Beyond Black

four

COLETTE: It’s Tuesday and I’m just—it’s ten-thirty in the evening and—Al, can you come a bit closer to the mike? I’m just resuming where we left off last night—now, Alison, we’ve sort of addressed the point about the trivia, haven’t we? Still, you might like to put your answer on the tape.

ALISON: I have already explained to you that the reason we get such trivial information from Spirit is—

COLETTE: All right, there’s no need to sound like a metronome. Monotone. Can’t you sound a bit more natural?

ALISON: If the people who’ve passed—is that okay now?

COLETTE: Go on.

ALISON: If the people who’ve passed were to give you messages about angels and, you know, spiritual matters, you’d think it was a bit vague. We wouldn’t have any way of checking on them. But if they give you messages about your kitchen units, you can say if they’re right or wrong.

COLETTE: So what you’re mainly worried about is convincing people?

ALISON: No.

COLETTE: What then?

ALISON: I don’t feel I have to convince anybody, personally. It’s up to them whether they come to see me. Their choice. There’s no compulsion to believe anything they don’t want … . Oh, Colette, what’s that? Can you hear it?

COLETTE: Just carry on.

ALISON: It’s snarling. Somebody’s let the dogs out?

COLETTE: What?

ALISON: I can’t carry on over this racket.

(click)

COLETTE: Okay, trying again. It’s eleven o’clock and we’ve had a cup of tea—

ALISON:—and a chocolate chip cookie—

COLETTE:—and we’re resuming. We were talking about the whole issue of proof, and I want to ask you, Alison, have you ever been scientifically tested?

ALISON: I’ve always kept away from that. You see, if you were in a laboratory wired up, it’s as good as saying, we think you’re some sort of confidence trick. Why should people come through from Spirit for other people who don’t believe in them? You see, most people, once they’ve passed, they’re not really interested in talking to this side. The effort’s too much for them. Even if they wanted to do it, they haven’t got the concentration span. You say they give trivial messages, but that’s because they’re trivial people. You don’t get a personality transplant when you’re dead. You don’t suddenly get a degree in philosophy. They’re not interested in helping me out with proof.

COLETTE: On the platform you always say, you’ve had your gift since you were very small.

ALISON: Yes.

COLETTE: (whispering) Al, don’t do that to me. I need a proper answer on the tape. Yes, you say it, or yes, it’s true?

ALISON: I don’t generally lie on the platform. Well, only to spare people.

COLETTE: Spare them what? (pause) Al?

ALISON: Can you move on?

COLETTE: Okay, so you’ve had this gift—

ALISON: If you call it that.

COLETTE: You’ve had this ability since you were small. Can you tell us about your childhood?

ALISON: I could. When you were little, did you have a front garden? COLETTE: Yes.

ALISON: What did you have in it?

COLETTE: Hydrangeas, I think.

ALISON: We had a bathtub in ours.

When Alison was young she might as well have been a beast in the jungle as a girl growing up outside Aldershot. She and her mum lived in an old terraced house with a lot of banging doors. It faced a busy road, but there was open land at the back. Downstairs there were two rooms, and a lean-to with a flat roof, which was the kitchen. Upstairs were two bedrooms, and a bathroom, which had a bath tub in it so there was no actual need for the one in the garden. Opposite the bathroom was the steep short staircase that led up to the attic.

Downstairs, the front room was the place where men had a party. They came and went with bags inside which bottles rattled and chinked. Sometimes her mum would say, better watch ourselves tonight, Gloria, they’re bringing spirits in. In the back room, her mum sat smoking and muttering. In the lean-to, she sometimes absently opened cans of carrots or butterbeans, or stood staring at the grill pan while something burned on it. The roof leaked, and black mould drew a drippy wavering line down one corner.

The house was a mess. Bits were continually falling off it. You’d get left with the door handle in your hand, and when somebody put his fist through a window one night it got mended with cardboard and stayed like that. The men were never willing to do hammering or operate a screwdriver. “Never do a hand’s turn, Gloria!” her mother complained.

As she lay in her little bed at night the doors banged, and sometimes the windows smashed. People came in and out. Sometimes she heard laughing, sometimes scuffling, sometimes raised voices and a steady rhythmic pounding. Sometimes she stayed in her bed till daylight came, sometimes she was called to get up for one reason and another. Some nights she dreamed she could fly; she passed over the ridge tiles, and looked down on the men about their business, skimming over the waste ground, where vans stood with their back doors open, and torchlight snaked through the smoky dark.

Sometimes the men were there in a crowd, sometimes they swarmed off and vanished for days. Sometimes at night just one or two men stayed and went upstairs with her mum. Then next day the bunch of them were back again, tee-heeing beyond the wall at men’s private jokes. Behind the house was a scrubby field, with a broken-down caravan on blocks; sometimes there was a light in it. Who lives in there? she asked her mum, and her mum replied, What you don’t know won’t hurt you, which even at an early age Alison knew was untrue.

Beyond the caravan was a huddle of leaning corrugated sheds and a line of lockup garages to which the men had the keys. Two white ponies used to graze in the field, then they didn’t. Where have the ponies gone? she asked her mum. Her mum replied, to the knackers, I suppose.

She said, Who’s Gloria? You keep talking to her. Her mum said, Never you mind.

“Where is she?” she said. “I can’t see her. You say, yes Gloria, no Gloria, want a cuppa, Gloria? Where is she?”

Her mum said, “Never mind Gloria, you’ll be in Kingdom Come. Because that’s where I’m going to knock you if you keep this up.”

Her mum would never stay in the house if she could help it: pacing, smoking, smoking, pacing. Desperate for a breath of air, she would say, “Come on, Gloria,” shrug on her coat and flee down the road to the minimart; and because she did not want the trouble of washing or dressing Alison, or having her underfoot whining for sweeties, she would take her up to the top of the house and lock her in the attic. “She can’t come to any harm up there,” she would reason, out loud to Gloria. “No matches, so she can’t set the house on fire. Too small to climb out the skylight. Nothing sharp up here the like of which she is drawn to, such as knives or pins. There’s really no damage she could come to.”

She put an old rug up there for Alison to sit on, when she played with her blocks and animals. “Quite a little palace,” she said. There was no heating, which again was a safety factor, there being no outlets for Alison to put her fingers into. She could have an extra cardigan instead. In summer the attic was hot. Midday rays streamed fiercely down, straight from the sky to the dusty rug. They lit up the corner where the little lady used to fade up, all dressed in pink, and call out to Alison in a timid Irish voice.

Alison was perhaps five years old when the little lady first appeared, and in this way she learned how the dead could be helpful and sweet. She had no doubt that the little lady was dead, in every meaningful sense. Her clothes were feltlike and soft to the touch, and her pink cardigan was buttoned right up to the first fold of her chin. “My name is Mrs. McGibbet, darlin’,” she said. “Would you like to have me round and about? I thought you might like to have me with you, round and about.”

Mrs. McGibbet’s eyes were blue and round and startled. In her cooing voice, she talked about her son, who had passed over before her, met with an accident. They’d never been able to find each other, she said, I never could meet up with Brendan. But sometimes she showed Alison his toys, little miniature cars and tractors, neatly boxed. Once or twice she faded away and left the toys behind. Mum just stubbed her toe on them. It was as if she didn’t see them at all.

Mrs. McGibbet was always saying, “I wouldn’t want, my darlin’, to come between a little girl and her mother. If that were her mother coming up the stair now, coming up with a heavy tread, no, I wouldn’t want to put myself forward at all.” When the door opened she faded away: leaving sometimes an old doll collapsed in the corner where she had sat. She chuckled as she fell backwards, into the invisible place behind the wall.

Al’s mum forgot to send her to school. “Good grief,” she said, when the man came around to prosecute her, “you mean to say she’s that age already?”

Even after that, Al was never where she should be. She never had a swim-suit, so when it was swimming she was sent home. One of the teachers threatened she’d be made to swim in her knickers next week, but she went home and mentioned it, and one of the men offered to go down there and sort it out. When Al went to school next day she told the teacher, Donnie’s coming down; he says he’ll push a bottle up your bleeding whatnot, and—I don’t think it’s very nice, miss—ram it in till your guts come out your mouf.

After that, on swimming afternoon, she was just sent home again. She never had her rubber-soled shoes for skipping and hopping or her eggs and basin for mixing a cake, her times tables or her poem or her model mosque made out of milk-bottle tops. Sometimes when she came home from school one of the men would stop her in the hall and give her 50 pence. She would run up to the attic and put it away in a secret box she had up there. Her mother would take it off her if she could, so she had to be quick.

One day the men came with a big van. She heard yapping and ran to the window. Three blunt-nosed brindle dogs were being led towards the garages. “Oh, what are their names?” she cried. Her mother said, “Don’t you go calling their names. Dogs like that, they’ll chew your face off. Isn’t that right, Gloria?”

She gave them names anyway: Blighto, Harry and Serene. One day Blighto came to the house and bumped against the back door. “Oh, he’s knocking,” Al said. She opened the door though she knew she shouldn’t, and tried to give him half her wafer biscuit.

A man came shooting out of nowhere and hauled the dog off her. He kicked it into the yard while he got Alison up off the floor. “Emmie, sort it!” he yelled, then wrapped his hands in an old jersey of her mum’s and went out and pummelled the dog’s face, dragging it back to the sheds and twisting its neck as he dragged. He came back in shouting, “I’ll shoot the fucker, I’ll strangle that bastard dog.” The man, whose name was Keith, wept when he saw how the dog had ripped at her hairline. He said, Emmie, she ought to go to Casualty, that needs stitching. Her mum said she couldn’t be sitting in a queue all afternoon.

The man washed her head at the kitchen sink. There wasn’t a cloth or a sponge so he put his hand on the back of her neck, pressed her down over the plastic bowl, and slapped the water up at her. It went in her eyes, so the bowl blurred. Her blood went in the bowl but that was all right; it was all right because the bowl itself was red. “Stay there, darling,” he said, “just keep still,” and his hand lifted from her nape as he bent to rummage in the cupboard at his feet. Obedient, she bent there; blood came down her nose too and she wondered why that was. She heard the chinking noise as Keith tossed the empties out from under the sink. Em, he said, you not got any disinfectant in here? Give us a rag for Christsakes, tear up a sheet, I don’t know, and her mother said, use your hankie or ain’t you got none? In the end her mother came up behind her with the used dish towel and Keith ripped it out of her hand. “There you go, there you go, there you go,” he kept saying, dabbing away, sighing the words between his teeth.

She felt faint with pain. She said, “Keef, are you my dad?”

He wrung the cloth between his hands. “What you been telling her, Emmie?” Her mother said, “I’ve not been telling her nothing, you ought to know by now she’s a bloody little liar. She says she can hear voices in the wall. She says there are people up in the attic. She’s got a screw loose, Gloria says.”

Keith moved: she felt a sudden sick cold at her back as he pulled away, as his body warmth left her. She reared up, dripping water and dilute pink blood. Keith had crossed the room and pinned her mother up against the wall. “I told you, Emmie, if I told you once I told you a dozen times, I do not want to hear that name spoken.” And the dozen times, Keith reinforced, by the way he gave her mum a little bounce, raising her by her hair near the scalp and bobbing her down again. “Gloria’s buggered off back to Paddyland,” he said [bounce]. “That’s all [bounce] you bloody [bounce] know about it, do you [bounce] understand [bounce] that? Do I bloody [bounce-bounce-bounce-bounce] make myself [bounce] crystal-clear? You just [bounce] forget you ever [bounce] set eyes.”

“She’s all right, is Gloria,” said her mum, “she can be a good laugh,” and the man said, “Do you want me to give you a slap? Do you want me to give you a slap and knock your teeth out?”

Alison was interested to see this happen. She had had many kinds of slap, but not that kind. She wiped the water from her eyes, the water and blood, till her vision cleared. But Keith seemed to get tired of it. He let her mother go and her legs went from under her; her body folded and slid down the wall, like the lady in the attic who could fold herself out of sight.

“You look like Mrs. McGibbet,” Al said.

Her mother twitched, as if her wires had been pulled; she squeaked up from the floor. “Who’s speaking names now?” she said. “You wallop her, Keith, if you don’t want names spoken. She’s always speaking names.” Then she screamed a new insult that Al had never heard before.

“You poxy little poxer, you got blood on your chin. Where’ve you got that from? You poxy little poxer.”

Al said, “Keef, does she mean me?”

Keith wiped his sweating forehead. It made you sweat, bouncing a woman a dozen times by the short hair of her head. “Yes. No,” he said. “She means to say poxy little boxer. She can’t talk, sweetheart, she don’t know who she’s talking to; her brain’s gone, what she ever had of it.”

“Who’s Gloria?” she asked. Keith made a hissing through his teeth. He tapped one fist into his opposite palm. For a moment she thought he was going to come after her, so she backed up against the sink. The cold edge of it dug into her back; her hair dripped, blood and water, down her T-shirt. Later she would tell Colette, I was never so frightened as then; that was my worst moment, one of the worse ones anyway, that moment when I thought Keef would knock me to Kingdom Come.

But Keith stepped back. “Here,” he said. He thrust the dish towel into her hand. “Keep at it,” he said. “Keep it clean.”

“Can I stay off school?” she said, and Keith said, yes, she’d better. He gave her a pound note and told her to yell out if she saw a dog loose again.

“And will you come and save me?”

“Somebody’ll be about.”

“But I don’t want you to strangle it,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “It’s Blighto.”

The next time she recalled seeing Keith was a few months later. It was night, and she should have been in bed as nobody had called her out. But when she heard Keith’s name she reached under her mattress for her scissors, which she always kept there in case they should be needed. She clutched them in one hand; with the other she held up the hem of the big nightie that was lent her as a special favour from her mum. When she came scrambling down the stairs, Keith was standing just inside the front door; or at least some legs were, wearing Keith’s trousers. He had a blanket over his head. Two men were supporting him. When they took off the blanket she saw that every part of his face looked like fatty mince, oozing blood. (“Oh, this mince is fatty, Gloria!” her mother would say.) She called out to him, “Keef, that needs stitching!” and one of the men swooped down on her and wrenched the scissors out of her hand. She heard them strike the wall, as the man flung them; looming above her, he pushed her into the back room and slammed the door.

Next day a voice beyond the wall said, “Hear Keef got mashed up last night. Tee-hee. As if he ain’t got troubles enough.”

She believed she never saw Keith again, but she might have seen him and just not recognized him; it didn’t seem as if he’d have much left by way of original features. She remembered how, the evening of the dog bite, once her head had stopped bleeding, she had gone out to the garden. She followed the furrows dug by the dog’s strong hind legs, as Keith dragged him away from the house, and Blighto twisted to look back. Not until it rained hard did the ruts disappear.

At that time Alison was saving up for a pony. One day she went up to the attic to count her money. “Ah dear,” said Mrs. McGibbet, “the lady your mother has been up here, darlin’, raiding your box that was your own peculiar property. The coins she’s tipped into her open purse, and the one single poor note she has tucked away in her brassiere. And not a thing I could do to stop her, my rheumatics being aggravated by the cold and damp, for by the time I was up and out of my corner, she had outstripped me.”

Alison sat down on the floor. “Mrs. McGibbet,” she said, “can I ask you a question?”

“You surely can. And why should you have to ask if you can ask, I ask myself?”

“Do you know Gloria?”

“Do I know Gloria?” Mrs. McGibbet’s eyelids fell over her bright blue eyes. “Ah, you’ve no business asking.”

“I think I saw her. I think I can see her these days.”

“Gloria is a cheap hoor, what else should she be? I never should have given her the name, for it put ideas in her head that was above her station. Go on the boat then, heedless and headstrong, she would go on the boat. Get off at Liverpool with all its attendant vices and then where will she go but via a meat lorry to the dreadful metropolis with its many occasions of sin. End up dead, dead and haunting about in a British army town, in a dirty house with a bath in the front garden, and her own mother a living witness to every hoor’s trick that she can contrive.”

After that, when she got 50 pence from the men, she took it straight down to the minimart and bought chocolate, which she ate on the way home.

When Alison was eight years old, or maybe nine or ten, she was playing outside one day, a greyish sticky day in late summer. She was alone, of course: playing horses, neighing occasionally, and progressing at a canter. The rough grass of their back plot was worn in patches, like the pile on the rug that made the attic into a little palace.

Something drew her attention, and she stopped in her paces, and glanced up. She could see men going to and fro from the garages, carrying boxes.

“Hi-ya!” she said. She waved to them. She was sure they were men she knew.

But then a minute later she thought they were men she didn’t know. It was hard to tell. They kept their faces turned away. A sick feeling crept over her. Silent, faces downcast, the men moved over the tussocky grass. Silent, faces downcast, they passed the boxes. She couldn’t judge the distance from herself to them; it was as if the light had grown more thick and dense. She took a step forward, but she knew she should not. Her dirty nails dug into the palms of her hands. Sick came up into her throat. She swallowed it and it burned. Very slowly, she turned her head away. She took one plodding step towards the house. Then another. Air thick as mud clotted around her ankles. She had some idea of what was in the boxes, but as she stepped inside the house it slipped clear from her mind, like a drug slipping from a syringe and deep into a vein.

Her mother was in the lean-to, nattering away to Gloria. “Excuse me, will you,” she said affably, “while I just see if this child wants a clip around the ear?” She turned around and glared at her daughter. “Look at you,” she said. “Wash your face, you’re all running in sweat, you bloody turn me up. I was never like that at your age, I was a neat little thing, I had to be, I wouldn’t have made a living if I’d gone about like that. What’s the matter with you, you’re green, girl, look at yourself in the mirror, have you been stuffing yourself with them Rolo again? If you’re going to chuck up, go outside and do it.”

Alison did as she was told and looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t recognize the person she saw there. It was a man, with a check jacket on and a tie skew-whiff; a frowning man with a low hairline and a yellowish face. Then she realized that the door was open, and that the men were piling in behind her. “Fuck, Emmie, got to wash me hands!” one of them shouted.

She ran. For always, more or less, she was afraid of the men. On the stairs to the attic she doubled up and let brown liquid run out of her mouth. She hoped her mother would think it was the cat, Judy, who was responsible. She toiled on upwards and swung open the door. Mrs. McGibbet was sitting, already formed, in her corner. Her stumpy legs in their thick stockings stuck out in front of her, wide apart, as if she had been punched and knocked down. Her eyes were no longer startled, but blank as if their blinds had been drawn.

She did not greet Alison: no “How’s my darlin’ girl today?” She just said, in a distracted mutter, “There’s an evil thing you wouldn’t want to see at all. There’s an evil thing you wouldn’t want to see … .” She faded with rapidity; there was a scrabbling noise beneath the floorboards, and she was gone.

Mrs. McGibbet never came back after that day. She missed her, but she realized that the old lady was too frightened to return. Al was a child and hadn’t got the option of leaving. Now there was no appeal or relief from Gloria and her mum, and the men in the front room. She went out to play at the back as seldom as possible; even the thought of it made thick spit come up into her mouth. Her mother berated her for getting no fresh air. If she was forced to play out—which happened sometimes, with the door locked after her—she made it a rule never to raise her eyes as far as the sheds and the lockup garages, or the belt of woodland beyond them. She could not shake off the atmosphere of that afternoon, a peculiar suspension, like a breath held: the men’s averted faces, the thunderous air, the dying grass, her mother’s outgust of tobacco smoke, the yellow face in the mirror where she expected to see her own, the man’s need to wash his hands. As for what was in the cardboard boxes, she hoped not to think about it; but sometimes the answer turned up, in dreams.

COLETTE: So … are you going to tell me?

ALISON: I might, if I was quite sure I knew.

COLETTE: Only might?

ALISON: I don’t know if I could speak it out.

COLETTE: Drugs, could it have been? Or didn’t they have drugs in those days?

ALISON: God Almighty, of course they had drugs, do you think I come out of the Ark? They’ve always had drugs.

COLETTE: So?

ALISON: It was a funny district, you see, the army camps all around, these squaddies coming and going, I mean it was a big area for, well, women like my mum and the sort of men she knew, there was a lot of illegal gambling, there were women and boys who were on the game, there were all sorts of—

COLETTE: So come on, what do you think was in the boxes? (pause) Bits of Gloria?

ALISON: No. Surely not? Keef said she’d gone home to Ireland.

COLETTE: You didn’t believe that, did you?

ALISON: I didn’t believe it or not believe it.

COLETTE: But she did disappear?

ALISON: Not from our house, she didn’t. Yes Gloria, no, Gloria, have a cuppa Gloria.

COLETTE: I’m quite interested in this because it suggests your mum was mad or something—but let’s just keep to the point about the disappearance—was anything reported?

ALISON: I was eight. I didn’t know what was reported.

COLETTE: Nothing on TV?

ALISON: I’m not sure we had a TV. Well, yes, we did. Several. I mean the men used to bring them in under their arms. Just, we never had an aerial. That was us. Two bathtubs, no TV aerial.

COLETTE: Al, why do you make such silly jokes all the time? You do it when you’re on the platform. It’s not appropriate.

ALISON: Personally I think the use of humour’s very important when you’re dealing with the public. It puts them at their ease. Because they’re scared, when they come in.

COLETTE: I was never scared. Why do they come if they’re scared?

ALISON: Most people have a very low fright threshold. But it doesn’t stop them being curious.

COLETTE: They should toughen up.

ALISON: I suppose we all should. (sighs) Look, Colette—you come from Uxbridge. Oh, I know you say, Uxbridge not Knightsbridge, but it’s a place where you had hydrangeas, right? Well, that’s not like where I come from. I suppose if you had a crime in Uxbridge, if you had somebody disappear, the neighbours would notice.

COLETTE: So what are you saying?

ALISON: People went missing all the time, round our way. There was wasteland. There was army land, there was miles of it. There was heath land and just generally these acres where anything … could have … .

COLETTE: Did the police ever come round?

ALISON: The police came round regularly, I mean there was no surprise in that.

COLETTE: So what did you do?

ALISON: My mother would say, down on the floor. The police would flap the letter box. They’d shout through, is that Mrs. Emmeline Cheetham?

COLETTE: Was that her name?

ALISON: Yes, Emmeline. It’s nice, isn’t it?

COLETTE: I mean Cheetham, that’s not your name.

ALISON: I changed it. Think about it.

COLETTE: Oh, yes … . Al, does this mean you might have previous identities?

ALISON: Past lives?

COLETTE: No … For God’s sake, I’m just talking about other names, other names by which you may have been known to the Revenue. I mean you must have worked before you became self-employed, so you must have tax records in the name of Cheetham, with some other district. I wish you’d mentioned this before!

ALISON: I want to go to the loo.

COLETTE: Because I don’t think you have any idea how embattled I am. About your tax. And I can do without any complication of this nature.

ALISON: So could you turn the tape off?

COLETTE: Oh, cross your legs, you can hang on for two minutes. Just to get us back on track—we are concluding our conversation about the mysterious boxes Alison saw when she was eight—

ALISON: Or maybe nine, or ten.

COLETTE:—and these boxes were being carried by people she didn’t know, men, and towards the back of her house, yes?

ALISON: Yes, towards the back, that’s right. Down towards the fields. The open ground. And no, I don’t know what was in them. Oh God, Colette, can you switch off? I really need the loo. And Morris is making such a racket. I don’t know what was in those boxes, but sometimes I feel as if it’s me. Does that make sense to you?

COLETTE: I think the big question is, will it make sense to our readers?

(click)

When Alison was at school, she had to keep My Diary. She was allowed to crayon what she did every day, as well as put words. She put about Keith and his face getting mashed. About the dog Blighto and the drag of his claws in the mud.

“Do we really want to know about this, Alison?” her teacher said.

Her mother was invited in to see the headmaster, but when she lit up he tapped the NO SMOKING sign perched on top of the typewriter on his desk.

“Yes, I can read,” Emmeline said proudly, as she puffed away.

“I really think—” said he, and her mother said, “Look, you asked me here, so you’ve got to put up with it, is that right?” She tapped her ash into his wire in-tray. “You got a complaint about Alison, is that it?”

“It’s not a question of complaint,” the headmaster said.

“Oh, good,” said her mum. “Because my daughter’s as good as gold. So if you had any complaint, it’d be up to you to get it sorted. Otherwise I’d have to get you sorted, wouldn’t I?”

“I’m not sure you quite grasp, Mrs. Cheetham—”

“I dare say,” Al’s mum said. “We know where your sort get off, smacking little girls’ bottoms, I mean you wouldn’t do it otherwise, it’s not a man’s job, is it?”

“Nothing of that kind—” the headmaster began.

Alison began to cry loudly.

“Shut it,” her mother said casually. “So I’m just telling you, I don’t like people writing to me. I don’t like stuff coming through my door. Any more of it, and you’ll be picking your teeth out of your typewriter.” She took one last draw on her cigarette and dropped the stub on the carpet tiles. “I’m only saying.”

By the time Al was in Mrs. Clerides’s class, she’d rather not put pen to paper because of the risk that someone else would master the pen and write gibberish in her exercise book. “Gibberish” was what Mrs. Clerides called it, when she got her up to the front of the class and asked her if she were subnormal.

Mrs. Clerides read out Al’s diary in a disgusted tone.

“Slurp, slurp, yum yum,” said Harry. “Give us some,” said Blighto.

“No,” said Harry. “Today it is all for me.”

“It’s a dog writing,” Al explained. “It’s Serene. She’s the witness. She tells how Harry polished his bowl. When he’d done you could see your face in it.”

“I don’t believe I asked you to keep the diary of your pet,” said Mrs. C.

“She’s not a pet,” Al said. “Bloody hell, Mrs. Clerides, she pays her way, we all have to pay. If you don’t work you don’t eat.” Then she had gone quiet, thinking, the dogs’ work is fighting, but what is the men’s? They go about in vans. They say, what game am I in? I am in the entertainment game.

Mrs. Clerides slapped her legs. She made her write out something or other, fifty times, maybe a hundred. She couldn’t remember what it was. Even when she was writing it she couldn’t remember. She had to keep on reminding herself by looking back at the line before.

After that, if she’d got a few words down safely, she preferred to go over them with her blue ballpoint, branding the letters well into the paper: then drawing daisy petals around the “o”s and giving the “g”s little fishy faces. This was dull but it was better to be bored than to risk letting the gibberish in by an unguarded stroke, branching out into white space. It made her look occupied, and as long as she looked occupied she got left alone at the back with the mongols, the dummies, and the spastics.

The men said, the bloody little bitch. Is she sorry for what she’s done? Because she don’t look sorry, stuffing her face wiv sweets like that!

I am, I am, she said; but she couldn’t remember what she ought to be sorry for. It had gone woolly in her mind, the way things do when they happen in the night.

The men said, she don’t look sorry, Em! It’s a wonder nobody’s dead. We’re going to take her down the back, and teach her a lesson she won’t forget.

They didn’t say what the lesson was. So after that she always wondered, have I had it? Or is it still to come?

By the time Al was ten, she had begun sleepwalking. She walked in on her mum, rolling on the sofa with a squaddie. The soldier raised his shaven head and roared. Her mother roared too, and her thin legs, blotched with fake tan, stood straight up into the air.

Next day her mum got the squaddie to fix a bolt on the outside of Al’s bedroom door. He did it gladly, humming as he worked. You’re the first man was ever handy around here, her mum said, is that right, Gloria?

Alison stood behind her bedroom door. She heard the bolt shunt into its bracket, with a small tight thud. The squaddie hummed, happy in his work. “I wish I was in Dixie, hooray, hooray”—tap-tap—“In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand … .” Mum, she said, let us out. I can’t breave. She ran to the window. They were walking down the road, laughing, the soldier swigging from a can of lager.

A few nights later she woke suddenly. It was very dark outside, as if they had been able to shut off the streetlamp. A number of ill-formed greasy faces were looking down on her. One of them seemed to be in Dixie, but she couldn’t be sure. She closed her eyes. She felt herself lifted up. Then there was nothing, nothing that she remembers.

ALISON: So what puzzles me, and the only thing that makes me think it might have been a dream, was that darkness—because how did they switch the streetlamp off?

COLETTE: You slept in the front, did you?

ALISON: Initially in the back, because the front was the bigger bedroom so Mum had it, but then she swapped me, must have been after the dog bite, probably after Keef, I get the impression she didn’t want me getting up in the night and looking out over the waste ground, which is possible because—

COLETTE: Al, face up to it. You didn’t dream it. She had you molested. Probably sold tickets. God knows.

ALISON: I think I’d already been—that. What you say. Molested.

COLETTE: Do you?

ALISON: Just not in a group situation.

COLETTE: Alison, you ought to go to the police.

ALISON: It’s years—

COLETTE: But some of those men could still be at large!

ALISON: It all gets mixed up in my mind. What happened. How old I was. Whether things happened once or whether they just went on happening—so they all rolled into one, you know.

COLETTE: So did you never tell anybody? Here. Blow your nose.

ALISON: No … . You see, you don’t tell anybody because there’s nobody to tell. You try and write it down, you write My Diary, but you get your legs slapped. Honestly … . It doesn’t matter now, I don’t think about it, it’s only once in a while I think about it. I might have dreamed it, I used to dream I was flying. You see, you wipe out in the day what happens in the night. You have to. It’s not as if it changed my life. I mean I’ve never gone in for sex much. Look at me, who’d want me, it’d need an army. So it’s not as if I feel … it’s not as if I remember … .

COLETTE: Your mother should have protected you. If she were my mum I’d kill her. Don’t you sometimes think about it, going over to Aldershot and killing her?

ALISON: She lives in Bracknell now.

COLETTE: Wherever. Why does she live in Bracknell?

ALISON: She went off with a man who had a council house over there, but it never lasted, anyway, he went over into Spirit and somehow or other she ended up with the tenancy. She wasn’t so bad. Isn’t. I mean, you have to feel sorry for her. She’s the size of a sparrow. In her looks, she’s more like your mother than mine. I walked past her once in the street and didn’t recognize her. She was always dyeing her hair. It was a different colour every week.

COLETTE: That’s no excuse.

ALISON: And it never came out what she intended. Champagne Hi-Life, and she’d end up ginger. Chocolate Mousse, and she’d end up ginger. Same with her pills. She used to swap other people’s prescriptions. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. I wondered how she kept going.

COLETTE: These men—could you still identify them, do you think?

ALISON: Some of them. Maybe. If I saw them in a good light. But they can’t arrest them after they’re passed.

COLETTE: If they’re dead I’m not worried. If they’re dead they can’t do any more damage.

When Al was twelve or so, she got cheeky. She said to her mum, “That one last night, what was his name then? Or don’t you know?”

Her mum tried to slap her around the head but she overbalanced and fell on the floor. Al helped her up.

“Thank you, you’re a good girl, Al,” her mum said, and Al’s cheeks burned, because she had never heard that before.

“What you on, Mum?” she asked. “What you taking?”

Her mum took a lot of Librium and a lot of Bacardi, which does make you fall over. Every week, though, she gave something else a try; it usually worked out, like the hair dye, to have a result she had not foreseen but should have.

Al had to go to the chemist for her mum’s prescriptions. “Are you here again?” said the man behind the counter, and because she was going through her brusque phase she would say, it’s me or somebody else, what’s your opinion? “My God,” he said. “I can’t believe she gets through this. Is she selling it on? Come on, you’re a bright girl, you must know.”

“She swallows it all,” she said. “I swear it.”

The man sniggered. “Swallows, does she? You don’t say.”

This remark mocked her; but still, when she left the pharmacy she felt ten feet tall. You’re a bright girl, she said to herself. She stared at herself in the next shop window: which was Ash Vale Motor Sport. The window was crammed with all the stuff you need for hacking across country with crappy old cars: sump guards, fog lamps, snow chains, and the latest model in a hi-lift jack. Swimming above this equipment was her own face, the face of a bright girl—a good girl, too—swimming in the oily glass.

By this time she had spent years pretending she was normal. She was never able to judge what other people knew and what they didn’t know. Take Gloria: Gloria had been clear enough to her mother, but not to her. Yet her mother hadn’t seen Mrs. McGibbet, and she’d almost skated across the attic, putting her foot on one of Brendan’s toy cars. And then one day—was it after Keith got mashed, was it after she got her scissors, was it before Harry cleaned his bowl?—one day she’d caught a glimpse of a red-haired lady with false eyelashes, standing at the foot of the stairs. Gloria, she thought, at last; she said, “Hi, are you all right?” but the woman didn’t reply. Another day, as she was coming in at the front door, she had glanced down into the bath, and didn’t she see the red-haired lady looking up at her, with her eyelashes half pulled off, and no body attached to her neck?

But that was not possible. They wouldn’t just leave a head on full view for passersby. You kept things under wraps; wasn’t that the rule?

What else was the rule? Was she, Alison, seeing more or less than she ought? Should she mention it, when she heard a woman sobbing in the wall? When should you shout up and when should you shut up? Was she stupid, or was that other people? And what would she do when she left school?

Tahera was going to do social studies. She didn’t know what that was. She and Tahera went shopping on Saturdays, if her mother let her out. Tahera shopped while she watched. Tahera was size six. She was four foot ten, brown, and quite spotty. Al herself was not much taller than that, but she was size eighteen. Tahera said, “You would be welcome to my castoffs, but—you know.” She looked Alison up and down, and her tiny nostrils flared.

When she asked her mother for money, her mother said, “What you want you got to earn, is that right Gloria? You’re not so bad, Al, you’ve got that lovely complexion, okay you’re fleshy but that’s what a lot of men like. You’re what we call two handfuls of bubbly fun. Now you didn’t ought to hang around with that Indian bint, it puts the punters off, they don’t like to think some Patel’s after ’em with a Stanley knife.”

“Her name’s not Patel.”

“All right, young lady! That’s enough from you.” Her mother hurtled across the kitchen in a Librium rage. “How long you expect me to keep you fed and housed, how long, eh? Lie on your back and take it, that’s what I had to do. And regular! Not just Oh-it’s-Thursday-I-don’t-feel-like-it. You can forget that caper, miss! That sort of attitude will get you nowhere. Make it regular, and start charging proper. That’s what you’ve got to do. How else you think you’re going to make a living?”

COLETTE: So how did you feel, Alison, when you first knew you had psychic powers?

ALISON: I never … I mean I never really did. There wasn’t a moment. How can I put it? I didn’t know what I saw, and what I just imagined. It—you see, it’s confusing, when the people you grow up with are always coming and going at night. And always with hats on.

COLETTE: Hats?

ALISON: Or their collars pulled up. Disguises. Changing their names. I remember once, I must have been twelve, thirteen, I came in from school and I thought the house was empty for once; I thought, thank Christ for that; I thought I might make some toast then do a bit of cleaning while they were all gone out. I walked through to the lean-to, and I looked up and this geezer was standing there—not doing anything, just standing there leaning against the sink—and he had a box of matches in his hand. Christ, he was evil-looking! I mean, they all were, but there was something about him, his expression … . I can tell you, Colette, he was in a league of his own. He just stared at me and I stared back at him, and I thought I’d seen him before, and you have to make conversation, don’t you, even if you suddenly feel as if you’re going to throw up? So I said, are you the one they call Nick? He said, no, love, I’m a burglar, and I said, go on, you are Nick. He flew into a temper. He rattled the matchbox and it was empty. He threw it down. He went, can’t even get a light around here, I’m going to sack the flaming lot of them, they’re not worth a bench in hell. He whipped his belt out of his trousers and lashed out at me.

COLETTE: What happened then?

ALISON: I ran out into the street.

COLETTE: Did he follow you?

ALISON: I expect so.

Al was fourteen. Fifteen perhaps. No spots still. She seemed immune to them. She had grown a bit, all ways, up and out. Her tits came around the corner before she did; or that’s what one of the men remarked.

She said to her mother, “Who’s my dad?”

Her mother said, “What you want to know that for?”

“People ought to know who they are.”

Her mother lit another cigarette.

“I bet you don’t know,” Al said. “Why did you bother to have me? I bet you tried to get rid of me, didn’t you?”

Her mother exhaled, blowing the smoke down her nose in two disdainful and separate streams. “We all tried. But you was stuck fast, you silly bitch.”

“You should have gone to the doctor.”

“Doctor?” Her mother’s eyes rolled up. “Listen to her! Doctor! Bloody doctor, they didn’t want to know. I was five, six months gone when MacArthur buggered off, and then I’d have shifted you all right, but there wasn’t any bloody shifting.”

“MacArthur? Is that my dad?”

“How should I know?” her mother said. “What you bloody asking me for? What you want to know for anyway? What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Mind your own bloody business.”

Seeing Gloria’s head in the bath was more worrying to her, somehow, than seeing Gloria entire. From the age of eight, nine, ten, she told Colette, she used to see disassembled people lying around, a leg here, an arm there. She couldn’t say precisely when it started, or what brought it on. Or whether they were bits of people she knew.

If you could understand what those years were like, she told Colette, you’d think I’m quite a triumph really, the way I keep myself together. When I walk out onstage I love it, when I’ve got my dress, my hair done, my opals, and my pearls that I wear in the summer. It’s for them, for the audience, but it’s for me too.

She knew there was this struggle in a woman’s life—at least, there had been in her mum’s—just to be whole, to be clean, to be tidy, to keep your own teeth in your head; just to have a clean tidy house and not fag ash dropped everywhere and bottle tops underfoot: not to find yourself straying out into the street with no tights on. That’s why nowadays she can’t bear fluff on the carpet or a chip in her nail polish; that’s why she’s a fanatic about depilation, why she’s always pestering the dentist about cavities he can’t see yet; why she takes two baths a day, sometimes a shower as well; why she puts her special scent on every day. Maybe it’s an old-fashioned choice, but it was the first grown-up scent she bought for herself, as soon as she could afford one. Mrs. Etchells had remarked at the time, “Oh, that’s lovely, it’s your signature perfume.” The house at Aldershot smelled of male farts, stale sheets, and something else, not quite identifiable. Her mother said the smell had been there ever since they took the floorboards up: “Keith and them, you know, that crowd what used to drink down the Phoenix? What did they want to do that for, Gloria? Why did they want to take the floorboards up? Men, honestly! You never know what they’ll be up to next.”

Al told Colette, “One day I saw an eye looking at me. A human eye. It used to roll along the street. One day it followed me to school.”

“What, like ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’?”

“Yes, but it felt more like a dog.” Al shivered. “And then one day, one morning when I was leaving the house … .”

One day—she was in her school-leaving year—Al came out in the morning and saw a man watching her from the door of the chemist’s shop. His hands were plunged into his trouser pockets and he was jiggling an unlit cigarette between his lips.

COLETTE: It wasn’t this Nick character? The one in the kitchen, the one who chased you with the belt?

ALISON: No, it wasn’t Nick.

COLETTE: But you had seen him before?

ALISON: Yes, yes, I had. But can we switch the tape off, please? Morris is threatening me. He doesn’t like me talking about the early days. He doesn’t want it recorded.

That same afternoon, she came out of school with Lee Tooley and Catherine Tattersall. Tahera herself was close behind, linking arms with Nicky Scott and Andrea Wossname. Tahera was still rich, small, and spotty—and now be-spectacled, since her dad, she said, had “read me the riot act.” Catherine had ginger curls and she was the girl who was most far behind in every subject, even farther behind than Alison. Lee was Catherine’s friend.

Morris was on the other side of the road, leaning against the window of the launderette. His eyes travelled over the girls. She went cold.

He was short, a dwarf nearly, like a jockey, and his legs were bowed like a jockey’s. She learned later he’d been more like normal height, at least five foot six, till his legs had been broken: in one of his circus feats, he’d said at first, but later he admitted it was in a gang feud.

“Come on,” she said. “Come on, Andrea. Hurry up. Come on, Lee.”

Then, because she was cold, she zipped up her jacket, her cherry-red jacket that only just covered her chest. “Ooh, spastic!” Lee said, because it was not the style to fasten your jacket. The whole group began its shuffling, swaying sideways procession down the street; there seemed nothing she could do to hurry them. The girls walked with their arms folded, hugging themselves. Lee, in a spirit of mockery, did the same. A radio played somewhere, it was playing an Elton John song. She remembered that. The kids began to sing. She tried, but her mouth was dry.

COLETTE: So was he—I feel I’m a bit in the dark here—this man who was watching you outside the school: are we talking about Morris? And was he the man with the yellow face?

ALISON: Yes.

COLETTE: The man you saw behind you, through the mirror? The low hairline?

ALISON: His tie not on straight.

Next day, when she came out, he was there again. I’ll go on the aggressive, she thought. She nudged Tahera. “Look at that pervert.”

“Where?”

Alison nodded across the road to where Morris leaned, just as he had the day before. Tahera attracted Nicky Scott’s attention by kicking her lightly on the back of her calf. “Gerroff me, you bloody bhaji!” Nicky bellowed.

“Can you see any pervert?” Tahera asked.

They looked around them. They followed where Alison pointed and then they swivelled their heads from side to side in an exaggerated fashion. Then they turned in circles, crying out, “Where, where?”—except for Catherine, who hadn’t caught on, and just started singing like yesterday. Then they lolled their tongues out and retched, because they confused a perv with a sicko, then they ran off and left her alone in the street.

Morris lurched away from the wall and came limping towards her. He ignored the traffic, and a van must have missed him by inches. He could limp very fast; he seemed to scuttle like some violent crab, and when he reached her he fastened his crab hand onto her arm above the elbow. She flinched and twisted in his grasp, but he held her firmly. Get off me, she was crying, you horrible pervert, but then, as so often, she realized that words were coming out of her mouth but no one could hear them.

After Al’s first meeting with Morris, he waited for her most days. “I’m a gentleman, I am,” he would boast, “and I am here to escort you. A growing girl like you, you don’t want to be out walking the streets on your own. Anything could happen.”

In the early days, he didn’t follow her into the house. He seemed nervous about who might be in there. As they turned at the corner of the street he would say, “Nick bin in?”

She would say no, and he’d say, “Just as well, never know where you are wiv Nick, if you see Nick you walk the other way, you hear? You don’t try any of your tricks round Nick, or he’ll upend you, he’ll slap you on the soles of your feet till your teeth drop out.” Then he would brighten up: “What about Aitkenside, you seen Aitkenside?”

She’d say, “Dunno, what’s his other name? Dunno who you mean.”

He’d say, “Much you don’t, oh, very likely. Pikey Pete been round?”

“I told you,” she said, “I don’t know who your friends are or what they’re called.”

But Morris sneered at this. “Not know Pete? The whole country knows him. Wherever there is dealing in dogs they know Pete.”

“I don’t deal in dogs.” She remembered the grown-up coldness of her voice.

“Oh, pardon me, I’m sure! You don’t deal with any of my mates, is it? You don’t deal with ’em in any way, shape, or form, is it?” He grumbled under his breath. “You’re not your mother’s daughter, I suppose. Not know Pete? Wherever there is dealing in horses, they know Pete.”

When he got to the front gate, he would say, “Emmie not moved that old bath yet?”

She’d say, “Have you known my mum a long time?”

He’d say, “I’ll say I have. Known Emmie Cheetham? I’ll say I have. Know everybody, me. I know Donnie. I know Pete. Emmie Cheetham? I’ll say I have.”

One day she said, “Morris, are you my dad?”

And he said “Dad, me, that’s a good one! Did she say so?”

“I think MacArthur’s my dad.”

“MacArthur!” he said. He stopped. She stopped too, and looked into his face. He had turned grey: greyer than usual. His voice came out wobbly. “You can stand there, and say that name?”

“Why not?”

“Cool as a bloody cucumber,” Morris said. He spoke to the air, as if he were talking to an audience. “Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouf.”

They staggered along the street, a pace or two, Morris’s hand clamped on her arm. She saw Lee and Catherine going by on the other side of the road. She waved to them to rescue her but they made vomity faces at her and walked on. She didn’t know if they could see Morris or not. Under his breath he was muttering.

“MacArthur, she says! Cool as you like.” He stopped and propped himself against the wall with his free hand, his bent fingers spread out. He had a tattoo of a snake running down his arm; now its head, darting across the back of his hand, seemed to gulp, and pulse out its tongue. Morris too made a vomity face and retched.

She was afraid of what might come out of his mouth, so she concentrated on his hand, planted against the brick.

“Speak the name of MacArthur!” He mimicked her voice. “I think he’s my dad. Suppose he is? Is that how you treat a dad? Is it? Got to hand it to her, she has some cheek, that girl.”

“How?” she said. “How did I treat him?”

The head pulsed, the snake’s tongue flicked out between his spread fingers. “I’ll tell you something about that bugger,” he said. “I’ll tell you something you don’t know. MacArthur owes me money. And so if I ever see MacArthur in this neck of the woods, I’ll saw him off at the bloody knees. Let the bloody bastard venture, just let him. I’ll poke out his other eye.”

“Has MacArthur only one eye?”

“Oh, tee-bloody-hee,” Morris said. “Still, girl, you got paid out. You got a lesson, eh? They taught you what a blade could do.”

“I hope you’re not,” she said. “I hope you’re not my dad. I like you worst of anybody. I don’t want you anywhere near me. You stink of fags and beer.”

“I bin near you,” Morris said. “We all have.”

COLETTE: But after that, when Morris came along, you must have known that other people couldn’t see him, I mean you must have realized that you had psychic powers.

ALISON: You see, I was ignorant. I didn’t know what a spirit guide was. Until I met Mrs. Etchells, I had no idea—

COLETTE: We’re going to go into that, aren’t we? Mrs. Etchells?

ALISON: When?

COLETTE: Tonight, if you’ve got the stamina.

ALISON: Can we eat first?

(click)

Pity Colette, who had to transcribe all this. “When you’re talking about Gloria,” she said, “I never know if she’s alive or dead.”

“No,” Al said. “Nor me.”

“But it worries me. I need to get it straight—for the book.”

“I’m telling you what I know.”

Was she? Or was she leaving things out? Sparing Colette’s feelings in some way, or testing her memory?

“These awful blokes,” Colette said, “all these fiends from Aldershot. I keep losing track of their names. Make me a list.”

Alison took a sheet of paper and wrote FIENDS FROM ALDERSHOT. “Let’s see … Donnie Aitkenside,” she said.

“The one who said he’d beat up your teacher?”

“Yes … well, and rape her, I think he was going to rape her too. There was MacArthur. Morris reckoned MacArthur was worse than most, but I dunno. There was Keith Capstick, that pulled the dog off me. And I thought he was my dad because he did that. But was he? I dunno.”

When she talks about them, Colette thought, she slips away somewhere: to a childhood country, where diction is slipshod. She said, “Al, are you writing this down?”

“You can see I’m not.”

“You wander off the point. Just make the list.”

Al sucked her pen. “There was this Pikey character, who was a horse dealer. I think he had relatives, cousins, up and down the country, you used to hear him talk about them, they might have come by but I don’t really know. And somebody called Bob Fox?”

“Don’t ask me! Get it on paper! What did he do, Bob Fox?”

“He tapped on the window. At my mum’s house. He did it to make you jump.”

“What else? He must have done something else?”

“Dunno. Don’t think he did. Then there was Nick, of course. The one with the empty matchbox, in the kitchen. Oh, wait, I remember now. Oh God, yes. I know where I saw him before. We had to go and collect him from the cop shop. They’d picked him up on the street, falling-down drunk. But they didn’t want to charge him, they just let him sober up, then they wanted rid of him because he’d put slime on the cell walls.”

“Slime?”

“And they didn’t want a heavy cleaning job. He was just lying there sliming everything, you see. He didn’t want to come out, so my mum had to go down and get him. They said—the police—they’d found her phone number in his wallet, so they sent a car to fetch her in, then she had to go down the cells. The desk sergeant said, a woman’s touch, tee-hee. He was being sarcastic. He said, he’ll be able to go now, won’t he, now he’s got his bike? My mum said, watch your lip, Little Boy Blue, or I’ll fatten it for you. He said, leave that kid here, you can’t take her down the cells. And my mum said, what, leave her here, so you can bloody touch her up? So she took me down to get Nick.”

Colette felt faint. “I wish I’d never started this,” she said.

“He came out on the street and he shouted, can’t I get drunk, same as anybody? My mum was trying to calm him down. She says, come back to our house.”

“And did he?”

“I expect. Look, Col, it was a long time ago.”

Colette wanted to ask, what kind of slime was it, on the cell walls? But then again, she didn’t want to ask.

COLETTE: Okay, so it’s eleven-thirty.

ALISON: P.M., that is.

COLETTE:—and we’re about to resume—

ALISON:—as I’ve now had a bottle of Crozes-Hermitage and feel able to continue reminiscing about my teenage years—

COLETTE: Al!

ALISON:—whereas Colette has had a Slimline Tonic and on the basis of this feels she has the courage to switch on the machine.

COLETTE: My uncle used to tickle me.

ALISON: You mean, your dad?

COLETTE: Yes, come to think of it. My dad. It wasn’t ordinary tickling … .

ALISON: It’s all right, take your time.

COLETTE: I mean it was aggressive, stabbing at you with a finger—a man’s finger, you know, it’s as thick as that—and I was little, and he knew it hurt me. Oh, God, and Gav used to do it. His idea of a joke. Maybe that’s why I went and married him. It seemed familiar.

ALISON: Sounds classic to me, marrying a man with the same sense of humour as your father. I hear about it all the time.

COLETTE: I didn’t laugh when he did it. It was more—you know, convulsing. As if I were having a fit.

ALISON: That must have been a pretty sight.

COLETTE: He stabbed into me with his finger, between my thin little ribs. It was like—it really was—the way he’d come at me, sticking it out … . Oh, I don’t think I can say it.

ALISON: It’s not like you to be coy.

COLETTE: As if he was rehearsing me.

ALISON: Giving you a practice for your later life. (pause) I suppose that’s what dads are for. Here, do you want a tissue?

COLETTE: Let’s get back on track. You need an early night, you’ve got a client phoning for tarot before her breakfast meeting. Mrs. Etchells, you were going to fill me in about Mrs. Etchells.

ALISON: You see, I got to the point where I wanted money of my own. I thought, if I saved up, I could get on the train at Ash Vale and just go somewhere, I wouldn’t have minded where. So, the way it was, Mrs. Etchells got me started. You see, one day I was leaning on her front hedge, bawling my eyes out, because Nicky Scott and Catherine and them—because these girls, my friends, at least they were supposed to be my friends—

COLETTE: Yes?

ALISON: They’d been calling me spastic all afternoon, because in English I’d had this—sort of incident. It was Morris really started it off; he’d come in halfway through English and said, oh, William bloody Shakespeare is it? Bloody Bill Wagstaffe, Bill Crankshaft, I know that cove, he’s dead, he is, or so he claims, and he owes me a fiver. We were doing Romeo and Juliet and he said, I seen that Juliet, she’s dead, and she’s no better than she should be, a right slapper let me tell you. So then I knew he was lying, because Juliet’s a fictional character. But at first, you see, I believed him about things. I didn’t know what to believe.

COLETTE: Yes, and?

ALISON: So then he squashed up in the chair next to me, because Nicky Scott and Catherine and all that lot, they weren’t bothering with me and they were leaving me to sit on my own. He put his hand on my knee—above my knee, really, squeezing—and I couldn’t help it, I squealed out. And he was saying, I’ll tell you another thing about that Juliet—her mother was at it before she was out of ankle socks, she was no slouch on the couch. Remind you of home, does it, remind you of home sweet home? And he started pulling my skirt up. And I was trying to pull it down and push his hands away, I was slapping at him but it didn’t do any good. And Mr. Naysmith said to me, excuse me for intruding on your private reverie, but I don’t think I have your undivided attention, Alison. Just then I couldn’t stand it and it all came out in a rush, I was crying and swearing and shouting “piss off, you perv,” and “bugger off back where you came from.” So Mr. Naysmith looking like thunder came belting down the class towards me, and I shout, keep your filthy pervvy hands to yourself. And he got hold of me by the back of my neck. Well, they did. In those days. At my school, anyway. They weren’t allowed to cane you but they used to get hold of you in a painful way. And he dragged me off to the headmaster … . So I got suspended. Excluded, they call it now. For making accusations against Mr. Naysmith. You see, I was wailing, he was pulling up my skirt, he was pulling up my skirt. And in those days they didn’t have sexual abuse, so nobody believed me, whereas these days nobody would believe him.

COLETTE: So how does this fit in with Mrs. Etchells?

ALISON: What?

COLETTE: You said you were leaning on her hedge crying.

ALISON: Yes, that’s it, because they’d been tormenting me you see. I didn’t care about getting suspended—it was a relief really—they said they’d be calling my mum in but I knew they wouldn’t because the headmaster was too frightened of her. Anyway, Mrs. Etchells spotted me and she came running out, she said leave off, girls, why ever are you tormenting poor Alison like that? And I was surprised that she knew my name.

COLETTE: And who was Mrs. Etchells? I mean I know she taught you all you know—you’ve said so several times—but, you know, who was she?

ALISON: My gran, or so she said.

COLETTE: What?

(click)

COLETTE: This is Colette, resuming the session at twelve-thirty. Alison, you were telling us about your reunion with your grandmother.

ALISON: Yes, but it wasn’t like that, good God, it wasn’t like This Is Your Life, and your gran walks in smiling through her bloody tears. I don’t know why you put these questions on the tape, Colette. I’ve just told you how it was.

COLETTE: Oh, for the fifteenth bloody time, it’s to have a record—

ALISON: All right, all right, but let me tell it my way, will you? She took me in and made me beans on toast. And do you know it was the first time I ever—I mean, my mum used to get distracted, so the beans and the toast came separate, you’d have your beans at five o’clock and then she’d look at you about ten past and she’d say, oh, you didn’t get your toast yet, did you? You know when you go to a café, like on the motorway, and they have those big laminated menus with pictures of the food on? I used to wonder what for, I mean, why do they do that, the food doesn’t look like that when it comes, it’s all huge and colored in the menus but in real life it’s all shrunken up and sick-coloured. Well, the reason they do that—this is what I think—is to help people like my mum, because they don’t know what food goes with what. When she’d got some man staying over, one she liked, she’d say, oh, I’m making a big Sunday, by which she meant a big Sunday lunch, but when it came he’d be, what’s this, Emmie? I mean, chicken and cauliflower, with white sauce out of a packet.

COLETTE: And mash?

ALISON: No, that would be later, that would come along at teatime. And she’d go to the corner and get curry—that was her idea of making lunch—she’d say, what you complaining about, I paid for it myself, didn’t I?

COLETTE: I really don’t want to interrupt your flow …

ALISON: So that’s why they have the pictures, to stop people like my mum ordering a fried egg with their chicken. And make sure they assemble all the bits of their meal at the same time.

COLETTE: And Mrs. Etchells—

ALISON: Made me beans on toast. Which made her a winner in my eyes, I mean I was always hungry then, I think that’s why I’m big now.

COLETTE: Just leaving that issue aside for the moment—

ALISON: She said, come in dear; sit down, tell me all about it. So I did. Because I had nobody to confide in. And I cried a lot, and it all came pouring out. Tehera. Lee. Mr. Naysmith. Morris. Everything.

COLETTE: And what did she say?

ALISON: Well, the thing was she seemed to understand. She just sat there nodding. When I’d finished she said, you see, like grandmother like granddaughter. I said, what? It’s descended to you, she said, my gift, missing out Derek, probably because he was a man. I said, who’s Derek, she said, my son Derek. Your dad, darling; well, he could be anyway.”

COLETTE: She only said, could be?

ALISON: All I thought was, thank God, so it wasn’t Morris. I said, so, if Derek’s my dad, and you’re my nan, why isn’t my name Etchells? She said, because he ran off before your mam could waltz him down the aisle. Not that I blame him there. I said, it’s surprising I wasn’t drawn to you. She said, you was, in a manner of speaking, because you was always leaning against my hedge with your young friends. And today, she said, I reckon that today you see, something drew you. You were in trouble, so you came to your nan.

COLETTE: That’s quite sad, really. You mean she’d been living down the road all the time?

ALISON: She said she didn’t like to interfere. She said, your mam minds her own business, and of course the whole neighbourhood knows what that business is—which was no surprise to me, you know, because I’d understood for quite some time why when a bloke went out he put a tenner on the sideboard.

COLETTE: And so, you and Mrs. Etchells, did you become close at this point?

ALISON: I used to go and do little errands for her. Carrying her shopping, because her knees were bad. Running for fags for her, not that she smoked like my mum. I always called her Mrs. Etchells, I didn’t like to start calling her Nan, I wasn’t sure if I ought. I asked my mother about Derek, and she just laughed. She said, she’s not on that old story again, is she? Bloody cloud-cuckoo land.

COLETTE: So she didn’t actually confirm it? Or deny it?

ALISON: No. She threw the salt pot at me. So … end of that conversation. The way Mrs. Etchells told it, Derek and my mum were going to get married, but he took off after he found out what she was like (laughter). Probably (laughter) probably she whizzed him up some of her tandoori prawns with tinned spaghetti. Oh God, she has no idea at all about nutrition, that woman. No idea of what constitutes a balanced meal.

COLETTE: Yes, can we get on to how you came to turn professional?

ALISON: When I got towards school-leaving, Mrs. Etchells said it’s time we had a talk, she said, there’s advantages and disadvantages to the life—

COLETTE: And did she say what they were, in her opinion?

ALISON: She said, why not use your God-given talent? But then she said, you come in for a great deal of name-calling and disbelief, and I can’t pretend that your colleagues in the profession are going to welcome you with open arms—which indeed I did find to be the case, as you know yourself, Colette, to your cost, because you know what they were like when I introduced you as my assistant. She said, of course, you could try to act as if you were normal, and I said I’d give it a try, though it never worked at school. I got a job in a chemist in Farnborough. Temporary sales assistant. It was more temporary than they meant, of course.

COLETTE: What happened?

ALISON: Catherine and Nicky Scott would come in, they hadn’t got jobs, they were on the social. When he saw them, Morris would start fiddling around with the contraceptives. Taking them out of their packets and strewing them around. Blowing them up like balloons. Naturally they thought it was me. They thought it was the sort of thing a sixteen-year-old would do—you know, have her mates in and have a laugh. So that was that. Then Mrs. Etchells got me a job at a cake shop.

COLETTE: And what happened there?

ALISON: I started eating the cakes.

When Alison decided to change her name she rang up her mother in Bracknell to ask if she would be offended. Emmie sighed. She sounded frayed and far away. “I can’t think what would be a good name in your line of country,” she said.

“Where are you?” Alison said. “You’re fading away.”

“In the kitchen,” said Emmie. “It’s the cigs, I can’t seem to give up no matter what. Do my voice in.”

“I’m glad I don’t smoke,” Alison said. “It wouldn’t be very professional.”

“Huh. Professional,” said Emmie. “You, a professional. That’s a laugh.”

Alison thought, I may as well change the whole thing while I’m about it. I don’t have to stick with any part of my old self. She went to a bookshop and bought one of those books for naming babies.

“Congratulations,” said the woman behind the till.

Alison smoothed down the front of her dress. “I’m not, actually,” she said. Sonia Hart. Melissa Hart. Susanna Hart. It didn’t work. She managed to lose Cheetham, but her baptismal name kept sliding back into her life. It was part of her, like Morris was.

Over the next few years she had to get used to life with Morris. When her mum went off to Bracknell she made it clear she didn’t want a daughter trailing after her, so Al got a temporary billet with Mrs. Etchells. Morris no longer stopped at the gate. He came inside and exploded the lightbulbs, and disarranged Mrs. Etchell’s china cabinet. “He is a one!” said Mrs. Etchells.

It was only when she got older and moved among a different set of psychics that she realized how vulgar and stupid Morris really was. Other mediums have spirit guides with a bit more about them—dignified impassive medicine men or ancient Persian sages—but she had this grizzled grinning apparition in a bookmaker’s checked jacket, and suede shoes with bald toe caps. A typical communication from Sett or Oz or Running Deer would be, “The way to open the heart is to release yourself from expectation.” But a typical communication from Morris would be: “Oh, pickled beetroot, I like a nice bit of pickled beetroot. Make a nice sandwich out of pickled beetroot!”

At first she thought that by an effort of will and concentration, she would make him keep his distance. But if she resists Morris, there is a buildup of pressure in her cheekbones and her teeth. There is a crawling feeling inside her spine, which is like slow torture; sooner or later you have to give in, and listen to what he’s saying.

On days when she really needs a break she tries to imagine a big lid, banging down on him. It works for a time. His voice booms, hollow and incomprehensible, inside a huge metal tub. For a while she doesn’t have to take any notice of him. Then, little by little, an inch at a time, he begins to raise the lid.