Beyond Black: A Novel

twelve, thirteen, I came in from school and I thought the house was empty for once; I thought, thank Christ for that; I thought I might make some toast then do a bit of cleaning while they were all gone out. I walked through to the lean-to, and I looked up and this geezer was standing there—not doing anything, just standing there leaning against the sink—and he had a box of matches in his hand. Christ, he was evil-looking! I mean, they all were, but there was something about him, his expression … . I can tell you, Colette, he was in a league of his own. He just stared at me and I stared back at him, and I thought I’d seen him before, and you have to make conversation, don’t you, even if you suddenly feel as if you’re going to throw up? So I said, are you the one they call Nick? He said, no, love, I’m a burglar, and I said, go on, you are Nick. He flew into a temper. He rattled the matchbox and it was empty. He threw it down. He went, can’t even get a light around here, I’m going to sack the flaming lot of them, they’re not worth a bench in hell. He whipped his belt out of his trousers and lashed out at me.

COLETTE: What happened then?

ALISON: I ran out into the street.

COLETTE: Did he follow you?

ALISON: I expect so.

Al was fourteen. Fifteen perhaps. No spots still. She seemed immune to them. She had grown a bit, all ways, up and out. Her tits came around the corner before she did; or that’s what one of the men remarked.

She said to her mother, “Who’s my dad?”

Her mother said, “What you want to know that for?”

“People ought to know who they are.”

Her mother lit another cigarette.

“I bet you don’t know,” Al said. “Why did you bother to have me? I bet you tried to get rid of me, didn’t you?”

Her mother exhaled, blowing the smoke down her nose in two disdainful and separate streams. “We all tried. But you was stuck fast, you silly bitch.”

“You should have gone to the doctor.”

“Doctor?” Her mother’s eyes rolled up. “Listen to her! Doctor! Bloody doctor, they didn’t want to know. I was five, six months gone when MacArthur buggered off, and then I’d have shifted you all right, but there wasn’t any bloody shifting.”

“MacArthur? Is that my dad?”

“How should I know?” her mother said. “What you bloody asking me for? What you want to know for anyway? What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Mind your own bloody business.”

Seeing Gloria’s head in the bath was more worrying to her, somehow, than seeing Gloria entire. From the age of eight, nine, ten, she told Colette, she used to see disassembled people lying around, a leg here, an arm there. She couldn’t say precisely when it started, or what brought it on. Or whether they were bits of people she knew.

If you could understand what those years were like, she told Colette, you’d think I’m quite a triumph really, the way I keep myself together. When I walk out onstage I love it, when I’ve got my dress, my hair done, my opals, and my pearls that I wear in the summer. It’s for them, for the audience, but it’s for me too.

She knew there was this struggle in a woman’s life—at least, there had been in her mum’s—just to be whole, to be clean, to be tidy, to keep your own teeth in your head; just to have a clean tidy house and not fag ash dropped everywhere and bottle tops underfoot: not to find yourself straying out into the street with no tights on. That’s why nowadays she can’t bear fluff on the carpet or a chip in her nail polish; that’s why she’s a fanatic about depilation, why she’s always pestering the dentist about cavities he can’t see yet; why she takes two baths a day, sometimes a shower as well; why she puts her special scent on every day. Maybe it’s an old-fashioned choice, but it was the first grown-up scent she bought for herself, as soon as she could afford one. Mrs. Etchells had remarked at the time, “Oh, that’s lovely, it’s your signature perfume.” The house at Aldershot smelled of male farts, stale sheets, and something else, not quite identifiable. Her mother said the smell had been there ever since they took the floorboards up: “Keith and them, you know, that crowd what used to drink down the Phoenix? What did they want to do that for, Gloria? Why did they want to take the floorboards up? Men, honestly! You never know what they’ll be up to next.”

Al told Colette, “One day I saw an eye looking at me. A human eye. It used to roll along the street. One day it followed me to school.”

“What, like ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’?”

“Yes, but it felt more like a dog.” Al shivered. “And then one day, one morning when I was leaving the house … .”

One day—she was in her school-leaving year—Al came out in the morning and saw a man watching her from the door of the chemist’s shop. His hands were plunged into his trouser pockets and he was jiggling an unlit cigarette between his lips.

COLETTE: It wasn’t this Nick character? The one in the kitchen, the one who chased you with the belt?

ALISON: No, it wasn’t Nick.

COLETTE: But you had seen him before?

ALISON: Yes, yes, I had. But can we switch the tape off, please? Morris is threatening me. He doesn’t like me talking about the early days. He doesn’t want it recorded.

That same afternoon, she came out of school with Lee Tooley and Catherine Tattersall. Tahera herself was close behind, linking arms with Nicky Scott and Andrea Wossname. Tahera was still rich, small, and spotty—and now be-spectacled, since her dad, she said, had “read me the riot act.” Catherine had ginger curls and she was the girl who was most far behind in every subject, even farther behind than Alison. Lee was Catherine’s friend.

Morris was on the other side of the road, leaning against the window of the launderette. His eyes travelled over the girls. She went cold.

He was short, a dwarf nearly, like a jockey, and his legs were bowed like a jockey’s. She learned later he’d been more like normal height, at least five foot six, till his legs had been broken: in one of his circus feats, he’d said at first, but later he admitted it was in a gang feud.

“Come on,” she said. “Come on, Andrea. Hurry up. Come on, Lee.”