Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

“Silvana went for her. But she’s asked to be dropped off at some bed and breakfast in Beeston.”

“Feeling the pinch, is she? Good. Cheating old bat.”

“Oh, I think she does all right, she does a lot of postal readings. She’s got regulars going back years. No, it’s just she finds a hotel impersonal, she says, she prefers a family home. You know what she’s like. She reads the tea cups and leaves her flyer. She tries to sign up the landlady. Sometimes they let her stop for nothing.”

Colette pulled a sheaf of Al’s new leaflets out of their box. They had chosen lavender, and a form of wording that declared her to be one of the most acclaimed psychics working in Britain today. Al had objected, modestly, but Colette said, what do you want me to put? Alison Hart, Slightly Famous Along The A4?

The schedule was this: a Fayre this evening, Saturday, to be followed next day by a Grand Fayre, where a group of them would have their forty-minute slots on the platform; meanwhile, whoever was not onstage could carry on with private readings in the side rooms.

The venue was an old primary school, the marks of violence still chipped into its red brick. As Al stepped inside she shuddered. She said, “As you know, my schooldays weren’t what you call happy.”

She put a smile on her face, and lollopped among the trestles, beaming from side to side as her colleagues set out their stalls. “Hi Angel. Hi Cara, how are you? This is Colette, my new assistant and working partner.”

Cara, setting down her Norse Wisdom Sticks, lifted her sunny little face. “Hi, Alison. I see you’ve not lost any weight.”

Mrs. Etchells staggered in, a box of baubles in her arms. “Oh, what a journey! What a day after the night before!”

“You got a toy boy, Mrs. Etchells?” Cara asked, giving Al a wink.

“If you must know, I was up all night with the Princess. Silvana, love, help me dress my table, would you?”

Silvana, raising her pencilled brows and hissing between her teeth, dumped down carrier bags and unfurled Mrs. Etchell’s fringed crimson cloth into air laden already with the smell from oil burners. “Personally,” she said, “I never heard a squeak from Di. Mrs. Etchells reckons she was with her, talking about the joys of motherhood.”

“Imagine that,” Mandy said.

“So this is your assistant, Alison?” Silvana ran her eyes over Colette; then ran them over Alison, with insulting slowness, as if they had to feel their way over a large surface area.

They hate it, Al thought, they hate it; because I’ve got Colette, they think I’m coining it. “I thought—you know,” she said. “A bit of help with the—with the secretarial, the bookkeeping, the driving, you know. Lonely on the road.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” Silvana said. “Mind you, if you wanted company on the motorway you could have run over to Aldershot and collected your granny, instead of leaving it to me. This your new flyer?” She picked it up and held it close to her eyes; psychics don’t wear glasses. “Mm,” she said. “Did you do this, Colette? Very nice.”

“I shall be setting up a Web site for Alison,” Colette said.

Silvana tossed the leaflet down on Mrs. Etchells’s table and passed her hands around Colette to feel her aura. “Oh dear,” she said, and moved away.

Seven o’clock. The scheduled finish was at eight, but tonight they would be lucky to get them out by half-past; the caretaker was already banging about, kicking his vacuum cleaner up and down the corridor. But what could you do with the punters: lever them, sodden and sobbing, into the streets? There was hardly one customer who had not mentioned Di; many broke down and cried, putting their elbows on the trestles, edging up the lucky pisky figurines and the brass finger cymbals so they could sob their hearts out in comfort. I identified with her, she was like a friend to me. Yes, yes, yes, Al would say, like her you are drawn to suffering, oh yes, I am I am, that’s me. You like to have a good time, oh yes I have always loved dancing. I think of those two boys, I would have had two boys, except the last one was a girl. Diana was Cancer like me, I was born under Cancer, it means you are like a crab, inside your shell you are squidgy, I think that’s where her nickname came from, don’t you? I never thought of that, Al said, but you could be right. I think they made her a scrapegoat. I dreamed of her last night, appearing to me in the form of a bird.

There was something gluttonous in their grief, something gloating. Al let them sob, agreeing with them and feeding them their lines, sometimes making little there-there noises; her eyes travelled from side to side, to see who was conspiring against her; Colette stalked between the tables, listening in. I must tell her not to do that, Al thought, or at least not to do it so conspicuously. As she passed, ill will trailed after her; let them not cold-shoulder me, Al prayed.

For it was usual among the psychics to pass clients to each other, to work in little rings and clusters, trading off their specialties, their weaknesses and strengths: well, darling, I’m not a medium personally, but you see Eve there, in the corner, just give her a little wave, tell her I’ve recommended you. They pass notes to one another, table to table—titbits gleaned, snippets of personal information with which to impress the clients. And if for some reason you’re not on the inside track, you can get disrecommended, you can get forced out. It’s a cold world when your colleagues turn their backs.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she sighed, patting the mottled palms she had just read. “It will all work out for the best. And I’m sure young Harry will look more like his daddy as time goes by.” The woman wrote her a cheque for three services—palms, crystal, and general clairvoyance—and as she detached it a final fat tear rolled out of her eye and splashed on her bank sort code.

As the woman rose, a new prospect hesitated in passing. “Do you do Vedic palmistry or ordinary?”

“Just ordinary, I’m afraid,” Alison said. The woman sneered and started to move on. Alison began, “You could try Silvana over there—” but she checked herself. Silvana, after all, was a fraud; her mother used to manage a newsagent in Farnborough, a fact at odds with her claim to be a Romany whose family origins were lost in the mists of occult tradition. Sometimes the punters would ask “What’s the difference between a clairaudient and an aura reader, a whatsit and a thing?” and Al would say, “No great difference, my dear, it’s not the instrument you choose that matters, it’s not the method, it’s not the technique, it’s your attunement to a higher reality.” But what she really wanted to do was lean across the table and say, you know what’s the difference, the difference between them and me? Most of them can’t do it, and I can. And the difference shows, she tells herself, not just in results, but in attitude, in deportment, in some essential seriousness. Her tarot cards, unused so far today, sat at her right hand, burning through their wrap of scarlet satin: priestess, lover, and fool. She had never touched them with a hand that was soiled, or opened them to the air without opening her heart; whereas Silvana will light a fag between customers, and Merlin and Merlyn will send out for cheeseburgers if there’s a lull. It isn’t right to smoke and eat in front of clients, to blow smoke at them over your crystals.

It’s this she must teach Colette, that a casual approach won’t do: you don’t shove your stuff in a nylon holdall and wrap your rose quartz in your knickers. You don’t carry your kit around in a cardboard box that used to contain a dozen bottles of lavatory cleaner, you don’t clear up at the end of a fayre by bundling your bits and pieces into a supermarket carrier bag. And you control your face, your expression, every moment you’re awake. She had sometimes noticed an unguarded expression on a colleague’s face, as the departing client turned away: a compound of deep weariness and boredom, as the lines of professional alertness faded and the face fell into its customary avaricious folds. She had made up her mind, in the early days, that the client would not like to see this expression, and so she had invented a smile, complicit and wistful, which she kept cemented to her face between readings; it was there now.