Beyond Black: A Novel

thirteen

At some point on your road you have to turn and start walking back towards yourself. Or the past will pursue you, and bite the nape of your neck, leave you bleeding in the ditch. Better to turn and face it with such weapons as you possess.

Her feet feel more swollen than usual. Perhaps she’s kneaded them too hard. Or perhaps she’s just reluctant to walk down this road, back through her teenage years, fireside chats with Emmie, happy schooldays, kindergarten fun. She hears Colette drop her keys through the door. Back, back. She hears the engine of a small car, struggling uphill on Admiral Drive; it’s Gavin.

Back, back, back to yesterday. The police are searching the house. Colette says, what are you looking for, Constable Delingbole, surely you don’t think we’ve got another corpse? Delingbole says, rather self-conscious, would you not call me that anymore? I’m Sergeant Delingbole now.

Lovely house, the policewoman says, looking around. Alison says, can I make you a cup of tea? and the policewoman says, oh no, you’ve had a fright, I’ll do the tea.

Al says, there’s lemon and ginger, camomile, Earl Grey, or proper tea, there’s a lemon in the fridge and semi-skimmed, there’s sugar on the top shelf there if you want it. Sergeant Delingbole plunges a long stick down the waste disposal, fetches it up again and sniffs it. Just routine, he says to Al. By the way, that’s quite a set of knives you’ve got there. I love those Japanese ones, don’t you? So chic.

The policewoman says, what do these houses come in at, then?

Back, back. Her fingers are pressed to the door of the shed, feeling for Mart’s pulse. She is coming down the garden towards the Balmoral. Colette is gesturing that the door is stuck. She is standing at the sink swabbing the spilled water. The kettle is boiling. Michelle’s face appears. Back, back. They are closing the door on Mrs. Etchells’s house. As you sow so shall you reap. She is holding a piece of paper with a scorch mark. Her head is in the wardrobe and she is breathing in camphor, violets, a faint body smell persisting down the years. They always said to me, if anyone asks you’re sixteen, right? I can never remember my age when things were done to me or when things happened. I’m not sure how old I am.

With each step backwards she is pushing at something light, tensile, clinging. It is a curtain of skin. With each step the body speaks its mind. Her ears pick up the trickle and swish of blood and lymph. Her eyes turn back and stare into the black jelly of her own thoughts. Inside her throat a door opens and closes; no one steps in. She does not look into the triangle of shadow behind the door. She knows a dead person might be there.

She hears a tap-tap, a knuckle on glass. “Are you there, Mr. Fox?” she says. She always says mister: when she remembers. The men say, here, you bloody tell her, Emmie; tell her politeness costs nothing.

There is a noise that might be crockery smashing, and a chair being knocked over. A door in her mind opens, and at first, once again, no one enters. She waits, holding her breath. It might be Keef, or it might be Morris Warren, or it might be their mate MacArthur, who always winks at her when he sees her.

But it’s her mum who staggers in, rights herself with some difficulty. “Whoops!” she says. “Must be my new pills. Blue, they is. That’s unusual, ain’t it. Blue? I says to him at the chemist, are you sure these are right? He says, lovely shade, he says, not blue, you’d not call that blue. It’s more heliotrope.”

She says, “Mum, did Donnie Aitkenside leave you any wages when he went off this morning? Because you know that magic shilling, that we have to put in the gas meter? He took it with him.”

Her mum says, “Donnie? Gone?”

“Yes,” she says, “he was creeping downstairs with his shoes in his hand, and he took our shilling for the gas. I thought maybe it was his change.”

“What in the Lord’s name is the girl talking about now, Gloria?”

“If we don’t have that shilling we need real money for the meter. It’s cold out and I haven’t had my breakfast.”

Her mother repeats, “Donnie? Gone?”

“And if he’s not paid you, we’ve no money for my school dinner.”

“And who gave you permission to call him Donnie, you stuck-up little madam? If a child such as you talked back in my day there’d be bloody blue murder.”

She says, there is anyway, innit? It’s bloody blue murder every day here. Her mum says, there you go again, if he takes his belt off to you I’ll not be surprised, I’ll not be the one holding him back, I’ll tell you: and there, thumping her fist on the wooden draining board, her mum is saying what they’ll do, what they’ll do and what they won’t, how they’re going to thrash her till she’s the texture of a jellyfish and she has to crawl to school on her belly, till she begins to wail and cry and say, but what can I eat for my breakfast? and her mum says, cornflakes if there’s no gas, and she says, but there’s no milk, and her mum says, so am I black and white, am I stood in the fucking meadow, and if not, what leads you to believe I am a fucking cow?

And that concludes it. It has to. Emmie falls over, knocked out by the force of her own sentence. Alison goes to school on an empty stomach. The lesson is scripture and she is thrown out to stand in the corridor. She is just standing there, doing no wrong. The headmaster sees her. “You again!” he bellows. She draws down the secret flaps, the membranes that cover her ears, and watches him gesticulating at her, his forehead creasing with fury. At playtime Tehera buys her a bag of crisps. She hopes they will give her a school dinner on credit but she doesn’t have a token so she is turned away. She says, the dogs have eaten my token, but they laugh. She gets half of a quarter of a marmite sandwich from Lee. On her way home she keeps her eyes down, searching the pavement for a magic shilling: or any money really, or a pin to pick up. She just thinks she sees a pin when wham! she walks straight into MacArthur. Hello, Mr. MacArthur, she says. All the day you’ll have good luck. He stares at her, suspicious. He says to her, your mam says you need a lesson. He puts out his hand, grabs her right nipple and twists it. She cries out. There’s one, he says, do you want me to do the other side? He winks at her.

Daylight has come to Admiral Drive. Dare she pull back a curtain? She is stiff and cold, except for her feet, which are burning. She limps into the kitchen. For a moment she stands paralyzed before the gas rings, thinking, how will I light them, when Aitkenside has taken our shilling? Then she depresses the ignition switch and the blue flame leaps up. She pours milk into a pan and sets it on the flame.

The telephone rings. It will be Colette, she thinks, wanting to come back. The cooker’s digital clock glows green, lighting the kitchen tiles with their frieze of fishes, lighting their slippery scales. Don’t be silly, she says to herself, she’ll barely be arrived in Whitton yet. She had thought a much longer time had elapsed: years. She stands with her cold hands stretched over the pan, and lets the machine take the call. Her message plays: there is a click. She thinks, it is the neighbours, trying to trick me into picking up; they want to know if I’m here.

Tentatively, she pulls up the kitchen blind. The clouds are charcoal and thick and grey, like the smoke from burning buildings. The full moon burrows into them and is immersed, swallowed. There is a tension headache at the back of her neck and, at the auditory rim, a faint high-pitched singing, like nocturnal wildlife in an equatorial forest, or God’s fingernail scraped against glass. The sound is continuous, but not steady; it pulses. There is a feeling that something—a string, a wire—is being stretched to its limit. She lowers the blind again, inch by inch, and with each inch the years fall away, she is in the kitchen at Aldershot, she is twelve, thirteen, but if anyone asks, she is sixteen of course.

“Mum,” she says, “did you run away with a circus?”

“Oh, circus, that was a laugh!” Her mum is merry from three strong lagers. “Your Uncle Morris was in that circus, he did sawing the lady in half. He wanted me to be sawed but I said, Morris, on your bike.”

“What about Gloria?”

“Oh yes, they sawed Gloria. Anybody could saw her. She was that sort of girl.”

“I don’t know what that sort would be. The sort of girl who lets herself be sawed in half.”

“Yes, you do,” her mum says, as if she is prompting her to remember. “They was always practicing on you. Morris, he liked to keep his hand in. Used to say, you never know when the old tricks will come in useful, you might have to turn your hand to it again. Many’s the time I seen your top half in the scullery and your bottom half in the front room. I seen your left half out the back in the shed and your right half God knows where. I says to Morris, I hope you know what you’re doing, I want her stuck together before you leave here tonight.”

Mum takes a pull on her can. She sits back. “You got any ciggies?” she says, and Al says, “Yes, I got some here somewhere, I nicked ’em for you.” Her mum says, “That’s nice: it’s thoughtful. I mean, some kids, they only go nicking sweeties, just thinking about themselves. You’re a good kid, Ali, we have our ups and downs, but that’s in the nature of mother and daughter. We’re alike, you see. That’s why we don’t always see eye to eye. When I say alike, I mean, not to look at obviously, plus we’re not in the same class when it comes to brains, you see I was always quick when I was at school, and as for weight I was about half the weight of a whippet, whereas you, I mean, you’re not the sharpest knife out of the drawer, you can’t help that, love, and as for your size it’s no secret some men like that type, MacArthur, for instance. When I took his deposit on you, he says, Emmie, it’s a good thing you’re not selling her by the pound.”

She asks, “Did MacArthur say that?”

Her mum sighs; her eyelids flutter. “Al,” she says, “get me one of my new blue pills. The helicopter ones. Would you?”

What year is this? Al runs a hand over her body. Has she breasts now, or just the promise of them? There is no point, when it comes to your own flesh, trying to knead it into precision; flesh doesn’t yield that kind of answer. She pours the hot milk onto a spoonful of instant coffee. Then she is too weak to do any more, and she sits down.

“They used to disappear you,” Emmie says. “For a laugh. Sometimes you’d be gone half an hour. I’d say, here, Morris, where’s Alison? That’s my only daughter you’ve disappeared. If she don’t come back I’ll sue you.”

“And did I?” she says. “Come back?”

“Oh yes. Else I really would. I’d have seen him in court. And Morris knew it. There was all sorts of money tied up in you. Trouble is with me I couldn’t keep me books straight.”

“You didn’t have books. You had a vase.”

“I couldn’t keep me vase straight. Bob Fox was always dipping in it. And then the boys fell to quarrelling about who was to go first at you. MacArthur put down his deposit, but oops! You see, I had borrowed money off Morris Warren. Morris said money owed counts for more than money down. And he wouldn’t leave it alone, I’m owed this, I’m owed that.”

Al says, “He’s still the same.”

“But then Keith Capstick got in anyway, before either of them could do the business, on account of your turning to him after the dog bite. The ones that weren’t there when the dog broke in, the ones that didn’t witness it, they couldn’t understand the way you was wiv Keith, making up to him and kissing him and all. So there was bound to be disputes. So then they was mired in a three-way fight. And MacArthur come first versus Keith, and Keith got a pasting.

“But Morris, he just maintained the same, Keith Capstick owes me money, Mac owes me, he said Bill Wagstaffe owed him, I could never see how that was, but I suppose it was a bet on the horses and boys will be boys. Morris said, I will go to my grave buried with my little black book saying who owes me what, I will never rest till I get my money’s worth, dead or alive.”

“I wish I’d known,” Alison says. “If I’d known all he wanted was a refund, I could have written him a cheque myself.”

“And Aitkenside,” her mum says, “was overseeing it all. Thank the Lord for Donnie Aitkenside. He was advising me, like. But then how was I supposed to make a living, after you was offering all-in for a shilling? I even lent you my nightdress, and that’s all the thanks I get.”

“You said I was a good kid.”

“When?”

“A while back.”

“I changed my mind,” said Em, sulking.

Her coffee is cold, and she raises her head to the tap-tap-tap. Mr. Fox, are you there? Are your friends with you? Click by click, she lifts the kitchen blind. Dawn: there is a dazing light, a bar of thunderous black across the sky: hail-stones are falling. These summers since the millennium have been all the same: days of clammy unnatural heat, sapping to the will. She puts her fingers against her forehead and finds her skin damp, but she couldn’t say whether she’s hot or cold. She needs a hot drink, to banish that deep internal quaking; I could try again, she thinks, with the kettle and a teabag. Will the police come back? She hears the neighbours chanting Out out out: a swell of distant voices, like a choir.

“Jesus,” Colette said. “Where did you get this clapped-out dodgem car?”

“My garage lent it. It’s only temporary. A courtesy car.” Gavin looked at her out of the tail of his eye. “You look done in,” he said.

“Done in,” she said. “Tired out.”

“Washed up,” Gavin offered.

“Look, I realize this isn’t convenient for you. I promise I won’t be in your way. I just need a few hours to catch up on my sleep, then I can think straight. I’ll soon put my life to rights. I’m by no means penniless, I just need to work out how to extricate myself from my ties with Alison. I may need to see a solicitor.”

“Oh. She in trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Small businesses going under all over the show,” Gavin said. “Easy to run up a tax bill. They claim there’s not a recession, but I dunno.”

“What about you, did you get fixed up?”

“Bit of contract work. Take it as it comes. Here and there. As and when.”

“Hand to mouth,” she said.

For a while they drove in silence. The suburbs were beginning to wake up. “What about Zoë?” Colette said. “What will she think about me turning up like this?”

“She’ll understand. She knows we used to be related.”

“Related? If that’s what you call it.”

“Married is a relation, isn’t it? I mean, you’re related to your wife?”

“She’s got no cause for jealousy. I shall make that perfectly clear. So don’t worry. It’s just for the emergency. It’s strictly temporary. I’ll make sure she knows that. I’ll soon be out of her way.”

“Anyway,” her mum says, “Gloria got sawed once too often. And then they had to get rid of her, didn’t they? It wasn’t even on the premises, that was the big nuisance of it. They had to fetch her back as consignments. But then the dogs came in handy, didn’t they? But Pete said, you got to watch them dogs now, Keith. You got to watch dogs, once they get a taste for human flesh. Which was proved, of course. With the dog flying out at you. And then the way he cleaned his dish, when you served him up a slice of Keith.”

She leaves the house now, young Alison, she leaves the house at Aldershot, kicking open the back door that is swollen with damp. MacArthur sees her go. He winks at her. It has rained that day and the ground is soft underfoot as she makes her way towards the lockup garages.

Emmie says, “Where there is waste ground, there is outbuildings. It stands to reason. That’s where the boys used to keep their knocked-off ciggies and their bottles of spirits, they was always bringing in spirits by the case—oops, I think I’ve spoken out of turn now, it’s a good thing MacArthur’s not around, he’d have walloped me one, do me a favour and don’t mention to the boys it was me what told you.”

“I’m not the police,” Al says.

“Police? That’s a laugh. They was all in on it, only you don’t want to mention it to MacArthur. I’ll only get my eye blacked and my teef knocked out—not that I have any teef, but I wouldn’t like a smack in the gums. Police used to come round, saying I’m after the whereabouts of MacArthur, I’m attempting to locate a gypsy fella name of Pete, they was having a laugh, they weren’t locating, all they was wanting was a rolled-up fiver in their top pocket and a glass of whisky and lemonade, and if I couldn’t oblige them, on account of I’d spent me last fiver and you’d drunk the lemonade, they’d say, well now, Mrs. Cheetham, well now, I’ll just get my leg over before I depart your premises.”

She walks past the van, young Alison, the van where Gloria rests in pieces: past the dog run, where Harry, Blighto and Serene lie dreaming; past the empty chicken runs, where the chickens are all dead because Pikey Pete has wrung their necks. Past the caravan with its blacked-out windows: back to the hut where she lies and howls. She peeps in, she sees herself, lying bleeding onto newspapers they’ve put down: it will be hygienic, Aitkenside says, because we can burn them once she’s clotted.

Aitkenside says, you’d better stay off school, till it scabs over. We don’t want questions asked, into our private business. If they say anything to you, say you was trying to jump barbed wire, right? Say you did it scrambling over broken glass.

She lies, moaning and thrashing. They have turned her over on her back now. She screams out: if anybody asks I’m sixteen, right? No, officer sir, my mummy is not at home. No officer sir, I have never seen this man before. No, officer, sir, I don’t know that man either. No sir, for certain I never saw a head in a bath, but if I do I will be faithfully sure to come to the station and tell you.

She hears the men saying, we said she’d get a lesson, she’s had one now.

The telephone again. She won’t answer. She has lowered the kitchen blind, in case despite the new locks the police have installed the neighbours are so furious as to swarm over the side gate. Colette was right, she thinks; those gates are no good, really, but I don’t think she was serious when she mentioned getting barbed wire.

She goes upstairs. The door of Colette’s room stands open. The room is tidy, as you would expect; and Colette, before leaving, has stripped the bed. She lifts the lid of the laundry basket. Colette has left her soiled sheets behind; she stirs them, but finds nothing else, not a single item of hers. She opens the wardrobe doors. Colette’s clothes hang like a rack of phantoms.

They are in Windsor, at the Harte and Garter. It is summer, they are younger; it is seven years ago; an era has passed. They are drinking coffee. She plays with the paper straws with the sugar in. She tells Colette, a man called M will enter your life.

At Whitton, Colette’s hand reached out in the darkness of the communal hall; accurately, she found the light switch at the foot of the stairs. As if I’d never been away, she thought. In seven years they say every cell of your body is renewed; she looked around her and remarked, the same is not true of gloss paintwork.

She walked upstairs ahead of Gavin, to her ex-front door. He reached around her to put the key in the lock; his body touched hers, his forearm brushed her upper arm.

“Sorry,” she said. She inched aside, shrinking herself, folding her arms across her chest.

“No, my fault,” he said.

She held her breath as she stepped in. Would Zoë, like Alison, be one of those people who fills up the rooms with her scent, a person who is present even when she’s absent, who sprays the sheets with rose or lavender water and who burns expensive oils in every room? She stood, inhaling. But the air was lifeless, a little stale. If it hadn’t been such a wet morning, she would have hurried to open all the windows.

She put her bag down and turned to Gavin, questioning.

“Didn’t I say? She’s away.”

“Oh. On a shoot?”

“Shoot?” Gavin said, “What do you mean?”

“I thought she was a model?”

“Oh, yes. That. I thought you meant like on safari.”

“So is she?”

“Could be,” Gavin said, nodding judiciously.

She noticed that he had placed his car magazines on a low table in a very tidy pile. Other than that, there was very little change from the room she remembered. I’d have thought he’d have redecorated, in all these years, she said to herself. I’d have thought she’d have wanted to put her stamp on it. I’d have thought she’d throw all my stuff out—everything I chose—and do a make-over. Tears pricked her eyes. It would have made her feel lonely, rejected, if she’d come back and found it all changed, but that fact that it was all the same made her feel somehow … futile.

“I suppose you’ll want the bathroom, Gav,” she said. “You’ll have to get off to work.”

“Oh no. I can work from home today. Make sure you’re all right. We can go out for a bite of lunch if you feel up to it later. We could go for a walk in the park.”

Her face was astonished. “A what, Gavin? Did you say a walk in the park?”

“I’ve forgotten what you like,” he said, shuffling his feet.

In the corner of Colette’s room, where the air is turbulent and thickening, there arises a little pink felt lady whom Al has not seen since she was a child.

“Ah, who called me back?” says Mrs. McGibbet.

And she says, “I did, Alison. I need your help.”

Mrs. McGibbet shifts on the floor, as if uncomfortable.

“Are you still looking for your boy Brendan? If you help me, I’ll swear I’ll find him for you.”

A tear creeps out of Mrs. McGibbet’s eye, and makes its way slowly down her parchment cheek. And immediately a little toy car materializes by her left foot. Alison doesn’t trust herself to pick it up, to handle it. She doesn’t like apports. Start on that business, and you’ll find some joker trying to force a grand piano through from the other side, pulling and tugging at the curve of space__time, wiping his boots on your carpet and crying, “Whew! Blimey! Left hand down a bit, steady how she goes!” As a child, of course, she had played with Brendan’s toys. But in those days she didn’t know how one thing led to another.

“I don’t know how many doors I’ve knocked on,” says Mrs. McGibbet. “I’ve tramped the streets. I’ve visited the door of every psychic and Sensitive from here to Aberdeen, and attended their churches though my priest told me I must not. And never a sighting of Brendan since the circus fellas put him in a box. He says, ‘Mam, it is the dream of every boy to join the circus, for hasn’t my sister Gloria a costume with spangles? And such a thing was never seen in these parts.’ And that was true. And I didn’t care to spell out to him the true nature of her employment. So he was taken on as box boy.”

“They put him in a box?”

“And fastened round the chain. And box boy will burst out, they said. A roll on the drums. The audience agog. The breath bated. The box rocking. And then nothing. It ceases to rock. The man MacArthur comes with his boot, oi, box boy!”

“Was MacArthur in the circus?”

“There wasn’t a thing that MacArthur wasn’t in. He was in the army. He was in the jail. He was in the horse game, and the fight game, and the box game. And he comes with his boot and kicks the side of the box. But poor Brendan, he makes not a murmur; and the box, not an inch does it shift. And a deadly silence falls. So then they look at each other, at a loss. Says Aitkenside, Morris, have you ever had this happen before? Says Keith Capstick, we’d better open it up, me old china. Morris Warren protests at the likely damage to his special box, but they come with a lever and a bar. They pull out the nails with pliers and they prize off the lid. But when they open it up, my poor son Brendan is gone.”

“That’s a terrible story, Mrs. McGibbet. Didn’t they get the police?”

“The police? Them? They’d be laughed out of the place. The police are the king of boxes. It is well known in every nation that people who trouble them disappear.”

“That’s true,” Alison said. “You’ve only to watch the news.”

“I would help you out,” the little lady said, “with your memorizing and all, but I’m sure the topic of MacArthur’s eye is not a topic for decent people. I’m sure I wasn’t looking, though I do recall the man MacArthur lying drunk as a lord on your mammy’s couch, for though I might have shifted his head to see if Brendan was under the cushion, if he then fell back into his stupor I barely recall. And if the man they call Capstick was incapable too, lying with his head under the table, I’m sure I was too busy to notice. I can’t recall at all you stooping over them vermin and patting their pockets, hoping for a shilling to roll out, for I wouldn’t know where the minimart was or what sort of sweeties you were fond of spending on. Now one or the other might have roared ‘bleeding thief,’ but then it could have been ‘bleeding Keith’ for I can’t claim I was paying attention—and you wouldn’t mention to them, would you, that it was me, McGibbet, that told you nothing at all about it, for I’m in mortal fear of those fiends? I’m sure I wasn’t seeing a little girl with a pair of scissors in her hand, snipping about a man’s private parts. I’m sure I was too busy about my own business to notice whether that was a fork you were carrying, or that was a knife, and whether you had a spoon in your pocket, or whether your mouth was bristling with pins. I’m sure I wouldn’t have known if you were carrying a knitting needle, for there were several on the premises, but I’m sure I was too busy seeking my boy Brendan to know whether you had opened the drawer and took one out. And I wouldn’t say I saw you go down the garden to feed the dogs, neither. If I hadn’t been peeping under the furniture as was my habit, I might have seen a smile on your face and a bowl in your hand, and a trickle of blood running down each arm. But your age I couldn’t swear to, it was no more than eight years, nine or ten. And I never saw the fella called Capstick run out and collapse on the ground at the side of the house, shouting Ambulance, ambulance! Nor did I see Morris God-curse-him Warren and the other bloody bleeder come up at the trot, his name I don’t suppose would be Aitkenside. I didn’t notice them haul up Capstick by his oxters and dump him in the bath that was kept out on the road in front of your mother’s premises. There was a deal of shouting then, but it was that sort of neighbourhood, so I couldn’t say he was crying out to the whole street, where’s my bollocks, find the fuckers for they can stitch them back on, beg your pardon but that’s the exact truth of what he might have said at the time, if I had been able to hear above the racket. And Morris Warren said something back to him, I dare say, but I wouldn’t like to quote you his words, which were too late I regret my son, for your bollocks are all eaten by the dogs, they cannot sew them back when they are swallered, not to my way of thinking, and to my way of thinking they are swallered good and proper and the dogs have cleaned their bowls. And he, Morris Warren, it’s possible he could not forbear to laugh, for he had told Capstick he should not interfere with your good self without paying money for it, and now you get paid out, he said, and now you get what’s coming to you, the little girl herself pays you out for being a dirty bugger.”

I paid him, Alison thought. At least one of the bastards is paid out. Or did I pay out two? “Mrs. McGibbet,” she urged, “go on.”

“I’m sure,” said Mrs. McGibbet, “I never heard the moment Morris Warren ceased to laugh. I never looked in the dogs’ bowls, curious to see what they were eating, for if you came near them they’d bite your leg off. And therefore I couldn’t have noticed MacArthur’s eye plop off a spoon and fall into a dish—surely I must have dreamed it, for such a thing could never be. And if your little self, no more than eight, nine, ten years old, were to have cried out, ‘Now wink at me, can you, you bloody bastard?’ I wouldn’t have known it because I was searching down the back of a cupboard for Brendan. And if Mr. Donald Aitkenside ran down the road in a panic, I wouldn’t have seen him. Still less the fella they call Pikey Pete jump in his van and drive screaming in all directions at once.”

Al walks down the road. She is eight, nine, ten. Once again she hasn’t got her swimming kit or her gym shoes or anything else she should have for school. Lee and Tehera are just behind her, then comes Catherine Tattersall; she looks back for Catherine, who is lagging, and there on the pavement she sees MacArthur’s eye, rolling along. “Look,” she says, and they say, “What?” She points, “Look at that,” she says, “at that.” Catherine steps right on MacArthur’s eye, and squashes it into the ground. “Yeachh!” Al says, and turns aside. “What’s up wiv you, Al?” Catherine says. When Al looks back, the jelly has bounced back again, to a perfect orb, and MacArthur’s eye continues to roll along.

It followed her to school one day, it was against the rule:

It made the children laugh and play, to see an eye at school.

It is evening. She is coming home from school. At the street corner, the half-crippled little bloke called Morris Warren leans against the wall. Eff off, she says under her breath. As she approaches, she expects him to reach out and make a grab at her breasts, as this is his usual habit. She prepares to swerve; that is her usual habit, too.

But today he doesn’t grab. He just looks at her, and as he looks, he almost falls over. It seems as if his crooked legs won’t support him; he grabs the wall for support, and when he speaks, his tone is amazed. He says, “Take off his bollocks, yes! But take out a cove’s eye? I’ve never heard of it before.”

She bangs into the house, casting a glance down into the stained bathtub, thinking, I better get something and scour that out, it looks bad. Emmie comes at her as soon as she gets in the door: “I saw MacArthur’s eye on a spoon, I saw MacArthur’s eye on a fork.”

“Which?”

“I saw you standing there with a knitting needle in your hand, young lady. He didn’t deserve that. He was only doing what men do. You was all over Capstick when he pulled the dog off you, but then you was all over MacArthur when he bought you sweeties. So what was he to think? He used to say, Emmie, what have you bred there? She’ll do anything for a bag of chocolate raisins.”

Al sits in her kitchen, her kitchen at Admiral Drive. Older now, suddenly wiser, she asks the empty air, “Mum, who’s my dad?”

Emmie says, “Leave off, will you!”

She says, “I cannot rest, till I know. And when I know, then possibly I still cannot rest.”

“Then you have to ask yourself what’s the use,” Emmie says. “I dunno, girl. I would help you, if I could. It could be any one of ’em, or it could be six other fellas. You don’t see who it is, because they always put a blanket over your head.”

Back, back, go back. She is at Aldershot. Darkness is falling, darkness is falling fast. The men are moving a bundle of something. They are passing it between them. It is limp, doll-sized, swaddled. She pulls the blanket aside with her own hand, and in its folds, dead-white, waxy, eyes closed tightly, she sees her own face. And now back she goes, back and back, till she is smaller and smaller, before she can walk, before she can talk: to the first wail, the first gasp: to the knitting needle pricking her skull and letting in the light.

At Whitton, Colette opened the wardrobe. “Where are Zoë’s things? Surely she doesn’t take everything with her when she travels?”

A pity. She had been looking forward to trying her clothes on, when Gavin went to work. She wished he would clear off, really, and let her go through all the drawers and cupboards, instead of hanging about in a sheepish way at the back of her and sighing like that.

Back and back. There is an interval of darkness, dwindling, suspension of the senses. She neither hears nor sees. The world has no scent or savour. She is a cell, a dot. She diminishes, to vanishing point. She is back beyond a dot. She is back where the dots come from. And still she goes back.

It is close of day, and Al is plodding home. The light is low and greyish. She must make it before dark. Clay is encrusted on her feet, and beneath them the track is worn into deep ruts. Her garments, which appear to be made of sacking—which may, indeed, be sacks—are stiffening with the day’s sweat, and chafing the knotty scars on her body. Her breath is coming hard. There is a stitch in her side. She stops and drinks from the ditch, scooping up the water with her fingers. She squats there, until the moon rises.

In the kitchen Colette was opening cupboards, staring critically at the scanty stocks. Zoë, she thought, is one of those people who lives on air, and has no intention of putting herself out to cook for Gavin; which is a mistake, because left to himself he reverts to fried chicken, and before you know where you are he’s bursting out of his shirts.

She opened the fridge, she pushed the contents about. What she found was unappealing: a half-used carton of full-fat long-life milk, some Scotch eggs, a lump of orange cheese which had gone hard, and three small blackened bananas.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell Zoë,” she said, “not to keep bananas in the fridge?”

“Feel free,” Gavin said.

“What?”

“Look in all the cupboards, why don’t you? Look in the dishwasher. Don’t mind me. Look in the washing machine.”

“Well, if it’s empty,” she said, “I’ll just pop in one or two things of mine that I brought with me. I didn’t like to leave my dirty laundry behind.”

He followed her into the sitting room as she went to pick up her bag. “You’re not going back then?”

“No chance. Gavin, excuse me, don’t stand in my way.”

“Sorry.” He sidestepped. “So won’t you miss her? Your friend?”

“I’ll miss my income. But don’t worry. I’ll get it sorted. I’ll ring up some agencies later.”

“It’s quiet,” Gavin warned.

“Anything at your place?”

“My place? Dunno.”

She stared at him, her pale eyes bulging slightly. “Gavin—correct me if I’m wrong.” She squatted and opened her bag. “Would I be near the truth if I said you’re still out of a job?”

He nodded.

She plucked out her dirty washing. “And would I be near the truth if I said you made Zoë up?”

He turned away.

“And that rustbucket out there, it really is your own car?” Damn, she thought, isn’t that just typical, he’s more embarrassed about the car than everything else put together. Gavin stood rubbing his head. She passed him, went into the kitchen with her bundle.

“It’s temporary,” he said. “I traded down. But now you’re back—”

“Back?” she said coldly. She bent down and retrieved a grey sock from the washing machine. It was a woolly sock, the kind you darn; the heel had gone into holes. “How long were you intending to leave it before you told me Zoë didn’t exist?”

“I thought you’d work it out for yourself. Which you did, didn’t you? I had to say something! You went on about this Dean guy, and the rest. Dean this and Donnie that. I had to say something.”

“To make me jealous?”

“Yes. I suppose.”

“I only mentioned Dean once, as far as I remember.”

“He going to come after you, is he?”

“No,” she said. “He’s dead.”

“Christ! Really? You’re not winding me up?”

She shook her head.

“Accident, was it?”

“I believe so.”

“You’d lost touch? I’m glad he’s dead. Suppose I shouldn’t say it, but I am.”

She sniffed. “He was nothing to me.”

“I mean, I hope he didn’t suffer. Kind of thing.”

“Gavin, is this sock yours?”

“What?” he said. “That? No. Never seen it before. So what about this psychic stuff, have you given it up?”

“Oh, yes. That’s all finished now.” She held up the sock to examine it. “It’s not like you usually wear. Horrible grey thing. Looks like roadkill.” She frowned at it; she thought she’d seen the other half of the pair, but couldn’t think where.

“Colette … listen … I shouldn’t have told you lies.”

“That’s all right.” She thought, I told you some. Then, in case she seemed to be excusing him too readily, she said, “It’s what I expect.”

“Doesn’t seem like seven years. Since we split.”

“Must be. Must be about that. It was the summer that Diana died.” She walked around the kitchen, her finger dabbing at sticky surfaces. “Looks like six years and three hundred and sixty-four days since you gave these tiles a wipe-down.”

“I’m glad now we didn’t sell up.”

“Are you? Why?”

“It makes it like before.”

“Time doesn’t go backwards.”

“No, but I can’t remember why we split.” She frowned. Neither could she, really. Gavin looked down at his feet. “Colette, we’ve been a couple of plonkers, haven’t we?”

She picked up the woolly sock, and threw it in the kitchen bin. “I don’t think women can be,” she said. “Plonkers. Not really.”

Gavin said humbly, “I think you could do anything, Colette.”

She looked at him; his head hanging like some dog that’s been out in the rain. She looked at him and her heart was touched: where her heart would be.

Admiral Drive: Al hears the neighbours, muttering outside. They are carrying placards, she expects. Sergeant Delingbole is speaking to them through a megaphone. You can’t scare Al. When you’ve been strangled as often as she has, when you’ve been drowned, when you’ve died so many times and found yourself still earthside, what are the neighbours going to do to you that’s so bloody novel?

There are several ways forward, she thinks, several ways I can go from here. She accepts that Colette won’t be back. Repentance is not out of the question; she imagines Colette saying, I was hasty, can we start again, and herself saying, I don’t think so, Colette: that was then and now it’s now.

Time for a shake-up. I’ll never settle here after all the name-calling and disruption. Even if, when all this dies down, the neighbours start to cosy up to me and bake me cakes. They may forget but I won’t. Besides, by now they know what I do for a living. That it’s not weather forecasting; and anyway, the Met Office has moved to Exeter.

I could ring an estate agent, she thinks, and ask for a valuation. (Colette’s voice in her ear says, you ought to ring three.) “Miss Hart, what about your shed, which is of local historic interest? And what about the black cloud of evil that hovers over your premises. Will you be leaving that?” Memories are short, she thinks, in house sales. She will be forgotten, just like the worms and voles who used to live here, and the foetus dug in under the hedge.

She calls Mandy.

“Natasha, Psychic to the Stars?”

“Mandy, Colette’s walked out.”

“Oh, it’s you, Alison. Oh dear. I foresaw as much, frankly. When we were at Irene’s, looking for the will, I said to Silvana, trouble there, mark my words.”

“And I’m on my own.”

“Don’t cry, lovie. I’ll come and get you.”

“Please. For a night or two. Till it dies down. You see, the press are here. Cameras.”

Mandy was puzzled. “Is that good? For business, I mean?”

“No, I’ve got vigilantes. Demonstrators.”

Mandy clicked her tongue. “Witch-burning, isn’t it? Some people are so narrow-minded. Are the police there?”

“Yes.”

“But they’re not trying to arrest you or anything? Sorry, silly question; of course not. Look, I’ll bring Gemma for a bit of muscle.”

“No. Just come yourself.”

“Take a nice hot bath, Al. Unplug the phone. Spray some lavender around. I’ll be there before you know it. I’ll have you out of there. A bit of sea air will do you good. We’ll go shopping for you, give you a makeover. I always thought Colette gave you bad advice. Shall I book you a hair appointment? I’ll line up Cara to give you a massage.”

Three hours later, she is ready to leave the house. The police have not had much success in dispersing the crowd; they don’t, they explain, want to get heavy-handed. Sergeant Delingbole says, what you could do, probably it would be for the best, would be to come out with a blanket over your head. She says, do you have an official blanket you use for that, or can I choose my own? They say, feel free: the policewoman helpfully runs upstairs and looks out at her direction her mohair throw, the raspberry-coloured throw that Colette bought her once, in better times than these.

She places it over her head; the world looks pink and fuzzy. Like a fish, or something newborn, she opens her mouth to breathe; her breath, moist, sucks in the mohair. The policewoman takes her elbow, and Delingbole opens the door; she is hurried to a police vehicle with darkened windows, which whisks her smartly away from Admiral Drive. Later, on the regional TV news, she will glimpse herself from the knee down. I always wanted to be on TV, she will say, and now I have; Mandy will say, well, bits of you, anyway.

As they swing onto the A322, she pulls aside the woollen folds and looks around her. Her lips itch from their contact with the throw; she presses them together, hoping not to smudge her lipstick. Sergeant Delingbole is sitting with her: for reassurance, he says. “I’ve always been fascinated,” he says. “The paranormal. UFOs. All that. I mean there must be something in it, mustn’t there?”

“I think you tried to come through,” she says, “at one of my dems. Couple of years back. Just after the Queen Mother passed.”

“God bless her,” says Delingbole automatically, and Alison answers, “God bless her.”

The day has brightened. At Worplesden, trees drip onto the fairways of the golf club. The policewoman says, “The cloud’s lifting. Might see some action at Wimbledon this afternoon.”

Al smiles. “I’m sure I couldn’t say.”

Before they reach Guildford, they pull into an out-of-town shopping centre. The exchange takes place in front of PC World. Mandy clip-clips towards the white van: high-heeled pastel pumps in pistachio green, tight pale jeans, fake Chanel jacket in baby pink. She is smiling, her big jaw jutting. She looks quite lined, Al thinks; it is the first time in years she has seen Mandy in full daylight. It must be Hove that’s aged her: the sea breezes, the squinting into the sun. “Got the consignment?” says Mandy, breezy herself, and Delingbole opens the back door and gives Al his arm to help her out of the van. She tumbles to the ground, her sore feet impacting hard.

The soft-top stands by, lacquered once again to a perfect hard scarlet. “There’s a new nail bar at the end of our road,” Mandy says. “I thought after we’ve had some lunch we could pop in and treat ourselves.”

For a moment Al sees her fist, dripping with gore; she sees herself, bloody to the elbows. She sees, back at Admiral Drive, the tape unspooling in the empty house; her past unspooling, back beyond this life, beyond the lives to come. “That will be nice,” she says.

MORRIS: And another thing you can’t get, you can’t get a saveloy.

CAPSTICK: You can’t get tripe like you used to get.

DEAN: When I get my tongue guard off, I’m going for a curry.

MORRIS: You can’t get a decent cuppa tea.

DEAN: And then I’m going to get a swastika studded into it. I can hang it over walls and be a mobile graffiti.

MART: Tee-hee. When Delingbole comes you can wag it at him and then bugger off.

AITKENSIDE: Etchells could make a good cuppa.

CAPSTICK: She could. I’ll give her that.

MORRIS: By the way, Mr. Aitkenside.

AITKENSIDE: Yes? Speak up.

MORRIS: I only mention it.

AITKENSIDE: Spit it out, lad.

MORRIS: It’s a question of fundage.

AITKENSIDE: Warren, you have already tapped me for a sub. When I look in my wages book I find it ain’t the first time either. You are spending in advance of your entire income, as far as I can see. It can’t go on, me old mate.

MORRIS: I don’t want a sub. I only want what’s due.

MACARTHUR: He’s right, Mr. Aitkenside. It ain’t fair that Pete should keep all the money he got from Etchells’s personal effects, seeing as we all helped to frighten her to death, and especially me rising up with my false eye rolling.

AITKENSIDE: Pete! What you got to say about this? (pause) Pete? … Where is he?

CAPSTICK: Bugger me. Taken to the road. His wodge of cash wiv him.

MORRIS: Ain’t that his sort all over?

BOB FOX: What can you expect, Mr. Aitkenside, taking on pikeys?

AITKENSIDE: Don’t you tell me how to do my job, lad! I’ve got a diploma in Human Resources from Nick himself. We are working towards equal opportunities for all. Don’t tell me how to recruit, or you’ll be knocking on windows for all eternity.

CAPSTICK: We’ll have to contact the missus, then. If we want our cut. She’ll nail down Pikey for us. He likes her. He can’t keep away.

AITKENSIDE: Pardon me, but I don’t know if you’ll see your missus again.

DEAN: You’ve pissed her off good and proper.

CAPSTICK: What, not see her? Who we going to mediumize, then?

BOB FOX: Morris? Morris, speak up. It’s you in charge of this fiasco.

MORRIS: You can’t get decent vinegar, neither. You go in for vinegar, there’s bloody shelves and shelves of the stuff. There’s only one sort of proper vinegar, and that’s brown.

CAPSTICK: Morris? We’re talking to you.

AITKENSIDE: It was you, Warren, according to my ledger, what requested to have that crustie hanged, that lived in her shed.

MORRIS: He was on my manor! Only just got a proper outbuilding, where I can put me feet up evenings, and some geezer with an ’at moves in.

AITKENSIDE: But what did you fail to see, my son? You failed to see he was her good deed.

WAGSTAFFE: A good deed in a naughty world.

AITKENSIDE: That you, Wagstaffe? Bugger off, we’re talking.

MORRIS: Besides, you was all agreeable. Oooh, Morris, you said, let’s have an ’anging, haven’t had a good ’anging in years, it’ll be a right laugh when the little bugger kicks his feet!

AITKENSIDE: You failed to see that little bugger was her good deed. And what’s the result? She’s looking to commit a few others. They get the habit … see? They get the habit. It’s sad. But they get the taste for it.

MORRIS: So she don’t want to know us no more?

AITKENSIDE: I very much doubt it, old son.

MORRIS: But we go back, me and the missus. (pause) I’ll miss her. Be on my own. Won’t be the same.

CAPSTICK: Oh, leave off, do! Bring on the bloody violins! You wouldn’t think so well of her if she’d had away your balls.

MACARTHUR: You wouldn’t think so well of her if you’d seen your eye on her spoon.

DEAN: You can get another place, Uncle Morris.

MORRIS: (sniffs) Won’t be the same, Dean lad.

AITKENSIDE: Not the bloody waterworks! Pull yourself together, Warren, or I’ll demote you. (Morris sobs.) Look … Morris, old son, don’t take on. Oh, blast it, ain’t nobody round here got a bleeding hankerchief?

WAGSTAFFE: Any handkerchief in particular?

AITKENSIDE: Wagstaffe? Put a sock in it. Listen, lads, I’ve an idea. Maybe she’ll come back if her dad asks for her.

(pause)

MACARTHUR: Who is her dad, then?

CAPSTICK: I always thought it was you, MacArthur. I thought that’s why she took your eye out.

MACARTHUR: I thought it were you, Keef. I thought that’s why she took your bollocks off.

AITKENSIDE: Don’t look at me! She’s not my daughter, I was in the forces.

MORRIS: She can’t be mine because I was still in the circus.

PIKEY PETE: She can’t be mine—

MORRIS: Oh, there you are, Pete! We thought you’d scarpered. Give a dog a bad name and hang him! We thought you had made off with the emoluments.

PIKEY PETE: I say, she can’t be mine, because I was in jail for painting horses.

CAPSTICK: Painting horses?

PIKEY PETE: You paint one racehorse to look like another, innit?

MORRIS: Don’t the paint run off, Pikey, when there’s a downpour?

PIKEY PETE: It’s an old Romany skill. Anyway, she ain’t mine.

CAPSTICK: She ain’t mine, because I was in the nick too.

MACARTHUR: And me. Serving five.

AITKENSIDE: So who’s left? Bob Fox?

BOB FOX: I never did nothing but tap on the window.

(pause)

MACARTHUR: Got to be that Derek bloke. Innit.

AITKENSIDE: Couldn’t have been. Bloody errand boy? He never had no money. Emmeline Cheetham, she didn’t do it for free.

MACARTHUR: True. You made sure of that.

CAPSTICK: Not like these girls you get these days, eh Dean?

MORRIS: So who’s left?

(pause)

MACARTHUR: Oh, blimey.

MORRIS: Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Only the great man himself!

CAPSTICK: Well, knock me down with a feather.

MORRIS: I never had such a thunderclap.

PIKEY PETE: You don’t want to mess with the fambly of Nick. Because Nick he is a fambly man.

(pause)

CAPSTICK: What would he do?

AITKENSIDE: Dear oh dear.

MORRIS: The worst thing that can befall a spirit is to be eaten by old Nick. You can be eaten and digested by him and then you’ve had your chips.

BOB FOX: You can’t get chips like you used to. Not fried in proper lard.

AITKENSIDE: Shut it, Bob, there’s a good lad.

CAPSTICK: What, you get et? You get et by Nick? And you don’t get another go round?

MORRIS: If he pukes you up you can reform and have another go, but otherwise you’re et and that’s all.

MACARTHUR: And that’s all?

MORRIS: El finito, Benito.

PIKEY PETE: Here, shall we do the share-out of these notes? It’s the proceeds from Etchells’s furniture. Lads? Where you going? Lads? Wait for me … .

October: Al is travelling, in the autumn’s first foul weather. There are mud slips and landslides, there are storm drains burst, a glugging and gurgling in sumps, conduits, and wells. There are fissures in the riverbeds, there are marshes, swamps, and bogs, there are cracked pipes and breached seawalls, and outswells of gas on the bubbling floodplain. There is coastal erosion, crumbling defences, spillage and seepages; where the saline and swift-rushing tide meets the viscid slime of swollen sewers, there the oceans are rising, half a metre, half a metre, half a metre onwards. On the orbital road the hazard lights of collided cars flash from the hard shoulder. Cameras flash on the bridges, there is the swish of the wipers against drenching rain, the mad blinking eyes of the breakdown trucks. “On we go!” Alison calls. “Sevenoaks, here we come.”

They are singing, Alison and the two little women: a few music hall favorites, but hymns, mostly, for it’s what the little women like. She didn’t know any of the words, but they have taught her.

Show pity, Lord! For we are frail and faint:

We fade away, O list to our complaint.

We fade away, like flowers in the sun;

We just begin, and then our work is done.

Maureen Harrison says, “Have we been to Sevenoaks?” and Alison says, “Not with me, you haven’t.”

Maureen says, anxious, “Will we get our tea there?” Alison says, “Oh yes, I hear in Sevenoaks you get a very good tea.”

“Just as well,” says Maureen’s friend from the back, “because I could have brought my own Eccles cakes.”

“Cakes,” says Maureen, “we’ve had some lovely cakes. Do you remember that one you bought me once, with a walnut on top? You can’t get cakes like that these days. Here, lovie, I’ll make you one. On your birthday. I always made you a cake on your birthday.”

“That would be nice,” says Maureen’s friend. “And she can have some too.”

“Oh, yes, we’ll give her some. She’s a lovely girl.”

Alison sighs. She likes to be appreciated; and before these last weeks, she never felt she was. They can’t do enough for her, the two old ladies, so happy they are to be together again, and when they are talking in the evening, from under a rug and behind the sofa they praise her, saying that they never had a daughter, but if they had, they would have wanted a bonny big girl just like Al. Whenever they set off in the car, they are so excited she has to make them wear incontinence pads. She cries, “Are your seat belts fastened, girls? Are your buttons all sewn on tight?” And they shout, “Yes, miss!” They say, “Look at us, riding in a motor vehicle, a private car!” They will never get tired of the orbital road, no matter how many times they go around it. Even if some image from her former life washes up—the fiends escaping Admiral Drive, vestigial heads trapped under the fences, multiple limbs thrashing, feet entangled in their tongues—even if some moment of dismay fades her smile, chills her, tightens her grip on the wheel or brings a shiny tear to her eye—even if she misses a junction, and has to cross the carriageway—the little women never complain.

They say, “Look at her hair, and look at her lovely rings, look at her frock and look at how she pedals the car—you’d think it would tire her out, but you can’t tire her out. Oh, I tell you, Maureen Harrison, we’ve landed on our feet here.” And Maureen adds, “Where our feet would be.”

Her cell phone rings. It’s Gemma. “How’s tricks? … Staines on the twenty-seventh? I doubt it, but I’ll check my diary when we pull in … . We? Did I say we? … No, not Colette. God forbid. I meant me and my new guides. Colette’s gone back to her husband. Near Twickenham. He used to be a, you know, what do they call it, one of those men who sets traps. Sort of gamekeeper.”

“Near Twickenham?” Gemma says, surprised, and Al says, “No, in a former life.” He was a man, she thought, who kept dogs, but not for pets. A terrier man. Digs out the earths, lays down poisons for hapless small creatures trying to earn a living. “I didn’t care for him,” she says, “when I ran into him in Farnham.” You shouldn’t leave bait about for it attracts entities, the slow grub and creep of legless things, feral crawlers looking for wounds to suck or open minds to creep inside. You shouldn’t leave traps, for you don’t know what will spring them: severed legs, unclaimed and nameless feet, ghouls and spectres looking to stitch themselves together, haunting the roads looking for a hand, an ear, for severed fingers and dislocated thumbs.

She has been, herself, of course, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. She doesn’t remember, really, if she saw MacArthur’s eye in a dish, though she’s been trying to remember, just to keep the record straight. It might not have been in a dish; it might have been on a plate, a saucer, a dog bowl. She remembers she had her spoon in her hand, her fork. “Business?” she says. “Business is booming, thanks for asking, Gemma. Give or take the odd quiet midweek, I’m booked out till next Feb.”

There are terrorists in the ditches, knives clenched between their teeth. There are fundis hoarding fertilizer, there are fanatics brewing bombs on brown-field sites, and holy martyrs digging storage pits where fiends have melted into the soil. There are citadels underground, there are potholes and sunken shafts; there are secret chambers in the hearts of men, sometimes of women too. There are unlicensed workings and laboratories underground, mutants breeding in the tunnels; there are cannibal moo-cows and toxic bunnikins, and behind the drawn curtains of hospital wards there are bugs that eat the flesh.

But today we are going to Sevenoaks, by way of Junction 5: to see whom fortune favours today. Will it be the brave, or is it the turn of the bloody? Will they be queuing to have their palm prints taken, the legion of the unbowed? Softly the cards are shuffled, whispering to the crimson cloth. A knight in armour is galloping from the battle—or to it. A dog climbs the wheel of fortune, while a monkey descends. A naked girl pours water into a pool, and seven stars shine in the evening sky.

“When is it teatime, miss?” the little woman enquires; and then, “Pedal faster, miss, see if you can beat that one!”

Alison checks her rearview mirror. She pulls out to overtake a truck; she puts her foot down. She moves into the fast lane, half hidden by the spray. Unmolested, unobserved, they flee before the storm. If the universe is a great mind, it may sometimes have its absences. Maureen Harrison pipes up from the back: “This cake we’re having: could we have it iced?”