A Plague of Psychic Shows: Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black (Part 9)

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 10. The novel was first published in 2005. Spoilers ahead! CW for medical and non-medical fatphobia, and slurs related to ethnicity and sexual orientation.

"If in case of a terrorist outrage, could I come in your shed?"

Summer brings a heat wave to Admiral Drive. Black slime bubbles from drains. Reservoirs dwindle. Hospitals fill. A "plague" of psychic TV shows break out; now knowledgeable about the trade, Colette denounces the seers’ blatant cheating and the studio audience's gullibility. The shows exhaust Alison. She couldn't do TV herself, she says, because her electromagnetic field is "hostile to modern technology." Also, Colette adds, she's "too fat for TV." Alison should stop being soft on the punters, talk about what the likes of Morris can do.

Don't talk about Morris, Alison begs. Colette's never learned how you need to guard your words, lest "literal-minded" Spirit World organizers take heed. That, or Colette's deliberately tormenting Alison by "wishing" for Morris, or describing the fiends to Gavin as Alison's "boyfriends". Gavin's been laid off, and though his model girlfriend Zoe is putatively still supportive, Colette takes over his payments for their formerly shared flat.

Mandy recruits Alison to help with psychic "hen parties" for the upscale market. Colette sits in designer kitchens and keeps track of the billable proceedings. Some psychics mutter about the "hanger-on," but Colette knows she's the one who keeps their business humming. After one disastrous party where a bride-to-be gets jilted by text, Alison and Colette return home to find their tape recorder running. Colette hears only mechanical hissing, but Alison hears Morris and Aitkenside chatting about foods you can't get anymore, and the fun they used to have tormenting MacArthur by pretending pickled eggs were his lost eye—that Bob Fox, what a joker.

The heat oppresses Alison. She tells Colette she feels she's done something "terrible," but she doesn't know what. Sometimes she gets strange tingling sensations, and she goes cold, and her feet won't carry her where she wants to go. Colette says she's probably got multiple sclerosis. Despite her bad experiences with fat-phobic doctors, Alison makes a health center appointment. Colette insists on driving her, offended that Alison supposes she’d let her handle bad news on her own.

The doctor assumes she's come about her weight. And why does she, like so many women, assume she has MS? Onto the scale with her, and why must she take so long fumbling with the sandals on her heat-swollen feet? Doesn't she know other patients are waiting? Alison doesn't abuse her powers by telling him about his own failing liver—she needs to do good actions. Good actions may keep the fiends away, as she later explains to Colette. Oh, why can't Alison stop the drivel, Colette wails. Why can't she realize how Colette's fixed, with Gavin dating a supermodel?

Alison takes the blood pressure and thyroid pills the doctor prescribed. They make her feel slower, which isn't unpleasant. Outside, Mart's been hired as one of the workmen digging up the contaminated playground. He's staying with a friend, but he’d like to spend an occasional night in the shed, sharing takeout with Alison like before. Colette wouldn't like that, Alison reminds him, but she promises that if the "terrorist outrage" discussed at the Neighborhood Watch comes to pass, he can live in the house. She gives him money. He tells her a "bloke" in a van was around the other day, looking for her. He was the kind of bloke "what always hits you," Mart remembers.

Alison goes to her room and thinks about her life with the fiends. She strips and studies her body. She should diet, she knows, but she has "to house so many people." Her flesh is "capacious" because she's "a settlement, a place of safety, a bombproof shelter." She looks at her old scars and hears the voice talking about what knives could do. A woman phones about dousing for uranium. Alison gives her another psychic's information, but the woman rattles on. Alison finally throws down the phone and collapses on the second-floor landing. The fiends are on their way back, when she thought Morris was going on to higher things. Though she may be a higher thing herself, having tried to do good actions. Why can't she be like the tortoise she never had as a pet? Tortoises may "have no lovable qualities, but they are admired just for lasting out."

Colette finds her curled naked on the landing. Alison saves herself from wrath by mumbling, "Colette, you were right all along." After all, if Alison were thin, there’d be less room for spirits inside her. After bathing, Alison tries to restore normality by chatting with neighbor Evan about the weather and to Colette about business, but Colette can't be long deterred from asking what happened.

Alison returns to the kitchen, which another hot evening has "filled with a hellish light." A tap-tapping comes from the window. No one's there. She goes into the seemingly-empty garden. She remembers, however, Bob Fox's window-tapping habit, and she calls out the fiend's name.

No reply, but is that a "fugitive movement" by the back fence? Maybe Mart, seeking refuge from catastrophe, or maybe her imagination. Alison wants to have imagined it. She doesn't want to "be premature. But."

This Week's Metrics

The Degenerate Dutch: Colette cannot stop harping about Al's weight, and as usual with this sort of thing it's impossible to tell whether she actually expects to push her into weight loss or has just found an awful button to push. Embrace the power of "and"? Then there's that all-too-realistic depiction of medical fatphobia.

In non (or at least less) body-shaming news, Morris is of the opinion that lettuce is for girls—or maybe for foreigners and/or queer people (he uses other terms for both of those groups).

Madness Takes Its Toll: Colette can't deal with Al having PTSD flashbacks from a shaken box of matches.

Ruthanna's Commentary

I’ve been watching outtakes from musicals I’ve never seen for Reasons, and my considered opinion is that "The Whole Being Dead Thing" from Beetlejuice would make an amazingly good theme song for Beyond Black. Or maybe just a useful reminder to the characters that yoga and diets will not make the afterlife any more pleasant. Do you really want to spend eternity passing low-fat recipes through psychics? Is this what you want to recall when you get a reincarnation foot massage in your next life?

Of course, we don't know if the reincarnation foot massages are retrieving anything real. It would be nice, given the alternative, which is just a gradual transformation into drain gunk and loss of selfhood. We should’ve carped way more diem!

Please. Please, Al and Colette. I am begging you. Carpe some diem. Go to a singalong, hang out in a park, play Scrabble together. Host a party with a non-work-related theme for your neighbors. Go to an aquarium and enjoy everyone thinking about fish.

Spoiler alert: they are going to do none of these things. It's called Beyond Black, not Darkness With Occasional Flashes of Color or Shades of Grey, But Not Those Shades, This is Not That Kind of Book. If there's one title that tells you a book is going to be relentless except for a funny scene about home-buying, this book has that title. They are going to continue making each other miserable, and making themselves miserable, and occasionally pushing each other to make others miserable.

Colette distrusts comfort and empathy in general. She's the one urging Al to "tell them what it's really like in the Spirit World" instead of being "so soft on them". She still half-thinks the whole thing is made up, but she wants Al miserable about her weight and hungry, wants the neighbors frightened of radioactive worms, wants audiences to face the worst truths Al has to offer. She also can't resist making herself miserable over her ex-husband's probably-made-up model girlfriend. Al wants to "do a good action" in spite of Colette's best efforts, but isn't above dropping Cassandra-like warnings on people who treat her badly.

That asshole doctor. She absolutely should’ve told him about his liver.

Mandy says that TV hosts want their psychic guests "edited down to the blink of an eye" and grateful for it, and that's not far off from Colette and the horrible doctor. They want to edit Al down, stripped of all the selfhood that they find socially inappropriate. Barring that, they want her to avoid being seen as much as possible. Going to work is all right (Colette would be in trouble if she didn't) but just plain socializing? Getting her eyeblink on TV? Better wait: carpe that diem only once you’ve achieved thin-ness.

It's an impossible situation—especially with the hints that other, less-fireable misery-makers might be on their way back. Morris, muttering about sandwiches on tape. Bob Fox, tapping on windows. Al tolerated the fiends, miserably, when she’d never experienced the alternative, but that brief reprieve has made the thought unbearable. And every symptom of her breakdown is treated by Colette, by that doctor, as related to being fat. Haunted by the people who made your childhood a misery? What do you expect, the way you look? Have you tried diet and exercise?

No wonder Al is spiraling down into the idea that she's done something to deserve all this. No wonder she's desperate for a good action. No wonder she uses Colette (who doesn't have to be good because she's thin) to punish herself—it may not be "enough" to "ignore it when people put you down", but it's necessary if not sufficient. No wonder she looks to Mart, who provides the opportunity for action and making herself miserable and receiving further punishment from Colette. You just have to become small enough.

Of course, squeeze yourself down too far, and it's hard to take any kind of action. And then, eventually, it's too late.

Anne's Commentary

As Chapter Ten opens, the portents of doom intensify. I don't care where you live, black slime coming up your drains is not a good thing; on Admiral Drive, where one has paid premium prices to escape the ills of urban life, one would hope to be slime-free. Drought is also unacceptable, given the money residents have poured into their lawns and water features. Yet slime and drought there are this summer, also heat waves and illness and a "plague of psychic shows…crawling all over the [TV] schedules."

Alison doesn't aspire to be on TV. She knows her electromagnetic field would play havoc with the tech. Colette isn't having that excuse. The real insurmountable difficulty is that Alison's too fat for television. Mandy doesn't think Alison's too fat to do upscale psychic parties, although maybe she shouldn't hand out nutritional advice. Gavin refers to Alison as the "fat lesbian." The health center doctor scoffs at her. Appraising her naked body, Alison "took handfuls of flesh from here and there, repositioned and resettled them," without producing "a better effect" in the mirror. Her one step toward self-acceptance is imagining that her "capacious flesh" serves as a "place of safety" for the spirits; then she takes two steps back by thinking Colette's right about her need to diet. Colette has to "take [Alison] in hand. Colette has to hate [her.]"

Why is it important that someone hates Allison? Because she deserves hatred? Because she really has done something terrible, though she doesn't know what? Her mother abused her, the fiends punished her, the world in general and Colette in particular treat her with contempt. Mandy is sympathetic, but Alison is isolated from her. Mart is nonjudgmental, but Mart's crazy, isn't he? Mart is sympathetic in that his past abuses mirror Alison's; at the same time, his present state casts a terrifying shadow on Alison's future.

That her past is creeping back up on her is presaged by both environmental disturbances and by tape-recorded conversations and sinisterly-loaded vans of which only Alison's aware. But Mart has also seen a van, with a driver asking for Alison—he describes the driver as a bloke likely to put you in the hospital for no good reason. Sounds ominously like one of the Aldershot fiends.

If only the insane can see ghosts, does that mean ghosts aren't real? If Alison can see ghosts, does that mean she's insane, or does spectral sensitivity belong to both the psychotic and the psychic?

Spectral sensitivity does not belong to Colette. She jokes about the fiends, wishing Morris would return and harass Mandy on live TV. Alison's upset that Colette hasn't learned to guard her words around literal-minded spirits. The trouble is that Colette only half-believes in the supernatural. She wants the excitement of believing, and the money to be had from believers, but she doesn't "want to alter [her] dumb view of the world."

I understand why Colette wouldn't fully believe in ghosts when she can't perceive them. Does this incredulity make her "saner" than Alison or Mart? Not when her grasp on reality is slipping fast in other areas. She's accepted Gavin's claim that he's dating a model; after his phone call about being laid off, shouldn't she doubt this? Gavin hesitates when she asks if Zoe is helping monetarily, a tell that suspicious Colette shouldn't miss. Maybe she doesn't—she asks if Zoe's still with him. Gavin insists Zoe's "very loyal…not the sort of girl to chuck you if you had a temporary setback;" even so, he won't be able to keep up his half of flat payments. Colette's sarcastic remarks about downturns in the modeling business and Zoe being in hock for plastic surgery could indicate doubt in Zoe's existence, or her continued existence in Gavin's life, or at least her professional success.

Post-call, Colette exults over having Gavin beholden to her. Does she see this as an advantage over her "rival" or just a nasty pill for Gavin to swallow? Does she hope it's a hook to drag him back? What's sure, regardless, is that Colette has built her "rival" into more than Gavin's claims. Zoe's become a supermodel, hence a more agonizing thorn in Colette's side, a greater grievance, a more compelling goad for Colette's intensified obsession with thinness. She's become anorexic, lost in her already petite clothing. Her disgust with Alison's weight grows. In imposing a diet on her housemate, she gets to preen herself in exceeding even its stringent limitations as an "example".

Colette's imaginary Zoe is the ideal to be reached. Alison is the monstrosity to be avoided. And so Colette heads towards monstrosity of a different sort, skeletal and rancorous.

On Admiral Drive, things are falling apart, the Neighborhood Watch's catastrophe in miniature, and the fiends begin to creep through the gaps, tap-tapping on windows to signal their advent.

We’ll be taking off next week—join us in two weeks for Molly Tanzer's trans-apocalyptic "Go, Go, Go, Said the Byakhee". You can find it in the 2011 Future Lovecraft anthology, or Nick Mamatas's more recent Wonder and Glory Forever collection.

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of A Half-Built Garden and 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.