Beyond Black: A Novel

“She does. But you wouldn’t understand.”

“I always thought you were a bit of a lezzie, Col. I’d have thought so when I first saw you, only you came down the bar—that hotel, where was it, France—you walked straight up to me with your tongue hanging out. So I thought, could be wrong on this one.”

She turned her back and walked away from him. He called, “Colette …” She turned. He said, “We could meet up for a drink, sometime. Not her, though. She can’t come.”

Her mouth opened—she stared at him—a lifetime of insults swallowed, insults swallowed and digested, gushed up from deep inside her and jammed in her throat. She hauled in her breath, her hands formed claws; but the only words that came out were “Get stuffed.” As she dived into the store, she caught sight of herself in a mirror, her skin mottled with wrath and her eyes popping, and for the first time she understood why when she was at school they had called her Monster.

The following week, in Walton-on-Thames, they got into a parking dispute with a man in a multistorey car park. Two cars nosing for the same space; it was just one of those crude suburban flare-ups, which men easily forget but which make women cry and shake for hours.

Nine times out of ten, in these spats, Al would put her restraining hand on Colette’s hand, as it tightened on the wheel, and say, forget it, let him have what he wants, it doesn’t matter. But this time, she whizzed down her window and asked the man, “What’s your name?”

He swore at her. She was inured to bad language, from the fiends; but why should you expect it from such a man, an Admiral Drive sort of man, a mail-order-jacket sort of man, a let’s-get-out-the-barbecue sort of man?

She said to him, “Stop, stop, stop! You should have more on your mind than cursing women in car parks. Go straight home and boost your life insurance. Clean up your computer and wipe off those kiddie pictures, that’s not the sort of thing you want to leave behind you. Ring up your GP. Ask for an early appointment and don’t take no for an answer. Tell them, left lung. They can do a lot these days, you know. If they catch these things before they spread.” She whizzed up the window again. The man mouthed something; his car squealed away.

Colette slotted them neatly into the disputed space. She glanced sideways at Al. She didn’t dare question her. They were running late, of course; they did need the space. She said to Al, testing her, “I wish I had done that.” Al didn’t answer.

When they got home that night and had poured a drink, she said, “Al, the man in the car park … .”

“Oh, yes,” Al said. “Of course, I was just guessing.” She added, “About the pornography.”

These days when they travelled there was blissful silence from the back of the car. Didcot and Abingdon, Blewberry and Goring: Shinfield, Wonersh, Long Ditton, and Lightwater. They knew the lives they glimpsed on the road were lives more ordinary than theirs. They saw an ironing board in a lean-to, waiting for its garment. A grandma at a bus stop, stooping forward to pop a biscuit into a child’s open mouth. Dirty pigeons hanging in the trees. A lamp shining behind a black hedge. Underpasses dropping away, lit by dim bulbs: Otford, Limpsfield, New Eltham, and Blackfen. They tried to avoid the high streets and shopping malls of the denatured towns, because of the bewildered dead clustered among the dumpsters outside the burger bars, clutching door keys in their hands or queuing with their lunch boxes where the gates of small factories once stood, where machines once whirred and chugged behind sooty panes of old glass. There are thousands of them out there, so pathetic and lame-brained that they can’t cross the road to get where they’re going, dithering on the kerbs of new arterial roads and bypasses, as the vehicles swish by: congregating under railway arches and under the stairwells of multistorey car parks, thickening the air at the entrance to underground stations. If they brush up against Alison they follow her home, and start pestering her the first chance they get. They elbow her in the ribs with questions, always questions; but never the right ones. Always, where’s my pension book, has the Number 64 gone, are we having a fry-up this morning? Never, am I dead? When she puts them right on that, they want to go over how it happened, trying to glean some sense out of it, trying to throw a slippery bridge over the gap between time and eternity. “I had just plugged in the iron,” a woman would say, “and I was just starting on the left sleeve of Jim’s blue striped shirt … of his … our Jim … his stripes … .” And her voice will grow faint with bafflement until Alison explains to her, puts her in the picture, and “Oh, I see now,” she will say, quite equable, and then, “I get it. These things happen, don’t they? So I’ll not take up your time any further. I’m very much obliged. No thanks, I’ve my own tea waiting for me when I get home. I wouldn’t want to cut into your evening … .”

And so she passes, her voice fading until she melts into the wall.

Even the ones who went over with plenty of warning liked to recall their last hours on the ward, dwelling in a leisurely fashion on which of their family showed up for the deathbed and which of them left it too late and got stuck in traffic. They wanted Alison to put tributes in the newspaper for them—Thanks, sincerely meant, to the staff at St. Bernard’s—and she promised she would, for I’ll do anything, she would say, that will make them lie down, wait quietly and waft to their next abode instead of making themselves at home in mine. They will finish their ramblings with, “Well, that’s all from me for now,” and “Hoping this finds you well,” and “Let me have your family news soon”: sometimes with a quiet, stoical, “I ought to go now.” Sometimes, when they bob back, with a cheery, “Hello, it’s me,” they are claiming to be Queen Victoria, or their own older sister, or a woman who lived next door to them before they were born. It’s not intentional fraud; it’s more that a mingling and mincing and mixing of personality goes on, the fusing of personal memory with the collective. You see, she explains to Colette, you and me, when we come back, we could manifest as one person. Because these last years, we’ve shared a lot. You could come back as my mum. I could come over, thirty years from now, to some psychic standing on a stage somewhere, and claim I was my own dad. Not that I know who my dad is, but I will one day, perhaps after I’ve passed.

But Colette would say, panicked for a moment, stampeded into belief, what if I die? Al, what shall I do, what shall I do if I die?

Al would say to her, keep your wits about you. Don’t start crying. Don’t speak to anybody. Don’t eat anything. Keep saying your name over and over. Close your eyes and look for the light. If somebody says, follow me, ask to see their ID. When you see the light, move towards it. Keep your bag clamped to your body—where your body would be. Don’t open your bag, and remember the last thing you should do is pull out a map, however lost you feel. If anybody asks you for money ignore them, push past. Just keep moving towards the light. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t let anyone stop you. If somebody points out there’s paint on your coat or bird droppings in your hair, just keep motoring, don’t pause, don’t look left or right. If a woman approaches you with some snotty-nosed kid, kick her out of the way. It sounds harsh, but it’s for your own safety. Keep moving. Move towards the light.

And if I lose it? Colette would say. What if I lose the light and I’m wandering around in a fog, with all these people trying to snatch my purse and my mobile? You can always come home, Alison would tell her. You know your home now, Admiral Drive. I’ll be here to explain it all to you and put you on the right path so that you can manage the next bit, and then when I come over in the fullness of time we can get together and have a coffee and maybe share a house again if we think it will work out.