Beyond Black: A Novel

“Dirty linen,” Colette said. “She washed her dirty linen … . it comes back on you in the end.”

They sped a mile or two in silence.

“I mean it’s not as if it’s exactly a surprise. You didn’t expect it to last, did you? Not as if she was exactly stable. If she’d been in real life, she’d have been just the sort of slag who’d end up with her arms and legs in left- luggage lockers and her head in a bin bag in Walthamstow.”

“Shh!” Al said. “She might be listening. She’s not gone yet, you know, not as far as I—as far as we’re concerned.”

“Do you think you might get a message from Dodi? No, I forgot, you don’t do ethnics, do you?”

At each bridge they glanced up. The crowds thickened. As they crossed the border into Northamptonshire, a leather-jacketed man was waving the Stars and Stripes. The hitchhikers lurking by the slip roads had tied black bands around their sleeves.

Alison hummed along with Morris, who was doing “Land of Our Fathers.” She struggled to find loyalty within herself: loyalty, compassion, something other than mere fatigue at the thought of the trouble Diana was going to cause her. “Of course,” she said, “she was against land mines.”

“That doesn’t seem much to be against,” Colette said. “Not exactly sticking your neck out, is it? Not like being against … dolphins.”

Silence within the car: except that Morris, in the back, had progressed to “Roll Out the Barrel.” A helicopter whirled overhead, monitoring the near-empty road.

“We’re much too early,” Colette said. “Our room won’t be ready. Do you want to stop for a wee? Or a proper breakfast? Could you manage a fry-up?”

Al thought, when I was awake in the night, I was so cold. Being cold makes you feel sick; or does feeling sick make you cold? Nothing to be hoped for from days like these, except nausea, cramps, shortness of breath, acceleration of the pulse, gooseflesh, and a leaden tinge to the skin.

Colette said, “Five miles, shall I pull in? Make your mind up, yes or no?”

Morris, at once, stopped singing and began agitating for his comfort stop. He showed an unhealthy interest in gents’ toilets: when he swarmed back into the car after a break at a service area, you could catch the whiff of piss and floral disinfectant from the crepe soles of his shoes. He liked to creep around the parked cars, pulling off hubcaps and bowling them like hoops among the feet of their returning owners. He would double up with laughter as the punters stood jaw dropped at the sight of the metal discs, spinning of their own volition, clattering to rest amid the overspill of polystyrene from the litter bins. Sometimes he would go into the shop and pull the newspapers from their racks, tossing top-shelf magazines into the wire baskets of respectable dads queuing with their families for giant packs of crisps. He would plunge his paw into the pick ’n’ mix sweets and stuff his bulging jaw. He would snatch from the shelves of travellers’ supplies a tartan box of choc-chip shortbread or traditional motorway fudge; then munching, spitting, denouncing it as ladies’ pap, he would head for the lorry park, for the caff where men’s men swigged from mugs of strong tea.

He hoped, always, to see somebody he knew, Aitkenside or Bob Fox or even bloody MacArthur, “though if I see MacArthur,” he’d say, “the ruddy swindler’ll wish he’d never been born, I’ll creep up on his blind side and twist his head off.” He would sneak around the parked-up rigs, bouncing himself on the bumper bars to snap off windscreen wipers; through the gaps in frilled curtains, he would peep in at the private interiors where tattooed drivers snored against flowered cushions, where hands rubbed lonely crotches: ooh, sissy-boy, Morris would jeer, and sometimes a man stirred from his doze and jolted awake, thinking for a moment that he had seen a yellow face staring in at him, lips drawn back in a grimace to show yellow fangs, like those of an ape behind toughened glass. I was dreaming, the man would tell himself: I was dreaming, what brought that on?

Truth was, he longed for a friend; it was no life, holed up with a bunch of women, always squawking and making leaflets. “Oh, what shall we have,” he mimicked, “shall we have a flower, a rose is nice, a dove of peace is nice, shall we have a dove of peace with a flower in its mouf?” Then would come Colette’s higher, flatter voice. “Beak, Alison, a beak’s what birds have.” Then Alison, “It doesn’t sound so nice, bill’s nicer, doesn’t a dove have a bill?” and Colette’s grudging, “You could be right.”

Bill’s nice, is it, he would jeer, from his perch on the back of the sofa: “bill’s nice, you should see the bloody bills I’ve mounted up, I could tell you about bills, Aitkenside owes me a pony, bloody Bill Wagstaffe, he owes me. I’ll give him Swan of bloody Avon, I put him on a florin at Doncaster only to oblige, goo-on, he says, goo-on, I’ll give you ’alf Morris he says if she romps home, romp, did she bloody romp, she ran like the clappers out of hell, dropped dead two hours after in her trailer, but san-fairy-ann, what’s that to me, and where’s my fiver? Then he’s explainin, ooh Morris, the trouble is I’m dead, the trouble is there’s a steward’s enquiry, the trouble is my pocket got frayed, the trouble is it must of fallen out me pocket of me pantaloons and bloody Kyd snapped it up, I say, then you get after Kyd and break his legs or I will, he says the trouble is he’s dead he ain’t got no legs, I says William old son don’t come that wiv me, break him where ’is legs would be.”

When he thought of the debts he had incurred, of the injuries done and what was rightfully owed him, he would run after Alison, agitated: after his hostess, his missus. Al would be in the kitchen making a toasted sandwich. He was eager to press on her the weight of his injustices, but she would say to him, get away, Morris, get your fingers out of that lo-fat cheddar. He wanted a man’s life, men’s company, and he would creep around the lorry park waving, gesturing, looking for his mates, making the secret signal that men make to other men, to say they want a chin-wag and a smoke, to say they’re lonely, to say they want company but they’re not like that. Bloody Wagstaffe were like that, if you ask me, he would tell Alison, but she would say, who? Him in pantaloons, he’d say. Come on, I wasn’t born yesterday, anybody showing his legs like that ’as got to be of the fairy persuasion. And again she’d say, who? dabbing up a shaving of cheese with her finger, and he’d say, Wagstaffe, he’s bloody famous, you must have heard of him, he’s coining it, he’s got his name in bloody lights and what do I get? Not even me stake money back. Not even me florin.

So in the caff at the lorry park he would roll between the tables, saying, “’scuse me mate, ’scuse me mate”— because he wanted to be polite—“have you seen Aitkenside around here? Cos Aitkenside he used to drive a forty- two-tonner, and he ’ad this belly dancer tattooed on his back, he got it when he were in Egypt, he were in the forces, he were stationed overseas, Aitken-side. And he’s a mermaid on his thigh, not that I seen his thigh, I’m not of that persuasion, don’t get me wrong.” But much as he tried to engage them, much as he thrust his face into theirs, much as he interposed himself between them and their All Day breakfasts, so much did they ignore him, freeze him, give him the elbow and the old heave-ho. So he would wander out, disconsolate, into the open air, sucking up from between his fingers a sausage he had snatched—call this a sausage, it’s not what I call a sausage, bleeding yankee-doodle pap, how can you have a sausage wiv no skin?—and around the tankers and the trucks he would slide on his crepe-soled feet, calling, “Aitkenside, MacArthur, are you there, lads?”

For in truth he intended to cripple them but after he had crippled them he meant to make his peace. For they were dead too and in the halls of the dead they were in different halls. And in the lorry parks of the dead they had