Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

COLETTE: What happened then?

ALISON: I ran out into the street.

COLETTE: Did he follow you?

ALISON: I expect so.

Al was fourteen. Fifteen perhaps. No spots still. She seemed immune to them. She had grown a bit, all ways, up and out. Her tits came around the corner before she did; or that’s what one of the men remarked.

She said to her mother, “Who’s my dad?”

Her mother said, “What you want to know that for?”

“People ought to know who they are.”

Her mother lit another cigarette.

“I bet you don’t know,” Al said. “Why did you bother to have me? I bet you tried to get rid of me, didn’t you?”

Her mother exhaled, blowing the smoke down her nose in two disdainful and separate streams. “We all tried. But you was stuck fast, you silly bitch.”

“You should have gone to the doctor.”

“Doctor?” Her mother’s eyes rolled up. “Listen to her! Doctor! Bloody doctor, they didn’t want to know. I was five, six months gone when MacArthur buggered off, and then I’d have shifted you all right, but there wasn’t any bloody shifting.”

“MacArthur? Is that my dad?”

“How should I know?” her mother said. “What you bloody asking me for? What you want to know for anyway? What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Mind your own bloody business.”

Seeing Gloria’s head in the bath was more worrying to her, somehow, than seeing Gloria entire. From the age of eight, nine, ten, she told Colette, she used to see disassembled people lying around, a leg here, an arm there. She couldn’t say precisely when it started, or what brought it on. Or whether they were bits of people she knew.

If you could understand what those years were like, she told Colette, you’d think I’m quite a triumph really, the way I keep myself together. When I walk out onstage I love it, when I’ve got my dress, my hair done, my opals, and my pearls that I wear in the summer. It’s for them, for the audience, but it’s for me too.

She knew there was this struggle in a woman’s life—at least, there had been in her mum’s—just to be whole, to be clean, to be tidy, to keep your own teeth in your head; just to have a clean tidy house and not fag ash dropped everywhere and bottle tops underfoot: not to find yourself straying out into the street with no tights on. That’s why nowadays she can’t bear fluff on the carpet or a chip in her nail polish; that’s why she’s a fanatic about depilation, why she’s always pestering the dentist about cavities he can’t see yet; why she takes two baths a day, sometimes a shower as well; why she puts her special scent on every day. Maybe it’s an old-fashioned choice, but it was the first grown-up scent she bought for herself, as soon as she could afford one. Mrs. Etchells had remarked at the time, “Oh, that’s lovely, it’s your signature perfume.” The house at Aldershot smelled of male farts, stale sheets, and something else, not quite identifiable. Her mother said the smell had been there ever since they took the floorboards up: “Keith and them, you know, that crowd what used to drink down the Phoenix? What did they want to do that for, Gloria? Why did they want to take the floorboards up? Men, honestly! You never know what they’ll be up to next.”

Al told Colette, “One day I saw an eye looking at me. A human eye. It used to roll along the street. One day it followed me to school.”

“What, like ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’?”

“Yes, but it felt more like a dog.” Al shivered. “And then one day, one morning when I was leaving the house … .”

One day—she was in her school-leaving year—Al came out in the morning and saw a man watching her from the door of the chemist’s shop. His hands were plunged into his trouser pockets and he was jiggling an unlit cigarette between his lips.

COLETTE: It wasn’t this Nick character? The one in the kitchen, the one who chased you with the belt?

ALISON: No, it wasn’t Nick.

COLETTE: But you had seen him before?

ALISON: Yes, yes, I had. But can we switch the tape off, please? Morris is threatening me. He doesn’t like me talking about the early days. He doesn’t want it recorded.

That same afternoon, she came out of school with Lee Tooley and Catherine Tattersall. Tahera herself was close behind, linking arms with Nicky Scott and Andrea Wossname. Tahera was still rich, small, and spotty—and now be-spectacled, since her dad, she said, had “read me the riot act.” Catherine had ginger curls and she was the girl who was most far behind in every subject, even farther behind than Alison. Lee was Catherine’s friend.

Morris was on the other side of the road, leaning against the window of the launderette. His eyes travelled over the girls. She went cold.

He was short, a dwarf nearly, like a jockey, and his legs were bowed like a jockey’s. She learned later he’d been more like normal height, at least five foot six, till his legs had been broken: in one of his circus feats, he’d said at first, but later he admitted it was in a gang feud.

“Come on,” she said. “Come on, Andrea. Hurry up. Come on, Lee.”

Then, because she was cold, she zipped up her jacket, her cherry-red jacket that only just covered her chest. “Ooh, spastic!” Lee said, because it was not the style to fasten your jacket. The whole group began its shuffling, swaying sideways procession down the street; there seemed nothing she could do to hurry them. The girls walked with their arms folded, hugging themselves. Lee, in a spirit of mockery, did the same. A radio played somewhere, it was playing an Elton John song. She remembered that. The kids began to sing. She tried, but her mouth was dry.

COLETTE: So was he—I feel I’m a bit in the dark here—this man who was watching you outside the school: are we talking about Morris? And was he the man with the yellow face?

ALISON: Yes.

COLETTE: The man you saw behind you, through the mirror? The low hairline?

ALISON: His tie not on straight.

Next day, when she came out, he was there again. I’ll go on the aggressive, she thought. She nudged Tahera. “Look at that pervert.”

“Where?”

Alison nodded across the road to where Morris leaned, just as he had the day before. Tahera attracted Nicky Scott’s attention by kicking her lightly on the back of her calf. “Gerroff me, you bloody bhaji!” Nicky bellowed.

“Can you see any pervert?” Tahera asked.

They looked around them. They followed where Alison pointed and then they swivelled their heads from side to side in an exaggerated fashion. Then they turned in circles, crying out, “Where, where?”—except for Catherine, who hadn’t caught on, and just started singing like yesterday. Then they lolled their tongues out and retched, because they confused a perv with a sicko, then they ran off and left her alone in the street.

Morris lurched away from the wall and came limping towards her. He ignored the traffic, and a van must have missed him by inches. He could limp very fast; he seemed to scuttle like some violent crab, and when he reached her he fastened his crab hand onto her arm above the elbow. She flinched and twisted in his grasp, but he held her firmly. Get off me, she was crying, you horrible pervert, but then, as so often, she realized that words were coming out of her mouth but no one could hear them.

After Al’s first meeting with Morris, he waited for her most days. “I’m a gentleman, I am,” he would boast, “and I am here to escort you. A growing girl like you, you don’t want to be out walking the streets on your own. Anything could happen.”

In the early days, he didn’t follow her into the house. He seemed nervous about who might be in there. As they turned at the corner of the street he would say, “Nick bin in?”