“I’m not suited to distances, or rough terrain.”

“But it’s the outside that’s worrying us.”

“Then you need my colleague Raven, who specializes in earth energies, neolithic burials, mounds, caverns, burrows, and henges.”

“But you’re in my area,” the woman said. “That’s why I rang. I’m going by your telephone code in your ad.”

“What is it you’re actually looking for?”

“Actually, uranium,” the woman said.

Al said, “Oh, dear. I do think it’s Raven you want.” I expect he’ll be branching out, she thought, if these poisonings continue: knotweed, the bad drains. He’ll be branching out into sludge and toxic seepages, and detecting the walls of underground installations. If there were walls beneath my feet, she thought, if there were occult silos and excavations, cavities blasted in the earth, would I know? If there were secret chambers and bricked-in cul-desacs, would I sense them?

“Are you still there?” she asked the client. She imparted Raven’s details: his e-mail, and so on. It was hard to get the woman off the phone; she seemed to want some sort of free extra, like, I’ll throw you in a tarot reading, pick one card of three. It’s a while since I unwrapped the cards, Al thought. She said to the woman, “I really ought to go, because I have, you know, another client coming in—well, fifteen minutes, and—oh, dear, what is that smell? Oh, dear, I think I’ve left something on the stove … .” She held the phone away from her ear, and still the woman talked, and she thought, Colette, where are you, get this woman off the line … . She threw the receiver down on the bed and ran out of the room.

She stood on the landing, naked. I never did any science at school, she thought, any chemistry or physics, so I can’t advise these people about the likelihood of aliens or rabies or uranium or knotweed or anything at all really. Imagine, she said to herself, Morris let loose in a laboratory, all his friends trapped in a test tube, amalgamating and reacting against each other and causing little puffs and whiffs. Then she said to herself, don’t imagine, because it is imagining that gives them the door to get in. If you were thinner they would have less space to live. Yes, Colette was right and right again.

She knelt down, leaned forward, and tucked her head down by her knees. “Boom!” she said softly. “Boom!” She crunched herself down as small as she could go and said to herself a phrase she did not know she knew: Sauve qui peut.

She rocked her body, back and to, back and to. Presently she felt stronger: as if a shell, as if the back of a tortoise, might have grown over her spine. Tortoises live for many years, she thought, they outlive human beings. No one really loves them for they have no lovable qualities, but they are admired just for lasting out. They don’t speak, they just don’t utter at all. They are okay as long as no one turns them upside down and shows their underside, which is their soft bits. She said to herself, when I was a child I had a tortoise for a pet. The name of my tortoise was Alison, I named it after me because it is like me, and with our slow feet we walk in the garden. With my tortoise at week-ends I have many enjoyable times. The food of my tortoise is bollocks grass and blood.

She thought, the fiends are on their way, the question is how fast and who is first. If I cannot enjoy a nice childhood thought about a tortoise I might have had but didn’t, then I can expect Morris will shortly be limping in my direction though I believed he had gone on to higher things. Unless I am the higher things. After all, I tried to do a good action. I try to be a higher thing myself, but why does something inside me always say, but? Thinking but, she squashed herself down hard. She tried to put her chin onto the carpet, so she could look up, as if she were emerging from her shell. To her surprise—she had not tried this sort of thing before— she found it anatomically impossible. What came naturally was to tuck her head into her shielding spine, her plaited fingers protecting her fontanel.

In this position Colette found her, as she scampered lightly up the stairs, coming back from a meeting with their tax advisor. “Colette,” she said to the carpet, “you were right all along.”

These were the words that saved her; protected her from the worst of what Colette could have said, when she extended a cool hand to help her up and finally, admitting the task beyond her, brought a chair upon which Alison could place her forearms, and from there, lever herself into a position that seemed like an undignified sexual invitation, and from there, upright. One hand was spread across her heaving diaphragm, another crept down to cover her private parts—“which I’ve seen, already, once this week,” Colette snapped, “and once too much, thank you, so if you don’t mind getting dressed—or at least covering yourself up decently, if the idea of getting dressed is too challenging—you might come down when you’re ready and I’ll tell you what Mr. Colefax has to say about short- term savings rates.”

For an hour, Alison lay on her bed to recover. A client called for a tarot reading, and she saw her cards so clearly in her mind that really, she might as well have jumped up and done it and earned the money, but she heard Colette making tactful excuses, taking the client into her confidence and saying that she knew she would understand, the unpredictable demands placed on Alison’s talent meant that she couldn’t always give of her best, so when she said she needed rest that must be respected … she heard Colette book the woman in for a callback, and impress on her the fact that she must be standing to attention when it came, ready for Alison, even if her house were on fire.

When she felt able, she sat upright; she ran a tepid bath, dipped herself in and out of it, and felt no cleaner. She didn’t want hot water, which would make her scars flare. She lifted her heavy breasts and soaped beneath them, handling each one as if it were a weight of dead meat that happened to adhere to her chest.

She dried herself, put on the lightest dress she owned. She crept down-stairs and, by way of the kitchen, into the garden. The weeds between the paving had withered, and the lawn was rock-hard. She looked down; snaky cracks crossed the ground.

“Ali!” came the cry. It was Evan, out poisoning his own weeds, his spray gun slung like a bandolier across his bare chest.

“Evan!” She moved stiffly, patiently, towards the fence. She was wearing her fluffy winter slippers, because her swollen feet wouldn’t go into any other shoes; she hoped Evan wouldn’t notice, and it was true he didn’t notice much.

“I don’t know,” he said, “why did we ever pay the extra five K for a garden due south?”

“Why did we?” she said heartily, buying time.

“Personally I did it because I was told it would boost the resale value,” Evan said. “And you?”

“Oh, the same,” she said.

“But we couldn’t have known what climate change had in store, eh? Not the most of us. But you must have

Вы читаете Beyond Black: A Novel
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату