Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

DEAN: You can get another place, Uncle Morris.

MORRIS: ( sniffs ) Won’t be the same, Dean lad.

AITKENSIDE: Not the bloody waterworks! Pull yourself together, Warren, or I’ll demote you. ( Morris sobs .) Look … Morris, old son, don’t take on. Oh, blast it, ain’t nobody round here got a bleeding hankerchief?

WAGSTAFFE: Any handkerchief in particular?

AITKENSIDE: Wagstaffe? Put a sock in it. Listen, lads, I’ve an idea. Maybe she’ll come back if her dad asks for her.

( pause )

MACARTHUR: Who is her dad, then?

CAPSTICK: I always thought it was you, MacArthur. I thought that’s why she took your eye out.

MACARTHUR: I thought it were you, Keef. I thought that’s why she took your bollocks off.

AITKENSIDE: Don’t look at me! She’s not my daughter, I was in the forces.

MORRIS: She can’t be mine because I was still in the circus.

PIKEY PETE: She can’t be mine—

MORRIS: Oh, there you are, Pete! We thought you’d scarpered. Give a dog a bad name and hang him! We thought you had made off with the emoluments.

PIKEY PETE: I say, she can’t be mine, because I was in jail for painting horses.

CAPSTICK: Painting horses?

PIKEY PETE: You paint one racehorse to look like another, innit?

MORRIS: Don’t the paint run off, Pikey, when there’s a downpour?

PIKEY PETE: It’s an old Romany skill. Anyway, she ain’t mine.

CAPSTICK: She ain’t mine, because I was in the nick too.

MACARTHUR: And me. Serving five.

AITKENSIDE: So who’s left? Bob Fox?

BOB FOX: I never did nothing but tap on the window.

( pause )

MACARTHUR: Got to be that Derek bloke. Innit.

AITKENSIDE: Couldn’t have been. Bloody errand boy? He never had no money. Emmeline Cheetham, she didn’t do it for free.

MACARTHUR: True. You made sure of that.

CAPSTICK: Not like these girls you get these days, eh Dean?

MORRIS: So who’s left?

( pause )

MACARTHUR: Oh, blimey.

MORRIS: Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Only the great man himself!

CAPSTICK: Well, knock me down with a feather.

MORRIS: I never had such a thunderclap.

PIKEY PETE: You don’t want to mess with the fambly of Nick. Because Nick he is a fambly man.

( pause )

CAPSTICK: What would he do?

AITKENSIDE: Dear oh dear.

MORRIS: The worst thing that can befall a spirit is to be eaten by old Nick. You can be eaten and digested by him and then you’ve had your chips.

BOB FOX: You can’t get chips like you used to. Not fried in proper lard.

AITKENSIDE: Shut it, Bob, there’s a good lad.

CAPSTICK: What, you get et? You get et by Nick? And you don’t get another go round?

MORRIS: If he pukes you up you can reform and have another go, but otherwise you’re et and that’s all.

MACARTHUR: And that’s all?

MORRIS: El finito, Benito.

PIKEY PETE: Here, shall we do the share-out of these notes? It’s the proceeds from Etchells’s furniture. Lads? Where you going? Lads? Wait for me … .

October: Al is travelling, in the autumn’s first foul weather. There are mud slips and landslides, there are storm drains burst, a glugging and gurgling in sumps, conduits, and wells. There are fissures in the riverbeds, there are marshes, swamps, and bogs, there are cracked pipes and breached seawalls, and outswells of gas on the bubbling floodplain. There is coastal erosion, crumbling defences, spillage and seepages; where the saline and swift-rushing tide meets the viscid slime of swollen sewers, there the oceans are rising, half a metre, half a metre, half a metre onwards. On the orbital road the hazard lights of collided cars flash from the hard shoulder. Cameras flash on the bridges, there is the swish of the wipers against drenching rain, the mad blinking eyes of the breakdown trucks. “On we go!” Alison calls. “Sevenoaks, here we come.”

They are singing, Alison and the two little women: a few music hall favorites, but hymns, mostly, for it’s what the little women like. She didn’t know any of the words, but they have taught her.

Maureen Harrison says, “Have we been to Sevenoaks?” and Alison says, “Not with me, you haven’t.”

Maureen says, anxious, “Will we get our tea there?” Alison says, “Oh yes, I hear in Sevenoaks you get a very good tea.”

“Just as well,” says Maureen’s friend from the back, “because I could have brought my own Eccles cakes.”

“Cakes,” says Maureen, “we’ve had some lovely cakes. Do you remember that one you bought me once, with a walnut on top? You can’t get cakes like that these days. Here, lovie, I’ll make you one. On your birthday. I always made you a cake on your birthday.”

“That would be nice,” says Maureen’s friend. “And she can have some too.”

“Oh, yes, we’ll give her some. She’s a lovely girl.”

Alison sighs. She likes to be appreciated; and before these last weeks, she never felt she was. They can’t do enough for her, the two old ladies, so happy they are to be together again, and when they are talking in the evening, from under a rug and behind the sofa they praise her, saying that they never had a daughter, but if they had, they would have wanted a bonny big girl just like Al. Whenever they set off in the car, they are so excited she has to make them wear incontinence pads. She cries, “Are your seat belts fastened, girls? Are your buttons all sewn on tight?” And they shout, “Yes, miss!” They say, “Look at us, riding in a motor vehicle, a private car!” They will never get tired of the orbital road, no matter how many times they go around it. Even if some image from her former life washes up—the fiends escaping Admiral Drive, vestigial heads trapped under the fences, multiple limbs thrashing, feet entangled in their tongues—even if some moment of dismay fades her smile, chills her, tightens her grip on the wheel or brings a shiny tear to her eye—even if she misses a junction, and has to cross the carriageway—the little women never complain.

They say, “Look at her hair, and look at her lovely rings, look at her frock and look at how she pedals the car—you’d think it would tire her out, but you can’t tire her out. Oh, I tell you, Maureen Harrison, we’ve landed on our feet here.” And Maureen adds, “Where our feet would be.”

Her cell phone rings. It’s Gemma. “How’s tricks? … Staines on the twenty-seventh? I doubt it, but I’ll check my diary when we pull in … . We? Did I say we? … No, not Colette. God forbid. I meant me and my new guides. Colette’s gone back to her husband. Near Twickenham. He used to be a, you know, what do they call it, one of those men who sets traps. Sort of gamekeeper.”

“Near Twickenham?” Gemma says, surprised, and Al says, “No, in a former life.” He was a man, she thought, who kept dogs, but not for pets. A terrier man. Digs out the earths, lays down poisons for hapless small creatures trying to earn a living. “I didn’t care for him,” she says, “when I ran into him in Farnham.” You shouldn’t leave bait about for it attracts entities, the slow grub and creep of legless things, feral crawlers looking for wounds to suck or open minds to creep inside. You shouldn’t leave traps, for you don’t know what will spring them: severed legs, unclaimed and nameless feet, ghouls and spectres looking to stitch themselves together, haunting the roads looking for a hand, an ear, for severed fingers and dislocated thumbs.

She has been, herself, of course, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. She doesn’t remember, really, if she saw MacArthur’s eye in a dish, though she’s been trying to remember, just to keep the record straight. It might not have been in a dish; it might have been on a plate, a saucer, a dog bowl. She remembers she had her spoon in her hand, her fork. “Business?” she says. “Business is booming, thanks for asking, Gemma. Give or take the odd quiet midweek, I’m booked out till next Feb.”