Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

She was grateful for Mandy’s tact. She obviously had her suspicions that Morris was back, but she didn’t want to say anything in case he was listening in.

Sometimes Morris’s voice was in her head; sometimes she found it on the tape. Sometimes he seemed to know everything about their past life together; he would talk, reprising the Aldershot days, running them back on a kind of loop, as if, like Mrs. Etchells at the dem, he’d gone on automatic. She tried every means she knew to tune him out; she played loud music, and distracted herself by long phone calls, going through her contacts book for the numbers of psychics she had known years ago, and calling them up to say, “Hi, guess who?”

“Al!” they would say. “Have you heard about Merlyn? He’s gone to Beverly Hills.” Then, “Shame about Irene Etchells. Sudden, wasn’t it? I never quite got it straight. Was she your gran, or not? Did you ever trace your dad? No? What a shame. Yes, Irene dropped in. I was just cleaning my crystal, and whoops, there she was, swimming about inside. She warned me I might have to have a little op.”

But, as she chatted, the past was chatting inside her: how’s my darling girl, Mrs. McGibbet, poxy little boxer, Keef are you my dad? If you’re going to chuck up go outside and do it. Fuck, Emmie, I’ve got to wash me hands. Dogmeat, Gloria, Gloria, dogmeat: there’s an evil thing you wouldn’t want to see. Round and round it went: there’s an evil thing you wouldn’t want to see at all. Morris was giving her earache, about the old days: the fight game, the scrap-metal game, the entertainment game. All the same, she felt there was something he wasn’t saying, something that he was holding back, perhaps some memory he was teasing her with. At other times, he seemed to be hazy about whom he was addressing; he seemed to be talking to the air.

He said, “Have you seen MacArthur? He’s the cove that owes me money. If you see him you’ll know him, he’s missing one eye. Have you seen young Dean? He’s got his head shaved and Rule Britannia stamped on it. Have you seen Pikey Pete? I’ve been down the waste ground and Pete ain’t there. Been up the waste tip—civic amenity, they call it now—I expect to see him rummaging but he’s not. Totting you call it, totting’s in his blood, together wiv scrap metal, his uncle were the biggest scrap-metal merchant in the Borders in the old days.”

“The Borders,” she said, “that’s a bit out of the way for you, how did you get up there then?”

Morris said, “Circus used to go up that way, didn’t it? Then in later years when I got kicked out of the circus I got a ride off Aitkenside. Aitkenside and his truck was always very handy, if you wanted picking up, if you want dropping off, post yourself by the side of a major trunk road and Aitkenside will be there. Very handy, a truck like that, when you’ve got boxes, when you’ve got a consignment, a van is very nice for a small consignment but nowadays we are trucking spookies by the score, gel. We bring ’em in by the hundreds, they are migrating from the east for a better life. But we charge, mind, and at the same time as we’re bringing ’em in we are kicking ’em out, it’s all part of the same racket, now you might not understand that but if you’d been on a course with Nick he’d make you understand: Comprenez? he’d say and hang you up by your feet until you answered yes. Now Aitkenside is management we have incentives for good work. We have vouchers to spend on modifications and we have family leisure breaks. We pack off on the weekends to the country, and we make crop circles. We fly over the fields and we make high-pitched whistling sounds, causing alarm to farmers and ramblers. We go on theme parks—that’s what they call a fair these days—and we hang off the rides and lie by night unscrewing the screws to cause fatalities. We go out to golf clubs to dig up the greens and they think we’re moles. Only you don’t want to go on a driving range, a spirit can get tangled up easy in them big nets. That’s how we found young Dean, we had to rescue him. Somebody shouted ‘old Nick’s coming’ and Dean being new, he panicked and run off, he run head first into one of them nets—well, where his head would be. It was Aitkenside what extricated him, using his teef.” Morris cackled. “Old Nick, if he sees you where he didn’t ought, he will spit your bollocks on his toasting fork. He will melt you on a brazier and sip the marrow out your bones.”

“Why did you get kicked out of the circus?” she asked. “I never heard that before.”

Morris didn’t answer. “Got kicked out of the circus,” he said. “Got kicked out of the army. Got kicked out of Etchells’s place and had to live in a skip. Story of my life. I don’t know, I don’t feel right in myself till I meet up with Pete. Maybe there’s a horse fair. Do you reckon there’s a horse fair? Maybe there’s a cockfight somewhere, Pete enjoys that.”

When she saw MacArthur again, materializing in the kitchen after this gap of many years, he had a false eye, just as Mrs. Etchells had suggested. Its surface was lustrous but hard, and light bounced from as it did from the surface of her lucky opals on the days when they refused to show their depths. Morris said, “Say what you like about MacArthur, but he was an artist wiv a knife. I seen him carve a woman like a turkey.”

The tape unspooled in the empty room, and Morris, speaking from the distant past, could be heard puffing and grunting into the microphone, as if he were carrying a heavy and awkward burden. “Up a bit, left a bit, mind the step, Donnie. Right, I’ve got her. You grab your corner of the blanket there … steady as she goes … . Fuckit, I’m going in the kitchen, I’ve got to wash me hands. They are all over sticky stuff.”

Colette came in from the garden, indignant. “I’ve just been in the shed,” she said. “Mart’s been back. Come and look, if you don’t believe me.”

Alison went down the garden. It was another of those hot, clammy days. A breeze stirred the saplings, bound to their posts like saints secured for burning, but the breeze itself was fevered, semitropical. Al wiped her hand across her forehead.

On the floor of the shed were a scatter of Mart’s belongings: a tin opener, some plastic cutlery nicked from the supermarket café, and a number of rusty, unidentifiable keys. Colette scooped them up.

“I’ll pass these on to PC Delingbole. Perhaps he can reunite them with their owners.”

“Oh, don’t be so spiteful!” Alison said. “What did Mart ever do to you? He’s been kicked out of any place he could call home. There’s no evil in him. He isn’t the sort to cut a woman up and leave her in a dirty van.”

Colette stared at her. “I don’t think you ought to go to Aldershot,” she said. “I think you ought to have a lie-down.” She ducked out of the Balmoral, and stood on the lawn. “I have to tell you, Alison, that I am very disturbed at your behaviour lately. I think we may have to reconsider the terms of our arrangement. I’m finding it increasingly untenable.”

“And where will you go?” Alison jeered. “Are you going to live in a shed as well?”

“That’s my business. Keep your voice down. We don’t want Michelle out here.”

“I wouldn’t mind. She could be a witness. You were down and out when I met you, Colette.”

“Hardly that. I had a very good career. I was regarded as a highflyer, let me tell you.”

Alison turned and walked into the house. “Yes, but psychically, you were down and out.”

On the way to Mrs. Etchells’s house, they did not speak. They drove through Pirbright—by the village green, by the pond fringed with rushes and yellow iris—through the black-shaded woodlands of the A324, where bars of light flashed through the treetops to rap the knuckles of Colette’s tiny fists clenched on the wheel: by the ferny verges and towering hedges, by deep-roofed homesteads of mellow timbers and old stock brick, the sprinklers rotating on their velvet lawns, the coo of wood pigeons in their chimney stacks, the sweet smells of lavender and beeswax wafting from linen press, commode, and étagère. If I walked out on her now, Colette thought, then with what I have got saved I could just about put a deposit on a Beatty, though to be frank I’d like somewhere with a bit more nightlife than Admiral Drive. If I can’t live here where the rich people live I’d like to live on a tube line, and then I could go out to a club with my friends and we could get wrecked on a Friday like we used to, and go home with men we hardly knew, and sneak off in the mornings when only the milk trucks are out and the birds are singing. But I suppose I’m old now, she thought, if I had any friends they’d all have kids by now, they’d be too old for clubbing, they’d be too grown-up, in fact it would be their kids that would be going out, and they’d be sitting at home with their gardening manuals. And I have grown up without anyone noticing. I went home with Gavin once, or rather I pressed the lift button to his hotel floor, and when I tapped at his door he looked through his spyhole and he liked what he saw—but would anybody like me now? As the first straggle of the settlement of Ash appeared—some rotting sixties in-fill, and the sway-walled cottages by the old church—she felt penetrated by a cold hopelessness, which the prospect before her did nothing to soothe.