Vacant Possession

CHAPTER 2

The Mukerjees’ stock in trade blocked most of the narrow passage: tinned cream of tomato soup in cartons of three dozen, boxes of pre-cooked rice and deodorant sprays, toothpicks, lavender furniture polish, and fancy bun cases. Muriel walked sideways between the boxes, holding her shopping bag across her chest, and went upstairs in the dark. She found she had forgotten the password again, so she booted the door until the sentiment “Christ is risen” came feebly from within.

The room was full of shadows and swirling dust, the sun kept out by a yellowing paper blind. Muriel walked to the window and released it; it shot up and out of her hand with a soft flurry like the exit of a family of rats. She looked out over the roofs of the outdoor privies and the coal sheds.

“Stir your stumps,” she advised the man on the bed.

It was Emmanuel Crisp, her friend, her mentor, her old mucker from the long-stay hospital; it was Emmanuel Crisp, who liked to pretend he was a vicar, and who got put away for it. He’d been a troublesome sort of lunatic, always needing big injections; whereas she, whose antecedents were much worse, had given no bother at all; always neat, clean, and biddable, at least after the first few years.

Crisp flapped a hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun. “Hello there, Muriel. I thought it was you, kicking.”

“I’m not Muriel. I’m Lizzie Blank.”

“But you are Muriel really, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes. But today I’m Lizzie Blank, because I’ve got my wig on, haven’t I, and my make-up?”

Crisp studied her. “It’s wonderful how you get transmogrified.”

“I’ve got my job to do,” she said grimly.

Emmanuel lay back on the bed. He was an exhausted man, with his greenish pallor and his high-pitched giggle. It was the day trip to York that had tired him. It had been their best get-together with old friends since they’d all been turfed out of Fulmers Moor Hospital, and left to fend for themselves.

“Sholto enjoyed it,” Muriel said. “He didn’t have a fit. It was only the excitement that made him sick.”

Crisp’s jaws worked around a yawn. He slid his long frame into a sitting position. “Do you have my press cuttings?”

Muriel took the newspapers out of her bag and tossed them onto the table. “It’s hot in here.” She pulled off her wig and dropped it by the Daily Telegraph; then, on second thoughts, arranged it on its stand, on the blank-faced head of white polystyrene that she kept on top of Crisp’s chest of drawers. She didn’t live here; she had a room of her own. But everything was arranged for her convenience.

“Well?” she asked Crisp.

Emmanuel looked up, gratified. “AN ACT OF GOD,” he read. Muriel said, “Do you want me to go for some fish and chips?”

“I couldn’t eat. I’m too excited.”

“Suit yourself. I’ve had my lunch with my employers. They’re not too pleased about the practice I had in their kitchen.”

“They’ll get it on their insurance,” Crisp said, absorbed. “Heretics have no insurance.” He smiled as he read. Muriel yawned, and scratched her itching scalp.

“I’m going to change,” she said. “Don’t watch me, Crisp.”

She took off her leopard-skin jacket and hung it in the wardrobe, kicked off her shoes with a groan, and delved about under the bed for the flat open sandals that Muriel wore. She hauled up her skirt and released her black stockings from their suspenders. From under his eyelids Crisp watched her, rubbing with her fingertips at the indentations the suspenders had left in her blue-white flesh. Her blouse went over her head and onto the floor, and with a grunt she undid the fastening of her painful padded brassiere. Her own body, free from Lizzie’s underpinnings, seemed flat and meagre. “Give me a towel,” she said to Crisp. He watched her as she scrubbed off Lizzie’s mouth, erased her lurid eyelids. After five minutes Muriel was back; her almost colourless eyes, her bland inexpressive features, her short dark hair now beginning to grey.

“Are you getting a multiple personality?” Crisp asked her.

She gave him a look. “I know who I am,” she said.

She put on Muriel’s skirt, and a limp cheesecloth blouse, embroidered on the bodice with blue flowers. She had a faraway look, Crisp thought; she was planning what she would do on the street. “Don’t go,” he said. “We could pass the afternoon in a study of the Psalms.”

“Stuff that,” Muriel said. “Where’s my collecting box?”

“Bodily resurrection is a fact.”

“I never said different. Don’t go picking quarrels.”

“Do you know, it’s not the first fire at York Minster. Jonathan Martin, 1829, described as a lunatic. Emmanuel Crisp, 1984, right hand of the Lord.”

“I hear you, talking like a nutter. Trying to get yourself readmitted.”

“What if I am? We all pretend to be something we’re not. Especially you, Muriel.” She was heading for the door. “Don’t leave me on my own. I feel jittery.”

“Well, what is it you want to do then?”

“Stay with me a bit. You can talk to me if you like.”

“What about?”

“About your life. I could give you absolution, Muriel.”

She hesitated, came back into the room. “What’s that?”

“Forgiveness for your sins.”

“What’s forgiving? It doesn’t change anything. Anyway, I don’t do sins.”

“Your crimes, then. It’s a nice point.”

“But I don’t like remembering, Crisp. It upsets me, thinking about my mother and all that. I’d like to oblige you. But it gives me a pain behind my eyes.”

“Do you good to have a pain. You’re a malicious old bat.”

“What about you? Burning down churches?”

“I do it for God.”

“I do it for me. I do it for fun. I do what I like.”

But already the unwelcome process had begun. Her recall had nothing dim about it. Ten years ago, she had been a woman with a mother and a child. She’d had a lifetime of Mother, but the baby she’d only had for a few days. She had disposed of both of them: 1975. Only hours after the disposal, her life had changed completely; chance had shackled her in the long chain of events that brought her to where she was now. And they say crime doesn’t pay! She was better off now than she’d ever been; it was only one of the things people said to comfort themselves. Before that dark February afternoon, with the social worker screaming in an upstairs room, she’d been nothing but a girl at home; a girl at home with her mother at 2, Buckingham Avenue, for thirty-four years.

Mother was not an easy woman. She was a landlord, a gaoler. She did a manoeuvre she called “keeping ourselves to ourselves.” It involved close planning, bad manners; cowering in the back room if anyone came knocking at the door. It was not age that did this to Mother; it had always been her policy. When Muriel went to school, Mother waited for her by the gate. She took her by the neck and by the arm and hauled her home.

This was Muriel’s life: days, whole weeks together, when Mother didn’t let her out of the house in the mornings. She locked her in the bedroom, or hid her shoes. At St. David’s School on Arlington Road, she was nothing but an object of remark. None of the remarks were flattering. She rocked on her chair, played with her fingers. She would not write, could not, had never learned, forgotten how. At the sound of a bell the children rushed out of the room and fought each other in an asphalt circus behind bars. She stood and watched the others, rubbing her arm above the elbow where Mother’s fingers left her permanently bruised. She licked some rust from the railings; there was iron on her tongue, salt, ice. She laid about her with her fists. Soon this part of life was over; Mother kept her at home.

The streets, Mother said, were dangerous for a growing girl. There were attacks, impregnations, thefts. She could make your flesh crawl with her tales. By and by a man came to the house, making enquiries. His name was Mr. Hutchinson, and he was called an attendance officer. Mother dodged him for a month; finally she let him in. “Are you Mrs. Evelyn Axon?” he asked. He saw Muriel, sitting on a stool in the kitchen. He called her my dear. Mother sneered. Oh dear, my dear, she said, isn’t it a gorgeous little cretin, a muttonhead, an oaf, and is it precisely what you want, sir, for your select conservatoire? Mr. Hutchinson had a cardboard file which he stored under his arm. He took a step backwards, away from Mother, holding the file across the breast of his fawn overcoat. It brought him up against the door of the lean-to; confused, he turned and fumbled for the handle, and found himself treading in the mulch of old cardboard and newspaper that was always underfoot in winter, breathing in the dank lean-to air. Cobwebs trailed across his glasses. From her stool, Muriel laughed out loud.

After Mr. Hutchinson had been retrieved from the lean-to and set on his way out of the front door, Mother had taken her aside and said: stupidity is the better part of valour. Doltishness is the best defence. After that, there had been similar visitors; meeting similar fates, if they got in at all. The Welfare, Mother called them. There had been a time when, just to keep them happy, Mother had let her go in a bus once a week to the handicapped class. She sat with other people in a room, four of them round each table. She cut out shapes in felt and sewed them with great tough stitches onto other felt. She got thin strips of cane and bent them up into baskets; and while she did this she spoke to no one, keeping her lips closed and preserving her eyes behind the thick glasses that the Welfare had got for her. Presently the materials were taken away, and they were given tea and biscuits.

A few months passed, and the results of freedom were visible. Mother kept her at home again. For decades she had sat imprisoned in the house; now she sat in the house behind the bulk of her pregnant belly. How did you get in that condition? her friend Sholto had once asked her. She had thought back, leaning on the hospital fence, looking over it into the world. I gave them the slip, she said. Mother took me to the door, down the path I went, round the corner, where I saw the dog lying on the path, the fox-terrier dog that lay there every Thursday afternoon; and I gave it a kick. I walked on, and I stood, and when I saw that little bus coming, I just turned myself round and went the other way.

I gave them the slip, she said. I went for a go in the park, looking in the litter bins, going in the summer house, getting on those swings. I should have been at my class doing basket weaving and community singing but I went for this go in the park instead. And your beau, Sholto asked; he had a little fiddle? He was a professional man, Muriel said; he had a lovely tweed coat, and some credit cards.

So it came about, she said sonorously to Sholto.

Sholto could keep a secret. He rolled her a cigarette, she smoked it leaning on the fence, and then they went in for their dinner. They had just got the cafeteria system. They took a tray and stood in a line and got brown baked beans and white fish pie. A few people arranged it into patterns, but Muriel had no heart for it. Talking about the past upset her: the cold and discomfort, Mother’s bullying, the lack of proper food, the musty unlit rooms inside the house, and the screen of dark trees outside. Buckingham Avenue was so silent you could hear the dust move, and Mother’s dying thoughts rustle through her skull; Christmas 1974, mice in the kitchen cupboards, two seasonal envelopes coming through the door. Miss Florence Sidney, their neighbour, came with a plate full of warm mince pies. Muriel was shut up; their fragrance, wafting up the staircase, made her jaws ache. Mother put Miss Sidney in her place. She forced raw whisky on her, bawled out “Merry Christmas,” and booted her out in short order. One of Miss Sidney’s pies leaped from the plate as she scurried down the hall, and smashed and opened itself on the dusty parquet floor. Muriel came down; she put her finger into its steaming golden insides and tasted it. Evelyn shooed her off, pushed her into the back room. She told her to let it lie. Next day it was gone.

Mother had knocked over the paraffin heater. She had groaned in the wet weather when her knees and hips gave her pain. She had taken away Muriel’s cards from the Welfare and burned them, and forbidden her to play in the garden for fear that the neighbours might see her and report on her state. Mother was afraid of the neighbours. She was afraid of ghosts, of changelings. She complained that as she walked down the hallway little claws pulled at her skirt, little devil’s crabs with no bodies, sliding noiselessly away from under her feet.

At one time, her trade had been giving seances for the neighbours. Mrs. Sidney, the pie-maker’s mother, had called in to speak to her late husband, and had got scared so badly at Mother’s proficiency that she had turned funny, and shortly afterwards had been sent away. People had come from the other side of town; once a woman had come all the way from Crewe, bringing a parcel of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof to sustain her during her trip on the train. Afternoons, Mother had spent in the front parlour; groaning, sweating, making the bleak monosyllabic conversations that the dead enjoy. Evening, money in her purse; she would snigger, and go and put the kettle on. One day, as she headed for the kitchen, a black wall of panic rose up in front of her and blocked her path. Muriel, lurking at the foot of the stairs, watched Mother’s throat gaping for air, watched her raise a fist and first hammer, then claw at the wall; saw her lift her feet and tussle in the thick air, treading and weaving inside her big woollen cardigan like a dancing bear.

The episode passed. I had a black-out, Mother said. It’s my age.

After that Mother had regretted her seances. The house was full of what she had conjured up; a three-bed two-reception property on a large corner plot, all jostled and crammed with the teeth-baring dead, stranded souls whistling in the cavity walls, half-animated corpses under the flagstones outside. One bedroom, which they called the spare room, had its special tenants. Without eyes and ears, they made themselves known by shuffling; by the soft sucking of their breath, in and out; but they had no lungs. They were malign intentions, Mother said, waiting to be joined to bodies; they were the notions of the dead, expecting flesh.

Mother was now seventy years old; tired, done for, blue stains under her eyes. She’d tried to make a living and now she was to be penalised. No one can help you, she said. No one ever will. They were on their own. They never went out, because they were afraid of what might happen in the house while they were away.

Muriel could see herself as she was then; her pudding face above her smock. Days went by when they never spoke.

She felt a movement inside her, very strange. Mother said, you’re occupied. It would be another mute, an ugly, a ne’er-do-well. She felt it ready to burst out, and that she would die. She knew about death very well, believing that her little thoughts would empty out of her head, and roll round and round in the spare room, picking up the dust from the floor.

Mother got books from the public library, first aid. When the baby started to be born she got out her reading glasses. She fumbled around in the bedroom, cursing. She went round the house with a torch, shining into all the dark corners. Muriel had a pain, a private pain, and she felt that something was going to come of it.

Next day Mother was tired. She made no secret of it; she had entertained hopes that a better sort of infant would be forthcoming. It was an evil-smelling scrap, greedy, drinking up everything that it was offered; it gave evidence of an intemperate nature, of an agitating character. It had a strange face, unlike theirs. It cried incessantly, like an animal shut up in a shed. I’m afraid it’s worse than I thought, Mother said.

On the third day she broke it to her: it’s not human. It’s a changeling, Muriel; you’ve been duped.

But Mother was never at a loss. She had a theory, and her theory was this: you take a firm line, stand no nonsense, and arrange to get a human child back. How?

You find some water, a river; but there was no river, not without taking the bus. Luckily there was the canal, and the canal would do. Float off the wastrel, the substitute; wait a bit, and the chances are you’ll get another in return. It’s the recommended method.

Hearing this theory, Muriel had laughed. The Welfare never told me that, she said, and you get to know things from the Welfare. Such as? Mother demanded. Such as supplementary benefit, rebate on your rent. Mother gave her a slap. It was tried and tested, she said. Desperate diseases require desperate remedies, is that a proverb with which you are unfamiliar? Muriel saw by the quivering of her mother’s face that she was at the end of her tether. She was afraid of the changeling and would not have it in the house. I could telephone the authorities, she said, and have you both locked up.

Of course Mother knew more than she did; she had years of experience, with the living and the dead. “All right,” Muriel said. She was persuaded.

And so the day came to try the substitution. It was a raw winter’s day, with a smell of earth and water. They walked over the fields to the canal bank, meeting no one. They set the box carefully on the surface of the water, the cardboard box with the baby inside. “Sink or swim,” Mother said. The baby had not made a sound; it had given up crying by then, and they had put a blanket over its face and folded over the flaps of the box. It was not cruelty, merely a precaution; Mother knew what she was doing and didn’t want interference.

Below the water was a slimy substance which Muriel found interesting. She put her hand in, and brought it out dripping. Mother gave her a handkerchief to dry it on. They watched the cardboard box, growing soggy, bobbing in the water. There was no sign of the swap. The two babies were already confused in her mind; cold, stunted, condemned to the changeling life, their scant humanity draining away from them year by year. The box dipped in the water and was soon lost from view; the days were short, and there was not much light under the trees. Was it a boy or a girl? Sholto had asked her. I don’t know, she replied; it was all so long ago. She had felt on the canal bank—or was it only later that she felt it?—a small gnawing inside that she called regret. It was all she had, and now it was drowning. It was true that her knowledge of matters was limited, but it was possible that everything, from her go in the park onwards, could have worked out differently. It was not regret for the infant she felt; after all, she hardly knew it. Perhaps it was for herself then; she wondered for a moment how she came to be alive, how it was that her old mother had not brought her here and floated her off one day in the hope of getting in exchange a human child. She brushed the thought away, rubbing her slimy hand down the sleeve of her winter coat. She was hungry. Mother said it had not worked. It was time to be getting home; darkness was closing in rapidly over the fields.

They returned home. It was only five o’clock, but it felt like the middle of the night. The lightbulb had gone in the hall. Her tummy was rumbling. When the knock came at the front door, Mother said, it’s that gas man again, I suppose we’ll have to let him in sooner or later. She gave Muriel a shove in the ribs, told her to stay in the back room. Make yourself scarce, she said.

But when Evelyn opened the front door it wasn’t the gas man at all. It was Miss Isabel Field from the Welfare, the lady they had been keeping out for months.

Mother had dropped her guard, and she probably knew then that she was going to suffer for it. But first she tried to retrieve her error, smiling sweetly at the girl, leading her up the stairs. Muriel leaned against the door of the back room, breathing, listening. As soon as Mother had ushered Miss Field into the spare room, she turned the key on her. Muriel came out into the hall. She sat on the stairs, her knees drawn up to her chin, and listened to Miss Field suffering. How she screamed! How she hammered at the door! How she hammered on the window! She’d put her hand through the glass if she didn’t take care.

When the banging started at the back of the house too, the devil got into Muriel; she said right, solve this one, Mother, but she didn’t dare to say it out loud. The sound of the words and the sound of the hammering went round and round and reverberated in her head as she padded in her bedroom slippers towards the kitchen door.

And then came the invasion. A man burst in. He ran through the house, shouting. Mother came after, striving and yelling; white in the face, wrapped in her cardigan, as fast as she could caper. Up the stairs ran sweating man. After him went Mother. The next moment she lay in a heap on the floor at the bottom. Muriel, behind the front door, stood regarding her.

Assembled in the hall now were Miss Florence Sidney, who baked mince pies; Miss Sidney’s brother Colin; and the welfare worker, Miss Isabel Field. Miss Field said she was leaving the profession. It was too much, she said, to be locked up in a bedroom by some type of madwoman when you were only trying to do a home visit. She was trembling, crying a little. Miss Sidney’s brother got down on the floor and lay on top of Mother. He fastened his mouth voraciously over hers. Mother did not respond; it was ages since she’d had the attentions of a man. After a few minutes, Colin Sidney pushed himself upright, wiped his mouth, and looked down at Mother lying between his legs. He raised his fist and hit her chest a tremendous blow; two blows, then three. Muriel watched closely, sharing his disappointment that Mother seemed to feel nothing of all this. Presently he gave up on her. He lurched to his feet, talking, breathing heavily. She was hanging on to me, he said, as I tried to get upstairs; like a maniac, Miss Field, you were pounding on the bedroom door. I shrugged her off, shrugged is all I did; she slipped, she lost her footing. Now, Colin, said his sister, Florence, now, Colin, the ambulance is on its way, no one is blaming you. You did the right thing to rescue me, Miss Field said; locked in that room by myself I felt something pulling at my skirt. She shivered. Colin took off his jacket and put it round her shoulders. There you are, Miss Er, he said. Field, she told him. Victor of the Field, Muriel whispered. For a moment they stared at her; they were not sure if she had spoken or not.

When Miss Sidney was out doing her telephoning, the brother and the social worker turned to each other. They acted as if no one was there; not her in the bedroom slippers, not Mother in a heap. They were people who had met before; their eyes met, and then their hands. She would not be surprised if they had not met on a go in the park. She had a grievance against the social worker, with her trim waist and pale pretty face. She herself was still bloated from her pregnancy, but the girl did not know that. The baby was something they’d kept to themselves; a private trial, which they had faced in their own way.

Miss Sidney was back now. She turned to Muriel. Now, Muriel, she said, I don’t want you to upset yourself, and what we could do with is a blanket to cover up your poor old mum. Let her shiver, Muriel thought, noticing that she did not. Already the grievances of a lifetime were rising up in her mind. Did other people live like this? She had no idea. The social worker said that the place was like a morgue. She bent over Mother, turning her head with her slim white hand. No one’s blaming you, she said to Colin Sidney; she’s had a heart attack. Mother’s face was a strange mottled colour; its expression was one of astonishment.

In the last few moments of Mother’s life, she, Muriel, had come up the stairs from the bottom. Whilst Mother was slipping, sliding, clutching with one hand at the banister and the other at her chest, she had knitted her fingers into the back of Mother’s cardigan, she had taken her by the scruff and bounced her slam, slam, against the wall; and this was why, when Mother died, she looked so surprised.

There were now more people in the house than Muriel could ever remember; more, at any rate, than since Father’s funeral. She had been only a child then; she had wondered why Clifford Axon couldn’t be buried at the back, outside the lean-to, but her mother had said no, she wanted him off the premises. Thirty years had passed; life was going to alter. In the midst of her speculations, her stomach rumbled again quite audibly. Murder makes me famished, she thought. She took a final look at her mother, then went into the kitchen and cut herself a piece of bread. She rummaged in the cupboards and found a pot of some kind of red jam. The old cow, she thought, she was keeping this for herself. There was quite a lot left, three-quarters of the pot. She got a knife from the cutlery drawer and spread the jam carefully, very thick and right to the edges of the bread. When Colin Sidney came in she offered him a bite, but he did not seem interested. She could hear the social worker being sick again. Vehicles drew up outside, and uniformed men took Evelyn away.

Soon after these events, Muriel left home herself. She understood that she would be going away for some years, to recuperate from her time with her mother. A woman called Tidmarsh collected her. She put a plastic bag in the boot of the car, containing Muriel’s personal effects; the two smocks that Mother had made for her out of a pair of old curtains, and a few other odds and ends she found in the drawers. Muriel looked back at the house where until now she had always lived. She felt a terrible sense of incompleteness, as if something that mattered to her had been abandoned in one of the rooms. She pawed at the woman’s arm, trying to get her to turn back, but the woman shook herself free and yelled out that they would have an accident. How was Muriel to know? She had never been in a car before, only the minibus.

Mother had always threatened her that if she didn’t do as she was told, she’d be rounded up with the other ne’er-do-wells, and taken off and gassed. It had happened once, Evelyn said; and the whole world profits by example. So was this it? She felt no emotion; she did not know what gassed would be like. She looked out at the factory walls as they passed, her head lolling against the glass, shaking with the vibrations of the car.

It was a mild spring day, but the women in the streets were still bundled into their heavy coats. They pushed children in trolleys, their heads bowed against the breeze. Sunlight dappled the glass of a bus shelter. The mill gates and little rows of shops gave way to an area of semi-detached houses with white painted fences and pretty flowering shrubs in the gardens. A red housing estate climbed up the side of a hill. Soon they were in the country. Miss Tidmarsh wound her window down, and the smell of fresh grass filled the car. They turned into a gateway, into a gravelled drive shaded by towering hedges. Clouds flew across the windscreen. The car nosed onwards, through the summer ahead; birds wheeled over the fields.

The house itself, a crumbling grey core, looked out over the fields and towards the road. Gravel paths ran away from it, with flower beds on either side. There were parked cars, an ambulance, a scatter of Nissen huts and sheds, and a colony of new buildings, made of metal and varnished wood and plate glass. Beyond these was a belt of dark trees, and more fields. There was a faint ground mist, and moisture in the air.

When the car stopped, Muriel scrambled out. “Hang on a minute,” Miss Tidmarsh called. She took her by the elbow. It reminded her of Mother.

The paths were dotted with little signposts: Hunniford Ward, Greyshott Ward, Occupational Therapy. She did not have time to read them all, but she could read much better than they thought. She craned her neck, straining back over her shoulder. “Come on, my dear,” the woman said. My dear; for the second time. Mother never said it, only “You useless lump.” Useless lump or my dear, the meaning was the same.

Inside the big building the tiles were cold underfoot. Another woman came out, wearing a blue and white check garment. She had an elastic belt and a paper hat. “Oh hello, Miss Tidmarsh,” she said. “And how are we today? Got another customer for us?”

She had a special way of looking at Muriel, as if she looked straight through her and around all the edges to assess her size and shape. She shifted from one foot to the other, a little self-consciously, and twanged at her elastic belt. “We’re supposed to be going into mufti soon,” she said. “What do you think of that?” The woman made some reply. Muriel looked around the entrance hall, up at the ceiling. The nurse asked, “How about a cup of tea?”

“That would be brilliant,” Muriel said.

The nurse gave her a queer look. “Not you, dear. Patients’ tea comes at ten-thirty, you’ve missed it.”

“I’ll have coffee,” Muriel said. “Jam, ham, Spam, roast beef, cornflakes, and Ovaltine.” Miss Tidmarsh laughed.

They followed the notices that said ADMISSIONS. The ward had thirty beds. This is your locker, this is your orange bedspread, this is your bedside mat, this is where you will live. “And then, dear, in a week or two, when Doctor has had a talk to us, we’ll be moving on.”

Muriel sat on her orange bedspread. “My head hurts,” she said. The nurse took away her dress. She took away her knickers. She gave her a thin cotton gown.

“Don’t you wear a bra?” she said. Muriel shook her head. The nurse smiled. “We don’t want to droop, do we?”

“I don’t know what we’re talking about,” Muriel said. “Our head hurts.”

“We mustn’t be cheeky. We’ll learn that soon enough, dear. Haven’t we got slippers?” Muriel shook her head again. “You’ll have to get your visitors to bring you some.”

“Will I get visitors?”

“You’ll get your family, won’t you, dear?”

Muriel thought this over. Baby: drip, drip. Mother. She closed her eyes tiredly. Mother always said she would haunt.

“Pay attention, dear,” the nurse said sharply. Muriel slapped the palm of her hand against her head. “That won’t help,” the nurse said. “I can’t give you any medication. Not till you’ve seen the doctor.”

“When will that be?”

“That will be on the ward round. Tomorrow.”

When Muriel was left alone, she sat on her bed and dangled her feet. She examined them, hanging there on the end of her legs, her fat red toes. She had done a lot of talking since Mother died. Before, days had gone by without speech; weeks, months. Except for rhymes. She’d not give up making those rhymes, she enjoyed them. They were all she remembered from St. David’s School. Sing a song of headache, holler scream and cry, Four and twenty nurses, baked in a pie. She would not cry; she could not be bothered. She scratched her knee instead. A blind was drawn at the window, and the ward was in semi-darkness. She felt the walls close in on her; safe again. Back in the prison of her body, and back in the prison routine with its sights and smells and noises; rumbling tummy, creaking ankles, the steady beating of the heart.

The first person Muriel met was Sholto. He stood in the long corridor blocking her path, a sinister dirty little man with bow legs. “Are you mad, or stupid?” he enquired.

“Both,” Muriel said promptly.

“Join the élite corps.” Sholto sprang forward and pumped her hand.

Country life. The birds woke her up at four o’clock. She struggled out of her dreams and threw back the bedclothes. She put her feet on the cold floor; head down, she blundered to the window. It showed her a pale milky light and her own pale reflection; the features blurred, amorphous, underwater. She rubbed her right hand down her nightdress, thinking of the clinging green weed.

“Come on, dear, back to bed,” said a voice behind her. “What are you doing up at this time? Didn’t you have your pill?”

Muriel nodded. “I swallowed it.”

Early morning waking, said the nurse to herself, a sign of clinical depression. “Back you go,” she said.

“Those damn squeakies in the trees,” Muriel muttered. She glared at the nurse.

“Six thirty you get up,” the nurse said. “Not four. We’ve got to get ourself into a routine.” She watched Muriel wiping her hand down her nightdress. Obsessive-compulsive behaviour, she said to herself. Tics.

In the country the medical care was under the supervision of Dr. Battachariya, a plump smiling little man; fat eyes, like disappointed raisins, were studded into his golden face. She screamed when he tried to examine her.

“You have had a baby, Muriel?” he said shrewdly. A rude, unmannerly man, prying about like that with his plastic gloves. “When was that?”

She mumbled something.

“Where is the little blighter?”

“With my mother,” she said.

The first week passed. Now who was mad? Who was bad? Who was stupid?

If they had been florid, talkative, and lively with delusion, the long years of Largactil and dormitory wards had made them vacant and passive. If they had been blundering, inadequate, and lost, the passage of time had taught them cunning, the thousand expedients of institutional life. A breezy humorous disregard was their attitude to the doctors; the doctors sat with downcast eyes, their voices droning, their thought processes slowed.

Day room. People sit about on vinyl-covered armchairs. None of the furniture here has any resemblance to the furniture used outside. They are not things that people would have in their houses. Jaws move, champing on nothing. Cigarette smoke curls up. My mother died…I had this accident…I worried all night because I hadn’t done my homework…I should never have got married. Hum, hum, hum. Questions are meaningless when you can’t sit still in your chair. They are like bluebottles buzzing round your head: hum, hum, hum. I had no idea there was such filth in the world…At this point there was no food left in the house…I knew he had got a knife…I knew that if I allowed myself to go to sleep I should die during the night. Each night in the six o’clock news there is a special message for me. People stare at me whenever I set foot in the street. Someone had broken my glasses/started a fire/informed on me, hum, hum, hum. Marilyn Monroe stole my giro. I went to the café till my money ran out.

Can you name ten cities? Can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister? Manic motion, impelled to tread, tread, tread along the corridors, hands flying about face and ears.

You must have some feelings about yourself? Stare. A slow shake of the head. Shoulders held rigid, gaze rigid, face and hair grey. A certain rigidity of posture, says the doctor. Seemingly negativistic. How long is it since we first saw you now? No reply.

An affective problem…semi-aggressive…schizophrenic excitement…marked thought disorder. What about a little injection? You aren’t afraid of a little injection, are you?

These were Muriel’s best friends: Sholto, and Emmanuel Crisp. There were a few hangers-on; Philip and Effie. At first she had been a lost soul, wandering around the day room washing her big red hands together. She had missed her mother, in strange ways; Evelyn with her chattering and her nagging and her little ruses to defeat persecutors and spies. It was a fair bet that Evelyn had taught her a thing or two, and unless in fact she were missing her it was impossible to account for the hollow feeling that she carried around inside. At the same time, she was growing a little garden of resentment and speculation, watering her weeds in the small hours when she lay staring into the darkness, wide-eyed despite her sleeping pill. The Welfare did things for people, she now learned, got them money so that they could live on the outside, got them gas fires and shoes. They had never got anything for her. Even when Evelyn let them in, she wheedled around them and said that everything possible was being done. Pretending to be sane was a great strain on Evelyn, and this strain was the origin of many of the stand-up fights they had after the Welfare had gone. Sometimes she said to herself, Mother should be here, not me, left in this homely home-from-home to pursue a career as a lunatic. She was told that in pursuance of the truth about her mother’s life they had sliced open her body, peered into it, and pulled out her insides. She thought back on the process with satisfaction.

Now that she knew more about other people and their way of life, she often wondered if her crimes entitled her to some sort of record. She could read properly now; there was a book, in great request among her friends, which had records of everything under the sun, and most of these activities—county cricket, nonstop dancing—seemed less interesting than her own. Ought she to put pen to paper about it?

Sholto advised caution. Was the baby found? he asked. No; or she would be in a prison. Still in the canal then; sunk into the soft mud at the bottom, strangled by green weeds, trapped under the rusting wrecks of bedsprings and fridges. He offered to consult Emmanuel Crisp, who with his church connections was an expert on all matters charnel.

Emmanuel thought. A peat bog will preserve anything, he said. That is not in question. Mud; soft mud, still water. And, a canal: acid in the water, surely. There’s not much to infant bones—“but what you have there, Muriel, is perhaps a skeleton.”

Sholto asked more questions. Was she blamed for her Mother’s demise? No. Foul play was not suspected, Crisp put in. Could she handle the scepticism her claims would provoke? They were pernickety, the publishers of this record book, they did not entertain idle claims, they might want her to repeat her feat under test conditions. You can get another child, said Sholto, winking lewdly so that she would grasp his meaning, but you cannot get another mother. Keep it to yourself, he advised. The fact is, Muriel, that you can’t prove a thing.

“I could, though,” she said. “If I found the bones.”

Crisp was a tall man, pallid and spare. He had a precisian’s lip, a cold eye; his hair was coiled about his dome like a woolly snake. Wherever did he get his wing collars, Sholto asked him.

“Charity,” said Crisp briskly.

“Myself I have fits,” Sholto explained. “Crisp’s life has been different. He was the verger once at St. Peter’s.”

Crisp cleared his throat. “I left undone those things that ought to be done.”

“What things?”

“My flies. Later, a gas tap.”

“He is one of those people who do not know what came over them,” Sholto said. “He lived to tell the tale, though he leaves me to tell it. They put it in the Reporter: SEX BEAST VERGER: VICAR SPEAKS.”

“Have you ever heard of entrapment?” Emmanuel Crisp asked. “It was what they call an agent provocateur. She said she was from the Women’s Institute. She wanted to go into the choir stalls, and see the organ.”

“You know you took her wrong,” Sholto said doggedly. “You did it on purpose.”

“She touched my sleeve.” He shuddered. “I often pray for her.”

“The vicar never spoke up for him. He’s left now.”

“He’s dead,” Crisp said. “Or ought to be.”

As a group, they got together in the day room. It was a new idea, to mix the boys and girls together. Autumn had come; but next year, Effie said, they would meet out of doors where there was more privacy. God willing, Philip added piously. Emmanuel led them in a verse or two of “The Church’s One Foundation” then they broke up for tea.

After this came a period of considerable longueurs. Winter closed in over the fields. She stood by the window of Greyshott Ward and watched the rain beating against it. It was a year before she was put into a charabanc and taken in a great herd of chattering fellow patients to the shops in town. The journey took thirty minutes, and the excitement mounted with every mile. They went into a sweet-shop, and into a hardware store where the patients looked at bread-bins and said which colour they would have if they had any bread of their own. She looked around and was very tempted, but she stole nothing at all. Afterwards, back on Greyshott, she was praised up for her good behaviour.

She had special clothes for the outing, given her out of a cardboard box kept in the nurses’ room: a blue frock with six buttons, and a mackintosh that was only a bit small. Back on Greyshott she was given her old smock again. A nurse stood over her waiting to take the outside clothes away. When she came to take her dress off, she could only account for five buttons. The nurse made the noise “tt-tt” and blew a little through her teeth. It was something only nurses should do; if patients did it they got shouted at. She scooped up the dress and the mackintosh and dropped them back into the box. “Come on, get dressed, you idle sod,” she said. “I can’t do it for you.” Muriel saw the dress and the mackintosh disappearing, the box borne away.

She sat on the end of her bed, rebellious. “Tt-tt,” she said, and wagged her head slowly, and cast her eyes to heaven. By watching other people, by stealing their expressions and practising them, she was adding to her repertoire. I was no one when I came here, she thought; but after a few years of this, there’s no saying how many people I’ll be.

Effie was often Her Majesty the Queen. They went along with her, lining up by the ward door. She wore a pink plastic shower cap that had been brought in from the outside by some long-forgotten visitor. She offered them each the tips of her fingers, and her very sweetest smile.

“And how long have you been at Fulmers Moor?”

“Ten years, Ma’am.”

“Indeed? You must have seen many changes in your time?”

Between official engagements, Effie sat and looked at the wall a great deal. From time to time a ripple of emotion made her face quiver. She would put a hand up to stop it, and then she would leap up in a frenzied pursuit of the nearest nurse. “I want my Largactil,” she would bleat, “I want my Modecate, I want my nice Fentazin syrup.” Tranquillised, she would lean against the wall, her face serene again; only a blink of the eye, only a minute parkinsonian quiver of the extremities, to show that she was alive at all.

“I make no showing,” Crisp said, petulant. “I’d better get a delusion. I hope to become a public man,” he told Dr. Battachariya. “I hope to be appointed Ambassador to St. Petersburg. Or Governor of the Bank of England.”

Dr. Battachariya sucked his pen. He questioned him closely. “What is the difference between a ladder and a staircase?” he asked him.

Crisp smiled. “A ladder is a series of portable gradations,” he suggested, “of either metal or wood; sometimes rope. It consists of two uprights, with steps, called rungs, between them. It serves as a means of ascent, as does a staircase; but a staircase, designed on the same principle, is a fixed internal structure. Suppose for the sake of argument that you were a window cleaner—and some honester men than you or I, Battachariya, do in fact earn their living in that fashion—then taking stout cords, you could bind the ladder to your vehicle’s roof, and thus transport it; which you could by no means do with a staircase.”

Dr. Battachariya toyed with his ballpoint. He was determined to fault it. “Don’t you think your explanation is rather over-elaborate?” he asked. Crisp smiled again; his dry, remote, ecclesiastical smile.

Muriel sought him out. “Crisp, give me a book,” she said. “A book of sermons. Anything.”

“What do you want a book for?”

“I want words. I’ve got to have more words. I was kept stupid on purpose. I want some like yours.”

“Listen,” Effie said sharply, “this is the bloody Savoy. Do you know what we had where I was last? No doors on the lavatories, pardon me. One toothmug per seventeen imbeciles. Crisp, you don’t know you’re born.” Recovering herself, she added, “Balmoral is no better.”

But next day Effie went on the rampage. She had a filthy tongue in her head when she wasn’t giving regal addresses. She ran screaming and cursing down Greyshott Ward and out into the corridor.

“I don’t need hospital,” she shouted. “I don’t need nurses. I’m not sick. I may be daft but I’m not sick. I don’t need getting up at six-thirty every day, Christmas Day, birthday, Queen’s official birthday and every bleeding Sunday. I need to get up when I want and make myself a little cup of tea.”

Two stout male orderlies got Effie by the arms and brought her back to Greyshott. They argued with her as they dragged her along. “And how would we get your breakfast, if you got up any old time you felt like it?”

“I’m not here to have breakfasts. I could get my own.”

“Go without is what you’d do. And if we didn’t get you up, what’s to say you’d ever get up at all? What’s to stop you lying in bed all day?”

Sholto stood by, scratching his head and looking on.

“The patients for the shifts,” he remarked, “or the shifts for the patients?”

Dumping Effie on her bed, reaching for the screens to pull around her, the orderly stared at Sholto; his face crimson, his breathing heavy. “Get your frigging ugly face out of here, Sholto Marks,” he bellowed.

Effie subsided. She began to cry, her chest heaving with the shock and horror of her outburst.

I’ve killed a psychiatrist…I pulled all the stuffing out of the doll…they put gunpowder through my letter box…they sang in the streets outside my house…a strange letter came, postmarked Scarborough.

Philip had the secret of perpetual motion. Chug, chug, chug. I am a tractor. I am a Centurion tank. I am a shiny red new Flymo. Otherwise sensible, Philip oils his moving parts each morning.

Crisp attributes it to the decline of faith. You may hear it, he says, as Philip garages himself for the night: the melancholy long withdrawing roar. In days gone by, Philip might have believed he was possessed by a devil, but the trend this century is to penetration by rays, bombs in the skull, and possession of men by machines.

I am the internal combustion engine, says Philip.

After a year or two Muriel became angry. She went to the end of the ward where the charge nurse sat in his little plastic cubicle. He was a fair-haired belligerent man, with a habit of sucking on his underlip. His biceps bulged pink and scrubbed beneath the short sleeves of his tunic. He was reading his racing paper.

When he saw Muriel he folded up his paper and put it down.

“Eh up, it’s Jane Fonda,” he said. Muriel did not know why he used this name, which he always did. He was looking amiable, but amiable was not his bent.

“I have a question,” she said.

The charge nurse lit a cigarette. “Fire away.”

“Can’t I be treated like a normal person?”

I’m worried about everything. What things? The bomb. What do you think will happen to you? Stay in hospital; then I’ll die. You got very drunk, didn’t you? Why did you go to the pub, do you think? My sinful nature. When did you last eat, do you think? 1952.

I’m dead of misery. Dead inside. There are murderers in this place, murderers in the night. They used to wear uniforms so you knew them but now you don’t know them any more. There are murderers in the night. Lizzie Borden. Ruth Ellis. Constance Kent.

Lizzie, thought Muriel. Later she couldn’t recall the surname. Lizzie Blank.

How would you like a new life? they asked Muriel one day. How would you like a new life, with your needs met by the community instead of the institution?

When Muriel looked at herself in the mirror, she knew that she was changing. She was a woman of forty, a woman of almost forty-three. In repose, her face was empty and expressionless, but at a word of inner command she could set it to work, assuming expressions acceptable to the people around her. The grimaces, she called them. The nods and smiles, the frown of concentration, the puzzled stare; all these were within her scope nowadays.

If you knew the language and the logic, you could get into people’s workings. You could press the right keys, get out the response you wanted. You have to appreciate their prejudices: good defeats evil and love conquers all. That two plus two equals four, that cause precedes effect. Remembering, all the time, that this is not really how the world works. Not at all.

The hospital was changing too. There were new nurses, milder in their ways; at least for the first month or so. The patients were left to their own devices, allowed to stroll about the grounds together while Crisp lectured them on eschatology. He looked forward to the day of a more immediate and worldly release. There was so much to be done; the Church was in a parlous state, and the General Synod—than where you would not find a bigger collection of atheists—had quite lost its grip. There were dwindling congregations, rectories turned into guest houses and deans living in maisonettes; and a demand for women in the ministry. Can you imagine, he asked, can you imagine Effie, in a sacramental character?

Crisp’s preoccupations were his own; but more and more, their thoughts were turning to the outside world. “I’m learning to make meals,” Muriel said to Effie.

Effie laughed. “Get away. Meals come out of those big trays in the canteen.”

“Oh, do they?” Muriel said passionately. “That shows your ignorance. When I was at home I used to get meals from my mother, eggs, vegetables, that sort of rubbish, peas out of a tin. Where do you think the nurses get meals when they go home?”

“They live here,” Effie said. “Don’t they? This is where we all live.” She relapsed into silence, and took up the occupation of looking at the wall.

Emmanuel was the first to go. “Social Services will be responsive,” the doctors said. Emmanuel made a little speech, thanking them for their support as a congregation over the years. They sang a few of his favourite hymns, and he shook hands all round. He would be returning, he said, by the road to town which had brought him here some ten years ago; as if Calvary had an exit route. He turned up his face. A stray shaft of autumn sunlight gilded the waxen tip of his nose.

“The heart’s gone out of things,” Sholto said. He kicked at a stone and dug his hands further into his pockets. “It will dull our wits, trying to pass for normal.”

They were walking in the grounds, their numbers diminished. “Do you think you can pass?” Sholto asked her. He looked at her keenly. “You might, Muriel. I might pass, if I don’t fall down and foam. Crisp will pass. But Effie—never.”

“After all, Muriel,” they said. “Look at all the stuff we’ve taught you. You know how to do your shopping. You can count your change. You can use the telephone.” Muriel nodded. “We’ll find you a place,” they said. “A nice little flat with a warden. You’ll be a free agent, you can come and go as you please.” They patted her hand. “You’ll have lots of support. The social worker will call and see you. And you know how to make your meals.”

Muriel thought: When I get out I shall get out, just let those wardens try; Four and twenty social workers baked in a pie.

Sholto said: “When you get out of here your aim should be to get as far away as possible from all those people who are going to treat you as an abnormal person. You have to get away to where nobody knows your face. You don’t want a pack of people around you who are going to say, oh, you know, you mustn’t expect too much, she comes from there. You don’t want people making loopy signs at every trifling embarrassment. You want to get right away. Get a fresh start. Get treated on your own merits.

“If you let the Welfare house you they’ll tell all the neighbours that they’re to keep an eye out. Is that any way to start life? Everybody makes mistakes, but as long as they’re watching you all your mistakes will be put on file. You want equal treatment, don’t you? You want to merge into the crowd. Not to be pointed out in the public library as that cove who has fits. Not people coming up helping you all the time. Stuff them, I say. If I want to lie in the gutter and foam at the mouth it should be my entitlement. What are gutters for?”

The odd letter came, here and there. Tales drifted back from the outside. “Crisp is walking the streets now,” Sholto said bitterly.

“I thought you didn’t want nothing from nobody, Sholto.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Effie said timidly. “But he’d like a little residence.”

“Philip got a council flat,” someone said.

“How did he like it?”

“He hanged himself.”

Sholto was a man of very good sense; wise and lucid, and ready for anything, except for the days when he sat on the floor, holding his head. “What they claim,” he said, “is an ongoing beanfeast, flats, nurses, jobs, day centres. But if you want to avoid all that you’ll have no trouble at all. There aren’t enough to go around.”

“They’re going to close this place,” Effie said. “What will happen to me? Where will I go? What will happen to my bedside mat? It’s all I’ve got.”

“You get money given you,” Muriel said.

“Of course, I shall have the Civil List.” Effie cheered up. “I’ll see you right, everybody.”

Hunniford Ward was closed. Effie got desperate, crying frenziedly and pulling at her hair. “Look, we’ll all keep in touch,” Sholto said. He wrung her hand. “Me and you, Muriel, the Reverend Crisp. We’ll go on trips together. We’ll have donkey rides and such. We’ll hire a little bus and go to places of interest.”

Effie blew her nose, consoled a little. The next day she came running up, her face alight; the greatest animation seen on her features since 1977, when she set fire to a cleaning lady. “Giuseppe is back,” she said, “that was thrown off Hunniford. If you don’t like it they take you back. Giuseppe didn’t like it.”

They went to see Giuseppe after he was dried out. “I went down London,” he said. His podgy face was lemon-yellow; his fingers played tunes on the bedcovers. “I went in a hotel. There was women in that hotel,” he crossed himself, “they was tarts. I never paid those women. A man come threatened me get out of that hotel. I went down the coach station. I went down the café. I went down the Sally Army.”

“Five more minutes,” the nurse said. “He’s been poorly.”

They smiled at her. The nurses liked it when you were poorly. They were kind to you. If you were sick in bed, they knew what you were up to and what they ought to be doing.

“I went up Camden Town,” Giuseppe said. “I went down Bayswater. I went up Tottenham Court Road to see my grandmother, but she was dead. I went in the bed and breakfast. I went in the night shelter. I ask for an extra blanket but they say, no no, fat man.” Giuseppe rubbed his side. “My chest hurts. I’m a tramp. I go to Clacton. It’s winter. I get a lodging and I walk by the sea.” He closed his eyes and screwed up his face. “Mother of God, it’s so lonely in Clacton.”

“Just remember your medication,” they said to Sholto. “A community nurse will call and see you.”

“Not if I see her first,” Sholto said.

Sholto got out on a Thursday. He was all set for his sister Myra’s house. He made his way along the street, carrying his navy-blue holdall, the yellow nylon straps wound around his wrist. When Myra saw him coming she locked the door.

Sholto walked on to the corner. When he turned off Adelaide Street, a terrible sight met his eyes. The whole district had been razed. Osborne Street was down, Spring Gardens had been flattened. The Primitive Methodist Chapel was boarded up and all the gravestones had been taken away. He tramped through the meadow of blight where the bones of Primitive Methodists had once rested; the ground was strewn with glass and broken pots. He squatted down, turning over the shards. The weather was damp; his holdall was smeared with yellow clay. From where he knelt he looked up and read a sign: MOTORWAY LINK BEGINS MAY 1983.

Where the Travellers’ Call had been there was a field of rosebay willowherb and scrap metal. There were a few aimless piles of red brick, two feet high, and in places the earth was turned up, as if someone had begun to dig foundations here and then thought better of it. Only the Rifle Volunteer was still standing, at the corner of where Sicily Street used to be. It was eleven-thirty, and while he watched, the landlord put on the lights and came out to open the doors. He stooped ponderously to draw out the bolt, and stood gazing for a minute at the sky; then he looked across the wasteland, shading his eyes as if he were scanning the prairie. Sholto was the only human figure within his view. There was a rusting refrigerator lying on its back, a swastika spray-gunned on a wall; human faeces. Sholto felt the straps of his holdall cutting into his wrists. Picking his feet out of the mud, scraping his shoe on a handy brick, he began to make his way towards the Rifle Volunteer. I thought the war was over, Sholto said.

Miss Tidmarsh was nearly fifty now, and still going strong. Her shiny new car waited outside on the gravel. Muriel followed her; withered flanks inside a scarlet bib-and-brace. “Guess what!” Miss Tidmarsh said. “We think we’ve found you a job. Who’s a lucky girl?”

She reached a hand across Muriel, pulled her seat belt, and snapped it fastened. They crunched off over the gravel. Even Miss Tidmarsh’s style of driving seemed less mature than it had been. Muriel said, “Whatever happened to Miss Field?”

Miss Tidmarsh glanced at her sideways. “Fancy you remembering Miss Field! Was she your social worker?”

“Such a lovely person,” Muriel said dotingly. It was an expression the nurses used, about lady doctors who did not snub them and relatives who did not pester.

“Did you think so? She left. Went to work in a bank, if I remember. I think she got married or something.”

They shot out of the main gate and onto the road to town. Muriel didn’t look back.

She started off as a cleaner, pulling a little trolley with her brush and her mop and her scouring powder and her special bucket. She had her name written on the trolley: MURIEL. She slopped her water about the corridors and under the tables in the canteen; she tipped her powder down the lavatories, and sang while she plied her mop. She learned to sing with a cigarette in her mouth, because cigarettes were what the factory made, and any worker was at liberty to pluck the finished article from the machines and puff away during the tea break and the half-hour for lunch.

At the end of the first week Maureen said to her: “Muriel, love, I don’t know what to say. Look at your brush, it’s all worn down to stumps. Have you been chewing it?” Maureen sighed heavily. “There’s a wheel coming off MURIEL. You’ve got through as much powder as I use in three months. And look at your Eeziwipes; they’re all over the place.”

Muriel stood looking down at her feet.

“No point putting your bottom lip out,” Maureen said. “I don’t know, where’ve you been all your life? I suppose some can clean and some can’t, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Am I discharged then?”

“That’s not up to me, duck. There’s enough on the dole as it is. On your own at home, are you?”

“I am at the moment. But I’m expecting my mother.”

“Ah, that’s nice. Well, look, lovey, buck up now. Perhaps we can get you on Ripping.”

That first weekend of freedom, Muriel paid a visit to her old home. It was quite a distance from the room that Miss Tidmarsh had found for her. She saw buses going about the streets, but she didn’t know how to get one to go in the right direction. So she walked; she had nothing else to do.

Considering how many years had passed, the district hadn’t changed much. She turned off Lauderdale Road, where she used to wait for the minibus. She paused for a few moments before the house where the fox terrier used to live, and took a good look. The stained glass and the net curtains had gone. The woodwork was painted white, and there was a panelled front door of polished wood, with a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head; and a carriage lamp on the wall. It looked very smart. If the dog came out, I could kick it, she thought. She turned the corner. Buckingham Avenue had hardly altered at all. Each house stood set back from the road behind its neat privet hedge. Peering down between the houses, she saw the thick clumps of rhododendrons, the striped lawns, the trellised archways for climbing roses. At number 2, her home, there were big stone urns on either side of the door; flowering plants spilled out of them, and a hanging basket swung from the porch. The shrubs had been cleared from the side of the house, and they had put up a flat-roofed extension, bright red brick against the pebble-dash. The windows gleamed. She walked to the gate and traced the number with her finger. She would never have believed that her mother’s house could look like this. She felt lonely.

She hung about for a while on the other side of the road, waiting to see if anyone would come out. Other people lived in the house, and she knew who; that monster of lust called Colin Sidney, who had seized his chance to buy it up cheap and move in next door to his scheming sister. What about the spare room, she wondered. Had there been an eviction, or were they still forced to keep the door locked?

Muriel waited for an hour. No one came in or out of number 2. Her feet hurt and she was thirsty. Presently she set off to walk back to her lodgings and sleep until it was time to go to the factory again. I can come again next week, she thought.

The Ripping Room had sixteen occupants, ranged at two long tables. Kieran came from the lift, pulling his trolley. “I’m a YOP,” he told Muriel. “They get me cheap.”

“What’s a Yop?” Muriel asked.

“Don’t you know? It’s a Youth Opportunity.” He added, “We get a lot of those.”

“Kieran brings the boxes,” Edna said. “Right? These are old cigarettes, right, off shop shelves what have gone out of date. On that trolley he’s got two hundred thousand rotten old fags. You get your box, right? Take out the packets. Open the packets, right?” She looked around her. “Kieran, where’s our boxes, where’s our bloody stacking boxes, where’s our Universal Containers?”

Kieran came sloping up. “I was putting me lipstick on,” he said. “I’m entitled.”

“Get on with it!” Edna said. “Empty the fags out, right? Fags to the left, foil to the right. Fags to the left, foil to the right. Got it?”

“Got it,” Muriel said. Edna was an angry-looking woman, with varicose veins and black corkscrew curls. She wore an overall and white cap. “Away you go then,” she said, and went off grumbling back to her own table.

“What happens to them all?” Muriel asked.

“Oh, they scrunch ’em all up and make ’em into new ones,” Kieran said.

There were two tables, and Edna’s got preferential treatment. When the Navy Issue came back in their tins, with the mould growing under the lids, it was never Edna’s table that got them. They were Permanent Rippers. On the other table, the girls could be moved, as the work required, to the Making Room, to the Blender, or the Hogshead. Before the week was out, Muriel had learned to rip very nicely. She was never moved; nor was the elderly lady who worked opposite her.

This was a humble little woman, with a worn bony face, and eyes and nose and mouth so insignificant that to call them features was an inflation of the truth. A scant amount of iron-grey hair was pinned fiercely to her little skull. The skin of her neck was yellow, her shoulders were bowed, and her hands shook a little as she reached for her cigarette boxes. She hardly seemed to have the strength for ripping. Every morning, before Kieran brought his first trolleyload, she would take out her teeth and wrap them in tissue paper, and slide them into her handbag. She would snap the clasp and hold the bag to her for a moment, looking around her with an anxious little smile; then she would put on her overall, over her pinny, over her old polyester dress. She seldom spoke. Her eyes watered continuously. She walked with her knees bent, her head down; a soft silent creature of depressive aspect. From time to time—once a week perhaps—some word from one of the other girls would catch her fancy, some gossip or quip, and she would tip her head back, open her toothless mouth, and roar with silent laughter, wiping her eyes the while and trembling at her own temerity.

She’d had a hard life, Edna said. Her name was Sarah; but everybody called her Poor Mrs. Wilmot.

Muriel’s second trip to Buckingham Avenue was more enlightening than the first. She had only been hanging around for five minutes when who should she see, coming up the road with her Saturday shopping, but Miss Florence Sidney?

Miss Sidney had put on weight, and her frizz of hair was now grey. She wore stout shoes, a check skirt, and a woollen scarf with bobbles on it, and she advanced along the street looking neither left nor right. As she passed number 2, going around the corner to her own gate, the front door flew open and a gang of screaming teenage children swarmed down the path and fanned out across the road. Miss Sidney was almost knocked into the hedge. Steadying herself against the gatepost, her face flushed, she called out after the children, “Alistair! For heaven’s sake!”

“Eff off, you old cow,” the boy called Alistair shouted back; wailing and yodelling, the gang careered around the corner into Lauderdale Road.

Miss Sidney put down her basket to recover herself. She steadied her breathing, allowed her flush to subside, and picked a few bits of privet from her cardigan. Looking up, she saw Muriel watching her from the other side of the road. Muriel smiled; there was no one she would rather see pushed into a hedge. Miss Sidney’s eyes passed over her, as if she thought it was rude to stare; it was plain that she had no idea who Muriel was. She gave a half-smile, picked up her shopping, and trotted round the corner.

She doesn’t expect me, Muriel thought. But she ought to expect me.

Muriel fished in her coat pocket, and brought out a piece of newspaper. She unwrapped it as she crossed the road, took out Mrs. Wilmot’s teeth, and tossed them over the hedge into the Sidneys’ front garden.

Just as she was rounding the corner, the front door of number 2 opened again. Colin Sidney came out and loped down the path towards his car; a big fair man, balding, lean and fit. She watched him jump into his car and shoot away from the kerb. He did not even notice her. She raised a hand after him; like someone giving a signal to a hangman.

Mrs. Wilmot was being retired. She had been at the factory for thirty years; today was her last day.

“Course,” she said, in her usual dead little whisper, “I’ll not get my pension, I’m not sixty. Course, I’ll get my benefit. Course, I’ll have to put in for it. Course, I don’t really know.” She picked up a corner of her overall and wiped her left eye.

“It’s a bloody shame,” Edna said. “Ripping’s all she’s got. Here, love, we’ll give you a send-off.”

“Course, they gave me a Teasmaid,” Poor Mrs. Wilmot said. She wiped her other eye and sniffed.

“Bugger the Teasmaid, we’ve got a lovely presentation to give you. We’ll give it you down the pub, it’s Friday night, isn’t it?”

“Course, the pot was broken,” Mrs. Wilmot whimpered. “Course, I didn’t complain.”

“I wish you’d told me,” Edna said, “I’d have complained all right. I don’t know, this place is going down the drain, you can’t leave anything about, people’s teeth being nicked out of their own handbags, they want bloody hanging. You could do with a new set, you should have asked for one, you should get compensation.”

“No point really,” Mrs. Wilmot said dejectedly. “I have to get my cards. I have to go to the office. I don’t like.”

“What do you mean, you don’t like?”

“Going to the office. I don’t like.”

“I’ll get your stuff for you,” Muriel offered.

“Oh, would you?” A tiny hope shone out of Poor Mrs. Wilmot. “Muriel, ask them for my wages as well, lovey.” The next moment her situation overwhelmed her again; she looked away and sniffed, and soon the tears were coursing down her cheeks.

“Off again,” Edna said. “Come on, duck, pull yourself together.”

“Course, you can understand it,” Poor Mrs. Wilmot said. “Course they don’t like me coughing on the tobacco. I appreciate that. Course I do.”

They arrived at the Swan of Avon just after opening time. Edna organised the moving of tables, commandeered extra chairs, and herded them into the Snug. “Let’s have a kitty, girls,” she called. The girls fumbled in their bags and tossed five-pound notes into the centre of the table. “No, not you, love,” Edna said to Poor Mrs. Wilmot. “This is your day, duck. Come on now, wipe your eyes. That’s it, give us a smile. Have a go on the Space Invaders.” She bustled her way to the bar, shouting through an open doorway to some male cronies from the Hogshead who were ordering up their first weekend pints in the public bar.

“Eh up, Edna!” the men shouted; and other badinage. “All girls together, is it, all girls together? Room for one more, is there, room for one more?”

A warm beery miasma drifted over towards the noisy party in the Snug. The weekend free-issue was opened, and soon the air turned blue with smoke. “Give over, you cheeky monkeys,” Edna yelled across the landlord’s head. The men roared back at her. Edna trilled with laughter, waved her arms. Her eyebrows shot up, her face reddened. Muriel watched her from the pub door. Her every gesture was florid, packed with life; her voice was as commanding as the factory hooter.

Muriel came up behind her. “I’ve been to the office for Mrs. Wilmot’s forms.”

“Good lass!” Edna cried. “Have you got them?”

“Yes, and I gave her the wages.”

“Righto then, you can help me carry.” She thrust a tin tray crammed with dazzling drinks into Muriel’s hands. “Here you go.”

“Oh ho, Passion Cocktail,” yelled the men from the Public, crowing in their mirth, and swaying backwards and forwards on the bar rail.

“Don’t buckle my rail, lads,” the landlord beseeched. Sweat started out of his forehead at the strain of keeping up with Edna’s drinks order. “Can you make a Harvey Wallbanger?” Edna asked him.

There were more than thirty women now packed into the Snug, perched on each other’s knees, flicking peanuts at each other, rocking and shrieking with laughter, and addressing the odd shout of encouragement to Poor Mrs. Wilmot. The younger women had stripped off their overalls and bundled them into their shopping bags, and were heading back from the Ladies; “Hutch up, hutch up,” they cried. “Where’s Edna with them drinks, I don’t know, taken the kitty and run off to Monte Carlo!”

“Course,” said Mrs. Wilmot under her breath, “it was good of Muriel to fetch me doings from the office. Course I’m not sure what I ought to have, I ought to have forms; course, I’m not sure.”

“Cheer up,” said Leslie-Anne, digging her hard in the ribs. “What are you mumbling on about now?”

Caught unawares, Mrs. Wilmot lurched forward and began to cough violently. With cries of alarm the women nearest to her slapped her on the back. “Here’s Edna with them drinks,” Maureen called, and Edna began to pass the order over their heads: “Six Pernods and blackcurrants, a port and lemon for Poor Mrs. Wilmot, seven Tía Marías and Cokes; and a Piña Colada for Yvonne.”

The noise level rose, the blue fug thickened and drifted, cocktail cherries rolled gaily across the tables. All around Poor Mrs. Wilmot, her colleagues were swaying from side to side on their chairs and stools, singing “Y Viva España.” As the debris around her accumulated, her timid little hand shot out and began to sort the cigarette packets, piling the cellophane and foil to one side; as the merriment grew, she looked about her, a swift glance from side to side; seeing herself unobserved, she seized up a packet, emptied it with one practised movement, and swept the cigarettes to the left of the table, while the papers went to the right. They had reached the third round of drinks by then, and her eyes were watering more than ever; never the centre of attention in her life before, she shook inwardly, her head nodded, she looked about her and showed her gums in a frequent wavering smile.

“Poor Mrs. Wilmot’s enjoying herself,” Leslie-Anne said, and returned to her argument with Edna; a friend from Dispatch had left to pursue matrimony full-time, and Edna said anyone was a flaming idiot who gave up a good packing job with three million out of work.

“Let’s hope she gets something out of him,” Edna said. “She got nothing out of the last one.”

“She did. She got shag-pile carpets. You had to take your shoes off when you went in her house.”

“Bugger 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. Lust, assault; 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 documents 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. “Bugger 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 passed 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 lacklustre 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 coarse 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 doorknobs as he perambulated about the four floors of his house; how he peered into dark corners, how he kept a knobkerrie 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 passed, Mr. K. reached across the table. He snatched 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. passed 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 passed. 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 canal, 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 assume 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-assembly, 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 reassembling 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 assistant 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.