Beyond Black: A Novel Read Free

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 crystallized 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, tread the stage beforehand to detect comic squeaks, and 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 okay 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 she was too shy to speak out if things didn’t suit her. She never did sound checks unless the management told her to, and that was a mistake; you needed to insist on them. Before Colette, nobody had tested the lighting, or walked out onstage 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—they were always putting out a high stool for her to perch on, not having realized 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 onstage. “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