There was a silence. Into it, Cara said, “Whoops-a-daisy.”
Alison turned her head over her shoulder, and looked back, her face blank; did I do that? She stood, her head swivelled, too weary to move back to attend to the accident.
“I’ll get it,” Mandy said, hopping up, crouching neatly over the shards and splinters. Gemma turned her large cowlike eyes on Al and said, “All in, poor love,” and Silvana, walking back in at that moment, tut-tutted at them. “What’s this, Alison? Breaking up the happy home?”
“This is the fact,” Al said. She was rocking to and fro on the bed—she was trying to rub her feet but finding the rest of her body got in the way. “I feel used. All the time I feel used. I’m put up onstage for them to see me. I have to experience for them the things they don’t dare.” With a little moan, she gripped her ankle, and lolled backwards. “I’m like—I’m like some form of muck-raker. No, I don’t mean that. I mean I’m in there, in the pockets of their dirty minds. I’m up to my elbows, I’m like—”
“A sewage worker?” Colette suggested.
“Yes! Because the clients won’t do their own dirty work. They want it contracted out. They write me a check for thirty quid and expect me to clean their drains. You say help the police. I’ll tell you why I don’t help the police. First ’cos I hate the police. Then because—do you know where it gets you?”
“Al, I take it back. You don’t have to help the police.”
“That’s not the point. I have to tell you why not. You have to know.”
“I don’t have to.”
“You do. Or you’ll keep coming back to it again and again. Make yourself useful, Alison. Make yourself socially useful.”
“I won’t. I’ll never mention it.”
“You will. You’re that type, Colette, you can’t help mentioning and mentioning things. I’m not getting at you. I’m not criticizing. But you do mention, you are—Colette, you are, one of the world’s great mentioners.” Al uncurled herself with a whimper, and fell back on the bed. “Can you find my brandy?”
“You’ve had too much already.” Alison moaned. Colette added generously, “It’s not your fault. We should have stopped for an early lunch. Or I could easily have brought you in a sandwich. I did offer.”
“I can’t eat when I’m sitting. The cards won’t work if you smudge them.”
“No, you’ve said that before.”
“Not cheeseburgers. I don’t agree with it.”
“Nor me. It’s disgusting.”
“You get fingerprints on your crystals.”
“It’s hard to see how you could help it.”
“Don’t you ever drink too much, Col?”
“No, I hardly ever do.”
“Don’t you ever, ever? Didn’t you ever, ever make a mistake?”
“Yes. Not that kind, though.”
Then Al’s wrath seemed to deflate. Her body collapsed too, back onto the hotel bed, as if hot air were leaking from a balloon. “I do want that brandy,” she said, quietly and humbly.
She stretched out her legs. Over her own rolling contours she saw a distant view of feet. They lolled outwards as she watched: dead man’s joints. “Christ,” she said: and screwed up her face. The cousin of John Joseph was back, and talking in her ear: I don’t want the hospital to take my legs off; I’d rather be dead out there in the field and buried, than alive with no legs.
She lay whimpering up at the dim ceiling, until Colette sighed and rose. “Okay. I’ll get you a drink. But you’d do better with an aspirin and some peppermint foot lotion.” She tripped into the bathroom and took from the shelf above the washbasin a plastic tumbler in a polythene shroud. Her nails punctured it; like a human membrane, it adhered, it had to be drawn away, and when she rubbed her fingertips together to discard it, and held up the tumbler, she felt against her face a bottled breath, something secondhand and not entirely clean, something breathing up at her from the interior of the glass.
She screwed open the brandy bottle and poured two fingers. Al had rolled herself up in the duvet. Her plump pink feet stuck out of the end. They did look hot, swollen. Mischievously, Colette took hold of a toe and waggled it. “This little piggy went to market—”
Alison bellowed, in someone else’s voice, “In the name of Bloody Christ!”
“Sorr-ee!” Colette sang.
Alison’s arm fought its way out of her wrappings, and her fingers took a grip on the tumbler, buckling its sides. She wriggled so that her shoulders were propped against the headboard, and swallowed half her drink in the first gulp. “Listen, Colette. Shall I tell you about the police? Shall I tell you? Why I won’t have anything to do with them?”
“You’re clearly going to,” Colette said. “Look, wait a minute. Just hold on.”
Al began, “You know Merlyn?”
“Wait,” Colette said. “We should get it on tape.”
“Okay. But hurry up.”
Alison swallowed the rest of her drink. At once her face flushed. Her head was tipped back, her shiny dark hair spilling over the pillows. “So are you fixing it?”
“Yes, just a minute—okay.”
COLETTE: So, it’s sixth September 1997, ten thirty-three P.M., Alison is telling me—
ALISON: You know Merlyn, Merlyn with a
COLETTE: So?
ALISON: So that’s where it gets you, helping the police. He doesn’t even have a proper lavatory.
COLETTE: How tragic.
ALISON: You say that, Miss Sneery, but you wouldn’t like it. He lives outside Aylesbury. And do you know what it’s like, when you help the police?
Al’s eyes closed. She thought of reliving—over and over—the last few seconds of a strangled child. She thought of drowning in a car under the waters of the canal, she thought of waking in a shallow grave. She slept for a moment and woke in her duvet, wrapped in it like a sausage in its roll; she pushed up and out, fighting for space and air, and she remembered why she couldn’t breathe—it was because she was dead, because she was buried. She thought, I can’t think about it anymore, I’m at the end of—the end of my—and she released her breath with a great gasp: she heard
Colette was at her side, her voice nervous, oh God, Al, bending over her now. Colette’s breath was against her face, polythene breath, not unpleasant but not either quite natural. “Al, is it your heart?”
She felt Colette’s tiny bony hand sliding under her head, lifting it. As Colette’s wrist and forearm took the weight, she felt a sudden sense of release. She gasped, sighed, as if she were newborn. Her eyes snapped open: “Switch on the tape again.”
Breakfast time. Colette was down early. Listening to Alison while the tape ran—Alison crying like a child, talking in a child’s voice, replying to spirit questions Colette could not hear—she had found her own hand creeping towards the brandy bottle. A shot had stiffened her spine, but the effect didn’t last. She felt cold and pale now, colder and paler than ever, and she nearly threw up when she came into the breakfast room and saw Merlyn and Merlin stirring a ladle around in a vat of baked beans.
“You look as if you’ve been up all night,” Gemma said, picking at the horns of a croissant.
“I’m fine,” Colette snapped. She looked around; she couldn’t very well take a table by herself, and she didn’t want to sit with the boys. She pointed imperiously to the coffeepot on its hotplate, and the waitress hurried across with it. “Black is fine.”
“Are you lactose intolerant?” Gemma asked her. “Soya milk is very good.”
“I prefer black.”
