Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

ALISON: I think I’d already been—that. What you say. Molested.

COLETTE: Do you?

ALISON: Just not in a group situation.

COLETTE: Alison, you ought to go to the police.

ALISON: It’s years—

COLETTE: But some of those men could still be at large!

ALISON: It all gets mixed up in my mind. What happened. How old I was. Whether things happened once or whether they just went on happening—so they all rolled into one, you know.

COLETTE: So did you never tell anybody? Here. Blow your nose.

ALISON: No … . You see, you don’t tell anybody because there’s nobody to tell. You try and write it down, you write My Diary, but you get your legs slapped. Honestly … . It doesn’t matter now, I don’t think about it, it’s only once in a while I think about it. I might have dreamed it, I used to dream I was flying. You see, you wipe out in the day what happens in the night. You have to. It’s not as if it changed my life. I mean I’ve never gone in for sex much. Look at me, who’d want me, it’d need an army. So it’s not as if I feel … it’s not as if I remember … .

COLETTE: Your mother should have protected you. If she were my mum I’d kill her. Don’t you sometimes think about it, going over to Aldershot and killing her?

ALISON: She lives in Bracknell now.

COLETTE: Wherever. Why does she live in Bracknell?

ALISON: She went off with a man who had a council house over there, but it never lasted, anyway, he went over into Spirit and somehow or other she ended up with the tenancy. She wasn’t so bad. Isn’t. I mean, you have to feel sorry for her. She’s the size of a sparrow. In her looks, she’s more like your mother than mine. I walked past her once in the street and didn’t recognize her. She was always dyeing her hair. It was a different colour every week.

COLETTE: That’s no excuse.

ALISON: And it never came out what she intended. Champagne Hi-Life, and she’d end up ginger. Chocolate Mousse, and she’d end up ginger. Same with her pills. She used to swap other people’s prescriptions. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. I wondered how she kept going.

COLETTE: These men—could you still identify them, do you think?

ALISON: Some of them. Maybe. If I saw them in a good light. But they can’t arrest them after they’re passed.

COLETTE: If they’re dead I’m not worried. If they’re dead they can’t do any more damage.

When Al was twelve or so, she got cheeky. She said to her mum, “That one last night, what was his name then? Or don’t you know?”

Her mum tried to slap her around the head but she overbalanced and fell on the floor. Al helped her up.

“Thank you, you’re a good girl, Al,” her mum said, and Al’s cheeks burned, because she had never heard that before.

“What you on, Mum?” she asked. “What you taking?”

Her mum took a lot of Librium and a lot of Bacardi, which does make you fall over. Every week, though, she gave something else a try; it usually worked out, like the hair dye, to have a result she had not foreseen but should have.

Al had to go to the chemist for her mum’s prescriptions. “Are you here again?” said the man behind the counter, and because she was going through her brusque phase she would say, it’s me or somebody else, what’s your opinion? “My God,” he said. “I can’t believe she gets through this. Is she selling it on? Come on, you’re a bright girl, you must know.”

“She swallows it all,” she said. “I swear it.”

The man sniggered. “Swallows, does she? You don’t say.”

This remark mocked her; but still, when she left the pharmacy she felt ten feet tall. You’re a bright girl, she said to herself. She stared at herself in the next shop window: which was Ash Vale Motor Sport. The window was crammed with all the stuff you need for hacking across country with crappy old cars: sump guards, fog lamps, snow chains, and the latest model in a hi-lift jack. Swimming above this equipment was her own face, the face of a bright girl—a good girl, too—swimming in the oily glass.

By this time she had spent years pretending she was normal. She was never able to judge what other people knew and what they didn’t know. Take Gloria: Gloria had been clear enough to her mother, but not to her. Yet her mother hadn’t seen Mrs. McGibbet, and she’d almost skated across the attic, putting her foot on one of Brendan’s toy cars. And then one day—was it after Keith got mashed, was it after she got her scissors, was it before Harry cleaned his bowl?—one day she’d caught a glimpse of a red-haired lady with false eyelashes, standing at the foot of the stairs. Gloria, she thought, at last; she said, “Hi, are you all right?” but the woman didn’t reply. Another day, as she was coming in at the front door, she had glanced down into the bath, and didn’t she see the red-haired lady looking up at her, with her eyelashes half pulled off, and no body attached to her neck?

But that was not possible. They wouldn’t just leave a head on full view for passersby. You kept things under wraps; wasn’t that the rule?

What else was the rule? Was she, Alison, seeing more or less than she ought? Should she mention it, when she heard a woman sobbing in the wall? When should you shout up and when should you shut up? Was she stupid, or was that other people? And what would she do when she left school?

Tahera was going to do social studies. She didn’t know what that was. She and Tahera went shopping on Saturdays, if her mother let her out. Tahera shopped while she watched. Tahera was size six. She was four foot ten, brown, and quite spotty. Al herself was not much taller than that, but she was size eighteen. Tahera said, “You would be welcome to my castoffs, but—you know.” She looked Alison up and down, and her tiny nostrils flared.

When she asked her mother for money, her mother said, “What you want you got to earn, is that right Gloria? You’re not so bad, Al, you’ve got that lovely complexion, okay you’re fleshy but that’s what a lot of men like. You’re what we call two handfuls of bubbly fun. Now you didn’t ought to hang around with that Indian bint, it puts the punters off, they don’t like to think some Patel’s after ’em with a Stanley knife.”

“Her name’s not Patel.”

“All right, young lady! That’s enough from you.” Her mother hurtled across the kitchen in a Librium rage. “How long you expect me to keep you fed and housed, how long, eh? Lie on your back and take it, that’s what I had to do. And regular! Not just Oh-it’s-Thursday-I-don’t-feel-like-it. You can forget that caper, miss! That sort of attitude will get you nowhere. Make it regular, and start charging proper. That’s what you’ve got to do. How else you think you’re going to make a living?”

COLETTE: So how did you feel, Alison, when you first knew you had psychic powers?

ALISON: I never … I mean I never really did. There wasn’t a moment. How can I put it? I didn’t know what I saw, and what I just imagined. It—you see, it’s confusing, when the people you grow up with are always coming and going at night. And always with hats on.

COLETTE: Hats?

ALISON: Or their collars pulled up. Disguises. Changing their names. I remember once, I must have been twelve, thirteen, I came in from school and I thought the house was empty for once; I thought, thank Christ for that; I thought I might make some toast then do a bit of cleaning while they were all gone out. I walked through to the lean-to, and I looked up and this geezer was standing there—not doing anything, just standing there leaning against the sink—and he had a box of matches in his hand. Christ, he was evil-looking! I mean, they all were, but there was something about him, his expression … . I can tell you, Colette, he was in a league of his own. He just stared at me and I stared back at him, and I thought I’d seen him before, and you have to make conversation, don’t you, even if you suddenly feel as if you’re going to throw up? So I said, are you the one they call Nick? He said, no, love, I’m a burglar, and I said, go on, you are Nick. He flew into a temper. He rattled the matchbox and it was empty. He threw it down. He went, can’t even get a light around here, I’m going to sack the flaming lot of them, they’re not worth a bench in hell. He whipped his belt out of his trousers and lashed out at me.