Vacant Possession Part 5

"b.u.g.g.e.r that for a game of coconuts," Edna said, unconvinced; it was an expression much in vogue among the rippers. "She took on that Norman when he was a cripple, and he used to sit in his wheelchair and hit her with his stick. She's too soft-hearted. This'n'll give her the run-around. He started giving his first wife's stuff away before her body was out of the house. He went round after the funeral and proposed to Trudie Thorpe's daughter."

"He didn't!"

"He did! Anyway, he gave her a sideboard."

Muriel listened. This is how their affairs are managed, she thought. l.u.s.t, a.s.sault; the exchange of furniture. These women had life at their fingertips. She watched Edna, expostulating, tossing the fourth Export Lager down her throat. Her eyes shone, her cheeks shone, and even her bared teeth. I could practise Edna, Muriel thought, I could crack her in one night. She felt in her bag for Mrs. Wilmot's papers, for the doc.u.ments that tied her colleague to the working world. It was six-thirty now, and some of the men were beginning to drift homewards, carried out into the wet blue street by the jeers of their mates; a game of darts was in progress, and the women never thought of moving. Their faces were flushed and their eyes alight; Raquel's mascara ran in black trails down her cheeks, and Leslie-Anne lurched from her chair and staggered into the Ladies to throw up. Edna came back from the bar with a handful of packets of crisps; she stuck another cigarette in her mouth. "b.u.g.g.e.r these free-issue," she said to Maureen. "Have one of these Balkan Sobranie. I've ordered us all pie and peas."

Presently the pianist arrived. Freddo lurched through from the Public, a gangling Welshman with a solemn face and a loud check jacket. He leaned on the piano and somebody pa.s.sed him up a pint. "I left my heart," he sang, "in San Francisco." Poor Mrs. Wilmot tipped back her head and laughed her stifled laugh. Suddenly she dived into her handbag and pulled out her wage packet; tore it open, and scattered its contents onto the table.

"Let it all go," she wheezed, "what does it matter? Let's enjoy ourselves while we can, girls! Let's have one of them Bacardis, and get one for Muriel!"

It was half-past eight before the party broke up. Muriel took care of her bag; she took care of the expressions on her face, and of a few ideas that were beginning to run through her head. Mrs. Wilmot was half carried through the doors, supported under her elbows by Maureen and the green-faced Leslie-Anne. Outside on the pavement, with a cry of "oh, blimey," Leslie-Anne dropped her and sped to the gutter, where she bent over and retched. It had been a lovely evening. Poor Mrs. Wilmot staggered back against the wall. Over her pinny she wore the long string of cultured pearls which her workmates had given her to remember them by. Her eyes closed. Her life was over, she thought: she was entirely slipping from view. She hummed softly to herself: "Where little cable cars, Climb halfway to the stars..." Soundless, she laughed.

As soon as she saw Mr. Kowalski and his house, Muriel knew it was where she must live. It was a big house, rambling and damp and dark; a permanent chill hung over the rooms. It had been condemned long ago, put on a schedule for demolition, but it seemed likely that before its turn came it would demolish itself, quietly crumbling and rotting away, with its wet rot and dry rot and its collection of parasites and moulds. There were only two lodgers, herself and a young girl, attracted by the card in the newsagent's window, by the low rent and by the faint spidery foreign hand setting out the terms in violet ink.

Two days went by, after Mrs. Wilmot's party. During those two days she practised; then she called on Mr. K.

She stood on the doorstep, presenting an altogether lackl.u.s.tre appearance. "I hear you've got a room to rent," she said. "I could do with a room."

Mr. Kowalski stood inside the hallway. A low wattage but unshaded bulb cast upon his caller a mottled and flickering pattern of shadows. "Step where I can see you," he ordered.

The visitor complied, turning up her sunken face. Her hands were blue with the raw autumn cold. Her mouse-coloured coat with its shawl collar reached almost to her ankles; her feet stuck out, monstrously huge in holey bedroom slippers.

"Here's me stuff," she said faintly. She indicated a bundle behind her, a battered old suitcase tied up with a plastic clothesline.

Mr. K. appraised her. His eyes were suspicious, sunk into a roll of fat. He stuck his thumbs into his belt, and glared at her in the swaying light; a meek and harmless creature, dowdy and friendless, and with a terrible cough. "Come in," he said, falling back. "Give me your baggage to port. Come in, you poor old woman, come in."

Kowalski, she learned, was only a version of his name. The real one had fewer vowels and more of the lesser-used consonants in proximity. He had learned English from the World Service, picked up on his illegal receiving set; latterly, from the instructions on packets of frozen food.

For some years Mr. K. had been a shift worker at the sausage-and-cooked-meats factory. His shift was permanent nights; he preferred it that way. He had a grey skin, for he never saw the daylight, and sad nocturnal pupils to his eyes. His moustache was ragged and bristly, and he wore trousers of some thick coa.r.s.e fabric like railway workers used to wear, held up with a thick leather belt; he wore an undershirt without a collar, and over this in extremely cold weather a sagging pullover of an indeterminate grey-green-blue shade. His figure was gross, his steps were slow, he mumbled as he walked, and shifted his little eyes this way and that. He dreamed of dugouts and barbed wire, of the rat-tat-tat of the machine gun and of corpses that came to light with the April thaw; of partisans, of decimated villages, of pine forests where wolves and wild boar ran. He did not know whether the dreams were his, or those of novelists, or of the long-slaughtered school-teachers who had taught him to sing folk songs and turn somersaults on a polished floor.

At Fulmers Moor the patients had minded pigs. The pigs stared out across the furrowed ground at the traffic going by to the city. Mothers would point them out to their children: look, darling, pigs. At the back of the field stood the men, loose-mouthed, their boots encrusted with clay and muck, the feed buckets swinging from their great red hands. When the children pointed to them, excitedly, their mothers pulled them away from the car windows.

When Muriel saw Mr. K. he reminded her powerfully of these men. And perhaps he has tenants, she thought. She noticed how he tapped the walls, rattled the doork.n.o.bs as he perambulated about the four floors of his house; how he peered into dark corners, how he kept a k.n.o.bkerrie within reach when he sat down to his bread and marmalade at the kitchen table. Home from home, she thought.

Inside Mr. K.'s kitchen, time had stood still. Modern conveniences were few or none. There was an old porcelain laundry sink in the corner, with a cold tap. There was a kitchen range, and most of Mr. K.'s leisure hours were spent in tending it, tipping in coal and riddling it with the rake and pulling out the dampers. It was exhausting work, and filmed his forehead with sweat, but it did not seem to have any effect on the temperature.

"You want work?" Mr. K. enquired gruffly. "Poor old woman, you too sick to work."

He was in his way a kindly man. "Sit down," he invited her. "Brew of tea for you."

When the tea was poured out and the sugar bowl pa.s.sed, Mr. K. reached across the table. He s.n.a.t.c.hed his lodger's mug from between her hands, and deposited his own before her; sat back to watch the effect, his eyes scouring her face. She picked it up and tasted it. "More sugar," she said, helping herself. Mr. K. seemed satisfied. He blew on his own tea and took a sip, and dabbed at his moustache.

"Go to hospital," he advised. "Old folks' hospital. She's crying out for staff."

His lodger shook her head. "They'll never take me on. A poor old woman like me."

"Temporary they take you on," Mr. K. said. "Temporary, subject to union. You try. You see. You get a nice job, my dear old lady. Bring the bedpans, wash the floors, for those of greater age."

"I'm used to hospitals," she said, "I could give it a try. Course, I could go charring as well. If I saw a nice ad for a private house. You'd have to write me a letter to apply, I'm not ever so good at writing. Course," added Poor Mrs. Wilmot, "I could put my own signature."

Later that week Mr. K. stopped her on the stairs.

"I heard a voice," he said accusingly.

She stopped, caught her breath, coughed a little. "My poor side," she said, rubbing her ribs. "What voice was this then?"

"Female voice. You get visitors?"

"I'm all alone in the world. Course," she suggested, "it could be her from the top floor."

"Miss Anne-Marie? That's a quiet female! Goes out for her giro, comes in, no trouble, no cooking smells."

"Well, you ought to ask her, that Miss Anaemia. I expect she's got a high-pitched boyfriend."

Mr. K. pa.s.sed a hand over his eyes. "I don't sleep for worry. A parcel of my clothes have appeared, mysteriously laundered." He saw her watching him. "Left dirty," he explained, "come out clean."

"That's no cause for consternation. I wish we all could say as much."

"But Wilmot, I have heard movements in the cellar. Perhaps they have caught up with me."

"Oh yes? Who's that then?"

"You have a day to spare?"

"Needs so long, does it?"

"If I say, the gentlemen from Montenegro? If I say, the boys from Bialystok?"

"There's worse than that, where I come from."

"Where is this?" A shadow of fresh apprehension crossed his face. "Yorkshire?"

"Oh, come off it," Mrs. Wilmot said. "You're all right now. This is a free country, haven't you heard?"

"But I carry my countries around with me," said Mr. K., "here, inside." He smote his pullover. "I will never be free. I am an exile by profession, Mrs. Wilmot. I am a badly wanted man."

"And you've been hearing voices, have you?"

"Noises, and human speech." He hugged himself, one stout forearm locked over the other. "A voice cried out in the pantry: Let us pray."

The winter pa.s.sed. One day, Poor Mrs. Wilmot-who only worked an evening shift-went into town for a day's shopping. She went into Boots the Chemist to get a bottle for her cough; shuffling away from the pharmacy counter, she saw the most amazing sight.

There on a display stand, packed in little Perspex boxes, were what appeared to be row upon row of human eyelashes. Fascinated, Muriel moved closer. She gazed down, no expression on Mrs. Wilmot's face. Dismemberment, she thought. Bones in the ca.n.a.l, those detachable teeth the real Mrs. Wilmot had. The teeth that other people had, at the hospital. Evelyn's body, sliced up after death. And distributed? She bent over the display stand and peered at it. Would she know Evelyn's eyelashes if she saw them? Some were black and spiky, others were feathery and fair; all were for sale.

At once she saw the solution to her problem. Alone in her room she had been practising Edna; but Edna needed a shape. It was easy to a.s.sume the abject form of Poor Mrs. Wilmot, but the imitation of Edna's vitality seemed to deplete her own inner resources to the point of near-extinction. She could not risk a situation where Edna and Poor Mrs. Wilmot wiped out Muriel entirely; who would mediate between their demands, and organise their different clothing? But if she could be Edna, yet not Edna; Edna's soul in an invented body, a body made up of other moving parts? A body for self-a.s.sembly, an easy-build knockdown effort? Eyelashes; and something for the head, auburn or blonde, to go over Muriel's hair. She straightened up and looked around her at the glowing counters of cosmetics. She pictured Mother; Mother rea.s.sembling herself, trotting her spectral bones round the department stores until she found those bits of her that had been dispersed. "Can I help you?" an a.s.sistant enquired.

"Of course you can," she said. "I'll have the whole shop."

"What?" Crisp started up from the bed. She hadn't realised she'd spoken out loud. In fact, she'd forgotten he was there; it seemed hours since her remembering began. With a great yawn, Crisp swung his legs to the floor. He looked at her intently. "Do you ever think about the future, Muriel?"

"Of course I do," she said angrily. "I'm not an animal."

"I don't think about it."

"But there's possibilities, Crisp. You don't have to be a reverend. You can be a safe-breaker, a shopkeeper, a tailor's dummy. You can be a monumental mason."

"Perhaps. Arson's not much to keep you going."

"You could be a singing telegram. You want to get yourself organised." She paused. "I won't always need to be three people. It's only till I give them their comeuppance...all those people that were in my life. Mr. Colin Sidney and Mrs. Sylvia Sidney, and Miss Florence Sidney, and Miss Isabel Field. I used to think about them when I was taking the cigarette packets apart...when I was on Ripping. I keep myself busy, but I always feel, you know, as if there's something I need...and they might have it."

Crisp let the newspapers slide to the floor. "I'll have another snooze," he said. Barelegged and bedraggled, Muriel went out for what was left of her free afternoon.

CHAPTER 3.

The label of the collecting box was peeling off a bit. Muriel smoothed it with a damp forefinger. No one ever read it. Trapped in their doorways by her accusatory stare, they delved into their pockets and purses and paid up. Stopped on the street, they produced a coin and moved away as fast as they could. One man, caught on his front step, tried to argue with her. "I believe in the primacy of individual effort," he said. Muriel brought up her boot-it was wet that day-and caught him painfully on the kneecap.

She didn't need the money. It was the social side of it she valued. Lauderdale Road was a good area. People gave generously; there was guilt behind those festoon blinds.

What if I did Buckingham Avenue, she wondered idly. What if I went up the path of number 2 and rang the doorbell; what if Mother answered the door?

Think when old Mrs. Sidney came up the path, Master Colin's mum. Think when she came for her seance, with her crocodile shoes and her bag over her wrist. By the time she went out again something had gone permanently wrong inside her head. Death wasn't what she'd thought; she was put in a home before the year was out.

When she was bored with collecting Muriel retraced her steps towards the town centre. She pa.s.sed the public library, where she often called in to steal books. She didn't go inside, but stopped in the lobby, arrested, as she had been before, by the advertis.e.m.e.nt for the Colorado Beetle. She didn't study the text, but gazed entranced at the creature; a gaudy beast, and, as portrayed, about the size of a small kitten. She was not surprised they were thought a public menace.

Then back to the shopping mall; there were some keys she had to get cut, Sylvia's house, Mr. K.'s house. She made a point of getting hold of keys, because you never knew when they might be useful. She paid for the keys out of her purse, not out of her collecting box, but she put it on the counter, and when the man had served her he slipped a 5p piece into it. Never let it be said that she was greedy, that she kept it all to herself. If in the mall she saw a wheelchair, parked by the litter bins and next to the munic.i.p.al flowerbeds, she would often toss its occupant a small coin, with a cheery "There you go, you poor cripple," as she pa.s.sed by.

Now she left the precinct behind. It was teatime; the sun was declining, the air was mild. Out towards the land of the link road she tramped in her sandals; the houses ran out on her, the pavements grew pitted, torn posters flapped from the broken walls. SORRY NO COACHES said an ancient sign in the window of the Rifle Volunteer. Across the wasteland the shop could be picked out easily; no other building had a roof for a quarter of a mile. Doggedly she struck out across country, picking up her feet over the fallen plaster and the tangle of low-growing weeds. She stopped to examine an iron grate and a pile of broken bottles. A breeze got up, and brown paper blew against her legs.

There were notices outside: GOLD AND SILVER ARTICLES WANTED, HOUSE CLEARENCES BEST PRICES PAYED. She pushed the door, heard the bell ping. From the darkness at the back of the shop came the clarion call of a bugle, and at the next moment, a squat and powerful figure leaped into view, brandishing a sabre.

"Cut it out, Sholto," Muriel said.

Sholto dropped his guard and sucked his bottom lip. He replaced the bugle on a high shelf. As he emerged from the dimness his manner became obsequious. He was blue-chinned, seedy and wild-eyed, and as he shuffled forward, sword in hand, it would have been no surprise to hear him claim that now was the winter of his discontent. Instead he smiled at Muriel, displaying his dreadful teeth, and asked her, "What can I suit you with today?"

"A cage," Muriel said.

Sholto ignored her. It was his pride that he sought out the secret whims of his clients. "a.s.sorted bra.s.s k.n.o.bs, 50p each. Door handles a.s.sorted, 2 a pair. What about a bra.s.s fingerplate?" He slapped one down on the counter. Muriel looked at it without interest. "And here-" he reached up to a shelf and produced an outstretched bra.s.s hand-"we have some bra.s.s fingers to go with it."

Muriel was looking around, poking into the piles of musty books and old clothes. It reminded her of the conservatory at Buckingham Avenue; long summer afternoons stirring through her late father's newspaper collection, Mother toddling through the hall, muttering her spells against spirit intrusion. Oo-oo-oo, Muriel would cry, and tap the cracked windowpanes, and flap her newspapers. Happy days! where Sylvia's kitchen extension stood now.

Sholto rubbed his chin. "Or what you could do with," he said, "is a phrenologist's head." He produced one, pushing it across the counter. "Look, Muriel."

Muriel stared down at the head, and traced with her finger the black lines which divided the skull.

"What are these lines, Sholto?"

"Those show the faculties. Look. Faculty of Imitation. Faculty of Calculation. Time and Tune and Wit."

"Is that how people work? I've often wondered. Does one person have them all?"

Sholto's grimy fingers probed the head, turning it up to squint at its base. "It's only a bit cracked," he said. "I could make you a special price."

She thought of her wig stand, the blank white slope of its skull. This was progress. One day these faculties would knit together, and she would go out into the world complete. Personality, more thorough than a plastic surgeon, would remould her formless face. "Look," Sholto said. "Faculty of Progenitiveness. Faculty of Amativeness."

"Oh, copulation," Muriel said. "If I had 7.95, I might buy that for my employer, Mr. Sidney."

"You could have easy terms," Sholto suggested. Muriel shook her head. "What about a bunch of keys then? 1.50, pick any bunch."

"What do they unlock?"

"How should I know?"

"What's the use of them?"

"They're not use. They're ornament."

"I have keys." Muriel's eyes roamed about the shop. "You sure you haven't got a cage, Sholto?"

"If I run across one, I'll give you first refusal."

"I'll have some a.s.sorted k.n.o.bs then," Muriel said sulkily. She began to rummage through the box that Sholto pushed towards her. "What did you think to the trip?"

"Rip-roaring. What makes Crisp do it, though? Don't give me this about the C of E. He's only copying Effie, the time she set that cleaner on fire. He never was happy with his own brand of insanity. No sooner would you say you were Pica.s.so than he'd claim to be Salvador Dali. Remember that time Philip said he was a helicopter? Crisp said, 'I'm Leob.l.o.o.d.ynardo,' and started drawing on the walls."

"He was never a person of deep originality."

"Oh, I see, been at the library books, have we?"

"I can talk, if I want to."

"You're getting very friendly with Crisp."

"He's all right."

"I hear wedding bells," Sholto said. He clicked his fingers. "Ding-dong."

"That's castanets."

"All right, don't get shirty. Going back up the Punjab, are you? Want a bag for your k.n.o.bs?"