; but why would anyone want to do that? Without taking her eyes from her own image, she cupped her hands beneath her breasts. Gavin would have the whole of her: all that was hers to give.

They saw a converted flat in Whitton, and thought it might be a good investment. It was leasehold, of course; otherwise, Colette would have done the conveyancing herself, from a DIY guide. As it was, she rang around the solicitors and beat them down to a price, making sure she got their best offers in writing. Once they had moved into the flat, Gavin said, let’s split the bills. Kids, he said, were not his priority at this time in his life. She got an IUD fitted, as she didn’t trust the Pill; against the workings of nature, some mechanical contrivance seemed called for. Later he would say, you’re unnatural, you’re cold, I wanted kids but you went off and got this lump of poisoned plastic stuck up you, and you didn’t tell me. This was not strictly true; she had cut out an article about the topic from a trade mag passed to her by an ex-colleague who worked for a medical supplies company, and she had put it in the back pocket of his briefcase, where she had thought he might see it.

They got married. People did. It was the tag end of the Thatcher/Major years and people held a wedding to show off. They didn’t have friends, so they invited everybody they knew. The wedding took six months to plan. When she woke up on the day, she had an urge to run downstairs, and howl in the streets of Whitton. Instead she pressed her frock and climbed into it. She was alone in the flat; Gavin was on his stag night, and she wondered what she would do if he didn’t turn up: marry herself? The wedding was designed to be exhausting, to wring value from each moment they had paid for. So they could recover, she had booked ten days in the Seychelles: sea view, balcony, private taxi transfer, and fruit in room on arrival.

Gavin turned up just in time, his eyes pouched and his skin grey. After the registrar, they went out to a hotel in Berkshire with a trout steam running through the grounds and fishing flies in glass cases on the walls of the bar, and French windows leading onto a stone terrace. She was photographed against the stone balustrade, with Gavin’s little nieces pawing her skirts. They had a marquee, and a band. They had gravlax with dill sauce, served on black plates, and a chicken dish that tasted, Gavin said, like an airline dinner. The Uxbridge people on both sides came, and never spoke to each other. Gavin kept belching. A niece was sick, luckily not on Colette’s dress, which was hired. Her tiara, though, was bought: a special order to fit her narrow skull. Later she didn’t know what to do with it. Space was tight in the flat in Whitton, and her drawers were crammed with packets of tights, which she bought by the dozen, and with sachets and scent balls to perfume her knickers. When she reached in amongst her underwear, the faux pearls of the tiara would roll beneath her fingers, and its gilt lattices and scrolls would remind her that her life was open, unfolding. It seemed mercenary to advertise it in the local paper. Besides, Gavin said, there can’t be two people with a head shaped like yours.

The pudding at their wedding breakfast was strawberries and meringue stacked up in a tower, served on frosted glass platters sprinkled with little green flecks, which proved to be not chopped mint leaves but finely snipped chives. Uxbridge ate it with a stout appetite; after all, they’d already done raw fish. But Colette—once her suspicion was verified by a tiny taste at the tip of her tongue—had flown out in her tiara, cornered the duty manager, and told him she proposed to sue the hotel in the small claims court. They paid her off, as she knew they would, being afraid of the publicity; she and Gavin went back there gratis for their anniversary dinner, and enjoyed a bottle of house champagne. It was too wet that night to walk by the trout stream: a lowering, misty evening in June. Gavin said it was too hot, and walked out onto the terrace as she was finishing her main course. By then the marriage was over, anyway.

It was no particular sexual incompatibility that had broken up her marriage: Gavin liked it on Sunday mornings, and she had no objection. Neither was there, as she learned later, any particular planetary incompatibility. It was just that the time had come in her relationship with Gavin when, as people said, she could see no future in it.

When she arrived at this point, she bought a large-format softback called What Your Handwriting Reveals. She was disappointed to find that your hand-writing can’t shed any light on your future. It only tells of character, and your present and your past, and her present and her past she was clear about. As for her character, she didn’t seem to have any. It was because of her character that she was reduced to going to bookshops.

The following week she returned the handwriting book to the shop. They were having a promotional offer—bring it back if it doesn’t thrill. She had to tell the boy behind the counter why, exactly, it didn’t; I suppose, she said, after so many years of word processing, I have no handwriting left. Her eyes flickered over him, from his head downwards, to where the counter cut off the view; she was already, she realized, looking for a man she could move on to. “Can I see the manager?” she asked, and amiably, scratching his barnet, the boy replied, “You’re looking at him.” “Really?” she said. She had never seen it before: a manager who dressed out of a dumpster. He gave her back her money, and she browsed the shelves, and picked up a book about tarot cards. “You’ll need a pack to go with that,” the boy said, when she got to the cash desk. “Otherwise you won’t get the idea. There are different sorts, shall I show you? There’s Egyptian tarot. There’s Shakespeare tarot. Do you like Shakespeare?”

As if, she thought. She was the last customer of the evening. He closed up the shop and they went to the pub. He had a room in a shared flat. In bed he kept pressing her clit with his finger, as if he were inputting a sale on the cash machine: saying, Helen, is that all right for you? She’d given him a wrong name, and she hated it, that he couldn’t see through to what she was really called. She’d thought Gavin was useless: but honestly! In the end she faked it, because she was bored and she was getting cramp. The Shakespeare boy said, Helen, that was great for me too.

It was the tarot that started her off. Before that she had been just like everybody, reading her horoscope in the morning paper. She wouldn’t have described herself as superstitious or interested in the occult in any way. The next book she bought—from a different bookshop—was An Encyclopedia of the Psychic Arts. Occult, she discovered, meant hidden. She was beginning to feel that everything of interest was hidden. And none of it in the obvious places; don’t, for example, look in trousers.

She had left that original tarot pack in the boy’s room, inadvertently. She wondered if he had ever taken it out and looked at the pictures; whether he ever thought of her, a mysterious stranger, a passing Queen of Hearts. She thought of buying another set, but what she read in the handbook baffled and bored her. Seventy-eight cards! Better employ someone qualified to read them for you. She began to visit a woman in Isleworth, but it turned out that her specialty was the crystal ball. The object sat between them on a black velvet cloth; she had expected it to be clear, because that’s what they said, crystal-clear, but to look into it was like looking into a cloud bank or into drifting fog.

“The clear ones are glass, dear,” the Sensitive explained. “You won’t get anything from those.” She rested her veined hands on the black velvet. “It’s the flaws that are vital,” she said. “The flaws are what you pay for. You will find some readers who prefer the black mirror. That is an option, of course.”

Colette raised her eyebrows.

“Onyx,” the woman said. “The best are beyond price. The more you look—but you have to know how to look—the more you see stirring in the depths.”

Colette asked straight out and heard that her crystal ball had set her back 500 pounds. “And then only because I have a special friend.” The psychic gained, in Colette’s eyes, a deal of prestige. She was avid to part with her 20 pounds for the reading. She drank in everything the woman said, and when she hit the Isleworth pavement, moss growing between its cracks, she was unable to remember a word of it.

She consulted a palmist a few times, and had her horoscope cast. Then she had Gavin’s done. She wasn’t sure that his chart was valid, because she couldn’t specify the time of his birth. “What do you want to know that for?” he’d said, when she asked him. She said it was of general interest to her, and he glared at her with extreme suspicion.

“I suppose you don’t know, do you?” she said. “I could ring your mum.”

“I very much doubt,” he’d said, “that my mother would have retained that piece of useless information, her brain being somewhat overburdened in my opinion with things like where is my plastic washball for my Persil, and what is the latest development in bloody EastEnders.”

The astrologer was unfazed by her ignorance. “Round it up,” he said, “round it down. Twelve noon is what we use. We always do it for animals.”

“For animals?” she’d said. “They have their horoscope done, do they?”

“Oh, certainly. It’s a valuable service, you see, for the caring owner who has a problem with a pet. Imagine, for instance, if you kept falling off your horse. You’d need to know, is this an ideal pairing? It could be a matter of life or death.”

“And do people know when their horse was born?”

“Frankly, no. That’s why we have a strategy to approximate. And as for your partner—if we say noon that’s fine, but we then need latitude and longitude—so where do we imagine Hubby first saw the light of day?”

Colette sniffed. “He won’t say.”

“Probably a Scorpio ascendant there. Controls by disinformation. Or could be Pisces. Makes mysteries where none needed. Just joking! Relax and think back for me. His mummy must have dropped a hint at some point. Where exactly did the dear chap pop out, into this breathing world scarce half made up?”

“He grew up in Uxbridge. But you know, she might have had him in hospital.”

“So it could have been anywhere along the A40?”

“Could we just say, London?”

“We’ll put him on the meridian. Always a wise choice.”

After this incident, she found it difficult to regard Gavin as fully human. He was standardized on zero degrees longitude and twelve noon, like some bucking bronco, or a sad mutt with no pedigree. She did call his mum, one evening when she’d had a half bottle of wine and was feeling perverse.

“Renee, is that you?” she said.

Renee said, “How did you get my name?”

“It’s me,” she said, and Renee replied. “I’ve got replacement windows, and replacement doors. I’ve got a conservatory and the loft conversion’s coming next week. I never give to charity, thank you, and I’ve planned my holiday for this year, and I had a new kitchen when you were last in my area.”

“It’s about Gavin,” she said. “It’s me, Colette. I need to know when he was born.”

“Take my name off your list,” her mother-in-law said. “And if you must call me, could you not call during my programme? It’s one of my few remaining pleasures.” There was a pause, as if she were going to put the receiver down. Then she spoke again. “Not that I need any others. I’ve had my suite recovered. I have a spa bath already. And a case of vintage wine. And a stair lift to help me keep my independence. Have you got that? Are you taking notice? Bugger off.”

Click.

Colette held the phone. Daughter-in-law of fourteen months, spurned by his mother. She replaced the receiver, and walked into the kitchen. She stood by the double sink, mastering herself. “Gavin,” she called, “do you want peas or green beans?”

There was no answer. She stalked into the sitting room. Gavin, his bare feet on the sofa arm, was reading What Car?

“Peas or green beans?” she asked.

No reply.

“Gavin!” she said.

“With wot?”

“Cutlets.”

“What’s that?”

“Lamb. Lamb chops.”

“Okay,” he said. “Whatever. Both.”

“You can’t.” Her voice shook. “Two green veg, you can’t.”

“Who says?”

“Your mother,” she said; she felt she could say anything, as he never listened.

“When?”

“Just now on the phone.”

“My mother was on the phone?”

“Just now.”

“Bloody amazing.” He shook his head and flicked over a page.

“Why? Why should it be?”

“Because she’s dead.”

“What? Renee?” Colette sat down on the sofa arm: later, when she told the story, she would say, well, at that point, my legs went from under me. But she would never be able to recapture the sudden fright, the weakness that ran through her body, her anger, her indignation, the violent exasperation that possessed her. She said, “What the hell do you mean, she’s dead?”

“It happened this morning. My sis rang. Carole.”

“Is this a joke? I need to know. Is this a joke? Because if it is, Gavin, I’ll kneecap you.”

Gavin raised his eyebrows, as if to say, why would it be funny?

“I didn’t suggest it was,” she said at once: why wait for him to speak? “I asked if it was your idea of a joke.”

“God help anybody who made a joke around here.”

Colette laid her hand on her rib cage, behind which something persistently fluttered. She stood up. She walked into the kitchen. She stared at the ceiling. She took a deep breath. She came back. “Gavin?”

“Mm?”

“She’s really dead?”

“Mm.”

She wanted to hit him. “How?”

“Heart.”

“Oh, God! Have you no feeling? You can sit there, going peas or beans—”

“You went that,” he said reasonably.

“Weren’t you going to tell me? If I hadn’t said, your mother was on the phone—”

Gavin yawned. “What’s the hurry? I’d have told you.”

“You mean you might just have mentioned it? When you got around to it? When would that have been?”

“After the food.” She gaped at him. He said, with some dignity, “I can’t mention when I’m hungry.”

Colette bunched her fingers into fists, and held them at chest height. She was short of breath, and the flutter inside her chest had subdued to a steady thump. At the same time an uneasy feeling filled her, that anything she could do was inadequate; she was performing someone else’s gestures, perhaps from an equivalent TV moment where news of a sudden death is received. But what are the proper gestures when a ghost’s been on the phone? She didn’t know. “Please. Gavin,” she said. “Put down What Car? Just … look at me, will you? Now tell me what happened.”

“Nothing.” He threw the magazine down. “Nothing happened.”

“But where was she? Was she at home?”

“No. Getting her shopping. In Safeway. Apparently.”

“And?”

Gavin rubbed his forehead. He seemed to be making an honest effort. “I suppose she was pushing her trolley.”

“Was she on her own?”

“Dunno. Yes.”

“And then?”

“She fell over.”

“She didn’t die there, did she? In the aisle?”

“Nah, they got her to the hospital. So no worries about the death certificate.”

“What a relief,” she said grimly.

Carole, it seemed, was proposing to get the bungalow on the market as soon as possible, with Sidgewick and Staff, who for sole agency charged 2 percent on completion, and promised unlimited colour advertising and national tie-ins. “There should be a good payout,” he said. “The place is worth a few quid.”

That was why, he explained, he was reading the new edition of What Car? Renee’s will would bring him nearer to what he most coveted in life, which was a Porsche 911.

“Aren’t you upset?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “We’ve all got to go, haven’t we? What’s it to you? It’s not as if you ever bothered with her.”

“And she lived in a bungalow, Renee?”

“’Course she did.” Gavin picked up his magazine and rolled it up in his hands, as if she were a wasp and he was going to swat her. “We went over for our lunch, that Sunday.”

“No, we didn’t. We never went.”

“Only because you kept cancelling us.”

It was true. She’d hoped she could keep Renee at arm’s length; the wedding reception had proved her to have a coarse joke habit and slipping false teeth. The teeth weren’t all that was false. “She told me,” she said to Gavin, “that she had a stair lift installed. Which, if she lived in a bungalow, she couldn’t have.”

“When? When did she tell you that?”

“On the phone just now.”

“Hello? Hello? Anyone at home?” Gavin asked. “Are you ever stupid? I told you she’s dead.”

Alerted by the mutiny on her face, he rose from the sofa and slapped her with What Car? She picked up the Yellow Pages and threatened to take out his eye. After he had slunk off to bed, hugging his expectations, she went back into the kitchen and grilled the cutlets. The peas and green beans she fed to the waste disposal; she hated vegetables. She ate the lamb with her fingers, her teeth scraping the bone. Her tongue came out, and licked the last sweetness from the meat. She couldn’t work out what was worse, that Renee had answered the phone after she was dead, or that she had answered the phone on purpose to lie to her and tell her to bugger off. She threw the bones down the waste disposal too, and rejoiced as the grinder laboured. She rinsed her fingers and wiped them on a kitchen roll.

In the bedroom, she inspected Gavin, spread-eagled across the available space. He was naked and snoring; his mag, rolled, was thrust under his pillow. That, she thought, is how much it means to him: the death of his only mother. She stood frowning down at him; her toe touched something hard and cold. It was a glass tumbler, lolling on its side, melted ice dribbling from its mouth onto the carpet. She picked it up. The breath of spirits hit her nostrils, and made her flinch. She walked into the kitchen and clicked the tumbler down on the draining board. In the dark tiny hall, she hauled Gavin’s laptop from its case. She lugged it into the sitting room and plugged it into the mains. She copied the files she thought might interest her, and erased his crucial data for tomorrow. In terms of life documentation, Gavin was less than some animal. He routinely misled her: but was it any wonder? What sort of upbringing could he have had, from a woman with false teeth who told lies after she was dead?

She left the machine humming, and went back into the bedroom. She opened the wardrobe and went through Gavin’s pockets. The word “rifled” came to her: “she rifled through his pockets.” He stirred once or twice in his sleep, reared up, snorted, collapsed back onto the mattress. I could kill him, she thought, as he lies here, or just maim him if I liked. She found a bunch of credit card receipts in his knicker drawer; her index finger shuffled through them. She found newspaper ads for sex lines: Spicy lesbo chicks!

She packed a bag. Surely he would wake? Drawers clicked, opening and shutting. She glanced over her shoulder. Gavin stirred, made a sort of whinny, and settled back again into sleep. She reached down to unplug her hair dryer, wrapped the flex around her hand, and stood thinking. She was entitled to half the equity in the flat; if he would embrace the car loan, she would continue paying off the wedding. She hesitated for a final moment. Her foot was on the wet patch the ice had left. Automatically she plucked a tissue from an open box and blotted the the carpet. Her fingers squeezed, the paper reduced itself to wet pulp. She walked away, brushing her hands together to jettison it.

Gavin’s screen saver had come up. Colette slotted a floppy into his drive, and overwrote his programs. She had heard of women who, before departing, scissored up their husband’s clothes. But Gavin’s clothes, in their existing state, were punishment enough. She had heard of women who performed castration; but she didn’t want to go to jail. No, let’s see how he gets on without his bits and bytes, she thought. With one keystroke, she wrecked his operating system.

She went down to the south coast to see a noted psychometrist, Natasha. She didn’t know then, of course, that Natasha would figure in her later life. At the time, it was just another hope she grappled with, a hope of making sense of herself; it was just another item in her strained monthly budget.

The flat was two blocks back from the sea. She parked with difficulty and at some distance. She wasted time looking for the street numbers. When she found the right door she rang the bell and spoke into the intercom: “I’m your eleven-thirty.”

Without a word, the psychic buzzed her up; but she thought she had heard a cough, stifling a little laugh. Her cheeks burned. She ran up three flights and as soon as Natasha opened the door she said, “I’m not late.”

“No, dear. You’re my eleven-thirty.”

“You really ought to tell your clients where to park.”

The psychic smiled tightly. She was a sharp little bleached blonde with a big jaw, common as a centrefold. “What?” she said. “You think I should exercise my powers and keep a space free?”

“I meant you should send a map.”

She turned to lead the way: tight high bottom in the kind of jeans that acts as a corset. She’s too old, Colette thought, for denim; shouldn’t somebody tell her?

“Sit there,” Natasha said precisely, dipping her false nail.

“The sun’s in my eyes,” Colette said.

“Diddums,” said Natasha.

A sad-eyed icon drooped at her, from a cheap gilt frame on the wall; a mist washed up from the sea. She sat and flipped open her shoulder bag: “Do you want the cheque now?”

She wrote it. She waited for the offer of a cup of herb tea. It didn’t come. She almost had hopes of Natasha; she was nasty, but there was a businesslike briskness about her that she’d never found in any psychic so far.

“Anything to give me?” Natasha said.

She dived into her bag and passed over her mother’s wedding ring.

Natasha twirled it around her forefinger. “Quite a smiley lady.”

“Oh, smiley,” Colette said. “I concede that.” She passed over a pair of cuff links that had belonged to her dad.

“Is that the best you can manage?”

“I don’t have anything else of his.”

“Sad,” Natasha said. “Can’t have been much of a relationship, can it? I sense that men don’t warm to you, somehow.” She sat back in her chair, her eyes far away.

Colette waited, respectfully silent.

“Well, look, I’m not getting much from these.” She jiggled the cuff links in her hand. “They’re definitely your dad’s, are they? The thing is, with cuff links, with dads, they get them for Christmas and then it’s, ‘Oh, thanks, thanks a bunch, just what I always needed!’”

Colette nodded. “But what can you do? What can you get, for men?”

“Bottle of Scotch?”

“Yes, but you want something that will last.”

“So he stuffs them in a drawer? Forgets he’s got them?”

She wanted to say, why do you think men don’t warm to me? Instead she opened her bag again. “My wedding ring,” she said. “I suppose you didn’t think I’d been married?”

Natasha held out a flat, open palm. Colette placed the ring on it. “Oh dear,” Natasha said. “Oh dear oh dear.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve already left.”

“Sometimes you’ve got to cut your losses,” Natasha agreed. “Well, sweetie, what else can I tell you?”

“It’s possible I might be psychic myself,” Colette said casually. “Certain, really. I dialled a number and a dead person answered.”

“That’s unusual.” Natasha’s eyes flitted sideways, in a calculating way. “Which psychic line offers that service?”

“I wasn’t calling a psychic line. I was calling my mother-in-law. It turned out she was dead.”

“So what gave you the idea?”

“No—no, look, you have to understand how it happened. I didn’t know she was dead when I rang. I didn’t know till afterwards.”

“So she was dead when you called? But you didn’t realize?”

“Yes.”

“So she came over from beyond?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say to you?”

“She said she’d got a stair lift. It was a lie.”

“Well, perhaps she’s got one in Spirit?”

Colette considered. Renee had said there was no comfort she lacked. “I’m not really bothered about that aspect, about what she said, only that she picked the phone up. That she answered. At first that was what bothered me, about the stair lift—that she didn’t even say the truth—but then when I thought about it, her saying anything seemed to be the most surprising … . Well, you know.”

Colette’s voice died in her throat. She was not used to speaking her thoughts. Life with Gavin had discouraged her.

“Nothing like that’s ever happened to me before, but I think it proves I must have a gift. I’m a bit bored with my job and I wouldn’t mind a change. I wondered about this, you know? If there’s much money in it.”

Natasha laughed. “Well, if you think you could stand the pace. You have to train.”

“Oh do you? It’s not enough to be able to do it?”

“Look,” Natasha said, “I don’t want to sound hostile, but isn’t it possible that you’re being a bit naïve? I mean you’ve got a good career now, I can see that. So why waste it? You’d need to build up your psychic skills. You can’t expect to start cold at your age.”

“I beg your pardon?” Colette said. “At my age?”

“I started at twelve,” Natasha said. “You’re not telling me you’re twelve, are you?” With one hand, she lazily shuffled her cards together. “Want me to see what I get?” She began to lay out a spread, her nails clicking on the back of each card. “Look, if you’re going to work with higher powers, it will happen. Nothing will stop it. But you’ll get the here-and-now sorted, if you’ll heed my advice.” She looked up. “Letter M comes to mind.”

Colette thought. “I don’t know anyone of that letter.” She thought, M for Man?

“Someone coming into your life. Not yet. An older bloke. Not too keen on you at first, I must say.”

“But then?”

“All’s well that ends well,” Natasha said. “I suppose.”

She had walked away, disappointed; when she got back to her car, she had been ticketed. After that she had gone for crystal healing, and had some private Reiki sessions. She arranged to meet Gavin in a new bar called Peppermint Plaza. He arrived before her, and when she walked in he was sitting on a pale green leather-look banquette, a bottle of Mexican lager planted in front of him, leafing through Thames Valley Autotrader.

“Renee’s money not come through yet?” she asked. She slid into the seat opposite. “When it does, you could use some of it to buy me out of the flat.”

“If you think I’m giving up the chance of a decent car, then no way,” said Gavin. “If I don’t get the Porsche this is what I’m getting, I’m getting this Lancia.” He flopped the magazine down on the table. “There’s one here.” He turned the picture around obligingly so it was the right way up for her. “Recarro seats. Full spec. Seriously speedy.”

“Put it on the market then. The flat. If you can’t buy me out.”

“You said that. You said it before. I said, yes. I agree. So don’t go on about it. Okay?”

There was a silence. Colette looked around. “Quite nice here. Quiet.”

“Bit girly.”

“That’s probably why I like it. Being a girl.” Her knees touched his, under the table. She tried to pull her chair away, but it was bolted to the floor.

Gavin said, “I want fifty percent of the bills till the flat’s sold.”

“I’ll pay half the monthly service charge.” Colette pushed his magazine back across the table. “I won’t pay half the utilities.”

“What’s that, utilities?”

“Gas and electric. Why should I pay to keep you warm?”

“I’ll tell you what, you stuffed me with a huge sodding phone bill. You can pay that.”

“It’s your phone too.”

“Yeah, but I’m not on it all night, blah-bloody-blah to some bint I’ve sat next to all day and I’ll be seeing again the next morning. And it’s not me phoning premium-rate lines to what’s it called, bloody predictionists, bloody psychic lines at a quid a minute?”

“Actually, sex lines are premium rate too.”

“Oh well, you would know about that, wouldn’t you?” Gavin gathered up his car magazine, as if to shield it from her. “You’re not normal.”

She sighed. She couldn’t summon up the energy to say, “I beg your pardon, not normal, what do you mean?” Any abstraction, indirection, or allusion was wasted on Gavin, and in fact even the most straightforward form of communication—other than a poke in the eye—was a challenge to his attention span. There hadn’t, so far as she’d understood, been any dispute between them about what they did in the bedroom—it had seemed fairly straightforward stuff, though she was fairly ignorant and limited, she supposed, and Gavin, certainly, he was fairly ignorant and limited. But after the marriage is over, maybe that’s what men do; they decide it was the sex that was wrong, because it’s something they can communicate over a drink, something they can turn into a story, snigger over; it’s an explanation they can give themselves, for what would otherwise remain the complete mystery of human relationships. There were other mysteries, which loomed large to her and hardly loomed at all for Gavin: what are we here for, what will happen next? It was no use trying to explain to him that without the fortune-tellers she had become afraid to act at all; that she liked to know that things were her fate, that she didn’t like life to be arbitrary. It was no use telling him either that she thought she might be psychic herself. The incident of the posthumous phone call, if it had ever sunk into his mind, had been chemically erased by the vodka he had drunk the night she moved out; this was lucky for her, because when next day he found his computer trashed he thought he had only himself to blame.

“Don’t you want to ask anything?” she asked. “Like where I’m living?”

“So where are you living, Colette?” he said sarcastically.

“With a friend.”

“Jesus, you’ve got a friend?”

“But from next week I’ve arranged a house share in Twickenham. I’ll have to start paying rent, so I need the flat to be sold.”

“All we need is a buyer.”

“No, all we need is a seller.”

“What?”

“Put it on the market.”

“I have. Last week.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” She slammed her glass down. “Why didn’t you just come out and say that?”

“I would if I could get a word in edgewise. Besides, I thought you’d get a tip-off from the spirits. I thought they’d say, a strange man is walking around your bedroom with a steel measure.”

Colette threw herself back in her seat; but it was strangely curved, and pushed her forward again, so her diaphragm was against the table’s edge. “So how much did they suggest?” He told her. “That’s far too low. They must think you’re an idiot. And they could be right. Leave it, Gavin, leave it. I’ll get on to it tomorrow. I’ll phone them myself.”

“They said, realistic price for a quick sale.”

“More likely they’ve got a mate lined up, who they’re selling it on to.”

“That’s your trouble.” Gavin scratched his armpit. “You’re paranoid.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You use words without any idea what they mean. All you know is stupid jargon out of car mags. Recarro seats. Spicy lesbo chicks. That’s all you know.”

Gavin turned down his mouth and shrugged. “So. You want anything?”

“Yes. I want my life back.”

“From the flat.”

“I’ll make a list.”

“Anything you want now?”

“The kitchen knives.”

“Why?”

“They’re good ones. Japanese. You don’t want them. You won’t cook.”

“I might want to cut something.”

“Use your teeth.”

He took a pull on his lager. She finished her spritzer.

“If that’s all?” she said. She gathered her bag and her jacket. “I want everything in writing, about the flat. Tell the agents, all the paperwork must be copied to me. I want full consultation at every point.” She stood up. “I’ll be ringing every two days to check on progress.”

“I’ll look forward to that.”

“Not you. The agent. Have you got their card?”

“No. Not on me. Come back and get it.”

Alarm flared inside her. Was he intending to mug her, or rape her? “Send it to me,” she said.

“I don’t have your address.”

“Send it to the office.”

When she got to the door it occurred to her that it might have been his single, clumsy effort at reconciliation. She glanced back. His head was down, and he was leafing through his magazine again. No chance, anyway. She would rather take out her appendix with nail scissors than go back to Gavin.

The encounter, though, had bruised her. Gavin was the first person, she thought, that I was ever really frank and honest with; at home, there wasn’t much premium on frankness, and she’d never had a girlfriend she was really close to, not since she was fifteen. She’d opened her heart to him, such as it was. And for what? Probably, when she opened her heart, he hadn’t even been listening. The night of Renee’s death she had seen him as he truly was: callow and ignorant and not even ashamed of it, not even asking her why she was so panicked, not even appreciating that his mother’s death woudn’t, by itself, have affected her like that: but shouldn’t it have affected him? Had he even bothered to go to the crematorium, or had he left it all to Carole? When she thought back to that night, which (she now knew) was the last night of her marriage, a peculiar disjointed, unstrung sensation occurred in her head, as if her thoughts and her feelings had been joined together by a zip, and the zip had broken. She had not told Gavin that in the days after she walked out, she had twice dialled Renee’s home number, just to see what would happen. What happened was nothing, of course. The phone rang in the empty house—bungalow—whatever.

It put a dent in her belief in her psychic powers. She knew, of course—her recollection was sharp if Gavin’s wasn’t—that the woman on the phone had at no point actually identified herself. She hadn’t said she wasn’t Renee, but she hadn’t agreed that she was, either. It was just possible that she had misdialled, and that she had been talking to some irate stranger. If pushed, she would have said it was her ma-in-law, but it was true that she didn’t know her voice all that well, and the woman had lacked the trademark lisp that was caused by Renee’s slipping teeth. Was that significant? It could be. Nothing else of a psychic nature seemed to manifest. She moved into the Twickenham house share and discovered that it made her unhappy to live with women younger than herself. She’d never thought of herself as a romantic, God knows, but the way they talked about men was near-pornographic, and the way they belched and put their feet on the furniture was like Gavin over again. She didn’t have to sleep with them, but that was the only difference. Every morning the kitchen was strewn with Häagen-Dazs tubs, and lager cans, and polystyrene trays from lo-fat microwave dinners, with a scraping of something beige and jellified left in the bottom.

So where was she going in life? What was she for? No man with the initial M had come into her life. She was stagnating, and struck by how quickly a temporary situation can become desolating and permanent. Soon she needed her fortune told more than ever. But her regular clairvoyant, the one she trusted most, lived in Brondesbury, which was a long way for her to travel, and kept cats, to which she developed an allergy. She got herself a train timetable, and began to work her way out, each weekend, from the London suburbs to the dormitory towns and verdant conurbations of Berkshire and Surrey. So it came about that one Saturday afternoon in spring, she saw Alison perform in Windsor, at the Victoria Room in the Harte and Garter.

It was a two-day Psychic Extravaganza. She had not prebooked, but because of her general beigeness and her inoffensive manner, she was good at queue-jumping. She had sat modestly in the third row, her whippy body crouching inside her blouson jacket, her khaki-coloured hair pushed behind her ears. Alison had fingered her right away. The lucky opals flashed fire in her direction. “I’m getting a broken wedding ring. It’s this lady here in beige. Is it you, darling?”

Mutely, Colette held up her hand, the tight gold band intact. She had started wearing it again, she hardly knew why; maybe just to spite Natasha in Hove, to show that a man had warmed to her, at least once.

Impatience crossed Alison’s face: then her smile wiped the expression away. “I know you still wear his ring. Maybe he thinks of you; maybe you think of him?”

“Only with hatred,” Colette said.

Al said, “Whatever. But you’re on your own for now, darling.” Al had held out her arms to the audience. “I see images, I can’t help it. For a marriage, I see a ring. For a separation, a divorce, I see a ring that’s broken. The line of the break is the line of the crack in this young girl’s heart.”

There was a murmur of sympathy from the audience. Colette nodded soberly, acknowledging what was said. Natasha had said much the same, when she held the wedding ring, as if in tweezers, between those dodgy false nails of hers. But Natasha had been a spiteful little slag, and the woman on the platform seemed to have no spite in her; Natasha had implied she was too old for new experiences, but Alison spoke as if she had her life before her. She spoke as if her feelings and thoughts could be mended; she imagined popping into the dry cleaners and getting the broken zip replaced, the zip that joined her thought to her feelings and joined her up inside.

This was Colette’s introduction to the metaphorical side of life. She realized that she hadn’t comprehended half that the fortune-tellers had said to her. She might as well have stood in the street in Brondesbury ripping up tenners. When they told you something, you were supposed to look at it all ways up; you were supposed to hear it, understand it, feel all around its psychological dimensions. You weren’t supposed to fight it but to let the words sink into you. You shouldn’t query and quibble and try and beat the psychic out of her convictions; you should listen with your inner ear and you should accept it, exactly what she said, if the feeling it gave you checked in with your feeling inside. Alison was offering hope and hope was the feeling she wanted to have, hope of redemption from the bathroom bickering of the house share, from finding other women’s bras stuffed under a sofa cushion when she flopped down after work with the Evening Standard: and from the sound of her house-mates rutting at dawn.

“Listen,” Alison said. “What I want to say to you is, don’t shed tears. The fact is, you barely started with this man. He didn’t know what marriage was. He didn’t know how to make an equal relationship. He liked—gadgets, am I right? Hi-fi, cars, that stuff; that was what he related to.”

“Oh yes,” Colette chirped up. “But then wouldn’t it be true of most men?” She stopped herself. “Sorry,” she said.

“True of most men?” Al queried gently. “I’ll give you that. The point is, though, was it true of him? Was it true that at the great highlights of your life, he was thinking about sports seats and sound systems? But look, darling, there is a man for you. A man who will be in your life for years and years to come.” She frowned. “I want to say—oh, you know, for better or worse—but you’ve been married, chuck, so you know all that.”

Colette took a deep breath. “Does he have the initial M?”

“Don’t prompt me, dear,” Al said. “He’s not in your life yet, but he’s coming into it.”

“So I don’t know him now?”

“Not yet.”

Oh, good, Colette thought; she had just done a quick mind scan of the men she already knew. “Will I meet him at work?”

Alison closed her eyes. “Sort of,” she offered. She frowned. “More through work, than at work. Through work, is how I’d put it. First you’ll be sort of colleagues, then it’ll get closer. You’ll have a—what’s the word?—a long association. It may take a bit of time to get close. He has to warm to you.” She chuckled. “His dress sense is a bit lacking, but I expect you’ll soon fix that, darling.” Alison smiled around at the audience. “She’ll just have to wait and see. Exciting, isn’t it?”

“It is.” Colette nodded. She kept up an inner monologue. It is, it is. I have hope, I have hope. I will get a salary rise—no, not that. I will get a place of my own—no, not that. I must, I had better, I ought to look around for a new job, I ought to shake my life up and open myself to opportunities. But whatever I do, something will happen. I am tired. I am tired of taking care of myself. Something will happen that is out of my hands.

Alison did a few other things that night at the Harte and Garter. She told a depressed-looking woman that she’d be going on a cruise. The woman at once straightened her collapsed spine and revealed in an awestruck voice that she had received a cruise brochure by the morning post, which she had sent for because her silver wedding was coming up shortly, and she thought it was time they exported their happiness somewhere other than the Isle of Wight.

“Well I want to say to you,” Alison had told her, “that you will be going on that cruise; yes you will.” Colette marvelled at the way Alison could spend the woman’s money. “And I’ll tell you something else; you’re going to have a lovely time. You’re going to have the time of your life.”

The woman sat up even straighter. “Oh, thank you, thank you!” she said. She seemed to take on a sort of glow. Colette could see it even though she was four rows away. It encouraged her to think that somebody could hand over a fiver at the door and get so much hope in return. It was cheap, compared to what she was paying in Brondesbury and elsewhere.

After the event, Colette walked to the Riverside station in the chilly evening air. The sun made a red channel down the centre of the Thames. Swans were bobbing in the milky water near the banks. Over towards Datchet, outside the pub called the Donkey House, some French exchange students were dipping one of their number in the water. She could hear their excited cries; they warmed her heart. She stood on the bridge and waved to them with a big sweep of her arm, as if she were bringing a light aircraft in to land.

I won’t come back tomorrow, she thought. I will, I won’t, I will.

The next morning, Sunday, her journey was interrupted by engineering works. She had hoped to be first in the queue but that was not to be. As she stepped out of the station, there was a burst of sunshine. The High Street was crammed with coaches. She walked uphill towards the castle and the Harte and Garter. The great Round Tower brooded over the street, and at its feet, like a munching worm, wound a stream of trippers gnawing at burgers.

It was eleven o’clock and the Extravaganza was in full spate. The tables and stands were set up in the hall where the medium had done the demonstration the night before. Spiritual healing was going on in one corner, Kirlian photography in another, and each individual psychic’s table, swathed in chenille or fringed silk, bore her stock-in-trade of tarot pack, crystal ball, charms, incense, pendulums, and bells—plus a small tape machine so the client could have a record of her consultation.

Almost all the psychics were women. There were just two men, lugubrious and neglected: Merlin and Merlyn, according to their name cards. One had on his table a bronze wizard, waving a staff, and the other had what appeared to be a shrunken head on a stand. There was no queue at his table. She wandered up.

“What’s that?” she mouthed, pointing. It was difficult to make yourself heard; the roar of prediction rose into the air and bounced around in the rafters.

“My spirit guide,” the man said. “Well, a model of him.”

“Can I touch it?”

“If you must, dear.”

She ran her fingers over the thing. It wasn’t skin but leather, a sort of leather mask bound to a wooden skull. Its brow was encircled by a cord into which were stuck the stumps of quills. “Oh, I get it,” she said. “He’s a Red Indian.”

“Native American,” the man corrected. “The actual model is a hundred years old. It was passed on to me by my teacher, who got it from his teacher. Blue Eagle has guided three generations of psychics and healers.”

“It must be hard if you’re a bloke. To know what to put on your table. That doesn’t look too poncey.”

“Look, do you want a reading, or not?”

“I don’t think so,” Colette said. To hear a psychic at all, you would almost have to be cheek to cheek, and she didn’t fancy such intimacy with Blue Eagle’s mate. “It’s a bit sordid,” she said. “This head. Off-putting. Why don’t you chuck it and get a new model?” She straightened up. She looked around the room. “Excuse me,” she said, shouting over a client’s head to a wizened old bat in a shawl, “excuse me, but where’s the one who did the dem last night? Alison?”

The old woman jerked her thumb. “Three down. In the corner there. Mind, she knows how to charge. If you hang on till I’m finished here, I can do you psychometry, cards, and palms, thirty quid all in.”

“How very unprofessional,” Colette said coldly.

Then she spotted her. A client, beaming, rose from the red leatherette chair, and the queue parted to let her through. Colette saw Alison, very briefly, put her face in her hands: before raising it, smiling, to the next applicant for her services.

Even Sundays bring their ebb and flow: periods of quiet and almost peace, when sleep threatens in the overheated rooms, and then times of such confusion—the sunlight strikes in, sudden and scouring, lighting up the gewgaws on the velvet cloth—and within the space of two heartbeats, the anxiety is palpable, a baby crying, the incense choking, the music whining, more fortune-seekers pressing in at the door and backing up those inside against the tables. There is a clatter as a few Egyptian perfume bottles go flying; Mrs. Etchells, three tables down, is jawing on about the joys of motherhood; Irina is calming a sobbing adolescent with a broken engagement; the baby, wound up with colic, twisting in the arms of an unseen mother, is preying on her attention as if he were entangled in her gut.

Alison looked up and saw a woman of her own age, meagrely built, with thin fair hair lying flat against her skull. Her features were minimal, her figure that of an orphan in a storm. A question jumped into Al’s head: how would this play if you were a Victorian, if you were one of those Victorian cheats? She knew all about it; after all, Mrs. Etchells, who had trained her, almost went back to those days. In those days the dead manifested in the form of muslin, stained and smelly from the psychic’s body cavities. The dead were packed within you, so you coughed or vomited them, or drew them out of your generative organs. They blew trumpets and played portable organs; they moved the furniture; they rapped on walls; they sang hymns. They offered bouquets to the living, spirit roses bound by scented hands. Sometimes they proffered inconveniently large objects, like a horse. Sometimes they stood at your shoulder, a glowing column made flesh by the eyes of faith. She could see it easily, a picture from the past: herself in a darkened parlour, her superb shoulders rising white out of crimson velvet, and this straight flat creature at her elbow, standing in the half-light: her eyes empty as water, impersonating a spirit form.

“Would you like to come and sit?”

Not fair! the queue said. Not her turn!

“Please be patient,” Alison said sweetly. “I think someone’s trying to come through for this lady, and I daren’t keep Spirit World waiting.”

The queue fell back, murmuring. She sat down before her, the pallid meek being, like a sacrifice drained of blood. Al searched her for clues. Probably never known the joys of motherhood? Fair bet, with those tits. Oh, wait, didn’t I see her last night? Near the front, third row, left of centre, no? Broken wedding ring. Man with the gadgets. Career girl, of sorts. Not much of a career, though. Drifting. Anxious. Pains in her gut. Tension at the back of her neck, a big dead hand squeezing her spine.

On her left, Mrs. Etchells was saying, “Going on hols, are we? I see an aeroplane.” Irina was saying, yes, yes, yes, you are very sad now, but by October zey are coming, four men in a truck, and building your home extension.

Alison held out her hand to Colette. Colette put her hand in it, turned up. The narrow palm was drained of energy, almost corpselike.

I would have liked that, Al thought, all that Victorian fuss and frippery, the frocks, the spirit pianos, the men with big beards. Was she seeing herself, in a former life, in an earlier and possibly more lucrative career? Had she been famous, perhaps, a household name? Possibly; or possibly it was wish fulfillment. She supposed she had lived before, but she suspected there wasn’t much glamour attached to whatever life she’d led. Sometimes when her mind was vacant she had a fleeting vision, low-lit, monochrome, of a line of women hoeing, bending their backs under a mud-coloured sky.

Well, now … . She scrutinized Colette’s palm, picking up her magnifying glass. The whole hand was bespattered with crosses, on the major lines and between them. She could see no arches, stars, or tridents. There were several worrying islands in the heart line, little vacant plots. Perhaps, she thought, she sleeps with men whose names she doesn’t know.

The pale client’s voice cut through. She sounded common and sharp. “You said somebody was coming through for me.”

“Your father. He recently passed into Spirit.”

“No.”

“But there’s been a passing. I’m getting six, the number six. About six months back?”

The client looked blank.

“Let me jog your memory,” Alison said. “I would be talking about Guy Fawkes Night, or maybe the run-up to Christmas. Where they say, only forty shopping days left, that sort of thing.” Her tone was easy; she was used to people not remembering the deaths in their family.

“My uncle died last November. If that’s what you mean.”

“Your uncle, not your father?”

“Yes, my uncle. For Christ’s sake, I should know!”

“Bear with me,” Alison said easily. “You don’t by any chance have something with you? Something that belonged to your dad?”

“Yes.” She had brought the same props she had given to the psychic in Hove. “These were his.”

She handed over the cuff links. Alison cupped them in her left palm, rolled them around with her right forefinger. Golf balls. Though he didn’t play golf. Still, people don’t know what to buy for men, do they? She tossed them up and caught them again. “No way,” she said. “Look, can you accept this? The bloke who owned these was not your dad. He was your uncle.”

“No, it was my uncle that died.” The client paused. “He died in November. My dad died about—I don’t know, ages ago—” She put her hand to her mouth. “Oh,” she said. “Run it past me again, will you?” Grant her this: she wasn’t slow on the uptake.

“Let’s just see if we can unknot this,” Al said. “You say these are your father’s cuff links. I say, no, though they may have belonged to the man you called your father. You say your uncle passed last November, and your father passed years ago. But I say, your uncle has been a long time in Spirit, but your dad passed in the autumn. Now, are you with me?”

The client nodded.

“You’re sure you’re with me? I mean, I don’t want you to think I’m slandering your mum. But these things happen, in families. Now your uncle’s name is—?”

“Mike.”

“Mike, and your dad’s—Terry, right? So you think. But the way I see it, Terry’s your uncle and Uncle Mike’s your dad.”

Silence. The woman shifted in her chair. “He was always hanging about, Mike, when I was little. Always round the house.”

“Chez vous,” Al said. “Well, he would be.”

“It explains a lot. My flat hair, for one thing.”

“Yes, doesn’t it?” Alison said. “When you finally get it sorted out, who’s who in your family, it does explain a lot.” She sighed. “It’s a shame your mum’s passed, so you can’t ask her what was what. Or why. Or anything like that.”

“She wouldn’t have told me. Can’t you tell me?”

“My guess is, Terry was a quiet type, whereas Uncle Mike, he was a bit of a boyo. Which was what your mum liked. Impulsive, that’s how I’d describe her, if I was pushed. You too, maybe. But only in—not in your general affairs but only in what we call—er—matters of partnership.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that when you see a bloke you like you go straight after him.” Like a whippet after a hare, she thought. “You say to yourself, no, I must do strategy, play it cool, but you don’t heed your own advice, you’re very much—how shall I say it?—bed on the first date. Well, why not? I mean, life’s too short.”

“I can’t do this. I’m sorry.” The client half rose.

Alison put her hand out. “It’s the shock. About your dad. It takes a bit of getting used to. I wouldn’t have broken it to you like that if I didn’t think you could take it. And straight talking—I think you can take that too.”

“I can take it,” Colette said. She sat down again.

“You’re proud,” Al said softly. “You won’t be bested.”

“That describes me.”

“If Jack and Jill can do it, you can do it.”

“That’s true.”

“You don’t suffer fools gladly.”

“I don’t.”

It was an old Mrs. Etchells line; she was probably using it right now, three tables down: “You don’t suffer fools gladly, dear!” As if the client were going to come back at you “Fools! I love ’em! Can’t get enough! I go out round the streets, me, looking for fools to ask them home to dinner!”

Alison sat back in her chair. “The way I see you now, you’re dissatisfied, restless.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve reached a place in your life where you don’t much want to be.”

“Yes.”

“You’re ready and willing to move on.”

“Yes.”

“So do you want to come and work for me?”

“What?”

“Can you type, drive, anything like that? I need a sort of, what do they call it? Girl Friday.”

“This is a bit sudden.”

“Not really. I felt I knew you when I saw you from the platform last night.”

“The platform?”

“The platform is what we call any kind of stage.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s historical, I suppose.”

Colette leaned forward. She locked her fists together between her knees. Alison said, “If you come into the front bar in about an hour, we can get a coffee.”

Colette cast a glance at the long queue behind her.

“Okay, say an hour and a quarter?”

“What do you do, put up a CLOSED sign?”

“No, I just put them on divert, I say, go see Mrs. Etchells three tables down.”

“Why? Is she good?”

“Mrs. Etchells? Entre nous, she’s rubbish. But she taught me. I owe her.”

“You’re loyal?”

“I hope so.”

“Is that her? Wrinkly old bag with a charm bracelet on? Now I’ll tell you something. She’s not loyal to you.”

She spelled it out: “She tried to poach me, tried to catch me as I was looking about for you: cards, crystal, and psychometry thrown in, thirty quid.”

Alison blushed, a deep crimson blush. “She said that? Thirty quid?”

“Fancy you not knowing.”

“My mind was somewhere else.” She laughed shakily. “Voilà. You’ve already earned your money, Colette.”

“You know my name?”

“It’s that certain something French about you. Je ne sais quoi.”

“You speak French?”

“Never till today.”

“You mustn’t mind-read me.”

“I would try not to.”

“An hour and a quarter?”

“You could get some fresh air.”

On Windsor Bridge, a young boy was sitting on a bench with his Rottweiler at his feet. He was eating an ice-cream cone and holding another out to the dog. Passersby, smiling, were collecting to watch. The dog ate with civil, swirling motions of his tongue. Then he crunched the last of his cornet, swarmed up onto the bench and laid his head lovingly on the boy’s shoulder. The boy fed him the last of his own ice cream, and the crowd laughed. The dog, encouraged, licked and nibbled the boy’s ears, and the crowd went ohh, feech, yuk, how sweet!

The dog jumped down from the bench. Its eyes were steady and its paws huge. For two pins, or the dog equivalent, it would set itself to eat the crowd, worrying each nape and tossing the children like pancakes.

Colette stood and watched until the crowd had dispersed and she was alone. She crossed the bridge and edged down Eton High Street, impeded by tourists. I am like the dog, she thought. I have an appetite. Is that wrong? My mum had an appetite. I realize it now, how she talked in code all those years. No wonder I never knew what was what and who was who. Nor surprising her aunts were always exchanging glances, saying things like I wonder where Colette gets her hair from, I wonder where she gets her brains? The man she’d called her father was distinguished by the sort of stupidity that made him squalid. She had a mental picture of him, sprawled before the television scratching his belly. Perhaps, when she’d bought him the cuff links, she’d been hoping to improve him. Her Uncle Mike, on the other hand—who was really her father—was a man whose wallet was always stuffed. Hadn’t he been round every week flashing his fivers and saying, here, Angie, get something nice for little Colette? He’d paid, but he hadn’t paid enough; he’d paid as an uncle, but not as a dad. I’ll sue the bastard, she thought. Then she remembered he was dead.

She went into the Crown and Cushion and got a pineapple juice, which she took into a corner. Every few minutes she checked her watch. Too early, she started back across the bridge.

Alison was sitting in the front room of the Harte and Garter with a cafetière and two cups. She had her back to the door, and Colette paused for a moment, getting a view of her: she’s huge, she thought, how can she go around like that? As she watched, Alison’s plump smooth arm reached for the coffee and poured it into the second cup.

Colette sat down. She crossed her legs. She fixed Alison with a cool stare. “You don’t mind what you say, do you? You could have really upset me, back there.”

“There was a risk.” Alison smiled.

“You think you’re a good judge of character.”

“More often than not.”

“And my mum. I mean, for all you know, I could have burst into tears. I could have collapsed.”

Not a real risk, Al thought. At some level, in some recess of themselves, people know what they know. But the client was determined to have her moment.

“Because what you were saying, really, is that she was having an affair with my uncle under my dad’s nose. Which isn’t nice, is it? And she let my dad think I was his.”

“I wouldn’t call it an affair. It was more of a fling.”

“So what does that make her? A slag.”

Alison put down her coffee cup. “They say don’t speak ill of the dead.” She laughed. “But why not? They speak ill of you.”

“Do they?” Colette thought of Renee. “What are they saying?”

“A joke. I was making a joke. I see you think I shouldn’t.”

She took from Colette the thimble-sized serving of milk she was fumbling with, flicked up the foil with her nail, and tipped the milk into Colette’s coffee.

“Black. I take it black.”

“Sorry.”

“Another thing you didn’t know.”

“Another.”

“This job you were talking about—” Colette broke off. She narrowed her eyes and looked speculatively at Al, as if she were a long way off.

Al said, “Don’t frown. You’ll stay like that one day. Just ask me what you need to ask.”

“Don’t you know?”

“You asked me not to read your mind.”

“You’re right. I did. Fair’s fair. But can you shut it off like that? Shut it off and then just turn it on when you want it?”

“It’s not like that. I don’t know how I can explain. It’s not like a tap.”

“Is it like a switch?”

“Not like a switch.”

“It’s like—I suppose—is it like somebody whispering to you?”

“Yes. More like that. But not exactly whispering. I mean, not in your ear.”

“Not in your ear.” Colette stirred her coffee round and round.

Al picked up a paper straw of brown sugar, pinched off the end, and dropped it into Colette’s cup. “You need the energy,” she explained. Colette, frowning, continued to stir.

“I have to get back soon,” Al said. “They’re building up in there.”

“So if it’s not a switch—”

“About the job. You could sleep on it.”

“And it’s not a tap—”

“You could ring me tomorrow.”

“And it’s not somebody whispering in your ear—”

“My number’s on the leaflet. Have you got my leaflet?”

“Does your spirit guide tell you things?”

“Don’t leave it too long.”

“You said he was called Morris. A little bouncing circus clown.”

“Yes.”

“Sounds a pain.”

“He can be.”

“Does he live with you? In your house? I mean, if you call it ‘live’?”

“You might as well,” Al said. She sounded tired. “You might as well call it ‘live’ as call it anything.” She pushed herself to her feet. “It’s going to be a long afternoon.”

“Where do you live?”

“Wexham.”

“Is that far?”

“Just up into Bucks.”

“How do you get home, do you drive?”

“Train and then a taxi.”

“By the way, I think you must be right. About my family.”

Al looked down at her. “I sense you’re wavering. I mean, about my offer. It’s not like you to be indecisive. More like you to take the plunge.”

“I’m not quite sure what you’d want me to do. I’m used to job description.”

“We could work one up. If that’s what’s worrying you. Write your own, why not? You’ll soon see what needs to be done.” Alison was rummaging for something in her bag. “I may not be able to pay as much as your last job. But then, when you’ve looked at my books, you’ll be able to tell me what I can afford. And also, it’s a quality-of-life thing, isn’t it? I should think the schedule will be more relaxed than in your last job. You’d have more leisure.” Then she said, as if she were embarrassed, “You wouldn’t get rich out of me. I’m no good for lottery numbers or anything like that.”

“Can you hang on for a minute?” Colette said. “I need to know more.”

“They’ll be waiting.”

“Make them wait.”

“Yes, but not too long. Or Mrs. Etchells will catch them.” Al had found a tube of mints in her bag. She proffered it to Colette. “Keeps the mind alert,” she said. “What I need, you see, is someone to keep the diary straight and make sure I don’t double-book. Liaise with the management, wherever I’m on the platform. Book hotels. Do the accounts. It would be good to have someone to answer the phone. If I’m with a client, I can’t always break off.”

“You don’t have an answering machine?”

“The clients would rather hear a human voice. Anyway, I’m not very good with electrical things.”

“So how do you do your washing? In a tub?”

“No, the fact is—” Alison looked down. She looked harried. “I can see there’s a lot I’m going to have to explain to you,” she said.

The truth was, it emerged, that whatever message Alison left on her machine was liable to become corrupted. Other messages, quite different ones, would overlay it. Where did they come from? “There’s no simple answer to that,” Alison said. She checked her watch. “I meant to eat but I’ve been talking.”

“I’ll bring you a sandwich in, shall I?”

“I never eat when I’m reading. It’s not professional. Oh, well. Do me no harm to be hungry, will it? I’ll hardly waste away.” She patted her tummy, smiled miserably. “Look, about the travelling, I do travel a lot, and I used to drive, but I don’t anymore. I think if I had a friend with me, I could manage, so we could split it, you see.”

“You need a navigator?”

“It’s not so much that.” What Alison needed, she explained—picking again at the sugar straws, opening them and putting them down—was a warm living body beside her, as she drove from town to town, fayre to fayre, and from one Psychic Extravaganza to another. Otherwise, a spirit would come and sit in the passenger seat, and natter on while she tried to negotiate an unfamiliar one-way system. “Do you know Bracknell? Bracknell’s hell. All those roundabouts.”

“What’s to stop the spirits from climbing in the back seat instead? Or have you got a two-door?”

Alison looked at her for a long moment. Colette thought she was actually going to answer the question. “Look, Colette,” she said softly. She had got four straws lined up now, and she moved them about, delicately, with one finger: changing the pattern, shuffling and reshuffling. “Look, it doesn’t matter if you’re a bit sceptical. I understand. I’d be sceptical myself. All you need to realize is that it doesn’t matter what you think, it doesn’t matter what I think—what happens, happens all the same. The only thing is, I don’t do tests, I don’t do tricks for people to try to prove myself, because I don’t need to prove anything. Do you see?”

Colette nodded.

Alison raised a finger to a girl who was serving and pointed to the cafetière. “A refill for you,” she explained. “I can see you’re bitter. Why shouldn’t you be? Life hasn’t treated you well. You’ve worked hard and had no reward. You’ve lost your home. And you’ve lost a lot of your money, haven’t you?”

Colette’s eyes followed the trail of brown sugar curling across the table; like an initial, trying to form itself. “You seem to know a lot about me.”

“I laid out a spread for you. After you’d gone.”

“A spread?”

“The tarot cards.”

“I know. Which spread?”

“Basic Romany.”

“Why that?”

“I was in a hurry.”

“And what did you see?”

“I saw myself.”

Al got up and headed back towards the main hall, handing a ten-pound note to a girl as she passed, pointing to the table she had just left. That’s far too much, Colette thought, two pots of coffee, ten pounds, what is she thinking? She felt a flare of indignation, as if it were her own cash that had been spent. She drank all the coffee, so as not to be wasteful, tipping the pot so its muddy grounds shifted. She went to the LADIES, and as she washed her hands she watched herself in the mirror. Maybe no mind-reading in it, she thought. No psychic tricks needed, or information from spirit guides. She did look like a woman who had lost her money: lost her lottery ticket in life, lost her dad and lost her home.

That summer they laughed a lot. They acted as if they were in love, planning for each other treats and nice things to eat and surprising each other with thoughtful gifts. Alison gave Colette a voucher for a day spa in Windsor; I won’t come, she said cheerfully, I don’t want some foul-breathed anorexic lecturing me about my cellulite, but you enjoy yourself, Colette. Colette dropped into Caleys and bought a warm throw, soft mohair and the colour of crushed raspberries; lovely, Al said that evening, just what I need, something to cover me up.

Colette took over most of the driving, finding that she didn’t mind at all. “Change the car,” she said to Alison, and they went out to a showroom that very afternoon. They picked one because they liked the colour and the up-holstery; she imagined herself, putting two fingers up to Gavin, and when the salesman tried to talk car sense they just giggled at each other. “The truth is, they’re all the same these days,” she said loudly. “I don’t know much, but I do know that.”

Al wasn’t interested, she just wanted it done with; but when the salesman tried to trap her into a finance deal, she slapped him down smartly. She agreed on a delivery date, wrote a cheque; Colette was impressed by her style. When they got home she rummaged through Al’s wardrobe and threw out the worst bits of Lurex. She tried to smuggle the “silk” out, in a black bin liner, but Al went after the plastic bag and retrieved it, drawing it out and looping it around her arm. “Nice try,” she said to Colette. “But I’m sticking with it, please.”

Colette’s education in the psychic trade was brisk and no-nonsense. Al’s absurd generosity to the waitress in the coffee shop might represent one side of her nature, but she was businesslike in her own way. She wouldn’t be taken for a ride, she knew how to charge out every minute of her time, though her accounts, kept on paper, were a mess. Having been a credulous person so recently, Colette was now cynical and sneery. She wondered how long it would be before Al initiated her into some fraud. She waited and waited. By mid-August she thought, what fraud could there be? Al doesn’t have secret wires tapping into people’s thoughts. There’s no technology in her act. All she does is stand onstage and make weak jokes. You may say Al’s a fake because she has to be, because nobody can do what she claims to do. But there it is; she doesn’t make claims, she demonstrates. And when you come down to it she can deliver the goods. If there is a fraud, it’s a transparent one; so clear that no one can see it.

Al hadn’t even been registered for VAT when Colette had come on board as her business brain. As for income tax, her allowances were all over the place. Colette went to the tax office in person. The official she saw admitted to a complete ignorance of a medium’s trade; she was poised to take advantage of it. “What about her clothes,” she said, “her stage outfits? Her outfits for meeting her clients. She has to look good, it’s a professional obligation.”

“Not one we recognize, I’m afraid,” the young woman said.

“Well, you should! As you ought to know, being the size you are yourself, decent clothes in large sizes don’t come cheap. She can’t get away with the tat you find on the High Street. It’s got to be specialist shops. Even her bras—well, I don’t need to spell it out.”

“I’m afraid it’s all dual purpose,” the woman said. “Underwear, outer-wear, whatever; it’s not just specific to her trade, is it?”

“What? You mean, she could pop to the postbox in it? Do the dusting? In one of her stage outfits?”

“If she liked. I’m trying to envisage—you didn’t bring pictures, did you?”

“I’ll drop some in.”

“That might be a help. So we could work out what sort of class of item we’re dealing with—you see, if it were, well, a barrister’s wig, say, or protective clothing, say, boots with steel toe caps, for example—”

“So are you telling me they’ve made special rules about it? For mediums?”

“Well, no, not specifically for—what you say your partner does. I’m just going by the nearest cases I can envisage. At this stage.” The woman looked restless. “I suppose you might classify it as show business. Look, I’ll pass it up for consideration. Take it under advisement.”

Colette wished—wished very strongly, most sincerely—that she had Al’s powers, just for sixty seconds. So that a whisper, a hiss, a flash, so that something would overtake her, some knowledge, insight, some piece of special information, so that she could lean across the desk and tell the woman at the tax office something about her private life, something embarrassing: or something that would make the hair stand up on the back of her neck. For the moment, they agreed to differ. Colette undertook to keep a complete record of Al’s expenditure on stage outfits. She lost no time, of course, in computerizing their accounts. But the thought nagged at her that a record kept in figures was not quite enough.

Hence her good idea, about writing a book. How hard could it be? Al made tape recordings for her clients, so wasn’t it logical, in the larger world, to tape-record Al? Then all she would need to do would be transcribe, edit, tighten up here and there, make some chapter headings … . Her mind moved ahead, to costings, to a layout, to a photographer. Fleetingly, she thought of the boy in the bookshop, who’d sold her the tarot pack. If I’d been self-employed then, she thought, I could have set those cards against tax. Those days seemed distant now: leaving the boy’s bed-sit at 5 A.M. in the rain. Her life with Gavin had receded; she remembered things he had, like his calculator, and his diver’s watch, but not necessarily the evil things he had done. She remembered her kitchen—the scales, the knives—but not anything she cooked there. She remembered her bed, and her bed linen; but not sex. I can’t keep on losing it, she thought, losing chunks of my life, years at a time. Or who will I be when I’m old? I should write a book for me too. I need a proof of some sort, a record of what goes down.

The tape recorder worked well on the whole, though sometimes it sounded as if Alison had a bag over her head; Colette’s questions, always, were piercingly clear. But when they played the tapes back, they found that, just as Al had foreseen, other items had intruded. Someone speaking, fast and urgent, in what might be Polish. A twittering, like small birds in a wood: nightingales, Alison said unexpectedly.

Once, a woman’s irate voice cut through Alison’s mutter: “Well, you’re in for it now. You’ve started so you may as well finish. It’s no use asking for your money back, sunshine. The trade doesn’t work that way.”

COLETTE: When you were a child, did you ever suffer a severe blow to the skull?

ALISON: Several … Why, didn’t you?