behind her eyes, as if unshed tears had banked up. Her nose was running, and she hadn’t got a tissue.
Al had found a woman with a stiff left knee, and was advising her on traditional Chinese medicine; it was a diversion, but they’d go away disappointed if she didn’t throw in some jargon about meridians and ley lines and chakras and feng shui. Gently, soothingly, she was bringing the first part of the evening to a close; and she was having her little joke now, asking about the lady standing at the back, leaning against the wall there, the lady in beige with a bit of a sniffle. It’s ridiculous, Colette thought, she can’t possibly see me, from where she’s standing. She just, somehow, she must just simply know that at some point in the evening I cry. ‘Never mind, my dear,’ Al said. ‘A runny nose is nothing to be ashamed of. Wipe it on your sleeve. We’re not looking, are we?’
You’ll pay for it later, Colette thought, and so she will; she’ll have to regurgitate or else digest all the distress that she’s sucked in from the carpet and the walls. By the end of the evening she’ll be sick to her stomach from other people’s chemotherapy, feverish and short of breath; or twitching and cold, full of their torsions and strains. She’ll have a neck spasm, or a twisted knee, or a foot she can hardly put on the floor. She’ll need to climb into the bath, moaning, amid the rising steam of aromatherapy oils from her special travel pack; and knock back a handful of painkillers, which, she always says, she should be allowed to set against her income tax.
Almost nine o’clock. Alison looked up, to the big double doors marked EXIT. There was a little green man above the door, running on the spot. She felt like that little green man. ‘Time to break,’ she said. ‘You’ve been lovely.’ She waved to them. ‘Stretch your legs and I’ll see you in fifteen.’
Morris was sprawled in Al’s chair when she came into her dressing room. He had his dick out and his foreskin pushed back, and he’d been playing with her lipstick, winding it up to the top of the tube. She evicted him with a dig to his shin from her pointed toe; dropped herself into the vacated chair – she shuddered at the heat of it – and kicked off her shoes.
‘Do yourself up,’ she told him. ‘Button your trousers, Morris.’ She spoke to him as if he were a two-year-old who hadn’t learned the common decencies.
She eased off the opals. ‘My hands have swelled up.’ Colette watched her through the mirror. Al’s skin was bland and creamy, flesh and fluid plumping it out from beneath. ‘Is the air conditioning working?’ She pulled at bits of her clothing, detaching them from the sticky bits of herself.
‘As if carnations were anybody’s favourite!’ Colette said.
‘What?’ Al was shaking her hands in the air, as if they were damp washing.
‘That poor woman who was just widowed. You said roses, but she said carnations, so then you said carnations.’
‘Colette, could you try to bear in mind, I’ve talked to about thirty people since then?’
Alison held her arms in a ‘U’ above her head, her naked fingers spread. ‘Let the fluid drain,’ she said. ‘Anything else, Colette? Let’s have it.’
‘You always say, oh, keep a note, Colette, keep your eyes open, listen out and tell me what goes right and what goes wrong. But you’re not willing to listen, are you? Perhaps it’s you who’s got the hearing problem.’
‘At least I haven’t got a sniffle problem.’
‘I can never understand why you take your shoes off, and your rings off, when you’ve got to force them back on again.’
‘Can’t you?’ Al sipped her blackcurrant juice, which she brought with her in her own carton. ‘What can you understand?’ Though Al’s voice was lazy, this was turning into a nasty little scrap. Morris had lain down across the doorway, ready to trip up anyone who came in.
‘Try thinking yourself into my body,’ Al suggested. Colette turned away and mouthed, no thank you. ‘It’s hot under the lights. Half an hour and I’m fit to drop. I know you’ve been running around with the mike, but it’s easier on the feet to be moving than standing still.’
‘Is it really? How would you know that?’
‘It’s easy, when you’re thin. Everything’s easier. Moving. Thinking. Deciding what you’ll do and what you won’t. You have choices. You can choose your clothes. Choose your company. I can’t.’ Al drank the end of her carton, with a little sound of sucking and bubbling. She put it down, and squashed the tip of the straw, judiciously, with her forefinger.
‘Oh, and the kitchen units,’ Colette said.
‘What’s your problem? I was right.’
‘It’s just telepathy,’ Colette said.
‘Just?’
‘Her granny didn’t tell you.’
‘How can you be sure?’
She couldn’t, of course. Like the punters out there, she could entertain simultaneously any number of conflicting opinions. They could believe in Al, and not believe in her, both at once. Faced with the impossible, their minds, like Colette’s, simply scuttled off in another direction.
‘Look,’ Alison said, ‘do we have to go through this every time? I would have thought we’d been on the road together for long enough now. And we’ve been making the tapes, haven’t we? Writing this book you say we’re writing? I’d have thought I’d answered most of your questions by now.’
‘All except the ones that matter.’
Al shrugged. A quick dab of Rescue Remedy under the tongue, and then she began to repaint her lips. Colette could see the effort of concentration needed; the spirits were nagging in her ear, wanting to stake out their places for the second half.
‘You see, I’d have imagined,’ she said, ‘that sometimes, once in a while, you’d feel the urge to be honest.’
Alison gave a little comic shiver, like a character in a pantomime. ‘What, with the punters? They’d run a mile,’ she said. ‘Even the ones with the blood pressure would be up and charging out the door. It’d kill them.’ She stood up and pulled down her clothes, smoothing the creases over her hips. ‘And what would that do but make more work for me?’
‘Your hem’s up at the back,’ Colette said. Sighing, she sank to her knees and gave the satin a tug.
‘I’m afraid it’s my bottom that does it,’ Al said. ‘Oh dear.’ She turned sideways to the mirror, resettled the skirt at what passed for her waistline. ‘Am I OK now?’ She held up her arms, stamped her feet in her high heels. ‘I could have been a flamenco dancer,’ she said. ‘That would have been more fun.’
‘Oh, surely not,’ Colette said. ‘Not more fun than this?’ She nudged her own head at the mirror, and smoothed down her hair; damp, it lay on her head like strings of white licqorice.
The manager put his head around the door. ‘All right?’ he said.
‘Will you stop saying that?’ Colette turned on him. ‘No, not all right. I want you out there for the second half, that girl from the bar is useless. And turn the bloody air conditioning up, we’re all melting.’ She indicated Alison. ‘Especially her.’
