Beyond Black: A Novel

professional skills whatever, and all I have to listen to is you rabbitting on to dead people I can’t see.”

Alison said gently, “I’m sorry if it seems as if I don’t appreciate you. I do remember, I know what my life was like when I was alone. I do remember, and I value everything you do.”

“Oh, stop it. Burbling like that. Being professional.”

“I’m trying to be nice. I’m just trying—”

“That’s what I mean. Being nice. Being professional. It’s all the same to you. You’re the most insincere person I know. It’s no use pretending to me. I’m too close. I know what goes on. You’re rotten. You’re a horrible person. You’re not even normal.”

There was a silence. Alison picked up the cards, dabbing each one with a damp fingertip. After a time she said, “I don’t expect you to mow the lawn.”

Silence.

“Honest, Col, I don’t.”

Silence.

“Can I be professional for a moment?”

Silence.

“The Hermit, reversed, suggests that your energy could be put to better use.”

Colette sniffed. “So what shall we do?”

“You could ring up a gardening service. Get a quote. For, let’s say, a fortnightly cut through the summer.” She added, smiling, “I expect they’d send a man.”

A thought about the garden had gone through her head: it will be nice for the dogs. Her smile faded. She pushed the thought violently away, seeing in her mind the waste ground behind her mother’s house at Aldershot.

Colette had taken on the task of contacting Al’s regular clients, to let them know about the move. She made a pretty lilac-coloured card, with the new details, which they handed out to contacts at their next big Psychic Fayre. In return they got cards back. “You’ll want a bit of Goddess Power, I expect,” said a nice woman in a ragged pullover, as she unloaded her kit from her beat-up old van. “You’ll want to come into alignment with the Path.” When they saw her next she was wearing a hairpiece and a push-up bra, charging forty pounds and calling herself Siobhan, palms and clairvoyance.

“Shall I come up and do your feng shui?” Mandy Coughlan asked. “It’s nice that you’re nearer to Hove.”

Cara rolled her eyes. “You’re not still offering feng shui? Are you getting any uptake? I’m training as a vastu consultant. It’s five thousand years old. This demon falls to earth, right? And you have to see which way his head comes down and where his feet are pointing. Then you can draw a mandala. Then you know which way the house should go.”

“It’s a bit late,” Al said. “It’s finished and we’ve moved in.”

“No, but it can still apply. You can fit your existing property into the grid. That’s advanced, though. I’ve not got up to that yet.”

“Well, come round when you do,” Al said.

Al said, I don’t want the neighbours to know what we do. Wherever I’ve lived I’ve kept away from the neighbours, I don’t want this lot around asking me to read their herbal teabags. I don’t want them turning up on our doorstep saying, you know what you told me, it hasn’t come true yet, can I have my money back? I don’t want them watching me and commenting on me. I want to be private.

The development progressed piecemeal, the houses at the fringes going up before the middle was filled in. They would look over to the opposite ridge, against the screen of pines, and see the householders running out into the streets, or where the streets would be, fleeing from gas leaks, floods, and falling masonry. Colette made tea for their next-door neighbours in the Beatty when their kitchen ceiling came down in its turn; Al was busy with a client.

“Are you sisters?” Michelle asked, standing in the kitchen and jiggling an infant up and down on her hip.

Colette’s eyes grew wide. “Sisters? No.”

“There, Evan,” she said to her husband. “Told you they couldn’t be. We thought perhaps one of you wasn’t staying. We thought perhaps she was helping the other one settle in.”

Colette said, “Are those boys or girls?”

“One of each.”

“Oh. But which is which?”

“You work at home?” Evan asked. “A contractor?”

“Yes.” He was waiting. She said, flustered. “I’m in communications.”

“British Telecom?”

“No.”

“It’s so confusing now,” Michelle said. “All these different tariffs you can go on. What’s the cheapest for phoning my nan in Australia?”

“That’s not my side of it,” Colette said.

“And what does your—your friend—do?”

“Forecasting,” Colette said. For a moment, she began to enjoy herself.

“Met Office, eh?” Evan said. “Bracknell, aren’t they? Bloody murder, getting onto the M3. Bet you didn’t know that till you moved in, eh? Three-mile tailback every morning. Should have done your research, eh?”