Beyond Black: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  “She’s all right, is Gloria,” said her mum, “she can be a good laugh,” and the man said, “Do you want me to give you a slap? Do you want me to give you a slap and knock your teeth out?”

  Alison was interested to see this happen. She had had many kinds of slap, but not that kind. She wiped the water from her eyes, the water and blood, till her vision cleared. But Keith seemed to get tired of it. He let her mother go and her legs went from under her; her body folded and slid down the wall, like the lady in the attic who could fold herself out of sight.

  “You look like Mrs. McGibbet,” Al said.

  Her mother twitched, as if her wires had been pulled; she squeaked up from the floor. “Who’s speaking names now?” she said. “You wallop her, Keith, if you don’t want names spoken. She’s always speaking names.” Then she screamed a new insult that Al had never heard before.

  “You poxy little poxer, you got blood on your chin. Where’ve you got that from? You poxy little poxer.”

  Al said, “Keef, does she mean me?”

  Keith wiped his sweating forehead. It made you sweat, bouncing a woman a dozen times by the short hair of her head. “Yes. No,” he said. “She means to say poxy little boxer. She can’t talk, sweetheart, she don’t know who she’s talking to; her brain’s gone, what she ever had of it.”

  “Who’s Gloria?” she asked. Keith made a hissing through his teeth. He tapped one fist into his opposite palm. For a moment she thought he was going to come after her, so she backed up against the sink. The cold edge of it dug into her back; her hair dripped, blood and water, down her T-shirt. Later she would tell Colette, I was never so frightened as then; that was my worst moment, one of the worse ones anyway, that moment when I thought Keef would knock me to Kingdom Come.

  But Keith stepped back. “Here,” he said. He thrust the dish towel into her hand. “Keep at it,” he said. “Keep it clean.”

  “Can I stay off school?” she said, and Keith said, yes, she’d better. He gave her a pound note and told her to yell out if she saw a dog loose again.

  “And will you come and save me?”

  “Somebody’ll be about.”

  “But I don’t want you to strangle it,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “It’s Blighto.”

  The next time she recalled seeing Keith was a few months later. It was night, and she should have been in bed as nobody had called her out. But when she heard Keith’s name she reached under her mattress for her scissors, which she always kept there in case they should be needed. She clutched them in one hand; with the other she held up the hem of the big nightie that was lent her as a special favour from her mum. When she came scrambling down the stairs, Keith was standing just inside the front door; or at least some legs were, wearing Keith’s trousers. He had a blanket over his head. Two men were supporting him. When they took off the blanket she saw that every part of his face looked like fatty mince, oozing blood. (“Oh, this mince is fatty, Gloria!” her mother would say.) She called out to him, “Keef, that needs stitching!” and one of the men swooped down on her and wrenched the scissors out of her hand. She heard them strike the wall, as the man flung them; looming above her, he pushed her into the back room and slammed the door.

  Next day a voice beyond the wall said, “Hear Keef got mashed up last night. Tee-hee. As if he ain’t got troubles enough.”

  She believed she never saw Keith again, but she might have seen him and just not recognized him; it didn’t seem as if he’d have much left by way of original features. She remembered how, the evening of the dog bite, once her head had stopped bleeding, she had gone out to the garden. She followed the furrows dug by the dog’s strong hind legs, as Keith dragged him away from the house, and Blighto twisted to look back. Not until it rained hard did the ruts disappear.

  At that time Alison was saving up for a pony. One day she went up to the attic to count her money. “Ah dear,” said Mrs. McGibbet, “the lady your mother has been up here, darlin’, raiding your box that was your own peculiar property. The coins she’s tipped into her open purse, and the one single poor note she has tucked away in her brassiere. And not a thing I could do to stop her, my rheumatics being aggravated by the cold and damp, for by the time I was up and out of my corner, she had outstripped me.”

  Alison sat down on the floor. “Mrs. McGibbet,” she said, “can I ask you a question?”

  “You surely can. And why should you have to ask if you can ask, I ask myself?”

  “Do you know Gloria?”

  “Do I know Gloria?” Mrs. McGibbet’s eyelids fell over her bright blue eyes. “Ah, you’ve no business asking.”

  “I think I saw her. I think I can see her these days.”

  “Gloria is a cheap hoor, what else should she be? I never should have given her the name, for it put ideas in her head that was above her station. Go on the boat then, heedless and headstrong, she would go on the boat. Get off at Liverpool with all its attendant vices and then where will she go but via a meat lorry to the dreadful metropolis with its many occasions of sin. End up dead, dead and haunting about in a British army town, in a dirty house with a bath in the front garden, and her own mother a living witness to every hoor’s trick that she can contrive.”

  After that, when she got 50 pence from the men, she took it straight down to the minimart and bought chocolate, which she ate on the way home.

  When Alison was eight years old, or maybe nine or ten, she was playing outside one day, a greyish sticky day in late summer. She was alone, of course: playing horses, neighing occasionally, and progressing at a canter. The rough grass of their back plot was worn in patches, like the pile on the rug that made the attic into a little palace.

  Something drew her attention, and she stopped in her paces, and glanced up. She could see men going to and fro from the garages, carrying boxes.

  “Hi-ya!” she said. She waved to them. She was sure they were men she knew.

  But then a minute later she thought they were men she didn’t know. It was hard to tell. They kept their faces turned away. A sick feeling crept over her. Silent, faces downcast, the men moved over the tussocky grass. Silent, faces downcast, they passed the boxes. She couldn’t judge the distance from herself to them; it was as if the light had grown more thick and dense. She took a step forward, but she knew she should not. Her dirty nails dug into the palms of her hands. Sick came up into her throat. She swallowed it and it burned. Very slowly, she turned her head away. She took one plodding step towards the house. Then another. Air thick as mud clotted around her ankles. She had some idea of what was in the boxes, but as she stepped inside the house it slipped clear from her mind, like a drug slipping from a syringe and deep into a vein.

  Her mother was in the lean-to, nattering away to Gloria. “Excuse me, will you,” she said affably, “while I just see if this child wants a clip around the ear?” She turned around and glared at her daughter. “Look at you,” she said. “Wash your face, you’re all running in sweat, you bloody turn me up. I was never like that at your age, I was a neat little thing, I had to be, I wouldn’t have made a living if I’d gone about like that. What’s the matter with you, you’re green, girl, look at yourself in the mirror, have you been stuffing yourself with them Rolo again? If you’re going to chuck up, go outside and do it.”

  Alison did as she was told and looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t recognize the person she saw there. It was a man, with a check jacket on and a tie skew-whiff; a frowning man with a low hairline and a yellowish face. Then she realized that the door was open, and that the men were piling in behind her. “Fuck, Emmie, got to wash me hands!” one of them shouted.

  She ran. For always, more or less, she was afraid of the men. On the stairs to the attic she doubled up and let brown liquid run out of her mouth. She hoped her mother would think it was the cat, Judy, who was responsible. She toiled on upwards and swung open the door. Mrs. McGibbet was sitting, already formed, in her corner. Her stumpy legs in their thick stockings stuck out in front
of her, wide apart, as if she had been punched and knocked down. Her eyes were no longer startled, but blank as if their blinds had been drawn.

  She did not greet Alison: no “How’s my darlin’ girl today?” She just said, in a distracted mutter, “There’s an evil thing you wouldn’t want to see at all. There’s an evil thing you wouldn’t want to see … .” She faded with rapidity; there was a scrabbling noise beneath the floorboards, and she was gone.

  Mrs. McGibbet never came back after that day. She missed her, but she realized that the old lady was too frightened to return. Al was a child and hadn’t got the option of leaving. Now there was no appeal or relief from Gloria and her mum, and the men in the front room. She went out to play at the back as seldom as possible; even the thought of it made thick spit come up into her mouth. Her mother berated her for getting no fresh air. If she was forced to play out—which happened sometimes, with the door locked after her—she made it a rule never to raise her eyes as far as the sheds and the lockup garages, or the belt of woodland beyond them. She could not shake off the atmosphere of that afternoon, a peculiar suspension, like a breath held: the men’s averted faces, the thunderous air, the dying grass, her mother’s outgust of tobacco smoke, the yellow face in the mirror where she expected to see her own, the man’s need to wash his hands. As for what was in the cardboard boxes, she hoped not to think about it; but sometimes the answer turned up, in dreams.

  COLETTE: So … are you going to tell me?

  ALISON: I might, if I was quite sure I knew.

  COLETTE: Only might?

  ALISON: I don’t know if I could speak it out.

  COLETTE: Drugs, could it have been? Or didn’t they have drugs in those days?

  ALISON: God Almighty, of course they had drugs, do you think I come out of the Ark? They’ve always had drugs.

  COLETTE: So?

  ALISON: It was a funny district, you see, the army camps all around, these squaddies coming and going, I mean it was a big area for, well, women like my mum and the sort of men she knew, there was a lot of illegal gambling, there were women and boys who were on the game, there were all sorts of—

  COLETTE: So come on, what do you think was in the boxes? (pause) Bits of Gloria?

  ALISON: No. Surely not? Keef said she’d gone home to Ireland.

  COLETTE: You didn’t believe that, did you?

  ALISON: I didn’t believe it or not believe it.

  COLETTE: But she did disappear?

  ALISON: Not from our house, she didn’t. Yes Gloria, no, Gloria, have a cuppa Gloria.

  COLETTE: I’m quite interested in this because it suggests your mum was mad or something—but let’s just keep to the point about the disappearance—was anything reported?

  ALISON: I was eight. I didn’t know what was reported.

  COLETTE: Nothing on TV?

  ALISON: I’m not sure we had a TV. Well, yes, we did. Several. I mean the men used to bring them in under their arms. Just, we never had an aerial. That was us. Two bathtubs, no TV aerial.

  COLETTE: Al, why do you make such silly jokes all the time? You do it when you’re on the platform. It’s not appropriate.

  ALISON: Personally I think the use of humour’s very important when you’re dealing with the public. It puts them at their ease. Because they’re scared, when they come in.

  COLETTE: I was never scared. Why do they come if they’re scared?

  ALISON: Most people have a very low fright threshold. But it doesn’t stop them being curious.

  COLETTE: They should toughen up.

  ALISON: I suppose we all should. (sighs) Look, Colette—you come from Uxbridge. Oh, I know you say, Uxbridge not Knightsbridge, but it’s a place where you had hydrangeas, right? Well, that’s not like where I come from. I suppose if you had a crime in Uxbridge, if you had somebody disappear, the neighbours would notice.

  COLETTE: So what are you saying?

  ALISON: People went missing all the time, round our way. There was wasteland. There was army land, there was miles of it. There was heath land and just generally these acres where anything … could have … .

  COLETTE: Did the police ever come round?

  ALISON: The police came round regularly, I mean there was no surprise in that.

  COLETTE: So what did you do?

  ALISON: My mother would say, down on the floor. The police would flap the letter box. They’d shout through, is that Mrs. Emmeline Cheetham?

  COLETTE: Was that her name?

  ALISON: Yes, Emmeline. It’s nice, isn’t it?

  COLETTE: I mean Cheetham, that’s not your name.

  ALISON: I changed it. Think about it.

  COLETTE: Oh, yes … . Al, does this mean you might have previous identities?

  ALISON: Past lives?

  COLETTE: No … For God’s sake, I’m just talking about other names, other names by which you may have been known to the Revenue. I mean you must have worked before you became self-employed, so you must have tax records in the name of Cheetham, with some other district. I wish you’d mentioned this before!

  ALISON: I want to go to the loo.

  COLETTE: Because I don’t think you have any idea how embattled I am. About your tax. And I can do without any complication of this nature.

  ALISON: So could you turn the tape off?

  COLETTE: Oh, cross your legs, you can hang on for two minutes. Just to get us back on track—we are concluding our conversation about the mysterious boxes Alison saw when she was eight—

  ALISON: Or maybe nine, or ten.

  COLETTE:—and these boxes were being carried by people she didn’t know, men, and towards the back of her house, yes?

  ALISON: Yes, towards the back, that’s right. Down towards the fields. The open ground. And no, I don’t know what was in them. Oh God, Colette, can you switch off? I really need the loo. And Morris is making such a racket. I don’t know what was in those boxes, but sometimes I feel as if it’s me. Does that make sense to you?

  COLETTE: I think the big question is, will it make sense to our readers?

  (click)

  When Alison was at school, she had to keep My Diary. She was allowed to crayon what she did every day, as well as put words. She put about Keith and his face getting mashed. About the dog Blighto and the drag of his claws in the mud.

  “Do we really want to know about this, Alison?” her teacher said.

  Her mother was invited in to see the headmaster, but when she lit up he tapped the NO SMOKING sign perched on top of the typewriter on his desk.

  “Yes, I can read,” Emmeline said proudly, as she puffed away.

  “I really think—” said he, and her mother said, “Look, you asked me here, so you’ve got to put up with it, is that right?” She tapped her ash into his wire in-tray. “You got a complaint about Alison, is that it?”

  “It’s not a question of complaint,” the headmaster said.

  “Oh, good,” said her mum. “Because my daughter’s as good as gold. So if you had any complaint, it’d be up to you to get it sorted. Otherwise I’d have to get you sorted, wouldn’t I?”

  “I’m not sure you quite grasp, Mrs. Cheetham—”

  “I dare say,” Al’s mum said. “We know where your sort get off, smacking little girls’ bottoms, I mean you wouldn’t do it otherwise, it’s not a man’s job, is it?”

  “Nothing of that kind—” the headmaster began.

  Alison began to cry loudly.

  “Shut it,” her mother said casually. “So I’m just telling you, I don’t like people writing to me. I don’t like stuff coming through my door. Any more of it, and you’ll be picking your teeth out of your typewriter.” She took one last draw on her cigarette and dropped the stub on the carpet tiles. “I’m only saying.”

  By the time Al was in Mrs. Clerides’s class, she’d rather not put pen to paper because of the risk that someone else would master the pen and write gibberish in her exercise book. “Gibberish” was what Mrs. Clerides called it, when she got her up to the front of
the class and asked her if she were subnormal.

  Mrs. Clerides read out Al’s diary in a disgusted tone.

  “Slurp, slurp, yum yum,” said Harry. “Give us some,” said Blighto.

  “No,” said Harry. “Today it is all for me.”

  “It’s a dog writing,” Al explained. “It’s Serene. She’s the witness. She tells how Harry polished his bowl. When he’d done you could see your face in it.”

  “I don’t believe I asked you to keep the diary of your pet,” said Mrs. C.

  “She’s not a pet,” Al said. “Bloody hell, Mrs. Clerides, she pays her way, we all have to pay. If you don’t work you don’t eat.” Then she had gone quiet, thinking, the dogs’ work is fighting, but what is the men’s? They go about in vans. They say, what game am I in? I am in the entertainment game.

  Mrs. Clerides slapped her legs. She made her write out something or other, fifty times, maybe a hundred. She couldn’t remember what it was. Even when she was writing it she couldn’t remember. She had to keep on reminding herself by looking back at the line before.

  After that, if she’d got a few words down safely, she preferred to go over them with her blue ballpoint, branding the letters well into the paper: then drawing daisy petals around the “o”s and giving the “g”s little fishy faces. This was dull but it was better to be bored than to risk letting the gibberish in by an unguarded stroke, branching out into white space. It made her look occupied, and as long as she looked occupied she got left alone at the back with the mongols, the dummies, and the spastics.