Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

“C’est la vie,” sighed the manager, and Colette said, “Yes, I dare say.”

Alison kept out of London when she could. She would fight her way in as far as Hammersmith, or work the further reaches of the North Circular. Ewell and Uxbridge were on her patch, and Bromley and Harrow and Kingston-on-Thames. But the hubs of their business were the conurbations that clustered around the junctions of the M25, and the corridors of the M3 and M4. It was their fate to pass their evenings in crumbling civic buildings from the sixties and seventies, their exoskeletons in constant need of patching: tiles raining from their roofs, murals stickily ungluing from their walls. The carpets felt tacky and the walls exhaled an acrid vapour. Thirty years of freeze-dried damp had crystallized in the concrete, like the tiny pellets from which you boil up packet soup. The village hall was worse, of course, and they still played some of those. She had to liaise with village-idiot caretakers, and bark her shins and ankles hauling chairs into the semicircle Al favoured. She had to take the money on the door, tread the stage beforehand to detect comic squeaks, and pull out splinters; it was not unknown for Al to kick off her shoes partway through the first half, and commune barefoot with Spirit World.

“Is she all okay back there on her own?” asked the manager. “A large gin, that’s the ticket. Anything else she needs? We could fill the place twice over, you know. I call her the consummate professional.”

Backstage, Al was sucking an extra-strong mint. She could never eat before a show, and afterwards she was too hot, too strung-up, and what she needed to do was talk, talk it all out of her system. But sometimes, hours after she had put out the light, she would wake up and find herself famished and nauseous. She needed cake and chocolate bars then, to pad her flesh and keep her from the pinching of the dead, their peevish nipping and needle teeth. God knows, Colette said, what this eating pattern does to your insulin levels.

I’d really like my gin, she thought. She imagined Colette out there, doing battle for it.

Colette was sharp, rude and effective. Before they joined up, Al was thrust into all sorts of arrangements that she didn’t want, and she was too shy to speak out if things didn’t suit her. She never did sound checks unless the management told her to, and that was a mistake; you needed to insist on them. Before Colette, nobody had tested the lighting, or walked out onstage as her surrogate self, to judge the acoustics and the sight lines from the performer’s point of view. Nobody had even checked underfoot, for nails or broken glass. Nobody made them take the high stool away—they were always putting out a high stool for her to perch on, not having realized she was a big girl. She hated having to hoist herself up, and teeter like an angel on a pinhead: getting her skirt trapped, and trying to drag it from under her bottom while keeping her balance: feeling the stool buck under her, threatening to pitch her off. Before Colette, she’d done whole shows standing, just leaning against the high stool, sometimes draping one arm over it, as if that were the reason why it was put there. But Colette just minced the management when she spotted a stool onstage. “Take it away, she doesn’t work under those conditions.”

Instead Colette asked for an armchair, wide, capacious. Here, ideally, Alison would begin the evening, relaxed, ankles crossed, steadying her breathing before her opening remarks. At the first hint of a contact, she would lean forward; then she would jump up and advance to the front of the stage. She would hang over the audience, almost floating above their heads, her lucky opals flashing fire as she reached out, fingers spread. She’d got the lucky opals mail-order but, if asked, she pretended they’d been left to her family by a Russian princess.

She had explained it all when Colette first joined her. Russia was favourite for ancestors, even better than Romany, nowadays; you didn’t want to put anxiety in the clients’ minds, about fly-tipping, head lice, illegal tarmac gangs, or motorhomes invading the Green Belt. Italian descent was good, Irish was excellent—though you must be selective. In the Six Counties hardly anywhere would do—too likely to crop up on the news. For the rest, Cork and Tipperary sounded too comic, Wicklow and Wexford like minor ailments, and Waterford was too dull.

“Al,” Colette said, “from where do you derive your amazing psychic gifts tonight?”

Al said at once, in her platform voice, “From my old great-grandmother, in County Clare. Bless her.”

Bless her and bless her, she said, under her breath. She looked away from the mirror so Colette wouldn’t see her lips moving. Bless all my great-grandmothers, whoever and wherever they may be. May my dad rot in hell, whoever he may be; whatever hell is and wherever, let him rot in it; and let them please lock the doors of hell at night, so he can’t be out and about, harassing me. Bless my mum, who is still earthside of course, but bless her anyway; wouldn’t she be proud of me if she saw me in chiffon, each inch of my flesh powdered and perfumed? In chiffon, my nails lacquered, with my lucky opals glittering—would she be pleased? Instead of being dismembered in a dish, which I know was her first ambition for me: swimming in jelly and blood. Wouldn’t she like to see me now, my head on my shoulders and my feet in my high-heeled shoes?

No, she thought, be realistic: she wouldn’t give a toss.

Ten minutes to go. Abba on the sound system, “Dancing Queen.” Glass of gin held in one hand, the bottle of tonic looped by her little finger, Colette peeped through a swing door at the back of the hall. Every seat was full and space was tight. They were turning people away, which the manager hated to do but it was fire regulations. How does it feel tonight? It feels all right. There’d been nights when she’d had to sit in the audience, so Alison could pick her out first and get the show going, but they didn’t like doing that and they didn’t need to do it often. Tonight she would be flitting around the hall with a microphone, identifying the people Al picked out and passing the mike along the rows so she could get clear answers out of them. We’ll need three minimum to cover the space, she’d told the manager, and no comedians who trip over their own feet, please. She herself, fast and thin and practiced, would do the work of two.

Colette thought, I can’t stand them now: the clients, the punters, the trade. She didn’t like to be among them, for any purpose. She couldn’t believe that she was ever one of them: lining up to listen to Al, or somebody like her. Booking ahead (all major cards accepted) or jostling in a queue by the box office: a tenner in her fist, and her heart in her mouth.

Alison twisted her rings on her fingers: the lucky opals. It wasn’t nerves exactly, more a strange feeling in her diaphragm, as if her gut were yawning: as if she were making space for what might occur. She heard Colette’s footsteps: my gin, she thought. Good-good. Carefully, she took the mint out of her mouth. The action left her lips sulky; in the mirror, she edged them back into a smile, using the nail of her third finger, careful not to smudge. The face does disarrange itself; it has to be watched. She wrapped the mint in a tissue, looked around, and looped it hesitantly towards a metal bin a few feet away. It fell on the vinyl.

Morris grunted with laughter. “You’re bloody hopeless, gel.”

This time, as Colette came in, she managed to step over Morris’s legs. Morris squawked out, “Tread on me, I love it.”

“Don’t you start!” Al said. “Not you. Morris. Sorry.”

Colette’s face was thin and white. Her eyes had gone narrow, like arrow slits. “I’m used to it.” She put the glass down by Alison’s eyelash curlers, with the bottle of tonic water beside it.