Beyond Black

twelve

Next morning, when she was eating her lo-salt cornflakes with skimmed milk, Morris put his head around the door. “Have you seen Keith Capstick?” he asked. “Have you seen MacArthur? He has a false eye and his earlobe chewed off, and he wears a knitted weskit? Have you seen Mr. Donald Aitkenside?”

“I think I’d know them if I saw them.” The skin of her entire body crept at the sight of him, as if there were a million ants walking under her clothes; but she wasn’t going to let him know she was scared. “Have you forgotten who you’re talking to?” she said. “Anyway, why the formality? What’s this about Mister Aitkenside?”

Morris puffed up his chest, and tried to straighten his buckled legs. “Aitkenside’s got made up to management. Aren’t you informate with our new terms of employment? We’ve all got our training under our belt and we’ve all been issued wiv notebooks and pencils. Mr. Aitkenside’s got certificates, too. So we’re supposed to be foregathering.”

“Foregathering where?”

“Here is as good as any.”

“What brings you back, Morris?”

“What brings me back? I have got a mission. I have got a big job on. I have got taken on a project. You’ve got to retrain these days. You’ve got to update yourself. You don’t want to go getting made redundant. There’s no such thing anymore as a job for life.”

Colette came in with the post in her hand. “Usual catalogues and junk mail,” she said. “Mayan calendar workshop, no thanks … . Shamanic requisites by return … . What about mixed seeds from Nature’s Cauldron? Henbane, wolfsbane, skullcap, hemlock?”

“Some might blow over to next door.”

“That’s what I was thinking. By the way, do you know you’re on the phone from eleven till three?”

Al groaned. Morris, squatting before the empty marble hearth, glanced up at her and began to roll up his sleeves.

“And we’ve had a call from those people near Gloucester, saying are you going on the Plutonic symbolism weekend? Only they need to know how many to cater for.” She laughed nastily. “And of course, they count you double.”

“I’m not sure I want to go away by myself.”

“Count me out, anyway. They say it’s in an idyllic location. That means no shops.” She flicked through the letters. “Do you do exorcisms for eating disorders?”

“Pass it on to Cara.”

“Will you go over to Twyford? There’s a woman got a loose spirit in her loft. It’s rattling around and she can’t get to sleep.”

“I don’t feel up to it.”

“You’re entitled to postpone things if you’ve had a bereavement. I’ll call her and explain, about Mrs. Etchells.”

A light blinked at Al from a corner of the room. She turned her eyes and it was gone. Morris was scuttling fast across the carpet, swinging on his knuckles like an ape. As he moved, the light moved with him, a crimson ripple, sinuous, like an exposed vein; it was Morris’s snake tattoo, lit and pulsing, slithering along his forearm as if it had a life of its own.

“Tee-hee,” Morris chuckled. She remembered what Mrs. Etchells had said: “They’ve got modifications. It turned me up.”

Colette said, “Are you having that yogurt or not?”

“I’ve lost my appetite.” Al put her spoon down.

She phoned her mum. The phone rang for a long time, and then after it was picked up there was a scuffling, scraping sound. “Just pulling up a chair,” Emmie said. “Now then, who is it and what can I do for you?”

“It’s me. I thought you’d like to know my grandma’s dead.”

“Who?”

“My grandma. Mrs. Etchells.”

Emmie laughed. “That old witch. You thought she was your grandma?”

“Yes. She told me so.”

“She told everybody that! All the kids. She wanted to get ’em in her house, captive bloody audience, innit, while she goes on about how she’s had bouquets and whatnot, little op, chain of love, then when the time’s right she’s offering ’em around the district to all comers. I should know, she bloody offered me. Same with you, only the lads got in early.”

“Now just stop there. You’re saying my grandmother was a—” She broke off. She couldn’t find the right word. “You’re saying my grandmother was as bad as you?”

“Grandmother my arse.”

“But Derek—listen, Derek was my dad, wasn’t he?”

“He could of been,” her mother said vaguely. “I think I done it with Derek. Ask Aitkenside, he knows who I done it with. But Derek wasn’t her son, anyway. He was just some kid she took in to run errands for her.”

Al closed her eyes tight. “Errands? But all these years, Mum. You let me think—”

“I didn’t tell you what to think. Up to you what you thought. I told you to mind your own business. How do I know if I done it with Derek? I done it with loads of blokes. Well, you had to.”

“Why did you have to?” Alison said balefully.

“You wouldn’t ask that question if you were in my shoes,” Emmie said. “You wouldn’t have the cheek.”

“I’m going to come over there,” Al said. “I want to put a few straight questions to you. About your past. And mine.”

Her mother shouted, “You hear that, Gloria? She’s coming over. Better bake a cake, eh? Better get the fancy doilies out.”

“Oh, you’re not on that again, are you?” Al’s voice was weary. “I thought we’d got Gloria out of our lives twenty years ago.”

“So did I, pardon me, till she turned up on me doorstep the other night. I never had such a thunderclap. I says, Gloria! and she says, hello, and I says, you’ve not changed a bit, and she says, I can’t say the same for you, she says, give us a fag, I says, how’d you track me down in Bracknell? She says—”

“Oh, Mum!” Alison yelled. “She’s dead!”

I said it, she thought, I uttered the word no Sensitive ever uses: well hardly ever. I didn’t say passed, I didn’t say gone over, I said dead, and I said it because I believe that when it comes to dead, Gloria is deader than most of us, deader than most of the people who claim to be dead: in my nightmares since I was a child she is cut apart, parcelled out, chewed up.

There was a silence. “Mum? You still there?”

“I know,” said Emmie, in a small voice. “I know she’s dead. I just forget, is all.”

“I want you to remember. I want you to stop talking to her. Because it’s driving me round the twist and it always did. It’s not as if you made a living out of it. So there’s no use fooling yourself. You may as well get it straight and keep it straight.”

“I have.” Emmie sounded cowed. “I have, Alison. I will.”

“So do you want to come to Mrs. Etchells’s service?”

“Why?” Emmie was mystified. “Is she getting married?”

“We’re burying her, Mum. I told you. Cremating. Whatever. We don’t know what her wishes would have been. I was hoping you could shed some light, but obviously not. Then as soon as that’s over, I’m coming to see you, and we’re going to sit down and have a heart-to-heart. I don’t think you’re fit to live on your own. Colette says you should be living in a warden-assisted bungalow. She says we ought to make you a care plan.”

“You hear that, Gloria?” said Emmie. “We’ll have to polish the silver, if Lady Muck is coming to tea.”

For a few days the fiends were faintly present, flickering at the corner of her eye: throughout her whole body, they left their mark. It’s as if, she thought, they’re walking in one by one, and wiping their feet on me. Her temperature dropped; her tongue furred up with a yellow-green coating. Her eyes looked small and bleary. Her limbs tingled and she lost sensation in her feet; they still seemed intent on walking off, leaving the whole mess behind, but though the intention was there, she no longer had the ability.

Morris said, got to get the boys together. We will be wanting a knees-up, seeing as Etchells is fetched away, and we are fully entitled in my opinion, there’s one we can tick off—well done, lads—there weren’t no messing about with Etchells.

“You arranged it?” she said. She had hoped their appearance in the back row of the dem might be coincidental—or rather, the kind of coincidence with unpleasant events that they liked to arrange for themselves.

“’Course we did,” Morris boasted. “What is our mission? It is to track down useless and ugly people and recycle them, and with Etchells we have made a start. I says to Mr. Aitkenside, do you mind if I kick off the project wiv a bit of personal business, and he says, Morris, old son, if I could give you the nod I would, but you know it is more than my skin’s worth, for you know old Nick, his temper when he is roused, and if you don’t go right through the proper procedure and your paperwork all straight he will take a pencil and ram it through your ear hole and swivel it about so your brain goes twiddle-de-dee, he says, I seen it done, and Nick has a special pencil he keeps behind his ear that makes it more painful. I says to him, Mr. Aitkenside, sir, upon my mother’s life I would not ask you to take any such risk of having your brain twiddled, forget I asked, but he says, Morris, old son, we go back, he says, we go back you and me, I tell you what I’ll do for you, when I happen to catch old Nick in a mellow mood—let us say we have had a good session in the back bar at the Bells of Hell, let us say Nick has won the darts, let us say we have had a barbecue on the back lawn and the great man is feeling at ease with himself—I’d say to him, Your ’Ighness, how would it be if my friend and yours Morris Warren were to do a bit of personal business, a bit of tidying up he has left over? For Nick was in the army, you know, and he likes things tidy.”

“What army?” Al said.

“I don’t know.” Morris sounded impatient. “The army, the navy, the forces, innit, bomber command, special boat squadron, there’s only one army, and that’s ours. Will you stop interrupting?”

“Sorry.”

“So it all worked out just like Mr. Aitkenside said it would, and I got leave, and off I go, rounding up a few of the lads as I go, and we pop up there and give the old biddy the fright of her life.”

“What had she ever done to you?”

“Etchells? She put me out in the street. She kicked me off Spirit Guide, she wanted Pikey Paul with his shiny outfits, Poncey Paul as I call him; if he wasn’t the uncle of Pete who is a mate of mine, I could cast aspersions there, I really could. I had to live in a builder’s skip, under an old broken fireplace, till I could happen to move in with you.”

“It’s a long time to hold a grudge.”

“It’s not a long time, when you’re dead and you’ve bugger-all else to do. You can’t treat a guide like that—maltreat him, and it comes back on you. So anyway … we got ourselves down the Fig and Pheasant, we tampered with the optics and nipped the little girls’ bottoms that was serving behind the bar, we strolled into the function room cool as you like and then we lined up on the back row. Etchells, blimey, you should have seen her face.”

“I did.”

“But you didn’t see our modifications.”

“So what are those? Apart from your tattoo?”

“Lifelike, innit?” Morris said. “I got it done when we was on a spot of R and R in the Far East. We got leave halfway through our course. Still, you ain’t seen nothing till you seen young Dean. We oldsters, we’ve got enough to sicken folk as it is, by God have we a collection of scars, there’s Mac with his eye socket and his chewed-off ear and Capstick with his private problem that he don’t like mentioned. Pikey Pete booked in to have his teeth filed, but Dean said, you could get that earthside nowadays, mate, you could get your teeth filed and your tongue slit. Oh, but Dean did rib him! So Capstick says, I’ll show willing, I’ll lay my money out, so he’s had his hair stood on end and his tongue rasped, but the youngsters don’t think nothing of that. They’ve all got these new tongue extensions. You can have it hung further back so it’s retractable, or you can have your palate heightened so your tongue rolls up neatly till required. Now Dean has opted for the last one, it costs you but it’s more neat and tidy, doesn’t slide out when you’re walking, and Mr. Aitkenside is teaching him to take a pride in his appearance. He’s going for the full scroll-out, so he’ll have to wear a guard till he gets used to it, but he claims it’s worth it, I dunno. He’s gone in for his knees swivelled as well, so he’s walking backwards when he’s walking forwards; you have to see it to appreciate it, but I can tell you it’s comical. Mr. Aitkenside has got six legs, so he has got six boots; that’s because he has got made up to management, that’s all the better for kicking them with.”

Colette came in. “Al? Cara’s on the phone—do you think Mrs. Etchells would have liked a woodland burial?”

“I don’t think so. She hated nature.”

“Right,” Colette said. She went out again.

Al said, “Kicking who?”

“Not just kicking, kicking out. We are chasing out all spooks what are asylum seekers, derelicts, vagrants, and refugees, and clearing out all spectres unlawfully residing in attics, lofts, cupboards, cracks in the pavement, and holes in the ground. All spooks with no identification will be removed. It ain’t good enough to say you’ve nowhere to go. It ain’t good enough to say that your documents fell through the hole in your breeches. It’s no good saying that you’ve forgot your name. It’s no good pretending to go by the name of some other spook. It’s no good saying you ain’t got no documents because they ain’t invented printing yet—you got your thumb print, ain’t you, and it’s no good saying they cut off your thumb—don’t come that, they all say that. Nobody is to take up room they ain’t entitled to. Show me your entitlement or I’ll show you the boot—in Aitkenside’s case, six boots. It’s no good trying to bamboozle us because we have got targets, because Nick has set us targets, because we have got a clear-up rate.”

Al said, “Is Nick management?”

“You’re joking me!” Morris said. “Is Nick management? He is the manager of us all. He is in charge of the whole blooming world. Don’t you know nothing, girl?”

She said, “Nick’s the devil, isn’t he? I remember seeing him, in the kitchen at Aldershot.”

“You should have taken more notice. You should have been respectful.”

“I didn’t recognize him.”

“What?” Morris said. “Not recognize a man wiv a leather jacket, asking for a light?”

“Yes, but you see, I didn’t believe in him.”

“That’s where you was under a mistake.”

“I was only a girl. I didn’t know. They kept throwing me out of the RE class, and whose fault was that? I hadn’t read any books. We never got a newspaper, except the ones the blokes brought in, their racing paper. I didn’t know the history of the world.”

“You should have worked harder,” Morris said. “You should have listened up in your history lessons, you should have listened up in your Hitler lessons, you should have learned to say your prayers and you should have learned some manners.” He mimicked her: “‘Is Nick the devil?’ ’Course he’s the devil. We have only been under pupillage with the best. Who have you got to put up against him? Only mincey Mandy and the rest, they’re not worth MacArthur’s fart. Only you and stringbean and that sad bastard used to live in the shed.”

As the week passed, her parade of business-as-usual became less convincing, even to Colette, whom she sometimes caught gazing at her dubiously. “Is something troubling you?” she said, and Colette replied, “I don’t know that I trust that doctor you saw. How about a private health check?”

Al shrugged. “They’ll only talk about my weight again. If I’m going to be insulted, I’m not paying for it. I can get insults on the NHS.” She thought, what the doctors fail to realize is that you need some beef, you need some heft, you need some solid substance to put up against fiends. She had been alarmed, climbing out of the bath, to see her left foot dematerialize. She blinked, and it was back again; but she knew it was not her imagination, for she heard muffled laughter from the folds of her bath towel.

That was the day they were getting ready for Mrs. Etchells’s funeral. They had opted for a cremation and the minimum of fuss. A few elderly practitioners, Mrs. Etchells’s generation, had clubbed together for a wreath, and Merlyn sent a telegram of sympathy from Beverly Hills. Al said, “You can come back to my house afterwards, Colette’s got some sushi in.” She thought, I ought to be able to count on my friends to help me, but they’d be out of their depth here. Cara, Gemma, even Mandy—they’ve had nothing like this in their lives, they’ve never been offered. They’ve sold spirit services; they haven’t been sold, like me. She felt sad, separate, set apart; she wanted to spare them.

“Do you think in Spirit she’ll be at her best age?” Gemma said. “I find it hard to picture what Mrs. Etchells’s best age might have been.”

“Sometime between the wars,” Mandy said. “She was one of the old school, she went back to when they had ectoplasm.”

“What’s that?” Cara said.

“Hard to say.” Mandy frowned. “It was supposed to be an ethereal substance that took on the form of the deceased. But some people say it was cheesecloth they packed in their fannies.”

Cara wrinkled her nose.

“I wonder if she left a will?” Colette said.

“No doubt behind the clock, with the milk money,” Gemma said.

“I hope you’re not looking at me,” Silvana said. She had threatened to boycott the ceremony, and only turned up out of fear that the other Sensitives might talk about her behind her back. “I don’t want anything from her. If she did leave me anything, I wouldn’t take it. Not after those wicked things she said about me.”

“Forget it,” Mandy said. “She wasn’t in her right mind. She said herself, she saw something in the back row she couldn’t stomach.”

“I wonder what it was,” Gemma said. “You wouldn’t have a theory, Al, would you?”

“Anyway,” Mandy said, “somebody ought to see about her affairs. You’ve still got a key, Silvy?” Silvana nodded. “We’ll all come over. Then if there’s no will in the obvious places, we can dowse for it.”

“I’d rather not, myself,” Al said. “I try to steer clear of Aldershot. Too many sad memories.”

“There would be,” Mandy said. “God knows, Al, I don’t think any of us had what you’d call a regular upbringing, I mean when you’re a Sensitive it’s not like a normal childhood, is it? But those kind of old people tend to keep cash lying about. And we’d want a responsible witness. A relative ought to be present.”

“I’m not,” Al said. “A relative. As it turns out.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Colette said. If there were any bundles of fivers to be picked up, she didn’t see why Alison should lose out. “It’s just what her mum’s been putting into her head.”

“Didn’t your mum want to come today?” Gemma asked.

But Alison said, “No. She’s got a house guest.”

Guilty—knowing they’d been fed up with Mrs. Etchells, knowing they were glad to have her off their patch—they let the conversation drift back to discounts, to advertising rates, to Web sites, and to supplies. Gemma had found a place on the North Circular that undercut the Cornwall people on crystal-gazing kits. “Nice cauldrons,” Gemma said. “Very solid. They’re fibre-glass, of course, but as long as they look the business. You don’t want to be lugging cast iron around in the boot of your car. They go from mini to three gallon. Which is going to set you back a hundred quid, but if that’s what you need, you’ve got to invest, haven’t you?”

“I don’t do much with Wicca anymore,” Cara said. “I got bored of it. I’m more interested in personal development, and ridding myself and others of limiting beliefs.”

“And are you still rubbing people’s feet?”

“Yes, if they’ll sign a disclaimer.”

“It can’t be very nice, remembering the womb,” Gemma said.

There was a feeling among them, in fact, that nothing about the day was very nice. Mandy’s nose kept twitching, as if she could smell spirits. Once the sushi and meringues were consumed, they showed no wish to linger. As they parted on the doorstep, Mandy took Al’s arm and said. “If you want a bolt-hole, you know. You can soon be down in Hove. Just pick up the car keys and come as you are.”

She was grateful for Mandy’s tact. She obviously had her suspicions that Morris was back, but she didn’t want to say anything in case he was listening in.

Sometimes Morris’s voice was in her head; sometimes she found it on the tape. Sometimes he seemed to know everything about their past life together; he would talk, reprising the Aldershot days, running them back on a kind of loop, as if, like Mrs. Etchells at the dem, he’d gone on automatic. She tried every means she knew to tune him out; she played loud music, and distracted herself by long phone calls, going through her contacts book for the numbers of psychics she had known years ago, and calling them up to say, “Hi, guess who?”

“Al!” they would say. “Have you heard about Merlyn? He’s gone to Beverly Hills.” Then, “Shame about Irene Etchells. Sudden, wasn’t it? I never quite got it straight. Was she your gran, or not? Did you ever trace your dad? No? What a shame. Yes, Irene dropped in. I was just cleaning my crystal, and whoops, there she was, swimming about inside. She warned me I might have to have a little op.”

But, as she chatted, the past was chatting inside her: how’s my darling girl, Mrs. McGibbet, poxy little boxer, Keef are you my dad? If you’re going to chuck up go outside and do it. Fuck, Emmie, I’ve got to wash me hands. Dogmeat, Gloria, Gloria, dogmeat: there’s an evil thing you wouldn’t want to see. Round and round it went: there’s an evil thing you wouldn’t want to see at all. Morris was giving her earache, about the old days: the fight game, the scrap-metal game, the entertainment game. All the same, she felt there was something he wasn’t saying, something that he was holding back, perhaps some memory he was teasing her with. At other times, he seemed to be hazy about whom he was addressing; he seemed to be talking to the air.

He said, “Have you seen MacArthur? He’s the cove that owes me money. If you see him you’ll know him, he’s missing one eye. Have you seen young Dean? He’s got his head shaved and Rule Britannia stamped on it. Have you seen Pikey Pete? I’ve been down the waste ground and Pete ain’t there. Been up the waste tip—civic amenity, they call it now—I expect to see him rummaging but he’s not. Totting you call it, totting’s in his blood, together wiv scrap metal, his uncle were the biggest scrap-metal merchant in the Borders in the old days.”

“The Borders,” she said, “that’s a bit out of the way for you, how did you get up there then?”

Morris said, “Circus used to go up that way, didn’t it? Then in later years when I got kicked out of the circus I got a ride off Aitkenside. Aitkenside and his truck was always very handy, if you wanted picking up, if you want dropping off, post yourself by the side of a major trunk road and Aitkenside will be there. Very handy, a truck like that, when you’ve got boxes, when you’ve got a consignment, a van is very nice for a small consignment but nowadays we are trucking spookies by the score, gel. We bring ’em in by the hundreds, they are migrating from the east for a better life. But we charge, mind, and at the same time as we’re bringing ’em in we are kicking ’em out, it’s all part of the same racket, now you might not understand that but if you’d been on a course with Nick he’d make you understand: Comprenez? he’d say and hang you up by your feet until you answered yes. Now Aitkenside is management we have incentives for good work. We have vouchers to spend on modifications and we have family leisure breaks. We pack off on the weekends to the country, and we make crop circles. We fly over the fields and we make high-pitched whistling sounds, causing alarm to farmers and ramblers. We go on theme parks—that’s what they call a fair these days—and we hang off the rides and lie by night unscrewing the screws to cause fatalities. We go out to golf clubs to dig up the greens and they think we’re moles. Only you don’t want to go on a driving range, a spirit can get tangled up easy in them big nets. That’s how we found young Dean, we had to rescue him. Somebody shouted ‘old Nick’s coming’ and Dean being new, he panicked and run off, he run head first into one of them nets—well, where his head would be. It was Aitkenside what extricated him, using his teef.” Morris cackled. “Old Nick, if he sees you where he didn’t ought, he will spit your bollocks on his toasting fork. He will melt you on a brazier and sip the marrow out your bones.”

“Why did you get kicked out of the circus?” she asked. “I never heard that before.”

Morris didn’t answer. “Got kicked out of the circus,” he said. “Got kicked out of the army. Got kicked out of Etchells’s place and had to live in a skip. Story of my life. I don’t know, I don’t feel right in myself till I meet up with Pete. Maybe there’s a horse fair. Do you reckon there’s a horse fair? Maybe there’s a cockfight somewhere, Pete enjoys that.”

When she saw MacArthur again, materializing in the kitchen after this gap of many years, he had a false eye, just as Mrs. Etchells had suggested. Its surface was lustrous but hard, and light bounced from as it did from the surface of her lucky opals on the days when they refused to show their depths. Morris said, “Say what you like about MacArthur, but he was an artist wiv a knife. I seen him carve a woman like a turkey.”

The tape unspooled in the empty room, and Morris, speaking from the distant past, could be heard puffing and grunting into the microphone, as if he were carrying a heavy and awkward burden. “Up a bit, left a bit, mind the step, Donnie. Right, I’ve got her. You grab your corner of the blanket there … steady as she goes … . Fuckit, I’m going in the kitchen, I’ve got to wash me hands. They are all over sticky stuff.”

Colette came in from the garden, indignant. “I’ve just been in the shed,” she said. “Mart’s been back. Come and look, if you don’t believe me.”

Alison went down the garden. It was another of those hot, clammy days. A breeze stirred the saplings, bound to their posts like saints secured for burning, but the breeze itself was fevered, semitropical. Al wiped her hand across her forehead.

On the floor of the shed were a scatter of Mart’s belongings: a tin opener, some plastic cutlery nicked from the supermarket café, and a number of rusty, unidentifiable keys. Colette scooped them up.

“I’ll pass these on to PC Delingbole. Perhaps he can reunite them with their owners.”

“Oh, don’t be so spiteful!” Alison said. “What did Mart ever do to you? He’s been kicked out of any place he could call home. There’s no evil in him. He isn’t the sort to cut a woman up and leave her in a dirty van.”

Colette stared at her. “I don’t think you ought to go to Aldershot,” she said. “I think you ought to have a lie-down.” She ducked out of the Balmoral, and stood on the lawn. “I have to tell you, Alison, that I am very disturbed at your behaviour lately. I think we may have to reconsider the terms of our arrangement. I’m finding it increasingly untenable.”

“And where will you go?” Alison jeered. “Are you going to live in a shed as well?”

“That’s my business. Keep your voice down. We don’t want Michelle out here.”

“I wouldn’t mind. She could be a witness. You were down and out when I met you, Colette.”

“Hardly that. I had a very good career. I was regarded as a highflyer, let me tell you.”

Alison turned and walked into the house. “Yes, but psychically, you were down and out.”

On the way to Mrs. Etchells’s house, they did not speak. They drove through Pirbright—by the village green, by the pond fringed with rushes and yellow iris—through the black-shaded woodlands of the A324, where bars of light flashed through the treetops to rap the knuckles of Colette’s tiny fists clenched on the wheel: by the ferny verges and towering hedges, by deep-roofed homesteads of mellow timbers and old stock brick, the sprinklers rotating on their velvet lawns, the coo of wood pigeons in their chimney stacks, the sweet smells of lavender and beeswax wafting from linen press, commode, and étagère. If I walked out on her now, Colette thought, then with what I have got saved I could just about put a deposit on a Beatty, though to be frank I’d like somewhere with a bit more nightlife than Admiral Drive. If I can’t live here where the rich people live I’d like to live on a tube line, and then I could go out to a club with my friends and we could get wrecked on a Friday like we used to, and go home with men we hardly knew, and sneak off in the mornings when only the milk trucks are out and the birds are singing. But I suppose I’m old now, she thought, if I had any friends they’d all have kids by now, they’d be too old for clubbing, they’d be too grown-up, in fact it would be their kids that would be going out, and they’d be sitting at home with their gardening manuals. And I have grown up without anyone noticing. I went home with Gavin once, or rather I pressed the lift button to his hotel floor, and when I tapped at his door he looked through his spyhole and he liked what he saw—but would anybody like me now? As the first straggle of the settlement of Ash appeared—some rotting sixties in-fill, and the sway-walled cottages by the old church—she felt penetrated by a cold hopelessness, which the prospect before her did nothing to soothe.

Much of the district had been razed; there were vast intersections, grassy roundabouts as large as public parks, signs leading to industrial estates. “Next right,” Al said. Only yards from the main road, the townscape dwindled to a more domestic scale. “That’s new.” She indicated the Kebab Centre, the Tanning Salon. “Slow down. Right again.” Between the 1910 villas some new-build terraces were squeezed, bright blue plastic sheeting where their window glass would be. On a wire fence hung a pictorial sign that showed a wider, higher, loftier, and airier version of the building it fronted: LAUREL MEWS, it said. MOVE IN TODAY FOR NINETY-NINE POUNDS.

“How do they do that?” Al said, and Colette said, “They offer to pay your stamp duty, your surveyor’s fees, all that, but they just stick it on the asking price and then they tie you into a mortgage deal they’ve picked out, you think you’re getting something for nothing but they’ve got a hand in your pocket at every turn.”

“They want their pound of flesh,” Al said. “Pity. Because I thought I could buy one for Mart. You’d think he’d be safe, in a mews. He could keep that sheeting over the windows, so nobody could see in.”

Colette hooted. “Mart? Are you serious? Nobody would give Mart a mortgage. They wouldn’t let him near the place.”

They were almost there: she recognized the dwarf wall, its plaster peeling, the stunted hedge made mostly of bare twigs. Mandy had pulled her smart little soft-top off the road, almost blocking the front door. Gemma had given Cara a lift, and she and Silvana were parked in the road, bumper-to-bumper.

“You want to watch that,” Silvana said, indicating Mandy’s car. “In a neighbourhood like this.”

“I know,” Mandy said. “That’s why I pulled as close as I could.”

“So where do you live, that’s so special?” Colette asked Silvana. “Somewhere with security dogs?”

Mandy said, trying to ease relations, “You look nice, Colette. Have you had your hair done? That’s a nice amulet, Cara.”

“It’s real silver, I’m selling them,” Cara said promptly. “Shall I send you one? Postage and packing free.”

“What does it do?”

“Sod-all,” said Silvana. “Silver, my arse. I had one off her. It makes a dirty mark round your neck, like a pencil mark, looks as if somebody’s put a dotted line round for snipping your head off.”

Colette said, “I’m surprised anyone notices it. Against your natural deep tan.”

Silvana put the key in the door. Alison’s heart squeezed small inside her chest.

“You nerved yourself, love,” said Mandy in a low voice. “Well done.” She squeezed Al’s hand. Al winced as the lucky opals bit into her flesh.

“Sorry,” Mandy whispered.

“Oh, Mand, I wish I could tell you the half of it.” I wish I had an amulet, she thought, I wish I had a charm against the stirring air.

They stepped in. The room felt damp. “Christ,” Silvana said, “where’s her furniture gone?”

Alison looked around. “No milk money. No clock.”

In the front parlour, nothing was left but a square of patterned carpet that didn’t quite meet the sides of the room, and an armchair hopelessly unsprung. Silvana wrenched open the cupboard by the fireplace; it was empty, but a powerful smell of mould rushed out of it. In the kitchen—where they had expected to find the crumbs of Mrs. Etchells’s last teatime—there was nothing to find but a teapot, unemptied, on the sink. Alison lifted the lid; a single teabag was sunk in brown watery depths.

“I think it’s obvious what’s happened here,” Gemma said. “I believe if we inspect the windows at the back we’ll find signs of forced entry.” Her voice faded as she walked down the passage to the scullery.

“She used to be married to a policeman,” Cara explained.

“Did she?”

“But you know how it is. She got involved in his work. She tried to help out. You do, don’t you? But she got strangled once too often. She lived through the Yorkshire Ripper, she had all sorts of hoaxers coming through, she used to report them to his seniors but it didn’t stop her having to walk about all day with an axe in her head. She gave him an ultimatum, get out of the CID, or we’re history.”

“I suppose he wouldn’t quit,” Colette said.

“So he was history.” Al sounded awed.

“She left him, moved down south, never looked back.”

“She must be older than she says, if she was married when it was the Yorkshire Ripper.”

“We’re all older than we say.” Gemma was back. “And some of us, my dears, are older than we know. The windows are intact. They must have got in upstairs. The back door is locked.”

“Funny, to come in upstairs, if you’re going to make off with the furniture,” Colette said.

Alison said, “Colette is nothing if not logical.” She called out, “Pikey Pete? You bin in here?” She dropped her voice. “He’s part of a gang that used to run about round here, Mrs. Etchells knew them all. He’s what you call a totter, collects old furniture, pots and pans, anything of that sort.”

“And he’s in Spirit, is he?” Gemma said. She laughed. “That explains it, then. Still, I’ve never seen such a wholesale teleportation of anybody’s goods, have you?”

“It’s a shame,” Al said. “It’s just plain greedy, that’s what it is. There are people earthside could have used the things she had. Such as nutmeg graters. Toby jugs. Decorative pin cushions with all the pins still in. She had a coffee table with a glass top and a repeat motif of the Beatles underneath, printed on wallpaper—it must have been an heirloom. She had original Pyrex oven dishes with pictures of carrots and onions on the side. She had a Spanish lady with a flouncy skirt that you sat on top of your spare loo roll. I used to run to her house when I wanted to go to the toilet because there was always some bloke wanking in ours. Though God knows why they were wanking because my mum and her friend Gloria was always ready to give them hand relief.”

Mandy put an arm around her. “Shh, lovey. Not easy for you. But we all had it rough.”

Alison scrubbed the tears out of her eyes. Pikey Paul was crying in the bare corner of the room. “It was me what gave her that Spanish lady,” he said. “I won it on a shooting stall in Southport on the pleasure beach. I’d a lift all the way from Ormskirk and down the East Lancs Road, and then I had the malfortune to be picked up by a chap in a truck called Aitkenside, which was the origin of the sad connection between my fambly and yours.”

“I’m sorry, Pikey Paul,” Alison said. “I do sincerely apologize.”

“I carried it all the way down the country wrapped in a cloth, and Aitkenside he would say, what’s that you’ve got between your legs, employing the utmost ambiguity, till finally he made a dive for it. So I held it out of the way, the dolly, above my head while Aitkenside had his way, for I wasn’t about to get Dolly spoiled, and I had a good inkling as to his nature, for those men’s men they are all the same.”

“Oh, I do agree,” said Alison.

“For it is all they can think of, those men’s men, rifling about in a boy’s tight little matador pants till they can find his wherewithal. But still and all it was worth it. You should have seen Irene smile, when I gave her the presentation. Oh, Paul, she said, is that dolly all for me? I never told her of the perils I’d been assaulted with. Well, you don’t, do you? She was a lady. I don’t say you’re not, but Mrs. Etchells wouldn’t have understood a thing like that. Whereas now it’s more the modern style. They’re all at it. They don’t like to miss any pleasure. They’re having extensions so they can fuck themselves, and whores will be out of business.”

“Pikey Paul!” said Alison. “Keep it low! Don’t talk so obscene. You never used to have such a filthy tongue in your head!”

“They’re queueing up for multiple tongues,” Paul said. “I seen ’em. What I say is mild, believe me. You want to hear ’em in the years to come. No sentence will be clean.”

“I can believe it,” Alison said. She began to cry. “All the same, Paul, I wish I’d had a spirit guide like you. Morris never brought me a present. Not so much as a bunch of flowers.”

“You should have kicked him out,” Paul said. “You should have kicked him out like Mrs. Etchells kicked him out. Soon as she saw my Spanish dolly, she hoisted him up in her arms—she was sinewy in those days, and you know how squat he is—she carried him down the road and she dumped him in a skip. Then she come back and cooked us some pancakes. I was uncommonly fond of pancakes with syrup, but now I lay off ’em, as I’ve to watch my waistline, which don’t we all. Now I was looking for a place to call my own, and I had a billet where I could come and go, ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, she was easygoing, was Mrs. Etchells. We was suited—that’s how you could express it. Little op, chain of love, joys of motherhood, she never varied it and why should she? Meanwhile I got on with my own life. She had a stack of testimonials, handwritten, some of them in real fountain pen by titled people, stacked up in that sideboard there.”

“What sideboard?” Al said.

“That sideboard that one of my fambly has removed, namely Pikey Pete.

To sell it on.”

“He should be ashamed,” Alison said. The Sensitives, acting on instinct or by training, had formed a semicircle around Al, aware that she was experiencing a manifestation. Only Colette walked away, bored, and stood with drooping head, her fingers flaking yellowed paint from the front windowsill. Silvana rubbed and rubbed at a spot below her jawline: trying, perhaps, to ease her teak-coloured line of tan into the tint of her flesh. The women stood, patient, till Pikey Paul vanished in a dull red flash, his suit of lights depleted, bagged at the knee and sagged at the seat, his aura—trailing on the air—resembling no more than a greasy smear of old-fashioned men’s hair cream.

“That was Pikey Paul,” Al said. “Mrs. E’s guide. Unfortunately he didn’t say anything about the will.”

“Okay,” said Cara. “Dowsing it is. If it’s here at all, it can only be under the lino or slid behind the wallpaper.” She opened her beaded satchel and took out her pendulum.

“Oh, you use a bobber,” Mandy said, interested. “Brass, is it? I swear by a Y-Rod, myself.”

Silvana took out of a carrier bag what looked like a length of lavatory chain, with a metal nut on the end. She glanced at Colette, as if daring her to say something. “It was my dad’s,” she said. “He was a plumber.”

“You could be done for carrying that around,” Gemma said. “Offensive weapon.”

“Tools of her trade,” Mandy said. “Did you get your Sight from your dad, then? That’s unusual.”

“Alison doesn’t know who her dad was,” Colette said. “She thought she had it worked out, but her mum knocked her theory on the head.”

“She’s not the only one,” Mandy said. “I believe that in your case too, Colette, what’s on the birth certificate isn’t quite the same as what’s in the genes.”

Al’s been gossiping, Colette thought: and yet she said it was all in confidence! How could she? She stored it up, for a future row.

“I don’t even have a birth certificate,” Al said. “Not that I know of. To be honest, I’m not really sure how old I am. I mean my mum gave me a date, but it might not be true. I can never remember my age when things were done to me or when things happened. It’s because they always said to me, if anybody asks, you’re sixteen, right? Which is confusing when you’re only about nine.”

“Poor love,” Mandy breathed.

“You must be recorded somewhere,” Colette said. “I’ll look into it. If you had no birth certificate, how did you get a passport?”

“That’s a point,” Al said. “How did I? Maybe we can dowse for my documentation, when we’re done here. Okay, look, ladies, you do down here—don’t forget to take that armchair apart. I’ll go and check upstairs.”

“Do you want somebody with you?” Gemma asked.

Mandy said in a low voice, “Let her have some privacy. Doesn’t matter whether she was her gran or not, she looked up to Irene Etchells.”

Pete had stripped out the stair carpet, so the creak of each tread carried to the women back in the parlour and, as their pendulums twitched, each tiny impulse registered an answering twitch in Alison, just above her diaphragm. The rooms were bare, but when she opened the wardrobe, a row of garments still hung there, close-covered against moths. She parted their calico shrouds; her hand brushed silk and crepe. They were Mrs. Etchells’s performance gowns, from her days of triumph on distant platforms. Here was a peacock green faded to grey, here a rose-pink faded to ash. She examined them: crystal beads rolled beneath finger and thumb, and a scatter of pewter-coloured sequins drifted to the floor of the wardrobe. She leaned in, breathing the smell of cedar, and began to scoop them into her cupped hand, thinking of Pikey Paul. But as she straightened up, she thought, no, I’ll buy him new. I’m patient for sewing, as long as it’s spirit sewing, and he’ll appreciate something more shiny than these. I wonder why Pete left her frocks? Probably thought they were worth nothing. Men! He had plundered the saggy polyester skirts and the cardigans that Mrs. Etchells usually wore; these, Al supposed, he would be selling onto some poor Iraqi grandma who’d lost everything but what she stood up in, or somebody who’d been bombed out in the Blitz; for in Spirit World, wars run concurrently.

She let the sequins drift, between her fingers, to the bare boards; then picked two empty wire hangers from the wardrobe. She wrenched them out of shape, formed each into a rod with a hook for a handle, and held them in front of her. She followed their guidance into the back room. They bucked and turned in her hand, and while she waited for them to settle she looked out of the uncurtained window onto the site of urban clearance beyond. Probably going to build a mews, she thought. For now, she had a clear view of the back plots of the neighbouring street, with its lean-tos and lockup garages, its yellowed nylon curtains billowing from open windows, its floribundas breaking through the earth and swelling into flagrant blood-dark bloom: a view of basking men throwing sickies, comatose in canvas chairs, their white bellies peeping from their shirts, their beer cans winking and weakly dribbling in the sun. From an upper storey hung a flag—ENGLAND—red on white: as if it could be somewhere else, she thought. Her eye carried to the street beyond, where on the corner stood municipal receptacles for the sorting and storage of waste, disposal bins for glass, others for grass, others for fabrics, for paper, for shoes; and at their feet clustered black sacks, their mouths tied with yellow tape.

The rods in her hands convulsed, and their hooks cut into her palms. She followed them to the corner of the room, and at their direction, laying them down, she tore into a foot of rotting linoleum. Her nails clawed at a seam; she inched two fingers under it and pulled. I should have a knife, she thought, why didn’t I bring a knife? She stood up, took a deep breath, bent again, tugged, tugged. There was a crack, a splintering; floorboards showed; she saw a small piece of paper, folded. She bent painfully to scoop it up. She unfolded it, and as she did so the fibres of the paper gave way, and it fell apart along the folds. My birth certificate, she thought: but no, it was barely six lines. First a blurred rubber stamp—PAID TO—then Emmeline Cheetham was written beneath, in a florid, black hand: THE SUM OF SEVEN SHILLINGS AND SIX-PENCE. Underneath came another stamp, at an angle to the above, RECEIVED WITH THANKS: and then in her mother’s youthful hand, her signature, Emmeline Cheetham: below that, IN WITNESS WHEREOF: Irene Etchells (Mrs.). Beneath the signature, the paper had a brown indentation, as if it had been ironed briefly on a high setting. As the nail of her little finger touched the scorch mark, the paper flaked away, leaving a ragged gap where the mark had been.

She kicked the divining rods away from her feet, and went downstairs; clattering, tread by tread. They were gathered in the kitchen, turned to the foot of the stairs and awaiting her arrival. “Anything?” Mandy said.

“Zilch. Nix.”

“What’s that? That paper?”

“Nothing,” Al said. She crumpled the paper and dropped it. “God knows. What’s seven shillings and sixpence? I’ve forgotten the old money.”

“What old money?” Cara said.

Mandy frowned. “Thirty-three pence?”

“What can you get for that?”

“Colette?”

“A bag of crisps. A stamp. An egg.”

When they went out, pulling the front door behind them, Mandy stood aghast at the sight of her car. “The sneaky bastards! How did they do that? I kept looking out, checking.”

“They must have crawled,” Silvana said. “Unless they ran up on very little legs.”

“Which, sadly, is possible,” Alison said.

Mandy said, “I cancelled a half day of readings to get here for this, thinking I was doing a favour. You try to do a good action, but I don’t know. Dammit, where does it get you?”

“Oh well,” Cara said, “you know what Mrs. Etchells used to say, as you sow shall you reap, or something like that. If you have done harm you’ll get it back threefold. If you’ve never done any harm in your life, you’ve nothing to worry about.”

“I never knew her well,” Mandy said, “but I doubt that, with her long experience, Irene thought it was that simple.”

“But there must be a way out of it,” Al said. She was angry. “There must be a route out of this shit.” She took Mandy’s arm, clung to it. “Mandy, you should know, you’re a woman of the world, you’ve knocked about a bit. Even if you have done harm, if you’ve done really bad harm, does it count if you’ve done it to evil people? It can’t, surely. It would count as self-defence. It would count as a good action.”

Colette said, “Well now, Mandy, I hope you’re insured.”

“I hope I am too,” Mandy said. She freed herself from Al. Tenderly, she passed her fingers over her paintwork. The triple lines were scored deep into the scarlet, as if scraped with a claw.

Tea, tea, tea! said Colette. How refreshing to come into the cleanliness and good order of the Collingwood. But Colette stepped short, her hand on the kettle, annoyed with herself. A woman of my age shouldn’t be wanting tea, she thought. I should be wanting—I don’t know, cocaine?

Alison was rummaging in the fridge. “You’re not eating again, are you?” Colette said. “It’s coming to the point where I’m getting ashamed to be seen with you.”

There was a tap on the window. Alison jumped violently; her head shot back over her shoulder. It was Michelle. She looked hot and cross. “Yes?” Colette said, opening the window.

“I saw that stranger again,” Michelle said. “Creeping around. I know you’ve been feeding him.”

“Not lately,” Alison said.

“We don’t want strangers. We don’t want pedophiles and homeless people around here.”

“Mart’s not a pedophile,” Al said. “He’s scared to death of you and your kids. As anybody would be.”

“You tell him that the next time he’s seen the police will be called. And if you don’t know any better than aiding and abetting him, we’re going to get up a petition against you. I told Evan, I’m not too happy anyway, I never have been, two single women living together, what does that say to you? Not as if you’re two girls starting out in life.”

Colette lifted the steaming kettle. “Back off, Michelle, or I’m going to pour this over your head. And you’ll shrivel up like a slug.”

“I’ll report you for threatening behaviour,” Michelle said. “I’ll call PC Delingbole.” But she backed away. “I’m going round right now to see the chairman of the Neighbourhood Watch.”

“Oh yes?” Colette said. “Bring it on!” But when Michelle had ducked out of sight, she slapped the kettle down and swore. She unlocked the back door, and said, “I’ve had enough of this. If he’s in there again I’m going to call the police myself.”

Alison stood by the kitchen sink, swabbing up the hot water that Colette had spilled from the kettle. Out in the garden there was seething activity, at ankle height. She couldn’t see Morris, but she could see movement behind a shrub. The other spirits were crawling about, prone on the lawn, as if they were on some sort of military exercise. They were hissing to each other, and Aitkenside was gesticulating, as if urging the others forward. As Colette crossed the grass they rolled over and kicked their legs; then they rolled back and followed her, slithering along, pretending to nip her calves and slash at them with spirit sticks.

She saw Colette push at the door of the Balmoral, and step back. Step forward and push again. Her face turned back towards the house. “Al? It’s stuck.”

Al hurried down the garden. The spirits edged away and lay in the verges. Dean was whistling. “Cut that out,” Morris said, speaking from within his bush. “Watch and observe. Watch how she goes now. Now she says to string-bean, well, what’s sticking it? Is it swollen up wiv damp? Stringbean says, what damp, it ain’t rained for weeks. Watch ’em now. Now she pushes. Watch how she breaks out in a sweat.”

“There’s something heavy behind the door,” Al said.

Dean giggled. “If she was any good at predictionating, she’d know, wouldn’t she? What we’ve done?”

Al crouched down and looked in at the window. It was dusty and smeared, almost opaque. Behind the door was an area of darkness, a shadow, which thickened, took on form, took on features. “It’s Mart,” she said. “Stopping the door.”

“Tell him to get away,” Colette said. She banged on the door with her fist, and kicked it. “Open up!”

“He can’t hear you.”

“Why not?”

“He’s hanged himself.”

“What, in our shed?”

There was a spatter of applause from the margins of the lawn.

“I’ll call nine-nine-nine,” Colette said.

“Don’t bother. It’s not an emergency. He’s passed.”

“You don’t know. He might still be breathing. They could revive him.”

Al put her fingertips against the door, feeling for a thread of life through the grain of the wood. “He’s gone,” she said. “Goddammit, Colette, I should know. Besides, look behind you.”

Colette turned. I still forget, Al thought, that—psychically speaking—Colette can’t see her hand in front of her face. Mart was perched on the top of the neighbours’ fence, swinging his feet in their big sneakers. The fiends now roused themselves, and began to giggle. By Al’s feet, a head popped up out of the soil, “Coo-ee!”

“I see you turned up, Pikey Pete,” Al said. “Fresh from that little job of yours at Aldershot.”

“Would I have missed this?” the fiend replied. “Rely on me for a nice noose, don’t they? I had a great-uncle that was an hangman, though that’s going back.”

Dean lay on top of the shed on his belly, his tongue flapping like a roller blind down over the door. Morris was urinating into the water feature, and Donald Aitkenside was squatting on the grass, eating a sausage roll from a paper bag.

“Ring the local station and ask for PC Delingbole,” Al said. “Yes, and an ambulance. We don’t want anybody to say we didn’t do it right. But tell them there’s no need for sirens. We don’t want to attract a crowd.”

But it was school-out time, and there was no avoiding the attention of the mums bowling home in their minivans and SUVs. A small crowd soon collected before the Collingwood, buzzing with shocked rumour. Colette double-locked the front door and put the bolts on. She drew the curtains at the front of the house. A colleague of Delingbole’s stood at the side gate, to deter any sightseers from making their way into the garden. From her post on the landing, Colette saw Evan approaching with a ladder and his camcorder; so she drew the upstairs curtains too, after jerking two fingers at him as his face appeared over the sill.

“We’ll have the media here before we know it,” Constable Delingbole said. “Dear, oh, dear. Not very nice for you two girls. Forensics will be in. We’ll have to seal off your garden. We’ll have to conduct a search of the premises. You got anybody you could go to, for the night? Neighbours?”

“No,” Al said. “They think we’re lesbians. If we must move out, we’ll make our own arrangements. But we’d rather not. You see, I run my business from home.”

Already the road was filling with vehicles. A radio car from the local station was parked on the verge, and Delingbole’s boy was attempting to move back the mothers and tots. The kebab van was setting up by the children’s playground, and some of the tots, whining, were trying to lead their mothers towards it. “This is your fault,” Michelle shouted up at the house. She turned to her neighbours. “If they hadn’t encouraged him, he’d have gone and hanged himself somewhere else.”

“Now,” said a woman from a Frobisher, “we’ll be in the local paper as that place where the tramp topped himself, and that won’t be very nice for our resale values.”

Inside, in the half-dark, Delingbole said. “Do I take it you knew him, poor bugger? Somebody will have to identify him.”

“You can do it,” Al said. “You knew him, didn’t you? You made his life a misery. You stamped on his watch.”

When the forensic team came, they stood thigh-deep in the low, salivating spirits that cluster at the scene of a sudden or violent death. They stood thigh-deep in them and never noticed a thing. They puzzled over the multiple footprints they found by the shed, prints from feet that were jointed to no ordinary leg. They cut Mart down, and the length of apricot polyester from which they found him suspended was labelled and placed carefully in a sealed bag.

“He must have taken a long time to die,” Alison said, later that night. “He had nothing, you see, Mart, nothing at all. He wouldn’t have a rope. He wouldn’t have a high place to hang himself from.”

They sat with the lamps unlit, so as not to attract the attention of the neighbours; they moved cautiously, sliding around the edges of the room.

“You’d have thought he could have jumped on the railway track,” Colette said. “Or thrown himself off the roof of Toys ‘R’ Us; that’s what they mostly do round Woking, I’ve seen it in the local paper. But oh no, he would have to go and do it here, where he would cause maximum trouble and inconvenience. We were the only people who were ever kind to him, and look how he repays us. You bought him those shoes, didn’t you?”

“And a new watch,” Al said. “I tried to do a good action. Look how it ended up.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” Colette said. But her tone was sarcastic, and—as far as Alison could discern her expression in the gloom—she looked both angry and bitter.

In spirit, Mart had looked quite chipper, Al thought, when she saw him perched on the fence. When she sneaked into the kitchen, in search of supper, she wondered if she should leave him out a plate of sandwiches. But I suppose I’d sleepwalk in the night, she thought, and eat them myself. She believed she caught a glimpse of him, behind the door of the utility room; livid bruising was still fresh on his neck.

Later, as she was coming out of the bathroom, Morris stopped her. “I suppose you think we was out of order?” he said.

“You’re an evil bastard, Morris,” she said. “You were evil when you were earthside, and now you’re worse.”

“Oh, come on!” Morris said. “Don’t take on! You’re worse than your bloody mother. We wanted a laugh, that’s all. Not as if the cove was doing much good this side, was he? Anyway, I’ve had a word with Mr. Aitkenside, and we’re going to take him on to clean our boots. Which is currently young Dean’s job, but with Mr. Aitkenside getting fitted with the sets of false feet, Dean could do with some assistance. He has to start at the bottom, you know, that’s the rule. I reckon he’ll shape up. He’s no more gormless than Dean was when we picked him out of the golf net. If he shapes up, in about fifty years he might get to go on Spirit Guide.”

“Don’t expect me to thank you,” said Al.

“That’s just like you, innit?” Morris said. His features convulsed with spite, he bounced up and down on the landing. “No bloody gratitude. You talk about when I was earthside, you give me the character of an evil bastard, but where would you be if it weren’t for me? If it hadn’t been for me, the boys would have cut you up a bloody sight worse. You’d be disfigured. Aitkenside said, she has to learn respect for what a knife can do, and they all said, all the boys, quite right, she has to learn, and your mum said, fine, you carve her, but don’t go carving her face, the punters won’t like it. She said, it’s all very well your squabbles, but when you gentlemen have all got bored of her, I’ve still got to sell her on, ain’t I? And I supported her, didn’t I? I backed her up. I said to Aitkenside, quite right, show her what’s what by all means, but don’t make her into a bloody liability.”

“But Morris, why did they do it?” Al cried. “What did I ever do to you? I was a child, for pity’s sake, who would want to take a knife and slice up a child’s legs and leave her scarred?” I must have screamed, she thought, I must have screamed but I don’t remember. I must have screamed but no one heard me.

“There was nobody to hear,” Morris said. “That’s why you have to have an outbuilding, innit? You have to have an outbuilding or a shed, or a caravan if you can’t manage that, or at least a trailer. You never know when you need to show some little shaver what’s what or hang some bugger what’s getting on your nerves.”

“You haven’t answered me,” Al said. She stood in his path, fingering the lucky opals as if they were weapons. He tried to swerve past her, but her aura, welling out and smothering him, forced him back. Gibbering with frustration, he condensed himself, and slid under the carpet, and she stamped on him hard saying, “Morris, if you want to keep your job, I want some answers. If you don’t give me answers I’m going to give up this game. I’ll go back and work in a cake shop. I’ll work in the chemist like I used to. I’ll scrub floors if I have to. I’m going to give it up, and then where will you be?”

“Ho,” said Morris, “you don’t frighten me, gel, if you go and work in the chemist I shall make myself into a pill. If you get a job in a cake shop I shall roll myself into a Swiss roll and spill out jam at inopportune moments. If you try scrubbing floors, I will rise up splosh! out of your bucket in a burst of black water, causing you to get the sack. Then you will be wheedling me around like you used to, oh, Uncle Morris, I’ve no spending money, oh Uncle Morris I’ve no money for me school dinners, I’ve no money for me school trip. And all the time going behind my back with the same sob story to MacArthur, and whining for sweeties to Keith. Too generous by half, that’s Morris Warren. The day I was taken over, there wasn’t five bob in my pocket. I was taken over and I don’t know how, taken over wiv money owing to me.” Morris began to whimper. “MacArthur owes me. Bill Wagstaffe owes me. I’ve got in my black book who owes me. Bloody spirits is devious, innit? Always some reason they can’t pay. ‘My pocket vapourized. Holy Bloody Ghost got my wallet.’ So there I was turning up airside, they says, turn out your pockets, and when they saw that was all the money I had to my name they bloody laughed. They said, you don’t work you don’t drink, me old mate. That’s the rule here. Then I got put on Spirit Guide. First I got Irene Etchells, and then you, God help me. I say God help me but the bugger never does. That’s why I bother wiv Nick, wiv Nick you get a career opportunity. You get sent on courses.”

“If you get promoted,” Al said, “nobody will be happier than I will. The only bit of peace and quiet I had was when you were on your course.”

“Peace and quiet?” Morris yelped. “How could you have peace and quiet? Wiv a past like yours? Not ten years old, and a man’s testicles on your conscience.”

“What testicles?” Alison yelled.

Across the landing, Colette’s door opened. She stood in her bedtime T-shirt, very white and severe. “That’s it,” she said. “I don’t intend to spend another night under this roof. How can I live with a woman who has rows with people I can’t see, and who stands outside my bedroom door shouting ‘What testicles?’ It’s more than flesh and blood can stand.”

Alison rubbed her forehead. She felt dazed. “You’re right,” she said. “But don’t be hasty.”

“It’s simply not acceptable conduct. Not even by your standards.”

Alison moved her foot, so Morris could slide from under it. “At least wait until the morning.”

“I don’t believe it’s safe to wait until morning. I shall pack a small bag and I shall send someone for the rest of my things in due course.”

“Who?” Al said, in simple wonderment. “Who will you send?” She said, “You can’t just rush off into the night. That’s silly. You owe it to me to talk it over.”

“I owe you nothing. I built your business up from scratch. It was a blundering amateur mess when I came on board.”

“That’s what I mean. Come on, Colette! We’ve been through such a lot.”

“Well, from now on you’re on your own. You’ve got plenty of company, I would have thought. Your special sort of company.”

“I’ve got my memories.” Al said. “Yes. That’s fine.”

She turned away. I won’t entreat you anymore, she thought. She heard low voices from downstairs. It sounded as if Aitkenside and the rest had come in and were making themselves a snack. Colette closed her door. Al heard her talking. For a moment she stood still, in astonishment. Who has she got in there with her? Then she realized that Colette was using her cell phone, and was making arrangements to depart.

“Wha?” Gavin said. “Who’s this?” He spluttered, coughed, blew his nose twice; he sounded like a bear that has been hibernating at the bottom of a pit.

“It’s not that late,” she snapped. “Wake up, Gavin. Are you awake? Are you listening to me? This is an emergency. I want you to get me out of here.”

“Oh,” said Gavin, “it’s you, Colette. How’ve you been?”

“I’ve been better. I wouldn’t ask, except I need to get out right now, and I need somewhere to stay, just for tonight. I’m packing a bag as we speak.”

There was a silence. “So let me get this straight. You want me to come over there?”

“Yes. At once.”

“You want me to drive over there and get you?”

“We used to be married. Is it too much to ask?”

“Yes—no—it’s not that—” He broke off. To consult Zoë, perhaps? Now he was back on the line. “The problem’s my car, you see, it’s—well, it’s in the garage.”

“What a time to pick!” she snapped. “You should have a little Japanese one like ours, never lets us down.”

“So why don’t you, you know, get in it?”

“Because it’s hers! Because she’s the owner and I don’t want a dispute. Because I don’t want her near me, or anything that belonged to her.”

“You mean Fat Girl? Are you running away from her?”

“Look, I’ll call a cab. Only be ready to let me in when I get there. It may take a while.”

“Oh, I’ve got wheels,” Gavin said. “I can come. No problem. As long as you don’t mind it. I mean, it’s not my usual standard.”

“Gavin, come now, in whatever you happen to be driving.”

She clicked the phone off. She put her hand on her solar plexus, and tried to breathe deeply, calmly. She sat on the side of the bed. Vignettes from her life with Al ran through her mind. Alison at the Harte and Garter, the day they got together, arranging the sugar straws and pouring the milk. Alison in a hotel in Hemel Hempstead, trying on earrings at the dressing table, between each pair dabbing at her earlobes with cotton wool balls soaked in vodka from the minibar. Alison wrapped in a duvet, on the night the princess died, her teeth chattering on the sofa of the flat in Wexham. As she hauled down a bag from the top of the wardrobe and pushed into it a wash bag and some underwear, she began to rehearse her explanation to Gavin, to the world. A vagrant hanged himself in the shed. The air grew thick and my head ached. She stamped outside my room and shouted, “What testicles!” She snapped her bag shut, and lugged it downstairs. At once she thought, I can’t turn up like this, what about Zoë, she’ll probably be wearing designer lingerie, maybe a one-off a friend has made for her, something chiffon, something silk, I wouldn’t like her to see these sweatpants, she’ll laugh in my face. She ran upstairs, took off her clothes, and stood before her open wardrobe, wondering what she could find to impress a model. She glanced at her watch: how long would it take Gavin to get over from Whitton? The roads will be empty, she thought. She dressed; she was not pleased by the result; maybe if I do my makeup, she thought. She went into the bathroom; painstakingly she drew two eyes and a mouth. She went downstairs again. She found she was shivering, and thought she would like a hot drink. Her hand reached for the kitchen light switch, and drew back. We’re not supposed to be here; the neighbours think we left. She crossed the room and began to inch up the kitchen blind.

It was three-thirty, and already the short midsummer darkness was becoming a smoggy haze. Aluminium barriers had been erected around the Balmoral, and on them a line of magpies was bouncing, as if they were sharing a joke. Behind her, she heard a footstep on the vinyl floor. She almost screamed. Al crossed the kitchen, bulky in her voluminous cotton night-gown. She moved slowly, as if drugged, hypnotized. She slid open the cutlery drawer, and stood looking down into it, fingering the knives and forks.

This is the last of it, Colette thought. A phase of my life ends here; the hidden clink, clink of the metal from inside the drawer, the conversational sound of the birds, Alison’s absorbed face. Colette crossed the room and passed her without speaking. She had to push past; she felt as if Al’s white gown had swelled out to fill the room, and the substance of Al’s flesh had swollen with it. In the distance she heard the sound of a car. My chariot, she thought. Gavin may not be much of a man, but he’s there for me in a crisis. At least he’s alive. And there’s only one of him.

From the kitchen, Al heard the front door close behind Colette. The letter box opened, keys dropped to the carpet, the letter box flipped shut. That was a bit dramatic, Al thought, there was no need for her to do that.

She limped to a kitchen chair, and sat down. With some difficulty, she raised one calf and crossed her ankle over the opposite knee. She felt the drag and pull on the muscle beneath her thigh, and she had to hang on to her shin bone to stop her foot from sliding off and back to the floor. She bent her back, hunched forward. It was uncomfortable; her abdomen was compressed, her breath was squeezed. It’s a pity Cara’s not here, she thought, to do it for me, or at least to instruct me in the proper technique; she must have got her diploma by now. I’ll just have to rub away and hope for the best; I’ll have to go back by myself, back to Aldershot, back to the dog runs and the scrubby ground, back to the swampish waters of the womb, and maybe back before that: back to where there is no Alison, only a space where Alison will be.

She felt for the underside of her toes, and delicately, tentatively, began to massage the sole of her foot.