Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

“We’ll have the media here before we know it,” Constable Delingbole said. “Dear, oh, dear. Not very nice for you two girls. Forensics will be in. We’ll have to seal off your garden. We’ll have to conduct a search of the premises. You got anybody you could go to, for the night? Neighbours?”

“No,” Al said. “They think we’re lesbians. If we must move out, we’ll make our own arrangements. But we’d rather not. You see, I run my business from home.”

Already the road was filling with vehicles. A radio car from the local station was parked on the verge, and Delingbole’s boy was attempting to move back the mothers and tots. The kebab van was setting up by the children’s playground, and some of the tots, whining, were trying to lead their mothers towards it. “This is your fault,” Michelle shouted up at the house. She turned to her neighbours. “If they hadn’t encouraged him, he’d have gone and hanged himself somewhere else.”

“Now,” said a woman from a Frobisher, “we’ll be in the local paper as that place where the tramp topped himself, and that won’t be very nice for our resale values.”

Inside, in the half-dark, Delingbole said. “Do I take it you knew him, poor bugger? Somebody will have to identify him.”

“You can do it,” Al said. “You knew him, didn’t you? You made his life a misery. You stamped on his watch.”

When the forensic team came, they stood thigh-deep in the low, salivating spirits that cluster at the scene of a sudden or violent death. They stood thigh-deep in them and never noticed a thing. They puzzled over the multiple footprints they found by the shed, prints from feet that were jointed to no ordinary leg. They cut Mart down, and the length of apricot polyester from which they found him suspended was labelled and placed carefully in a sealed bag.

“He must have taken a long time to die,” Alison said, later that night. “He had nothing, you see, Mart, nothing at all. He wouldn’t have a rope. He wouldn’t have a high place to hang himself from.”

They sat with the lamps unlit, so as not to attract the attention of the neighbours; they moved cautiously, sliding around the edges of the room.

“You’d have thought he could have jumped on the railway track,” Colette said. “Or thrown himself off the roof of Toys ‘R’ Us; that’s what they mostly do round Woking, I’ve seen it in the local paper. But oh no, he would have to go and do it here, where he would cause maximum trouble and inconvenience. We were the only people who were ever kind to him, and look how he repays us. You bought him those shoes, didn’t you?”

“And a new watch,” Al said. “I tried to do a good action. Look how it ended up.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” Colette said. But her tone was sarcastic, and—as far as Alison could discern her expression in the gloom—she looked both angry and bitter.

In spirit, Mart had looked quite chipper, Al thought, when she saw him perched on the fence. When she sneaked into the kitchen, in search of supper, she wondered if she should leave him out a plate of sandwiches. But I suppose I’d sleepwalk in the night, she thought, and eat them myself. She believed she caught a glimpse of him, behind the door of the utility room; livid bruising was still fresh on his neck.

Later, as she was coming out of the bathroom, Morris stopped her. “I suppose you think we was out of order?” he said.

“You’re an evil bastard, Morris,” she said. “You were evil when you were earthside, and now you’re worse.”

“Oh, come on!” Morris said. “Don’t take on! You’re worse than your bloody mother. We wanted a laugh, that’s all. Not as if the cove was doing much good this side, was he? Anyway, I’ve had a word with Mr. Aitkenside, and we’re going to take him on to clean our boots. Which is currently young Dean’s job, but with Mr. Aitkenside getting fitted with the sets of false feet, Dean could do with some assistance. He has to start at the bottom, you know, that’s the rule. I reckon he’ll shape up. He’s no more gormless than Dean was when we picked him out of the golf net. If he shapes up, in about fifty years he might get to go on Spirit Guide.”

“Don’t expect me to thank you,” said Al.

“That’s just like you, innit?” Morris said. His features convulsed with spite, he bounced up and down on the landing. “No bloody gratitude. You talk about when I was earthside, you give me the character of an evil bastard, but where would you be if it weren’t for me? If it hadn’t been for me, the boys would have cut you up a bloody sight worse. You’d be disfigured. Aitkenside said, she has to learn respect for what a knife can do, and they all said, all the boys, quite right, she has to learn, and your mum said, fine, you carve her, but don’t go carving her face, the punters won’t like it. She said, it’s all very well your squabbles, but when you gentlemen have all got bored of her, I’ve still got to sell her on, ain’t I? And I supported her, didn’t I? I backed her up. I said to Aitkenside, quite right, show her what’s what by all means, but don’t make her into a bloody liability.”

“But Morris, why did they do it?” Al cried. “What did I ever do to you? I was a child, for pity’s sake, who would want to take a knife and slice up a child’s legs and leave her scarred?” I must have screamed, she thought, I must have screamed but I don’t remember. I must have screamed but no one heard me.

“There was nobody to hear,” Morris said. “That’s why you have to have an outbuilding, innit? You have to have an outbuilding or a shed, or a caravan if you can’t manage that, or at least a trailer. You never know when you need to show some little shaver what’s what or hang some bugger what’s getting on your nerves.”

“You haven’t answered me,” Al said. She stood in his path, fingering the lucky opals as if they were weapons. He tried to swerve past her, but her aura, welling out and smothering him, forced him back. Gibbering with frustration, he condensed himself, and slid under the carpet, and she stamped on him hard saying, “Morris, if you want to keep your job, I want some answers. If you don’t give me answers I’m going to give up this game. I’ll go back and work in a cake shop. I’ll work in the chemist like I used to. I’ll scrub floors if I have to. I’m going to give it up, and then where will you be?”

“Ho,” said Morris, “you don’t frighten me, gel, if you go and work in the chemist I shall make myself into a pill. If you get a job in a cake shop I shall roll myself into a Swiss roll and spill out jam at inopportune moments. If you try scrubbing floors, I will rise up splosh! out of your bucket in a burst of black water, causing you to get the sack. Then you will be wheedling me around like you used to, oh, Uncle Morris, I’ve no spending money, oh Uncle Morris I’ve no money for me school dinners, I’ve no money for me school trip. And all the time going behind my back with the same sob story to MacArthur, and whining for sweeties to Keith. Too generous by half, that’s Morris Warren. The day I was taken over, there wasn’t five bob in my pocket. I was taken over and I don’t know how, taken over wiv money owing to me.” Morris began to whimper. “MacArthur owes me. Bill Wagstaffe owes me. I’ve got in my black book who owes me. Bloody spirits is devious, innit? Always some reason they can’t pay. ‘My pocket vapourized. Holy Bloody Ghost got my wallet.’ So there I was turning up airside, they says, turn out your pockets, and when they saw that was all the money I had to my name they bloody laughed. They said, you don’t work you don’t drink, me old mate. That’s the rule here. Then I got put on Spirit Guide. First I got Irene Etchells, and then you, God help me. I say God help me but the bugger never does. That’s why I bother wiv Nick, wiv Nick you get a career opportunity. You get sent on courses.”