Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

It was 5 A.M. when Al came down. Her guts were churning; this happened. She could eat quite an ordinary meal, but her insides would say no-no, not for you. She raised the kitchen blind, and while her bicarb fizzed in a glass at her elbow she looked out over the larch-lap fences swathed in pearly light. Something moved, a shadow against the lawn. In the distance, a milk truck hummed, and nearer at hand an early businessman slammed with a metallic clatter his garage’s Georgian door.

Alison unlocked the kitchen door and stepped out. The morning was fresh and damp. From across the estate a car alarm whooped and yodelled. The man on the lawn was young, and had a dark stubble and a blueish pallor. He wore a woolly hat pulled down over his brow. His big sneakers bruised his footprints into the dew. He saw Alison, but hardly checked his stride, simply raising two fingers to his forehead in acknowledgement.

What’s your name? she asked him silently.

There was no reply.

It’s all right, you can tell Al, don’t be shy. The creature smiled shyly and continued to circle.

She thought, you can go under a false name if you like. Just as long as I have something to call you by, to make our life together possible. Look at him, she thought, look at him! Why can’t I get a spirit guide with some dress sense?

Yet there was something humble in his manner, that she liked. She stood shivering, waiting for him to communicate. A train rattled away in the distance, up from Hampshire, London bound. She noticed how it gently shook the morning; the light broke up around her, flaking into creamy fragments edged with gold, then settling again. The sun was creeping around the edge of a Rodney. She blinked, and the lawn was empty.

Colette, pouring her orange juice at eight-thirty, said, “Al, you cannot have two pieces of toast.” Colette was making her diet; it was her new hobby.

“One?”

“Yes, one. With a scrape—no more than a scrape, mind—of low-fat spread.”

“And a scrape of jam?”

“No. Jam will play havoc with your metabolism.” She sipped her orange juice. “I dreamed there was a man on the lawn.”

“Did you?” Alison frowned, holding the lid of the bread bin before her like a shield. “On the lawn? Last night? What was he like?”

“Dunno,” Colette said. “I almost came and woke you.”

“In your dream?”

“Yes. No. I think I was dreaming that I was awake.”

“That’s common,” Al said. “Those sorts of dreams, people who are Sensitives have them all the time.”

She thought, I dreamed there were trucks outside the house, and a blanket in the back of one, and under that blanket—what? In my dream I came inside and lay down again, and dreamed again, within my dream; I dreamed of an animal, tight and trembling inside its skin, quivering with lust as it wolfed human meat from a bowl.

She said, “I wonder if you’re becoming a Sensitive, Colette.” She didn’t say it aloud.

Colette said, “When I agreed to one slice of bread, I meant one normal-sized one, not one slice two inches thick.”

“Ah. Then you should have said.”

“Be reasonable.” Colette crossed the kitchen and barged into her. “I’ll show you what you can have. Give me that bread knife.”

Al’s fingers yielded it, unwillingly. She and the bread knife were friends.

It was gardening day. The new contractors had brought plans and costed out the decking. They were going to build a water feature; it would be more like a small fountain than a pond. By the time Colette had beaten down their estimate by a few hundred pounds, she had forgotten all about her disturbed night, and her mood, like the day, was sunny.

As the men were leaving, Michelle beckoned her to the fence. “Glad to see you’re doing something with it, at last. It was a bit of an eyesore, lying all bare like that. By the way—I don’t know if I should mention—when Evan got up this morning he saw a man in your garden. Evan thought he was trying the shed door.”

“Oh. Anyone we know?”

“Evan had never seen him before. He rang your doorbell.”

“Who, the man?”

“No, Evan. You must have been in the land of dreams, both of you. Evan said, they’re not hearing me. He said, all right for some.”

“The advantages,” Colette said, “of the child-free lifestyle.”

“Evan said, they’ve got no lock on their side gate. And them two women alone.”

“I’ll get a lock,” Colette snapped. “And seeing as the blessed gate is all of five feet high, and anybody but a midget could vault over it, I’ll get some barbed wire on top, shall I?”

“Now that would be unsightly,” Michelle said. “No, what you should do, come to our next meeting with community policing and get some advice. This is a big time of year for shed crime. Police Constable Delingbole gave us a talk on it.”

“I’m sorry I missed that,” Colette said. “Anyway, the shed’s empty. All the stuff’s still locked in the garage, waiting for me to move it. By the way, has Evan found any of those white worms?”

“What?” Michelle said. “White worms? Yuk. Are they in your garden?”

“No, they’re in Reading,” Colette said. “At the last sighting. A man was digging in his garden and there they were on the end of his spade, huge writhing clusters of them. Did Constable Wossname not mention it?”

Michelle shook her head. She looked as if she might throw up.

“I can’t think why he didn’t. It’s been in all the papers. The poor man’s had to board his property up. Now he’s asking for an investigation. Thing with worms is, they travel underground, they’ll be heading out in search of a food source, and of course being radioactive they won’t hang about, they’ll be scorching along like buggery. Excuse my language, but being the police he ought to have warned you really.”

“Oh God,” Michelle said. “Evan didn’t mention it either. Didn’t want to scare me, I suppose. What can we do? Shall I ring the council?”

“You ask for pest control, I think. And then they come out with very fine mesh nets, and fence all around your garden with them.”

“Are you having them?”

“Oh yes. Same time as we get the decking, to save digging up twice near the house.”

“Do you have to pay?”

“’Fraid so. But it’s worth it, wouldn’t you say?”

She went back into the house and said, “Al, I’ve told Michelle that gross poisoned worms are going to come and eat her kiddiwinks.”

Al looked up, frowning, from her tarot spread. “Why did you do that?”

“Just to see her shit herself.” Then she remembered. “By the way, that dream I had, it wasn’t a dream. When Evan got up this morning he saw some bloke messing around near the shed.”

Alison laid the cards down. Her situation, she saw, needed a rethink. I’ll have that rethink, she decided, when Colette goes out.

In the kitchen, out of Colette’s earshot, the breakfast dishes were chinking together; a little spirit woman was pushing them around on the worktop, wanting to help, wanting to wash up for them but not knowing how. “Excuse me, excuse me,” she was saying, “have you seen Maureen Harrison?”

Honestly, Al thought. A spirit guide is wasted on Colette. I ought to take time out and lay hold of Maureen Harrison and send her zinging to the next stage, out of Colette’s way, and then grab her poor little friend and catapult her after. It would be doing them a favour, in the long run. But she imagined their frail flesh shrinking inside the baggy sleeves of their cardigans (where their cardigans would be) as her strong psychic grip fell on their arms; she imagined the old pair weeping and struggling, snapping their feeble bones under her hand. Muscular tactics were seldom any use, she had found, when you needed to send a spirit over. You call it firm action and you think it’s for their own good, but they don’t think so. Especially not the older generation. She knows psychics who will call in a clergyman at the least excuse. But that’s like sending the bailiffs in; it shames them. It’s like dosing them with a laxative when they can’t get to their commode.