Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

“Do you know Gloria?”

“Do I know Gloria?” Mrs. McGibbet’s eyelids fell over her bright blue eyes. “Ah, you’ve no business asking.”

“I think I saw her. I think I can see her these days.”

“Gloria is a cheap hoor, what else should she be? I never should have given her the name, for it put ideas in her head that was above her station. Go on the boat then, heedless and headstrong, she would go on the boat. Get off at Liverpool with all its attendant vices and then where will she go but via a meat lorry to the dreadful metropolis with its many occasions of sin. End up dead, dead and haunting about in a British army town, in a dirty house with a bath in the front garden, and her own mother a living witness to every hoor’s trick that she can contrive.”

After that, when she got 50 pence from the men, she took it straight down to the minimart and bought chocolate, which she ate on the way home.

When Alison was eight years old, or maybe nine or ten, she was playing outside one day, a greyish sticky day in late summer. She was alone, of course: playing horses, neighing occasionally, and progressing at a canter. The rough grass of their back plot was worn in patches, like the pile on the rug that made the attic into a little palace.

Something drew her attention, and she stopped in her paces, and glanced up. She could see men going to and fro from the garages, carrying boxes.

“Hi-ya!” she said. She waved to them. She was sure they were men she knew.

But then a minute later she thought they were men she didn’t know. It was hard to tell. They kept their faces turned away. A sick feeling crept over her. Silent, faces downcast, the men moved over the tussocky grass. Silent, faces downcast, they passed the boxes. She couldn’t judge the distance from herself to them; it was as if the light had grown more thick and dense. She took a step forward, but she knew she should not. Her dirty nails dug into the palms of her hands. Sick came up into her throat. She swallowed it and it burned. Very slowly, she turned her head away. She took one plodding step towards the house. Then another. Air thick as mud clotted around her ankles. She had some idea of what was in the boxes, but as she stepped inside the house it slipped clear from her mind, like a drug slipping from a syringe and deep into a vein.

Her mother was in the lean-to, nattering away to Gloria. “Excuse me, will you,” she said affably, “while I just see if this child wants a clip around the ear?” She turned around and glared at her daughter. “Look at you,” she said. “Wash your face, you’re all running in sweat, you bloody turn me up. I was never like that at your age, I was a neat little thing, I had to be, I wouldn’t have made a living if I’d gone about like that. What’s the matter with you, you’re green, girl, look at yourself in the mirror, have you been stuffing yourself with them Rolo again? If you’re going to chuck up, go outside and do it.”

Alison did as she was told and looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t recognize the person she saw there. It was a man, with a check jacket on and a tie skew-whiff; a frowning man with a low hairline and a yellowish face. Then she realized that the door was open, and that the men were piling in behind her. “Fuck, Emmie, got to wash me hands!” one of them shouted.

She ran. For always, more or less, she was afraid of the men. On the stairs to the attic she doubled up and let brown liquid run out of her mouth. She hoped her mother would think it was the cat, Judy, who was responsible. She toiled on upwards and swung open the door. Mrs. McGibbet was sitting, already formed, in her corner. Her stumpy legs in their thick stockings stuck out in front of her, wide apart, as if she had been punched and knocked down. Her eyes were no longer startled, but blank as if their blinds had been drawn.

She did not greet Alison: no “How’s my darlin’ girl today?” She just said, in a distracted mutter, “There’s an evil thing you wouldn’t want to see at all. There’s an evil thing you wouldn’t want to see … .” She faded with rapidity; there was a scrabbling noise beneath the floorboards, and she was gone.

Mrs. McGibbet never came back after that day. She missed her, but she realized that the old lady was too frightened to return. Al was a child and hadn’t got the option of leaving. Now there was no appeal or relief from Gloria and her mum, and the men in the front room. She went out to play at the back as seldom as possible; even the thought of it made thick spit come up into her mouth. Her mother berated her for getting no fresh air. If she was forced to play out—which happened sometimes, with the door locked after her—she made it a rule never to raise her eyes as far as the sheds and the lockup garages, or the belt of woodland beyond them. She could not shake off the atmosphere of that afternoon, a peculiar suspension, like a breath held: the men’s averted faces, the thunderous air, the dying grass, her mother’s outgust of tobacco smoke, the yellow face in the mirror where she expected to see her own, the man’s need to wash his hands. As for what was in the cardboard boxes, she hoped not to think about it; but sometimes the answer turned up, in dreams.

COLETTE: So … are you going to tell me?

ALISON: I might, if I was quite sure I knew.

COLETTE: Only might ?

ALISON: I don’t know if I could speak it out.

COLETTE: Drugs, could it have been? Or didn’t they have drugs in those days?

ALISON: God Almighty, of course they had drugs, do you think I come out of the Ark? They’ve always had drugs.

COLETTE: So?

ALISON: It was a funny district, you see, the army camps all around, these squaddies coming and going, I mean it was a big area for, well, women like my mum and the sort of men she knew, there was a lot of illegal gambling, there were women and boys who were on the game, there were all sorts of—

COLETTE: So come on, what do you think was in the boxes? ( pause ) Bits of Gloria?

ALISON: No. Surely not? Keef said she’d gone home to Ireland.

COLETTE: You didn’t believe that, did you?

ALISON: I didn’t believe it or not believe it.

COLETTE: But she did disappear?

ALISON: Not from our house, she didn’t. Yes Gloria, no, Gloria, have a cuppa Gloria.

COLETTE: I’m quite interested in this because it suggests your mum was mad or something—but let’s just keep to the point about the disappearance—was anything reported?

ALISON: I was eight. I didn’t know what was reported.

COLETTE: Nothing on TV?

ALISON: I’m not sure we had a TV. Well, yes, we did. Several. I mean the men used to bring them in under their arms. Just, we never had an aerial. That was us. Two bathtubs, no TV aerial.

COLETTE: Al, why do you make such silly jokes all the time? You do it when you’re on the platform. It’s not appropriate.

ALISON: Personally I think the use of humour’s very important when you’re dealing with the public. It puts them at their ease. Because they’re scared, when they come in.

COLETTE: I was never scared. Why do they come if they’re scared?

ALISON: Most people have a very low fright threshold. But it doesn’t stop them being curious.

COLETTE: They should toughen up.

ALISON: I suppose we all should. ( sighs ) Look, Colette—you come from Uxbridge. Oh, I know you say, Uxbridge not Knightsbridge, but it’s a place where you had hydrangeas, right? Well, that’s not like where I come from. I suppose if you had a crime in Uxbridge, if you had somebody disappear, the neighbours would notice.

COLETTE: So what are you saying?

ALISON: People went missing all the time, round our way. There was wasteland. There was army land, there was miles of it. There was heath land and just generally these acres where anything … could have … .