Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

“And it records the wrong numbers, too,” said a pert girl near the front. She had her friends with her; their sniggers ruffled adjacent rows.

Alison smiled. It was for her to make the jokes; she wouldn’t be upstaged. “Yes, I admit we record the wrong numbers. And we record the nuisance calls, if you like to put it that way. I sometimes think they have telesales in the next world, because I never sit down with a nice cup of coffee without some stranger trying to get through. Just imagine—double glazing salesman … debt collectors …”

The girl’s smile faded. She tensed.

Al said, “Look, darling. Let me give you a word of advice. Cut up that credit card. Throw away those catalogues. You can break these spending habits—well, you must, really. You have to grow up and exercise some self-control. Or I can see the bailiffs in, before Christmas.”

Al’s gaze rested, one by one, on those who had dared to snigger; then she dropped her voice, whipped her attention away from the troublemaker, and became confidential with her audience.

“The point is this. If I get a message I don’t censor it. I don’t ask, do you need it? I don’t ask, does it make sense? I do my duty, I do what I’m here for. I put it out there, so the person it applies to can pick it up. Now people in Spirit World can make mistakes. They can be wrong, just like the living. But what I hear, I pass on. And maybe, you know, what I tell you may mean nothing to you at the time. That’s why I sometimes have to say to you, stay with that: go home: live with it. This week or next week, you’ll go, oh, I get it now! Then you’ll have a little smile, and think, she wasn’t such a fool, was she?” She crossed the stage; the opals blazed.

“And then again, there are some messages from Spirit World that aren’t as simple as they seem. This lady, for example—when I speak about ear trouble, what I may be picking up is not so much a physical problem—I might be talking about a breakdown in communication.” The woman stared up at her glassily. Al passed on.

“Jenny’s here. She went suddenly. She didn’t feel the impact, it was instantaneous. She wants you to know.”

“Yes.”

“And she sends her love to Peg. Who’s Peg?”

“Her aunt.”

“And to Sally, and Mrs. Moss. And Liam. And Topsy.”

Jenny lay down. She’d had enough. Her little light was fading. But wait, here’s another—tonight she picked them up as if she were vacuuming the carpet. But it was almost nine o’clock, and it was quite usual to get onto something serious and painful before the interval. “Your little girl, was she very poorly before she passed? I’m getting—this is not recent, we’re going back now, but I have a very clear—I have a picture of a poor little mite who’s really very sick, bless her.”

“It was leukemia,” her mother said.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Al said, swiftly agreeing, as if she had thought of it first: so that the woman would go home and say, she told me Lisa had leukemia, she knew. All she could feel was the weakness and the heat, the energy of the last battle draining away: the flickering pulse at the hairless temple, and the blue eyes, like marbles under translucent lids, rolling into stillness. Dry your tears, Alison said. All the tears of agony you’ve shed, the world doesn’t know, the world can’t count them; and soberly, the woman agreed: nobody knows, she said, and nobody can count. Al, her own voice trembling, assured her, Lisa’s doing fine airside, the next world’s treated her well. A beautiful young woman stood before her—twenty-two, twenty-three—wearing her grandmother’s bridal veil. But whether it was Lisa or not, Al could not say.

Eight-fifty, by Colette’s watch. It was time for Al to lighten up. You have to start this process no less than eight minutes before the end of the first half. If the interval catches you in the middle of something thrilling and risky, they simply don’t want to break; but she, Al, she needed the break, to get back there, touch base with Colette, gulp a cold drink and redo her face. So she would begin another ward round now, picking up a few aches and pains. Already she was homing in on a woman who suffered from headaches. Don’t we all, Colette thought. It was one of the nets Al could safely cast. God knows, her own head ached. There was something about these summer nights, summer nights in small towns, that made you feel that you were seventeen again, and had chances in life. The throat ached and clogged then; there was tightness behind her eyes, as if unshed tears had banked up. Her nose was running, and she hadn’t got a tissue … Al had found a woman with a stiff left knee and was advising her on traditional Chinese medicine; it was a diversion, but they’d go away disappointed if she didn’t throw in some jargon about meridians and ley lines and chakras and feng shui. Gently, soothingly, she was bringing the first part of the evening to a close; and she was having her little joke now, asking about the lady standing at the back, leaning against the wall there, the lady in beige with a bit of a sniffle.

It’s ridiculous, Colette thought, she can’t possibly see me from where she’s standing. She just, somehow, she must just simply know that at some point in the evening I cry.

“Never mind, my dear,” Al said, “a runny nose is nothing to be ashamed of. Wipe it on your sleeve. We’re not looking, are we?”

You’ll pay for it later, Colette thought, and so she will; she’ll have to regurgitate or else digest all the distress she’s sucked in from the carpet and the walls. By the end of the evening she’ll be sick to her stomach from other people’s chemotherapy, feverish and short of breath; or twitching and cold, full of their torsions and strains. She’ll have a neck spasm, or a twisted knee, or a foot she can hardly put on the floor. She’ll need to climb in the bath, moaning, amid the rising steam of aromatherapy oils from her special travel pack, and knock back a handful of painkillers, which, she always says, she should be allowed to set against her income tax.

Almost nine o’clock. Alison looked up, to the big double doors marked EXIT. There was a little green man above the door, running on the spot. She felt like that little green man. “Time to break,” she said. “You’ve been lovely.” She waved to them. “Stretch your legs, and I’ll see you in fifteen.”

Morris was sprawled in Al’s chair when she came into her dressing room. He had his dick out and his foreskin pushed back, and he’d been playing with her lipstick, winding it up to the top of the tube. She evicted him with a dig to his shin from her pointed toe; dropped herself into the vacated chair—she shuddered at the heat of it—and kicked off her shoes. “Do yourself up,” she told him. “Button your trousers, Morris.” She spoke to him as if he were a two-year-old who hadn’t learned the common decencies.

She eased off the opals. “My hands have swelled up.” Colette watched her through the mirror. Al’s skin was bland and creamy, flesh and fluid plumping it out from beneath. “Is the air-conditioning working?” She pulled at bits of her clothing, detaching them from the sticky bits of herself.

“As if carnations were anybody’s favourite!” Colette said.

“What?” Al was shaking her hands in the air, as if they were damp washing.

“That poor woman who was just widowed. You said roses, but she said carnations, so then you said carnations.”

“Colette, could you try to bear in mind, I’ve talked to about thirty people since then?”

Alison held her arms in U above her head, her naked fingers spread. “Let the fluid drain,” she said. “Anything else, Colette? Let’s have it.”

“You always say, oh, make a note, Colette, keep your eyes open, listen and tell me what goes right and what goes wrong. But you’re not willing to listen, are you? Perhaps it’s you who’s got the hearing problem.”