Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

Oh dear, she said. They ought to hold postmortems, maybe. She couldn’t think what else to say. Got to go, she said; as she limped away from the fence, Michelle called, will the warm weather last till weekend?

By eight o’clock Al was beginning to feel very hungry. Colette didn’t show any sign of coming down and supervising her dinner. She crept upstairs to listen. More and more, this evening reminded her of her youth. The need to tip-toe, listen at doors: sighs and groans from other rooms. “Colette?” she called softly. “I need you to do my calories.”

No reply. She eased the door open. “Colette?”

“Go and eat yourself to death,” Colette said. “What do I care?”

She was lying face down on the bed. She looked very flat. She looked very out-of-it. Alison drew the door closed, in a manner so quiet that she hoped it showed her complete respect for Colette’s state of mind, so quiet that it offered condolences.

She crept down the garden. The moon had not yet turned the corner above the Mountbatten at the curve of the road, and she wasn’t clear where she was putting her feet. She felt she ought to knock, but that’s ridiculous, she thought, knock at your own shed?

She inched open the door. Mart was sitting in the dark. He had a torch, and batteries, but they were the wrong size; something else for my shopping list, she thought. She could have fixed him up with a candle, but she didn’t trust him not to start a fire.

“Get your shopping?”

“What shopping? I’m ravenous in here. Fainting.”

“I’m giving you fifty quid,” Al said. “Sneak off into Knaphill, will you, and get a takeaway Chinese? Get me a set menu for two, and whatever you want for yourself. Keep the change.”

When Mart left, diving low under the light sensors, she tried to make herself comfortable in the canvas garden chair. The earth was cooling, beneath their hardstanding; she lifted her feet and tried to tuck them beneath her, but the chair threatened to overbalance; she had to sit up straight, metal digging into her back, and plant her feet back on the ground. She thought, I wonder what happened to the shopping?

When Mart came back they sat companionably, licking spare ribs and tossing down the bones. “You’ve got to take the cartons away,” she said. “Do you understand that? You mustn’t put them in our wheelie bin. Or Colette will see them. You have to be gone soon. The garden design will be coming. They’ll probably say, take down that shed, it’s an eyesore.” She chewed thoughtfully on a sweet-and-sour prawn. “I knew we should get a better one.”

“It’s late,” Mart said, consulting his new watch. “You ought to go in.”

“Oh, just so you can finish everything off by yourself!”

“I’m more hungry than you,” Mart said, and she thought, that’s true. So in she went. Up to bed. All quiet from Colette’s room. She didn’t dream, for once; or not of being hungry.

It couldn’t last, of course. Previously there had been an element of camouflage about Mart, his dirty clothes blending into the earth tones of the gardens, but you noticed his feet now, in the big clean navy and white shoes, seeming to come around the corner before him.

When he saw Colette approaching, he slammed the door of the shed and wedged his rucksack against it; but Colette defeated him with one push. Her yodel of alarm drove him back against the wall.

Al galumphed down the garden, shouting, “Don’t hit him! Don’t call the police, he’s not dangerous.”

Mart laughed when Colette said she had seen him on the lawn.

“I bet you thought I was from space, did you? You said, oops, there goes an extraterrestrial! Or did you think I was a brickie from off the building site?”

“I didn’t form any opinion,” Colette said coldly.

“She thought she was dreaming,” Al said.

“Alison, I’ll deal with this, please.”

“In fact, my troubles started with an alien encounter,” Mart said. “Aliens give you a headache, did you know that? Plus they make you fall over. When you’ve seen an alien, it’s like somebody’s drilled your middle out.” He made a gesture—a gouge and a twist—like someone plunging a corer into an apple. “Pinto,” he said, “when we was white-lining up near Saint Albans, he got taken up bodily into an alien craft. Female aliens came and pulled off his overalls and palpitated his body all over.”

“He was dreaming,” Colette said.

Al thought, she doesn’t know how lucky we are, we could have been playing host to Pinto as well.

“He wasn’t asleep,” Mart said. “He was carried off. The proof of it is, when he got back, he took his shirt off and they’d erased his tattoo.”

“You can’t stay here any longer,” Colette said. “I hope that’s perfectly clear to you?”

“A shed wouldn’t do for everybody,” Mart conceded. “But it’ll do nicely for me. Less bugs in a shed.”

“I should have thought there’d be more. Though I’m sure you’ll find that it’s perfectly clean.”

“Not crawling bugs. Listening bugs.”

“Don’t be silly. Who’d want to listen to you? You’re a vagrant.”

“And there’s cameras everywhere these days,” Mart said. “Blokes watching you out of control towers. You can’t go anywhere without somebody knows about it. You get post from people that don’t know you, how do you do that? Even I get post, and I don’t have an address. Constable Delingbole says, I’ve got your number, mate.” He added, under his breath, “His is written on him.”

“I expect you out of here within ten minutes,” Colette said. “I am going back to the house and I shall be counting. Then, whatever you say, Alison, I shall call the police and have you removed.”

Al thought, I wonder if Delingbole is real, or in a dream? Then she thought, yes, of course he’s real. Michelle knows him, doesn’t she? He gave a talk on shed crime. She wouldn’t have dreamed that.

It was some hours before Colette was speaking to her again. There were interactions, chance meetings; at one point Colette had to hand her the telephone to take a call from a client, and later they arrived in the utility room at the same time, with two baskets of washing, and stood saying coldly, after you, no, after you.

But the Collingwood wasn’t big enough to keep up a feud.

“What do you want me to say?” Al demanded. “That I won’t keep a vagrant again? Well, I won’t, if you feel that strongly about it. Jesus! It isn’t as if there was any harm done.”

“No thanks to you.”

“Let’s not start again,” she said.

“I don’t think you realize the kind of people who are out there.”

“No, I’m too good,” Al muttered. “You don’t realize half the evil that is in the world,” she told herself under her breath.

Colette said, “I saw Michelle earlier. She says, guard your shopping.”

“What?”

“In the boot of the car. In case it vanishes while you’re unlocking the front door. Don’t leave the boot lid open. There’s been a spate of grocery theft.”

“I don’t go shopping by myself, do I?”

Colette said, “Stop muttering like that.”

“Truce?” she said. “Peace talks? Cup of tea?”

Colette did not answer but she took it as a yes, standing at the sink filling the kettle, looking down the garden towards the now-deserted Balmoral. Colette had accused her of harbouring Mart, but not of actually feeding him; not of actually buying supplies and smuggling them in. She had not actually slapped her, but she had screamed in her face, asked her if she was insane, and if it was her intention to bring into the neighbourhood a gang of robbers, child molesters, terrorists, and would-be murderers.

I don’t know, she’d said, I don’t think so. I didn’t have an intention, I just wanted to do a good action, I suppose I didn’t think; I just felt sorry for him, because he’s got nowhere to go and so he has to go in a shed.