Beyond Black: A Novel

“Oh, come on!” Merlyn sneered. “Martyred with a tie pin? In antiquity they didn’t have tie pins. Brooches, I grant you.”

“Maybe it was me who did the martyring,” she said. “I don’t know, Merlyn. Look, good luck with your book. I hope you do get all that wealth. I do really. If you deserve it, of course. And I’m sure you do. Whatever. Whatever you think. When you leave your mobile home for Beverly Hills, let us have your new address.”

Colette came in five minutes later, with the shopping. “Do you want a fudge double-choc brownie?” she asked.

Al said, “Merlyn phoned. He’s doing a new book.”

“Oh yes?” Colette said. “You do like these yogurts, don’t you?”

“Are they high-fat?” Al said happily. Colette turned the pot about in her fingers, frowning. “They must be,” Al said, “if I like them. By the way, Merlyn asked me to go and live with him.”

Colette continued stacking the fridge. “Your chops are past their sell-by,” she said. She hurled them in the bin and said, “What? In his trailer?”

“I said no.”

“Who the fuck does he think he is?”

“He propositioned me,” Al said.

She wiped her hand down her skirt. “What about our book, Colette? Will it ever be finished?”

Colette had accumulated a little pile of printout upstairs; she guarded it, locking it in her wardrobe—a precaution Al found touching. The tapes still gave them trouble. Sometimes they would find their last session had been replaced entirely by gibberish. Sometimes their conversation was overlaid by squeaks, scrapes, and coughs, as if a winter audience were tuning up for a symphony concert.

COLETTE: So, do you regard it as a gift or more as a—what’s the opposite of a gift?

ALISON: Unsolicited goods. A burden. An infliction.

COLETTE: Is that your answer?

ALISON: No. I was just telling you some expressions.

COLETTE: So … ?

ALISON: Look, I just am this way. I can’t imagine anything else. If I’d had somebody around me with more sense when I was training, instead of Mrs. Etchells, I might have had a better life.

COLETTE: So it could be different?

ALISON: Yes. Given a more evolved guide.

COLETTE: You seem to be doing okay without Morris.

ALISON: I told you I would.

COLETTE: After all, you’ve said yourself, a lot of it is psychology.

ALISON: When you say psychology, you’re calling it cheating.

COLETTE: What would you call it?

ALISON: You don’t call Sherlock Holmes cheating! Look, if you get knowledge, you have to use it however it comes.

COLETTE: But I’d rather think, in a way—let me finish—I’d rather think you were cheating, if I had your welfare at heart. Because a lot of people who hear voices, they get diagnosed and put in hospital.

ALISON: Not so much now. Because of cutbacks, you know? There are people who walk around believing all sorts of things. You see them on the streets.

COLETTE: Yes, but that’s just a policy. That doesn’t make them sane.

ALISON: I make a living, you see. That’s the difference between me and the people who are mad. They don’t call you mad, if you’re making a living.

Sometimes Colette would leave the tape running without telling Al. There was some obscure idea in her mind that she might need a witness. That if she had a record she could make Al stick to any bargains she made; or that, in an unwary moment while she was out of the house, Al might record something incriminating. Though she didn’t know what her crime might be.

COLETTE: My project for the new millennium is to manage you more efficiently. I’m going to set you monthly targets. It’s time for blue-skies thinking. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be at least ten percent more productive. You’re sleeping through the night now, aren’t you? And possibly I could handle a more proactive role. I could pick up the overflow clients. Just the ones who require fortune-telling. After all, you can’t really tell the future, can you? The cards don’t know it.

ALISON: Most people don’t want to know about the future. They just want to know about the present. They want to be told they’re doing all right.

COLETTE: Nobody ever told me I was doing all right. When I used to go to Brondesbury and places.

ALISON: You didn’t feel helped, you didn’t feel you’d had any emotional guidance?

COLETTE: No.

ALISON: When I think back to those days, I think you were trying to believe too much. People can’t believe everything at once. They have to work up to it.

COLETTE: Gavin thought it was all a fraud. But then Gavin was stupid.

ALISON: You know, you still talk about him a lot.

COLETTE: I don’t. I never talk about him.