Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

Oh, you wish , Al thought, you wish you did, you’d be round there like a shot, getting yourself flattered. “It will have to do me for this week,” she said, good-humoured. “Okay, see you tomorrow night.”

Next day when they came to pack the car, they couldn’t find her silk, her apricot silk for draping the portrait. But it’s always, always, she said, in just the same place, unless it’s in the wash, and to prove to herself it wasn’t she turned out her laundry basket, and then turned out Colette’s.

Her heart wasn’t in it, she knew it had vanished or been filched. For a week she had noticed the loss of small objects from her bathroom and dressing table.

Colette came in. “I looked in the washing machine,” she said.

“And? It’s not there, is it?”

Colette said, “No. But you might like to look for yourself.”

In the kitchen, Colette had been running the extractor fan, and spraying room freshener. But the odour of burst fat still hung in the air. Al bent down and looked into the washing machine. Her hand shrank from it, but she picked out the object inside. She held it up, frowning. It was a man’s sock, grey, woolly, the heel gone into holes.

So this is what it’s led to, she thought; Morris going on a course. It’s led to him sucking away my silk and my nail scissors and my migraine pills, and taking eggs out of the fridge and frying them. It’s led to him intruding his sock into Colette’s sight: and soon, perhaps, his foot. She looked over her shoulder, as if he might have materialized entirely; as if he might be sitting on the hob and taunting her.

Colette said, “You’ve had that vagrant in.”

“Mart?” How wrong can you be?

“I’ve seen him hanging around,” Colette said, “but I draw the line at his actual admission to the premises, I mean his using the cooking facilities and our utilities. I suppose that would account for the lavatory seat left up, which I have found on several occasions over the last few days. You have to decide who’s living here, Alison, and if it’s him or me, I’m afraid it won’t be me. As for the frying, and the bread that was obviously brought in somehow, that will have to rest with your own conscience. There isn’t a diet on this earth that allows the wholescale consumption of animal fats and burning another person’s pan. As for the sock—I suppose I should be glad I didn’t find it before it was washed.”

The Fig and Pheasant, under a more dignified name, had once been a coaching inn, and its frontage was still spattered with the exudates of a narrow busy A-road. In the sixties it had stood near-derelict and draughty, with a few down-at-heel regulars huddled into a corner of its cavernous rooms. In the seventies it was bought out by a steak-house chain and Tudorized, fitted with plywood oak-stained panels and those deep-buttoned settles covered in stain-proof plush of which the Tudors were so fond. It offered the novelty of baked potatoes wrapped in foil, with butter or sour cream, and a choice of cod or haddock in bread crumbs, accompanied by salad or greyish and lukewarm peas. With each decade, as its ownership had changed, experiments in theming had suceeded each other, until its original menu had acquired retro-chic, and prawn cocktails had reappeared. Plus there was bruschetta. There was ricotta. There was a Junior Menu of pasta shapes and fish bites, and tiny sausages like the finger that the witch tested for plumpness. There were dusty ruched curtains and vaguely William Morris wallpaper, washable but not proof against kids wiping their hands down it, just as they did at home. In the Sports Bar, where smoking was banned, the ceilings were falsely yellowed, to simulate years of tobacco poisoning; it had been done thirty years ago, and no one saw reason to interfere with it.

To get to the function room you had to push through the bar, past the winking fruit machines. Colette got a round in, counting on her fingers: Gemma, Cara, Silvana, Natasha—four large vodka tonics, include me in and make that five, sweet sherry for Mrs. Etchells, and a fizzy water for Alison. The internal walls were thin, porous; at the noisy reenactment of early evening goals the rooms seemed to rock, and cooking smells crept into the nostrils of the Sensitives as they gathered in an airless hutch behind the stage. The mood was militant. Mandy read out the order.

“I’ll only do twenty minutes because of my arthritis,” Mrs. Etchells said, and Mandy said, “Look, love, you were only doing twenty minutes anyway, that’s the whole idea, it’s like a tag team, or passing the baton.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do anything like that,” Mrs. Etchells said.

Mandy sighed. “Forget I spoke. You just do your usual. You can have a chair on stage if you want. Colette, do you think you could find her a chair?”

“That’s not my job.”

“Perhaps not, but couldn’t you show a bit of team spirit?”

“I’ve already agreed to do the microphone. That’s enough.”

“I’ll get Mrs. E a chair,” Al said.

Mrs. Etchells said, “She never calls me granny, you know.”

“We can go into that another time,” Al said.

“I could tell you a story,” Mrs. Etchells said. “I could tell you a thing or two about Alison that would knock your socks off. Oh, you think you’ve seen it all, you young ’uns. You’ve seen nothing, let me tell you.”

When the card Papessa is reversed, it hints that problems go deeper than you think. It warns you of the hidden hand of a female enemy, but it doesn’t oblige by telling you who she is.

“Let’s kick it off, shall we?” said Cara. From beyond the wall came a long roar of Go-o-o-al!

It’s raw, this kind of work, and near the knuckle: unsupported by music, lighting, video screen, it’s just you and them, you and them and the dead, the dead who may oblige or may not, who may confuse and mislead and laugh at you, who may give you bursts of foul language very close up in your ear, who may give you false names and lay false trails just to see you embarrassed. There’s no leeway for a prolonged course of error and no time to retrieve a misstep, so you must move on, move on. The punters all think they are talented now, gifted. They’ve been told so often that everyone has dormant psychic powers that they’re only waiting for the opportunity for theirs to wake up, preferably in public. So you have to suppress them. The less they get to say, the better. Besides, the psychics need to avoid any charge of complicity, of soliciting information. Times have changed and the punters are aggressive. Once they shrank from the psychics, but now the psychics shrink from them.

“Don’t worry,” Gemma said, “I won’t stand for any nonsense.” Her face grim, she stepped out to begin.

“Go, girl!” Cara said defiantly. “Go, go, go!”

It was a low platform; she was only a step above her audience. Her eyes scoured them as if they were a bunch of criminals. “When I come to you shout up. Do not say your name, I don’t want to know your name. I want no information from you but yes or no. I need a minute. I need a minute of hush please; I need to attune; I need to tune in to the vibrations of Spirit World.” Time was she would have told them to hold hands, but these days you don’t want them to strike up alliances.

“I have it, I have it,” Gemma said. Her face was strained, and she tapped the side of her head, which was a mannerism of hers. “You, have I ever seen you before, madam?”

“No,” mouthed the woman.

Colette stuck the mike under her nose. “Can you give us that again, loud and clear?”

“No!” the woman roared.

Gemma was satisfied. “I’m going to give you a name. Answer yes or no. I’m going to give you the name Margaret.”