Beyond Black: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  “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.”