Beyond Black

‘Actually, sex lines are premium rate too.’

‘Oh well, you would know about that, wouldn’t you?’ Gavin gathered up his car magazine, as if to shield it from her. ‘You’re not normal.’

She sighed. She couldn’t summon up the energy to say, ‘I beg your pardon, not normal, what do you mean?’ Any abstraction, indirection and allusion was wasted on Gavin, and in fact even the most straightforward form of communication – other than a poke in the eye – was a challenge to his attention span. There hadn’t, so far as she’d understood, been any dispute between them about what they did in the bedroom – it had seemed fairly straightforward stuff, though she was fairly ignorant and limited, she supposed, and Gavin, certainly, he was fairly ignorant and limited. But after the marriage is over, maybe that’s what men do, they decide it was the sex that was wrong, because it’s something they can communicate over a drink, something they can turn into a story, snigger over; it’s an explanation they can give themselves, for what would otherwise remain the complete mystery of human relationships. There were other mysteries, which loomed large to her and hardly loomed at all for Gavin: what are we here for, what will happen next? It was no use trying to explain to him that without the fortune tellers she had become afraid to act at all; that she liked to know that things were her fate, that she didn’t like life to be arbitrary. It was no use telling him either that she thought she might be psychic herself. The incident of the posthumous phone call, if it had ever sunk into his mind, had been chemically erased, because of the vodka he had drunk the night she moved out; this was lucky for her, because when next day he found his computer trashed he thought he had only himself to blame.

‘Don’t you want to ask anything?’ she asked. ‘Like where I’m living?’

‘So where are you living, Colette?’ he said sarcastically.

‘With a friend.’

‘Jesus, you’ve got a friend?’

‘But from next week I’ve arranged a house-share in Twickenham. I’ll have to start paying rent, so I need the flat to be sold.’

‘All we need is a buyer.’

‘No, all we need is a seller.’

‘What?’

‘Put it on the market.’

‘I have. Last week. ’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ She slammed her glass down. ‘Why didn’t you just come out and say that?’

‘I would if I could get a word in edgewise. Besides, I thought you’d get a tip-off from the spirits. I thought they’d say, a strange man is walking around your bedroom with a steel measure.’

Colette threw herself back in her seat: but it was strangely curved, and pushed her forward again, so her diaphragm was against the table’s edge.

‘So how much did they suggest?’ He told her. ‘That’s far too low. They must think you’re an idiot. And they could be right. Leave it, Gavin, leave it. I’ll get on to it tomorrow. I’ll phone them myself.’

‘They said, realistic price for a quick sale.’

‘More likely they’ve got a mate lined up, who they’re selling it on to.’

‘That’s your trouble.’ Gavin scratched his armpit. ‘You’re paranoid.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You use words without any idea what they mean. All you know is stupid jargon out of car mags. Recarro seats. Spicy lesbo chicks. That’s all you know.’

Gavin turned down his mouth and shrugged. ‘So. You want anything?’

‘Yes, I want my life back.’

‘From the flat.’

‘I’ll make a list.’

‘Anything you want now?’

‘The kitchen knives.’

‘Why?’

‘They’re good ones. Japanese. You don’t want them. You won’t cook.’

‘I might want to cut something.’

‘Use your teeth.’

He took a pull on his lager. She finished her spritzer.

‘If that’s all?’ she said. She gathered her bag and her jacket. ‘I want everything in writing, about the flat. Tell the agents, that all the paperwork must be copied to me. I want full consultation at every point.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll be ringing every two days to check on progress.’

‘I’ll look forward to that.’

‘Not you. The agent. Have you got their card?’

‘No. Not on me. Come back and get it.’

Alarm flared inside her. Was he intending to mug her, or rape her?

‘Send it to me,’ she said.

‘I don’t have your address.’

‘Send it to the office.’

When she got to the door it occurred to her that it might have been his single, clumsy effort at reconciliation. She glanced back. His head was down, and he was leafing through his magazine again. No chance, anyway. She would rather take out her appendix with nail scissors than go back to Gavin.

The encounter, though, had bruised her. Gavin was the first person, she thought, that I was ever really frank and honest with; at home, there wasn’t much premium on frankness, and she’d never had a girlfriend she was really close to, not since she was fifteen. She’d opened her heart to him, such as it was. And for what? Probably, when she opened her heart, he hadn’t even been listening. The night of Renee’s death she had seen him as he truly was: callow and ignorant and not even ashamed of it, not even asking her why she was so panicked, not even appreciating that his mother’s death wouldn’t, by itself, have affected her like that: but shouldn’t it have affected him? Had he even bothered to go to the crematorium, or had he left it all to Carole? When she thought back to that night, which (she now knew) was the last night of her marriage, a peculiar disjointed, unstrung sensation occurred in her head, as if her thoughts and her feelings had been joined together by a zip, and the zip had broken. She had not told Gavin that in the days after she walked out, she had twice dialled Renee’s home number, just to see what would happen. What happened was nothing, of course. The phone rang in the empty house: bungalow: whatever.

It put a dent in her belief in her psychic powers. She knew, of course – her recollection was sharp if Gavin’s wasn’t – that the woman on the phone had at no point actually identified herself. She hadn’t said she wasn’t Renee, but she hadn’t agreed that she was, either. It was just possible that she had misdialled, and that she had been talking to some irate stranger. If pushed, she would have said it was her main-law, but it was true that she didn’t know her voice all that well, and the woman had lacked the trademark lisp that was caused by Renee’s slipping teeth. Was that significant? It could be. Nothing else of a psychic nature seemed to manifest. She moved into the Twickenham house-share, and discovered that it made her unhappy to live with women younger than herself. She’d never thought of herself as a romantic, God knows, but the way they talked about men was near pornographic, and the way they belched and put their feet on the furniture was like Gavin over again. She didn’t have to sleep with them, but that was the only difference. Every morning the kitchen was strewn with Hägen-Dazs tubs, and lager cans, and polystyrene trays from low-fat microwave dinners, with a scraping of something beige and jellified left in the bottom.

So where was she going in life? What was she for? No man with the initial M had come into her life. She was stagnating, and struck by how quickly a temporary situation can become desolating and permanent. Soon she needed her fortune told more than ever. But her regular clairvoyant, the one she trusted most, lived in Brondesbury, which was a long way for her to travel, and kept cats, to which she developed an allergy. She got herself a train timetable, and began to work her way out, each weekend, from the London suburbs to the dormitory towns and verdant conurbations of Berkshire and Surrey. So it came about that one Saturday afternoon in spring, she saw Alison perform in Windsor, at the Victoria Room in the Harte & Garter.

It was a two-day Psychic Extravaganza. She had not prebooked, but because of her general beigeness and her inoffensive manner, she was good at queue-jumping. She had sat modestly in the third row, her whippy body crouching inside her blouson jacket, her khaki-coloured hair pushed behind her ears. Alison had fingered her right away. The lucky opals flashed fire in her direction. ‘I’m getting a broken wedding ring. It’s this lady here in beige. Is it you, darling?’

Mutely, Colette held up her hand, the tight gold band intact. She had started wearing it again, she hardly knew why; maybe just to spite Natasha in Hove, to show that a man had warmed to her, at least once.

Impatience crossed Alison’s face: then her smile wiped the expression away. ‘Yes, I know you still wear his ring. Maybe he thinks of you; maybe you think of him?’

‘Only with hatred,’ Colette said, and Al said, ‘Whatever. But you’re on your own for now, darling.’ Al had held out her arms to the audience. ‘I see images, I can’t help it. For a marriage, I see a ring. For a separation, a divorce, I see a ring that’s broken. The line of the break is the line of the crack in this young girl’s heart.’

There was a murmur of sympathy from the audience. Colette nodded soberly, acknowledging what was said. Natasha had said much the same, when she held the wedding ring, as if in tweezers, between those dodgy false nails of hers. But Natasha had been a spiteful little slag, and the woman on the platform seemed to have no spite in her; Natasha had implied she was too old for new experiences, but Alison spoke as if she had her life before her. She spoke as if her feelings and thoughts could be mended; she imagined popping into the dry-cleaner’s, and getting the broken zip replaced, the zip that joined her thoughts to her feelings and joined her up inside.

This was Colette’s introduction to the metaphorical side of life. She realised that she hadn’t comprehended half that the fortune tellers had said to her. She might as well have stood in the street in Brondesbury ripping up tenners. When they told you something, you were supposed to look at it all ways up; you were supposed to hear it, understand it, feel all around its psychological dimensions. You weren’t supposed to fight it, but let the words sink into you. You shouldn’t query and quibble and try and beat the psychic out of her convictions; you should listen with your inner ear, and you should accept it, exactly what she said, if the feeling it gave you checked in with your feeling inside. Alison was offering hope and hope was the feeling she wanted to have; hope of redemption from the bathroom bickering of the house-share, and from finding other women’s bras stuffed under a sofa cushion when she flopped down after work with the Evening Standard: and from the sound of her housemates rutting at dawn.