Vacant Possession

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 passed 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 advertisement 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 municipal flowerbeds, she would often toss its occupant a small coin, with a cheery “There you go, you poor cripple,” as she passed 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. “Assorted brass knobs, 50p each. Door handles assorted, £2 a pair. What about a brass 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 brass hand—“we have some brass 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 assorted knobs 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 Picasso than he’d claim to be Salvador Dali. Remember that time Philip said he was a helicopter? Crisp said, ‘I’m Leobloodynardo,’ 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 knobs?”

It was five-thirty when Muriel arrived back at Eugene Terrace; the tail end of the hot afternoon. Inside the Mukerjees’ Emporium, a drowsy girl with a pitted bluish face sat by the till on a high stool. She glanced up without interest as Muriel passed the window; her shoulders moved fractionally, and her eyelids drooped again.

Crisp had left. There was a note on the table: GONE TO EVENSONG. And I brought doughnuts for our tea, Muriel thought crossly. She dumped the paper bag on a chair and walked around the room for a while, looking in Crisp’s drawers and under his mattress; there was nothing of interest. The room was close and stuffy; outside it smelled like thunder. At least, that was what the people at the doughnut shop said; she could not smell it. Over the Punjab, the sky had turned a leaden colour; pigeons huddled together on the guttering, heads sunk low into their feathers like vultures in cartoons.

Muriel shed her clothes again. With the weight of the day upon her, it wasn’t difficult to become Poor Mrs. Wilmot. Her shoulders slumped, her knees bent, her toes turned in; she sprayed her hair with dry shampoo, and flattened it to her head gritty and streaked with grey, and secured it with two large hairgrips. As she did this, the years crept up and weighed her down; her joints locked, her mouth grew pinched, her hands began to shake. She put on Mrs. Wilmot’s elastic stockings and leaned over with a rheumaticky quiver for her bedroom slippers. What was the real Wilmot doing, she wondered. Probably having a cup of tea or something. Experimentally, she opened her mouth in a silent laugh.

Finally she put on Mrs. Wilmot’s coat, which she needed in all weathers, feeling the cold as she did; it was a coat Sholto had found in a dustbin, no shape at all and the colour of the fluff that collects under beds. She went downstairs. A plump little boy of about twelve years old minded the till. The family were so numerous that, despite the shop’s long hours, she had never seen the same Mukerjee twice. His eyes behind his thick spectacles were glued to his Darth Vader comic; Wilmot passed, and he didn’t look up.

When she returned to Mr. K.’s house she was surprised to find him up and about. “I thought you’d be having your sleep,” she said, as she shuffled dispiritedly into the kitchen. “Course, you know what’s best for you.”

Mr. K. was taping up the kitchen window. “In case of poison gas,” he explained. As he stretched up his garments parted company, exposing the greyish roll of fat above his hips.

“Pardon me,” his lodger said, “course, you know best, but couldn’t it come through the letter box?”

“A welcome thought,” Mr. K. said. “I shall tape it instanter. Would you graciously put on tea kettle?”

Mrs. Wilmot made the tea while Mr. K. went out into the hall to secure his letter box. When it was brewed she poured out for them, and they sat companionably at the kitchen table.

“Woman watching house again today,” Mr. K. said. “Drove by, stopped, got out, waited ten minutes, passed on. Miss Anaemia said it is Snoopers, from the department.”

She nodded, and drank her tea.

“Who is this Snoopers?” He did not expect an answer. There were no answers to the questions which plagued him. He sucked his tea through a sugar lump, and eyed his roll of adhesive tape.

“Any law against keeping pets?” his lodger asked suddenly.

“What?” said Mr. K. “Cats, dogs, horses?”

“Beetles.”

“The famous British sense of humour,” Mr. K. said sadly.

“It’s no joke. I’ve seen them advertised.” She picked up her shopping bag and made off towards the kitchen door with it, her large feet padding softly in their pink bedroom slippers. “I’m going to get a cage,” she muttered. “Great big striped ones as fat as melons.”

Muriel climbed the stairs to the first landing. It grew colder as she ascended, and the smell of decay was pronounced. The ancient paper, with its design of cabbage roses, was peeling from the walls. “Hello there, Mrs. Wilmot,” someone whispered. It was Miss Anaemia, creeping down from her third-floor attic. She emerged into the faint light from the long window, filtered through years of dust; a fragile young woman, little more than a child, with a child’s flat body, minimal features, and a skin so translucent that it was easy to imagine that you saw the circulation of the thin blood beneath it. Her red hair was plastered damply to her head, and her whole body seemed to jump and quiver in a state of perpetual fright.

“I hear you’ve got problems, course I don’t want to pry,” said Poor Mrs. Wilmot.

“Shh. Not so loud.”

“I thought you were at the Polytechnic. Course, I don’t know, I’ve no education.”

“I was.” Tears welled up in the girl’s large eyes. “They made a new timetable. They’ve got split sites. They moved my lectures. I couldn’t find them. So I stopped going.”

“Couldn’t you ask them?”

“I did, but nobody seemed to know who I was.”

“Well, there you are then. Cellar vee, isn’t it? Che sera, sera. And what do you do with yourself now?”

“I’m a claimant. I make up different names. Primrose Hill’s one I go under. Penny Black.” She whispered to herself. “Black Maria, Bad Penny. Faint Hope. Square Peg.”

“Is it frightening?”

“It’s terrifying,” Miss Anaemia said. “It makes your palms sweat.” For a second, before she descended the dark staircase, she laid the palm of her hand, ice-cold and clammy, against Muriel’s cheek.