Beyond Black: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

the car park. In the ghastly lights behind the venue, in the drizzle and the rain, they’d say, when you gave me the message I didn’t know, I didn’t understand, I couldn’t take it in. “I know it’s difficult,” Al would say, trying to soothe them, trying to help them, but trying, for God’s sake, to get them off her back; she would be sweating, shaking, desperate to get into the car and off. But now, thank God, she had Colette to manage the situation; Colette would smoothly pass over their business card, and say, “When you feel ready, you might like to come for a private reading.”
    Now Alison fished around in the front rows for somebody who’d lost a pet and found a woman whose terrier, on an impulse three weeks ago, had dashed out of the front door into the traffic. “Don’t you listen,” she told the woman, “to people who tell you animals have no souls. They go on in spirit, same as we do.”
    Animals distressed her, not cats but just dogs: their ownerless whimper as they padded though the afterlife on the trail of their masters. “And has your husband gone over too?” she asked, and when the woman said yes, she nodded sympathetically but pulled her attention away, throwing out a new question, changing the topic: “Anybody over here got blood pressure?”
    Let her think it, that dog and master are together now; let her take comfort, since comfort’s what she’s paid for. Let her assume that Tiddles and his boss are together in the Beyond. Reunion is seldom so simple; and really it’s better for dogs—if people could just grasp it—not to have an owner waiting for them, airside. Without a person to search for, they join up in happy packs, and within a year or two you never hear from them individually: there’s just a joyful corporate barking, instead of that lost whine, the sore pads, the disconsolate drooping head of the dog following a fading scent. Dogs had figured in her early life—men, and dogs—and much of that life was unclear to her. If you knew what the dogs were up to, she reasoned, if you knew what they were up to in Spirit World, it might help you work out where their owners were now. They must be gone over, she thought, most of those men I knew when I was a child; the dogs, for sure, are in spirit, for years have passed and those kinds of dogs don’t make old bones. Sometimes in the supermarket she would find herself standing in Pets, eyeing the squeaky toys, the big tough chews made for big friendly jaws; then she would shake herself and move slowly back towards organic vegetables, where Colette would be waiting with the cart, cross with her for vanishing.
    She will be cross tonight, Al thought, smiling to herself: I’ve slipped up again about the blood pressure. Colette has nagged her, don’t talk about blood pressure, talk about hypertension. When she’d argued back—“They might not understand me”—Colette lost her temper and said, “Alison, without blood pressure we’d all be dead, but if you want to sound like something from the remedial stream, don’t let me get in your way.”
    Now a woman put her hand up, admitted to the blood pressure. “Carrying a bit of weight, aren’t we, darling?” Al asked her. “I’ve got your mum here. She’s a bit annoyed with you—well no, I’m pitching it a bit high— concerned  would be more like it. You need to drop a stone, she’s saying. Can you accept that?” The woman nodded, humiliated. “Oh, don’t mind what  they  think.” Al swept her hand over the audience; she gave her special throaty chuckle, her woman-to-woman laugh. “You’ve no need to worry about what anybody here’s thinking, we could most of us stand to lose a few pounds. I mean, look at me, I’m a size twenty and not ashamed of it. But your mum now, your mum, she says you’re letting yourself go, and that’s a shame, because you know you’re really—look at you, you’ve got such a lot going for you, lovely hair, lovely skin—well