“That’s what I was thinking. By the way, do you know you’re on the phone from eleven till three?”
Al groaned. Morris, squatting before the empty marble hearth, glanced up at her and began to roll up his sleeves.
“And we’ve had a call from those people near Gloucester, saying are you going on the Plutonic symbolism weekend? Only they need to know how many to cater for.” She laughed nastily. “And of course, they count you double.”
“I’m not sure I want to go away by myself.”
“Count me out, anyway. They say it’s in an idyllic location. That means no shops.” She flicked through the letters. “Do you do exorcisms for eating disorders?”
“Pass it on to Cara.”
“Will you go over to Twyford? There’s a woman got a loose spirit in her loft. It’s rattling around and she can’t get to sleep.”
“I don’t feel up to it.”
“You’re entitled to postpone things if you’ve had a bereavement. I’ll call her and explain, about Mrs. Etchells.”
A light blinked at Al from a corner of the room. She turned her eyes and it was gone. Morris was scuttling fast across the carpet, swinging on his knuckles like an ape. As he moved, the light moved with him, a crimson ripple, sinuous, like an exposed vein; it was Morris’s snake tattoo, lit and pulsing, slithering along his forearm as if it had a life of its own.
“Tee-hee,” Morris chuckled. She remembered what Mrs. Etchells had said: “They’ve got modifications. It turned me up.”
Colette said, “Are you having that yogurt or not?”
“I’ve lost my appetite.” Al put her spoon down.
She phoned her mum. The phone rang for a long time, and then after it was picked up there was a scuffling, scraping sound. “Just pulling up a chair,” Emmie said. “Now then, who is it and what can I do for you?”
“It’s me. I thought you’d like to know my grandma’s dead.”
“Who?”
“My grandma. Mrs. Etchells.”
Emmie laughed. “That old witch. You thought she was your grandma?”
“Yes. She told me so.”
“She told everybody that! All the kids. She wanted to get ’em in her house, captive bloody audience, innit, while she goes on about how she’s had bouquets and whatnot, little op, chain of love, then when the time’s right she’s offering ’em around the district to all comers. I should know, she bloody offered me. Same with you, only the lads got in early.”
“Now just stop there. You’re saying my grandmother was a—” She broke off. She couldn’t find the right word. “You’re saying my grandmother was as bad as you?”
“Grandmother my arse.”
“But Derek—listen, Derek
“He could of been,” her mother said vaguely. “I think I done it with Derek. Ask Aitkenside, he knows who I done it with. But Derek wasn’t her son, anyway. He was just some kid she took in to run errands for her.”
Al closed her eyes tight. “Errands? But all these years, Mum. You let me think—”
“I didn’t tell you what to think. Up to you what you thought. I told you to mind your own business. How do I know if I done it with Derek? I done it with loads of blokes. Well, you had to.”
“Why did you have to?” Alison said balefully.
“You wouldn’t ask that question if you were in my shoes,” Emmie said. “You wouldn’t have the cheek.”
“I’m going to come over there,” Al said. “I want to put a few straight questions to you. About your past. And mine.”
Her mother shouted, “You hear that, Gloria? She’s coming over. Better bake a cake, eh? Better get the fancy doilies out.”
“Oh, you’re not on that again, are you?” Al’s voice was weary. “I thought we’d got Gloria out of our lives twenty years ago.”
“So did I, pardon me, till she turned up on me doorstep the other night. I never had such a thunderclap. I says, Gloria! and she says, hello, and I says, you’ve not changed a bit, and she says, I can’t say the same for you, she says, give us a fag, I says, how’d you track me down in Bracknell? She says—”
“Oh, Mum!” Alison yelled. “She’s
I said it, she thought, I uttered the word no Sensitive ever uses: well hardly ever. I didn’t say passed, I didn’t say gone over, I said dead, and I said it because I believe that when it comes to dead, Gloria is deader than most of us, deader than most of the people who claim to be dead: in my nightmares since I was a child she is cut apart, parcelled out, chewed up.
There was a silence. “Mum? You still there?”
“I know,” said Emmie, in a small voice. “I know she’s dead. I just forget, is all.”
“I want you to remember. I want you to stop talking to her. Because it’s driving me round the twist and it always did. It’s not as if you made a living out of it. So there’s no use fooling yourself. You may as well get it straight and keep it straight.”
“I have.” Emmie sounded cowed. “I have, Alison. I will.”
“So do you want to come to Mrs. Etchells’s service?”
“Why?” Emmie was mystified. “Is she getting married?”
“We’re burying her, Mum. I told you. Cremating. Whatever. We don’t know what her wishes would have been. I was hoping you could shed some light, but obviously not. Then as soon as that’s over, I’m coming to see you, and we’re going to sit down and have a heart-to-heart. I don’t think you’re fit to live on your own. Colette says you should be living in a warden-assisted bungalow. She says we ought to make you a care plan.”
“You hear that, Gloria?” said Emmie. “We’ll have to polish the silver, if Lady Muck is coming to tea.”
For a few days the fiends were faintly present, flickering at the corner of her eye: throughout her whole body, they left their mark. It’s as if, she thought, they’re walking in one by one, and wiping their feet on me. Her temperature dropped; her tongue furred up with a yellow-green coating. Her eyes looked small and bleary. Her limbs tingled and she lost sensation in her feet; they still seemed intent on walking off, leaving the whole mess behind, but though the intention was there, she no longer had the ability.
Morris said, got to get the boys together. We will be wanting a knees-up, seeing as Etchells is fetched away, and we are fully entitled in my opinion, there’s one we can tick off—well done, lads—there weren’t no messing about with Etchells.
“You arranged it?” she said. She had hoped their appearance in the back row of the dem might be coincidental—or rather, the kind of coincidence with unpleasant events that they liked to arrange for themselves.
“’Course we did,” Morris boasted. “What is our mission? It is to track down useless and ugly people and recycle them, and with Etchells we have made a start. I says to Mr. Aitkenside, do you mind if I kick off the project wiv a bit of personal business, and he says, Morris, old son, if I could give you the nod I would, but you know it is more than my skin’s worth, for you know old Nick, his temper when he is roused, and if you don’t go right through the proper procedure and your paperwork all straight he will take a pencil and ram it through your ear hole and swivel it about so your brain goes twiddle-de-dee, he says, I seen it done, and Nick has a special pencil he keeps behind his ear that makes it more painful. I says to him, Mr. Aitkenside, sir, upon my mother’s life I would not ask you to take any such risk of having your brain twiddled, forget I asked, but he says, Morris, old son, we go back, he says, we go back you and me, I tell you what I’ll do for you, when I happen to catch old Nick in a mellow mood—let us say we have had a good session in the back bar at the Bells of Hell, let us say Nick has won the darts, let us say we have had a barbecue on the back lawn and the great man is feeling at ease with himself—I’d say to him, Your ’Ighness, how would it be if my friend and yours Morris Warren were to do a bit of personal business, a bit of tidying up he has left over? For Nick was in the army, you know, and he likes things tidy.”
