Beyond Black: A Novel

“It was a miscarriage,” the woman said. “I never—I never saw—they didn’t say and so I didn’t—”

“Didn’t know it was a little boy. But,” Al said softly, “you know now.” She turned her head to encompass the hall: “You see, we have to recognize that it wasn’t a very compassionate world back then. Times have changed, and for that we can all be thankful. I’m sure those nurses and doctors were doing their best, and they didn’t mean to hurt you, but the fact is, you weren’t given a chance to grieve.”

The woman hunched forward. Tears sprang out of her eyes. The heavy husband moved forward, as if to catch them. The hall was rapt.

“What I want you to know is this.” Al’s voice was calm, unhurried, without the touch of tenderness that would overwhelm the woman entirely; dignified and precise, she might have been querying a grocery bill. “That little boy of yours is a fine young man now. He knows you never held him. He knows that’s not your fault. He knows how your heart aches. He knows how you’ve thought of him”—Al dropped her voice—“always, always, without missing a day. He’s telling me this, from Spirit. He understands what happened. He’s opening his arms to you, and he’s holding you now.”

Another woman, in the row behind, began to sob. Al had to be careful, at this point, to minimize the risk of mass hysteria. Women, Colette thought: as if she weren’t one. But Alison knew just how far she could take it. She was on form tonight; experience tells. “And he doesn’t forget your husband,” she told the woman. “He says hello to his dad.” It was the right note, braced, unsentimental: “Hello, Dad.” The trade sighed, a low mass sigh. “And the point is, and he wants you to know this, that though you’ve never been there to look after him, and though of course there’s no substitute for a mother’s love, your little boy has been cared for and cherished, because you’ve got people in Spirit who’ve always been there for him—your own grandma? And there’s another lady, very dear to your family, who passed the year you were married.” She hesitated. “Bear with me, I’m trying for her name. I get the colour of a jewel. I get a taste of sherry. Sherry, that’s not a jewel, is it? Oh, I know, it’s a glass of port. Ruby. Does that name mean anything to you?”

The woman nodded, again and again and again: as if she could never nod enough. Her husband whispered to her, “Ruby, you know—Eddie’s first wife?” The mike picked it up. “I know, I know,” she muttered. She gripped his hand. Her fluttering breath registered. You could almost hear her heart.

“She’s got a parcel for you,” Al said. “No, wait; she’s got two.”

“She gave us two wedding presents. An electric blanket and some sheets.”

“Well,” Al said, “if Ruby kept you so warm and cosy, I think you can trust her with your baby.” She threw it out to the audience. “What do you say?”

They began to clap: sporadically, then with gathering force. Weeping broke out again. Al lifted her arm. Obedient to a strange gravity, the lucky opals rose and fell. She’d saved her best effect till last.

“And he wants you to know, this little boy of yours who’s a fine young man now, that in Spirit he goes by the name you chose for him, the name you had planned to give him … if it—if he—if he was a boy. Which was”—she pauses—“correct me if I’m wrong—which was Alistair.”

“Was it?” said the heavy husband: he was still on the mike, though he didn’t know it. The woman nodded.

“Would you like to answer me?” Al asked pleasantly.

The man cleared his throat, then spoke straight into the mike. “Alistair. She says that’s right. That was her choice. Yes.”

Unseeing, he handed the mike to his neighbour. The woman got to her feet, and the heavy man led her away as if she were an invalid, her handkerchief held over her mouth. They exited, to a fresh storm of applause.

“Steroid rage, I expect,” Al said. “Did you see those muscles of hers?” She was sitting up in her hotel bed, dabbing cream on her face. “Look, Col, as you quite well know, everything that can go wrong for me out there has gone wrong at some time. I can cope. I can weather it. I don’t want you getting stressed.”

“I’m not stressed. I just think it’s a landmark. The first time anybody’s threatened to beat you up.”

“The first time while you’ve been with me, maybe. That’s why I gave up working in London.” Al sat back against the pillows, her eyes closed; she pushed the hair back from her forehead, and Colette saw the jagged scar at her hairline, dead white against ivory. “Who needs it? A fight every night. And the trade pawing you when you try to leave, so you miss the last train home. I like to get home. But you know that, Col.”

But she doesn’t like night driving, either; so when they’re outside the ring of the M25, there’s nothing for it except to put up somewhere, the two of them in a twin room. A bed-and-breakfast is no good because Al can’t last through till breakfast, so for preference they need a hotel that will do food through the night. Sometimes they take prepacked sandwiches, but it’s joy-less for Al, sitting up in bed at 4 A.M., sliding a finger into the plastic triangle to fish out the damp bread. There’s a lot of sadness in hotel rooms, soaked up by the soft furnishings: a lot of loneliness and guilt and regret. A lot of ghosts too: whiskery chambermaids stumping down the corridors on their bad legs, tippling night porters who’ve collapsed on the job, guests who’ve drowned in the bath or suffered a stroke in their beds. When they check into a room, Alison stands on the threshold and sniffs the atmosphere, inhales it: and her eyes travel dubiously around. More than once, Colette has shot down to reception to ask for a different room. “What’s the problem?” the receptionists will say (sometimes adding madam) and Colette, stiff with hostility and fright, will say, “Why do you need to know?” She never fails in her mission; challenged, she can pump out as much aggression as the girl in the khaki vest.

What Alison prefers is somewhere new-built and anonymous, part of some reliable chain. She hates history: unless it’s on television, safe behind glass. She won’t thank you for a night in a place with beams. “Sod the inglenooks,” she once said, after an exhausting hour tussling with an old corpse in a sheet. The dead are like that; give them a cliche and they’ll run to it. They enjoy frustrating the living, spoiling their beauty sleep. They enjoyed pummelling Al’s flesh and nagging at her till she got earache; they rattled around in her head until some nights, like tonight, it seemed to quiver on the soft stem of her neck. “Col,” she groaned, “be a good girl, rummage around in the bags and see if you can find my lavender spray. My head’s throbbing.”

Colette knelt on the floor and rummaged as directed. “That woman at the end, the couple, the miscarriage— you could have heard a pin drop.”

Al said, “See a pin and pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck. My mum told me that. I never do, though—see a pin. Or find money in the street.”

That’s because you’re too fat to see your feet, Colette thought. She said, “How did you do that thing with the name? When you were going on about mother love I nearly puked, but I have to hand it to you, you got there in the end.”