Free Beyond Black: A Novel by Hilary Mantel Page A

tell the boy behind the counter why, exactly, it didn’t; I suppose, she said, after so many years of word processing, I have no handwriting left. Her eyes flickered over him, from his head downwards, to where the counter cut off the view; she was already, she realized, looking for a man she could move on to. “Can I see the manager?” she asked, and amiably, scratching his barnet, the boy replied, “You’re looking at him.” “Really?” she said. She had never seen it before: a manager who dressed out of a dumpster. He gave her back her money, and she browsed the shelves, and picked up a book about tarot cards. “You’ll need a pack to go with that,” the boy said, when she got to the cash desk. “Otherwise you won’t get the idea. There are different sorts, shall I show you? There’s Egyptian tarot. There’s Shakespeare tarot. Do you like Shakespeare?”
    As if,  she thought. She was the last customer of the evening. He closed up the shop and they went to the pub. He had a room in a shared flat. In bed he kept pressing her clit with his finger, as if he were inputting a sale on the cash machine: saying, Helen, is that all right for you? She’d given him a wrong name, and she hated it, that he couldn’t see through to what she was really called. She’d thought Gavin was useless: but honestly! In the end she faked it, because she was bored and she was getting cramp. The Shakespeare boy said, Helen, that was great for me too.
    It was the tarot that started her off. Before that she had been just like everybody, reading her horoscope in the morning paper. She wouldn’t have described herself as superstitious or interested in the occult in any way. The next book she bought—from a different bookshop—was  An Encyclopedia of the Psychic Arts.  Occult, she discovered, meant hidden. She was beginning to feel that everything of interest was hidden. And none of it in the obvious places; don’t, for example, look in trousers.
    She had left that original tarot pack in the boy’s room, inadvertently. She wondered if he had ever taken it out and looked at the pictures; whether he ever thought of her, a mysterious stranger, a passing Queen of Hearts. She thought of buying another set, but what she read in the handbook baffled and bored her. Seventy-eight cards! Better employ someone qualified to read them for you. She began to visit a woman in Isleworth, but it turned out that her specialty was the crystal ball. The object sat between them on a black velvet cloth; she had expected it to be clear, because that’s what they said, crystal-clear, but to look into it was like looking into a cloud bank or into drifting fog.
    “The clear ones are glass, dear,” the Sensitive explained. “You won’t get anything from those.” She rested her veined hands on the black velvet. “It’s the flaws that are vital,” she said. “The flaws are what you pay for. You will find some readers who prefer the black mirror. That is an option, of course.”
    Colette raised her eyebrows.
    “Onyx,” the woman said. “The best are beyond price. The more you look—but you have to know how to look—the more you see stirring in the depths.”
    Colette asked straight out and heard that her crystal ball had set her back 500 pounds. “And then only because I have a special friend.” The psychic gained, in Colette’s eyes, a deal of prestige. She was avid to part with her 20 pounds for the reading. She drank in everything the woman said, and when she hit the Isleworth pavement, moss growing between its cracks, she was unable to remember a word of it.
    She consulted a palmist a few times, and had her horoscope cast. Then she had Gavin’s done. She wasn’t sure that his chart was valid, because she couldn’t specify the time of his birth. “What do you want to know that for?” he’d said, when she asked him. She said it was of general interest to her, and he glared at her with extreme suspicion.
    “I suppose you don’t know,