Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

She felt for the underside of her toes, and delicately, tentatively, began to massage the sole of her foot.

At some point on your road you have to turn and start walking back towards yourself. Or the past will pursue you, and bite the nape of your neck, leave you bleeding in the ditch. Better to turn and face it with such weapons as you possess.

Her feet feel more swollen than usual. Perhaps she’s kneaded them too hard. Or perhaps she’s just reluctant to walk down this road, back through her teenage years, fireside chats with Emmie, happy schooldays, kindergarten fun. She hears Colette drop her keys through the door. Back, back. She hears the engine of a small car, struggling uphill on Admiral Drive; it’s Gavin.

Back, back, back to yesterday. The police are searching the house. Colette says, what are you looking for, Constable Delingbole, surely you don’t think we’ve got another corpse? Delingbole says, rather self-conscious, would you not call me that anymore? I’m Sergeant Delingbole now.

Lovely house, the policewoman says, looking around. Alison says, can I make you a cup of tea? and the policewoman says, oh no, you’ve had a fright, I’ll do the tea.

Al says, there’s lemon and ginger, camomile, Earl Grey, or proper tea, there’s a lemon in the fridge and semi-skimmed, there’s sugar on the top shelf there if you want it. Sergeant Delingbole plunges a long stick down the waste disposal, fetches it up again and sniffs it. Just routine, he says to Al. By the way, that’s quite a set of knives you’ve got there. I love those Japanese ones, don’t you? So chic.

The policewoman says, what do these houses come in at, then?

Back, back. Her fingers are pressed to the door of the shed, feeling for Mart’s pulse. She is coming down the garden towards the Balmoral. Colette is gesturing that the door is stuck. She is standing at the sink swabbing the spilled water. The kettle is boiling. Michelle’s face appears. Back, back. They are closing the door on Mrs. Etchells’s house. As you sow so shall you reap. She is holding a piece of paper with a scorch mark. Her head is in the wardrobe and she is breathing in camphor, violets, a faint body smell persisting down the years. They always said to me, if anyone asks you’re sixteen, right? I can never remember my age when things were done to me or when things happened. I’m not sure how old I am.

With each step backwards she is pushing at something light, tensile, clinging. It is a curtain of skin. With each step the body speaks its mind. Her ears pick up the trickle and swish of blood and lymph. Her eyes turn back and stare into the black jelly of her own thoughts. Inside her throat a door opens and closes; no one steps in. She does not look into the triangle of shadow behind the door. She knows a dead person might be there.

She hears a tap-tap , a knuckle on glass. “Are you there, Mr. Fox?” she says. She always says mister : when she remembers. The men say, here, you bloody tell her, Emmie; tell her politeness costs nothing.

There is a noise that might be crockery smashing, and a chair being knocked over. A door in her mind opens, and at first, once again, no one enters. She waits, holding her breath. It might be Keef, or it might be Morris Warren, or it might be their mate MacArthur, who always winks at her when he sees her.

But it’s her mum who staggers in, rights herself with some difficulty. “Whoops!” she says. “Must be my new pills. Blue, they is. That’s unusual, ain’t it. Blue? I says to him at the chemist, are you sure these are right? He says, lovely shade, he says, not blue, you’d not call that blue. It’s more heliotrope.”

She says, “Mum, did Donnie Aitkenside leave you any wages when he went off this morning? Because you know that magic shilling, that we have to put in the gas meter? He took it with him.”

Her mum says, “Donnie? Gone?”

“Yes,” she says, “he was creeping downstairs with his shoes in his hand, and he took our shilling for the gas. I thought maybe it was his change.”

“What in the Lord’s name is the girl talking about now, Gloria?”

“If we don’t have that shilling we need real money for the meter. It’s cold out and I haven’t had my breakfast.”

Her mother repeats, “Donnie? Gone?”

“And if he’s not paid you, we’ve no money for my school dinner.”

“And who gave you permission to call him Donnie, you stuck-up little madam? If a child such as you talked back in my day there’d be bloody blue murder.”

She says, there is anyway, innit? It’s bloody blue murder every day here. Her mum says, there you go again, if he takes his belt off to you I’ll not be surprised, I’ll not be the one holding him back, I’ll tell you: and there, thumping her fist on the wooden draining board, her mum is saying what they’ll do, what they’ll do and what they won’t, how they’re going to thrash her till she’s the texture of a jellyfish and she has to crawl to school on her belly, till she begins to wail and cry and say, but what can I eat for my breakfast? and her mum says, cornflakes if there’s no gas, and she says, but there’s no milk, and her mum says, so am I black and white, am I stood in the fucking meadow, and if not, what leads you to believe I am a fucking cow?

And that concludes it. It has to. Emmie falls over, knocked out by the force of her own sentence. Alison goes to school on an empty stomach. The lesson is scripture and she is thrown out to stand in the corridor. She is just standing there, doing no wrong. The headmaster sees her. “You again!” he bellows. She draws down the secret flaps, the membranes that cover her ears, and watches him gesticulating at her, his forehead creasing with fury. At playtime Tehera buys her a bag of crisps. She hopes they will give her a school dinner on credit but she doesn’t have a token so she is turned away. She says, the dogs have eaten my token, but they laugh. She gets half of a quarter of a marmite sandwich from Lee. On her way home she keeps her eyes down, searching the pavement for a magic shilling: or any money really, or a pin to pick up. She just thinks she sees a pin when wham! she walks straight into MacArthur. Hello, Mr. MacArthur, she says. All the day you’ll have good luck. He stares at her, suspicious. He says to her, your mam says you need a lesson. He puts out his hand, grabs her right nipple and twists it. She cries out. There’s one, he says, do you want me to do the other side? He winks at her.

Daylight has come to Admiral Drive. Dare she pull back a curtain? She is stiff and cold, except for her feet, which are burning. She limps into the kitchen. For a moment she stands paralyzed before the gas rings, thinking, how will I light them, when Aitkenside has taken our shilling? Then she depresses the ignition switch and the blue flame leaps up. She pours milk into a pan and sets it on the flame.

The telephone rings. It will be Colette, she thinks, wanting to come back. The cooker’s digital clock glows green, lighting the kitchen tiles with their frieze of fishes, lighting their slippery scales. Don’t be silly, she says to herself, she’ll barely be arrived in Whitton yet. She had thought a much longer time had elapsed: years. She stands with her cold hands stretched over the pan, and lets the machine take the call. Her message plays: there is a click. She thinks, it is the neighbours, trying to trick me into picking up; they want to know if I’m here.

Tentatively, she pulls up the kitchen blind. The clouds are charcoal and thick and grey, like the smoke from burning buildings. The full moon burrows into them and is immersed, swallowed. There is a tension headache at the back of her neck and, at the auditory rim, a faint high-pitched singing, like nocturnal wildlife in an equatorial forest, or God’s fingernail scraped against glass. The sound is continuous, but not steady; it pulses. There is a feeling that something—a string, a wire—is being stretched to its limit. She lowers the blind again, inch by inch, and with each inch the years fall away, she is in the kitchen at Aldershot, she is twelve, thirteen, but if anyone asks, she is sixteen of course.