They travel: Orpington, Sevenoaks, Chertsey, Runnymede, Reigate, and Sutton. They strike out east of the Thames barrier, where travellers’ encampments huddle beneath tower blocks and seagulls cry over the floodplains, where the smell of sewage is carried on the cutting wind. There are flood-lights and bunkers, gravel pits and pallet yards, junctions where traffic cones cluster. There are featureless hangars with TO LET signs pinned to them, tyres spun away into shabby fields. Colette puts her foot down; they pass vehicles mounted on the backs of vehicles, locked in oily copulation. They pass housing developments just like theirs—“Look, portholes,” Al says—their dormers and their Juliet balconies staring out over low hills made of compacted London waste. They pass Xmas tree farms and puppy farms, barnyards piled with scrap. Pictures of salivating dogs are hung on wire fences, so that those who don’t read English get the point. Crosswinds rock them; cables lash across a fast sky. Colette’s radio is tuned to traffic reports—trouble at Trellick Tower, an insurmountable blockage afflicting the Kingston bypass. Al’s mind drifts, across the central reservation. She sees the walls of warehouses shining silver like the tinny armour of the tarot knights. She sees incinerators, oil storage tankers, gas holders, electricity substations. Haulage yards. Portakabins, underpasses, subways, and walkways. Industrial parks and science parks and retail parks.
The world beyond the glass is the world of masculine action. Everything she sees is what a man has built. But at each turnoff, each junction, women are waiting to know their fate. They are looking deep inside themselves, into their private hearts, where the foetus forms and buds, where the shape forms inside the crystal, where fingernails click softly on the backs of the cards, and pictures flutter upwards, towards the air: Justice, Temperance, The Sun, The Moon, The World.
At the motorway services, there are cameras pointing, watching the queues for fish and chips and tepid jellified cheesecake. Outside there are notices affixed to poles, warning of hawkers, peddlers, itinerant sellers, and illegal traders. There are none that warn against the loose, travelling dead. There are cameras guarding the exits, but none that register the entrances of Pikey Pete.
“You don’t know what will trigger them,” Al says. “There’s a whole pack of them, you see. Accumulating. It worries me. I’m not saying it doesn’t worry me. The only thing is, the only good thing—Morris doesn’t bring them home. They fade away somewhere, before we turn into Admiral Drive. He doesn’t like it, you see. Says it’s not a proper home. He doesn’t like the garden.”
They were coming back from Suffolk—or somewhere, at any rate, where people still had an appetite— because they were behind a van that said WRIGHT’S FAMOUS PIES, SAVORIES, CONFECTIONERY.
“Look at that,” Al said, and read it out, laughing. At once she thought, why did I do that? I could kick myself. They’ll claim they’re hungry now.
Morris gripped the passenger seat and rocked it, saying, “I could murder a Famous Pie.” Said Pikey Pete, “You can’t beat a Savoury.” Said young Dean, with his customary politeness, “I’ll have a Confectionery, please.”
Colette said, “Is that headrest rocking again, or is it you fidgetting? God, I’m starving, I’m going to pull in at Clacket Lane.”
When Colette was at home she lived on vitamin pills and ginseng. She was a vegetarian except for bacon and skinless chicken breasts. On the road they ate what they could get, when they could get it. They dined in the theme pubs of Billaricay and Egham. In Virginia Water they ate nachos and in Broxborne they ate fat pillows of dough that the baker called Belgian Buns. In laybys they ate leaking seafood sandwiches and when spring came, in the pedestrianized zones of small Thameside towns they sat on benches with warm Cornish pasties, nibbling daintily around the frills. They ate broccoli and three-cheese bake straight from the cash-and-carry, and wholesaler’s quiche Lorraine with sinewy nuggets of ham as pink as a scalded baby, and KrispyKrum Chickettes, and lemon mousse that reminded them of the kind of foam you clean carpets with.
“I have to have something sweet,” Alison said. “I have to keep my energy levels up. Some people think it’s glamorous having psychic powers. They’re dead wrong.”
Colette thought, it’s hard enough keeping her tidy, never mind glamorous. She served her time with Al, in the shopping precincts of small towns, standing outside fitting rooms the size of sentry boxes, with curtains that never pulled straight across. There were creaks and sighs from the other sentry boxes; the thin smell of desperation and self-hatred hung in the air. Colette had made a vow to take her upmarket, but Al was uncomfortable in posh shops. She did have some pride, though. Whatever she bought, she decanted into a carrier bag from a shop that catered to normal-sized women.
“I have to keep body and mind receptive and quiet,” she said. “If carrying a bit of flesh is the price I have to pay, so be it. I can’t tune in to Spirit if I’m bouncing around in an aerobics class.”
Morris said, have you seen MacArthur, he is a mate of mine and Keef Capstick, he is a mate of Keef ’s too. Have you seen MacArthur, he is a mate of mine and he wears a knitted weskit. Have you seen MacArthur, he has only one eye, have you seen him, he has one earlobe ripped off, a sailor ripped it off in a fracas, that’s what he tells 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,
