Beyond Black

“I do remember, I do,” the woman said. She took the mike gingerly and held it as if it might detonate. “Marje was my aunt. She was fond of turquoise and also lilac.”

“Yes,”—and now Al softened her voice—“and she was like a mother to you, wasn’t she? She’s still looking out for you, in Spirit World. Now tell me, have you seen your GP about that indigestion?”

“No,” the woman said. “Well, they’re so busy.”

“They’re well paid to look after you, my love.”

“Coughs and colds all around you,” the woman said. “You come out worse than you went in— and you never see the same doctor twice.”

There was an audible smirk from the audience, a wash of fellow feeling. But the woman herself looked fretful. She wanted to hear from Marje: the dyspepsia she lived with every day.

“Stop making excuses.” Al almost stamped her foot. “Marje says, why are you putting it off? Call the surgery tomorrow morning and book yourself in. There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

Isn’t there? Relief dawned on the woman’s face; or an emotion that would be relief, when it clarified; for the moment she was tremulous, a hand on her ribs, folded in on herself as if to protect the space of the pain. It would take her some time to give up thinking it was cancer.

Now it’s the glasses ploy. Look for a woman in middle age who isn’t wearing glasses and say, have you had your eyes tested recently? Then the whole world of optometry is at your command. If she had an eye test last week, she’ll say, yes, as a matter of fact I have. They’ll applaud. If she says no, not recently, she’ll be thinking, but I know I ought to … and you say, get it checked, I’ve a feeling you need a new prescription. As for the woman who says she wears no glasses ever: oh, my love, those headaches of yours! Why don’t you just pop along to Boots? I can see you, a month from now, in some really pretty squarish frames.

You could ask them if they need to see the dentist, since everybody does, all the time; but you don’t want to see them flinch. You’re giving them a gentle nudge, not a pinch. It’s about impressing them without scaring them, softening the edges of their fright and disbelief.

“This lady—I see a broken wedding ring—did you lose your husband? He passed quite recently? And very recently you planted a rosebush in his memory.”

“Not exactly,” the woman said. “I placed some—in fact it was carnations—”

“Carnations in his memory,” said Al, “because they were his favourite, weren’t they?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the woman. Her voice slid off the mike; she was too worried to keep her head still.

“You know, aren’t men funny?” Al threw it out to the audience. “They just don’t like talking about these things; they think it means they’re oversensitive or something—as if we’d mind. But I can assure you, he’s telling me now, carnations were his favourite.”

“But where is he?” the woman said, still off the mike. She wasn’t going to quarrel about the flowers; she was pressed against the back of her seat, almost hostile, on the verge of tears.

Sometimes they waited for you afterwards, the punters, at the back exit, when you were running head down for the car park. In the ghastly lights behind the venue, in the drizzle and the rain, they’d say, when you gave me the message I didn’t know, I didn’t understand, I couldn’t take it in. “I know it’s difficult,” Al would say, trying to soothe them, trying to help them, but trying, for God’s sake, to get them off her back; she would be sweating, shaking, desperate to get into the car and off. But now, thank God, she had Colette to manage the situation; Colette would smoothly pass over their business card, and say, “When you feel ready, you might like to come for a private reading.”

Now Alison fished around in the front rows for somebody who’d lost a pet and found a woman whose terrier, on an impulse three weeks ago, had dashed out of the front door into the traffic. “Don’t you listen,” she told the woman, “to people who tell you animals have no souls. They go on in spirit, same as we do.”

Animals distressed her, not cats but just dogs: their ownerless whimper as they padded though the afterlife on the trail of their masters. “And has your husband gone over too?” she asked, and when the woman said yes, she nodded sympathetically but pulled her attention away, throwing out a new question, changing the topic: “Anybody over here got blood pressure?”

Let her think it, that dog and master are together now; let her take comfort, since comfort’s what she’s paid for. Let her assume that Tiddles and his boss are together in the Beyond. Reunion is seldom so simple; and really it’s better for dogs—if people could just grasp it—not to have an owner waiting for them, airside. Without a person to search for, they join up in happy packs, and within a year or two you never hear from them individually: there’s just a joyful corporate barking, instead of that lost whine, the sore pads, the disconsolate drooping head of the dog following a fading scent. Dogs had figured in her early life—men, and dogs—and much of that life was unclear to her. If you knew what the dogs were up to, she reasoned, if you knew what they were up to in Spirit World, it might help you work out where their owners were now. They must be gone over, she thought, most of those men I knew when I was a child; the dogs, for sure, are in spirit, for years have passed and those kinds of dogs don’t make old bones. Sometimes in the supermarket she would find herself standing in Pets, eyeing the squeaky toys, the big tough chews made for big friendly jaws; then she would shake herself and move slowly back towards organic vegetables, where Colette would be waiting with the cart, cross with her for vanishing.

She will be cross tonight, Al thought, smiling to herself: I’ve slipped up again about the blood pressure. Colette has nagged her, don’t talk about blood pressure, talk about hypertension. When she’d argued back—“They might not understand me”—Colette lost her temper and said, “Alison, without blood pressure we’d all be dead, but if you want to sound like something from the remedial stream, don’t let me get in your way.”

Now a woman put her hand up, admitted to the blood pressure. “Carrying a bit of weight, aren’t we, darling?” Al asked her. “I’ve got your mum here. She’s a bit annoyed with you—well no, I’m pitching it a bit high —concerned would be more like it. You need to drop a stone, she’s saying. Can you accept that?” The woman nodded, humiliated. “Oh, don’t mind what they think.” Al swept her hand over the audience; she gave her special throaty chuckle, her woman-to-woman laugh. “You’ve no need to worry about what anybody here’s thinking, we could most of us stand to lose a few pounds. I mean, look at me, I’m a size twenty and not ashamed of it. But your mum now, your mum, she says you’re letting yourself go, and that’s a shame, because you know you’re really—look at you, you’ve got such a lot going for you, lovely hair, lovely skin—well excuse me, but it seems to me your mum’s a plainspoken lady, so excuse me if I offend anybody, she’s saying, get up off your bum and go to the gym.”

This is Al’s public self: a little bit jaunty and a little bit crude, a bit of a schoolmistress and a bit of a flirt. She often speaks to the public about “my wicked sense of humour,” warning them not to take offence; but what happens to her sense of humour in the depth of the night, when she wakes up trembling and crying, with Morris crowing at her in the corner of the room?

Colette thought, you are a size 26 and you are ashamed of it. The thought was so loud, inside her own head, that she was amazed it didn’t jump out into the hall.

“No,” Al was saying, “please give the mike back to this lady, I’m afraid I’ve embarrassed her and I want to put it right.” The woman was reluctant, and Al said to her neighbour, “Just hold that mike steady under her chin.” Then Alison told the fat woman several things about her mother, which she’d often thought but not liked to admit to. “Oh, and I have your granny. Your granny’s coming through. Sarah Anne? Now she’s an old soul,” Al said. “You were five when she passed, am I right?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Speak up, my love.”

“Small. I was small.”

“Yes, you don’t remember much about her, but the point is she’s never left you, she’s still around, looking after the family. And she likes those cabinets you’ve got—I can’t quite make this out—a new kitchen, is it?”

“Oh, my God. Yes,” the woman said. “Yes.” She shifted in her seat and turned bright red.

Al chuckled, indulging her surprise. “She’s often with you in that kitchen. And by the way, you were right not to go for the brushed steel, I know they tried to talk you into it, but it’s so over and done with, there’s nothing worse than a dated kitchen when you come to sell, and besides it’s such a harsh look at the heart of the home. Sarah Anne says, you won’t go wrong with light oak.”

They burst into applause: the punters, the trade. They are deeply appreciative of information about their kitchen fittings; they marvel at your uncanny knowledge of where they position their bread bin. This is how you handle them; you tell them the small things, the personal things, the things no one else could really know. By this