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 9. The novel was first published in 2005. Spoilers ahead! CW for food restriction.
“I am refused bread in my own house, she thought. I am refused a slice of bread.”
Colette wakes at 2 a.m. to the sound of garden birds squabbling, waves breaking, the rain forest at night: Alison’s relaxation tapes seeping through the bedroom wall. She glances out at the moonlit lawn and sees a shabbily dressed man walks in circles, “as if under an enchantment.” She’s seen him before, or maybe dreamed him? Maybe she’s dreaming now, as she drops to sleep to whalesong.
At 5 a.m. Alison meets the man on the lawn, believing he’s her new spirit guide. He doesn’t answer the questions she thinks at him, only acknowledging her by tapping his forehead as he continues circling. She’s distracted by the distant rattle of a train; she blinks, and the man is gone.
Colette’s latest “hobby” is keeping Alison on a strict diet. While overseeing her meager breakfast, she describes her “dream.” Alison wonders if Colette’s becoming Sensitive. Bargaining with prospective landscapers makes Colette forget about the man until neighbor Michelle says there was an intruder, probably one of these shed-robbers Constable Delingbole’s cautioned the community-watch about. Colette retaliates by scaring Michelle over the radioactive “white worms.”
Alison gets a call from Mandy. They discuss the circling man, but Mandy’s more concerned about Colette’s controlling behavior. Alison can’t fire her, she says—Colette needs her, needs love in her empty life. She needs a slap, Mandy counters.
Colette off shopping, Alison confronts the neither spirit-nor-dream man, a “mournful bundle” of a boy crouched fetally in a corner. Tea and sandwiches coax out his story: He was squatting in sheds at the garden center—in fact, he was the “specter” Alison glimpsed in one model. Mart’s been living rough for a while; he’s always falling through the cracks of “policy,” in and out of low-level jobs, hospitalized here and there, never quite “policy-ed” into a stable living situation. From the pills he shows Alison, he suffers from some form of schizophrenia. Between her own telepathic insights and Mart’s rambling revelations, Alison pieces together the rest of his history: Removed from his birth mother to foster care, head beaten in by one of many stepfathers, constantly moved along by the police including Michelle’s Constable Delingbole.
Alison identifies with too many of Mart’s experiences. When one of Michelle’s children bites the other, prompting Michelle to threaten them with “slaps all round,” Mart cringes to the shed floor trembling; Alison kneels to support and comfort a body “made of bones and scraps.” Over the next couple days, she brings him bedding and new shoes. To feed him out of their pantry risks Colette accusing her of diet-cheating, so Alison gives Mart money to purchase take-out meals. She joins him, finally getting enough to eat herself. She even walks to the store to get Mart groceries, but Michelle’s warning about grocery-stealing “illegal immigrants” has a grain of truth, and the groceries Alison hid in the garage vanish before her secret guest can retrieve them.
Colette gets a call from ex-husband Gavin, who’s now seeing somebody named Zoe. She pretends disinterest while wanting to know all about the new woman, so she can compare her to herself. Zoe is, horrifyingly, a model. Later Colette scolds Alison, returned exhausted from her unusual walk: How far has she “waddled,” doesn’t she know she’ll have to sprint to see any improvement? Later Alison hears Colette sobbing in her bedroom. She leaves her alone until dinner-time, when Colette sends her off without caloric guidance, saying “Go and eat yourself to death. What do I care?”
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A House With Good Bones
Inevitably Colette discovers Mart. While Alison begs Colette not to hit him or call the police, Mart supposes Colette thought he was an extraterrestrial, then admits that his troubles started with an alien encounter: Aliens give you headaches, make you fall over, make you feel your “middle” has been drilled out. Colette’s unappeased. She lays down the law: Mart has ten minutes to clear out, or she’ll have the police remove him.
Mart leaves. Colette screams in Alison’s face: Is she insane? Did she want to unleash criminals on the neighborhood? To Alison’s explanation that she “just wanted to do a good action,” Colette insults her intelligence as well as her fatness (again).
Alison thinks that in Mart’s case, she was “temporarily muddled by the ingress of memory, some seepage from [her] early life.” She too was “kept in a shed,” chased there seeking refuge, only to be attacked by “a dark shape rising up from the corner.” Afterwards she was “temporarily inconvenienced” by someone locking her in, to lie “bleeding, alone, on newspapers, in the dark.” Still, the past is unclear, the present “muddled” by the force of Colette’s rage. Alison can see the future, however, in which Colette will force her out on weighted walks, or maybe just drive her from the house with nowhere to go but someone’s outbuilding.
The two settle into an uneasy truce. Colette congratulates herself on banishing Mart—she, at least, is no “soft touch.” She feels hungry, thinks of raiding the biscuit tin, but no. “Food is over, as far as [she’s] concerned,” for “pictures of Zoe were gnawing at her brain, like rats in a cage with no door.”
This Week’s Metrics
What’s Cyclopean: Mart’s language is not always precisely English. Asked about help getting jobs, he says, “I’m an outloop. I’m on a list, but I’m not computerate yet.”
The Degenerate Dutch: There is so much fatphobia this week. So much. Not to mention xenophobia, ablism, and slurs against the Romany. Most of it coming from Colette.
Anne’s Commentary
Hunger is getting to be a dominant theme here on Reading the Weird. Last week we read about the hungry dead and a hungry ghost; this week it’s the living who are starving to death, both figuratively and actually.
On Admiral Drive you’d think people could afford plenty of food to keep body and soul together, but their bodies and souls hunger for more than sufficient caloric intake. The Drive’s residents have forked over big money to live in a safe, well-scrubbed and uniform community (if one discounts Alison and Colette, the “lesbian” couple.) Isn’t it reasonable that they should expect some security, some immunity from the modern plague of anxiety? Instead the paranoia that drove them to the “countryside” has followed them like an unwanted cat, contrarily persistent. We’ve already seen that the very land their mini-mansions are built on is untrustworthy, as are the brand-new ceilings over their heads. Chapter Nine sees the mysteriously tainted playground still closed off. The rumor of radioactive white worms can still terrify, as Colette maliciously demonstrates with Michelle. Add to that a mysterious epidemic among pet rabbits—they simply keel over, dribbling black blood!
White worms, black-bleeding bunnies. Worrisome enough, but much worse are those people, the ones who should have been left behind in the cities. Illegal immigrants lurk around the shops, ready to swoop down on any unattended groceries. They may even follow you home and snatch the food from your car trunk, your garage! Spring, Constable Delingbole informs the Admiral Drive community watch, is prime season for shed robbers—how are you supposed to maintain the kind of garden neighbors expect when your mowers and rakes are always disappearing? That’s if your shed hasn’t been invaded by vagrants, “gyppos” and “pedos,” the lot of them! The kiddiwinks biting each other, the mums conscientiously offering corrective slaps, they’re not safe in their own backyards!
It’s not right, regular people having to keep the hungry world at bay. People are hungry for two reasons only: one, they’re lazy, two, they’re crazy. Okay, there’s a third reason, but it’s a commendable one: They’re on a diet.
Mart may be lazy, or he may just be hopelessly incompetent because, no doubt here, he’s crazy, and no doubt whatever the concatenation of causes, he’s hungry.
Alison is on a highly restrictive diet. Ergo, she’s hungry, but that’s a good thing—it proves the diet is working. Besides, her starvation feeds Colette’s new hobby of monitoring Alison’s intake, and Colette has so little else in her life, Colette needs Alison, and Alison needs to be needed. Hence Mart is a godsend: someone to feed, someone with whom she can feed herself. Someone who doesn’t judge her consumption. Someone who, in hunger and hurt and need, is a mirror of herself, her childhood past and her future when Colette, however needful, drives her from their home.
Colette, already as lean and hungry as Shakespeare’s Cassius, is about to give up food because she’s not thin enough—not as thin, she assumes, as Gavin’s new girlfriend, Zoe. She couldn’t want Gavin back for his sterling qualities, but it’s intolerable to think that he’s done “better” than Colette, post-divorce. That he’s got that societal superlative, a model, while she’s done worse than even Gavin had imagined she would, with fat—and female—Alison.
Morris has not come home to roost, nor have any of his fiendish mates come looking for him. Mart, whom Alison initially pegged as a new spirit guide, has proven to be human, his bone-and-scrap body clinging hard to life. The sole remaining spirits are Maureen Harrison and her little old lady friend, both too innocuous for Alison to trouble herself—and them—with a boot to the next plane. But we can’t certify Admiral Drive as ghost-free yet, not while the living abide there. Alison attracts spirits, sure, but the hungriest ghosts haunt her and Colette alike—and all the other residents, I’ve got to suppose, because they too exist through time, trailing pasts that hang over the present and must dog the future, as ravenous as the rats Colette imagines gnawing at her brain, wearing the face of a perfect usurper.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
I vastly prefer the awe-ful horrors to the petty ones. I want brain-breaking physics, tunnels through deep time, attraction and repulsion swirling together in a galactic spiral. I particularly want those here, in this chapter where the horrors are so breathtakingly, painfully petty. If Mandy isn’t actually willing to come over and slap Colette, the least I can ask is that the Outer Ones come to collect her brain. Right?
The problem with petty horror is that it’s not only realistically frightening, but realistically stressful. Real life is full of people who hate other people’s bodies so intensely that they devote vast swathes of precious life-time to trying to re-shape (or de-shape) those bodies. It’s full, too, of people who internalize that hate and spend swathes of their own irretrievable time trying to make their bodies more worthy of life and love. I’ve been the Mandy trying to talk Al away from an abusive relationship, and can recognize the stage where she’s full of reasons why she couldn’t possibly leave. Until that changes, it’s not going to happen. All you can do is wait nearby until she realizes that life would be better without someone who isolates her from friends and takes away her independent movement and controls the freaking size of her freaking toast slices.
Except that Al also has traumas that aren’t quite so mundane, and helplessness learned from Morris—whom she tried to leave and literally couldn’t. Colette is the apparent opposite of Morris—well-organized, neatly put together, a suburban stickler for rules—in everything except cruelty. Worse, where Morris’s cruelty was ad-hoc and juvenile, Colette’s is well-organized and rule-bound. Systematic. So I fear that if the Outer Ones don’t arrive, it will take a long time for Al to disentangle herself. I hope she makes it out alive.
Actually, my working theory continues to be that Morris and Colette have even more in common than is apparent. I think the reason that no new spirit guide has knocked is that Colette is Al’s new spirit guide. It just happens that she guides Al on taxes and advertising and diet rather than more traditional ghost wrangling. She can’t be a traditional spirit herself, visible as she is to neighbors and real estate agents. But Colette, whose hair never grows, who despises people and food and bodies, presents precious little evidence of being alive.
And we’ve seen this week that Al, for all her skill, can’t always tell the living from the dead. She thinks her garden vagrant a ghost until he proves himself very much alive via desire for sandwiches. (But then again, per last week’s poems, the dead can be ravenous.) He’s homeless, schizophrenic, fallen outside the laws and structures that acknowledge someone as alive—but he still has those inconveniently corporeal needs for food and shoes and shelter. Al, who perceives people as real even when no one else is willing, provides an oasis from his Kafkaesque string of failed jobs and failed safety nets. But she’s also nearly as bad at setting boundaries with him as she is with Colette. Sensing people’s needs, identifying with them as easily as she does, makes her obligations as porous as the identities of the dead.
Colette, of course, has no patience for empathy. She sees weakness and idiocy, not nuanced humanity.
Al needs someone to balance her—but Colette isn’t it. Maybe Mandy could come over, provide that much-needed slap, and offer a truckload of moving boxes. Yeah. If I can’t be team Outer Ones Kidnap Colette’s Brain, I’m going with Team Mandy.
Continuing the themes of hunger and messy parenting, join us next week for C.L. Taylor’s “The Limb Garden”.
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.
