Beyond Black: A Novel

“That’s not an exam, though, is it? Did you—”

“What,” Al said, “me have a guinea pig? Christ, no, my mum would have barbecued it. We didn’t have pets. We had dogs. But not pets.”

“No,” Cara said, her brow crinkling, “I meant, did you get any exams, Al?”

“I tried. They entered me. I turned up. I had a pencil and everything. But there’d always be some sort of disturbance in the hall.”

Gemma said, “I was barred from biology for labelling a drawing in obscene terms. But I didn’t do it myself. I don’t think I even knew half those words.”

There was a murmur of fellow feeling. Alison said, “Colette didn’t have those problems, she’s got exams, I need somebody brighter than me in my life.” Her voice rattled on: Colette, my working partner … my partner, not assistant: she broke off, and laughed uncertainly.

Raven said, “Do you know that for every person on this side, there’s thirty-three on the other?”

“Really?” Gemma said. “Thirty-three airside, for every one earthside?”

Colette thought, in that case, I’m backing the dead.

Merlin and Merlyn came back from the pub: boring on with men’s talk. I use Transit Forecaster, I find it invaluable oh yes, I can run it on my old Amstrad, what’s the point of pouring money into the pockets of Bill Gates?

Colette leaned over to put him right on the matter, but Merlyn caught her by the arm and said, “Have you read The Truth About Exodus? Basically it’s how they found this bit of the Bible written on a pyramid, inscribed on the side. And how, contrary to popular belief, the Egyptians actually, they actually paid the Israelis to leave. And they used the money for making the ark of the covenant. Jesus was an Egyptian, they’ve found scrolls, he was actually of pharaoh descent. And it’s why they walk round and round at Mecca. Like they used to walk around the Great Pyramid.”

“Oh, did they? I see,” Colette said. “Well, you’ve put me right, there, Merlyn, I always did wonder.”

“Mountain K2, Search for the Gods, that’s another good one. The Lost Book of Enki. That’s one you’ve got to get. He’s this god from the planet Nibiru. You see, they were from space, and they needed gold from the earth to enrich the dying atmosphere of their planet, so they saw that it was on earth, gold was, so they needed somebody to mine it for them, so they therefore created man … .”

Al’s eyes were distant; she was back at school, back in the exam hall. Hazel Leigh opposite, working her red ponytail round and round in her fingers till it was like a twist of barley sugar—and peppermints, you were allowed to suck peppermints—you weren’t allowed much, not a fag: when Bryan lit up Miss Adshead was down the hall like a laser beam.

All during the maths paper there was a man chattering in her ear. It wasn’t Morris, she knew it was not by his accent, and his whole general tone and bearing, by what he was talking about, and by how he was weeping: for Morris could not weep. The man, the spirit, he was talking just below the threshold, retching and sobbing. The questions were algebra; she filled in a few disordered letters, a, b, x, z. When she reached question five the man began to break through. He said, look for my cousin John Joseph, tell our Jo that my hands are bound with wire. In Spirit, even now, he had a terrible pain where the bones of his feet used to be, and that’s what he relied on her to pass on to his cousin, the knowledge of this pain: tell our Jo, tell him it was that bastard that drives the Escort with the rusty wing, that cunt that always has a cold, him … and when in the end the crushing of the rifle butts and the men’s boots seemed to drive her own feet through the scuffed vinyl tiles of the exam room, she had let the letters freely intermingle on the page, so that when Miss Adshead came to flick her paper into the pile there was nothing on it but thin pen scrawls, like the traces and loops of the wire with which the hands of this total stranger had been bound.

“Alison?” She jumped. Mandy had taken her by the wrist; she was shaking her, bringing her back to the present. “You all right, Al?” Over her shoulder she said, “Cara, go get her a stiff drink and a chicken leg. Al? Are you back with us, love? Is she pestering you? The princess?”

“No,” Al said. “It’s paramilitaries.”

“Oh, them,” Gemma said. “They can be shocking.”

“I get Cossacks,” Mandy said. “Apologizing for, you know—what they used to do. Cleaving. Slashing. Scourging peasants to death. Terrible.”

“What’s Cossacks?” Cara said, and Mandy said, “They are a very unpleasant kind of mounted police.”

Raven said, “I never get anything like that. I have led various pacific lives. That’s why I’m so karmically adjusted.”

Al roused herself. She rubbed the wounds on her wrists. Live in the present moment, she told herself. Nottingham. September. Funeral Night. Ten minutes to ten. “Time for bed, Col,” she said.

“We’re not watching the highlights?”

“We can watch them upstairs.” She pushed herself up from the sofa. Her feet seemed unable to support her. An effort of will saw her limp across the room, but she had wobbled as she took the weight on her feet, and her skirt flicked a wineglass from a low table, sent it spinning away from her, the liquid flying across the room and splashing red down the paintwork. It flew with such force it looked as if someone had flung it, a fact that did not escape the women; though it escaped Raven, who was slumped in his chair, and hardly twitched as the glass smashed.

There was a silence. Into it, Cara said, “Whoops-a-daisy.”

Alison turned her head over her shoulder, and looked back, her face blank; did I do that? She stood, her head swivelled, too weary to move back to attend to the accident.

“I’ll get it,” Mandy said, hopping up, crouching neatly over the shards and splinters. Gemma turned her large cowlike eyes on Al and said, “All in, poor love,” and Silvana, walking back in at that moment, tut-tutted at them. “What’s this, Alison? Breaking up the happy home?”

“This is the fact,” Al said. She was rocking to and fro on the bed—she was trying to rub her feet but finding the rest of her body got in the way. “I feel used. All the time I feel used. I’m put up onstage for them to see me. I have to experience for them the things they don’t dare.” With a little moan, she gripped her ankle, and lolled backwards. “I’m like—I’m like some