Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we continue Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black with Chapter 8. The novel was first published in 2005. Spoilers ahead!
“You have to walk blind. And you walk slap into the truth.”
Psychic business declines as the millennium approaches. Clients are “caught up in some general intake of breath” as the new age looms. At Admiral Drive, families set off fireworks in their backyards; they’d use the playground, but it’s been plastered with KEEP OUT notices. Residents fear unexploded bombs or radiation from secret underground nuclear tests; health department officials admit to “some sort of contamination” of unknown nature. Alison wonders if Morris might have cursed the playground before leaving.
When no apocalypse enlivens the new year, clients refocus on their chronic woes and business picks up. Alison and Colette enjoy the post-Morris peace. Alison sleeps through nights, and her looks improve. They consider taking a holiday. Alison prefers a destination with ruins and culture. Colette envisions “Greek waiters” sweeping her into bed. Alison recalls her lonely holiday with a randy Mandy, but she supposes “People should enjoy themselves, if they can.” Colette snarks back, “It just happens you can’t,” and the holiday never materializes.
9/11 comes, and Colette and Alison watch the disaster on TV. Alison can’t say she foresaw it, or that no one foresaw it. “The whole world has drawn this card,” she concludes. Merlyn proposes that Alison a life-coaching scheme based on the “universal law” that “you get what you think you deserve.” They might get together in other ways, too. Alison’s reaction is that Merlyn “thinks [she’] stupid just because [she’s] fat.” She declines his offers. After telling Colette that Merlyn’s writing a new book, she asks whether their own book will ever be finished. Recording problems continue: conversations overwhelmed by gibberish and spectral throat-clearing. In one surviving conversation, Alison defends what Colette calls her use of “psychology.” Colette would rather think Alison was cheating than psychic—people who hear voices get put in hospitals. Not if they can make a living, Alison retorts.
Colette sometimes leaves the recorder running without telling Alison, in case Alison says something “incriminating.” Not that Colette knows what Alison’s crime might be. She suggests expanding their business by telling fortunes herself, but palm reading and tarot baffle her. Unlike Alison, she senses nothing from skin creases or cards.
Colette sticks to seeking better venues, like the grand theaters along the south coast. On Admiral Drive, spring brings “swampish swelling and bubbling” around the lower-lying houses. Shopping, the pair run into Colette’s ex-husband Gavin. He comments on Alison’s size, wonders that Colette can’t do better, declares he always thought she might be “a lezzie,” although the way she came after him with “tongue hanging out…” He follows these negging pleasantries with the suggestion that they have a drink. Colette tells him to “get stuffed.”
The pair continue motoring through “denatured towns,” where confused spirits find their homes replaced by burger bars and their factories by malls. Some follow Alison home, pelting her with questions. She does her best to send them onward. After a parking garage incident where Alison tells a surly (live) spot-grabber to see his doctor about his left lung, Colette’s spooked into asking what she should do, if she dies. Don’t get distracted by other spirits, Alison counsels. Just keep moving toward the light. If she loses it, no worries: Colette can always come home to Admiral Drive. Or, when Alison dies, maybe they’ll share a house again.
Colette worries about Morris returning. Alison reassures her: Morris has been sent on a “course,” and courses get you to higher levels, right? Nevertheless, Colette should watch for unaccountable lumps in the vacuum cleaner bag. Some spirits are “so tenacious of existence” that they settle for any earthly form, no matter how filthy. A spotless house is a Morris-free house.
Alison still experiences uncomfortable sensations. Her bodily boundaries feel “invisible, uncertain;” her extremities “drifted, in time and space.” Her “daydreams and night dreams ran together.” She sees two trucks parked outside the house; their cabs are driverless, but one contains something wrapped in a gray blanket. Colette finds her late at night, staring through their porthole at the still-quarantined playground.
They’ve “been given a breathing space, time to reevaluate.” They sit over wine and talk about their future. Colette continues to ask about the next life, unconvinced that Alison isn’t “withholding information.” Alison considers learning the latest fad, Kabbalah. Colette considers landscaping the backyard, as neighbor Evan’s always urging—they at least need a shed. One Sunday Colette and Alison go to buy one. Colette bullies the salesman, who’s pushing something picturesque and expensive. Alison smooths his feathers. They pick the most utilitarian shed. Returning home, Colette ruminates about the chance meeting with Gavin. Her angrily erratic driving unnerves Alison. She asks Colette about what car rescue services they’re members of, which brings on more reminiscences of Gavin’s obtuseness. Alison thinks about braining Colette. Instead she plies her with comfort food, which Colette snubs, then gulps down “like a hungry dog.”
That night, both of them “tucked up safe,” Alison dreams of the vicious watchdogs that plagued her childhood.
This Week’s Metrics
The Degenerate Dutch: Gavin, bumping into Colette and Al in the grocery store, suggests that Colette is lesbian and asks if Al is “the best you could do”.
Libronomicon: Merlyn (not Merlin) is writing a new book, Self-Heal Through Success, which sounds like rewarmed prosperity gospel. You get what you think you deserve.
Madness Takes Its Toll: You see people wandering around on the street believing all sorts of things—but if you make a living, they don’t call you “mad.”
Ruthanna’s Commentary
In Mantel’s cynical England, people circle cautiously around the possibility of being known, pulling back from that center as if it’s a burning coal. True knowing requires psychic powers, and is deeply unpleasant; love and respect are too distant to be seen, let alone desired. Al and Colette need and infuriate and reject each other; neighbors touch only over shared fears, lives slip past at bus stops never to be encountered again.
And this is as good as it gets. After death we lose our own names, or the boundaries that distinguish self from self and make us worth knowing as individuals.
Diana, Princess of Wales, earned a full chapter in dying. The whole of psychic England girded for her fans and detractors; the spiritual waves sickened Al. Now Y2K and 9/11 pass with mere blips. In the development, suburban parents spout theories about white worms and radiation, the coming of the fearful Drain Officials. Do they sense the inescapable background radiation of mouse bones that Al first noted, or just need to believe that something lies beneath shallow lives?
Colette continues to be deeply uncomfortable with the possibility of a non-shallow life. She imagines wild vacations, which ultimately never happen because she can’t get past her partner being fat. And neither, fundamentally, can Al. Life is short and the afterlife tawdry and self-destroying, but don’t you dare go dancing unless everyone involved has a societally-approved body. Don’t you dare stop judging yourself or others, or fearing others’ judgment, long enough to let the mind or the soul matter for the brief time you’ve got them.
I spent quite a lot of this chapter wanting to shake people.
Colette accuses Al of “cheating” via Holmesian observation—a real attempt to get below the surface and know people. Colette’s terrible at it, when she tries, unable to pull so much as an intuition from a tarot spread. Yet she doesn’t come away with any sort of realization that Al has both psychic talent and hard-won skill at understanding other humans; she doesn’t come away with the idea that she, too, might win such a skill. If anything, she’s gotten worse, shifting over the years from strategic assholery for house-hunting to strategy-free assholery while hunting up a mere shed.
By this point, Al resents Colette and Colette resents Al to the point of random paranoia, recording her without her knowledge, seeking “incriminating” comments without any clue what form they might take. Colette perceives her own “monstrousness” when fury blotches her face, but not when she merely looses bitter comments. Why bother being polite to a psychic?
There is something wrong with Colette, and I’m not convinced it’s merely mundane. Her aura is patchy, her touch “like a spirit touch,” her life a plate withdrawn half-eaten. Al wonders if she might disappear suddenly, ghostlike. This is about the fifth time I’ve wondered if all this metaphorical language is literal. “I see dead people. They don’t even know they’re dead. Sometimes I hire them.”
Then there’s that odd discussion about how Gavin wouldn’t cover Colette’s road rescue insurance, how Colette could have died en route in a dozen ways, all harking back to the impossible rules of “Sooner or Later Your Wife Will Drive Home.” Maybe it happened. Maybe the beigeness of Colette’s life was such that no one, not even her, noticed the transition.
That, scarily, seems like the true best one can hope for. Ghosts drift through the world, forgetting and fusing and drifting apart, repeating dull questions in a misery of posthumous dementia. Ghost women beg for scraps of attention, trying not to take up too much space or time. Morris, if he returns, might become a gummed-up bit of dirt.
Given all that, getting to the light seems like it requires as much luck as deliberate focus. The tawdry dead have no boundaries on their selfhood, no protection for their identities—and the afterlife has no opportunity to recover from squandered opportunities.
Anne’s Commentary
The thing I remember from the turn of the millennium is the spectacular laser and fireworks show Providence put on. We partied like it was 1999 because it was 1999, and then it was the Year 2K. Our digital networks didn’t blow up, for the most part, and we’d wait over a year for the signature catastrophe of the new age. I suppose it was only fitting for Nine-Eleven to hold off until 2001, since 2001 was the actual calendar start of the third millennium. Like everyone else with access to a TV, Colette and Alison watch live as the Towers collapse. Alison is rendered speechless; in her mind the only sense she can make of the horrorshow is that “The whole world has drawn this card.”
And so the disasters spool out, wars and famines, floods and earthquakes, plagues and extinctions, but we are vicarious residents of Admiral Drive, and let its travails suffice. The Year 2K celebration should have taken place in the playground , featuring grand communal fireworks instead of nervous every-dad-for-himself pyrotechnics in separate backyards. But Admiral Drive’s “heart” is sick with “some sort of blockage, some sort of seepage, some sort of contamination.” Some sort of something bad enough for the authorities to fence furious kids out for months, and no solution found by the end of the chapter.
Japanese knotweed, my ass, is the general opinion of the residents (and, anyway, Japanese knotweed’s not poisonous—as Bon Appetit informs us, its stems taste “a lot like rhubarb…tart, crunchy and juicy,” and can be eaten raw or cooked.) The real problem, neighbors speculate, is unexploded bombs from, um, some sort of war; or the kind of lingering nuke test radiation that turns worms white. Watch out for the white worms!
Alison’s not worried about bleached annelids. She’s hoping that she’s not responsible, via Morris, for the playground pollution—what if he “pissed on the plot, on his way out of her life?” That would be just like Morris. In addition, the lower-lying houses are troubled by damp-squelching turf and patios lifted by “a swampish swelling and bubbling.” At night, the security lights “flitter,” sensing what? Colette imagines neighbors creeping around, stealing each other’s electronics. That’s just like Colette. Unlike Alison, she doesn’t see the phantom trucks at their curb, one bearing a blanket-shrouded object out of the Aldershot past.
Morris gone, the resident ghost on Admiral Drive is Maureen Harrison, who haunts cupboards and the dead space behind appliances. More troublesome to Alison are the spirits who swarm the “denatured” towns of southeastern England, too baffled by change to move on. She tries to avoid them, but inevitably some follow her rare living ear that can hear their complaints. It’s both mercy and self-protection to send them on, into the light. And though she’s feeling and looking better, Alison still has moments when “her own boundaries seemed invisible, uncertain,” when she loses spans of time.
The neighbors, abominable ex Gavin, and random salespeople continue to assume Alison and Colette are lesbians, a mistake semi-pardonable: The two have fallen into all the dynamics of a couple apart from the sexual ones. The “next-doors” Evan and Michelle treat them as a married pair of sorts. Michelle confides more in Alison, the “feminine” partner, while Evan has grown over-the-fence chummy with “masculine” partner Colette, the one who mows the lawn. Colette wonders whether Evan might regard her with “lecherous” intent, but what she reads in his expression is “sympathy,” as in for another backyard warrior struggling with the burdens of grass and inconveniently configured garages.
Colette has taken on the stereotypically male tasks of financial management, driving, outdoor maintenance, and “bad-cop” negotiation with hirelings and sales people. She does nurse Alison along, but more as a hired caregiver than a loving partner. Alison is the “good-cop” in public; in private, she’s the more supportive and nurturing, the more self-effacing, ultimately channeling the motherly spirit Mrs. McGibbet who consoled Alison herself as a child. But it’s uncertain how much love has to do with her interactions with Colette.
The two argue like any long-time couple over vacations, purchases and housekeeping. Colette’s louder in her grievances, complaining about the onerous routine of the professional psychic’s keeper, the aspirations she’s given up, the proper man (or men) she doesn’t have, the way Alison in her sheer size flattens carpet pile and rubs marks into clean walls. Alison self-deprecates or promises drastically selfless solutions, like jumping down three steps instead of treading on their carpet. Inside, she recalls the easier early days of their relationship and “[thinks] of ways to stove [Colette’s] head in.”
Yet sometimes “they would sit over a bottle of wine and talk about their future.” The future’s hard to plan for, since Colette feels Alison’s “withholding information… that she could very well part with.” That includes information about the afterlife. But Colette concedes “you can’t waste time everyday worrying about the theory of your life, you have to get on with the practice.” With practical shit in the face of the big unknown, the uncertainties even an Alison must face.
For this chapter, as Mantel writes, “they had been given a breathing space.” For now, and in the end, Alison and Colette need each other.
In the end, the consequences of that need might be the most terrifying thing.
Next week, we continue our National Poetry Month celebration with two poems about the perils of ghostly feasts: Carly Racklin’s “Unearthen” and Deborah Davitt’s “Feeding the Dead”.
Ruthanna Emrys is the author of A Half-Built Garden and the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. You can find some of her fiction, weird and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon and on Mastodon as [email protected], and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.
