“It’s a bit late,” Al said. “It’s finished and we’ve moved in.”
“No, but it can still apply. You can fit your existing property into the grid. That’s advanced, though. I’ve not got up to that yet.”
“Well, come round when you do,” Al said.
Al said, I don’t want the neighbours to know what we do. Wherever I’ve lived I’ve kept away from the neighbours, I don’t want this lot around asking me to read their herbal teabags. I don’t want them turning up on our doorstep saying, you know what you told me, it hasn’t come true yet, can I have my money back? I don’t want them watching me and commenting on me. I want to be private.
The development progressed piecemeal, the houses at the fringes going up before the middle was filled in. They would look over to the opposite ridge, against the screen of pines, and see the householders running out into the streets, or where the streets would be, fleeing from gas leaks, floods, and falling masonry. Colette made tea for their next-door neighbours in the Beatty when their kitchen ceiling came down in its turn; Al was busy with a client.
“Are you sisters?” Michelle asked, standing in the kitchen and jiggling an infant up and down on her hip.
Colette’s eyes grew wide. “Sisters? No.”
“There, Evan,” she said to her husband. “Told you they couldn’t be. We thought perhaps one of you wasn’t staying. We thought perhaps she was helping the other one settle in.”
Colette said, “Are those boys or girls?”
“One of each.”
“Oh. But which is which?”
“You work at home?” Evan asked. “A contractor?”
“Yes.” He was waiting. She said, flustered. “I’m in communications.”
“British Telecom?”
“No.”
“It’s so confusing now,” Michelle said. “All these different tariffs you can go on. What’s the cheapest for phoning my nan in Australia?”
“That’s not my side of it,” Colette said.
“And what does your—your friend—do?”
“Forecasting,” Colette said. For a moment, she began to enjoy herself.
“Met Office, eh?” Evan said. “Bracknell, aren’t they? Bloody murder, getting onto the M3. Bet you didn’t know that till you moved in, eh? Three-mile tailback every morning. Should have done your research, eh?”
Both infants began to squall. The grown-ups watched as a workman came out of the Beatty, damp to his knees, carrying a bucket. “I’ll sue those fuckers,” Evan said.
Later, Colette said to Al, “How could he ever have thought we were sisters? I would have thought half sisters, at the most. And even that would be stretching a point.”
“People aren’t very observant,” Alison said kindly, “so you mustn’t be insulted, Colette.”
Colette didn’t tell Alison that the neighbours thought she worked for the meteorological office. Word spread, around the estate, and the neighbours would call out to her, “No joke you know, this rain! Can’t you do better than this?” Or simply, with a wave and a grin, “Oi! I see you got it wrong again.”
“I seem to be a personality around here.” Al said. “I don’t know why.”
Colette said, “I should think it’s because you’re fat.”
As Easter approached, Michelle popped her head over the fence and asked Al what she should pack for their holiday in Spain. “I’m sorry,” Al said, aghast, “I simply wouldn’t be able to forecast anything like that.”
“Yes, but unofficially,” Michelle coaxed. “You must know.”
“Off the record,” Evan said, wheedling.
Colette ran her eyes over Michelle. Was she pregnant again, or just letting herself go? “Cover up, would be my advice,” she said.
The weather affects the motorway as it affects the sea. The traffic has its rising tides. The road surface glistens with a pearly sheen, or heaves its black wet deeps. They find themselves at distant service stations as dawn breaks, where yellow light spills out into an oily dimness and a line of huddled birds watches them from above. On the M40 near High Wycombe, a kestrel glides on the updraught, swoops to pluck small squealing creatures from the rough grass of the margins. Magpies toddle amid the roadkill.
They traveclass="underline" Orpington, Sevenoaks, Chertsey, Runnymede, Reigate, and Sutton. They strike out east of the Thames barrier, where travellers’ encampments huddle beneath tower blocks and seagulls cry over the floodplains, where the smell of sewage is carried on the cutting wind. There are flood-lights and bunkers, gravel pits and pallet yards, junctions where traffic cones cluster. There are featureless hangars with TO LET signs pinned to them, tyres spun away into shabby fields. Colette puts her foot down; they pass vehicles mounted on the backs of vehicles, locked in oily copulation. They pass housing developments just like theirs—“Look, portholes,” Al says—their dormers and their Juliet balconies staring out over low hills made of compacted London waste. They pass Xmas tree farms and puppy farms, barnyards piled with scrap. Pictures of salivating dogs are hung on wire fences, so that those who don’t read English get the point. Crosswinds rock them; cables lash across a fast sky. Colette’s radio is tuned to traffic reports—trouble at Trellick Tower, an insurmountable blockage afflicting the Kingston bypass. Al’s mind drifts, across the central reservation. She sees the walls of warehouses shining silver like the tinny armour of the tarot knights. She sees incinerators, oil storage tankers, gas holders, electricity substations. Haulage yards. Portakabins, underpasses, subways, and walkways. Industrial parks and science parks and retail parks.
The world beyond the glass is the world of masculine action. Everything she sees is what a man has built. But at each turnoff, each junction, women are waiting to know their fate. They are looking deep inside themselves, into their private hearts, where the foetus forms and buds, where the shape forms inside the crystal, where fingernails click softly on the backs of the cards, and pictures flutter upwards, towards the air: Justice, Temperance, The Sun, The Moon, The World.
At the motorway services, there are cameras pointing, watching the queues for fish and chips and tepid jellified cheesecake. Outside there are notices affixed to poles, warning of hawkers, peddlers, itinerant sellers, and illegal traders. There are none that warn against the loose, travelling dead. There are cameras guarding the exits, but none that register the entrances of Pikey Pete.
“You don’t know what will trigger them,” Al says. “There’s a whole pack of them, you see. Accumulating. It worries me. I’m not saying it doesn’t worry me. The only thing is, the only good thing—Morris doesn’t bring them home. They fade away somewhere, before we turn into Admiral Drive. He doesn’t like it, you see. Says it’s not a proper home. He doesn’t like the garden.”
They were coming back from Suffolk—or somewhere, at any rate, where people still had an appetite—because they were behind a van that said WRIGHT’S FAMOUS PIES, SAVORIES, CONFECTIONERY.
“Look at that,” Al said, and read it out, laughing. At once she thought, why did I do that? I could kick myself. They’ll claim they’re hungry now.
Morris gripped the passenger seat and rocked it, saying, “I could murder a Famous Pie.” Said Pikey Pete, “You can’t beat a Savoury.” Said young Dean, with his customary politeness, “I’ll have a Confectionery, please.”
Colette said, “Is that headrest rocking again, or is it you fidgetting? God, I’m starving, I’m going to pull in at Clacket Lane.”
When Colette was at home she lived on vitamin pills and ginseng. She was a vegetarian except for bacon and skinless chicken breasts. On the road they ate what they could get, when they could get it. They dined in the theme pubs of Billaricay and Egham. In Virginia Water they ate nachos and in Broxborne they ate fat pillows of dough that the baker called Belgian Buns. In laybys they ate leaking seafood sandwiches and when spring came, in the pedestrianized zones of small Thameside towns they sat on benches with warm Cornish pasties, nibbling daintily around the frills. They ate broccoli and three-cheese bake straight from the cash-and-carry, and wholesaler’s quiche Lorraine with sinewy nuggets of ham as pink as a scalded baby, and KrispyKrum Chickettes, and lemon mousse that reminded them of the kind of foam you clean carpets with.