Beyond Black: A Novel

MacArthur in this neck of the woods, I’ll saw him off at the bloody knees. Let the bloody bastard venture, just let him. I’ll poke out his other eye.”

“Has MacArthur only one eye?”

“Oh, tee-bloody-hee,” Morris said. “Still, girl, you got paid out. You got a lesson, eh? They taught you what a blade could do.”

“I hope you’re not,” she said. “I hope you’re not my dad. I like you worst of anybody. I don’t want you anywhere near me. You stink of fags and beer.”

“I bin near you,” Morris said. “We all have.”

COLETTE: But after that, when Morris came along, you must have known that other people couldn’t see him, I mean you must have realized that you had psychic powers.

ALISON: You see, I was ignorant. I didn’t know what a spirit guide was. Until I met Mrs. Etchells, I had no idea—

COLETTE: We’re going to go into that, aren’t we? Mrs. Etchells?

ALISON: When?

COLETTE: Tonight, if you’ve got the stamina.

ALISON: Can we eat first?

(click)

Pity Colette, who had to transcribe all this. “When you’re talking about Gloria,” she said, “I never know if she’s alive or dead.”

“No,” Al said. “Nor me.”

“But it worries me. I need to get it straight—for the book.”

“I’m telling you what I know.”

Was she? Or was she leaving things out? Sparing Colette’s feelings in some way, or testing her memory?

“These awful blokes,” Colette said, “all these fiends from Aldershot. I keep losing track of their names. Make me a list.”

Alison took a sheet of paper and wrote FIENDS FROM ALDERSHOT. “Let’s see … Donnie Aitkenside,” she said.

“The one who said he’d beat up your teacher?”

“Yes … well, and rape her, I think he was going to rape her too. There was MacArthur. Morris reckoned MacArthur was worse than most, but I dunno. There was Keith Capstick, that pulled the dog off me. And I thought he was my dad because he did that. But was he? I dunno.”

When she talks about them, Colette thought, she slips away somewhere: to a childhood country, where diction is slipshod. She said, “Al, are you writing this down?”

“You can see I’m not.”

“You wander off the point. Just make the list.”

Al sucked her pen. “There was this Pikey character, who was a horse dealer. I think he had relatives, cousins, up and down the country, you used to hear him talk about them, they might have come by but I don’t really know. And somebody called Bob Fox?”

“Don’t ask me! Get it on paper! What did he do, Bob Fox?”

“He tapped on the window. At my mum’s house. He did it to make you jump.”

“What else? He must have done something else?”

“Dunno. Don’t think he did. Then there was Nick, of course. The one with the empty matchbox, in the kitchen. Oh, wait, I remember now. Oh God, yes. I know where I saw him before. We had to go and collect him from the cop shop. They’d picked him up on the street, falling-down drunk. But they didn’t want to charge him, they just let him sober up, then they wanted rid of him because he’d put slime on the cell walls.”

“Slime?”

“And they didn’t want a heavy cleaning job. He was just lying there sliming everything, you see. He didn’t want to come out, so my mum had to go down and get him. They said—the police—they’d found her phone number in his wallet, so they sent a car to fetch her in, then she had to go down the cells. The desk sergeant said, a woman’s touch, tee-hee. He was being sarcastic. He said, he’ll be able to go now, won’t he, now he’s got his bike? My mum said, watch your lip, Little Boy Blue, or I’ll fatten it for you. He said, leave that kid here, you can’t take her down the cells. And my mum said, what, leave her here, so you can bloody touch her up? So she took me down to get Nick.”

Colette felt faint. “I wish I’d never started this,” she said.

“He came out on the street and he shouted, can’t I get drunk, same as anybody? My mum was trying to calm him down. She says, come back to our house.”

“And did he?”

“I expect. Look, Col, it was a long time ago.”

Colette wanted to ask, what kind of slime was it, on the cell walls? But then again, she didn’t want to ask.

COLETTE: Okay, so it’s eleven-thirty.

ALISON: P.M., that is.

COLETTE:—and we’re about to resume—

ALISON:—as I’ve now had a bottle of Crozes-Hermitage and feel able to continue reminiscing about my teenage years—