Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

COLETTE: On the platform you always say, you’ve had your gift since you were very small.

ALISON: Yes.

COLETTE: ( whispering ) Al, don’t do that to me. I need a proper answer on the tape. Yes, you say it, or yes, it’s true?

ALISON: I don’t generally lie on the platform. Well, only to spare people.

COLETTE: Spare them what? ( pause ) Al?

ALISON: Can you move on?

COLETTE: Okay, so you’ve had this gift—

ALISON: If you call it that.

COLETTE: You’ve had this ability since you were small. Can you tell us about your childhood?

ALISON: I could. When you were little, did you have a front garden? COLETTE: Yes.

ALISON: What did you have in it?

COLETTE: Hydrangeas, I think.

ALISON: We had a bathtub in ours.

When Alison was young she might as well have been a beast in the jungle as a girl growing up outside Aldershot. She and her mum lived in an old terraced house with a lot of banging doors. It faced a busy road, but there was open land at the back. Downstairs there were two rooms, and a lean-to with a flat roof, which was the kitchen. Upstairs were two bedrooms, and a bathroom, which had a bath tub in it so there was no actual need for the one in the garden. Opposite the bathroom was the steep short staircase that led up to the attic.

Downstairs, the front room was the place where men had a party. They came and went with bags inside which bottles rattled and chinked. Sometimes her mum would say, better watch ourselves tonight, Gloria, they’re bringing spirits in. In the back room, her mum sat smoking and muttering. In the lean-to, she sometimes absently opened cans of carrots or butterbeans, or stood staring at the grill pan while something burned on it. The roof leaked, and black mould drew a drippy wavering line down one corner.

The house was a mess. Bits were continually falling off it. You’d get left with the door handle in your hand, and when somebody put his fist through a window one night it got mended with cardboard and stayed like that. The men were never willing to do hammering or operate a screwdriver. “Never do a hand’s turn, Gloria!” her mother complained.

As she lay in her little bed at night the doors banged, and sometimes the windows smashed. People came in and out. Sometimes she heard laughing, sometimes scuffling, sometimes raised voices and a steady rhythmic pounding. Sometimes she stayed in her bed till daylight came, sometimes she was called to get up for one reason and another. Some nights she dreamed she could fly; she passed over the ridge tiles, and looked down on the men about their business, skimming over the waste ground, where vans stood with their back doors open, and torchlight snaked through the smoky dark.

Sometimes the men were there in a crowd, sometimes they swarmed off and vanished for days. Sometimes at night just one or two men stayed and went upstairs with her mum. Then next day the bunch of them were back again, tee-heeing beyond the wall at men’s private jokes. Behind the house was a scrubby field, with a broken-down caravan on blocks; sometimes there was a light in it. Who lives in there? she asked her mum, and her mum replied, What you don’t know won’t hurt you, which even at an early age Alison knew was untrue.

Beyond the caravan was a huddle of leaning corrugated sheds and a line of lockup garages to which the men had the keys. Two white ponies used to graze in the field, then they didn’t. Where have the ponies gone? she asked her mum. Her mum replied, to the knackers, I suppose.

She said, Who’s Gloria? You keep talking to her. Her mum said, Never you mind.

“Where is she?” she said. “I can’t see her. You say, yes Gloria, no Gloria, want a cuppa, Gloria? Where is she?”

Her mum said, “Never mind Gloria, you’ll be in Kingdom Come. Because that’s where I’m going to knock you if you keep this up.”

Her mum would never stay in the house if she could help it: pacing, smoking, smoking, pacing. Desperate for a breath of air, she would say, “Come on, Gloria,” shrug on her coat and flee down the road to the minimart; and because she did not want the trouble of washing or dressing Alison, or having her underfoot whining for sweeties, she would take her up to the top of the house and lock her in the attic. “She can’t come to any harm up there,” she would reason, out loud to Gloria. “No matches, so she can’t set the house on fire. Too small to climb out the skylight. Nothing sharp up here the like of which she is drawn to, such as knives or pins. There’s really no damage she could come to.”

She put an old rug up there for Alison to sit on, when she played with her blocks and animals. “Quite a little palace,” she said. There was no heating, which again was a safety factor, there being no outlets for Alison to put her fingers into. She could have an extra cardigan instead. In summer the attic was hot. Midday rays streamed fiercely down, straight from the sky to the dusty rug. They lit up the corner where the little lady used to fade up, all dressed in pink, and call out to Alison in a timid Irish voice.

Alison was perhaps five years old when the little lady first appeared, and in this way she learned how the dead could be helpful and sweet. She had no doubt that the little lady was dead, in every meaningful sense. Her clothes were feltlike and soft to the touch, and her pink cardigan was buttoned right up to the first fold of her chin. “My name is Mrs. McGibbet, darlin’,” she said. “Would you like to have me round and about? I thought you might like to have me with you, round and about.”

Mrs. McGibbet’s eyes were blue and round and startled. In her cooing voice, she talked about her son, who had passed over before her, met with an accident. They’d never been able to find each other, she said, I never could meet up with Brendan. But sometimes she showed Alison his toys, little miniature cars and tractors, neatly boxed. Once or twice she faded away and left the toys behind. Mum just stubbed her toe on them. It was as if she didn’t see them at all.

Mrs. McGibbet was always saying, “I wouldn’t want, my darlin’, to come between a little girl and her mother. If that were her mother coming up the stair now, coming up with a heavy tread, no, I wouldn’t want to put myself forward at all.” When the door opened she faded away: leaving sometimes an old doll collapsed in the corner where she had sat. She chuckled as she fell backwards, into the invisible place behind the wall.

Al’s mum forgot to send her to school. “Good grief,” she said, when the man came around to prosecute her, “you mean to say she’s that age already?”

Even after that, Al was never where she should be. She never had a swim-suit, so when it was swimming she was sent home. One of the teachers threatened she’d be made to swim in her knickers next week, but she went home and mentioned it, and one of the men offered to go down there and sort it out. When Al went to school next day she told the teacher, Donnie’s coming down; he says he’ll push a bottle up your bleeding whatnot, and—I don’t think it’s very nice, miss—ram it in till your guts come out your mouf.

After that, on swimming afternoon, she was just sent home again. She never had her rubber-soled shoes for skipping and hopping or her eggs and basin for mixing a cake, her times tables or her poem or her model mosque made out of milk-bottle tops. Sometimes when she came home from school one of the men would stop her in the hall and give her 50 pence. She would run up to the attic and put it away in a secret box she had up there. Her mother would take it off her if she could, so she had to be quick.

One day the men came with a big van. She heard yapping and ran to the window. Three blunt-nosed brindle dogs were being led towards the garages. “Oh, what are their names?” she cried. Her mother said, “Don’t you go calling their names. Dogs like that, they’ll chew your face off. Isn’t that right, Gloria?”