CAPSTICK: Well, knock me down with a feather.
MORRIS: I never had such a thunderclap.
PIKEY PETE: You don’t want to mess with the fambly of Nick. Because Nick he is a fambly man.
(
CAPSTICK: What would he do?
AITKENSIDE: Dear oh dear.
MORRIS: The worst thing that can befall a spirit is to be eaten by old Nick. You can be eaten and digested by him and then you’ve had your chips.
BOB FOX: You can’t get chips like you used to. Not fried in proper lard.
AITKENSIDE: Shut it, Bob, there’s a good lad.
CAPSTICK: What, you get et? You get et by Nick? And you don’t get another go round?
MORRIS: If he pukes you up you can reform and have another go, but otherwise you’re et and that’s all.
MACARTHUR: And that’s all?
MORRIS: El finito, Benito.
PIKEY PETE: Here, shall we do the share-out of these notes? It’s the proceeds from Etchells’s furniture. Lads? Where you going? Lads? Wait for me … .
October: Al is travelling, in the autumn’s first foul weather. There are mud slips and landslides, there are storm drains burst, a glugging and gurgling in sumps, conduits, and wells. There are fissures in the riverbeds, there are marshes, swamps, and bogs, there are cracked pipes and breached seawalls, and outswells of gas on the bubbling floodplain. There is coastal erosion, crumbling defences, spillage and seepages; where the saline and swift-rushing tide meets the viscid slime of swollen sewers, there the oceans are rising, half a metre, half a metre, half a metre onwards. On the orbital road the hazard lights of collided cars flash from the hard shoulder. Cameras flash on the bridges, there is the swish of the wipers against drenching rain, the mad blinking eyes of the breakdown trucks. “On we go!” Alison calls. “Sevenoaks, here we come.”
They are singing, Alison and the two little women: a few music hall favorites, but hymns, mostly, for it’s what the little women like. She didn’t know any of the words, but they have taught her.
Maureen Harrison says, “Have we been to Sevenoaks?” and Alison says, “Not with me, you haven’t.”
Maureen says, anxious, “Will we get our tea there?” Alison says, “Oh yes, I hear in Sevenoaks you get a very good tea.”
“Just as well,” says Maureen’s friend from the back, “because I could have brought my own Eccles cakes.”
“Cakes,” says Maureen, “we’ve had some lovely cakes. Do you remember that one you bought me once, with a walnut on top? You can’t get cakes like that these days. Here, lovie, I’ll make you one. On your birthday. I always made you a cake on your birthday.”
“That would be nice,” says Maureen’s friend. “And
“Oh, yes, we’ll give
Alison sighs. She likes to be appreciated; and before these last weeks, she never felt she was. They can’t do enough for her, the two old ladies, so happy they are to be together again, and when they are talking in the evening, from under a rug and behind the sofa they praise her, saying that they never had a daughter, but if they had, they would have wanted a bonny big girl just like Al. Whenever they set off in the car, they are so excited she has to make them wear incontinence pads. She cries, “Are your seat belts fastened, girls? Are your buttons all sewn on tight?” And they shout, “Yes, miss!” They say, “Look at us, riding in a motor vehicle, a private car!” They will never get tired of the orbital road, no matter how many times they go around it. Even if some image from her former life washes up—the fiends escaping Admiral Drive, vestigial heads trapped under the fences, multiple limbs thrashing, feet entangled in their tongues—even if some moment of dismay fades her smile, chills her, tightens her grip on the wheel or brings a shiny tear to her eye—even if she misses a junction, and has to cross the carriageway—the little women never complain.
They say, “Look at her hair, and look at her lovely rings, look at her frock and look at how she pedals the car—you’d think it would tire her out, but you can’t tire her out. Oh, I tell you, Maureen Harrison, we’ve landed on our feet here.” And Maureen adds, “Where our feet would be.”
Her cell phone rings. It’s Gemma. “How’s tricks? … Staines on the twenty-seventh? I doubt it, but I’ll check my diary when we pull in … .
“Near Twickenham?” Gemma says, surprised, and Al says, “No, in a former life.” He was a man, she thought, who kept dogs, but not for pets. A terrier man. Digs out the earths, lays down poisons for hapless small creatures trying to earn a living. “I didn’t care for him,” she says, “when I ran into him in Farnham.” You shouldn’t leave bait about for it attracts entities, the slow grub and creep of legless things, feral crawlers looking for wounds to suck or open minds to creep inside. You shouldn’t leave traps, for you don’t know what will spring them: severed legs, unclaimed and nameless feet, ghouls and spectres looking to stitch themselves together, haunting the roads looking for a hand, an ear, for severed fingers and dislocated thumbs.
She has been, herself, of course, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. She doesn’t remember, really, if she saw MacArthur’s eye in a dish, though she’s been trying to remember, just to keep the record straight. It might not have been in a dish; it might have been on a plate, a saucer, a dog bowl. She remembers she had her spoon in her hand, her fork. “Business?” she says. “Business is booming, thanks for asking, Gemma. Give or take the odd quiet midweek, I’m booked out till next Feb.”
There are terrorists in the ditches, knives clenched between their teeth. There are fundis hoarding fertilizer, there are fanatics brewing bombs on brown-field sites, and holy martyrs digging storage pits where fiends have melted into the soil. There are citadels underground, there are potholes and sunken shafts; there are secret chambers in the hearts of men, sometimes of women too. There are unlicensed workings and laboratories underground, mutants breeding in the tunnels; there are cannibal moo-cows and toxic bunnikins, and behind the drawn curtains of hospital wards there are bugs that eat the flesh.
But today we are going to Sevenoaks, by way of Junction 5: to see whom fortune favours today. Will it be the brave, or is it the turn of the bloody? Will they be queuing to have their palm prints taken, the legion of the unbowed? Softly the cards are shuffled, whispering to the crimson cloth. A knight in armour is galloping from the battle—or to it. A dog climbs the wheel of fortune, while a monkey descends. A naked girl pours water into a pool, and seven stars shine in the evening sky.
“When is it teatime, miss?” the little woman enquires; and then, “Pedal faster, miss, see if you can beat that one!”
Alison checks her rearview mirror. She pulls out to overtake a truck; she puts her foot down. She moves into the fast lane, half hidden by the spray. Unmolested, unobserved, they flee before the storm. If the universe is a great mind, it may sometimes have its absences. Maureen Harrison pipes up from the back: “This cake we’re having: could we have it iced?”
ALSO BY HILARY MANTEL
