Beyond Black: A Novel

her fork. “Business?” she says. “Business is booming, thanks for asking, Gemma. Give or take the odd quiet midweek, I’m booked out till next Feb.”

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

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

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

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

ALSO BY HILARY MANTEL

Every Day Is Mother’s Day

Vacant Possession

A Place of Greater Safety

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

A Change of Climate

An Experiment in Love

The Giant O’Brien

Fludd

Giving Up the Ghost

About the Author

Among HILARY MANTEL’s novels are A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. She has also written a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. A winner of the Hawthornden Prize, she reviews for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books and lives in England.

Copyright © 2005 by Hilary Mantel

All rights reserved.

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eISBN 9781429900638

First eBook Edition : July 2011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data

Mantel, Hilary, [date]

Beyond black : a novel / Hilary Mantel.—1st ed.

p. cm.

“A John Macrae book.”

1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Divorced women—Fiction. 3. Women mediums—Fiction. 4. Spritualists— Fiction. 5. England—Fiction. I. Title. PR6063.A438B49 2005 823’.914—dc22

2004063589

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First Edition 2005

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