a size twenty and not ashamed of it. But your mum now, your mum, she says you’re letting yourself go, and that’s a shame, because you know you’re really—look at you, you’ve got such a lot going for you, lovely hair, lovely skin— well excuse me, but it seems to me your mum’s a plainspoken lady, so excuse me if I offend anybody, she’s saying, get up off your bum and go to the gym.”
This is Al’s public self: a little bit jaunty and a little bit crude, a bit of a schoolmistress and a bit of a flirt. She often speaks to the public about “my wicked sense of humour,” warning them not to take offence; but what happens to her sense of humour in the depth of the night, when she wakes up trembling and crying, with Morris crowing at her in the corner of the room?
Colette thought, you are a size 26 and you
“No,” Al was saying, “please give the mike back to this lady, I’m afraid I’ve embarrassed her and I want to put it right.” The woman was reluctant, and Al said to her neighbour, “Just hold that mike steady under her chin.” Then Alison told the fat woman several things about her mother, which she’d often thought but not liked to admit to. “Oh, and I have your granny. Your granny’s coming through. Sarah Anne? Now she’s an old soul,” Al said. “You were five when she passed, am I right?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Speak up, my love.”
“Small. I was small.”
“Yes, you don’t remember much about her, but the point is she’s never left you, she’s still around, looking after the family. And she likes those cabinets you’ve got—I can’t quite make this out—a new kitchen, is it?”
“Oh, my God. Yes,” the woman said. “Yes.” She shifted in her seat and turned bright red.
Al chuckled, indulging her surprise. “She’s often with you in that kitchen. And by the way, you were right not to go for the brushed steel, I know they tried to talk you into it, but it’s so over and done with, there’s nothing worse than a dated kitchen when you come to sell, and besides it’s such a harsh look at the heart of the home. Sarah Anne says, you won’t go wrong with light oak.”
They burst into applause: the punters, the trade. They are deeply appreciative of information about their kitchen fittings; they marvel at your uncanny knowledge of where they position their bread bin. This is how you handle them; you tell them the small things, the personal things, the things no one else could really know. By this means you make them drop their guard; only then will the dead begin to speak. On a good night, you can hear the scepticism leaking from their minds, with a low hiss like a tyre deflating.
Someone in uniform was trying to get through. It was a policeman, young and keen, with a flushed face; he was eager for promotion. She worked the rows, but no one would own him. Perhaps he was still earthside, employed at the local station; you did get these crossed wires, from time to time. Something to do with radio frequencies, perhaps?
“This lady, have you got ear trouble? Or ear trouble somewhere in the family?” Slowly, the barmaid lurched across the hall in her platform shoes, the mike held out at arm’s length.
“What?” the woman said.
“Ear trouble.”
“The boy next door to me plays football,” the woman said. “He’s done his knee up. He was getting in trim for the World Cup. Not that he’s playing in it. Only in the park. Their dog died last year, but I don’t think it had ear trouble.”
“No, not your neighbour,” Al insisted. “You, someone close to you.”
“I haven’t got anyone close to me.”
“What about throat trouble? Nose trouble? Anything in the ENT line at all? You have to understand this,” Al said, “when I get a message from Spirit World, I can’t give it back. I can’t pick and choose. Think of me as your answering machine. Imagine if people from Spirit World had phones. Now your answering machine, you press the button and it plays your messages back. It doesn’t wipe some out, on the grounds that you don’t need to know them.”
“And it records the wrong numbers, too,” said a pert girl near the front. She had her friends with her; their sniggers ruffled adjacent rows.
Alison smiled. It was for her to make the jokes; she wouldn’t be upstaged. “Yes, I admit we record the wrong numbers. And we record the nuisance calls, if you like to put it that way. I sometimes think they have telesales in the next world, because I never sit down with a nice cup of coffee without some stranger trying to get through. Just imagine—double glazing salesman … debt collectors …”
The girl’s smile faded. She tensed.
Al said, “Look, darling. Let me give you a word of advice. Cut up that credit card. Throw away those catalogues. You can break these spending habits—well, you must, really. You have to grow up and exercise some self-control. Or I can see the bailiffs in, before Christmas.”
Al’s gaze rested, one by one, on those who had dared to snigger; then she dropped her voice, whipped her attention away from the troublemaker, and became confidential with her audience.
“The point is this. If I get a message I don’t censor it. I don’t ask, do you need it? I don’t ask, does it make sense? I do my duty, I do what I’m here for. I put it out there, so the person it applies to can pick it up. Now people in Spirit World can make mistakes. They can be wrong, just like the living. But what I hear, I pass on. And maybe, you know, what I tell you may mean nothing to you at the time. That’s why I sometimes have to say to you, stay with that: go home: live with it. This week or next week, you’ll go, oh, I get it now! Then you’ll have a little smile, and think, she wasn’t such a fool, was she?” She crossed the stage; the opals blazed.
“And then again, there are some messages from Spirit World that aren’t as simple as they seem. This lady, for example—when I speak about ear trouble, what I may be picking up is not so much a physical problem—I might be talking about a breakdown in communication.” The woman stared up at her glassily. Al passed on.
“Jenny’s here. She went suddenly. She didn’t feel the impact, it was instantaneous. She wants you to know.”
