Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

“Now just stop there. You’re saying my grandmother was a—” She broke off. She couldn’t find the right word. “You’re saying my grandmother was as bad as you?”

“Grandmother my arse.”

“But Derek—listen, Derek was my dad, wasn’t he?”

“He could of been,” her mother said vaguely. “I think I done it with Derek. Ask Aitkenside, he knows who I done it with. But Derek wasn’t her son, anyway. He was just some kid she took in to run errands for her.”

Al closed her eyes tight. “Errands? But all these years, Mum. You let me think—”

“I didn’t tell you what to think. Up to you what you thought. I told you to mind your own business. How do I know if I done it with Derek? I done it with loads of blokes. Well, you had to.”

“Why did you have to?” Alison said balefully.

“You wouldn’t ask that question if you were in my shoes,” Emmie said. “You wouldn’t have the cheek.”

“I’m going to come over there,” Al said. “I want to put a few straight questions to you. About your past. And mine.”

Her mother shouted, “You hear that, Gloria? She’s coming over. Better bake a cake, eh? Better get the fancy doilies out.”

“Oh, you’re not on that again, are you?” Al’s voice was weary. “I thought we’d got Gloria out of our lives twenty years ago.”

“So did I, pardon me, till she turned up on me doorstep the other night. I never had such a thunderclap. I says, Gloria! and she says, hello, and I says, you’ve not changed a bit, and she says, I can’t say the same for you, she says, give us a fag, I says, how’d you track me down in Bracknell? She says—”

“Oh, Mum!” Alison yelled. “She’s dead !”

I said it, she thought, I uttered the word no Sensitive ever uses: well hardly ever. I didn’t say passed, I didn’t say gone over, I said dead, and I said it because I believe that when it comes to dead, Gloria is deader than most of us, deader than most of the people who claim to be dead: in my nightmares since I was a child she is cut apart, parcelled out, chewed up.

There was a silence. “Mum? You still there?”

“I know,” said Emmie, in a small voice. “I know she’s dead. I just forget, is all.”

“I want you to remember. I want you to stop talking to her. Because it’s driving me round the twist and it always did. It’s not as if you made a living out of it. So there’s no use fooling yourself. You may as well get it straight and keep it straight.”

“I have.” Emmie sounded cowed. “I have, Alison. I will.”

“So do you want to come to Mrs. Etchells’s service?”

“Why?” Emmie was mystified. “Is she getting married?”

“We’re burying her, Mum. I told you. Cremating. Whatever. We don’t know what her wishes would have been. I was hoping you could shed some light, but obviously not. Then as soon as that’s over, I’m coming to see you, and we’re going to sit down and have a heart-to-heart. I don’t think you’re fit to live on your own. Colette says you should be living in a warden-assisted bungalow. She says we ought to make you a care plan.”

“You hear that, Gloria?” said Emmie. “We’ll have to polish the silver, if Lady Muck is coming to tea.”

For a few days the fiends were faintly present, flickering at the corner of her eye: throughout her whole body, they left their mark. It’s as if, she thought, they’re walking in one by one, and wiping their feet on me. Her temperature dropped; her tongue furred up with a yellow-green coating. Her eyes looked small and bleary. Her limbs tingled and she lost sensation in her feet; they still seemed intent on walking off, leaving the whole mess behind, but though the intention was there, she no longer had the ability.

Morris said, got to get the boys together. We will be wanting a knees-up, seeing as Etchells is fetched away, and we are fully entitled in my opinion, there’s one we can tick off—well done, lads—there weren’t no messing about with Etchells.

“You arranged it?” she said. She had hoped their appearance in the back row of the dem might be coincidental—or rather, the kind of coincidence with unpleasant events that they liked to arrange for themselves.

“’Course we did,” Morris boasted. “What is our mission? It is to track down useless and ugly people and recycle them, and with Etchells we have made a start. I says to Mr. Aitkenside, do you mind if I kick off the project wiv a bit of personal business, and he says, Morris, old son, if I could give you the nod I would, but you know it is more than my skin’s worth, for you know old Nick, his temper when he is roused, and if you don’t go right through the proper procedure and your paperwork all straight he will take a pencil and ram it through your ear hole and swivel it about so your brain goes twiddle-de-dee, he says, I seen it done, and Nick has a special pencil he keeps behind his ear that makes it more painful. I says to him, Mr. Aitkenside, sir, upon my mother’s life I would not ask you to take any such risk of having your brain twiddled, forget I asked, but he says, Morris, old son, we go back, he says, we go back you and me, I tell you what I’ll do for you, when I happen to catch old Nick in a mellow mood—let us say we have had a good session in the back bar at the Bells of Hell, let us say Nick has won the darts, let us say we have had a barbecue on the back lawn and the great man is feeling at ease with himself—I’d say to him, Your ’Ighness, how would it be if my friend and yours Morris Warren were to do a bit of personal business, a bit of tidying up he has left over? For Nick was in the army, you know, and he likes things tidy.”

“What army?” Al said.

“I don’t know.” Morris sounded impatient. “The army, the navy, the forces, innit, bomber command, special boat squadron, there’s only one army, and that’s ours. Will you stop interrupting?”

“Sorry.”

“So it all worked out just like Mr. Aitkenside said it would, and I got leave, and off I go, rounding up a few of the lads as I go, and we pop up there and give the old biddy the fright of her life.”

“What had she ever done to you?”

“Etchells? She put me out in the street. She kicked me off Spirit Guide, she wanted Pikey Paul with his shiny outfits, Poncey Paul as I call him; if he wasn’t the uncle of Pete who is a mate of mine, I could cast aspersions there, I really could. I had to live in a builder’s skip, under an old broken fireplace, till I could happen to move in with you.”

“It’s a long time to hold a grudge.”

“It’s not a long time, when you’re dead and you’ve bugger-all else to do. You can’t treat a guide like that—maltreat him, and it comes back on you. So anyway … we got ourselves down the Fig and Pheasant, we tampered with the optics and nipped the little girls’ bottoms that was serving behind the bar, we strolled into the function room cool as you like and then we lined up on the back row. Etchells, blimey, you should have seen her face.”

“I did.”

“But you didn’t see our modifications.”

“So what are those? Apart from your tattoo?”

“Lifelike, innit?” Morris said. “I got it done when we was on a spot of R and R in the Far East. We got leave halfway through our course. Still, you ain’t seen nothing till you seen young Dean. We oldsters, we’ve got enough to sicken folk as it is, by God have we a collection of scars, there’s Mac with his eye socket and his chewed-off ear and Capstick with his private problem that he don’t like mentioned. Pikey Pete booked in to have his teeth filed, but Dean said, you could get that earthside nowadays, mate, you could get your teeth filed and your tongue slit. Oh, but Dean did rib him! So Capstick says, I’ll show willing, I’ll lay my money out, so he’s had his hair stood on end and his tongue rasped, but the youngsters don’t think nothing of that. They’ve all got these new tongue extensions. You can have it hung further back so it’s retractable, or you can have your palate heightened so your tongue rolls up neatly till required. Now Dean has opted for the last one, it costs you but it’s more neat and tidy, doesn’t slide out when you’re walking, and Mr. Aitkenside is teaching him to take a pride in his appearance. He’s going for the full scroll-out, so he’ll have to wear a guard till he gets used to it, but he claims it’s worth it, I dunno. He’s gone in for his knees swivelled as well, so he’s walking backwards when he’s walking forwards; you have to see it to appreciate it, but I can tell you it’s comical. Mr. Aitkenside has got six legs, so he has got six boots; that’s because he has got made up to management, that’s all the better for kicking them with.”