people. How did he lose his eye? Well, that’s another story. He blames that on a sailor too, but round here, we know he’s lying. And Morris gave a dirty laugh.
When spring came, the gardening service sent a man. A truck dropped him, and his mower, then rattled off. Colette went to the door to administer him. No use waiting for Al to do it.
“It’s only I don’t know how to start it?” he said. He stood pushing a finger under his woolly hat, as if, Colette thought, he were making some sort of secret sign to her.
She stared at him. “You don’t know how to start the mower?”
He said, “What do I look like, in this hat?”
“I can’t imagine,” she said.
“Do you think I look like a brickie?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“You can see ’em all over the place, they’re building walls.” He pointed. “Down there.”
“You’re soaked through,” Colette said, noticing this.
The man said, “No, it’s not up to much, is it, this cardigan, parka, jacket? I could do with a fleece.”
“A fleece wouldn’t keep the rain out.”
“I could get a plastic, a plastic to put over it.”
“Whatever you think best,” Colette said coldly.
The man trudged away. Colette shut the door.
Ten minutes later the doorbell rang. The man had pulled his hat over his eyes. He was standing on the doormat, dripping under the porch. “So, starting it? Could you?”
Colette’s eyes swept him, up and down. She saw with disgust that his toes were poking out of his shoes, waggling the cracked leather up and down. “Are you sure you’re qualified for this job?”
The man shook his head. “I’ve not been trained on a mower,” he said.
“Why did they send you?”
“I suppose they thought you could train me on it.”
“And why would they think that?”
“Well, you look a lovely girl.”
“Don’t try it on,” Colette said. “I’m ringing your manager.” She slammed the door.
Al came to the head of the stairs. She had been having a lie-down, after seeing a bereaved client. “Col?”
“Yes?”
“Was that a man?” Her voice was vague, sleepy.
“It was the gardening service. He was crap. He couldn’t start the mower.”
“So what happened?”
“So I told him to bugger off and I’m ringing them to complain.”
“What sort of man was he?”
“An idiot.”
“Young, old?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t look. He was wet. He had a hat on.”
In summer, they drove through countryside perfumed by the noxious vapours of pesticides and herbicides, and by the sweet cloud that lay over the golden fields of oil-seed rape. Their eyes streamed, their throats dried and tightened; Al groped in her bag for antiseptic lozenges. Autumn: she saw the full moon snared in the netting of a football field, caught there bulging, its face bruised. When a traffic snarl-up brought them to a halt, she noticed the trudging shopper with her grocery bags, leaning into the wind. She noticed the rotted wood of a balcony, London brick weeping soot, winter mould on a stack of garden chairs. A curve in the road, a pause at traffic lights, brings you close to another life, to an office window where a man leans on a filing cabinet in a crumpled shirt, as close as some man you know; while a van backs into the road, you halt, you are detained, and the pause makes you intimate with a man stroking his bald head, framed in the lighted cavity of his garage beneath the up-and-over door.
At journey’s end comes the struggle with randomly arriving trivia, zinging through the ether. You are going to get a new sofa. You are a very tenacious person. Morris was supposed to act as a sort of doorman, ushering the spirits and making them queue up, threatening them so they don’t all talk at once. But he seemed to have fallen into a prolonged sulk, since they moved to Admiral Drive. Nothing suited him, and he left her to be teased and tormented by Diana imitators, Elvis imitators, the petty dead purveying misinformation, working tricks and setting riddles. From her audiences, the same old questions: for example, is there sex in Spirit World?
She would answer, giggling, “There’s an elderly lady I know who’s very psychic, and I’ll tell you what she says: she says, there’s a tremendous amount of love in Spirit World, but there’s none of that funny stuff.”
It would get a laugh. The audience would relax. They didn’t really suppose there could be an answer to this question. But once when they got home, Colette had said, “Well, is there sex in Spirit World? I don’t want to know what Mrs. Etchells says, I want to know what you say.”
“Mostly, they don’t have body parts,” Al said. “Not as such. There are exceptions. There are some really low spirits that are—well, just genitals, really. The others, they just … they like to watch us doing it.”
“Then we can’t provide them with much entertainment,” Colette said.
