Beyond Black: A Novel

seven

At Admiral Drive there were these house types: the Collingwood, the Frobisher, the Beatty, the Mountbatten, the Rodney, and the Hawkyns. Colette, initially, was unimpressed. The site was ragged grassland, half of it turned over already by the diggers.

“Why is it called Admiral Drive?”

The woman in the sales caravan said, “We theme all our developments nautically, you know?” She wore a name badge and a bright orange skirt and jersey, like a supermarket cashier.

“Awful uniform,” Colette said. “Wouldn’t navy be more appropriate?”

“We’ll be glad of it,” the woman said, “once the building starts. Orange stands out against the landscape. We’ll have to wear hard hats when we go out there. It’ll be mud up to your knees. Like a battlefield.” One of nature’s saleswomen, Colette thought. “What I’m saying is,” the woman added, “it’s really much better to buy off-plan?”

Colette picked up a fistful of brochures from the desk, banged them end-on to tidy them, and dropped them into her bag.

“Can I help you there at all?” the woman said. She looked aggrieved at the loss of her leaflets. “How many beds were you looking at?”

“I don’t know. Three?”

“Here you are then. The Beatty?”

Colette was puzzled by the woman, who turned most of her statements into questions. It must be what they do in Surrey, she decided; they must have had it twinned with Australia.

She opened the brochure for the Beatty and took it to the light. “Are these the actual room sizes, Suzi?”

“Oh no. It’s for information purposes only?”

“So it’s information, but it’s wrong?”

“It’s guidelines?”

“So the rooms could be bigger than this?”

“Probably not.”

“But they could be smaller?”

“Some contraction could occur.”

“We aren’t midgets, you know? What are the four-beds like? We could merge the rooms, or something.”

“At this stage, subject to building regulations, some redesign is possible?” Suzi said. “Extra costs may be incurred?”

“You’d charge for walls you didn’t put up?”

“Any alteration to the basic plan may be subject to extra costs,” Suzi said, “but I don’t say it will. Might you be interested in the Frobisher at all? It comes with a spacious utility area?”

“Wait a minute,” Colette said. “Wait a minute, I’ll get my friend.” She skipped out of the sales caravan and across the hardstanding to where the car was parked. The builders had put up a flagpole to dignify their sales area, and Alison was watching their emblem sailing in the wind. Colette swung open the car door. “Al, you’d better come in. The Frobisher comes with a spacious utility area. So I’m told.”

Al released her seat belt and stepped out. Her knees were stiff after the short drive down into Surrey. Colette had said, new-build appeals, but I need time to do my research. You have to go back beyond paint finishes and colour schemes, back beyond bricks and mortar, look at the ground we’ll be standing on. It isn’t just a place to live. It’s an investment. We need to maximize the profit. We need to think long-term. After all, she said, you appear to have no pension plans in place. Don’t be silly, Al had said. How could I retire?

Now she stood looking about her. She sensed the underscape, shuddering as it waited to be ripped. Builders’ machines stood ready, their maws crusted with soil, waiting for Monday morning. Violence hung in the air, like the smell of explosive. Birds had flown. Foxes had abandoned their lairs. The bones of mice and voles were mulched into mud, and she sensed the minute snapping of frail necks and the grinding into paste of muscle and fur. Through the soles of her shoes she felt gashed worms turning, twisting and repairing themselves. She looked up, to the grassland that remained. The site was framed by a belt of conifers, like a baffle wall; you could not guess what lay beyond it. In the middle distance was a stand of young birch trees. She could see a ditch running with water. Towards the main road to Guildford, she could see a hedge, a miscarried foetus dug in beneath it. She could see ghost horses, huddled in the shadow of a wall. It was an indifferent place; no better nor worse than most others.

Colette said briskly, “Is something upsetting you?”

“No.”

“Was there something here before?”

“Nothing. Just country.”

“Come in the caravan. Talk to Suzi.”

Al caught the scent of standing water; the ditch, a pond, a sludgy canal, widening into a basin that reflected faces looking down at her from the sky, sneering. The dead don’t ascend, or descend, so properly speaking they can neither leer down at you from the treetops nor grumble and toss beneath your feet; but they can give the appearance of it, if it takes them that way.

She followed Colette and heaved herself into the caravan. The metal steps were flimsy; each tread, under her weight, bowed a little and came snapping back.

“This is my friend,” Colette said.

“Oh, hello?” Suzi said. She looked as if she meant to say, we discourage friends. For a few minutes she left them alone. She took out a duster and passed it over her model drawer fronts and cupboard doors, clicking them backwards and forwards on their swivel-jointed display stand with a sound like the gnashing of giant dentures. She blew some dust off her carpet samples, and found a spot of something disagreeable on her stack of vinyl tiles, which she worked at by spitting on it and then scrubbing at it with her fingernail.

“You could offer us a coffee?” Colette said. “We’re not time wasters.”

“Some people make a hobby of it. Driving around the new developments on a Sunday afternoon, comparing prices? With their friends?”

I never got this far with Gavin, Colette thought. She tried to imagine the life they might have had, if they’d been planning to have a family. She would have said to him, what kitchen do you want, and he’d have said, wot’s the choice? And when she pointed to the model drawer fronts and cupboards, he’d have said, are they kitchens? And when she had said yes, he’d have said, wotever.

But here was Alison, studying the details of the Frobisher, behaving just like a normal purchaser. Suzi had put her duster away and, her back still turned, was edging towards the counter by degrees. Al looked up. “It’s tiny, Col. You can’t do anything with these rooms, they’re just dog kennels.” She handed the leaflet back to the woman. “No thank you,” she said. “Have you got anything bigger?” She rolled her eyes and said to Colette, “Story of my life, eh?”

Suzi enquired, “Which lady is the purchaser?”

“We are both the purchaser.”

Suzi turned away and snatched up the coffeepot from its hotplate. “Coffee? Milk and sugar?” She turned, the pot held defensively before her, and gave them a wide smile. “Certainly,” she said. “Oh, yes, of course. We don’t discriminate. Far from it. Far on the other side. We’ve been away for a training day. We are enthused to play our part to enhance the diversity of the community. The very special kind of community that’s created wherever you find a Galleon Home?”

Colette said, “What do you mean, far on the other side?”

“I mean, no discrimination at all?”

Al said, “No sugar, thanks.”

“But you don’t get a bonus? I mean, if we were lesbians? Which by the way we aren’t? Would you get extra commission?”

Just then a normal couple came up the steps. “Hello?” Suzi called to them, with a warmth that almost scared them down again. “Coffee?” she sang. A few drips from the poised pot leaked onto the plans of the Frobisher, and widened like a fresh fecal stain.

Alison turned away. Her cheeks were plum-coloured.

Colette followed her. “Ignore her. This is Surrey. They don’t get many gays and they’re easily upset.” She thought, if I were a lesbian, I hope I’d get a woman who wasn’t so bulky.

“Could we come back later?” Alison asked. “When there are houses here?”

Suzi said coldly, “Half of these plots are under offer.”

Colette took Al back to the car and laid the facts before her. This is prime building land, she said. She consulted the literature and read it out. Convenient transport links and first-class health and leisure facilities.

“But there aren’t,” Al said. “It’s a field. There’s nothing here. No facilities of any sort.”

“You have to imagine them.”

“It’s not even on a map, is it?”

“They’ll redraw the map, in time.”

She touched Colette’s arm, conciliatory. “No, what I mean is, I like it. I’d like to live nowhere. How long would it be before we could move in?”

“About nine months, I should think.”

Alison was silent. She had given Colette a free hand in the choice of site. Just nowhere near my old house, she had said. Nowhere near Aldershot. Nowhere near a race course, a dog track, an army camp, a dockyard, a lorry park, or a clinic for special diseases. Nowhere near a sidings or a depot, a customs shed or a warehouse; not near an outdoor market or an indoor market or a sweatshop or a body shop or a bookie’s. Colette had said, I thought you might have a psychic way of choosing—for instance, you’d get the map and swing a pendulum over it. God, no, Al had said, if I did that, we’d probably end up in the sea.

“Nine months,” she said now. “I was hoping to do it quicker.”

She had thought of Dean and Aitkenside and whoever, wondered what would happen if Morris brought them home and they got dug in at Wexham. She imagined them hanging around the communal grounds and making their presence felt: tipping over the bins and scratching the residents’ cars. Her neighbours didn’t know the nature of her trade; she had been able to keep it from them. But she imagined them talking behind her back. She imagined the residents’ meeting, which they held every six months. It was at best a rancorous affair: who moves furniture late at night, how did the stair carpet get frayed? She imagined them muttering, talking about her, levelling spiteful but unspecific accusations. Then she would be tempted to apologize; worse, tempted to try to explain.

“Well, there it is,” Colette sighed. “If you want new-build, I don’t think we can do it any quicker. Not unless we buy something nobody else wants.”

Alison swivelled in her seat. “We could do that, couldn’t we? We don’t have to want what everybody else wants?”

“Fine. If you’re prepared to settle for some peculiar little house next to a rubbish dump. Or a plot next to a main road, with all the traffic noise day and night.”

“No, we wouldn’t want that.”

“Alison, should we give it up for today? You’re just not in the mood, are you? It’s like dealing with a five-year-old.”

“Sorry. It’s Morris.”

“Tell him to go to the pub.”

“I have. But he says there isn’t a pub. He keeps going on about his mates. I think he’s met up with another one, I can’t get the name. Oh, wait. Hush, Col, he’s coming through now.”

Morris came through, loud, clear, indignant: “What, are we going to come and live in the middle of a field? I’m not living here.”

Al said, “Wait. He just said something interesting.” She paused, her hand held above her abdomen, as if she were tuning him in. “All right,” she said, “if you’re going to be like that, you know what you can do. See if you can find a better home to go to. (Not you, Col, I’m talking to Morris.) What makes you think I want you moving in anyway? I don’t need you. I’ve had it up to here! Bugger off!” She shouted the last phrase, staring through the windscreen.

Colette said, “Shh! Keep it down!” She checked over her shoulder that no one was watching them.

Al smiled. “I’ll tell you what, Colette, I’ll tell you what we should do. Go back in there, and tell that woman to put us down for the biggest house she’s got.”

Colette placed a small holding deposit and they returned two days later. Suzi was on duty, but it was a weekday morning and the caravan was empty.

“Hello, again. So you’re not working ladies?” Suzi enquired. Her eyes skittered over them, sharp as scissors.

“Self-employed,” Colette said.

“Oh, I see. Both of you?”

“Yes, is that a problem?”

Suzi took a deep breath. Once again a smile spread over her face. “No problem at all? But you will be wanting our package of personally tailored mortgage advice and assistance?”

“No, thank you.”

Suzi spread out the site map. “The Collingwood,” she said, “is very unique, on this site we shall only be erecting three. Being exclusive, it is in a preferential situation, here on top of the hill? We don’t have a computer-generated image as of this moment, because we’re waiting for the computer to generate it. But if you can imagine the Rodney? With an extra bedroom en suite?”

“But what will it look like on the outside?”

“If you’ll excuse me?” Suzi got on the phone. “Those two ladies?” she said. “That I mentioned? Yes, those ones. Wanting to know about the Collingwood, the exterior elevations? Like the Rodney with different gob-ons? Yes. Mmm. Just ordinary, really … . No, not to look at them. By-eee.” She turned back to Colette. “Now, if you can imagine?” She passed her forefinger over the sales leaflet. “For the Rodney you have this band of decorative plasterwork with the nautical knots motif, but with the Collingwood you will get extra portholes?”

“Instead of windows?”

“Oh no, they will just be decorative.”

“They won’t open?”

“I’ll check that for you, shall I?” She picked up the phone again. “Hi, there! Yes, fine. My ladies—yes, those ones—want to know, do the portholes open? That’s on the Collingwood?”

The answer took some time to find. A voice in Al’s ear said, did you know Capstick was at sea? He was in the merchant navy before he got taken on as a bouncer.

“Colette,” she said. She put her hand on Colette’s hand. “I think Morris has met Keef Catsick.”

“No?” Suzi said. “No! Really? You too? In Dorking? … Well, there must be a plague of them. What can you do? Live and let live, that’s what I say … . Yes, will do. By-eee.”

She clicked the phone down and turned away politely, believing she was witnessing a moment of lesbian intimacy.

Colette said, “Keith who?”

Alison took her hand away. “No. It’s all right. It’s nothing.” Her knuckles looked skinned and darkly bruised. The lucky opals had congealed in their settings, dull and matt like healing scabs.

Al thought you couldn’t bargain with a house builder, but Colette showed her that you can. Even when they had agreed on a basic price, three thousand below Suzi’s target, she kept on pushing, pushing, pushing, until Suzi felt sick and hot and she began to capitulate to Colette’s demands; for Colette made it clear that until she was dealt with, and dealt with in a way satisfactory to herself, she would keep away any other potential customers—which she did, by darting her head at them as they climbed the steps and fixing them with her pale glare; by snapping, “Do you mind, Suzi is busy with me?” When Suzi’s phone rang, Colette picked it up and said, “Yes? No she can’t. Call back.” When Suzi yearned after lost prospects as they stumbled down the steps, following them with her eyes, Colette zipped her bag, stood up and said, “I could come back when you’re more fully staffed—say, next Saturday afternoon?”

Suzi grew frantic then, as she saw her commission seeping away. She became accommodating and flexible. When Suzi agreed to upgrade to a power shower en-suite to Bed Two, Colette signed up for fitted wardrobes. When Colette hesitated over a double oven, Suzi offered to make it a multifunction model including microwave. When Colette—after prolonged deliberation—gave the nod to brass switchplates throughout, Suzi was so relieved she threw in a carriage lamp free. And when Colette—after stabbing at her calculator buttons and gnawing her lip—opted for wood-style flooring to kitchen and utility, Suzi, sweating inside her orange skin, agreed to turf the back garden at Galleon’s expense.

Meanwhile, Alison had plummeted down on the click ’n’ fix korner group seating. I can afford it, she thought, I can probably afford it. Business was booming, thanks in part to Colette’s efficiency and bright ideas. There was no shortage of clients; and it was just as Colette said, one must invest, one must invest against leaner times. Morris sat in the corner, picking at the carpet tiles, trying to lift one. He looked like a toddler, absorbed, his short legs and potbelly thrust out, his tongue between his teeth.

She watched Colette negotiating, small rigid hand chopping the air. At last she got the nod and limped out to the car after her. Colette jumped into the driving seat, whipped out her calculator again, and held it up so that Al could see the display.

Al turned away. “Tell me in words,” she said. Morris leaned forward and poked her in the shoulder. Here’s the lads coming, he shouted. Here’s the cheeky chappies. Knew you’d find me, knew you would, that’s the spirit.

“You could take more of an interest,” Colette snapped. “I’ve probably saved us ten K.”

“I know. I just can’t read the panel. The light’s in my eyes.”

“Plain ceilings or Artex?” Colette said. Her voice rose to a squeak, imitating Suzi. “They think you’ll give them money to stop them making plaster swirls.”

“I expect it’s harder to make plaster smooth.”

“That’s what she said! I said, smooth should be standard! Silly bitch. I wouldn’t pay her in washers.”

Aitkenside said, we can’t live here. There’s no bleeding accommodation.

Dean said, Morris, are we going camping? I went camping once.

Morris said, how was it, mate?

Dean said, it were crap.

Aitkenside said, call it a porthole and it don’t bleeding open? Won’t do for Keef, you know, it won’t do for Keef.

“Brilliant,” Al said. “Couldn’t be better. What won’t do for Keith will do just fine for me.” She put out her hand and squeezed Colette’s cold bony fingers.

That summer, the birch trees were cut down and the last birds flew away. Their song was replaced by the roaring of road drills, the beeping of the earth movers backing up, the cursing of hod carriers and the cries of the wounded, and scrubland gave way to a gashed landscape of trenches and moats, of mud chutes and standing pools of yellow water; which within a year, in its turn, gave way to the violent emerald of new turf, the Sunday morning roar of mowers and strimmers, the tinkling of the ice-cream vans, the trundling of gas barbecues over paving and the stench of searing meat.

The flat in Wexham had sold to the first people who saw it. Alison wondered, will they sense something: Morris glugging inside the hot-water tank, or murmuring in the drains? But they seemed delighted, and offered the full asking price.

“It seems so unfair,” Colette said, “when our flat in Whitton wouldn’t sell. Not even when we dropped the price.”

She and Gavin had sacked Sidgewicks, tried another agent; still no takers. Eventually, they had agreed Gavin should stay there, and buy her out by installments. “We have hopes the arrangement will be persuasive to Mrs. Waynflete,” his solicitor had written, “as we understand she is now living with a partner.” Colette had scrawled over the letter, Not that sort of partner!!! It was just for her own satisfaction that she wrote it; it was no business of Gavin’s, she thought, what kind of partnership she was in now.

On the day they moved from Wexham, Morris was fuming and snarling in a corner. “How can I move,” he said, “when I have given out this as my address? How will Nick find me, how will my old mates know where to come?” When the men came to take the pine dresser away, he lay on top of it to make it heavy. He infiltrated Al’s mattress and infused his spirit sulks among the fibres, so that it bucked and rippled in the men’s hands, and they almost dropped it in alarm. When the men slammed the tailgate and vaulted into the driver’s cab, they found their whole windscreen had been spattered with something green, viscid, and dripping. “What kind of pigeons do you have around here?” they said. “Vultures?”

As the Collingwood was Galleon’s top-of-the-range model, it had more gob-ons than any other house type in the development, more twiddles and teases, more gables and spindles; but most of them, Colette predicted, would fall off within the first six months. Down the hill they were still building, and yellow machines picked and pecked at the soil, their stiff bending necks strangely articulated, like the necks of prototype dinosaurs. Trucks jolted up with glue-on timbers of plastic oak, bound together in bundles like kindling. Swearing men in woolly hats unloaded paper-thin panels of false brickwork, which they pinned to the raw building blocks; they disembarked stick-on anchor motifs, and panels of faux pargetting with dolphin and mermaid designs. The beeping, roaring, and drilling began promptly at seven, each morning. Inside the house there were a few mistakes, like a couple of the internal doors being hung the wrong way around, and the Adam-style fireplace being off-centre. Nothing, Al said, that really affected your quality of life. Colette wanted to keep arguing with the builders till she got compensation, but Al said, let it go, what does it matter, just close the door on it. Colette said, I would but the frame’s warped.

The day their kitchen ceiling fell in, she strode off to the sales caravan, where Suzi was still selling off the last remaining units. She made a scene; punters fled back to their cars, thinking they’d had a lucky escape. But when she left Suzi and began splashing uphill, picking her way between stacked paving slabs and lengths of piping, she found that she was shaking.

The Collingwood stood at the top of a rise; its portholes stared out over the neighbours like blind eyes. Is this my life now? she thought. How will I ever meet a man? At Wexham there were one or two young bachelors she used to glimpse down by the bins. One had never met her eye and only grunted when she greeted him. The other was Gavin to the life and went about swinging his car keys around his forefinger; the sight of him had almost made her nostalgic. But the men who had moved into Admiral Drive were married with two kids. They were computer programmers, systems analysts. They drove minivans like square little houses on wheels. They wore jackets with flaps and zips that their wives chose for them from mail order catalogues. Already the postman could be seen, ploughing across the furrows carrying flat boxes containing these jackets, and splattered white vans bounced over the ruts, delivering gob-ons for their home computers. At weekend they were outside, wearing their jackets, constructing playhouses and climbing frames of primary-coloured plastic. They were hardly men at all, not men as Colette knew them; they were dutiful emasculates, squat and waddling under their burden of mortgage debt, and she despised them with an impartial, all-embracing spite. Sometimes she stood at her bedroom window, as the men drove away in the mornings, each edging his square-nosed vehicle cautiously into the muddy track; she watched them and hoped they got into a pileup on the M3, each folding neatly, fatally, into the back of the vehicle in front. She wanted to see their widows sitting in the road, daubing themselves with mud, wailing.

The Collingwood still smelled of paint. As she let herself in at the front door, kicking off her shoes, it caught in her throat and mingled with the taste of salt and phlegm. She went upstairs to her own room—Bed Two, 15 by 14 feet with en-suite shower—and slammed the door, and sat down on the bed. Her little shoulders shook, she pressed her knees together; she clenched her fists and pressed them into her skull. She cried quite loudly, thinking Al might hear. If Al opened the bedroom door she would throw something at her, she decided—not anything like a bottle, something like a cushion—but there wasn’t a cushion. I could throw a pillow, she thought, but you can’t throw a pillow hard. I could throw a book, but there isn’t a book. She looked around her, dazed, frustrated, eyes filmed and brimming, looking for something to throw.

But it was a useless effort. Al wasn’t coming, not to comfort her: nor for any other purpose. She was, Colette knew, selectively deaf. She listened into spirits and to the voice of her own self-pity, carrying messages to her from her childhood. She listened to her clients, as much as was needful to get money out of them. But she didn’t listen to her closest associate and personal assistant, the one who got up with her when she had nightmares, the friend who boiled the kettle in the wan dawn: oh no. She had no time for the person who had taken her at her word and given up her career in event management, no time for the one who drove her up and down the country without a word of complaint and carried her heavy suitcase when the bloody wheels fell off. Oh no. Who carried her case full of her huge fat clothes—even though she had a bad back.

Colette cried until two red tracks were scored into her cheeks, and she got hiccoughs. She began to feel ashamed. Every lurch of her diaphragm added to her indignity. She was afraid that Alison, after her deafness, might now choose to hear.

Downstairs, Al had her tarot pack fanned out before her. The cards were face down, and when Colette appeared in the doorway she was idly sliding them in a rightward direction, over the pristine surface of their new dining table.

“What are you doing? You’re cheating.”

“Mm? It’s not a game.”

“But you’re fixing it, you’re shoving them back into the pack! With your finger! You are!”

“It’s called Washing the Cards,” Al said. “Have you been crying?”

Colette sat down in front of her. “Do me a reading.”

“Oh, you have been crying. You have so.”

Colette said nothing.

“What can I do to help?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“So I should make general conversation?”

“If you like.”

“I can’t. You start.”

“Did you have any more thoughts about the garden?”

“Yes. I like it as it is.”

“What, just turf?”

“For the moment.”

“I thought we could have a pond.”

“No, the children. The neighbours’ children.”

“What about them?”

“Cut the pack.”

Colette did it.

“Children can drown in two inches of water.”

“Aren’t they ingenious?”

“Cut again. Left hand.”

“I could get some quotes for landscaping.”

“Don’t you like grass?”

“It needs cutting.”

“Can’t you do it?”

“Not with my back.”

“Your back? You never mentioned it.”

“You never gave me the chance.”

“Cut again. Left hand, Colette, left hand. Well, I can’t do it. I’ve got a bad back too.”

“Really? Where did that originate?”

“When I was a child.” I was dragged, Alison thought, over the rough ground.

“I’d have thought it would have been better.”

“Why?”

“I thought time was a great healer.”

“Not of backs.”

Colette’s hand hovered.

“Choose one,” Al said. “One hand of seven. Seven cards. Hand them to me.” She laid down the cards. “And your back, Colette?”

“What?”

“The problem. Where it began?”

“Brussels.”

“Really?”

“I was carrying fold-up tables.”

“That’s a pity.”

“Why?”

“You’ve spoiled my mental picture. I thought that perhaps Gavin had put you in some unorthodox sexual position.”

“How could you have a picture? You don’t know Gavin.”

“I wasn’t picturing his face.” Alison began to turn the cards. The lucky opals were flashing their green glints. Alison said, “The Chariot, reversed.”

“So what do you want me to do? About the garden?”

“Nine of swords. Oh dear.”

“We could take it in turns to mow it.”

“I’ve never worked a mower.”

“Anyway, with your weight. You might have a stroke.”

“Wheel of Fortune, reversed.”

“When you first met me, in Windsor, you said I was going to meet a man. Through work, you said.”

“I don’t think I committed to a time scheme, did I?”

“But how can I meet a man through work? I don’t have any work except yours. I’m not going out with Raven, or one of those freaks.”

Al fluttered her hand over the cards. “This is heavy on the major Arcana, as you see. The Chariot, reversed. I’m not sure I like to think of wheels turning backward … . Did you send Gavin a change-of-address card?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“As a precaution.”

“Sorry?”

“Something might come for me. For forwarding. A letter. A package.”

“A package? What would be in it?”

Al heard tapping, tapping, at the sliding glass doors of the patio. Fear jolted through her; she thought, Bob Fox. But it was only Morris, trapped in the garden; beyond the glass, she could see his mouth moving.

She lowered her eyes, turned a card. “The Hermit reversed.”

“Bugger,” Colette said. “I think you were reversing them on purpose, when you were messing about. Washing them.”

“What a strange hand! All those swords, blades.” Al looked up. “Unless it’s just about the lawn mower. That would make some sense, wouldn’t it?”

“No use asking me. You’re the expert.”

“Colette … Col … don’t cry now.”

Colette put her elbows on the table, her head on her hands, and howled away. “I ask you to do a reading for me and it’s about bloody garden machinery. I don’t think you have any consideration for me at all. Day in, day out I am doing your VAT. We never go anywhere. We never do anything nice. I don’t think you have any respect for my professional skills whatever, and all I have to listen to is you rabbitting on to dead people I can’t see.”

Alison said gently, “I’m sorry if it seems as if I don’t appreciate you. I do remember, I know what my life was like when I was alone. I do remember, and I value everything you do.”

“Oh, stop it. Burbling like that. Being professional.”

“I’m trying to be nice. I’m just trying—”

“That’s what I mean. Being nice. Being professional. It’s all the same to you. You’re the most insincere person I know. It’s no use pretending to me. I’m too close. I know what goes on. You’re rotten. You’re a horrible person. You’re not even normal.”

There was a silence. Alison picked up the cards, dabbing each one with a damp fingertip. After a time she said, “I don’t expect you to mow the lawn.”

Silence.

“Honest, Col, I don’t.”

Silence.

“Can I be professional for a moment?”

Silence.

“The Hermit, reversed, suggests that your energy could be put to better use.”

Colette sniffed. “So what shall we do?”

“You could ring up a gardening service. Get a quote. For, let’s say, a fortnightly cut through the summer.” She added, smiling, “I expect they’d send a man.”

A thought about the garden had gone through her head: it will be nice for the dogs. Her smile faded. She pushed the thought violently away, seeing in her mind the waste ground behind her mother’s house at Aldershot.

Colette had taken on the task of contacting Al’s regular clients, to let them know about the move. She made a pretty lilac-coloured card, with the new details, which they handed out to contacts at their next big Psychic Fayre. In return they got cards back. “You’ll want a bit of Goddess Power, I expect,” said a nice woman in a ragged pullover, as she unloaded her kit from her beat-up old van. “You’ll want to come into alignment with the Path.” When they saw her next she was wearing a hairpiece and a push-up bra, charging forty pounds and calling herself Siobhan, palms and clairvoyance.

“Shall I come up and do your feng shui?” Mandy Coughlan asked. “It’s nice that you’re nearer to Hove.”

Cara rolled her eyes. “You’re not still offering feng shui? Are you getting any uptake? I’m training as a vastu consultant. It’s five thousand years old. This demon falls to earth, right? And you have to see which way his head comes down and where his feet are pointing. Then you can draw a mandala. Then you know which way the house should go.”

“It’s a bit late,” Al said. “It’s finished and we’ve moved in.”

“No, but it can still apply. You can fit your existing property into the grid. That’s advanced, though. I’ve not got up to that yet.”

“Well, come round when you do,” Al said.

Al said, I don’t want the neighbours to know what we do. Wherever I’ve lived I’ve kept away from the neighbours, I don’t want this lot around asking me to read their herbal teabags. I don’t want them turning up on our doorstep saying, you know what you told me, it hasn’t come true yet, can I have my money back? I don’t want them watching me and commenting on me. I want to be private.

The development progressed piecemeal, the houses at the fringes going up before the middle was filled in. They would look over to the opposite ridge, against the screen of pines, and see the householders running out into the streets, or where the streets would be, fleeing from gas leaks, floods, and falling masonry. Colette made tea for their next-door neighbours in the Beatty when their kitchen ceiling came down in its turn; Al was busy with a client.

“Are you sisters?” Michelle asked, standing in the kitchen and jiggling an infant up and down on her hip.

Colette’s eyes grew wide. “Sisters? No.”

“There, Evan,” she said to her husband. “Told you they couldn’t be. We thought perhaps one of you wasn’t staying. We thought perhaps she was helping the other one settle in.”

Colette said, “Are those boys or girls?”

“One of each.”

“Oh. But which is which?”

“You work at home?” Evan asked. “A contractor?”

“Yes.” He was waiting. She said, flustered. “I’m in communications.”

“British Telecom?”

“No.”

“It’s so confusing now,” Michelle said. “All these different tariffs you can go on. What’s the cheapest for phoning my nan in Australia?”

“That’s not my side of it,” Colette said.

“And what does your—your friend—do?”

“Forecasting,” Colette said. For a moment, she began to enjoy herself.

“Met Office, eh?” Evan said. “Bracknell, aren’t they? Bloody murder, getting onto the M3. Bet you didn’t know that till you moved in, eh? Three-mile tailback every morning. Should have done your research, eh?”

Both infants began to squall. The grown-ups watched as a workman came out of the Beatty, damp to his knees, carrying a bucket. “I’ll sue those fuckers,” Evan said.

Later, Colette said to Al, “How could he ever have thought we were sisters? I would have thought half sisters, at the most. And even that would be stretching a point.”

“People aren’t very observant,” Alison said kindly, “so you mustn’t be insulted, Colette.”

Colette didn’t tell Alison that the neighbours thought she worked for the meteorological office. Word spread, around the estate, and the neighbours would call out to her, “No joke you know, this rain! Can’t you do better than this?” Or simply, with a wave and a grin, “Oi! I see you got it wrong again.”

“I seem to be a personality around here.” Al said. “I don’t know why.”

Colette said, “I should think it’s because you’re fat.”

As Easter approached, Michelle popped her head over the fence and asked Al what she should pack for their holiday in Spain. “I’m sorry,” Al said, aghast, “I simply wouldn’t be able to forecast anything like that.”

“Yes, but unofficially,” Michelle coaxed. “You must know.”

“Off the record,” Evan said, wheedling.

Colette ran her eyes over Michelle. Was she pregnant again, or just letting herself go? “Cover up, would be my advice,” she said.

The weather affects the motorway as it affects the sea. The traffic has its rising tides. The road surface glistens with a pearly sheen, or heaves its black wet deeps. They find themselves at distant service stations as dawn breaks, where yellow light spills out into an oily dimness and a line of huddled birds watches them from above. On the M40 near High Wycombe, a kestrel glides on the updraught, swoops to pluck small squealing creatures from the rough grass of the margins. Magpies toddle amid the roadkill.

They travel: Orpington, Sevenoaks, Chertsey, Runnymede, Reigate, and Sutton. They strike out east of the Thames barrier, where travellers’ encampments huddle beneath tower blocks and seagulls cry over the floodplains, where the smell of sewage is carried on the cutting wind. There are flood-lights and bunkers, gravel pits and pallet yards, junctions where traffic cones cluster. There are featureless hangars with TO LET signs pinned to them, tyres spun away into shabby fields. Colette puts her foot down; they pass vehicles mounted on the backs of vehicles, locked in oily copulation. They pass housing developments just like theirs—“Look, portholes,” Al says—their dormers and their Juliet balconies staring out over low hills made of compacted London waste. They pass Xmas tree farms and puppy farms, barnyards piled with scrap. Pictures of salivating dogs are hung on wire fences, so that those who don’t read English get the point. Crosswinds rock them; cables lash across a fast sky. Colette’s radio is tuned to traffic reports—trouble at Trellick Tower, an insurmountable blockage afflicting the Kingston bypass. Al’s mind drifts, across the central reservation. She sees the walls of warehouses shining silver like the tinny armour of the tarot knights. She sees incinerators, oil storage tankers, gas holders, electricity substations. Haulage yards. Portakabins, underpasses, subways, and walkways. Industrial parks and science parks and retail parks.

The world beyond the glass is the world of masculine action. Everything she sees is what a man has built. But at each turnoff, each junction, women are waiting to know their fate. They are looking deep inside themselves, into their private hearts, where the foetus forms and buds, where the shape forms inside the crystal, where fingernails click softly on the backs of the cards, and pictures flutter upwards, towards the air: Justice, Temperance, The Sun, The Moon, The World.

At the motorway services, there are cameras pointing, watching the queues for fish and chips and tepid jellified cheesecake. Outside there are notices affixed to poles, warning of hawkers, peddlers, itinerant sellers, and illegal traders. There are none that warn against the loose, travelling dead. There are cameras guarding the exits, but none that register the entrances of Pikey Pete.

“You don’t know what will trigger them,” Al says. “There’s a whole pack of them, you see. Accumulating. It worries me. I’m not saying it doesn’t worry me. The only thing is, the only good thing—Morris doesn’t bring them home. They fade away somewhere, before we turn into Admiral Drive. He doesn’t like it, you see. Says it’s not a proper home. He doesn’t like the garden.”

They were coming back from Suffolk—or somewhere, at any rate, where people still had an appetite—because they were behind a van that said WRIGHT’S FAMOUS PIES, SAVORIES, CONFECTIONERY.

“Look at that,” Al said, and read it out, laughing. At once she thought, why did I do that? I could kick myself. They’ll claim they’re hungry now.

Morris gripped the passenger seat and rocked it, saying, “I could murder a Famous Pie.” Said Pikey Pete, “You can’t beat a Savoury.” Said young Dean, with his customary politeness, “I’ll have a Confectionery, please.”

Colette said, “Is that headrest rocking again, or is it you fidgetting? God, I’m starving, I’m going to pull in at Clacket Lane.”

When Colette was at home she lived on vitamin pills and ginseng. She was a vegetarian except for bacon and skinless chicken breasts. On the road they ate what they could get, when they could get it. They dined in the theme pubs of Billaricay and Egham. In Virginia Water they ate nachos and in Broxborne they ate fat pillows of dough that the baker called Belgian Buns. In laybys they ate leaking seafood sandwiches and when spring came, in the pedestrianized zones of small Thameside towns they sat on benches with warm Cornish pasties, nibbling daintily around the frills. They ate broccoli and three-cheese bake straight from the cash-and-carry, and wholesaler’s quiche Lorraine with sinewy nuggets of ham as pink as a scalded baby, and KrispyKrum Chickettes, and lemon mousse that reminded them of the kind of foam you clean carpets with.

“I have to have something sweet,” Alison said. “I have to keep my energy levels up. Some people think it’s glamorous having psychic powers. They’re dead wrong.”

Colette thought, it’s hard enough keeping her tidy, never mind glamorous. She served her time with Al, in the shopping precincts of small towns, standing outside fitting rooms the size of sentry boxes, with curtains that never pulled straight across. There were creaks and sighs from the other sentry boxes; the thin smell of desperation and self-hatred hung in the air. Colette had made a vow to take her upmarket, but Al was uncomfortable in posh shops. She did have some pride, though. Whatever she bought, she decanted into a carrier bag from a shop that catered to normal-sized women.

“I have to keep body and mind receptive and quiet,” she said. “If carrying a bit of flesh is the price I have to pay, so be it. I can’t tune in to Spirit if I’m bouncing around in an aerobics class.”

Morris said, have you seen MacArthur, he is a mate of mine and Keef Capstick, he is a mate of Keef ’s too. Have you seen MacArthur, he is a mate of mine and he wears a knitted weskit. Have you seen MacArthur, he has only one eye, have you seen him, he has one earlobe ripped off, a sailor ripped it off in a fracas, that’s what he tells people. How did he lose his eye? Well, that’s another story. He blames that on a sailor too, but round here, we know he’s lying. And Morris gave a dirty laugh.

When spring came, the gardening service sent a man. A truck dropped him, and his mower, then rattled off. Colette went to the door to administer him. No use waiting for Al to do it.

“It’s only I don’t know how to start it?” he said. He stood pushing a finger under his woolly hat, as if, Colette thought, he were making some sort of secret sign to her.

She stared at him. “You don’t know how to start the mower?”

He said, “What do I look like, in this hat?”

“I can’t imagine,” she said.

“Do you think I look like a brickie?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“You can see ’em all over the place, they’re building walls.” He pointed. “Down there.”

“You’re soaked through,” Colette said, noticing this.

The man said, “No, it’s not up to much, is it, this cardigan, parka, jacket? I could do with a fleece.”

“A fleece wouldn’t keep the rain out.”

“I could get a plastic, a plastic to put over it.”

“Whatever you think best,” Colette said coldly.

The man trudged away. Colette shut the door.

Ten minutes later the doorbell rang. The man had pulled his hat over his eyes. He was standing on the doormat, dripping under the porch. “So, starting it? Could you?”

Colette’s eyes swept him, up and down. She saw with disgust that his toes were poking out of his shoes, waggling the cracked leather up and down. “Are you sure you’re qualified for this job?”

The man shook his head. “I’ve not been trained on a mower,” he said.

“Why did they send you?”

“I suppose they thought you could train me on it.”

“And why would they think that?”

“Well, you look a lovely girl.”

“Don’t try it on,” Colette said. “I’m ringing your manager.” She slammed the door.

Al came to the head of the stairs. She had been having a lie-down, after seeing a bereaved client. “Col?”

“Yes?”

“Was that a man?” Her voice was vague, sleepy.

“It was the gardening service. He was crap. He couldn’t start the mower.”

“So what happened?”

“So I told him to bugger off and I’m ringing them to complain.”

“What sort of man was he?”

“An idiot.”

“Young, old?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t look. He was wet. He had a hat on.”

In summer, they drove through countryside perfumed by the noxious vapours of pesticides and herbicides, and by the sweet cloud that lay over the golden fields of oil-seed rape. Their eyes streamed, their throats dried and tightened; Al groped in her bag for antiseptic lozenges. Autumn: she saw the full moon snared in the netting of a football field, caught there bulging, its face bruised. When a traffic snarl-up brought them to a halt, she noticed the trudging shopper with her grocery bags, leaning into the wind. She noticed the rotted wood of a balcony, London brick weeping soot, winter mould on a stack of garden chairs. A curve in the road, a pause at traffic lights, brings you close to another life, to an office window where a man leans on a filing cabinet in a crumpled shirt, as close as some man you know; while a van backs into the road, you halt, you are detained, and the pause makes you intimate with a man stroking his bald head, framed in the lighted cavity of his garage beneath the up-and-over door.

At journey’s end comes the struggle with randomly arriving trivia, zinging through the ether. You are going to get a new sofa. You are a very tenacious person. Morris was supposed to act as a sort of doorman, ushering the spirits and making them queue up, threatening them so they don’t all talk at once. But he seemed to have fallen into a prolonged sulk, since they moved to Admiral Drive. Nothing suited him, and he left her to be teased and tormented by Diana imitators, Elvis imitators, the petty dead purveying misinformation, working tricks and setting riddles. From her audiences, the same old questions: for example, is there sex in Spirit World?

She would answer, giggling, “There’s an elderly lady I know who’s very psychic, and I’ll tell you what she says: she says, there’s a tremendous amount of love in Spirit World, but there’s none of that funny stuff.”

It would get a laugh. The audience would relax. They didn’t really suppose there could be an answer to this question. But once when they got home, Colette had said, “Well, is there sex in Spirit World? I don’t want to know what Mrs. Etchells says, I want to know what you say.”

“Mostly, they don’t have body parts,” Al said. “Not as such. There are exceptions. There are some really low spirits that are—well, just genitals, really. The others, they just … they like to watch us doing it.”

“Then we can’t provide them with much entertainment,” Colette said.

Winter: from the passenger seat Al turns her face towards the lighted windows of a school. Children’s drawings are pinned up, facing away from her: she sees the backs of triangular angels, with pointing frosted wings. Weeks after Christmas, into the new year, the cardboard stars still hang against the glass, and polyester snowflakes fall dryly, harmlessly down the inside of the panes. Winter and another spring: on the A12 towards Ipswich the lamps overhead burst into flower, their capsules splitting; they snap open like seedpods, and from their metal cups the rays of light burst out against the sky.

One day in early spring Alison looked out over the garden, and saw Morris squatting in the far corner, crying—or pretending to. Morris’s complaint about the garden was that, when you looked out the window, all you could see was turf, and fence, and him.

They had paid extra for a plot backing south. But that first summer the light beat in through the French windows, and they were forced to hang voile panels to protect themselves. Morris spent his time sequestered in these drapes, swathed in them; he did not care for the light of the sun or the unshaded moon. After the idiot from the gardening service, they had bought their own mower, and Colette, complaining, had trimmed the lawn; but I’m not grubbing about in flower beds, she said, I’m not planting things. Al was embarrassed at first, when the neighbours stopped her and offered her magazine articles about garden planning, and recommended certain television programmes with celebrity horticulturalists, that they felt sure she would enjoy. They think we’re letting the side down, she thought; as well as being sexual deviants, we don’t have a pond or even decking. Morris complained there was no cover for his nefarious activities. His mates, he said, were jeering at him, crying “Hup! Hup! Hup! Morris on parade! By the left, quick march; by the right, quick march … . Fall out! Morrr-iisss, report for special fucking kitchen duties and licking ladies’ shoes.”

Al sneered at him. “I don’t want you in my kitchen.” No chance, she thought; not amongst our hygienic granite-look worktops. There is no crack or corner and there is no place to hide in our stainless-steel double oven, not without the risk of being cooked. At her mum’s house in Aldershot the sink had an old-style wooden draining board, reeking, mouldy, sodden to the touch. For Morris, after he passed, it had been his natural home. He insinuated himself through the spongy fibres and lay there breathing wetly, puffing through his mouth and snorting through his nose. When this first happened she couldn’t bear to do the washing up. After she had left it for three days in a row her mother had said, “I’ll have you, young lady,” and came after her with a plastic clothesline. Emmie couldn’t decide whether to lash her, or tie her up, or hang her: and while she was deciding, she wobbled and fell over. Alison sighed and stepped over her. She took one end of the clothesline and drew it through her mother’s half-closed hand until Emmie yielded the last foot, the last inch. Then she took it outside and hung it back, between the hook driven into the brickwork and the sloping post that was sunk into the grass.

It was twilight, a moon rising over Aldershot. The line was not taut, and her amateurish, womanly knots slipped away from their anchors. Some spirits fluttered down onto the line, and fluttered away again, squawking, when it dipped and swayed under their feet. She threw a stone after them, jeering. She was only a girl then.

At first, Morris had mocked the new house. “This is posh, innit? You’re doing very well out of me, ducks.” Then he threatened her. “I can take you over, you cheeky bitch. I can have you away airside. I can chew you up and spit you out. I’ll come for you one night and the next day all they’ll find is your torn knickers. Don’t think I’ve not done it before.”

“Who?” she said, “Who have you taken over?”

“Gloria, for one. Remember her? Tart with red hair.”

“But you were earthside then, Morris. Anybody can do it with knives and hatchets but what can you do with your spirit hands? Your memory’s going. You’re forgetting what’s what. You’ve been kicking around too long.” She spoke to him roughly, man to man, as Aitkenside might: “You’re fading, mate. Fading fast.”

Then he began to coax her. “We want to go back to Wexham. It was a nice area in Wexham. We liked going down Slough, we liked it there because we could go down the dog track, where the dog track used to be. We liked it because you could go out fighting, but here there ain’t the possibility of fighting. There ain’t a bit of land where you can set up a cockfight. Young Dean enjoys nicking cars, but here you can’t nick ’em, these buggers have all got alarms and Dean don’t do alarms, he’s only a kid and he ain’t got trained on alarms yet. Donnie Aitkenside, he says we’ll never meet up with MacArthur if we stay around these parts. He says, we’ll never get Keef Capstick to stick around, Keef he likes a bit of a roughhouse and the chance of a ruckus.” Morris’s voice rose, he began to wheedle and whine. “Suppose I got a parcel? Where’m I going to keep me parcel?”

“What kind of parcel?” Al asked him.

“Suppose I got a consignment? Supposing I got a package? Supposing I had to keep guard on a few packing cases or a few crates. To help out me mates. You never know when your mate is going to come to you and say, Morris, Morris old son, can you keep an eye on these for me, ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies?”

“You? You don’t know anything but lies.”

“And if that happens, where am I going to keep ’em? Answer me that, girl.”

Alison told him, “You’ll just have to say no, won’t you?,” and Morris said, “Say no, say no? Is that a way to treat a mate of yours? If old stringbean asked you, keep this package for me, would you refuse her, would you say, Colette, me old mate, no can do?”

“I might.”

“But what if Nick asked you? What if old Nick himself was to come to you with a proposition, what if he was to say, cut you in on this my friend, trust me and I’ll see you right, what if he was to say, least said soonest mended; what if he was to say, I’d regard it as a special favour?”

“What’s Nick to me? I wouldn’t cross the road for him.”

“Because Nick, he don’t ask you, he tells you. Because Nick, he hangs you from a tree and shoots off your kneecaps, I’ve seen it done. Because you don’t say no to Nick or if you do you’re bloody crippled. I seen him personally poke out a man’s eye with a pencil. Where ’is eye would be.”

“Is that what happened to MacArthur? You said he only had one eye.”

A jeering, incredulous look spread over Morris’s face. “Don’t play the innocent wiv me,” he said. “You evil baggage. You know bloody fine how his eye got took out.” He headed, grumbling, for the French windows and wrapped his head in the curtain. “Tries it on wiv me, plays the innocent, fucking ’ell it won’t wash. Tell it to Dean, try it on some kid and see if it will wash wiv him, it won’t wash wiv me. I was there, girl. You claim my memory’s gone. Nothing wrong with mine, I’m telling you. Could be something wrong with yours. I don’t bloody forget his eye springing out. You don’t forget a thing like that.”

He looked frightened, she thought. Going up to bed, she hesitated outside Colette’s room, Bed Two with en-suite shower. She would have liked to say, I am lonely sometimes, and—the brute fact is—I want human company. Was Colette human? Just about. She felt a yawning inside her, an unfilled space of loss, as if a door in her solar plexus were opening on an empty room, or a stage waiting for a play to begin.

The day Morris said he was going, she could hardly wait to tell people the news. “He’s been called away,” she said. “Isn’t that great?” Smiles kept breaking out. She felt as if she were fizzing inside.

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Mandy said on the phone. “I mean, it’s good news for all of us, Al. Merlin said he was at the limit of his tolerance, and so did Merlyn. Your Morris had a really nasty way with him, he upset me dread-fully that night of Di’s funeral. I never felt clean afterwards. Well, you don’t, do you?”

“You don’t think it’s a trick?” Al said, but Mandy reassured her.

“It’s his time, Al. He’s pulled towards the light. He can’t resist, I bet you. It’s time he broke out of that cycle of criminality and self-destructive behaviour. He’ll be moving upwards. You’ll see.”

Colette was in the kitchen making decaffeinated coffee. Al told her, “Morris is leaving. He’s been called away.”

Colette raised her eyebrows and said, “Called away by who?”

“I don’t know, but he says he’s going on a course. I talked to Mandy, she says it means he’s moving to a higher level.”

Colette stood waiting for the kettle to boil, her fingers tapping. “Does that mean he won’t be bothering us in the future?”

“He swears he’s leaving today.”

“And it’s like, a residential course, is it?”

“I suppose.”

“And how long is it? Will he be coming back?”

“I think it takes as long as it takes. I can’t believe he’ll come back to the Woking area. Spirits don’t generally go backwards. I’ve never heard of that happening. When he’s moved towards the light he’ll be free to—” She stopped, perplexed. “Whatever they do,” she said finally. “Melt. Disperse.”

The kettle clicked itself off. “And all those other people he talks about—Dean, those others we get in the back of the car—will they be melting too?”

“I don’t know about Dean. He doesn’t seemed very evolved. But yes, I think, it’s Morris who attracts them, not me, so if he goes they’ll all go. You see, it might be the end of Morris as we know him. It had to happen one day.”

“Then what? What will it be like?”

“Well, it’ll be—silent. We’ll have some peace. I can get a night’s sleep.”

Colette said, “Could you move, please, so I can get to the fridge? … You won’t be giving up the business, will you?”

“If I gave up, how would I make a living?”

“I just want the milk. Thanks. But what will you do for a spirit guide?”

“Another one could turn up any day. Or I could borrow yours.”

Colette almost dropped the milk carton. “Mine?”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

Colette looked horrified. “But who is he?”

“It’s a she. Maureen Harrison, her name is.”

Colette poured her milk all over the granite-style work surface, and stood watching it stupidly as it dripped. “Who’s that? I don’t know her. I don’t know anyone of that name.”

“No, you wouldn’t. She passed before you were born. In fact, it took me a while to locate her, but her poor old friend kept calling around, asking for her. So I thought I’d do a good action, link them up together. Okay, I should have told you! I should have mentioned it. But what’s your problem? She won’t make any difference to you. Look, relax, she’s not doing you any harm, she’s just one of those grannies who lose the buttons off their cardigans.”

“But can she see me? Is she looking at me now?”

“Maureen,” Al said softly. “You around, love?”

From a cupboard came the chink of a teacup.

“There,” Al said.

“Can she see me in my room at night?”

Alison crossed the kitchen and began to mop up the spilled milk. “Go and sit down, Colette, you’ve had a shock. I’ll make you another cup.”

She boiled the kettle again. Decaf’s not much use for a shock. She stood looking out over the empty garden. When Morris actually goes, she thought, we’ll have champagne. Colette called out to know where Maureen Harrison came from, and when Al called back, “Somewhere up north,” she sounded shocked, as if it would have been more natural to have a spirit guide from Uxbridge.

Al couldn’t help smiling to herself. “Look on the bright side,” she said, bringing the coffee through; she’d put out some chocolate biscuits as the beginning of her celebration. “Look on the bright side, you might have been lumbered with a Tibetan.” She imagined the Collingwood, ringing with temple bells.

There was an unusual calm in their sitting room. She stared hard at the voile panels, but Morris’s form was not bulking them out, nor was he lying, stretched, along the hem. No Aitkenside, no Dean, no Pikey. She sat down. “Here we are,” she said, beaming. “Just the two of us.” She heard a moaning, a scraping, a metallic rattle; then the flap of the letter box, as Morris made his exit.