Beyond Black: A Novel

Oh, she says that now. But honestly, when you let them move in, they’re like leeches, they’re like—whatever, whatever it is, that’s at you twenty-four hours a day. Actually my mum said as much. She warned me, well, she tried to warn me, but you don’t take any notice, do you? Did you know I was born the night that Kennedy was shot? Well, that dates me! (Mandy, in Al’s mind, laughed shakily.) No point trying to keep secrets from you, Al! The point is, my mum—you know she was like me, Natasha, Psychic to the Stars, and my grandma was Natasha, Psychic to the Tsars—this man she was with then, when I was born, he said, didn’t you know anything about it, doll? Couldn’t you of—oh, he was ignorant in his speech—couldn’t you of prevented it? My mum said, what do you want me to do, ring up the White House, with my feet up in stirrups and this withered old nun shouting in my ear, Push, Mother, push?

Nun? Alison was surprised. Are you a Catholic, Mandy?

No, Russian Orthodox. But you know what I mean, don’t you? About a relationship with the laity. They expect too much.

I know they do. But Mandy, I need someone, someone with me. A friend.

Of course you do. Mandy’s voice softened. A friend. A live-in friend. I’m not judgemental, God knows. Takes all sorts. Live and let live. Who am I to moralize? Al, you can tell me. We go back, you and me. You want a little love in your life, yes you do, you do.

Mandy, do you know the pleasures of lesbian anal sex? No. Nor me. Nor any other pleasures. With Morris around I really need some sort of fanny guard. You know what they do, don’t you—the guides—while you’re asleep? Creepy-creepy. Creak at the door, then a hand on the duvet, a hairy paw tugging the sheet. I know you thought Lug and Glug tried it on, though you say you had been taking Nytol so were a bit confused at being woken and you suspect it may well have been Simon, judging by the smell. It’s difficult to say, isn’t it? What kind of violation, spirit or not spirit. Especially if your boyfriend has a small one. I am fairly confident that Morris, when it comes down to it, he can’t—not with me, anyway. But what gets to me is all this back-alley masculinity, all this beer and belching and scratching your belly, billiards and darts and minor acts of criminal damage, I get tired of being exposed to it all the time, and it was fine for you, I know you kicked out the druid and Lug and Glug, but they were Psychic Simon’s, and Morris is mine. And somehow I suppose, what it is, with Colette as my partner—with Colette as my business partner—I was hoping—oh, let me say it—I was aspiring—I want a way out of Aldershot, out of my childhood, away from my mother, some way to upscale, to move into the affluent world of the Berkshire or Surrey commuter, the world of the businessman, the entrepreneur: to imagine how the rich and clever die. To imagine how it is, if you’re senior in IT and your system crashes: or the finance director, when your last shekel is spent: or in charge of Human Resources, when you lose your claim to have any.

When she was packing for their trip to Nottingham, Colette came in. Al was wearing just a T-shirt, bending over the case. For the first time, Colette saw the backs of her thighs. “Christ,” she said. “Did you do that?”

“Me?”

“Like Di? Did you cut yourself?”

Alison turned back to her packing. She was perplexed. It had never occurred to her that she might have inflicted the damage herself. Perhaps I did, she thought, and I’ve just forgotten; there is so much I’ve forgotten, so much that has slipped away from me. It was a long time since she’d given much thought to the scars. They flared, in a hot bath, and the skin around them itched in hot weather. She avoided seeing them, which was not difficult if she avoided mirrors. But now, she thought, Colette will always be noticing them. I had better have a story because she will want answers.

She fingered her damaged flesh; the skin felt dead and distant. She remembered Morris saying, we showed you what a blade could do! For the first time she thought, oh, I see now, that was what they taught me; that was the lesson I had.

six

As they drove north, Colette said to Alison, “When you were a little girl, did you ever think you were a princess?”

“Me? God, no.”

“What did you think then?

“I thought I was a freak.”

And now? The question hung in the air. It was the day of Diana’s funeral, and the road was almost empty. Al had slept badly. Beyond the bedroom wall of the flat in Wexham, Colette had heard her muttering, and heard the deep groan of her mattress as she turned over and over in bed. She had been downstairs at seven-thirty, standing in the kitchen, bundled into her dressing gown, her hair straggling out of its rollers. “We may as well get on the road,” she said. “Get ahead of the coffin.”

By ten-thirty, crowds were assembling on the bridges over the M1, waiting for the dead woman to pass by on her way to her ancestral burial ground just off Junction 15A. The police were lining the route as if waiting for disaster, drawn up in phalanxes of motorcycles and cordons of watching vans. It was a bright, cool morning—perfect September weather.

“S’funny,” Colette said. “It’s only a fortnight ago, those pictures of her in the boat with Dodi, in her bikini. And we were all saying, what a slapper.”

Al opened the glove box and ferreted out a chocolate biscuit.

“That’s the emergency Kit-Kat,” Colette protested.

“This is an emergency. I couldn’t eat my breakfast.” She ate the chocolate morosely, finger by finger. “If Gavin had been the Prince of Wales,” she said, “do you think you’d have tried harder with your marriage?”

“Definitely.”

Colette’s eyes were on the road; in the passenger seat Alison twisted over her shoulder to look at Morris in the back, kicking his short legs and singing a medley of patriotic songs. As they passed beneath a bridge policemen’s faces peered down at them, pink sweating ovals above the sick glow of high-visability jackets. Stubble-headed boys—the type who, in normal times, heave a concrete block through your windscreen—now jabbed the mild air with bunches of carnations. A ragged bedsheet, grey-white, drifted down into their view. It was scrawled in crimson capitals, as if in virgin’s blood: DIANA, QUEEN OF OUR HEARTS.

“You’d think they’d show more respect,” Alison said. “Not flap about with their old bed linen.”