“But that’s because you don’t get on with the job. You should have self-respect! That’s what’s important to all of us.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. That’s what people used to call it, now they call it self-esteem, but same difference. People are always trying to take it away from you. Don’t let them. You have to have backbone. Pride. So! You see! Get digging!” She stumped away, then stopped and turned. “This man, Mart, this courier. What did it say on the side of his van?” As an afterthought, she added, “Can you read?”
“I can,” Mart said, “but not a plain van with no writing. It didn’t say his name or anything. There was mud up the side of it, though.”
“So did he speak to you? I mean, did he have a box that he was wanting to leave, did he have a clipboard or one of those computers that you sign on, you know?”
“He had boxes. He opened the back doors and I looked in. He had boxes stacked up. But he didn’t leave any.”
A terrible uprush of fear swept over her. She thought her new heart pills prohibited such a feeling. But seemingly not.
“What type of bloke was he?” she said.
“He was one of them type of blokes what always hits you. The kind that, you’re in a pub, and he says, oi, mate, what you looking at? and you say, nothing, mate, and then he says—”
“Yes, I get the picture,” Al said.
“—and then the next thing you know is you’re in the hospital,” said Mart. “Having yourself stitched together. Your ears all sliced and blood down your jersey, if you have a jersey. And your teef spitting out of your head.”
In her own room, Alison took an extra heart pill. For as long as she could endure, she sat on the edge of the bed, hoping it would take effect. But her pulse wouldn’t slow; it’s remarkable, she thought, how you can be both bored and frightened at the same time. That’s a reasonable way, she thought, to describe my life with the fiends: I lived with them, they lived with me, my childhood was spent in the half-light, waiting for my talent to develop and my means of making a living, knowing always, knowing always I owed my existence to them; for didn’t a voice say, where d’you fink your mum gets the money to go down the shop and get instant mash, if it ain’t from your uncle Morris; where d’you fink your mum gets funding for her little bevvy, if it ain’t from your uncle Keef?
She took off her clothes: peeling them wetly from her body, dropping them on the floor. Colette was right, of course; she should be on a diet, any diet, all the diets at once. If TV, as people said, put extra weight on you, then she would look like—she couldn’t think what she would look like, something ridiculous, perhaps faintly menacing. Something from a sci-fi channel. She felt her aura wobbling around her, as if she were wearing a giant’s cape made of jelly. She pinched herself. The thyroid pills had not made any instant impact on her flesh. She imagined how it would be if she woke up one morning, to find she had shed layers of herself, like someone taking off a winter coat—then two coats, then three … . She took handfuls of flesh from here and there, repositioned and resettled them. She viewed herself from all angles but she couldn’t produce a better effect. I try my best with the diets, she said to herself; but I have to house so many people. My flesh is so capacious; I am a settlement, a place of safety, a bombproof shelter.
Cold sweat sprang out across her back. Colette was right, Colette is right, she has to take me in hand, she has to hate me, it is important someone hates me. I liked it when Mart came and we got the takeaway, but I should have left it all to him. Though in all conscience I didn’t do it for the sake of the spare ribs. I did it because I wanted to do a good action. Colette never does a good action because she is being thin; it is what she does instead. See how she has starved herself, just to teach me, just to shame me, and see how impervious I am to example. In the last week or two, Colette’s wheat-coloured clothes had hung on her like bleached sacks. So cheer up, Al thought, we can go shopping. We can go shopping, me for a bigger size and Colette for a smaller. That will put her in a good mood.
The phone rang, making her jump. She sat down, naked, to take the call.
“Alison Hart, how may I help you today?”
“Oh, Miss Hart … is that you in person?”
“Yes.”
“So you are real? I thought you might be a call centre. Do you offer dowsing?”
“It depends what for. I do missing jewellery, old insurance policies, concealed wills. I don’t do lost computer files or any type of electronic recovery. I charge a flat-rate call-out fee, which depends on your area, and then after that I work on a no-find no-fee basis. I do indoor work only.”
“Really?”
“I’m not suited to distances, or rough terrain.”
“But it’s the outside that’s worrying us.”
“Then you need my colleague Raven, who specializes in earth energies, neolithic burials, mounds, caverns, burrows, and henges.”
“But you’re in my area,” the woman said. “That’s why I rang. I’m going by your telephone code in your ad.”
“What is it you’re actually looking for?”
“Actually, uranium,” the woman said.
Al said, “Oh, dear. I do think it’s Raven you want.” I expect he’ll be branching out, she thought, if these poisonings continue: knotweed, the bad drains. He’ll be branching out into sludge and toxic seepages, and detecting the walls of underground installations. If there were walls beneath my feet, she thought, if there were occult silos and excavations, cavities blasted in the earth, would I know? If there were secret chambers and bricked-in cul-desacs, would I sense them?
“Are you still there?” she asked the client. She imparted Raven’s details: his e-mail, and so on. It was hard to get the woman off the phone; she seemed to want some sort of free extra, like, I’ll throw you in a tarot reading, pick one card of three. It’s a while since I unwrapped the cards, Al thought. She said to the woman, “I really ought to go, because I have, you know, another client coming in—well, fifteen minutes, and—oh, dear, what is that smell? Oh, dear, I think I’ve left something on the stove … .” She held the phone away from her ear, and still the woman talked, and she thought, Colette, where are you, get this woman off the line … . She threw the receiver down on the bed and ran out of the room.
She stood on the landing, naked. I never did any science at school, she thought, any chemistry or physics, so I can’t advise these people about the likelihood of aliens or rabies or uranium or knotweed or anything at all really. Imagine, she said to herself, Morris let loose in a laboratory, all his friends trapped in a test tube, amalgamating and reacting against each other and causing little puffs and whiffs. Then she said to herself, don’t imagine, because it is imagining that gives them the door to get in. If you were thinner they would have less space to live. Yes, Colette was right and right again.
She knelt down, leaned forward, and tucked her head down by her knees.
She rocked her body, back and to, back and to. Presently she felt stronger: as if a shell, as if the back of a tortoise, might have grown over her spine. Tortoises live for many years, she thought, they outlive human beings. No one really loves them for they have no lovable qualities, but they are admired just for lasting out. They don’t speak, they just don’t utter at all. They are okay as long as no one turns them upside down and shows their underside, which is their soft bits. She said to herself, when I was a child I had a tortoise for a pet. The name of my tortoise was Alison, I named it after me because it is like me, and with our slow feet we walk in the garden. With my tortoise at week-ends I have many enjoyable times. The food of my tortoise is bollocks grass and blood.
