But what if you go before me, Colette would say, what if we go together, what if we’re on the M25 and a wind blows up and what if it’s a mighty wind and we’re blown into the path of a lorry?
Alison would sigh and say, Colette, Colette, we all get there in the end. Look at Morris! We end up in the next world raw, indignant, baffled or furious, and ignorant, all of us: but we get sent on courses. Our spirits move, given time, to a higher level, where everything becomes clear. Or so people tell me, anyway. Hauntings can persist for centuries, for sure, but why wouldn’t they? People have no sense of urgency, airside.
Inside the Collingwood the air was serene. Weekly, Colette polished the crystal ball. You had to wash it in vinegar and water and rub it up with a chamois. Al said, the tools of the trade are what keep you on track. They focus the mind and direct the energy. But they have no magic in themselves. Power is contained in domestic objects, in the familiar items you handle every day. You can look into the side of an aluminium pan and see a face that’s not your own. You can see a movement on the inside of an empty glass.
The days, months, blurred into one. The venues offered a thousand grannies with buttons missing; a thousand hands raised. Why are we here? Why must we suffer? Why must children suffer? Why does God mistreat us? Can you bend spoons?
Smiling, Al said to her questioner, “I should give it a go, shouldn’t I? Give me something to do in the kitchen. Stop me raiding the fridge.”
The truth was—though she never admitted it to anyone—that she had once tried it. She was against party tricks, and generally against showing off and being wasteful, and wrecking your cutlery seemed to come under those heads. But one day at Admiral Drive the urge overcame her. Colette was out: all well and good. She tiptoed into the kitchen and slid out a drawer. It snagged, bounced back. The potato masher had rolled forward spitefully and was catching its rim on the front of the unit. Unusually irritated, she slid in her hand, dragged the utensil out and threw it across the kitchen. Now she was in the mood for spoon-bending, she wasn’t to be thwarted.
Her hand jumped for the knives. She picked one out, a blunt round-edged table knife. She ran her fingers around the blade. She put it down. Picked up a soupspoon. She knew how to do this. She held it loosely, fingers caressing its neck, her will flowing from her spinal column sweetly into the pads of her fingers. She closed her eyes. She felt a slight humming behind them. Her breathing deepened. She relaxed. Then her eyes snapped open. She looked down. The spoon, unaltered, smiled up at her; and suddenly she understood it, she understood the essence of spoonhood. Bending it wasn’t the point, anymore. The point was that she would never feel the same about cutlery. Something stirred deep in her memory, as if she had been cross-wired, as if some old source of feeling had been tapped. She laid the spoon to rest, reverently, snug inside a fellow spoon. As she closed the drawer her eye caught the glint of the paring knife, a more worthwhile blade. She thought, I understand the nature of it. I understand the nature of spoon and knife.
Later, Colette picked up the potato masher from where it had fallen. “It’s bent,” she said.
“That’s all right. I did it.”
“Oh. You’re sure?”
“Just a little experiment.”
“I thought for a minute it must be Morris come back.” Colette hesitated. “You would tell me, wouldn’t you?”
But truly, there was no sign of him. Al sometimes wondered how he was doing on his course. It must be that he’s going to a higher level, she reasoned, you wouldn’t get sent on a course to go to a lower level.
“No, not even Morris,” Colette said, when she mentioned it. If Morris were on a lower level, he’d be no good, he’d not even scrape up to standard as an ordinary spirit, let alone get employed anywhere as a guide. He’d be just an agglomeration of meaninglessness, a clump of cells rolling around through the netherworld.
“Colette,” she said, “when you’re sweeping, have a look at the vacuum cleaner bag from time to time. If you find any big lumps you can’t account for, check it out with me, okay?”
Colette said, “I don’t think that sifting through the vacuum cleaner bag was in my job description.”
“Well, write it in, there’s a good girl,” Al said.
There are some spirits, she knew, who are willing to sink: who are so tenacious of existence that they will assume any form, however debased, ridiculous, and filthy. That was why Al, unlike her mother, made sure to keep a clean house. She thought that she and Colette, between them, could keep down the lower sort, who drift in dust rolls under beds and make streaks and finger-prints on windowpanes. They cloud mirrors and sometimes vanish with a chortle, leaving the mirror clear and unkind. They clump in hairbrushes, and when you comb them out, you think, can this thin grey frizz be mine?
Sometimes, when Alison came into a room, she thought the furniture had shifted slightly; but no doubt that was Colette, pushing it around as she cleaned. Her own boundaries seemed invisible, uncertain. Her core temperature tended to fluctuate, but there was nothing new in that. Her extremities drifted, in time and space. Sometimes she thought an hour, an afternoon, a day had gone missing. Less and less did she want to go out; her clients e-mailed her, the phone rang less often; Colette, who was restless, could always be persuaded to shop for them. It was the house’s silence that entranced her, lulled her. Her daydreams and night dreams ran together. She thought she saw two cars—trucks, really—parked outside the Collingwood; it was dark, Colette was in bed, she pulled her coat around her shoulders and went outside.
The carriage lamp flared into life, and the thump of a hi-fi came from a Hawkyns. There was no one around. She looked into the cab of one truck and it was empty. The cab of the other was empty too, but in the back there was a grey blanket tied with twine, covering something irregular and lumpy.
She shivered, and went back inside. When she woke the next morning the trucks had gone.
She wondered about them; whose were they? Had they not looked a bit old-fashioned? She wasn’t good on makes of cars, but there was something about their lines that suggested her childhood. “Colette,” she said, “when you’re at Sainsbury’s, you wouldn’t pick up a car magazine? One of those with lots and lots of pictures of every car anyone might want?” She thought, at least I could exclude all modern makes.
Colette said, “Are you winding me up?”
“What?” she said.
“Gavin!”
