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 4. The novel was first published in 2005. Spoilers ahead! Content warning for physical, verbal, and sexual child abuse. In the chapter, though not our discussion of it, also CW for ableist slurs.
“By this time she had spent years pretending she was normal.”
Colette continues interviewing Alison for a book to peddle at events. It’s no easy task, what with Alison tending to lapse into muttered monotone, or hear phantom dogs snarling, or need a tea and cookie break. Also, she has to prod Alison to talk about her childhood. Finally Alison gets started by confessing that, while Colette had hydrangeas in her childhood front yard, Alison had a bathtub.
Alison “might as well have been a beast in the jungle as a girl growing up outside Aldershot.” She and her mother Emmie Cheetham lived in an old house facing a busy road, but with open land in the back. The place is a mess, with “bits…continually falling off” and black mold in the leaky-roofed kitchen. Not that Emmie did much cooking. Mostly she smoked and muttered at someone called Gloria, who wasn’t actually there, although sometimes Alison thought she glimpsed her. Men came and went at night, to laugh and shout, drink and scuffle in the front room. Sometimes a man or two would go upstairs with Emmie. Alison stayed in her bed until daylight, unless “she was called to get up for one reason or another.” During the day Emmie would lock Alison in the attic, where a little old Irish lady used to “fade up.” The lady’s name was Mrs. McGibbet. From her, Alison learned “how the dead could be helpful and sweet.”
The men had business in the scrubby waste-ground and corrugated garages behind the house, where they chained up dogs; when Alison tried to give one a biscuit, it bit her face. One day she saw silent men hustling boxes out of the garages; she had such a sick feeling about what was in the boxes that afterwards she stayed away from the backyard. On the same day Mrs. McGibbet faded away forever, saying, “There’s an evil thing you wouldn’t want to see at all.”
Emmie forgot to send Alison to school until the authorities reminded her. Alison was never prepared for activities and often got sent home early. The things she recorded in an assigned diary got Emmie called to the headmaster, whom she threatened to have “sorted” if he didn’t mind his business. After that, Alison was careful what she wrote about. Colette needs to understand, things were always happening where Alison lived, what with the waste-lands and the women like her mother and the sort of men they knew. Something happened to Alison on a night that’s gone “woolly” in her memory. The men were angry at her. They said they were going to take her “down the back, and teach her a lesson.” She wonders: Has she had the lesson yet, or is it still to come?
Another night when she was ten, she woke suddenly to see “greasy faces” looming over her. She was lifted up. She doesn’t remember the rest, or did she dream it? Colette tells her to face up to the truth that her mother had her molested, “probably sold tickets.” Alison says she thinks she’d already been molested, but it’s mixed up in her mind, whether “things” happened once or went on happening.
Asked why she didn’t report the abuse, Alison says there was no one to tell. If Emmie were her mum, Colette says, she’d kill her. But Alison feels sorry for Emmie, how nothing’s ever worked out for her. As for the men, what can the police do now that they’re dead?
***
Alison spent years pretending she was normal. Meanwhile Emmie accused Alison of sponging off her, and told her to just “lie on [her] back and take it” to pay her way. Alison asked why Emmie even bothered to have her. Emmie admitted trying DIY abortions, but “[Alison] was stuck fast.” Besides, she was five or six months pregnant when “MacArthur buggered off,” and no, how would Emmie know if he was Alison’s dad?
If Colette understood Alison’s childhood, she’d realize it’s a triumph Alison has kept herself together. She’d get why Alison’s so fastidious about her surroundings, her personal cleanliness, her appearance. A woman has to struggle “just to be whole.”
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Echo
Alison managed to make some friends. She soldiered on through her growing psychic sensitivity. Two episodes stand out from the general weirdness. Alone at home, she encountered an evil-looking “geezer” leaning on the kitchen sink and fingering an empty matchbox. She asked if he was the one the men call “Nick.” Enraged, he chased her with his belt. Later she remembers how Emmie was called to the police station once to pick up Nick because he was “sliming” the cell walls.
A couple years later she met Morris. Actually, she’d seen him before, alive, among the men with business out back. Now dead, he began dogging Alison. He tormented her by pulling up her skirt in class and making her shout about a (to the class) nonexistent “perv.” She got suspended. Her “friends” made such vicious fun of her that she stood sobbing against a random hedge.
The hedge belonged to Mrs. Etchells, who chased the “friends” off and brought Alison inside. That’s how Alison finally met someone who shared her “gift.” Mrs. Etchells claims to be Alison’s grandmother through her son Derek, who meant to marry Emmie before finding out “what she was like.”
After Alison failed at “normal” jobs, she accepted Mrs. Etchells’ offer to teach her the psychic business. After meeting other mediums, guided by Persian sages, she realized how stupid and vulgar Morris was, but resisting him is “slow torture.” Eventually she always gives in.
This Week’s Metrics
The Degenerate Dutch: Alison both suffers from and parrots a great deal of ableist school culture, complete with terms that range from horribly old-fashioned to out-and-out slurs.
Weirdbuilding: There’s something about Alison’s childhood—the abusive parent, the lower-class setting, the school that only makes things worse when she repeats her mother’s words—reminiscent of Stephen King. You wouldn’t expect rural Maine to have so much in common with the outskirts of London.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Colette is interested in Gloria because “it suggests your mum was mad or something”. While talking to her psychic daughter.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
I have a feeling that this book—not Beyond Black, but Secrets of a Psychic or whatever she’s calling it—is not going to work out the way Colette thought it would. There are plenty of people who read trauma memoirs, and plenty of people who read inspirational tracts about contacting the great beyond, but they aren’t necessarily the same people. (I think. I will admit to not being in either group, so maybe The Five People You meet in Heaven is more honest about the horrors of mortal life than I’m assuming.)
We don’t, really, all live in the same consensus reality. Sure, rocks stub your toe when you kick them, whether or not you believe in them, and the afterlife won’t change to match the pretty lies Alison tells on stage—but how much of reality is kickable rocks? Love, civilization, democracy, all depend on human belief and interpretation. So do hate and fascism, for that matter. We live with and through what we’ve learned from family and school—and books.
Many people don’t believe in Alison’s psychic powers. And many people don’t believe in her childhood, and didn’t believe her when it could have done the most good.
Trauma notoriously screws with memory and perception. It can cast a veil of vagueness and misinterpretation over years of life. It can make it hard to tell the difference between love and hate and desire for control. It means you know things about reality that other people insist aren’t true, that you may even sometimes deny yourself. Things it’s better not to know. Sound familiar?
And, well, so much classic weird fiction grew around the traumatic “revelations” of World War I. When reality gets horrific and inhuman, it’s easy to imagine further, stranger veils. And worse revelations. For Alison, this blurry line between natural and supernatural is literalized. No one would believe the abuse she suffered in her household, but every night she can get up on stage and have people believe her about ghosts. Colette has offers an audience to acknowledge her childhood as well—if she can remember the details, if she’s willing to talk about them, if she wants that audience at all. And if she’s willing to accept Colette’s controlling, judgmental friendship and assistance.
And then there’s Morris. No matter how much she cleans up and dresses up and keeps far away from her mother, Alison can never get away from the sort of man who made her childhood a hell. Admittedly he’s dead, but that isn’t as limiting as one might like. And, where no one was willing to see what the living men did, no one else can see what Morris does. Some spirit guide.
I wonder if he knows Gloria. And I wonder what realities Alison’s mother is trying to avoid.
Child-Alison struggles with the question of what others don’t see and why. Is she hallucinating, or are all her unacknowledged experiences real? Are other people ignoring the disembodied heads because they don’t see them, or because it isn’t polite to acknowledge them? What rules govern what you’re allowed to talk about? Adult-Alison has figured some of that out, but has also (like many) found a place where she can speak the unspeakable. Not only that, but she can say harsh truths without taking responsibility for them. Sometimes she chooses to lie—but sometimes she chooses to pass along nastiness and criticism. Maybe because she still doesn’t have a complete sense of what’s unreasonably harsh to say, but also maybe because on stage she has leeway that she never got as a kid.
We’re starting to get a sense of what draws Alison and Colette together: the beige monster and the ghost-talker who couldn’t ever fit in. Two people who want to be seen and are terrified of it.
Anne’s Commentary
In comparison with Alison’s backstory, Colette’s is beige, beige, ultrabeige, with “no big traumas or triumphs.” Emphasis on the traumas, where Alison is concerned. Alison’s preferred colors are the “emerald, burnt orange, scarlet” of her stage wardrobe and the softer apricot of her poster embellishment. The black street clothes into which Colette chivvies her are far from Alison’s preference; her pre-Colette closet was packed with lurid Lurex. Even so, if I wanted to pick a color for Alison’s past, black would be the obvious choice. She compares her child-self to a “beast in a jungle,” and under their dense canopies jungles are notoriously dark. At night they’re as close to black as you can get without descending into a cave or ocean depths. To a beastling like Alison, essentially orphaned, nights are to be dreaded.
Nights are the time when things happen.
Night-things invade young Alison’s days, which are often gray, blackness diluted by the merciful wooliness of her memories. Red’s a complementary color, as in the blood dripping from Alison’s scalp after Blighto savages her, as in the oozing “fatty mince” of Keith’s face after a fight. Morris leaves us to imagine what red flowed when “they taught [Alison] what a blade could do.”
I identify the “they” who teach Alison a sharp-edged lesson with the “they” who earlier in the chapter threaten to punish her (unspecified) transgression “down the back” of the waste-grounds. “They” are “the men,” the gangsters who frequent Emmie’s house; the term’s vagueness cuts knife-deep if we read into it the girl’s unsurprising conviction that all sex must be as vicious as her earliest male acquaintances.
How sad that for all her negative experience, Alison persists in questioning Emmie about her father’s identity. She even asks some of “the men” whether they’re her father. Her grounds for singling out potential dads are often slight. Some men give her coins. Keith rescues her from the dog attack. Less slight grounds: MacArthur left a pregnant Emmie; Mrs. Etchell’s son Derek was engaged to Emmie. No one can be sure about Alison’s paternity because Emmie was such a “hore” that even she doesn’t know, or so she insists.
Alison even asks Morris if he was her father, though he’s the last one she wants to say yes.
Colette urges Alison to “face up to” the fact that her prostitute mother failed to protect her, probably even “sold tickets” for her daughter’s molestation. Alison says that as a child she was sometimes summoned out of bed “for one reason or another.” At ten years old, she woke under the stare of “ill-formed greasy faces.” She “felt herself lifted up.” Then there was “nothing, nothing that she remembers.” Probably Colette’s right about what happened that night, but Alison thinks she was molested earlier, “just not in a group situation.” Anyhow, it’s not as if the event “changed [her] life.” She’s “never gone in for sex much.” Colette needs to forget reporting the incident to the police. They can’t arrest men who’ve “passed.”
Colette’s concession that if the molesters are dead, they “can’t do any more damage” would be insensitive if Alison were “normal,” capable of suffering only “normal” post-traumatic distress. The statement’s exponentially more chilling because it’s wrong. For psychic Alison, the dead can sure as hell do more damage.
Particularly those who, fiendish in life, have become actual fiends in death, minions of a greater evil. Call it the Devil, or use an alias like Old Nick. Or simply Nick, that shadowy boss of whom Morris goes in awe, and whom Alison finds loitering in her kitchen, a man more evil-looking than the others, evil in “a league of his own,” with a stare that sickened. Nick’s enraged when Alison calls him by name. Finding himself unable to “even get a light around here,” he threatens to “sack the flaming lot of them” because “they’re not worth a bench in hell.”
Maybe Nick wasn’t speaking metaphorically about that “bench in hell. Maybe he gave the Aldershot gang a place in perdition after all, making them indeed the FIENDS OF ALDERSHOT Colette wants listed. How else can she keep track of them?
After schooling by maybe-grandmum Mrs. Etchells, Alison enters the ranks of psychic professionals. First off, she changes her name. Even drug-addled Emmie understands why “Cheetham” won’t do.
Mantel leaves us to get the joke. The witticism’s been around since at least the 1830s, when Frederick Marryat wrote in his Diary in America about a New York law firm called “Catchem and Chetum.” The Three Stooges originated a variation, “Dewey, Burnham and Howe.” The Tappert Brothers of NPR’s Car Talk claimed their show was produced by “Dewey, Cheetham and Howe.”
No, Alison would not want to go by “Cheetham.” To plant the suspicion in her clients’ minds that she might be cheating them! It would be a giveaway if she was a fake and a self-slur if she wasn’t.
I’m in the “she’s not” camp, myself. More’s the pity for Alison.
Next week, Charles R. Saunders offers a slightly different take on the traditional Lovecraftian investigator in “Jeroboam Henley’s Debt.” You can find it most easily in Ross Lockhart’s The Book of Cthulhu.
Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden is out! She is also the author of 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.
