“You’ve had too much already.” Alison moaned. Colette added generously, “It’s not your fault. We should have stopped for an early lunch. Or I could easily have brought you in a sandwich. I did offer.”
“I can’t eat when I’m sitting. The cards won’t work if you smudge them.”
“No, you’ve said that before.”
“Not cheeseburgers. I don’t agree with it.”
“Nor me. It’s disgusting.”
“You get fingerprints on your crystals.”
“It’s hard to see how you could help it.”
“Don’t you ever drink too much, Col?”
“No, I hardly ever do.”
“Don’t you ever, ever? Didn’t you ever, ever make a mistake?”
“Yes. Not that kind, though.”
Then Al’s wrath seemed to deflate. Her body collapsed too, back onto the hotel bed, as if hot air were leaking from a balloon. “I do want that brandy,” she said, quietly and humbly.
She stretched out her legs. Over her own rolling contours she saw a distant view of feet. They lolled outwards as she watched: dead man’s joints. “Christ,” she said: and screwed up her face. The cousin of John Joseph was back, and talking in her ear: I don’t want the hospital to take my legs off; I’d rather be dead out there in the field and buried, than alive with no legs.
She lay whimpering up at the dim ceiling, until Colette sighed and rose. “Okay. I’ll get you a drink. But you’d do better with an aspirin and some peppermint foot lotion.” She tripped into the bathroom and took from the shelf above the washbasin a plastic tumbler in a polythene shroud. Her nails punctured it; like a human membrane, it adhered, it had to be drawn away, and when she rubbed her fingertips together to discard it, and held up the tumbler, she felt against her face a bottled breath, something secondhand and not entirely clean, something breathing up at her from the interior of the glass.
She screwed open the brandy bottle and poured two fingers. Al had rolled herself up in the duvet. Her plump pink feet stuck out of the end. They did look hot, swollen. Mischievously, Colette took hold of a toe and waggled it. “This little piggy went to market—”
Alison bellowed, in someone else’s voice, “In the name of Bloody Christ!”
“Sorr-ee!” Colette sang.
Alison’s arm fought its way out of her wrappings, and her fingers took a grip on the tumbler, buckling its sides. She wriggled so that her shoulders were propped against the headboard, and swallowed half her drink in the first gulp. “Listen, Colette. Shall I tell you about the police? Shall I tell you? Why I won’t have anything to do with them?”
“You’re clearly going to,” Colette said. “Look, wait a minute. Just hold on.”
Al began, “You know Merlyn?”
“Wait,” Colette said. “We should get it on tape.”
“Okay. But hurry up.”
Alison swallowed the rest of her drink. At once her face flushed. Her head was tipped back, her shiny dark hair spilling over the pillows. “So are you fixing it?”
“Yes, just a minute—okay.”
COLETTE: So, it’s sixth September 1997, ten thirty-three P.M., Alison is telling me—
ALISON: You know Merlyn, Merlyn with a y? He says he’s a psychic detective. He says he’s helped police forces all over the southeast. He says they call him in regularly. And you know where Merlyn lives? He lives in a trailer home.
COLETTE: So?
ALISON: So that’s where it gets you, helping the police. He doesn’t even have a proper lavatory.
COLETTE: How tragic.
ALISON: You say that, Miss Sneery, but you wouldn’t like it. He lives outside Aylesbury. And do you know what it’s like, when you help the police?
Al’s eyes closed. She thought of reliving—over and over—the last few seconds of a strangled child. She thought of drowning in a car under the waters of the canal, she thought of waking in a shallow grave. She slept for a moment and woke in her duvet, wrapped in it like a sausage in its roll; she pushed up and out, fighting for space and air, and she remembered why she couldn’t breathe—it was because she was dead, because she was buried. She thought, I can’t think about it anymore, I’m at the end of—the end of my—and she released her breath with a great gasp: she heard click.
Colette was at her side, her voice nervous, oh God, Al, bending over her now. Colette’s breath was against her face, polythene breath, not unpleasant but not either quite natural. “Al, is it your heart?”
She felt Colette’s tiny bony hand sliding under her head, lifting it. As Colette’s wrist and forearm took the weight, she felt a sudden sense of release. She gasped, sighed, as if she were newborn. Her eyes snapped open: “Switch on the tape again.”
Breakfast time. Colette was down early. Listening to Alison while the tape ran—Alison crying like a child, talking in a child’s voice, replying to spirit questions Colette could not hear—she had found her own hand creeping towards the brandy bottle. A shot had stiffened her spine, but the effect didn’t last. She felt cold and pale now, colder and paler than ever, and she nearly threw up when she came into the breakfast room and saw Merlyn and Merlin stirring a ladle around in a vat of baked beans.
“You look as if you’ve been up all night,” Gemma said, picking at the horns of a croissant.
“I’m fine,” Colette snapped. She looked around; she couldn’t very well take a table by herself, and she didn’t want to sit with the boys. She pointed imperiously to the coffeepot on its hotplate, and the waitress hurried across with it. “Black is fine.”
“Are you lactose intolerant?” Gemma asked her. “Soya milk is very good.”
“I prefer black.”
“Where’s Alison?”
“Doing her hair.”
“I’d have thought that would have been your job.”
“I’m her business partner, not her maid.”
Gemma turned the corners of her mouth down. She nudged Cara conspiratorially, but Cara was unfolding the papers to see the funeral pictures. Mandy Coughlan came in. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her lips compressed. “Another one who’s had a bad night,” Gemma said. “Princess?”
“Morris,” Mandy said. She rummaged bad-temperedly at the breakfast buffet and slammed a banana down on the table. “I’ve passed the whole night under psychic attack.”
“Tea or coffee?” the waitress said.
“Got any rat poison?” Mandy said. “I wish I’d had some last night for that little bastard. You know, I pity Alison, I really do, I wouldn’t be in her shoes for any money. But can’t she get him under control? I’d hardly got into bed before he was there trying to pull the duvet off me.”
“He always did fancy you,” Cara said, flapping the newspaper. “Ooh, look at poor little Prince Harry. Look at his liddle face, bless him.”
“Pulling and tugging till nearly three o’clock. I thought he’d gone, I got out of bed to go to the loo, and he just jumped out from behind the curtains and put his filthy paw right up my nightie.”
“Yeah, he does that,” Colette said. “Hides behind the curtains. Alison says she finds it very annoying.”
Alison winced in a moment later, looking green.
“Oh, poor love,” Mandy breathed. “Look at her.”
“I see you didn’t manage to do anything with your hair after all,” Cara said sympathetically.
“At least she doesn’t look like a bloody pixie,” Colette snapped.
“Tea, coffee?” the waitress said.
Al pulled her chair well out from the table and sat down heavily. “I’ll get changed later,” she said, by way of explaining herself. “I was sick in the night.”