Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

She would say no, and he’d say, “Just as well, never know where you are wiv Nick, if you see Nick you walk the other way, you hear? You don’t try any of your tricks round Nick, or he’ll upend you, he’ll slap you on the soles of your feet till your teeth drop out.” Then he would brighten up: “What about Aitkenside, you seen Aitkenside?”

She’d say, “Dunno, what’s his other name? Dunno who you mean.”

He’d say, “Much you don’t, oh, very likely. Pikey Pete been round?”

“I told you,” she said, “I don’t know who your friends are or what they’re called.”

But Morris sneered at this. “Not know Pete? The whole country knows him. Wherever there is dealing in dogs they know Pete.”

“I don’t deal in dogs.” She remembered the grown-up coldness of her voice.

“Oh, pardon me, I’m sure! You don’t deal with any of my mates, is it? You don’t deal with ’em in any way, shape, or form, is it?” He grumbled under his breath. “You’re not your mother’s daughter, I suppose. Not know Pete? Wherever there is dealing in horses, they know Pete.”

When he got to the front gate, he would say, “Emmie not moved that old bath yet?”

She’d say, “Have you known my mum a long time?”

He’d say, “I’ll say I have. Known Emmie Cheetham? I’ll say I have. Know everybody, me. I know Donnie. I know Pete. Emmie Cheetham? I’ll say I have.”

One day she said, “Morris, are you my dad?”

And he said “Dad, me, that’s a good one! Did she say so?”

“I think MacArthur’s my dad.”

“MacArthur!” he said. He stopped. She stopped too, and looked into his face. He had turned grey: greyer than usual. His voice came out wobbly. “You can stand there, and say that name?”

“Why not?”

“Cool as a bloody cucumber,” Morris said. He spoke to the air, as if he were talking to an audience. “Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouf.”

They staggered along the street, a pace or two, Morris’s hand clamped on her arm. She saw Lee and Catherine going by on the other side of the road. She waved to them to rescue her but they made vomity faces at her and walked on. She didn’t know if they could see Morris or not. Under his breath he was muttering.

“MacArthur, she says! Cool as you like.” He stopped and propped himself against the wall with his free hand, his bent fingers spread out. He had a tattoo of a snake running down his arm; now its head, darting across the back of his hand, seemed to gulp, and pulse out its tongue. Morris too made a vomity face and retched.

She was afraid of what might come out of his mouth, so she concentrated on his hand, planted against the brick.

“Speak the name of MacArthur!” He mimicked her voice. “ I think he’s my dad . Suppose he is? Is that how you treat a dad? Is it? Got to hand it to her, she has some cheek, that girl.”

“How?” she said. “How did I treat him?”

The head pulsed, the snake’s tongue flicked out between his spread fingers. “I’ll tell you something about that bugger,” he said. “I’ll tell you something you don’t know. MacArthur owes me money. And so if I ever see MacArthur in this neck of the woods, I’ll saw him off at the bloody knees. Let the bloody bastard venture, just let him. I’ll poke out his other eye.”

“Has MacArthur only one eye?”

“Oh, tee-bloody-hee,” Morris said. “Still, girl, you got paid out. You got a lesson, eh? They taught you what a blade could do.”

“I hope you’re not,” she said. “I hope you’re not my dad. I like you worst of anybody. I don’t want you anywhere near me. You stink of fags and beer.”

“I bin near you,” Morris said. “We all have.”

COLETTE: But after that, when Morris came along, you must have known that other people couldn’t see him, I mean you must have realized that you had psychic powers.

ALISON: You see, I was ignorant. I didn’t know what a spirit guide was. Until I met Mrs. Etchells, I had no idea—

COLETTE: We’re going to go into that, aren’t we? Mrs. Etchells?

ALISON: When?

COLETTE: Tonight, if you’ve got the stamina.

ALISON: Can we eat first?

(click)

Pity Colette, who had to transcribe all this. “When you’re talking about Gloria,” she said, “I never know if she’s alive or dead.”

“No,” Al said. “Nor me.”

“But it worries me. I need to get it straight—for the book.”

“I’m telling you what I know.”

Was she? Or was she leaving things out? Sparing Colette’s feelings in some way, or testing her memory?

“These awful blokes,” Colette said, “all these fiends from Aldershot. I keep losing track of their names. Make me a list.”

Alison took a sheet of paper and wrote FIENDS FROM ALDERSHOT. “Let’s see … Donnie Aitkenside,” she said.

“The one who said he’d beat up your teacher?”

“Yes … well, and rape her, I think he was going to rape her too. There was MacArthur. Morris reckoned MacArthur was worse than most, but I dunno. There was Keith Capstick, that pulled the dog off me. And I thought he was my dad because he did that. But was he? I dunno.”

When she talks about them, Colette thought, she slips away somewhere: to a childhood country, where diction is slipshod. She said, “Al, are you writing this down?”

“You can see I’m not.”

“You wander off the point. Just make the list.”

Al sucked her pen. “There was this Pikey character, who was a horse dealer. I think he had relatives, cousins, up and down the country, you used to hear him talk about them, they might have come by but I don’t really know. And somebody called Bob Fox?”

“Don’t ask me! Get it on paper! What did he do, Bob Fox?”

“He tapped on the window. At my mum’s house. He did it to make you jump.”

“What else? He must have done something else?”

“Dunno. Don’t think he did. Then there was Nick, of course. The one with the empty matchbox, in the kitchen. Oh, wait, I remember now. Oh God, yes. I know where I saw him before. We had to go and collect him from the cop shop. They’d picked him up on the street, falling-down drunk. But they didn’t want to charge him, they just let him sober up, then they wanted rid of him because he’d put slime on the cell walls.”

“Slime?”

“And they didn’t want a heavy cleaning job. He was just lying there sliming everything, you see. He didn’t want to come out, so my mum had to go down and get him. They said—the police—they’d found her phone number in his wallet, so they sent a car to fetch her in, then she had to go down the cells. The desk sergeant said, a woman’s touch, tee-hee. He was being sarcastic. He said, he’ll be able to go now, won’t he, now he’s got his bike? My mum said, watch your lip, Little Boy Blue, or I’ll fatten it for you. He said, leave that kid here, you can’t take her down the cells. And my mum said, what, leave her here, so you can bloody touch her up? So she took me down to get Nick.”

Colette felt faint. “I wish I’d never started this,” she said.

“He came out on the street and he shouted, can’t I get drunk, same as anybody? My mum was trying to calm him down. She says, come back to our house.”

“And did he?”

“I expect. Look, Col, it was a long time ago.”

Colette wanted to ask, what kind of slime was it, on the cell walls? But then again, she didn’t want to ask.

COLETTE: Okay, so it’s eleven-thirty.

ALISON: P.M., that is.

COLETTE:—and we’re about to resume—

ALISON:—as I’ve now had a bottle of Crozes-Hermitage and feel able to continue reminiscing about my teenage years—

COLETTE: Al!

ALISON:—whereas Colette has had a Slimline Tonic and on the basis of this feels she has the courage to switch on the machine.