Hilary Mantel
Beyond Black

Dedication

To Jane Haynes

Epigraph

‘There are powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge.’

H.M. the Queen (attributed)

Chapter One

Travelling: the dank oily days after Christmas. The motorway, its wastes looping London: the margin’s scrub-grass flaring orange in the lights, and the leaves of the poisoned shrubs striped yellow-green like a cantaloupe melon. Four o’clock: light sinking over the orbital road. Teatime in Enfield, night falling on Potters Bar.

There are nights when you don’t want to do it, but you have to do it anyway. Nights when you look down from the stage and see closed stupid faces. Messages from the dead arrive at random. You don’t want them and you can’t send them back. The dead won’t be coaxed and they won’t be coerced. But the public has paid its money and it wants results.

A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.

Beside her, in profile against the fogged window, the driver’s face is set. In the back seat, something dead stirs, and begins to grunt and breathe. The car flees across the junctions, and the space the road encloses is the space inside her: the arena of combat, the wasteland, the place of civil strife behind her ribs. Heart beats, the tail lights wink. Dim lights shine from tower blocks, from passing helicopters, from fixed stars. Night closes in on the perjured ministers and burnt-out paedophiles, on the unloved viaducts and graffitied bridges, on ditches beneath mouldering hedgerows and railings never warmed by human touch.

Night and winter: but in the rotten nests and empty setts, she can feel the signs of growth, intimations of spring. This is the time of Le Pendu, the Hanged Man, swinging by his foot from the living tree. It is a time of suspension, of hesitation, of the indrawn breath. It is a time to let go of expectation, yet not abandon hope; to anticipate the turn of the Wheel of Fortune. This is our life and we have to lead it. Think of the alternative.

A static cloud bank, like an ink smudge. Darkening air.

It’s no good asking me whether I’d choose to be like this, because I’ve never had a choice. I don’t know about anything else, I’ve never been any other way.

And darker still. Colour has run out from the land. Only form is left: the clumped treetops like a dragon’s back. The sky deepens to midnight blue. The orange of the street lights is blotted to a fondant cerise; in pastureland, the pylons lift their skirts in a ferrous gavotte.

Chapter Two

Colette put her head round the dressing-room door. ‘All right?’ she said. ‘It’s a full house.’

Alison was leaning into the mirror, about to paint her mouth on. ‘Could you find me a coffee?’

‘Or a gin and tonic?’

‘Yes, go on then.’

She was in her psychic kit now; she had flung her day clothes over the back of a chair. Colette swooped on them; lady’s maid was part of her job. She slid her forearm inside Al’s black crêpe skirt. It was as large as a funerary banner, a pall. As she turned it the right way out, she felt a tiny stir of disgust, as if flesh might be clinging to the seams.

Alison was a woman who seemed to fill a room, even when she wasn’t in it. She was of an unfeasible size, with plump creamy shoulders, rounded calves, thighs and hips that overflowed her chair; she was soft as an Edwardian, opulent as a showgirl, and when she moved you could hear (though she did not wear them) the rustle of plumes and silks. In a small space, she seemed to use up more than her share of the oxygen; in return her skin breathed out moist perfumes, like a giant tropical flower. When you came into a room she’d left – her bedroom, her hotel room, her dressing room backstage – you felt her as a presence, a trail. Alison had gone, but you would see a chemical mist of hairspray falling through the bright air. On the floor would be a line of talcum powder, and her scent – Je Reviens – would linger in curtain fabric, in cushions and in the weave of towels. When she headed for a spirit encounter, her path was charged, electric; and when her body was out on stage, her face – cheeks glowing, eyes alight – seemed to float still in the dressing-room mirror.

In the centre of the room Colette stooped, picked up Al’s shoes. For a moment she disappeared from her own view. When her face bobbed back into sight in the mirror, she was almost relieved. What’s wrong with me? she thought. When I’m gone I leave no trace. Perfume doesn’t last on my skin. I barely sweat. My feet don’t indent the carpet.

‘It’s true,’ Alison said. ‘It’s as if you wipe out the signs of yourself as you go. Like a robot housekeeper. You polish your own fingerprints away.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Colette said. ‘And don’t read my private thoughts.’ She shook the black skirt, as if shaking Alison.

‘I often ask myself, let’s see now, is Colette in the room or not? When you’ve been gone for an hour or two, I wonder if I’ve imagined you.’

Colette looped the black skirt on to a hanger, and hung it on the back of the long mirror. Soon Al’s big black overshirt joined it. It was Colette who had persuaded her into black. Black, she had said, black and perfectly plain. But Alison abhorred plainness. There must be something to capture the gaze, something to shiver, something to shine. At first glance the shirt seemed devoid of ornament: but a thin line of sequins ran down the sleeve, like the eyes of sly aliens, reflecting black within black. For her work on stage, she insisted on colour: emerald, burnt orange, scarlet. ‘The last thing you want, when you go out there,’ she explained, ‘is to make them think of funerals.’

Now she pouted at herself in the glass. ‘I think that’s quite nice, don’t you?’

Colette glanced at her. ‘Yes, it suits you.’

Alison was a genius with make-up. She had boxfuls and she used it all, carrying it in colour-coded washbags and cases fitted with loops for brushes and small-size bottles. If the spirit moved her to want some apricot eyeshadow, she knew just which bag to dip into. To Colette, it was a mystery. When she went out to get herself a new lipstick, she came back with one which, when applied, turned out to be the same colour as all the others she had; which was always, give or take, the colour of her lips. ‘So what’s that shade called?’ she asked. Alison observed herself, a cotton bud poised, and effected an invisible improvement to her underlip. ‘Dunno. Why don’t you try it? But get me that drink first.’ Her hand moved for her lipstick sealant. She almost said, look out, Colette, don’t tread on Morris.

He was on the floor, half sitting and half lying, slumped against the wall: his stumpy legs were spread out, and his fingers playing with his fly buttons. When Colette stepped back she trampled straight over him.

As usual she didn’t notice. But Morris did. ‘Fucking stuck-up cow,’ he said, as Colette went out. ‘White-faced fucking freak. She’s like a bloody ghoul. Where did you get her, gel, a churchyard?’

Under her breath Alison swore back at him. In their five years as partners, he’d never accepted Colette; time meant little to Morris. ‘What would you know about churchyards?’ she asked him. ‘I bet you never had a Christian burial. Concrete boots and a dip in the river, considering the people you mixed with. Or maybe you were sawn up with your own saw?’

Alison leaned forward again into the mirror, and slicked her mouth with the tiny brush from the glass tube. It tickled and stung. Her lips flinched from it. She made a face at herself. Morris chuckled.

It was almost the worst thing, having him around at times like these, in your dressing room, before the show, when you were trying to calm yourself down and have your intimate moments. He would follow you to the lavatory if he was in that sort of mood. A colleague had once said to her, ‘It seems to me that your guide is on a very low vibratory plane, very low indeed. Had you been drinking when he first made contact?

‘No,’ Al had told her. ‘I was only thirteen.’

‘Oh, that’s a terrible age,’ the woman said. She looked Alison up and down. ‘Junk food, I expect. Empty calories. Stuffing yourself.’

She’d denied it, of course. In point of fact she never had any money after school for burgers or chocolate, her mum keeping her short in case she used the money to get on a bus and run away. But she couldn’t put any force into her denial. Her colleague was right, Morris was a low person. How did she get him? She probably deserved him, that was all there was to it. Sometimes she would say to him, Morris, what did I do to deserve you? He would rub his hands and chortle. When she had provoked him and he was in a temper with her, he would say, count your blessings, girl, you fink I’m bad but you could of had MacArthur. You could have had Bob Fox, or Aitkenside, or Pikey Pete. You could have had my mate Keef Capstick. You could of had Nick, and then where’d you be?

Mrs Etchells (who taught her the psychic trade) had always told her, there are some spirits, Alison, who you already know from way back, and you just have to put names to the faces. There are some spirits that are spiteful and will do you a bad turn. There are others that are bloody buggering bastards, excuse my French, who will suck the marrow out your bones. Yes, Mrs E, she’d said, but how will I know which are which? And Mrs Etchells had said, God help you, girl. But God having business elsewhere, I don’t expect he will.

Colette crossed the foyer, heading for the bar. Her eyes swept over the paying public, flocking in from the dappled street; ten women to every man. Each evening she liked to get a fix on them, so she could tell Alison what to expect. Had they pre-booked, or were they queuing at the box office? Were they swarming in groups, laughing and chatting, or edging through the foyer in singles and pairs, furtive and speechless? You could probably plot it on a graph, she thought, or have some kind of computer program: the demographics of each town, its typical punters and their networks, the location of the venue relative to car parks, pizza parlour, the nearest bar where young girls could go in a crowd.

The venue manager nodded to her. He was a worn little bloke coming up to retirement; his dinner jacket had a whitish bloom on it and was tight under the arms. ‘All right?’ he said. Colette nodded, unsmiling; he swayed back on his heels, and as if he had never seen them before he surveyed the bags of sweets hanging on their metal pegs, and the ranks of chocolate bars. Why can’t men just stand? Colette wondered. Why do they have to sway on the spot and feel in their pockets and pat themselves up and down and suck their teeth? Alison’s poster was displayed six times, at various spots through the foyer. The flyers around advertised forth-coming events: ‘Fauré’s Requiem’, giving way in early December to ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.

Alison was a sensitive: which is to say, her senses were arranged in a different way from the senses of most people. She was a medium: dead people talked to her, and she talked back. She was a clairvoyant; she could see straight through the living, to their ambitions and secret sorrows, and tell you what they kept in their bedside drawers, and how they had travelled to the venue. She wasn’t (by nature) a fortune teller, but it was hard to make people understand that. Prediction, though she protested against it, had become a lucrative part of her business. At the end of the day, she believed, you have to suit the public and give them what they think they want. For fortunes, the biggest part of the trade was young girls. They always thought there might be a stranger on the horizon, love around the corner. They hoped for a better boyfriend than the one they’d got – more socialised, less spotty: or at least, one who wasn’t on remand. Men, on their own behalf, were not interested in fortune or fate. They believed they made their own, thanks very much. As for the dead, why should they worry about them? If they need to talk to their relatives, they have women to do that for them.

‘G & T,’ Colette said to the girl behind the bar. ‘Large.’

The girl reached for a glass and shovelled in a single ice cube.

‘You can do better than that,’ Colette said. ‘And lemon.’

She looked around. The bar was empty. The walls were padded to hip height with turquoise plastic leather, deep-buttoned. They’d been needing a damp cloth over them since about 1975. The fake wood tables looked sticky: the same applied. The girl’s scoop probed the ice bucket. Another cube slinked down the side of the glass, to join its predecessor with a dull tap. The girl’s face showed nothing. Her full, lead-coloured eyes slid away from Colette’s face. She mouthed the price. ‘For tonight’s artiste,’ Colette said. ‘On the house, I’d have thought!’

The girl did not understand the expression. She had never heard ‘on the house’. She closed her eyes briefly: blue-veined lids.

Back through the foyer. It was filling up nicely. On their way to their seats the audience had to pass the easel she had set up, with Al’s super-enlarged picture swathed in a length of apricot polyester that Al called ‘my silk’. At first she’d had trouble draping it, getting the loops just right, but now she’d got it off pat – a twist of her wrist made a loop over the top of the portrait, another turn made a drift down one side, and the remainder spilled in graceful folds to whatever gritty carpet or bare boards they were performing on that night. She was working hard to break Al’s addiction to this particular bit of kitsch. Unbelievably tacky, she’d said, when she first joined her. She thought instead of a screen on to which Al’s image was projected. But Al had said, you don’t want to find yourself overshadowed by the special effects. Look, Col, I’ve been told this, and it’s one bit of advice I’ll never forget; remember your roots. Remember where you started. In my case, that’s the village hall at Brookwood. So when you’re thinking of special effects, ask yourself, can you reproduce it in the village hall? If you can’t, forget it. It’s me they’ve come to see, after all. I’m a professional psychic, not some sort of magic act.

The truth was, Al adored the photo. It was seven years old now. The studio had mysteriously disappeared two of her chins; and caught those big starry eyes, her smile, and something of her sheen, that inward luminescence that Colette envied.

‘All right?’ said the manager. ‘All humming along, backstage?’ He had slid back the lid of the icecream chest, and was peering within.

‘Trouble in there?’ Colette asked. He closed the lid hastily and looked shifty, as if he had been stealing. ‘See you’ve got the scaffolding up again.’

‘C’est la vie,’ sighed the manager, and Colette said, ‘Yes, I dare say.’

Alison kept out of London when she could. She would fight her way in as far as Hammersmith, or work the further reaches of the North Circular. Ewell and Uxbridge were on her patch, and Bromley and Harrow and Kingston upon Thames. But the hubs of their business were the conurbations that clustered around the junctions of the M25, and the corridors of the M3 and M4. It was their fate to pass their evenings in crumbling civic buildings from the sixties and seventies, their exoskeletons in constant need of patching: tiles raining from their roofs, murals stickily ungluing from their walls. The carpets felt tacky and the walls exhaled an acrid vapour. Thirty years of freeze-dried damp had crystallised in the concrete, like the tiny pellets from which you boil up packet soup. The village hall was worse of course, and they still played some of those. She had to liaise with village-idiot caretakers, and bark her shins and ankles hauling chairs into the semicircle Al favoured. She had to take the money on the door, and tread the stage beforehand to detect comic squeaks, and to pull out splinters; it was not unknown for Al to kick off her shoes partway through the first half, and commune barefoot with spirit world.

‘Is she all OK back there on her own?’ asked the manager. ‘A large gin, that’s the ticket. Anything else she needs? We could fill the place twice over, you know. I call her the consummate professional.’

Backstage, Al was sucking an extra-strong mint. She could never eat before a show, and afterwards she was too hot, too strung-up, and what she needed to do was talk, talk it all out of her system. But sometimes, hours after she had put out the light, she would wake up and find herself famished and nauseous. She needed cake and chocolate bars then, to pad her flesh and keep her from the pinching of the dead, their peevish nipping and needle teeth. God knows, Colette said, what this eating pattern does to your insulin levels.

I’d really like my gin, she thought. She imagined Colette out there, doing battle for it.

Colette was sharp, rude and effective. Before they joined up, Al was thrust into all sorts of arrangements that she didn’t want, and was too shy to speak out if things didn’t suit her. She never did soundchecks unless the management told her to, and that was a mistake; you needed to insist on them. Before Colette, nobody had tested out the lighting, or walked out on stage as her surrogate self, to judge the acoustics and the sight lines from the performer’s point of view. Nobody had even checked underfoot, for nails or broken glass. Nobody made them take the high stool away – because they were always putting out a high stool for her to perch on, not having realised she was a big girl. She hated having to hoist herself up, and teeter like an angel on a pinhead: getting her skirt trapped, and trying to drag it from under her bottom while keeping her balance: feeling the stool buck under her, threatening to pitch her off. Before Colette, she’d done whole shows standing, just leaning against the high stool, sometimes draping one arm over it, as if that were the reason why it was put there. But Colette just minced the management when she spotted a stool on stage. ‘Take it away, she doesn’t work under those conditions.’

Instead, Colette asked for an armchair, wide, capacious. Here, ideally, Alison would begin the evening, relaxed, ankles crossed, steadying her breathing before her opening remarks. At the first hint of a contact, she would lean forward; then she would jump up and advance to the front of the stage. She would hang over the audience, almost floating above their heads, her lucky opals flashing fire as she reached out, fingers spread. She’d got the lucky opals mail order but, if asked, she pretended they’d been left to her family by a Russian princess.

She had explained it all, when Colette first joined her. Russia was favourite for ancestors, even better than Romany, nowadays; you didn’t want to put anxiety in the clients’ minds, about fly-tipping, head lice, illegal tarmac gangs, or motorhomes invading the green belt. Italian descent was good, Irish was excellent – though you must be selective. In the Six Counties hardly anywhere would do – too likely to crop up on the news. For the rest, Cork and Tipperary sounded too comic, Wicklow and Wexford like minor ailments, and Waterford was too dull – ‘Al,’ Colette had said, ‘from where do you derive your amazing psychic gifts tonight?’ Al had said at once, in her platform voice, ‘From my old great-grandmother, in County Clare. Bless her.’

Bless her and bless her, she said, under her breath. She looked away from the mirror so Colette wouldn’t see her lips moving. Bless all my great-grandmothers, whoever and wherever they may be. May my dad rot in hell, whoever he may be; whatever hell is and wherever, let him rot in it; and let them please lock the doors of hell at night, so he can’t be out and about, harassing me. Bless my mum, who is still earthside of course, but bless her anyway; wouldn’t she be proud of me if she saw me in chiffon, each inch of my flesh powdered and perfumed? In chiffon, my nails lacquered, with my lucky opals glittering – would she be pleased? Instead of being dismembered in a dish, which I know was her first ambition for me: swimming in jelly and blood. Wouldn’t she like to see me now, my head on my shoulders and my feet in my high-heeled shoes?

No, she thought, be realistic: she wouldn’t give a toss.

Ten minutes to go. Abba on the sound system, ‘Dancing Queen’. Glass of gin held in one hand, the bottle of tonic looped by her little finger, Colette peeped through a swing door at the back of the hall. Every seat was full and space was tight. They were turning people away, which the manager hated to do but it was fire regulations. How does it feel tonight? It feels all right. There’d been nights when she’d had to sit in the audience, so Alison could pick her out first and get the show going, but they didn’t like doing that and they didn’t need to do it often. Tonight she would be flitting around the hall with a microphone, identifying the people Al picked out and passing the mike along the rows so she could get clear answers out of them. We’ll need three minimum to cover the space, she’d told the manager, and no comedians who trip over their own feet, please. She herself, fast and thin and practised, would do the work of two.

Colette thought, I can’t stand them now: the clients, the punters, the trade. She didn’t like to be among them, for any purpose. She couldn’t believe that she was ever one of them: lining up to listen to Al, or somebody like her. Booking ahead (all major cards accepted) or jostling in a queue by the box office: a tenner in her fist, and her heart in her mouth.

Alison twisted her rings on her fingers: the lucky opals. It wasn’t nerves exactly, more a strange feeling in her diaphragm, as if her gut were yawning: as if she were making space for what might occur. She heard Colette’s footsteps: my gin, she thought. Good-good. Carefully, she took the mint out of her mouth. The action left her lips sulky; in the mirror, she edged them back into a smile, using the nail of her third finger, careful not to smudge. The face does disarrange itself; it has to be watched. She wrapped the mint in a tissue, looked around, and looped it hesitantly towards a metal bin a few feet away. It fell on the vinyl. Morris grunted with laughter. ‘You’re bloody hopeless, gel.’

This time, as Colette came in, she managed to step over Morris’s legs. Morris squawked out, ‘Tread on me, I love it.’

‘Don’t you start!’ Al said. ‘Not you. Morris. Sorry.’

Colette’s face was thin and white. Her eyes had gone narrow, like arrow slits. ‘I’m used to it.’ She put the glass down by Alison’s eyelash curlers, with the bottle of tonic water beside it.

‘A splash,’ Al directed. She picked up her glass and peered into the fizzing liquid. She held it up to the light.

‘I’m afraid your ice has melted.’

‘Never mind.’ She frowned. ‘I think there’s someone coming through.’

‘In your G & T?’

‘I think I caught just a glimpse. An elderly person. Ah well. There’ll be no lolling in the old armchair tonight. Straight on with the show.’ She downed the drink, put the empty glass on the countertop with her strewn boxes of powder and eyeshadow. Morris would lick her glass while she was out, running his yellow fissured tongue around the rim. Over the public address system, the call came to switch off mobile phones. Al stared at herself in the mirror. ‘No more to be done,’ she said. She inched to the edge of her chair, wobbling a little at the hips. The manager put his face in at the door. ‘All right?’ Abba was fading down: ‘Take a Chance on Me’. Al took a breath. She pushed her chair back; she rose, and began to shine.

She walked out into the light. The light, she would say, is where we come from, and it’s to the light we return. Through the hall ran small detonations of applause, which she acknowledged only with a sweep of her thick lashes. She walked, slowly, right to the front of the stage, to the taped line. Her head turned. Her eyes searched, against the dazzle. Then she spoke, in her special platform voice. ‘This young lady.’ She was looking three rows back. ‘This lady here. Your name is —? Well, Leanne, I think I have a message for you.’

Colette released her breath from the tight space where she held it.

Alone, spotlit, perspiring slightly, Alison looked down at her audience. Her voice was low, sweet and confident, and her aura was a perfectly adjusted aquamarine, flowing like a silk shawl about her shoulders and upper arms. ‘Now, Lee, I want you to sit back in your seat, take a deep breath, and relax. And that goes for all of you. Put on your happy faces – you’re not going to see anything that will frighten you. I won’t be going into a trance, and you won’t be seeing spooks, or hearing spirit music.’ She looked around, smiling, taking in the rows. ‘So why don’t you all sit back and enjoy the evening? All I do is, I just tune in, I just have to listen hard and decide who’s out there. Now if I get a message for you, please raise your hand, shout up – because if you don’t it’s very frustrating for the spirits trying to come through. Don’t be shy, you just shout up or give me a wave. Then my helpers will rush over to you with the microphone – don’t be afraid of it when it comes to you, just hold it steady and speak up.’

They were all ages. The old had brought cushions for their bad backs, the young had bare midriffs and piercings. The young had stuffed their coats under their chairs, but their elders had rolled theirs and held them on their knees, like swaddled babies. ‘Smile,’ Al told them. ‘You’re here to enjoy yourselves, and so am I. Now, Lee my love, let me get back to you – where were we? There’s a lady here called Kathleen, who’s sending lots of love in your direction. Who would that be, Leanne?’

Leanne was a dud. She was a young lass of seventeen or so, hung about with unnecessary buttons and bows, her hair in twee little bunches, her face peaky. Kathleen, Al suggested, was her granny: but Leanne wouldn’t own it because she didn’t know her granny’s name.

‘Think hard, darling,’ Al coaxed. ‘She’s desperate for a word with you.’

But Lee shook her bunches. She said that she didn’t think she had a granny; which made some of the audience snigger. ‘Kathleen says she lives in a field, at a certain amount of money. Bear with me. Penny. Penny Meadow, do you know that address? Up the hill from the market – such a pull, she says, when you’ve got a bagful of potatoes.’ She smiled at the audience. ‘This seems to be before you could order your groceries online,’ she said. ‘Honestly, when you think how they lived in those days – we forget to count our blessings, don’t we? Now, Lee, what about Penny Meadow? What about Granny Kathleen walking uphill?’

Leanne indicated incredulity. She lived on Sandringham Court, she said.

‘Yes, I know,’ Al said. ‘I know where you live, sweetheart, but this isn’t anywhere around here, it’s a filthy old place, Lancashire, Yorkshire, I’m getting a smudge on my fingers, it’s grey, it’s ash, it’s something below the place you hang the washing – could it be Ashton-under-Lyne? Never mind,’ Alison said. ‘Go home, Leanne, and ask your mum what Granny was called. Ask her where she lived. Then you’ll know, won’t you, that she was here for you tonight?’

There was a patter of applause. Strictly speaking, she hadn’t earned it. But they acknowledged that she’d tried; and Leanne’s silliness, deeper than average, had brought the audience over to her side. It was not uncommon to find family memory so short, in these towns where nobody comes from, these south-eastern towns with their floating populations and their car parks where the centre should be. Nobody has roots here; and maybe they don’t want to acknowledge roots, or recall their grimy places of origin and their illiterate foremothers up north. These days, besides, the kids don’t remember back more than eighteen months – the drugs, she supposed. She was sorry for Kathleen, panting and striving, her wheezy goodwill evaporating, unacknowledged; Penny Meadow and all the terraced rows about seemed shrouded in a northern smog. Something about a cardigan, she was saying. A certain class of dead people was always talking about cardigans. The button off it, the pearl button, see if it’s dropped behind the dresser drawer, that little drawer, that top drawer, I found a threepenny bit there once, back of the drawer, it gets down between the you-know, slips down the whatsit, it’s wedged, like – and so I took it, this threepence, and I bought me friend a cake with a walnut on top. Yes, yes, Al said, they’re lovely, those kind of cakes: but it’s time to go, pet. Lie down, Kathleen. You go and have a nice lie-down. I will, Kathleen said, but tell her I want her mum to look for that button. And by the way, if you ever see my friend Maureen Harrison, tell her I’ve been looking for her this thirty year.

Colette’s eyes darted around, looking for the next pickup. Her helpers were a boy of seventeen, in a sort of snooker player’s outfit, a shiny waistcoat and a skewed bow tie; and, would you believe it, the dozy little slapper from the bar. Colette thought, I’ll need to be everywhere. The first five minutes, thank God, are no guide to the evening to come.

Look, this is how you do it. Suppose it’s a slow night, no one in particular pushing your buttons; only the confused distant chit-chat that comes from the world of the dead. So you’re looking around the hall and smiling, saying, ‘Look, I want to show you how I do what I do. I want to show you it’s nothing scary, it’s just, basically, abilities that we all have. Now can I ask, how many of you,’ she pauses, looks around, ‘how many of you have sometimes felt you’re psychic?’

After that it’s according to, as Colette would say, the demographics. There are shy towns and towns where the hands shoot up, and of course as soon as you’re on stage you can sense the mood, even if you weren’t tipped off about it, even if you’ve never been in that particular place before. But a little word, a word of encouragement, a ‘don’t hold back on me’; sooner or later the hands go up. You look around – there’s always that compromise, between flattering stage lighting, and the need to see their faces. Then you choose a woman near the front, not so young as Leanne but not so old she’s completely buggered up: and you get her to tell you her name.

‘Gillian.’

Gillian. Right. Here goes.

‘Gill, you’re the sort of woman – well,’ she gives a little laugh and a shake of her head, ‘well, you’re a bit of a human dynamo, I mean, that’s how your friends describe you, isn’t it? Always on the go, morning, noon and night, you’re the sort of person, am I right, who can keep all the plates spinning? But if there’s one thing, if there’s one thing, you know, all your friends say, it’s that you don’t give enough time to yourself. I mean, you’re the one everybody depends on, you’re the one everybody comes to for advice, you’re the Rock of Gibraltar, aren’t you, but then you have to say to yourself, hang on, hang on a minute, who do I go to when I want advice? Who’s there for Gilly, when it comes to the crunch? The thing is, you’re very supportive, of your friends, your family, it’s just give give give, and you do find yourself, just now and then, catching yourself up and saying, hang on now, who’s giving back to me? And the thing about you, Gillian – now stop me if you think I’m wrong – is that you’ve got so much to give, but the problem is you’re so busy running round picking up after other people and putting their lives to rights, that you haven’t hardly got any opportunity to develop your own, I mean your own talents, your own interests. When you think back, when you think back to what made you happy as a young girl, and all the things you wanted out of life – you see, you’ve been on what I call a Cycle of Caring, and it’s not given you, Gill, it’s not given you the opportunity to look within, to look beyond – you really are capable, now I’m not telling you this to flatter you, but you really are capable of the most extraordinary things if you put your mind to it, if you just give all those talents of yours a chance to breathe. Now am I right? Say if I’m not right. Yes, you’re nodding. Do you recognise yourself?’

Gillian has of course been nodding since the first time Al paused for breath. In Alison’s experience there’s not a woman alive who, once past her youth, doesn’t recognise this as a true and fair assessment of her character and potential. Or there may be such a woman, out in some jungle or desert: but these blighted exceptions are not likely to be visiting Alison’s Evening of Psychic Arts.

She is now established as a mind-reader; and if she can tell Gillian something about herself, her family, so much the better. But she’s really done enough – Gillian’s brimming with gratification – so even if nobody comes through from spirit, she can just move right on to whoever is her next target. But long before this point Alison has become conscious of a background mutter (at times rising to a roar) situated not there in the hall but towards the back of her skull, behind her ears, resonating privately in the bone. And on this evening, like every other, she fights down the panic we would all feel, trapped with a crowd of dead strangers whose intentions towards us we can’t know. She takes a breath, she smiles, and she starts her peculiar form of listening. It is a silent sensory ascent; it is like listening from a stepladder, poised on the top rung; she listens at the ends of her nerves, at the limit of her capacities. When you’re doing platform work, it’s rare that the dead need coaxing. The skill is in isolating the voices, picking out one and letting the others recede – making them recede, forcing them back if need be, because there are some big egos in the next world. Then taking that voice, the dead voice you’ve chosen, and fitting it to the living body, to the ears that are ready to hear.

So: time to work the room. Colette tensed, forward on her toes, ready to sprint with the mike. ‘This lady. I feel some connection with the law here. Do you have to see a solicitor?’

‘Constantly,’ the woman said. ‘I’m married to one.’

There was a yell of laughter. Al joined it. Colette smirked. She won’t lose them now, she thought. Of course she wanted Al to succeed; of course I do, she told herself. They had a joint mortgage, after all, financially they were tied together. And if I quit working for her, she thought, how would I get another job? When it comes to ‘your last position’, what would I put on my CV?

‘Who’s got indigestion at the back?’ Al’s forehead was damp, the skin at the nape of her neck was clammy. She liked to have clothes with pockets so she could carry a folded cologne tissue, ready for a surreptitious dab, but you don’t usually get pockets in women’s clothes, and it looks stupid taking a handbag out there on stage. ‘This lady,’ she said. She pointed; the lucky opals winked. ‘This is the one I’m speaking to. You’re the one with the heartburn, I can feel it. I have someone here for you who’s very happy in spirit world, a Margo, Marje, can you accept that? A petite woman wearing a turquoise blouse, she was very fond of it, wasn’t she? She says you’ll remember.’

‘I do remember, I do,’ the woman said. She took the mike gingerly, and held it as if it might detonate. ‘Marje was my aunt. She was fond of turquoise and also lilac.’

‘Yes,’ and now Al softened her voice, ‘and she was like a mother to you, wasn’t she? She’s still looking out for you, in spirit world. Now tell me, have you seen your GP about that indigestion?’

‘No,’ the woman said. ‘Well, they’re so busy.’

‘They’re well paid to look after you, my love.’

‘Coughs and colds all around you,’ the woman said. ‘You come out worse than you went in – and you never see the same doctor twice.’

There was an audible smirk from the audience, a wash of fellow feeling. But the woman herself looked fretful. She wanted to hear from Marje; the dyspepsia she lived with every day.

‘Stop making excuses.’ Al almost stamped her foot. ‘Marje says, why are you putting it off? Call the surgery tomorrow morning and book yourself in. There’s nothing to be frightened of.’

Isn’t there? Relief dawned on the woman’s face; or an emotion that would be relief, when it clarified; for the moment she was tremulous, a hand on her ribs, folded in on herself as if to protect the space of the pain. It would take her a while to give up thinking it was cancer.

Now it’s the glasses ploy. Look for a woman in middle age who isn’t wearing glasses and say: have you had your eyes tested recently? Then the whole world of optometry is at your command. If she had an eye test last week, she’ll say, yes, as a matter of fact I have. They’ll applaud. If she says no, not recently, she’ll be thinking, but I know I ought to…As for the woman who says she wears no glasses ever: oh, my love, those headaches of yours! Why don’t you just pop along to Boots? I can see you, a month from now, in some really pretty squarish frames.

You could ask them if they need to see the dentist, since everybody does, all the time; but you don’t want to see them flinch. You’re giving them a gentle nudge, not a pinch. It’s about impressing them without scaring them; softening the edges of their fright and disbelief.

‘This lady – I see a broken wedding ring – did you lose your husband? He passed quite recently? And very recently you planted a rose bush in his memory.’

‘Not exactly,’ the woman said, ‘I placed some – in fact it was carnations – ’

‘ – carnations in his memory,’ said Al, ‘because they were his favourite, weren’t they?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said the woman. Her voice slid off the mike; she was too worried to keep her head still.

‘You know, aren’t men funny?’ Al threw it out to the audience. ‘They just don’t like talking about these things, they think it means they’re oversensitive or something – as if we’d mind. But I can assure you, he’s telling me now, carnations were his favourite.’

‘But where is he?’ the woman said: still off the mike. She wasn’t going to quarrel about the flowers; she was pressed against the back of her seat, almost hostile, on the verge of tears.

Sometimes they waited for you afterwards, the punters, at the back exit, when you were running head down for the car park. In the ghastly lights behind the venue, in the drizzle and the rain, they’d say, when you gave me the message I didn’t know, I didn’t understand, I couldn’t take it in. ‘I know it’s difficult,’ Al would say, trying to soothe them, trying to help them, but trying, for God’s sake, to get them off her back; she would be sweating, shaking, desperate to get into the car and off. But now, thank God, she had Colette, to manage the situation; Colette would smoothly pass over their business card, and say, ‘When you feel ready, you might like to come for a private reading.’

Now Alison fished around in the front rows for somebody who’d lost a pet and found a woman whose terrier, on an impulse three weeks ago, had dashed out of the front door into the traffic. ‘Don’t you listen,’ she told the woman, ‘to people who tell you animals have no souls. They go on in spirit, same as we do.’

Animals distressed her, not cats, just dogs: their ownerless whimper as they padded through the afterlife on the trail of their masters. ‘And has your husband gone over too?’ she asked, and when the woman said yes, she nodded sympathetically but pulled her attention away, throwing out a new question, changing the topic: ‘Anybody over here got blood pressure?’

Let her think it, that dog and master are together now; let her take comfort, since comfort’s what she’s paid for. Let her assume that Tiddles and his boss are together in the Beyond. Reunion is seldom so simple; and really it’s better for dogs – if people could just grasp it – not to have an owner waiting for them, spiritside. Without a person to search for, they join up in happy packs, and within a year or two you never hear from them individually: there’s just a joyful, corporate barking, instead of that lost whine, the sore pads, the disconsolate drooping head of the dog following a fading scent. Dogs had figured in her early life – men, and dogs – and much of that life was unclear to her. If you knew what the dogs were up to, she reasoned, if you knew what they were up to in spirit world, it might help you work out where their owners were now. They must be gone over, she thought, most of those men I knew when I was a child; the dogs, for sure, are in spirit, for years have passed and those kind of dogs don’t make old bones. Sometimes in the supermarket she would find herself standing in Pets, eyeing up the squeaky toys, the big tough chews made for big friendly jaws; then she would shake herself, and move slowly back towards organic vegetables, where Colette would be waiting with the trolley, cross with her for vanishing.

She will be cross tonight, Al thought, smiling to herself: I’ve slipped up again about the blood pressure. Colette has nagged her, don’t talk about blood pressure, talk about hypertension. When she’d argued back – ‘they might not understand me’ – Colette lost her temper and said, ‘Alison, without blood pressure we’d all be dead, but if you want to sound like something from the remedial stream, don’t let me get in your way.’

Now a woman put her hand up, admitted to the blood pressure.

‘Carrying a bit of weight, aren’t we, darling?’ Al asked her. ‘I’ve got your mum here. She’s a bit annoyed with you – well, no, I’m pitching it a bit high – concerned, would be more like it. You need to drop a stone, she’s saying. Can you accept that?’ The woman nodded: humiliated. ‘Oh, don’t mind what they think.’ Al swept her hand over the audience; she gave her special throaty chuckle, her woman-to-woman laugh. ‘You’ve no need to worry about what anybody here’s thinking, we could most of us stand to lose a few pounds. I mean, look at me, I’m a size twenty and not ashamed of it. But your mum now, your mum, she says you’re letting yourself go, and that’s a shame, because you know you’re really, look at you, you’ve got such a lot going for you, lovely hair, lovely skin – well, excuse me, but it seems to me your mum’s a plain-spoken lady, so excuse me if I offend anybody, she’s saying, get up off your bum and go to the gym.’

This is Al’s public self: a little bit jaunty and a little bit crude, a bit of a schoolmistress and a bit of a flirt. She often speaks to the public about ‘my wicked sense of humour’, warning them not to take offence; but what happens to her sense of humour in the depth of the night, when she wakes up trembling and crying, with Morris crowing at her in the corner of the room?

Colette thought, you are a size twenty-six. And you are ashamed of it. The thought was so loud, inside her own head, that she was amazed it didn’t jump out into the hall. ‘No,’ Al was saying, ‘please give the mike back to this lady, I’m afraid I’ve embarrassed her and I want to put it right.’ The woman was reluctant, and Al said to her neighbour, ‘Just hold that mike steady under her chin.’ Then Alison told the fat woman several things about her mother, which she’d often thought but not liked to admit to. ‘Oh, and I have your granny. Your granny’s coming through. Sarah-Anne? Now she’s an old soul,’ Al said. ‘You were five when she passed, am I right?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Speak up, my love.’

‘Small. I was small.’

‘Yes, you don’t remember much about her, but the point is she’s never left you, she’s still around, looking after the family. And she likes those cabinets you’ve got – I can’t quite make this out – a new kitchen, is it?’

‘Oh my God. Yes,’ the woman said. ‘Yes.’ She shifted in her seat and turned bright red.

Al chuckled, indulging her surprise. ‘She’s often with you in that kitchen. And by the way, you were right not to go for the brushed steel, I know they tried to talk you into it, but it’s so over and done with, there’s nothing worse than a dated kitchen when you come to sell, and besides it’s such a harsh look at the heart of the home. Sarah-Anne says, you won’t go wrong with light oak.’

They burst into applause: the punters, the trade. They are deeply appreciative over information about their kitchen fittings: they marvel at your uncanny knowledge of where they position their bread bin. This is how you handle them; you tell them the small things, the personal things, the things no one else could really know. By this means you make them drop their guard: only then will the dead begin to speak. On a good night, you can hear the scepticism leaking from their minds, with a low hiss like a tyre deflating.

Someone in uniform was trying to get through. It was a policeman, young and keen, with a flushed face; he was eager for promotion. She worked the rows, but no one would own him. Perhaps he was still earthside, employed at the local station: you did get these crossed wires, from time to time. Something to do with radio frequencies, perhaps?

‘This lady, have you got ear trouble? Or ear trouble somewhere in the family? Slowly, the barmaid lurched across the hall in her platform shoes, the mike held out at arm’s length.

‘What?’ the woman said.

‘Ear trouble.’

‘The boy next door to me plays football,’ the woman said, ‘he’s done his knee up. He was getting in trim for the World Cup. Not that he’s playing in it. Only in the park. Their dog died last year, but I don’t think it had ear trouble.’

‘No, not your neighbour,’ Al insisted. ‘You, someone close to you.’

‘I haven’t got anyone close to me.’

‘What about throat trouble? Nose trouble? Anything in the ENT line at all? You have to understand this,’ Al said, ‘when I get a message from spirit world, I can’t give it back. I can’t pick and choose. Think of me as your answering machine. Imagine if people from spirit world had phones. Now your answering machine, you press the button and it plays your messages back. It doesn’t wipe some out, on the grounds that you don’t need to know them.’

‘And it records the wrong numbers, too,’ said a pert girl near the front. She had her friends with her; their sniggers ruffled adjacent rows.

Alison smiled. It was for her to make the jokes; she wouldn’t be upstaged. ‘Yes, I admit we record the wrong numbers. And we record the nuisance calls, if you like to put it that way. I sometimes think they have telesales in the next world, because I never sit down with a nice cup of coffee without some stranger trying to get through. Just imagine – double-glazing salesmen…debt collectors…’

The girl’s smile faded. She tensed. Al said, ‘Look, darling. Let me give you a word of advice. Cut up that credit card. Throw away those catalogues. You can break these spending habits – well, you must, really. You have to grow up and exercise some self-control. Or I can see the bailiffs in, before Christmas.’

Al’s gaze rested, one by one, on those who had dared to snigger; then she dropped her voice, whipped her attention away from the troublemaker and became confidential with her audience. ‘The point is this. If I get a message I don’t censor it. I don’t ask, do you need it? I don’t ask, does it make sense? I do my duty, I do what I’m here for. I put it out there, so the person it applies to can pick it up. Now people in spirit world can make mistakes. They can be wrong, just like the living. But what I hear, I pass on. And it may happen, you know, what I tell you may mean nothing to you at the time. That’s why I sometimes have to say to you, stay with that: go home: live with it. This week or next week, you’ll go, oh I get it now! Then you’ll have a little smile, and think, she wasn’t such a fool, was she?’ She crossed the stage; the opals blazed. ‘And then again, there are some messages from spirit world that aren’t as simple as they seem. This lady, for example, when I speak about ear trouble, what I may be picking up is not so much a physical problem – I might be talking about a breakdown in communication.’

The woman stared up at her glassily. Al passed on. ‘Jenny’s here. She went suddenly. She didn’t feel the impact, it was instantaneous. She wants you to know.’

‘Yes.’

‘And she sends her love to Peg. Who’s Peg?’

‘Her aunt.’

‘And to Sally, and Mrs Moss. And Liam. And Topsy.’

Jenny lay down. She’d had enough. Her little light was fading. But wait, here’s another – tonight she picked them up as if she were vacuuming the carpet. But it was almost nine o’clock, and it was quite usual to get on to something serious and painful before the interval. ‘Your little girl, was she very poorly before she passed? I’m getting – this is not recent, we’re going back now, but I have a very clear – I have a picture of a poor little mite who’s really very sick, bless her.’

‘It was leukaemia,’ her mother said.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Al said, swiftly agreeing, as if she had thought of it first: so that the woman would go home and say, she told me Lisa had leukaemia, she knew. All she could feel was the weakness and the heat, the energy of the last battle draining away: the flickering pulse at the hairless temple, and the blue eyes, like marbles under translucent lids, rolling into stillness. Dry your tears, Alison said. All the tears of agony you’ve shed, the world doesn’t know, the world can’t count them; and soberly, the woman agreed: nobody knows, she said, and nobody can count. Al, her own voice trembling, assured her, Lisa’s doing fine airside, the next world’s treated her well. A beautiful young woman stood before her – twenty-two, twenty-three – wearing her grandmother’s bridal veil. But whether it was Lisa or not, Al could not say.

Eight fifty, by Colette’s watch. It was time for Al to lighten up. You have to start this process no less than eight minutes before the end of the first half. If the interval catches you in the middle of something thrilling and risky, they simply don’t want to break; but she, Al, she needed the break, to get back there, touch base with Colette, gulp a cold drink and redo her face. So she would begin another ward round now, picking up a few aches and pains. Already she was homing in on a woman who suffered from headaches. Don’t we all? Colette thought. It was one of the nets Al could safely cast. God knows, her own head ached. There was something about these summer nights, summer nights in small towns, that made you feel that you were seventeen again, and had chances in life. The throat ached and clogged then; there was tightness behind her eyes, as if unshed tears had banked up. Her nose was running, and she hadn’t got a tissue.

Al had found a woman with a stiff left knee, and was advising her on traditional Chinese medicine; it was a diversion, but they’d go away disappointed if she didn’t throw in some jargon about meridians and ley lines and chakras and feng shui. Gently, soothingly, she was bringing the first part of the evening to a close; and she was having her little joke now, asking about the lady standing at the back, leaning against the wall there, the lady in beige with a bit of a sniffle. It’s ridiculous, Colette thought, she can’t possibly see me, from where she’s standing. She just, somehow, she must just simply know that at some point in the evening I cry. ‘Never mind, my dear,’ Al said. ‘A runny nose is nothing to be ashamed of. Wipe it on your sleeve. We’re not looking, are we?’

You’ll pay for it later, Colette thought, and so she will; she’ll have to regurgitate or else digest all the distress that she’s sucked in from the carpet and the walls. By the end of the evening she’ll be sick to her stomach from other people’s chemotherapy, feverish and short of breath; or twitching and cold, full of their torsions and strains. She’ll have a neck spasm, or a twisted knee, or a foot she can hardly put on the floor. She’ll need to climb into the bath, moaning, amid the rising steam of aromatherapy oils from her special travel pack; and knock back a handful of painkillers, which, she always says, she should be allowed to set against her income tax.

Almost nine o’clock. Alison looked up, to the big double doors marked EXIT. There was a little green man above the door, running on the spot. She felt like that little green man. ‘Time to break,’ she said. ‘You’ve been lovely.’ She waved to them. ‘Stretch your legs and I’ll see you in fifteen.’

Morris was sprawled in Al’s chair when she came into her dressing room. He had his dick out and his foreskin pushed back, and he’d been playing with her lipstick, winding it up to the top of the tube. She evicted him with a dig to his shin from her pointed toe; dropped herself into the vacated chair – she shuddered at the heat of it – and kicked off her shoes.

‘Do yourself up,’ she told him. ‘Button your trousers, Morris.’ She spoke to him as if he were a two-year-old who hadn’t learned the common decencies.

She eased off the opals. ‘My hands have swelled up.’ Colette watched her through the mirror. Al’s skin was bland and creamy, flesh and fluid plumping it out from beneath. ‘Is the air conditioning working?’ She pulled at bits of her clothing, detaching them from the sticky bits of herself.

‘As if carnations were anybody’s favourite!’ Colette said.

‘What?’ Al was shaking her hands in the air, as if they were damp washing.

‘That poor woman who was just widowed. You said roses, but she said carnations, so then you said carnations.’

‘Colette, could you try to bear in mind, I’ve talked to about thirty people since then?’

Alison held her arms in a ‘U’ above her head, her naked fingers spread. ‘Let the fluid drain,’ she said. ‘Anything else, Colette? Let’s have it.’

‘You always say, oh, keep a note, Colette, keep your eyes open, listen out and tell me what goes right and what goes wrong. But you’re not willing to listen, are you? Perhaps it’s you who’s got the hearing problem.’

‘At least I haven’t got a sniffle problem.’

‘I can never understand why you take your shoes off, and your rings off, when you’ve got to force them back on again.’

‘Can’t you?’ Al sipped her blackcurrant juice, which she brought with her in her own carton. ‘What can you understand?’ Though Al’s voice was lazy, this was turning into a nasty little scrap. Morris had lain down across the doorway, ready to trip up anyone who came in.

‘Try thinking yourself into my body,’ Al suggested. Colette turned away and mouthed, no thank you. ‘It’s hot under the lights. Half an hour and I’m fit to drop. I know you’ve been running around with the mike, but it’s easier on the feet to be moving than standing still.’

‘Is it really? How would you know that?’

‘It’s easy, when you’re thin. Everything’s easier. Moving. Thinking. Deciding what you’ll do and what you won’t. You have choices. You can choose your clothes. Choose your company. I can’t.’ Al drank the end of her carton, with a little sound of sucking and bubbling. She put it down, and squashed the tip of the straw, judiciously, with her forefinger.

‘Oh, and the kitchen units,’ Colette said.

‘What’s your problem? I was right.’

‘It’s just telepathy,’ Colette said.

‘Just?’

‘Her granny didn’t tell you.’

‘How can you be sure?’

She couldn’t, of course. Like the punters out there, she could entertain simultaneously any number of conflicting opinions. They could believe in Al, and not believe in her, both at once. Faced with the impossible, their minds, like Colette’s, simply scuttled off in another direction.

‘Look,’ Alison said, ‘do we have to go through this every time? I would have thought we’d been on the road together for long enough now. And we’ve been making the tapes, haven’t we? Writing this book you say we’re writing? I’d have thought I’d answered most of your questions by now.’

‘All except the ones that matter.’

Al shrugged. A quick dab of Rescue Remedy under the tongue, and then she began to repaint her lips. Colette could see the effort of concentration needed; the spirits were nagging in her ear, wanting to stake out their places for the second half.

‘You see, I’d have imagined,’ she said, ‘that sometimes, once in a while, you’d feel the urge to be honest.’

Alison gave a little comic shiver, like a character in a pantomime. ‘What, with the punters? They’d run a mile,’ she said. ‘Even the ones with the blood pressure would be up and charging out the door. It’d kill them.’ She stood up and pulled down her clothes, smoothing the creases over her hips. ‘And what would that do but make more work for me?’

‘Your hem’s up at the back,’ Colette said. Sighing, she sank to her knees and gave the satin a tug.

‘I’m afraid it’s my bottom that does it,’ Al said. ‘Oh dear.’ She turned sideways to the mirror, resettled the skirt at what passed for her waistline. ‘Am I OK now?’ She held up her arms, stamped her feet in her high heels. ‘I could have been a flamenco dancer,’ she said. ‘That would have been more fun.’

‘Oh, surely not,’ Colette said. ‘Not more fun than this?’ She nudged her own head at the mirror, and smoothed down her hair; damp, it lay on her head like strings of white licqorice.

The manager put his head around the door. ‘All right?’ he said.

‘Will you stop saying that?’ Colette turned on him. ‘No, not all right. I want you out there for the second half, that girl from the bar is useless. And turn the bloody air conditioning up, we’re all melting.’ She indicated Alison. ‘Especially her.’

Morris rolled lazily on to his back in the doorway and made faces at the manager. ‘Bossy cow, ain’t she?’

‘So sorry to disturb your toilette,’ the manager said, bowing to Alison.

‘OK, OK, time to move.’ Colette clapped her hands. ‘They’re out there waiting.’

Morris grabbed Al’s ankle as she stepped over him. She checked her stride, took a half-pace backwards, and ground her heel into his face.

The second half usually began with a question-and-answer session. When Colette first joined Al she had worried about this part of the evening. She waited for some sceptic to jump up and challenge Al about her mistakes and evasions. But Al laughed. She said, those sort of people don’t come out at night, they stay at home watching Question Time and shouting at the TV.

Tonight they were quick off the mark. A woman stood up, wreathed in smiles. She accepted the microphone easily, like a professional. ‘Well, you can guess what we all want to know.’

Al simpered back at her. ‘The royal passing.’

The woman all but curtsied. ‘Have you had any communication from Her Majesty the Queen Mother? How is she faring in the other world? Has she been reunited with King George?’

‘Oh yes,’ Alison said, ‘she’ll be reunited.’

In fact, the chances are about the same as meeting somebody you know at a main-line station at rush hour. It’s not 14 million to one, like the National Lottery, but you have to take into account that the dead, like the living, sometimes like to dodge and weave.

‘And Princess Margaret? Has she seen HRH her daughter?’

Princess Margaret came through. Al couldn’t stop her. She seemed to be singing a comic song. Nothing derails an evening so fast as royalty. They expect to make the running, they choose the topic, they talk and you’re supposed to listen. Somebody, perhaps the princess herself, was pounding a piano, and other voices were beginning to chime in. But Alison was in a hurry; she wanted to get to a man, the evening’s first man, who’d got his hand up with a question. Ruthless, she gave the whole tribe the brush-off: Margaret Rose, Princess Di, Prince Albert, and a faint old cove who might be some sort of Plantagenet. It was interesting for Al that you got so many history programmes on TV these days. Many a night she’d sat on the sofa, hugging her plump calves, pointing out people she knew. ‘Is that really Mrs Pankhurst?’ she’d say. ‘I’ve never seen her in that hat.’

The man had risen to his feet. The manager – pretty quick round the room now Colette had given him a rocket – had got the mike across the hall. Poor old bloke, he looked shaky. ‘I’ve never done this before,’ he said.

‘Take it steady,’ Al advised. ‘No need to rush, sir.’

‘Never been to one of these,’ he said. ‘But I’m getting on a bit myself, now, so…’ He wanted to know about his dad, who’d had an amputation before he died. Would he be reunited with his leg, in spirit world?

Al could reassure him on the point. In spirit world, she said, people are healthy and in their prime. ‘They’ve got all their bits and whatsits. Whenever they were at their happiest, whenever they were at their healthiest, that’s how you’ll find them in spirit world.’

The logic of this, as Colette had often pointed out, was that a wife could find herself paired with a pre-adolescent for a husband. Or your son could, in spirit world, be older than you. ‘You’re quite right, of course,’ Al would say blithely. Her view was, believe what you want, Colette: I’m not here to justify myself to you.

The old man didn’t sit down; he clung, as if he were at sea, to the back of the chair in the row ahead. He was hoping his dad would come through, he said, with a message. Al smiled. ‘I wish I could get him for you, sir. But again it’s like the telephone, isn’t it? I can’t call them, they have to call me. They have to want to come through. And then again, I need a bit of help from my spirit guide.’

It was at this stage in the evening that it usually came out about the spirit guide. ‘He’s a little circus clown,’ Al would say. ‘Morris is the name. Been with me since I was a child. I used to see him everywhere. He’s a darling little bloke, always laughing, tumbling, doing his tricks. It’s from Morris that I get my wicked sense of humour.’

Colette could only admire the radiant sincerity with which Al said this: year after year, night after bloody night. She blazed like a planet, the lucky opals her distant moons. For Morris insisted, he insisted that she give him a good character, and if he wasn’t flattered and talked up, he’d get his revenge. ‘But then,’ Al said to the audience, ‘he’s got his serious side too. He certainly has. You’ve heard, haven’t you, of the tears of a clown?’

This led on to the next, the obvious question: how old was she when she first knew about her extraordinary psychic gifts?

‘Very small, very small indeed. In fact, I remember being aware of presences before I could walk or talk. But of course it was the usual story with a sensitive child – sensitive is what we call it, when a person’s attuned to spirit – you tell the grown-ups what you see, what you hear, but they don’t want to know, you’re just a kiddie, they think you’re fantasising. I mean, I was often accused of being naughty when I was only passing on some comment that had come to me through Spirit. Not that I hold it against my mum, God bless her, I mean, she’s had a lot of trouble in her life – and then along came me!’ The trade chuckled, en masse, indulgent.

Time to draw questions to a close, Alison said; because now I’m going to try to make some more contacts for you. There was applause. ‘Oh you’re so lovely,’ she said. ‘Such a lovely, warm and understanding audience, I can always count on a good time whenever I come in your direction. Now I want you to sit back, I want you to relax, I want you to smile, and I want you to send some lovely positive thoughts up here to me…and let’s see what we can get.’

Colette glanced down the hall. The manager seemed to have his eye on the ball, and the vague boy, after shambling about aimlessly for the first half, was now at least looking at the trade instead of up at the ceiling or down at his own feet. Time to slip backstage for a cigarette? It was smoking that kept her thin: smoking and running and worrying. Her heels clicked in the dim narrow passage, on the composition floor.

The dressing-room door was closed. She hesitated in front of it. Afraid, always, that she’d see Morris. Al said there was a knack to seeing spirit. It was to do with glancing sideways, not turning your head: extending, Al said, your field of peripheral vision.

Colette kept her eyes fixed in front of her; sometimes, the rigidity she imposed seemed to make them ache in their sockets. She pushed the door open with her foot, and stood back. Nothing rushed out. On the threshold she took a breath. Sometimes she thought she could smell him; Al said he’d always smelled. Deliberately, she turned her head from side to side, checking the corners. Al’s scent lay sweetly on the air: there was an undernote of corrosion, damp and drains. Nothing was visible. She glanced into the mirror, and her hand went up automatically to pat her hair.

She enjoyed her cigarette in the corridor, wafting the smoke away from her with a rigid palm, careful not to set off the fire alarm. She was back in the hall in time to witness the dramatic highlight; which was always, for her, some punter turning stroppy.

Al had found a woman’s father, in spirit world. ‘Your daddy’s still keeping an eye on you,’ she cooed.

The woman jumped to her feet. She was a small aggressive blonde in a khaki vest, her cold bluish biceps pumped up at the gym. ‘Tell the old sod to bugger off,’ she said. ‘Tell the old sod to stuff himself. Happiest day of my life when that fucker popped his clogs.’ She knocked the mike aside. ‘I’m here for my boyfriend that was killed in a pile-up on the sodding M25.’

Al said, ‘There’s often a lot of anger when someone passes. It’s natural.’

‘Natural?’ the girl said. ‘There was nothing natural about that fucker. If I hear any more about my bastard dad I’ll see you outside and sort you out.’

The trade gasped, right across the hall. The manager was moving in, but anyone could see he didn’t fancy his chances. Al seemed quite cool. She started chatting, saying anything and nothing – now, after all, would have been a good time for a breakthrough ditty from Margaret Rose. It was the woman’s two friends who calmed her; they waved away the vague boy with the mike, dabbed at her cheeks with a screwed-up tissue, and persuaded her back into her seat, where she muttered and fumed.

Now Alison’s attention crossed the hall, rested on another woman, not young, who had a husband with her: a heavy man, ill at ease. ‘Yes, this lady. You have a child in spirit world.’

The woman said politely, no, no children. She said it as if she had said it many times before; as if she were standing at a turnstile, buying admission tickets and refusing the half-price.

‘I can see there are none earthside, but I’m talking about the little boy you lost. Well, I say little boy. Of course, he’s a man now. He’s telling me we have to go back to, back a good few years, we’re talking here thirty years and more. And it was hard for you, I know, because you were very young, darling, and you cried and cried, didn’t you? Yes, of course you did.’

In these situations, Al kept her nerve; she’d had practice. Even the people at the other side of the hall, craning for a view, knew something was up and fell quiet. The seconds stretched out. In time, the woman’s mouth moved.

‘On the mike, darling. Talk to the mike. Speak up, speak out, don’t be afraid. There isn’t anybody here who isn’t sharing your pain.’

Am I? Colette asked herself. I’m not sure I am.

‘It was a miscarriage,’ the woman said. ‘I never, I never saw. It wasn’t, they didn’t, and so I didn’t – ’

‘Didn’t know it was a little boy. But,’ Al said softly, ‘you know now.’ She turned her head to encompass the hall: ‘You see, we have to recognise that it wasn’t a very compassionate world back then. Times have changed, and for that we can all be thankful. I’m sure those nurses and doctors were doing their best, and they didn’t mean to hurt you, but the fact is, you weren’t given a chance to grieve.’

The woman hunched forward. Tears sprang out of her eyes. The heavy husband moved forward, as if to catch them. The hall was rapt.

‘What I want you to know is this.’ Al’s voice was calm, unhurried, without the touch of tenderness that would overwhelm the woman entirely; dignified and precise, she might have been querying a grocery bill. ‘That little boy of yours is a fine young man now. He knows you never held him. He knows that’s not your fault. He knows how your heart aches. He knows how you’ve thought of him,’ Al dropped her voice, ‘always, always, without missing a day. He’s telling me this, from spirit. He understands what happened. He’s opening his arms to you, and he’s holding you now.’

Another woman, in the row behind, began to sob. Al had to be careful, at this point, to minimise the risk of mass hysteria. Women, Colette thought: as if she weren’t one. But Alison knew just how far she could take it. She was on form tonight; experience tells. ‘And he doesn’t forget your husband,’ she told the woman. ‘He says hello to his dad.’ It’s the right note, braced, unsentimental: ‘Hello, Dad.’ The trade sighed, a low mass sigh. ‘And the point is, and he wants you to know this, that though you’ve never been there to look after him, and though of course there’s no substitute for a mother’s love, your little boy has been cared for and cherished, because you’ve got people in spirit who’ve always been there for him – your own grandma? And there’s another lady, very dear to your family, who passed the year you were married.’ She hesitated. ‘Bear with me, I’m trying for her name. I get the colour of a jewel. I get a taste of sherry. Sherry, that’s not a jewel, is it? Oh, I know, it’s a glass of port. Ruby. Does that name mean anything to you?’

The woman nodded, again and again and again: as if she could never nod enough. Her husband whispered to her, ‘Ruby, you know – Eddie’s first wife?’ The mike picked it up. ‘I know, I know,’ she muttered. She gripped his hand. Her fluttering breath registered. You could almost hear her heart.

‘She’s got a parcel for you,’ Al said. ‘No, wait, she’s got two.’

‘She gave us two wedding presents. An electric blanket and some sheets.’

‘Well,’ Al said, ‘if Ruby kept you so warm and cosy, I think you could trust her with your baby.’ She threw it out to the audience. ‘What do you say?’

They began to clap: sporadically, then with gathering force. Weeping broke out again. Al lifted her arm. Obedient to a strange gravity, the lucky opals rose and fell. She’d saved her best effect till last. ‘And he wants you to know, this little boy of yours who’s a fine young man now, that in spirit he goes by the name you chose for him, the name you had planned to give him…if it, if he, if he was a boy. Which was,’ she pauses, ‘correct me if I’m wrong, which was Alistair.’

‘Was it?’ said the heavy husband: he was still on the mike, though he didn’t know it. The woman nodded. ‘Would you like to answer me?’ Al asked pleasantly.

The man cleared his throat, then spoke straight into the mike. ‘Alistair. She says that’s right. That was her choice. Yes.’

Unseeing, he handed the mike to his neighbour. The woman got to her feet, and the heavy man led her away, as if she were an invalid, her handkerchief held over her mouth. They exited, to a fresh storm of applause.

‘Steroid rage, I expect,’ Al said. ‘Did you see those muscles of hers?’ She was sitting up in her hotel bed, dabbing cream on her face. ‘Look, Col, as you quite well know, everything that can go wrong for me out there, has gone wrong at sometime. I can cope. I can weather it. I don’t want you getting stressed.’

‘I’m not stressed. I just think it’s a landmark. The first time anybody’s threatened to beat you up.’

‘The first time while you’ve been with me, maybe. That’s why I gave up working in London.’ Al sat back against the pillows, her eyes closed; she pushed the hair back from her forehead, and Colette saw the jagged scar at her hairline, dead white against ivory. ‘Who needs it? A fight every night. And the trade pawing you when you try to leave, so you miss the last train home. I like to get home. But you know that, Col.’

She doesn’t like night driving, either; so when they’re outside the ring of the M25, there’s nothing for it except to put up somewhere, the two of them in a twin room. A bed and breakfast is no good because Al can’t last through till breakfast, so for preference they need a hotel that will do food through the night. Sometimes they take pre-packed sandwiches, but it’s joyless for Al, sitting up in bed at 4 a.m., sliding a finger into the plastic triangle to fish out the damp bread. There’s a lot of sadness in hotel rooms, soaked up by the soft furnishings: a lot of loneliness and guilt and regret. A lot of ghosts too: whiskery chambermaids stumping down the corridors on their bad legs, tippling night porters who’ve collapsed on the job, guests who’ve drowned in the bath or suffered a stroke in their beds. When they check into a room Alison stands on the threshold and sniffs the atmosphere, inhales it: and her eyes travel dubiously around. More than once, Colette has shot down to reception to ask for a different room. ‘What’s the problem?’ the receptionists will say (sometimes adding ‘madam’) and Colette, stiff with hostility and fright, will say, ‘Why do you need to know?’ She never fails in her mission: challenged, she can pump out as much aggression as the girl in the khaki vest.

What Alison prefers is somewhere new-built and anonymous, part of some reliable chain. She hates history: unless it’s on the television, safe behind glass. She won’t thank you for a night in a place with beams. ‘Sod the inglenooks,’ she once said, after an exhausting hour tussling with an old corpse in a sheet. The dead are like that; give them a cliché, and they’ll run to it. They enjoy frustrating the living, spoiling their beauty sleep. They enjoyed pummelling Al’s flesh, and nagging at her till she got earache; they rattled around in her head until some nights, like tonight, it seemed to quiver on the soft stem of her neck. ‘Col,’ she groaned, ‘be a good girl, rummage around in the bags and see if you can find my lavender spray. My head’s throbbing.’

Colette knelt on the floor and rummaged as directed. ‘That woman at the end, the couple, the miscarriage – you could have heard a pin drop.’

Al said, ‘“See a pin and pick it up and all the day you’ll have good luck.” My mum told me that. I never do, though. See a pin. Or find money in the street.’

That’s because you’re too fat to see your feet, Colette thought. She said, ‘How did you do that thing with the name? When you were going on about mother love I nearly puked, but I have to hand it to you, you got there in the end.’

‘Alistair? Well, of course, if he’d been called John, you wouldn’t be giving me any credit. You’d have said it was one of my lucky guesses.’ She sighed. ‘Look, Colette, what can I tell you? The boy was standing there. He knew his own name. People do.’

‘The mother, she must have been thinking his name.’

‘Oh yes, I could have picked it out of her head. I know that’s your theory. Mind-reading. Oh God, Colette.’ Al slid down inside the covers. She closed her eyes. Her head dropped back against the pillows. ‘Think that, if you find it easier. But you will admit I sometimes tell people things they’ve yet to find out.’

She hated that phrase of Al’s: ‘Think that, if you find it easier.’ As if she were a child and couldn’t be told the truth. Al only seemed dense – it was part of her act. The truth was, she listened to Radio 4 when they were on the road. She’d got a vocabulary, though she didn’t use it on the trade. She was quite a serious and complicated person, and deep, deep and sly: that was what Colette thought.

Al seldom talked about death. At first when they started working together, Colette had thought the word would slip out, if only through the pressure of trying to avoid it. And sometimes it did; but mostly Al talked about passing, she talked about spirit, she talked about passing into spirit world; to that eventless realm, neither cold nor hot, neither hilly nor flat, where the dead, each at their own best age and marooned in an eternal afternoon, pass the ages with sod all going on. Spirit world, as Al describes it to the trade, is a garden, or to be more accurate a public place in the open air: litter-free like an old-fashioned park, with a bandstand in a heat haze in the distance. Here the dead sit in rows on benches, families together, on gravelled paths between weedless beds, where heat-sozzled flowers bob their heads, heavy with the scent of eau de Cologne: their petals crawling with furry, intelligent, stingless bees. There’s a certain 1950s air about the dead, or early sixties perhaps, because they’re clean and respectable and they don’t stink of factories: as if they came after white nylon shirts and indoor sanitation, but before satire, certainly before sexual intercourse. Unmelting ice cubes (in novelty shapes) chink in their glasses, for the age of refrigeration has come. They eat picnics with silver forks; purely for pleasure, because they never feel hunger, nor gain weight. No wind blows there, only a gentle breeze, the temperature being controlled at a moderate 71° F; these are the English dead, and they don’t have centigrade yet. All picnics are share and share alike. The children never squabble or cut their knees, for whatever happened to them earth-side, they are beyond physical damage now. The sun shall not strike them by day nor the moon by night; they have no red skin or freckles, none of the flaws that make the English so uncouth in summer. It’s Sunday, yet the shops are open, though no one needs anything. A mild air plays in the background, not quite Bach, possibly Vaughan Williams, quite like the early Beatles too; the birds sing along, in the green branches of the seasonless trees. The dead have no sense of time, no clear sense of place; they are beyond geography and history, she tells her clients, till someone like herself tunes in. Not one of them is old or decrepit or uselessly young. They all have their own teeth: or an expensive set of implants, if their own were unsightly. Their damaged chromosomes are counted and shuffled into good order; even the early miscarriages have functioning lungs and a proper head of hair. Damaged livers have been replaced, so their owners live to drink another day. Blighted lungs now suck at God’s own low-tar blend. Cancerous breasts have been rescued from the surgeons’ bin, and blossom like roses on spirit chests.

Al opened her eyes. ‘Col, are you there? I was dreaming that I was hungry.’

‘I’ll ring down for a sandwich, shall I?’

She considered. ‘Get me ham on brown. Wholemeal. Dab of mustard – French, not English. Dijon – tell them cupboard on the left, third shelf. Ask them for – do they do a cheese plate? I’d like a slice of Brie and some grapes. And some cake. Not chocolate. Coffee maybe. Walnuts. It has walnuts on top. Two at the rim and one in the centre.’

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