Travelling: the dank oily days after Christmas. The motorway, its wastes
looping London: the margin’s scrub grass flaring orange in the lights, and the
leaves of the poisoned shrubs striped yellow-green like a cantaloupe melon.
Four o’clock: light sinking over the orbital road. Teatime in Enfield, night
falling on Potter’s Bar. There are nights when you don’t want to do it, but you
have to do it anyway. Nights when you look down from the stage and see
closed stupid faces. Messages from the dead arrive at random. You don’t want
them and you can’t send them back. The dead won’t be coaxed and they
won’t be coerced. But the public has paid its money and it wants results.
A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of
strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and
starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and
escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle
and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms
here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the
Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.
Beside her, in profile against the fogged window, the driver’s face is set.
In the back seat, something dead stirs, and begins to grunt and breathe. The car
flees across the junctions, and the space the road encloses is the space inside
her: the arena of combat, the wasteland, the place of civil strife behind her
ribs. A heart beats, taillights wink. Dim lights shine from tower blocks, from
passing helicopters, from fixed stars. Night closes in on the perjured ministers
and burnt-out pedophiles, on the unloved viaducts and graffitied bridges, on
ditches beneath mouldering hedgerows and railings never warmed by human
touch.
Night and winter: but in the rotten nests and empty setts, she can feel the
signs of growth, intimations of spring. This is the time of Le Pendu, the
Hanged Man, swinging by his foot from the living tree. It is a time of
suspension, of hesitation, of the indrawn breath. It is a time to let go of
expectation, yet not abandon hope; to anticipate the turn of the Wheel of
Fortune. This is our life and we have to lead it. Think of the alternative.
A static cloud bank, like an ink smudge. Darkening air.
It’s no good asking me whether I’d choose to be like this, because I’ve
never had a choice. I don’t know about anything else. I’ve never been any
other way.
And darker still. Colour has run out from the land. Only form is left: the
clumped treetops like a dragon’s back. The sky deepens to midnight blue.
The orange of the streetlights is blotted to a fondant cerise; in pastureland,
the pylons lift their skirts in a ferrous gavotte.
Chapter Two
Colette put her head around the dressing room door. “All right?” she said.
“It’s a full house.”
Alison was leaning into the mirror, about to paint her mouth on. “Could
you find me a coffee?”
“‘Or a gin and tonic?”
“Yes, go on then.”
She was in her psychic kit now; she had flung her day clothes over the
back of a chair. Colette swooped on them; lady’s maid was part of her job.
She slid her forearm inside Al’s black crepe skirt. It was as large as a
funerary banner, a pall. As she turned it the right way out, she felt a tiny
stir of disgust, as if flesh might be clinging to the seams.
Alison was a woman who seemed to fill a room, even when she wasn’t in
it. She was of an unfeasible size, with plump creamy shoulders, rounded
calves, thighs and hips that overflowed her chair; she was soft as an Edwardian,
opulent as a showgirl, and when she moved you could hear (though she
did not wear them) the rustle of plumes and silks. In a small space, she
seemed to use up more than her share of the oxygen; in return her skin
breathed out moist perfumes, like a giant tropical flower. When you came
into a room she’d left-her bedroom, her hotel room, her dressing room
backstage-you felt her as a presence, a trail. Alison had gone, but you would
see a chemical mist of hair spray falling through the bright air. On the floor
would be a line of talcum powder, and her scent-Je Reviens-would
linger in curtain fabric, in cushions, and in the weave of towels. When she
headed for a spirit encounter, her path was charged, electric; when her body was
out on stage, her face-cheeks glowing, eyes alight-seemed to float still in
the dressing room mirror.
In the centre of the room Colette stooped, picked up Al’s shoes. For a
moment she disappeared from her own view. When her face bobbed back into
sight in the mirror, she was almost relieved. What’s wrong with me? she
thought. When I’m gone I leave no trace. Perfume doesn’t last on my skin. I
barely sweat. My feet don’t indent the carpet.
“It’s true,” Alison said. “It’s as if you wipe out the signs of yourself as
you go. Like a robot housekeeper. You polish your own fingerprints away.”
“Don’t be silly.” Colette said. “And don’t read my private thoughts.” She
shook the black skirt, as if shaking Alison.
“I often ask myself, let’s see now, is Colette in the room or not? When
you’ve been gone for an hour or two, I wonder if I’ve imagined you.”
Colette looped the black skirt onto a hanger, and hung it on the back of
the long mirror. Soon Al’s big black overshirt joined it. It was Colette who
had persuaded her into black. Black, she had said, black and perfectly
plain. But Alison abhorred plainness. There must be something to capture the
gaze, something to shiver, something to shine. At first glance the shirt seemed
devoid of ornament, but a thin line of sequins ran down the sleeve, like the
eyes of sly aliens, reflecting black within black. For her work onstage, she
insisted on colour: emerald, burnt orange, scarlet. “The last thing you want,
when you go out there,” she explained, “is to make them think of funerals.”
Now she pouted at herself in the glass. “I think that’s quite nice, don’t you?”
Colette glanced at her. “Yes, it suits you.”
Alison was a genius with makeup. She had boxes full and she used it all,
carrying it in colour-coded wash bags and cases fitted with loops for brushes
and small-size bottles. If the spirit moved her to want some apricot eye
shadow, she knew just which bag to dip into. To Colette, it was a mystery.
When she went out to get herself a new lipstick, she came back with one
that, when applied, turned out to be the same colour as all the others she had,
which was always, give or take, the colour of her lips.
“So what’s that shade called?” she asked.
Alison observed herself, a cotton bud poised, and effected an invisible
improvement to her underlip. “Dunno. Why don’t you try it? But get me that
drink first.” Her hand moved for her lipstick sealant. She almost said, look
out, Colette, don’t tread on Morris.
He was on the floor, half sitting and half lying, slumped against the wall;
his stumpy legs were spread out, and his fingers played with his fly buttons.
When Colette stepped back she trampled straight over him.
As usual she didn’t notice. But Morris did. “Fucking stuck-up cow,” he
said, as Colette went out. “White-faced fucking freak. She’s like a bloody
ghoul. Where did you get her, gel, a churchyard?”
Under her breath Alison swore back at him. In Colette’s five years as her
partner, he’d never accepted her; time meant little to Morris. “What would
you know about churchyards?” she asked him. “I bet you never had a Christian
burial. Concrete boots and a dip in the river, considering the people you
mixed with. Or maybe you were sawed up with your own saw?”
Alison leaned forward again into the mirror, and slicked her mouth with
the tiny brush from the glass tube. It tickled and stung. Her lips flinched from
it. She made a face at herself. Morris chuckled.
It was almost the worst thing, having him around at times like these, in
your dressing room, before the show, when you were trying to calm yourself
down and have your intimate moments. He would follow you to the lavatory
if he was in that sort of mood. A colleague had once said to her, “It seems to
me that your guide is on a very low vibratory plane, very low indeed. Had
you been drinking when he first made contact?”
“No,” Al had told her. “I was only thirteen.”
“Oh, that’s a terrible age,” the woman said. She looked Alison up and
down. “Junk food, I expect. Empty calories. Stuffing yourself.'”
She’d denied it, of course. In point of fact she never had any money after
school for burgers or chocolate, her mum keeping her short in case she used
the money to get on a bus and run away. But she couldn’t put any force into
her denial. Her colleague was right, Morris was a low person. How did she
get him? She probably deserved him, that was all there was to it. Sometimes
she would say to him, Morris, what did I do to deserve you? He would rub his
hands and chortle. When she had provoked him and he was in a temper with
her, he would say, count your blessings, girl, you fink I’m bad but you could
of had MacArthur. You could have had Bob Fox, or Aitkenside, or Pikey Pete.
You could have had my mate Keef Capstick. You could of had Nick, and then
where’d you be?
Mrs. Etchells (who taught her the psychic trade) had always told her, there
are some spirits, Alison, who you already know from way back, and you just
have to put names to the faces. There are some spirits that are spiteful and
will do you a bad turn. There are others that are bloody buggering bastards,
excuse my French, who will suck the marrow out your bones. Yes, Mrs. E,
she’d said, but how will I know which are which? And Mrs. Etchells had said,
God help you, girl. But God having business elsewhere, I don’t expect he will.
Colette crossed the foyer, heading for the bar. Her eyes swept over the paying
public, flocking in from the dappled street; ten women to every man. Each
evening she liked to get a fix on them, so she could tell Alison what to expect.
Had they prebooked, or were they queuing at the box office? Were they
swarming in groups, laughing and chatting, or edging through the foyer in
singles and pairs, furtive and speechless? You could probably plot it on a
graph, she thought, or have some kind of computer programme: the demographics
of each town, its typical punters and their networks, the location of
the venue relative to car parks, pizza parlours, the nearest bar where young
girls could go in a crowd.
The venue manager nodded to her. He was a worn little bloke coming up
to retirement; his dinner jacket had a whitish bloom on it and was tight under
the arms. “All right?” he said. Colette nodded, unsmiling; he swayed back on
his heels, and as if he had never seen them before he surveyed the bags of
sweets hanging on their metal pegs, and the ranks of chocolate bars.
Why can’t men just stand? Colette wondered. Why do they have to sway
on the spot and feel in their pockets and pat themselves up and down and
suck their teeth? Alison’s poster was displayed six times, at various spots
through the foyer. The flyers around advertised forthcoming events: ܰé’
Requiem, giving way in early December to Jack and the Beanstalk.
Alison was a Sensitive: which is to say, her senses were arranged in a
different way from the senses of most people. She was a medium: dead people
talked to her, and she talked back. She was a clairvoyant; she could see
straight through the living, to their ambitions and secret sorrows, and tell
you what they kept in their bedside drawers and how they had travelled to
the venue. She wasn’t (by nature) a fortune-teller, but it was hard to make
people understand that. Prediction, though she protested against it, had become
a lucrative part of her business. At the end of the day, she believed,
you have to suit the public and give them what they think they want. For
fortunes, the biggest part of the trade was young girls. They always
thought there might be a stranger on the horizon, love around the corner.
They hoped for a better boyfriend than the one they’d got-more socialized,
less spotty: or at least, one who wasn’t on remand. Men, on their own
behalf, were not interested in fortune or fate. They believed they made
their own, thanks very much. As for the dead, why should they worry
about them? If they need to talk to their relatives, they have women to do
that for them.
“G and T,” Colette said to the girl behind the bar. “Large.”
The girl reached for a glass and shoveled in a single ice cube.
“You can do better than that,” Colette said. “And lemon.”
She looked around. The bar was empty. The walls were padded to hip
height with turquoise plastic leather, deep-buttoned. They’d been needing a
damp cloth over them since about 1975. The fake wood tables looked sticky:
the same applied.
The girl’s scoop probed the ice bucket. Another cube slinked down the
side of the glass, to join its predecessor with a dull tap. The girl’s face
showed nothing. Her full, lead-coloured eyes slid away from Colette’s face. She
mouthed the price.
“For tonight’s artiste,” Colette said. “On the house, I’d have thought!”
The girl did not understand the expression. She had never heard “on the
house.” She closed her eyes briefly: blue-veined lids.
Back through the foyer. It was filling up nicely. On the way to their seats,
the audience had to pass the easel she had set up, with Al’s superenlarged
picture swathed in a length of apricot polyester that Al called “my silk.” At
first Colette had had trouble draping it, getting the loops just right, but now
she’d got it pat-a twist of her wrist made a loop over the top of the portrait,
another turn made a drift down one side, and the remainder spilled in graceful
folds to whatever gritty carpet or bare boards they were performing on that
night. She was working hard to break Al’s addiction to this particular bit of
kitsch. Unbelievably tacky, she’d said, when she first joined her. She thought
instead of a screen on which Al’s image was projected. But Al had said, you
don’t want to find yourself overshadowed by the special effects. Look, Col,
I’ve been told this, and it’s one bit of advice I’ll never forget; remember your
roots. Remember where you started. In my case, that’s the village hall at
Brookwood. So when you’re thinking of special effects, ask yourself, can you
reproduce it in the village hall? If you can’t, forget it. It’s me they’ve come
to see, after all. I’m a professional psychic, not some sort of magic act.
The truth was, Al adored the photo. It was seven years old now. The studio
had mysteriously disappeared two of her chins; and caught those big
starry eyes, her smile, and something of her sheen, that inward luminescence
that Colette envied.
“All right?” said the manager. “All humming along, backstage?” He had slid
back the lid of the ice cream chest and was peering within.
“Trouble in there?” Colette asked.
Continues…
Excerpted from Beyond BLACK
by Hilary Mantel
Copyright © 2005 by Hilary Mantel.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2005
Hilary Mantel
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8050-7356-6
