Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

“He’d take a bath, would he?”

“Oh yes, a shower.”

“And he wouldn’t, sort of, undo his clothes and take out private bits of himself in public?”

“No!”

“And if he saw a little girl on the street, he wouldn’t turn around and make comments about her? Like, look at it waggle its little arse?”

“You frighten me, Al,” Colette said coldly.

I know, Al thought. Why mention it now?

“You have a very peculiar imagination. How can you think I would marry a man like that?”

“You might not know. Till you’d tied the knot. You might have had a nasty surprise.”

“I wouldn’t have been married to that kind of a man. Not for an instant.”

“But he had magazines, did he?”

“I never looked at them.”

“It’s on the Internet, these days.”

Colette thought, I should have searched his systems. But those were early days, as far as technology went. People weren’t sophisticated, like they are now.

“He used to call hotlines,” she admitted. “Once I myself, just out of curiosity—”

“Did you? What happened?”

“They kept you hanging on for ages. Just messing you about, basically, while you were running up a bill. I put the phone down. I thought, what will it be? Just some woman pretending to come. Moaning, I suppose.”

“You could do that for yourself,” Al said.

“Precisely.”

“If we moved, we might be able to lose them. I suppose Morris will stick, but I’d like to shake off his friends.”

“Wouldn’t they come after us?”

“We’d go somewhere they don’t know.”

“Don’t they have maps?”

“I don’t think they do. I think it’s more like … they’re more like dogs. They have to pick up the scent.”

In the LADIES, she watched her own face in the mirror, as she washed her hands. Colette must be coaxed towards a house move, she must be made to see the sense. Yet she must not be terrified too much. Last night the tape had frightened her, but how could that have been prevented? It was a shock to me too, she said to herself. If Morris has caught up with Aitkenside, can Capstick be far behind? Will he be bringing home MacArthur, and lodging him in the bread bin or her dressing table drawer? Will she sit down to breakfast one day and find Pikey Pete lurking under the lid of the butter dish? Will she get a sudden fright, as Bob Fox taps at the window?

Move on, she thought: it might baffle them for a bit. Even a temporary bewilderment could keep them off your back. It might cause them to disperse, lose each other again in those vast tracts the dead inhabit.

“Oi, oi, oi oi!” Morris called, yelling right in her ear. “Bob’s your uncle!”

“Is he?” she’d said, surprised. “Bob Fox? I always wanted a relative.”

“Blimey, Emmie,” Morris said, “is she simple, or what?”

That night, when they got home, Morris crept in with them; the others, his friends, seemed to have melted away, somewhere in Bedfordshire between Junctions 9 and 10. To check for them, she lifted the carpet in the boot of the car, peered into the cold metal well; no one was there, and when she dragged out her case she found it was no heavier than it had been when she packed it. So far so good. To keep them out permanently—that would be another matter. Once inside she was solicitous to Colette, recommending a hot bath and the Coronation Street omnibus edition.

“If it’s on,” Colette said. All she could summon up was funeral coverage. “For God’s sake. I wish they’d give it a rest. They’ve buried her now. She’s not going to get up again.” She slumped on the sofa with a bowl of breakfast cereal. “We ought to get a satellite dish.”

“We can when we move.”

“Or cable. Whatever.”

She’s resilient, Al thought, as she climbed the stairs—or maybe she’s just forgetful? At the stop back in Leicestershire, Colette had turned the shade of porridge, when it was broken to her about the menagerie riding in the back seat of the car. But now she was her usual self, carping away, always with some petty grievance. You couldn’t say her colour had come back, because she never had any colour; but when she was frightened, Al had noticed, she sucked her lips inwards so that they seemed almost to disappear; at the same time, her eyes seemed to shrink back in her skull, so you noticed their pink rims even more.

In her own room, Al sank down onto the bed. Hers was the master bedroom; Colette, when she moved in, had squeezed into what even the estate agent, when he’d sold the flat to Al, had the grace to describe as a small double. It was a good thing she had few clothes and no possessions; or, to put it as Colette did, a capsule wardrobe and a minimalist philosophy.

Al sighed; she stretched her cramped limbs, checking out her body for spirit aches and pains. Some entity was tweaking her left knee, some desolate soul was trying to hold her hand; not now, kids, she said, give me a break. I need, she thought, to give Colette more of a stake in life. Get her name on the house deeds. Give her more reason to stick around, so she’s less inclined to take off in a sulk or on a whim, or under the pressure of unnatural events. For we all have our limits; though she’s brave—brave with the true-blue staunchness of those who lack imagination.

I could, she thought, go downstairs and tell her face-to-face how much I appreciate her; I could, as it were, pin a medal on her: Order of Diana (deceased). She levered herself upright. But her resolution failed. No, she thought; as soon as I see her she’ll irritate me, sitting sideways with her legs flung over the arm of the chair, swinging her feet in her little beige ankle socks. Why doesn’t she get slippers? You can get quite acceptable kinds of slippers these days. Moccasins, something like that. Then there will be a bowl half full of milk on the floor by her chair, with a few malted flakes bobbing in it. Why does she drop her spoon into the bowl when she decides she’s finished, so that driblets of milk shoot out onto the carpet? And why should such small things work one up to an extreme level of agitation? Before I lived with Colette, she thought, I supposed I was easy to live with, I thought I would be happy if people didn’t actually vomit on the carpet, or bring home friends who did. I thought it was quite good to have a carpet, even. I thought of myself as quite a placid person. Probably I was mistaken.

She took the tape recorder out of its bag and set it up on her bedside table. She kept the volume low, whizzing the tape backward to find last night.

MORRIS: Run out for five Woodbine, would you? Thanks Bob, you’re a scholar and a gentleman. ( eructation ) Blimey. I should never ’ave ’ad that cheese an’ onion pie.

AITKENSIDE: Cheese an’ onion? Christ, I ’ad that once, it was at the races, remember that time we went up to Redcar?

MORRIS: Ooh, yer, do I? And Pikey had his motorbike with the sidecar? Redcar, sidecar, we was laughing about that?

AITKENSIDE: Bloody crucified me, that pie. Repeating on me for three bloody weeks.

MORRIS: ’Ere, Dean, they don’t make pies like that these days. I remember Pikey Pete, he kept saying, fanks, Donnie, fanks for the memory. Oh, he were a right laugh! ’Ere, Bob, are you going for them fags?

AITKENSIDE: They don’t make Woodbine no more.

MORRIS: What, they don’t make Woodies? Why not? Why don’t they?

AITKENSIDE: And you can’t buy five. You’ve got to buy ten these days.

MORRIS: What, buy ten, and not even Woodies?

BOY’S VOICE: Where’ve you been, Uncle Morris?

MORRIS: Dead. That’s where I bloody been.

BOY’S VOICE: Have we got to stay dead, Uncle Morris?

MORRIS: Well, it’s up to you, Dean lad, if you can find some way to bloody recycle yourself you get on and do it, san-fairy-ann, no skin off my blooming nose. If you’ve got the contacts, you bloody use ’em. I give a hundred pounds, one hundred nicker in notes to a bloke I met that said he could get me restarted. I said to him, I don’t want borning in bloody wogland, you hear what I’m saying, I don’t want to come back as some nig, and he swore he could get me born in Brighton—or Hove which is near as dammit—born in Brighton and free, white, and twenty-one. Well, not twenty-one, but nar what I mean. And I thought, not bad, Brighton’s near the course, and when I’m a tiddler I’ll be getting the sea air and all, grow up strong and healthy, besides I always had mates in Brighton, show me the bloke wiv no mates in Brighton and I’ll show you a tosser. Anyway, he took my readies and he scarpered. Left me high and dry, dead.