Beyond Black: A Novel

eight

As the millennium approached, their trade declined. It was nothing personal, no misstep in Colette’s business plan. All the psychics called up to grouch about it. It was as if their clients had put their personal curiosity on pause, as if they had been caught up in some general intake of breath. The new age was celebrated at Admiral Drive with fireworks, released by careful fathers from the raw back plots. The children’s play area, the natural site for the fiesta, had been fenced off and KEEP OUT notices erected.

The local free sheet said Japanese knotweed had been found. “Is that a good thing?” Michelle asked, over the back fence. “I mean, are they conserving it?”

“No, I think it’s noxious,” Al said. She went inside, worried. I hope it’s not my fault, she thought. Had Morris pissed on the plot, on his way out of her life?

Some people didn’t buy into the knotweed theory. They said the problem was an unexploded bomb, left over from the last war—whenever that was. Evan leaned over the fence and said, “Have you heard about that bloke over Reading way, Lower Earley? On a new estate like this? He kept noticing his paint was blistering. His drains filled up with black sludge. One day he was digging in his vegetable plot, and he saw something wriggling on his spade. He thought, hell, what’s this?”

“And what was it?” Colette asked. Sometimes she found Evan entrancing.

“It was a heap of white worms,” he said. “Where you’ve got white worms you’ve got radioactivity. That’s the only thing you need to know about white worms.”

“So what did he do?”

“Called in the council,” Evan said.

“If it were me I’d call in the army.”

“Of course it’s a cover-up. They denied everything. Poor beggar’s boarded the place up and cut his losses.”

“So what caused it?”

“Secret underground nuclear explosion,” Evan said. “Stands to reason.”

At Admiral Drive a few people phoned the local environmental health department, putting questions about the play area, but officials would only admit to some sort of blockage, some sort of seepage, some sort of contamination the nature of which they were unable as yet to confirm. They insisted that the white worm problem was confined to the Reading area and that none of them had made their way to Woking. Meanwhile the infants remained shut out of paradise. They roared with temper when they saw the swings and the slide, and rattled the railings. Their mothers dragged them uphill, towards their Frobishers and Mountbattens, out of harm’s way. Nobody wanted news of the problem to leak, in case it affected their house prices. The populace was restless and transient, and already the first FOR SALE signs were going up, as footloose young couples tried their luck in a rising market.

New Year’s Eve was cold at Admiral Drive, and the skies were bright. The planes didn’t fall out of them, and there was no flood or epidemic—none, anyway, affecting the southeast of England. The clients gave a listless, apathetic sigh and—just for a month or two—accepted their lives as they were. By spring, trade was creeping back.

“They’re coming to take samples from the drains,” Michelle told Alison.

“Who are?”

“Drain officials,” Michelle said fearfully.

After Morris left, their life was like a holiday. For the first time in years, Alison went to bed knowing she wouldn’t be tossed out of it in the small hours. She could have a leisurely late-night bath without a hairy hand pulling out the plug, or Morris’s snake tattoo rising beneath the rose-scented bubbles. She slept through the night and woke refreshed, ready for what the day might bring. She blossomed, her plumped-out skin refining itself, the violet shadows vanishing from beneath her eyes. “I don’t know when I’ve felt so well,” she said.

Colette slept through the nights too, but she looked just the same.

They began to talk about booking a last-minute holiday, a break in the sun. Morris on an aircraft had been impossible, Al said. When she was checking in, he would jump on her luggage, so that it weighed heavy and she was surcharged. He would flash his knuckle-dusters as they walked through the metal detector, causing the security staff to stop and search her. If they made it as far as the plane, he would lock himself in the lavatory or hide in some vulnerable person’s sick bag and come up—boom!—into their face when they opened it. On the way to Madeira once, he had caused a cardiac arrest.

“You don’t have to worry about that anymore,” Colette said. “Where would you like to go?”

“Dunno,” Al said. Then: “Somewhere with ruins. Or where they sing opera. It’s night, and you hold candles, and they sing in an arena, an amphitheatre. Or they perform plays wearing masks. If I were an opera singer I’d be quite alluring. Nobody would think I was overweight.”

Colette had been thinking in terms of sex with a Greek waiter. There was no reason, on the face of it, why Alison’s cultural yearnings and her sexual ones shouldn’t be fulfilled within five hundred yards of each other. But she pictured her hot-eyed beau circling their table on the terrace, his sighs, his raised pulse, his fiery breath, his thoughts running ahead: is it worth it, because I’ll have to pay a mate of mine to sleep with the fat girl?

“Besides,” Al said, “it would be nice to have somebody with me. I went to Cyprus with Mandy but I never saw her, she was in and out of bed with somebody new every night. I found it quite squalid. Oh, I love Mandy, don’t get me wrong. People should enjoy themselves, if they can.”

“It just happens you can’t,” Colette said.

It didn’t matter what she said to Al, she reasoned. Even if she didn’t speak out loud, Al would pull the thoughts out of her head; so she would know anyway.

Alison withdrew into a hurt silence; so they never got the holiday. A month on, she mentioned it again, timidly, but Colette snapped at her, “I don’t want to go anywhere with ruins. I want to drink too much and dance on the table. Why do you think this is all I want to do, live with you and drive you to sodding Oxted to a Celtic Mystery Convention? I spend my sodding life on the M25, with you throwing up in the passenger seat.”

Alison said timidly, “I’m not sick much, since Morris went.” She tried to imagine Colette dancing on a table. She could only conjure a harsh tango on the blond wood of the coffee table, Colette’s spine arched, her chicken-skin armpits exposed as if for a bite. She heard a buzz in her ear; the meek little woman came through, saying, ’scuse me,’scuse me, have you seen Maureen Harrison?

“Look in the kitchen,” Al said. “I think she’s behind the fridge.”

When 9/11 came, Colette was watching daytime TV. She called Alison through. Al rested her hands on the back of the sofa. She looked without surprise as the Twin Towers crumbled, as the burning bodies plunged through the air. Alison watched till the news looped itself around again and the same pictures were played. Then she left the room without comment. You feel as if you should say something, but you don’t know what it is. You can’t say you foresaw it; yet you can’t say no one foresaw it. The whole world has drawn this card.

Merlyn rang up later that day. “Hello,” she said. “How’s you? Seen the news?”

“Awful,” Merlyn said, and she said, “Yes, awful, And how’s Merlin?”

“No idea,” he said.

“Not seen him on the circuit?”

“I’m quitting that.”

“Really? You’re going to build up the psychic detective work?”

Or psychic security services, she thought. You could certainly offer them. You could stand at airports and X-ray people’s intentions.

“No, nothing like that,” Merlyn said. He sounded remarkably buoyant. “I’m thinking of becoming a life coach. I’m writing a book, a new one. Self-Heal Through Success. It’s using the ancient wisdom traditions for health, wealth, and happiness. Believe the world owes you: that’s what I say.”

Alison excused herself, put the receiver down, and went into the kitchen to get an orange. When she came back, she wedged the receiver under her chin while she peeled it. You don’t want to waste your time, Merlyn was saying, with these young girls and grandmas. Here we are in the heartland of the hi-tech boom. Affluence is as natural as breathing. Each morning when you rise you stretch out your arms and say, I possess the universe.

“Merlyn, why are you telling me this?”

“I was hoping you’d buy a franchise. You’re very inspirational, Alison.”

“You’d have to talk to Colette. She makes the business decisions.”

“Oh, does she?” said Merlyn. “Let me tell you now, and I’ll tell you for free, you alone are responsible for your health and your wealth. You cannot delegate what is at the core of your being. Remember the universal law: you get what you think you deserve.”

Peel fell on the carpet, fragrant and curly. “Really?” she said. “Not much, then, in my case.”

“Alison, I’m disappointed by your negativity. I may have to put the phone down, before it contaminates my day.”

“Okay,” she said, and Merlyn said, “No, don’t go. I’d hoped—oh, well, I was thinking along the lines of a partnership. Well, there you are. I’ve said it. What do you think?”

“A business partnership?”

“Any kind you like.”

She thought, he thinks I’m stupid, just because I’m fat; because I’m fat, he thinks I’m stupid.

“No.”

“Would you be more specific?”

“More specific than no?”

“I value feedback. I can take it on the chin.”

The trouble is, she thought, you don’t have a chin. Merlyn was running to fat, and his damp grey skin seemed to sweat out, in public, the private moisture contained within the shell of his trailer home. She looked, in imagination, into his chocolate-coloured eyes, and saw how his pastel shirt stretched over his belly.

“I couldn’t,” she said. “You’re overweight.”

“Well, pardonnez-moi,” Merlyn said. “Look who’s talking.”

“Yes, I know, me too. But I don’t like the way your shirt buttons are bursting off. I hate sewing, I’m no good with a needle.”

“You can get staplers,” Merlyn said nastily. “You can get dedicated staplers nowadays. Anyway, who told you that I would require you to sew on my shirt buttons?”

“I thought you might.”

“And you are seriously giving me this as a reason why you are turning down my offer of a business arrangement?”

“But I thought you were offering something else.”

“Who knows?” Merlyn said. “That’s the technical term, I believe, that people use when advertising. “For friendship and who knows?”

“But in your case, what you want is my money in your bank, and who knows? Come on, Merlyn! You just think I’m an easy touch. And by the way it’s no good ringing up Mandy—Natasha, I mean—or any of the girls. They all don’t like you, for the reason I don’t like you.” She paused. No, that’s unfair, she thought. There is a particular reason I don’t like Merlyn. “It’s your tie pin,” she said. “I don’t like the sight of a tie pin. I always think it’s dangerous.”

“I see,” Merlyn said. “Or rather, I don’t, I don’t at all.”

She sighed. “I’m not sure I can account for it myself. Goes back to a past life, I suppose.”

“Oh, come on!” Merlyn sneered. “Martyred with a tie pin? In antiquity they didn’t have tie pins. Brooches, I grant you.”

“Maybe it was me who did the martyring,” she said. “I don’t know, Merlyn. Look, good luck with your book. I hope you do get all that wealth. I do really. If you deserve it, of course. And I’m sure you do. Whatever. Whatever you think. When you leave your mobile home for Beverly Hills, let us have your new address.”

Colette came in five minutes later, with the shopping. “Do you want a fudge double-choc brownie?” she asked.

Al said, “Merlyn phoned. He’s doing a new book.”

“Oh yes?” Colette said. “You do like these yogurts, don’t you?”

“Are they high-fat?” Al said happily. Colette turned the pot about in her fingers, frowning. “They must be,” Al said, “if I like them. By the way, Merlyn asked me to go and live with him.”

Colette continued stacking the fridge. “Your chops are past their sell-by,” she said. She hurled them in the bin and said, “What? In his trailer?”

“I said no.”

“Who the fuck does he think he is?”

“He propositioned me,” Al said.

She wiped her hand down her skirt. “What about our book, Colette? Will it ever be finished?”

Colette had accumulated a little pile of printout upstairs; she guarded it, locking it in her wardrobe—a precaution Al found touching. The tapes still gave them trouble. Sometimes they would find their last session had been replaced entirely by gibberish. Sometimes their conversation was overlaid by squeaks, scrapes, and coughs, as if a winter audience were tuning up for a symphony concert.

COLETTE: So, do you regard it as a gift or more as a—what’s the opposite of a gift?

ALISON: Unsolicited goods. A burden. An infliction.

COLETTE: Is that your answer?

ALISON: No. I was just telling you some expressions.

COLETTE: So … ?

ALISON: Look, I just am this way. I can’t imagine anything else. If I’d had somebody around me with more sense when I was training, instead of Mrs. Etchells, I might have had a better life.

COLETTE: So it could be different?

ALISON: Yes. Given a more evolved guide.

COLETTE: You seem to be doing okay without Morris.

ALISON: I told you I would.

COLETTE: After all, you’ve said yourself, a lot of it is psychology.

ALISON: When you say psychology, you’re calling it cheating.

COLETTE: What would you call it?

ALISON: You don’t call Sherlock Holmes cheating! Look, if you get knowledge, you have to use it however it comes.

COLETTE: But I’d rather think, in a way—let me finish—I’d rather think you were cheating, if I had your welfare at heart. Because a lot of people who hear voices, they get diagnosed and put in hospital.

ALISON: Not so much now. Because of cutbacks, you know? There are people who walk around believing all sorts of things. You see them on the streets.

COLETTE: Yes, but that’s just a policy. That doesn’t make them sane.

ALISON: I make a living, you see. That’s the difference between me and the people who are mad. They don’t call you mad, if you’re making a living.

Sometimes Colette would leave the tape running without telling Al. There was some obscure idea in her mind that she might need a witness. That if she had a record she could make Al stick to any bargains she made; or that, in an unwary moment while she was out of the house, Al might record something incriminating. Though she didn’t know what her crime might be.

COLETTE: My project for the new millennium is to manage you more efficiently. I’m going to set you monthly targets. It’s time for blue-skies thinking. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be at least ten percent more productive. You’re sleeping through the night now, aren’t you? And possibly I could handle a more proactive role. I could pick up the overflow clients. Just the ones who require fortune-telling. After all, you can’t really tell the future, can you? The cards don’t know it.

ALISON: Most people don’t want to know about the future. They just want to know about the present. They want to be told they’re doing all right.

COLETTE: Nobody ever told me I was doing all right. When I used to go to Brondesbury and places.

ALISON: You didn’t feel helped, you didn’t feel you’d had any emotional guidance?

COLETTE: No.

ALISON: When I think back to those days, I think you were trying to believe too much. People can’t believe everything at once. They have to work up to it.

COLETTE: Gavin thought it was all a fraud. But then Gavin was stupid.

ALISON: You know, you still talk about him a lot.

COLETTE: I don’t. I never talk about him.

ALISON: Mm.

COLETTE: Never.

“So okay, okay,” Al said. “If you want to learn. What do you want to try first, cards or palms? Palms? Okay.”

But after five minutes, Colette said, “I can’t see the lines, Al. I think my eyes are going.” Al said nothing. “I might get contacts. I’m not having glasses.”

“You can use a magnifying glass, the punters don’t mind. In fact, they think they’re getting more for their money.”

They tried again. “Don’t try to tell my future,” Al said. “Leave that aside for now. Take my left hand. That’s where my character is written, the capacities I was born with. You can see all my potential, waiting to come out. Your job is to alert me to it.”

Colette held her hand tentatively, as if she found it disagreeable. She glanced down at it, and up at Alison again. “Come on,” Al said. “You know my character. Or you say you do. You’re always talking about my character. And you know about my potential. You’ve just made me a business plan.”

“I don’t know,” Colette said. “Even when I look through a magnifier I can’t make sense of it.”

“We’ll have a go with the cards then,” Al said. “As you know, there are seventy-eight to learn, plus all the meaningful combinations, so you’ll have a lot of homework. You know the basics, you must have picked that up by now. Clubs rule the fire signs—you know the signs, don’t you? Hearts rule water, diamonds earth.”

“Diamonds, earth,” Colette said, “that’s easy to remember. But why do spades rule air?”

“In the tarot, spades are swords,” Al said. “Think of them cutting through the air. Clubs are wands. Diamonds are pentacles. Hearts are cups.”

Colette’s hands were clumsy when she shuffled; pictures cascaded from the pack and she gave herself paper cuts, as if the cards were nipping her. Al taught her to lay out a consequences spread and a Celtic Cross. She turned the major arcana face up so she could learn them one by one. But Colette couldn’t get the idea. She was diligent and conscientious, but when she saw the cards she couldn’t see beyond the pictures on them. A crayfish is crawling out of a pond: why? A man in a silly hat stands on the brink of a precipice. He carries his possessions in a bundle and a dog is nipping at his thigh. Where is he going? Why doesn’t he feel the teeth? A woman is forcing open the jaws of a lion. She seems happy with life. There is a collusive buzz in the air.

Al said, “What does it convey to you? No, don’t look at me for an answer. Close your eyes. How do you feel?”

“I don’t feel anything,” Colette said. “How should I feel?”

“When I work with the tarot, I generally feel as if the top of my head has been taken off with a tin opener.”

Colette threw down the cards. I’ll stick to my side of the business, she said.

Al said, that would be very wise. She couldn’t explain to Colette how it felt to read for a client, even if it was just psychology. You start out, you start talking, you don’t even know what you’re going to say. You don’t even know your way to the end of the sentence. You don’t know anything. Then suddenly you do know. You have to walk blind. And you walk slap into the truth.

In the new millennium Colette intended to lever her away from low-rent venues, where there are recycling bins in the car parks, crisps ground into the carpet, strip lighting. She wanted to see her in big well-furbished auditoriums with proper sound-and-lighting crews. She detested the public nature of public halls, where tipsy comics played on Saturday night and gusts of dirty laughter hung in the air. She loathed the worn grubby chairs, stained with beer and worse; hated the thought of Al attuning to Spirit in some broom cupboard, very often with a tin bucket and a string mop for company. She said, I don’t like it down there by the Gymnastics Club, by the Snooker Centre. I don’t like the types you get. I want to get down to the south coast where they have some lovely restored theatres, gilt and red plush, where you can fill the stalls and the royal circle, fill the balcony right to the back.

At Admiral Drive the early bulbs pushed through, points of light in the lush grass. The brick of the Mountbatten and the Frobisher was still raw, the tiled roofs slicked by April rain. Al was right when she said that the people down the hill would have a problem with damp. Their turf squelched beneath their feet, and a swampish swelling and bubbling lifted their patios. At night the security lights flittered, as if all the neighbours were creeping from house to house, stealing each other’s game consoles and DVD players.

Gavin never called, though his monthly payment for his share of the flat in Whitton continued to arrive in her bank account. Then one day, when she and Al were shopping in Farnham, they ran straight into him; they were coming out of Elphicks department store, and he was going in.

“What are you doing in Farnham?” she said, shocked.

Gavin said, “It’s a free country.”

It was just the sort of inane reply he always used to make when you asked him why he was doing anything, or why he was wherever he was. It was the kind of reply that reminded her why she had been right to leave him. He couldn’t have done much better if he’d pre-meditated it for a week.

Al’s glance took him in. When Colette turned to introduce her, she was already backing away. “I’ll just be …” she said, and melted in the direction of cosmetics and perfume. Tactfully, she averted her eyes, and stood spraying herself with one scent and then another, to distract herself from tuning in to what they were saying.

“That her? Your friend? Gavin said. “Christ, she’s a size, isn’t she? That the best you could do?”

“She’s a remarkably sound businesswoman,” Colette said, “and a very kind and thoughtful employer.”

“And you live with her?”

“We have a lovely new house.”

“But why do you have to live in?”

“Because she needs me. She works twenty-four/seven.”

“Nobody does that.”

“She does. But you wouldn’t understand.”

“I always thought you were a bit of a lezzie, Col. I’d have thought so when I first saw you, only you came down the bar—that hotel, where was it, France—you walked straight up to me with your tongue hanging out. So I thought, could be wrong on this one.”

She turned her back and walked away from him. He called, “Colette …” She turned. He said, “We could meet up for a drink, sometime. Not her, though. She can’t come.”

Her mouth opened—she stared at him—a lifetime of insults swallowed, insults swallowed and digested, gushed up from deep inside her and jammed in her throat. She hauled in her breath, her hands formed claws; but the only words that came out were “Get stuffed.” As she dived into the store, she caught sight of herself in a mirror, her skin mottled with wrath and her eyes popping, and for the first time she understood why when she was at school they had called her Monster.

The following week, in Walton-on-Thames, they got into a parking dispute with a man in a multistorey car park. Two cars nosing for the same space; it was just one of those crude suburban flare-ups, which men easily forget but which make women cry and shake for hours.

Nine times out of ten, in these spats, Al would put her restraining hand on Colette’s hand, as it tightened on the wheel, and say, forget it, let him have what he wants, it doesn’t matter. But this time, she whizzed down her window and asked the man, “What’s your name?”

He swore at her. She was inured to bad language, from the fiends; but why should you expect it from such a man, an Admiral Drive sort of man, a mail-order-jacket sort of man, a let’s-get-out-the-barbecue sort of man?

She said to him, “Stop, stop, stop! You should have more on your mind than cursing women in car parks. Go straight home and boost your life insurance. Clean up your computer and wipe off those kiddie pictures, that’s not the sort of thing you want to leave behind you. Ring up your GP. Ask for an early appointment and don’t take no for an answer. Tell them, left lung. They can do a lot these days, you know. If they catch these things before they spread.” She whizzed up the window again. The man mouthed something; his car squealed away.

Colette slotted them neatly into the disputed space. She glanced sideways at Al. She didn’t dare question her. They were running late, of course; they did need the space. She said to Al, testing her, “I wish I had done that.” Al didn’t answer.

When they got home that night and had poured a drink, she said, “Al, the man in the car park … .”

“Oh, yes,” Al said. “Of course, I was just guessing.” She added, “About the pornography.”

These days when they travelled there was blissful silence from the back of the car. Didcot and Abingdon, Blewberry and Goring: Shinfield, Wonersh, Long Ditton, and Lightwater. They knew the lives they glimpsed on the road were lives more ordinary than theirs. They saw an ironing board in a lean-to, waiting for its garment. A grandma at a bus stop, stooping forward to pop a biscuit into a child’s open mouth. Dirty pigeons hanging in the trees. A lamp shining behind a black hedge. Underpasses dropping away, lit by dim bulbs: Otford, Limpsfield, New Eltham, and Blackfen. They tried to avoid the high streets and shopping malls of the denatured towns, because of the bewildered dead clustered among the dumpsters outside the burger bars, clutching door keys in their hands or queuing with their lunch boxes where the gates of small factories once stood, where machines once whirred and chugged behind sooty panes of old glass. There are thousands of them out there, so pathetic and lame-brained that they can’t cross the road to get where they’re going, dithering on the kerbs of new arterial roads and bypasses, as the vehicles swish by: congregating under railway arches and under the stairwells of multistorey car parks, thickening the air at the entrance to underground stations. If they brush up against Alison they follow her home, and start pestering her the first chance they get. They elbow her in the ribs with questions, always questions; but never the right ones. Always, where’s my pension book, has the Number 64 gone, are we having a fry-up this morning? Never, am I dead? When she puts them right on that, they want to go over how it happened, trying to glean some sense out of it, trying to throw a slippery bridge over the gap between time and eternity. “I had just plugged in the iron,” a woman would say, “and I was just starting on the left sleeve of Jim’s blue striped shirt … of his … our Jim … his stripes … .” And her voice will grow faint with bafflement until Alison explains to her, puts her in the picture, and “Oh, I see now,” she will say, quite equable, and then, “I get it. These things happen, don’t they? So I’ll not take up your time any further. I’m very much obliged. No thanks, I’ve my own tea waiting for me when I get home. I wouldn’t want to cut into your evening … .”

And so she passes, her voice fading until she melts into the wall.

Even the ones who went over with plenty of warning liked to recall their last hours on the ward, dwelling in a leisurely fashion on which of their family showed up for the deathbed and which of them left it too late and got stuck in traffic. They wanted Alison to put tributes in the newspaper for them—Thanks, sincerely meant, to the staff at St. Bernard’s—and she promised she would, for I’ll do anything, she would say, that will make them lie down, wait quietly and waft to their next abode instead of making themselves at home in mine. They will finish their ramblings with, “Well, that’s all from me for now,” and “Hoping this finds you well,” and “Let me have your family news soon”: sometimes with a quiet, stoical, “I ought to go now.” Sometimes, when they bob back, with a cheery, “Hello, it’s me,” they are claiming to be Queen Victoria, or their own older sister, or a woman who lived next door to them before they were born. It’s not intentional fraud; it’s more that a mingling and mincing and mixing of personality goes on, the fusing of personal memory with the collective. You see, she explains to Colette, you and me, when we come back, we could manifest as one person. Because these last years, we’ve shared a lot. You could come back as my mum. I could come over, thirty years from now, to some psychic standing on a stage somewhere, and claim I was my own dad. Not that I know who my dad is, but I will one day, perhaps after I’ve passed.

But Colette would say, panicked for a moment, stampeded into belief, what if I die? Al, what shall I do, what shall I do if I die?

Al would say to her, keep your wits about you. Don’t start crying. Don’t speak to anybody. Don’t eat anything. Keep saying your name over and over. Close your eyes and look for the light. If somebody says, follow me, ask to see their ID. When you see the light, move towards it. Keep your bag clamped to your body—where your body would be. Don’t open your bag, and remember the last thing you should do is pull out a map, however lost you feel. If anybody asks you for money ignore them, push past. Just keep moving towards the light. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t let anyone stop you. If somebody points out there’s paint on your coat or bird droppings in your hair, just keep motoring, don’t pause, don’t look left or right. If a woman approaches you with some snotty-nosed kid, kick her out of the way. It sounds harsh, but it’s for your own safety. Keep moving. Move towards the light.

And if I lose it? Colette would say. What if I lose the light and I’m wandering around in a fog, with all these people trying to snatch my purse and my mobile? You can always come home, Alison would tell her. You know your home now, Admiral Drive. I’ll be here to explain it all to you and put you on the right path so that you can manage the next bit, and then when I come over in the fullness of time we can get together and have a coffee and maybe share a house again if we think it will work out.

But what if you go before me, Colette would say, what if we go together, what if we’re on the M25 and a wind blows up and what if it’s a mighty wind and we’re blown into the path of a lorry?

Alison would sigh and say, Colette, Colette, we all get there in the end. Look at Morris! We end up in the next world raw, indignant, baffled or furious, and ignorant, all of us: but we get sent on courses. Our spirits move, given time, to a higher level, where everything becomes clear. Or so people tell me, anyway. Hauntings can persist for centuries, for sure, but why wouldn’t they? People have no sense of urgency, airside.

Inside the Collingwood the air was serene. Weekly, Colette polished the crystal ball. You had to wash it in vinegar and water and rub it up with a chamois. Al said, the tools of the trade are what keep you on track. They focus the mind and direct the energy. But they have no magic in themselves. Power is contained in domestic objects, in the familiar items you handle every day. You can look into the side of an aluminium pan and see a face that’s not your own. You can see a movement on the inside of an empty glass.

The days, months, blurred into one. The venues offered a thousand grannies with buttons missing; a thousand hands raised. Why are we here? Why must we suffer? Why must children suffer? Why does God mistreat us? Can you bend spoons?

Smiling, Al said to her questioner, “I should give it a go, shouldn’t I? Give me something to do in the kitchen. Stop me raiding the fridge.”

The truth was—though she never admitted it to anyone—that she had once tried it. She was against party tricks, and generally against showing off and being wasteful, and wrecking your cutlery seemed to come under those heads. But one day at Admiral Drive the urge overcame her. Colette was out: all well and good. She tiptoed into the kitchen and slid out a drawer. It snagged, bounced back. The potato masher had rolled forward spitefully and was catching its rim on the front of the unit. Unusually irritated, she slid in her hand, dragged the utensil out and threw it across the kitchen. Now she was in the mood for spoon-bending, she wasn’t to be thwarted.

Her hand jumped for the knives. She picked one out, a blunt round-edged table knife. She ran her fingers around the blade. She put it down. Picked up a soupspoon. She knew how to do this. She held it loosely, fingers caressing its neck, her will flowing from her spinal column sweetly into the pads of her fingers. She closed her eyes. She felt a slight humming behind them. Her breathing deepened. She relaxed. Then her eyes snapped open. She looked down. The spoon, unaltered, smiled up at her; and suddenly she understood it, she understood the essence of spoonhood. Bending it wasn’t the point, anymore. The point was that she would never feel the same about cutlery. Something stirred deep in her memory, as if she had been cross-wired, as if some old source of feeling had been tapped. She laid the spoon to rest, reverently, snug inside a fellow spoon. As she closed the drawer her eye caught the glint of the paring knife, a more worthwhile blade. She thought, I understand the nature of it. I understand the nature of spoon and knife.

Later, Colette picked up the potato masher from where it had fallen. “It’s bent,” she said.

“That’s all right. I did it.”

“Oh. You’re sure?”

“Just a little experiment.”

“I thought for a minute it must be Morris come back.” Colette hesitated. “You would tell me, wouldn’t you?”

But truly, there was no sign of him. Al sometimes wondered how he was doing on his course. It must be that he’s going to a higher level, she reasoned, you wouldn’t get sent on a course to go to a lower level.

“No, not even Morris,” Colette said, when she mentioned it. If Morris were on a lower level, he’d be no good, he’d not even scrape up to standard as an ordinary spirit, let alone get employed anywhere as a guide. He’d be just an agglomeration of meaninglessness, a clump of cells rolling around through the netherworld.

“Colette,” she said, “when you’re sweeping, have a look at the vacuum cleaner bag from time to time. If you find any big lumps you can’t account for, check it out with me, okay?”

Colette said, “I don’t think that sifting through the vacuum cleaner bag was in my job description.”

“Well, write it in, there’s a good girl,” Al said.

There are some spirits, she knew, who are willing to sink: who are so tenacious of existence that they will assume any form, however debased, ridiculous, and filthy. That was why Al, unlike her mother, made sure to keep a clean house. She thought that she and Colette, between them, could keep down the lower sort, who drift in dust rolls under beds and make streaks and finger-prints on windowpanes. They cloud mirrors and sometimes vanish with a chortle, leaving the mirror clear and unkind. They clump in hairbrushes, and when you comb them out, you think, can this thin grey frizz be mine?

Sometimes, when Alison came into a room, she thought the furniture had shifted slightly; but no doubt that was Colette, pushing it around as she cleaned. Her own boundaries seemed invisible, uncertain. Her core temperature tended to fluctuate, but there was nothing new in that. Her extremities drifted, in time and space. Sometimes she thought an hour, an afternoon, a day had gone missing. Less and less did she want to go out; her clients e-mailed her, the phone rang less often; Colette, who was restless, could always be persuaded to shop for them. It was the house’s silence that entranced her, lulled her. Her daydreams and night dreams ran together. She thought she saw two cars—trucks, really—parked outside the Collingwood; it was dark, Colette was in bed, she pulled her coat around her shoulders and went outside.

The carriage lamp flared into life, and the thump of a hi-fi came from a Hawkyns. There was no one around. She looked into the cab of one truck and it was empty. The cab of the other was empty too, but in the back there was a grey blanket tied with twine, covering something irregular and lumpy.

She shivered, and went back inside. When she woke the next morning the trucks had gone.

She wondered about them; whose were they? Had they not looked a bit old-fashioned? She wasn’t good on makes of cars, but there was something about their lines that suggested her childhood. “Colette,” she said, “when you’re at Sainsbury’s, you wouldn’t pick up a car magazine? One of those with lots and lots of pictures of every car anyone might want?” She thought, at least I could exclude all modern makes.

Colette said, “Are you winding me up?”

“What?” she said.

“Gavin!”

“There you are! I told you that you’re always talking about him.”

Later, she was sorry for upsetting Colette. I meant no harm, she said to herself, I just didn’t think. As for the trucks, they were spirit vehicles, probably, but whose? Sometimes she rose in the night to look down from the landing porthole over Admiral Drive. Around the children’s playground, warning lamps shone from deep holes in the ground. Great pipes, like troglodyte dwellings, lay gaping at the landscape; the moon’s single eye stared down at them.

Colette would find her, standing by the porthole, tense and cold. She would find her and draw her back to bed; her touch was like a spirit touch, her face hollow, her feet noiseless. By day or night, Colette’s aura remained patchy, wispy. When she was out and Alison found traces of her about the house—a discarded shoe, a bangle, one of her elastic hairbands—she thought, who ever is she, and how did she get here? Did I invite her? If so, why did I do that? She thought about Gloria and Mrs. McGibbet. She wondered if Colette might disappear one day, just as suddenly as they did, fading into nothingness and leaving behind only snatches of conversation, a faint heat trace on the air.

They had been given a breathing space. Time to reconsider. To pause. To reevaluate. They could see middle age ahead of them. Forty is the new thirty, Colette said. Fifty is the new forty. Senescence is the new juvenility, Alzheimer’s is the new acne. Sometimes they would sit over a bottle of wine and talk about their future. But it was difficult for them to plan in the way other people did. Colette felt that maybe Al was withholding information, information about the future that she could very well part with. Her questions about this life and the next were by no means resolved in a way that satisfied her; and she was always thinking of new ones. But what can you do? You have to make an accommodation. You have to accept certain givens. You can’t waste time every day worrying about the theory of your life, you have to get on with the practice. Maybe I’ll get into Kaballah, Al said. That seems to be the thing now. Colette said, maybe I’ll get into gardening. We could have some shrubs, now Morris isn’t here to hide behind them. Michelle and Evan keep hinting we should do something at the back. Get some flags laid, at least.

“They keep talking to me about the weather,” Al said. “I don’t know why.”

“Just being English, I suppose,” Colette said innocently. She sat brooding over the Yellow Pages. “I might ring up a gardening service. But not the one that sent that idiot last time, the one who couldn’t start the mower.”

“Do the next-doors still think we’re lesbians?”

“I expect so.” Colette added, “I hope it spoils their enjoyment of their property.”

She rang up the gardening service. A few flagstones, so less grass to mow, she thought. Her imagination didn’t stretch beyond an alleviation of her weekly routine. She made sure it didn’t. If she allowed herself to think about her life as a whole she felt an emptiness, an insufficiency: as if her plate had been taken away before she’d finished eating.

Meanwhile Evan leaned on the fence, watching her mow. She wondered if he was wearing an expression of lechery, but when she turned, it was actually an expression of sympathy. “I sometimes think, Astroturf,” he said. “Don’t you? They’re bringing in an auto-mower, one you preprogramme. But I suppose it’ll be a while before they hit the shops.”

His own plot was scuffed up and worn bald by the skirmishing of his two older brats. Colette was amazed at the speed with which they had grown. She remembered Michelle jiggling them on a hip; now they were out at all hours, scavenging and savaging, leaving scorched earth behind them, like child soldiers in an African war. Inside the house, Michelle was training up another one; when they had the French windows open, you could hear its stifled wails and roars.

“What you need there is a shed,” Evan said. “Stop you needing to get your mower out of the garage and walk it round the side.”

“I’m going to hire a man,” Colette said. “It didn’t work out before, but I’m trying somebody different. Going to do some planting.”

“There it is,” Evan said. “You need a man for some things, you see.”

Colette banged into the house. “Evan says we need a man.”

“Oh, surely not,” Alison said. “Or not any man we know.”

“He also says we need a shed.”

Alison looked surprised, a little hesitant. She frowned. “A shed? I suppose that’ll be all right,” she said.

On Sunday they went down the A322 to a shed supplier. Alison wandered around looking at the different kinds. There were some like Regency arbours, and some like miniaturized Tudor houses, and some with cupolas and arabesque cornices. There was one that reminded her of a Shinto shrine; Cara would probably go for that, she thought. Mandy would want the one with the onion dome. She liked the Swiss chalets, with little porches. She imagined hanging gingham curtains. I could go in there, she thought, shrunk (in thought form) to a small size. I could have a doll’s tea set and little cakes with pastel fondant icing and candied fruit on top.

Colette said, “We were hoping, my friend and I, to buy a shed.”

“Nowadays,” the man advised, “we call them garden buildings.”

“Okay, a garden building,” Al said. “Yes, that would be nice.”

“We only need something basic,” Colette said. “What sort of price are we looking at?”

“Oh,” said the man, “before we discuss price, let’s study your needs.”

Alison pointed to a sort of cricket pavilion. “What if our need were that one?”

“Yes, the Grace Road,” the man said. “An excellent choice where space is no object.” He thumbed his lists. “Let me tell you what that comes at.”

Colette peered over his shoulder. “Good God!” Colette said. “Don’t be silly, Al. We don’t want that.”

The man ushered them to a revolving summerhouse. “This is nice,” he said, “for a lady. You can envisage yourself, as the day closes, sitting with your face turned to the west, a cooling drink in hand.”

“Give over!” Colette said. “All we want is a place to keep the mower.”

“But what about your other essential equipment? What about your barbecue? And what about your winter storage? Tables, waterproof covers for tables, parasols, waterproof covers for parasols—”

“Garage,” said Colette.

“I see,” the man said. “So forcing you to park your car in the open, exposing it to the elements and the risk of theft?”

“We’ve got Neighbourhood Watch.”

“Yes,” Alison said. “We all watch each other, and report each other’s movements.” She thought of the spirit trucks, and the mound beneath the blanket: she imagined the nature of it.

“Neighbourhood Watch? I wish you joy of it! In my opinion, house-holders should be armed. We in the Bisley area are run ragged by opportunistic thieves and every type of intruder. Police Constable Delingbole gave us a lecture on home security.”

“Can we get on?” Colette said. “I’ve set aside this afternoon for buying a shed, and I want to get it sorted. We still have to do our food shopping.”

Alison saw her dreams of dolls’ teatime fading. Come to think of it, had she ever had a doll? She followed the salesman towards a small log cabin.

“We call this one ‘Old Smokey,’” he said. “It takes its inspiration, the designers claim, from railway buildings in the golden days of the Old West.”

“I’ll say this for you. You don’t give up easily.” Colette turned her back and stalked away in the direction of the honest working sheds.

Just as Alison was about to follow her, she thought she saw something move inside Old Smokey. For a second she saw a face, looking out at her. Bugger, she thought, a haunted shed. But it was nobody she knew. She trailed after Colette, thinking, we’re not going to get anything nice, we’re just going to get one of these tidgy sheds that anybody could have. What if I were to lie down on the ground and say, it’s my money, I want one of those cream-painted Shaker-style ones with a porch?

She caught up with them. Colette must be in an exceptionally nice mood today, because she hadn’t struck the salesman. “Pent or Apex?” he demanded.

Colette said, “It’s no good trying to blind me with science. The pent are the ones with a sloping roof, and the apex are the ones with pointy roofs. That’s obvious.”

“I can do you a Sissinghurst. Wooden garden workshop, twelve-by-ten, double door, and eight fixed-glass windows, delivery date normally one month but we could be flexible on that: 699.99 pounds, on-the-road price.”

“You’ve got a nerve,” Colette said.

Alison said, “Did you see somebody, Colette? Inside Old Smokey?”

The salesman said, “That will be a customer, madam.”

“He didn’t look like a customer.”

“Nor do I,” Colette said. “That’s obvious. Are you going to sell me something, or shall I drive up to Nottcutts on the A30?”

Al pitied the man; like her, he had his job to do, and part of his job was to stimulate the customer’s imagination. “Don’t worry,” she said, “we’ll have one from you. Honest. If you can just point us to the kind my friend wants.”

“I’ve lost my bearings here,” the man said. “I confess to a certain amount of total bafflement. Which of you ladies is the purchaser?”

“Oh, let’s not go through that again.” Colette groaned. “Al, you take over.” She walked away, giggling, between the ornamental wheelbarrow planters, the cast-iron conservatory frogs and the roughcast Buddhas. Her thin shoulders twitched.

“Will you sell one to me?” Al asked. She smiled her sweetest smile. “What about that one?”

“What, the Balmoral?” The man sneered. “Eight-by-ten pent with single-pitch roof? Well, that seems like a decision made, at last. Thank you, madam, it seems we’ve found something to suit you. The only problem is, as I could have told you if you’d let me get a word in edgewise, it’s the end of the range.”

“That’s okay,” Al said. “I’m not bothered about whether it’s in fashion.”

“No,” the man said, “what I’m saying to you is this, it would be futile, at this stage in the season, for me to ask the manufacturer to supply.”

“But what about this one? The one standing here?” Al tapped its walls. “You could send it right away, couldn’t you?”

The man turned away. He needed to struggle with his temper. His grand-dad had come through in spirit and was sitting on the Balmoral’s roof—its pent—ruminatively working his way through a bag of sweets. When the man spoke, granddad flapped his tongue out, with a melting humbug on the end of it.

“Excuse me madam—”

“Go ahead.”

“—are you asking me and my colleagues to dismantle that garden building and supervise its immediate transport, for a price of some four hundred pounds plus VAT plus our normal service charge? While the World Cup’s on?”

“Well, what else are you going to do with it?” Colette came up to rejoin them, her hands thrust deep in the pockets of her jeans. “You planning to leave it there till it falls down by itself?” Her foot scuffed the ground, kicked out casually at a concrete otter with its concrete pup. “If you don’t sell it now, mate, you never will. So come on, look sharp. Whistle up your crew, and let’s get on with the job.”

“What about your hardstanding?” the man said. “I don’t suppose you’ve given a thought to your hardstanding. Have you?”

As they walked back to the car, Colette said, “You know, I really think, when men talk, it’s worse than when they don’t.”

Alison looked at her narrowly, sideways. She waited for more.

“Gavin never said much. He’d say nothing for such a long time that you wanted to lean over and poke your finger in him to see if he was dead. I used to say, tell me your thoughts, Gavin. You must have thoughts. You remember when we met him, in Farnham?”

Alison nodded. She had smelled, trailing after Gavin, the reek of a past life: an old tweed collar rancid with hair oil. His aura was oatmeal, grey, it was as tough as old rope.

“Well,” Colette said. She flicked her remote to open the car doors. “I wonder what he was doing in Farnham.”

“Having a run out?”

“He could shop in Twickenham.”

“Change of scene?”

“Or Richmond.” Colette chewed her pale lip. “I wonder what he wanted in Elphicks? Because when you think, he gets all he needs at car shops.”

“Perhaps he wanted a new shirt.”

“He has a wardrobe full of shirts. He has fifty shirts. He must have. I used to pay a woman to iron them. Why did I pay? He seemed to think, if I didn’t want to do it myself, I ought to pay. When I look back now, I can’t for one minute imagine what was going through my head when I agreed to that.”

“Still,” Al said. She eased herself into her seat. “Some years have passed. Since you were together. They might be—I don’t know—frayed? His neck might have grown.”

“Oh yes,” Colette said. “He looks porky, all right. But he never did up his top button. So. Anyway. Plenty shirts.”

“But a new tie? Socks, underpants?” She felt shy; she’d never lived with a man.

“Knickers?” Colette said. “Car shops every time. Halfords. Velour for the proles, but leather for Gavin, top spec. They stock them in six-packs, shouldn’t wonder. Or else he buys them mail order from a rescue service.”

“A rescue service?”

“You know. Automobile Association. Royal Automobile Club. National Breakdown.”

“I know. But I didn’t think Gavin would need rescuing.”

“Oh, he just likes to have a badge and a personal number.”

“Have I got a personal number?”

“You are in all the major motoring organizations, Alison.”

“Belts-and-braces approach?”

“If you like.” Colette swung them out of the shed sellers’ compound, carelessly scattering a party of parents and children who were clustering about the hot-dog stand. “That’s done their arteries a favour,” Colette said. “Yes, you have several, but you don’t need to know them.”

“Perhaps I do,” Al said. “In case anything happened to you.”

“Why?” Colette was alarmed. “Are you seeing something?”

“No, no, nothing like that. Colette, don’t drive us off the road!”

Colette corrected their course. Their hearts were beating fast. The lucky opals had paled on Alison’s fists. You see, she thought. That’s how accidents happen. There was a silence.

“I don’t really like secrets,” Alison said.

“Bloody hell!” Colette said. “It’s only a few digits.” She relented. “I’ll show you where I keep them. On the computer. Which file.” Her heart sank. Why had she said that? She’d just bought an elegant little laptop, silver and pleasingly feminine. She could perch it on her knees and work in bed. But when Al loomed up with a cup of coffee for her, the keyboard started chattering and scrambled itself.

“So what about when you lived with Gavin, did he tell you his personal number?”

Colette tilted up her chin. “He kept it secret. He kept it where I couldn’t access it.”

“That seems a bit unnecessary,” Alison said, thinking, now you know how it feels, my girl.

“He wouldn’t put me on joint membership. I think he was ashamed, to phone them up and mention my car. It was all I could afford, at the time. I used to say, what’s your problem, Gavin? It gets me from A to B.”

Alison thought, if I were a great enthusiast for motoring, and somebody said “It gets me from A to B,” I think I would sneak up on them and smash their skull in with a spanner—or whatever’s good to smash skulls in, that you keep in the back of a car.

“We’d have rows.” Colette said. “He thought I should have a better car. Something flash. He thought I should run up debt.”

Debt and dishonour, Al thought. Oh dear. Oh dear and damnation. If somebody said to me, “What’s your problem?” in that tone of voice, I would probably wait till they were snoring and drive a hot needle through their tongue.

“And as it worked out, I was putting so much into the household—his ironing and so on—I went through a whole winter without cover. Anything could have happened. I could have broken down in the middle of nowhere—”

“On a lonely road at night.”

“Exactly.”

“On a lonely motorway.”

“Yes! You stop on the hard shoulder, if you get out—Jesus,” Colette slapped the wheel, “they just drive into you.”

“Or suppose a man stopped to help you. Could you trust him?”

“A stranger?”

“He would be. On a lonely road at night. He wouldn’t be anyone you knew.”

“You’re advised to stay put and lock your doors. Don’t even put your window down.”

“By the rescue services? Is that what they say?”

“It’s what the police say! Alison, you drove yourself around, didn’t you? Before me? You must know.”

She said, “I try to imagine.”

For think of the perils. Men who wait for you to break down just so they can come and kill you. Men hovering, monitoring the junctions. How would you know a sick car, to follow it? Presumably, smoke would come out of it. She herself, in her driving days, had never thought of such disasters; she sang as she drove, and her engine sang in tune. At the least whine, stutter, or hiccough, she sent it her love and prayers, then stuffed it in the garage. She supposed they were fleecing her, at the garage; but that’s the way it goes.

She thought, when me and Colette bought the car, soon after we got together, it was quite easy, a good afternoon out, but now we can’t even buy a Balmoral without Colette nearly driving us off the road, and me thinking of ways to stove her skull in. It shows how our relationship’s come on.

Colette careered them to a halt in the Collingwood’s drive, and the handbrake groaned as she hauled at it. “Bugger,” she said. “We should have food-shopped.”

“Never mind.”

“You see, Gavin, he didn’t care if I was raped, or anything.”

“You could have been drugged with date-rape drugs, and taken away by a man who made you live in a shed. Sorry. Garden building.”

“Don’t laugh at me, Al.”

“Look, the man back there asked us a question. Have we given a thought to our hardstanding?”

“Yes! Yes! Of course! I got a man out of the local paper. But I got three quotes!”

“That’s okay then. Let’s go in. Come on, Colette. It’s okay, sweetheart. We can have a cheese omelette. I’ll make it. We can go back. We can shop later. For God’s sake, they’re open till ten.”

Colette walked into the house, and her eyes roamed everywhere. “We’ll have to replace that stair carpet,” she said, “in under a year.”

“You think so?”

“The pile’s completely flattened.”

“I could avoid wearing it, if I jumped down the last three steps.”

“No, you might put your back out. But it seems a shame. Only been here two minutes.”

“Three years. Four.”

“Still. All those marks rubbed along the walls. Do you know you leave a mark? Wherever your shoulders touch it, and your big hips. You smear everything, Al. Even if you’re eating an orange, you slime it all down the wall. It’s a disgrace. I’m ashamed to live here.”

“At the mercy of shed merchants,” Al said. “Ah dear, ah dear, ah dear.”

At first she didn’t recognize who was speaking, and then she realized it was Mrs. McGibbet. She urged Colette towards the kitchen by slow degrees and consoled her with a microwaved sponge pudding, with hot jam and double cream. “You seriously think I’m going to eat this?” Colette asked; then gulped it down like a hungry dog.

They went to bed all tucked up safe that night. But she dreamed of snapping jaws, and temporary wooden structures. Of Blighto, Harry and Serene.