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 excuse me, but it seems to me your mum’s a plainspoken lady, so excuse me if I offend anybody, she’s saying, get up off your bum and go to the gym.”
This is Al’s public self: a little bit jaunty and a little bit crude, a bit of a schoolmistress and a bit of a flirt. She often speaks to the public about “my wicked sense of humour,” warning them not to take offence; but what happens to her sense of humour in the depth of the night, when she wakes up trembling and crying, with Morris crowing at her in the corner of the room?
Colette thought, you are a size 26 and you are ashamed of it. The thought was so loud, inside her own head, that she was amazed it didn’t jump out into the hall.
“No,” Al was saying, “please give the mike back to this lady, I’m afraid I’ve embarrassed her and I want to put it right.” The woman was reluctant, and Al said to her neighbour, “Just hold that mike steady under her chin.” Then Alison told the fat woman several things about her mother, which she’d often thought but not liked to admit to. “Oh, and I have your granny. Your granny’s coming through. Sarah Anne? Now she’s an old soul,” Al said. “You were five when she passed, am I right?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Speak up, my love.”
“Small. I was small.”
“Yes, you don’t remember much about her, but the point is she’s never left you, she’s still around, looking after the family. And she likes those cabinets you’ve got—I can’t quite make this out—a new kitchen, is it?”
“Oh, my God. Yes,” the woman said. “Yes.” She shifted in her seat and turned bright red.
Al chuckled, indulging her surprise. “She’s often with you in that kitchen. And by the way, you were right not to go for the brushed steel, I know they tried to talk you into it, but it’s so over and done with, there’s nothing worse than a dated kitchen when you come to sell, and besides it’s such a harsh look at the heart of the home. Sarah Anne says, you won’t go wrong with light oak.”
They burst into applause: the punters, the trade. They are deeply appreciative of information about their kitchen fittings; they marvel at your uncanny knowledge of where they position their bread bin. This is how you handle them; you tell them the small things, the personal things, the things no one else could really know. By this means you make them drop their guard; only then will the dead begin to speak. On a good night, you can hear the scepticism leaking from their minds, with a low hiss like a tyre deflating.
Someone in uniform was trying to get through. It was a policeman, young and keen, with a flushed face; he was eager for promotion. She worked the rows, but no one would own him. Perhaps he was still earthside, employed at the local station; you did get these crossed wires, from time to time. Something to do with radio frequencies, perhaps?
“This lady, have you got ear trouble? Or ear trouble somewhere in the family?” Slowly, the barmaid lurched across the hall in her platform shoes, the mike held out at arm’s length.
“What?” the woman said.
“Ear trouble.”
“The boy next door to me plays football,” the woman said. “He’s done his knee up. He was getting in trim for the World Cup. Not that he’s playing in it. Only in the park. Their dog died last year, but I don’t think it had ear trouble.”
“No, not your neighbour,” Al insisted. “You, someone close to you.”
“I haven’t got anyone close to me.”
“What about throat trouble? Nose trouble? Anything in the ENT line at all? You have to understand this,” Al said, “when I get a message from Spirit World, I can’t give it back. I can’t pick and choose. Think of me as your answering machine. Imagine if people from Spirit World had phones. Now your answering machine, you press the button and it plays your messages back. It doesn’t wipe some out, on the grounds that you don’t need to know them.”
“And it records the wrong numbers, too,” said a pert girl near the front. She had her friends with her; their sniggers ruffled adjacent rows.
Alison smiled. It was for her to make the jokes; she wouldn’t be upstaged. “Yes, I admit we record the wrong numbers. And we record the nuisance calls, if you like to put it that way. I sometimes think they have telesales in the next world, because I never sit down with a nice cup of coffee without some stranger trying to get through. Just imagine—double glazing salesman … debt collectors …”