Felicia's Journey

12

Mr Hilditch draws up the figures for the January expenditure and canteen takings, spreading the monthly subsidy lightly in the hope of holding on to a bit extra for February. At four o’clock a vending-machine representative begins his sales pitch: install a bank of food machines in the canteen and you dispense with all canteen staff. The machines would back directly on to the kitchens, the prepared portions loaded straight into them: at the drop of a coin the dishes would emerge when and how they’re required, piping hot or chilled. Drinks likewise: load the machines with the necessary ingredients – tea, coffee, chocolate, softs, no more than ten minutes’ labour a day. ‘You can’t lose, Mr Hilditch,’ the vending man assures him, but Mr Hilditch has no intention of making a change. He likes the old ways. He likes to see his canteen staff, the women’s hair tied up under their caps, the chatter and bustle of the queues, steam rising from the pans, mashed potato scooped up, an extra spoonful of sprouts jollied out of the server. Yet in spite of this preference he is always prepared to see a catering representative in the lull of the afternoon. He enjoys the interruption, a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits shared. He feels it gives a shape to the day. Tomorrow the Colman’s mustard man is due. These passing days are shaped in another way also: with speculation, with reassurance following doubt, with the steadying of his thoughts. The unknown factor is how much money she retained in her handbag, how long she can manage to keep going. The nag is that while she’s hanging about on the streets there’s the danger of her running into the boyfriend. Added to which it could dawn on her at any moment that there might be something, after all, in her father’s astute suspicions: anyone she cares to ask would direct her to the barracks. Driving home on the evening of the vending salesman’s visit, Mr Hilditch shakes his head with renewed finality: all that is a chance that has to be taken. What matters more is that she’s still around, and is likely to be. But that night, having deadlocked his front door and shot the bolts at the back, Mr Hilditch mounts his stairs feeling nervous in case he has let everything slip away from him. In the days that have passed since his sighting of the girl she could have stumbled on her quarry. At this very moment he could be making a clean breast of his deception, buttering her up with devious excuses. At this very moment she could be getting herself up the pole all over again. Savagely Mr Hilditch brushes his teeth, painfully attacking his lower gum as he reflects on the way the world is these days: crazy God-botherers enticing young girls, lying thugs taking advantage, you name it and it’s there. GP Ruined my Sex Life! says Boob-Op Fourteen-Year-Old Mum. Dog-Collar Dougie Had Sofa Sex with my Pal for Revenge! Kids in Black Mass Sacrifices! The headlines race through Mr Hilditch’s memory, culled from the newspapers he sometimes carries away from the canteen because he likes to see it tidy. Every day of the week, seemingly, cigarettes are stubbed out on the flesh of infants. Every day of the week women in their nineties suffer rape and violence. Flaming petrol is poured through letter-boxes for the fun of it. Cars are stolen, televisions are stolen. Company directors spend their employees’ pensions on motor yachts. Drug addicts get their fixes over the counter in Boot’s. Teenage girls are set alight on city wastelands. Mr Hilditch cools his face with water. Calm again, in bed, he recalls an evening with Bobbi in the Welcome Spoon at Legge’s Corner near Junction 18. They sat for hours, maybe even three, while she poured out her troubles, in much the same way as the Irish one has. ‘You wouldn’t credit half of it,’ Bobbi said: the abuse she received at the hands of the man her mother took in after her father went off; the home she spent six months at, where men in belted overcoats arrived at weekends intent on the same. With Bobbi’s almost pretty face for company, Mr Hilditch drops off. The following evening, distancing himself equally from his place of work and Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road, Mr Hilditch drives to a supermarket where he is not known. He purchases hairnets and tights and women’s underclothes, talcum powder and skin cream. Already, at a Saturday jumble sale, he has selected outer garments and two hats. After he has eaten, he arranges these articles about the house, filling a wardrobe with coats and skirts and dresses, and drawers with underclothes which he takes the trouble to crumple up, even to tear a little. He half empties bottles of lotions and squeezes cream from tubes. He packs the talcum powder, with lipstick and eye make-up, into the bathroom cabinet. He drapes the tights over the rails of the ceiling-drier in the kitchen. He locks away his spike of receipts, and any envelopes and papers that bear his name, old cheque-books and bank statements. When Mr Hilditch’s mother died he sold her belongings to a clothes dealer who sent in a card, but he later discovered that the cardboard box he’d filled with her shoes had been overlooked. Planning to dispose of these on some future occasion, he stored them in an outside shed. On the kitchen table he wipes off the mildew and later arranges them in a row by the side of the wardrobe.

‘I require your national insurance number.’ The clerk speaks through glass, making it difficult to hear him. He repeats what he has said. ‘I haven’t one over here.’ The clerk directs her to where the forms are, pointing behind her. He mentions a permanent address, stating that that will be necessary. ‘I haven’t anywhere permanent. I’ve had my money stolen.’ ‘An address is required on a benefit application.’ Overhearing this conversation, a middle-aged man with waist-length hair and torn clothes says Felicia is wasting her time, an opinion confirmed by a girl trailing a dog on a string. The girl has a safety-pin hanging from a nostril. Her hair is pink and blue, tomahawk style. Felicia says she has been staying at the Salvation Army hostel, but they tell her that won’t do for an address. The man says the benefit’s no loss: if he was beginning again himself he would keep well clear of the System and its computers. Once you fill in a form you’re harassed for ever. Earn a wage for a day and half of it’s taken off you to buy false teeth for old-age pensioners. ‘Play music, do you? Pity,’ the girl adds when Felicia shakes her head. That evening the hostel is full when she arrives. In a Spud-U-Like she spends some of her money on a cup of tea and asks the people whose table she shares if the bus station remains open all night. It’s not something they’d know, they say. On the street again, she is accosted by two men loitering outside a pool-hall. They want to know her name and when she tells them they want to know where she’s from. They say they can fix her up, but she doesn’t understand. She feels frightened and hurries on. ‘Get off out of this street,’ a woman whose face is green in the night-light orders when she sets her bags down for a moment in a shop doorway. ‘Move yourself.’ The woman is big, with artificial fur on the coat, and earrings shaped like hearts. Felicia says she is only having a rest. ‘Rest yourself somewhere else then.’ ‘D’you know is the bus station open all night?’ ‘What d’you want the bus place for?’ ‘I need somewhere for the night.’ A car draws up beside them. ‘Business, love?’ The woman simpers as the driver winds down the window. ‘She ain’t on the game,’ she adds, jerking her head towards Felicia. The man opens the car door and the woman gets in beside him. ‘How’re you doing?’ another voice asks when another car draws up. ‘No,’ Felicia says. She walks on, reaching streets that are familiar to her, where the night-time traffic is busy. Clothes are displayed in the fashion windows, their bald-headed models prancing in affected motion, pouting at nothing. Building societies offer mortgage rates. A cardboard man and woman stride forward, holding a roof above their heads: 8.25% the enticement is. Sports equipment and ski clothing vie for attention with furniture and shoes. Washing machines and microwave ovens are in a sale. Every Camera Slashed! another message is. Olympus! Minolta! Praktica! A Pizzaland is brightly lit, people occupying all the tables along the windows, a girl in a red beret talking urgently to her companion, a man with a ponytail who keeps nodding. A crowd of eight share a single table. A couple with a child gesture at the child, cross because she won’t eat the food. A man wearing a cap is on his own. ‘I’ll go for a Kentucky,’ someone passing by on the pavement says. ‘I’d rather a Kentucky.’ Cartons are thrown down outside the Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Colonel Sanders is reassuring in the window, his honest gaze, his white goatee, Finger Lickin’ Good. The voice of Sheena Easton on a ghetto-blaster is drowned by Michael Jackson’s. Bright neon sparkles: Coca-Cola is a Way of Life, it says in the sky. Two women rattle charity boxes. A West Indian is talking to himself, gesturing with his hands. A gang of hooligans push through the pedestrians, pretending to elbow them aside. In a gambling arcade men and youths, grim-faced, play the machines. Felicia’s eyes dart about as she continues on her way, still searching in the crowd. When she arrives at the bus station she settles herself on a seat, but an hour later she is told that no further buses are due either to arrive or depart, and is asked to go. She finds the railway station, and lies on a wooden seat in the waiting-room, but from there, too, she is eventually moved on. She rests in the entrance to a shop that is more than just a doorway: a wide secluded area hidden from the street by a central pillar with windows in it, displaying watches. She sits there, crouched on the tiled ground. One of her shoes has come through in the sole. She roots in her bags and when she has changed her shoes she remains where she is because it is quiet. She wanders on eventually, resting sometimes on a pavement seat, moving again when it becomes too cold. At a stall beneath a bridge where taxi drivers stand about she buys a sausage roll that is reduced to fourpence because it’s stale. The air is dank with mist. Already, hours ago, the homeless of this town have found their night-time resting places – in doorways, and underground passages left open in error, in abandoned vehicles, in the derelict gardens of demolished houses. As maggots make their way into cracks in masonry, so the people of the streets have crept into one-night homes in graveyards and on building sites, in alleyways and courtyards, making walls of dustbins pulled close together, and roofs of whatever lies near by. Some have crawled up scaffolding to find a corner beneath the tarpaulin that protects an untiled expanse. Others have settled down in cardboard cartons that once contained dishwashers or refrigerators. Hidden away, the people of the streets drift into sleep induced by alcohol or agitated by despair, into dreams that carry them back to the lives that once were theirs. They lie with their begging notices still beside them, with enough left of a bottle to ease the waking moment, with pavement cigarette butts to hand. Homeless and hungry is their pasteboard plea, scrawled without thought, one copying another: only money matters. All ages lie out in the places that have been found, men and women, children. The family rejects have ceased to weep into their make-do pillows; those brought low by their foolishness or by untimely greed plead silently for sleep. A one-time clergyman no longer dwells on his disgrace, but dreams instead that it never happened. Rejected husbands, abandoned wives, victims of chance, have passed beyond bitterness, and devote their energies to keeping warm. The deranged are lulled by voices that often in the night persuade them to rise and walk on, which obediently they do, knowing they must. Men who have failed lie on their own and dream of a reality they dare not contemplate by day: great hotels and deferential waiters, the power they once possessed, the limbs of secretaries. Women who were beautiful in their day are beautiful again. There is no arrogance among the people of the streets, no insistent pride in their sleeping features, no lingering telltale of a past’s corruption. They have passed the stage of desperation, and on their downward path some among the women have sold themselves: faces chapped, fingernails ingrained, they are beyond that now. Men, in threes and fours, have offered the three-card trick on these same streets. Beards unkempt, hair matted, skin darkened with filth, they would not now attract the wagers of their passing trade. In their dreams there is occasionally the fantasy that they may be cured, that they may be loved, that all voices and visions will cease, that tomorrow they will discover the strength to resist oblivion. Others remain homeless by choice and for their own particular reasons would not return to a more settled life. The streets, they feel, are where they now belong. ‘Looking for a kip, dear?’ Felicia is addressed by a limping woman who is pushing a pram full of rags, with plastic bags tied around the belt of her coat. The woman’s face is crimson and gnarled, her eyes bloodshot. Wisps of white hair escape from beneath a woollen muffler that’s tied under her chin. Scabs have formed around her mouth. ‘Nowhere to settle, dear?’ ‘The hostel’s full.’ ‘Happen it would be.’ ‘I had my money stolen.’ ‘Am I right you’re an Irish girl?’ ‘I am.’ ‘I’m from the County Clare myself. A while back.’ ‘I’m looking for someone.’ The lame woman isn’t interested in that. She has been going about the streets for forty-one years, she says; forty-one years, two months and a day. ‘I keep the count. Sharpens you to keep the count.’ Feeling safer in company than alone, Felicia walks with the woman through a neighbourhood that becomes quieter and darker as they advance. Their progress is slow, each litter-bin investigated, the remains of food rescued and gnawed, bottles drained of their dregs. ‘What age would you call me?’ Felicia is asked during such a pause, and she says she doesn’t know. ‘Eighty-two years of age, still going strong. I’ve been all over. Liverpool, Plymouth, all the sailor towns. I was in Glasgow one time. I knew all sorts in Glasgow. I knew the cousin of the Queen. Lovely, considerate man. Lovely in his uniform.’ Skirting an area of waste ground, they have left the streets and are approaching the tow-path of a canal. The water lies below them, at the bottom of an incline, reached by a path through scrub and weeds. Good shelter down on the cut, the lame woman promises, and delves among the rags in her pram. She holds a few up to demonstrate their usefulness as blankets, and Felicia shudders, affected by the fetid odour this rummaging has brought with it. ‘Lena’s out!’ a voice cries, near them somewhere, and then two figures emerge from the mist, one of them waving and exclaiming again that Lena is out. From time to time weak moonlight filters through the clouds, and as the figures come closer Felicia distinguishes a skinny young man with a boyish face and clipped fair hair, and a scrawny middle-aged woman with matchstick legs. The man is attired in flannel trousers and a knitted jersey under a tweed overcoat torn at one pocket, a tie knotted into the collar of a grubby shirt. Orange dye is growing out of the woman’s grey hair; in a skeletal face her lips are sensual, pouted into a tulip shape, shiny now with lipstick. Stubble sprouts on her companion’s chin and upper lip and in a soft growth on the sides of his face. In the misty twilight the woman’s clothes seem shabby. ‘How are you, George?’ the lame woman inquires after she has welcomed Lena back. Lena was released that morning at eight, subsequent exchanges reveal, and got a lift on a narrow boat to the Flowers and Castle, where George was waiting. They’ve been drinking barley wine. ‘I’m off if you’re not coming,’ the lame woman abruptly threatens and, not waiting for Felicia’s reply, she disappears into the scrub of the slope, the wheels of her pram rattling and juddering over the uneven surface. ‘Haven’t you a place for the night?’ the skinny young man asks Felicia. ‘Are you stuck?’ ‘I’ve nowhere tonight.’ Still preferring to be in company than on her own, Felicia remains with the two, returning with them the way she has come with the limping woman. They are curious at first: she tells them that she has been looking for a lawn-mower factory because a friend works there. She gives a description: dark hair kept short, medium height, greenish eyes, grey you’d probably call them. Johnny Lysaght, she says, and tells about the money that has disappeared from the sleeves of her jersey. ‘Typical, that,’ is Lena’s response, the description Felicia has given eliciting no interest. ‘Turn your head and you’re robbed while you’d blink.’ As they walk, Lena talks a lot. Stale as old cabbage, a prison social worker is; another one’s called Miss Rubbish. She was lucky, this time, with her cell-mate. ‘Wants me to go in with her when she gets out, Phyllsie does. Some type of dodge she has with the benefit. I wouldn’t go in with no one, Felicia, I give it to her honest. Now I’ve found the boy I ain’t looking for nothing else. Me and George stick together, Felicia, know what I mean? I wouldn’t want nothing dodgy there, not with young George. Don’t know the meaning of it, the boy don’t.’ ‘You’re hungry, Felicia?’ George interrupts. His voice is the most beautiful Felicia has ever heard. Each word he utters is perfectly enunciated, undistorted by accent or slurred delivery. Lena speaks roughly. ‘Yes, I’m hungry.’ Felicia adds that she hasn’t any money to spare for food, but George says that doesn’t matter and Lena agrees. In the streetlight Lena’s threadbare coat has acquired colour: a faded yellow, with ersatz gold buttons. They buy portions of chips in a fish-and-chip shop and eat them on the street. She’s London herself, Lena says, bred and born. She and George met up there and decided on a change of scenery a while back on account of a problem they had, a woman who gave a description. They were sleeping under cardboard in London, and previous to that she was on the game, playing the motors. She never took to it. Before that, a man she met in Westbourne Grove persuaded her to have snow-capped mountains tattooed on her back. They’re there for ever now; act on an impulse and you have a landscape all over you for the rest of your days. George is silent while Lena talks, content to nod sympathetically when the tattooing episode is recounted. His eyes screw up when he’s sympathetic, spreading geniality into his soft, boy’s features. ‘Wet as draining-boards some of them magistrates is,’ Lena comments, but adds that the judge who sent her down this time was a different kettle of fish, loving every minute of his sentencing. She describes the hot, red face, excitedly stern. ‘Example-to-others stuff. Know what I mean, Felicia?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You pregnant then, Felicia? Bun in your tin, have you?’ ‘That’s why I’m looking for Johnny.’ ‘Johnny-come-lately, eh? Johnny-I-hardly-knew-you?’ ‘It’s not like that.’ ‘Course it ain’t. Course not.’ Lena pauses, then adds: ‘I’m not the boy’s mother, Felicia. Did you think I was his mother? He’s sixteen, you know, mother of his own down London way.’ ‘Drives a Daimler,’ George says. ‘Don’t stand for a word against her, Georgie don’t. I hear that boy called a saint, Felicia, many’s the time. Bring him into a Pricerite or a Victor Value or a Lo-Cost, he don’t lift nothing, never has in his life, not so much as a tube of pastilles.’ All the time she was inside, George was out begging, sleeping rough, making do on cups of tea, never touched a thing. ‘Sends a card to the bishops on their birthdays, never forgets one of them. Education done that to him, Felicia, know what I mean?’ They arrive at a house with scaffolding around it and a temporary front door, made of unpainted blockboard. ‘No charge here for a doss,’ George reassures Felicia, pressing a bell that hangs on its wires, no longer attached to the door frame. From somewhere within the house comes the thump of music, and occasional hammering. ‘You’re welcome.’ A man in a bomber jacket, with a mug in his hand, greets them when the door is opened. ‘Come on in.’ He leads the way through an uncarpeted hall, towards uncarpeted stairs. Wallpaper has been partially removed from the walls, torn strips of it still hanging. Pieces of plaster, bricks, wood shavings and lengths of electrical wire are strewn about in the hall and on the stairs. Bags of cement, shovels, buckets and a stack of concrete blocks almost fill the first-floor landing. Coming from behind a closed door from which the paint has been burnt off, the music is louder at the top of the house. In another room the intermittent hammering is louder also. ‘So they’ve turned you loose again, Lena.’ Opening the third door on the landing, the man in the bomber jacket has to shout to make himself heard. ‘Remit, eh?’ ‘That’s it, Mr Caunce.’ An unshaded bulb dimly lights a small room, empty of furniture. Several rust-marked mattresses, two of them occupied, lie close together on the floor. ‘There you go.’ The man in the bomber jacket smiles another welcome at the three newcomers. ‘OK then?’ Lena says the accommodation is fine. ‘Good-night, Mr Caunce.’ The occupants of the mattresses are a young man and a girl, fully dressed, without further covering. Both are lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling. Neither addresses the newcomers, nor ceases to gaze upwards. ‘The toilet’s across the way.’ Lena directs Felicia before she makes the journey herself. When she returns, George and Felicia go in turn. Felicia doesn’t like the lavatory. There is no bolt on the door and it isn’t clean. The floorboards are sodden because the bowl is cracked and oozes water. A piece of rope has replaced the chain. A single tap protrudes from the wall, but the basin that was once beneath it has been removed. There is no lavatory paper. She doesn’t like the room when she returns to it. She doesn’t like the house. Lena has taken her coat off, revealing a tight black imitation-leather skirt and a black jumper, which she now removes also. George has taken off his overcoat and his shoes. ‘All right for you?’ Lena asks, not pausing for a response. ‘Looks like our friends is on the needle.’ Lena and George share one of the mattresses, with George’s overcoat spread over them. Felicia lies down on the remaining one. Lena asks her to turn the light off. Mr Caunce doesn’t charge, George assures her again. Felicia lies listening to the noisy breathing of the drugged couple, and the music and the hammering. These sounds and the rank smell in the room pass into Felicia’s sleep, until another sound wakes her. A woman is shouting. From somewhere lower down in the house come desperate, hysterical cries of distress. The breathing of the couple does not alter. Neither Lena nor George wakes up. Then the music ceases, and with it the hammering, leaving behind only the woman’s shrill cries, words occasionally articulated. ‘Bestial! Bestial animals!’ Sobbing begins when the woman becomes exhausted, then silence until the music starts again, and the hammering. Felicia does not sleep after that, even though both sounds cease when the darkness lightens. She sobs herself, wishing she could have stayed asleep, not knowing what to do when the day begins. ‘Fancy a tea?’ Lena’s voice interrupts. ‘Tea, Georgie?’ The two they have shared the room with are disturbed by their going, their eyes dilated and unfocused. Not speaking, they inject themselves, one passing the syringe to the other. ‘Who was that screaming?’ Felicia asks on the street. ‘That woman?’ ‘A Spanish lady.’ George looks sorrowful, his high spirits of the night before gone. ‘Singer from way back,’ Lena adds. ‘Nightclub stuff. She objects to the noise, see. Plus there’s that toilet dripping down through her ceiling, plus she has a tale about her telephone breaking down. Caunce has the music and the hammering going, plus every kind of derelict up and down the stairs, so’s he can get her out.’ ‘Mr Caunce is not a very nice man.’ George offers the opinion with reluctance. ‘I’m afraid we have to say that.’ ‘I often think of her crooning in the nightclub,’ Lena says, ‘back in her heyday. Sixty or so she is now.’ ‘That screaming was terrible.’ ‘Shocking,’ Lena agrees, and the subject is left. They queue for tea outside a church hall, its doors not open yet. You don’t get much, Lena warns: tea, and bread with something on it, more if you queue a second time and they don’t notice. ‘Good morning!’ a woman greets them, propping open the doors after twenty minutes have passed. Beryl it says on a badge she is wearing. Inside, trestle-tables and benches are set out in rows. In a corner there’s a sink, beside a refrigerator and a gas stove. Three other women are spreading sliced bread with margarine; a fifth is pouring tea from a large metal teapot into rows of mugs with milk already in them. There’s a smell of gas and washing-up. The morning visitors shuffle in, mostly men, all of them unkempt. They are silent except for two who mutter quarrelsomely. Lena has begun again about her colleague in gaol and the scheme she has devised for extracting extra benefits from the social-security system. ‘That’ll do there,’ the woman pouring tea sharply calls out, a reprimand to the men who are quarrelling. They’re not running a beer garden, the woman adds jollily, doing her best to cheer the men out of their disagreement. But the men remain morose. ‘Phyllsie’ll never get away with it, know what I mean, Felicia? Poor Phyllsie hasn’t the way with her for stuff like that.’ Two more women, clearly not intent on sustenance, and younger than the women supplying it, enter the hall. Swiftly they survey those gathered there, and choose Felicia and her companions to approach first. ‘The Aids brigade,’ Lena remarks. ‘Ever prick yourselves with a needle you pick up,’ one of the women begins in a hectoring manner, ‘you squeeze the blood out of the prick hard as you can. Really hard, much as’ll come out. D’you understand?’ ‘We’re not on the needle,’ Lena says. ‘No one’s saying you are.’ The second young woman picks up her companion’s petulant tone. ‘All that’s being said to you is you might handle something by chance.’ ‘Hold the finger under a hot tap for a good ten minutes. Then dip it into household bleach.’ When the Aids women have passed on, and in a tone that suggests he has been giving the matter thought during their harangue, George says: ‘We wouldn’t know about lawn-mowers.’ He nods repeatedly to emphasize this conclusion, and Lena says she agrees. Not in their line, she adds, but there you are. They finish the breakfast they’ve been provided with and Lena says: ‘Coming over to the park, Felicia?’ It isn’t far away; they sit there watching people going to work. On soil as black as coal, roses have not yet begun to sprout their new season’s leaves. The grass, cropped close months ago, still shows no sign of growth; flowerbeds are free of weeds. The wooden seat they occupy is dedicated to Jacob and Mir Abrahams. Died with others, 1938. Remembered here. ‘What I’d have is one of them big brown dogs that has their mouths open,’ Lena remarks. ‘First thing if I came into money I’d get one of them dogs. Nice friendly fellow you could take on to the streets. Know what I mean, Felicia?’ A sedate couple pass by, arm in arm. Retired, Lena speculates; taking it easy now. Funny to be out so early, funny they don’t have a dog. ‘Anyone today, George?’ she inquires, and George says yes, today is the birthday of the Bishop of Bath and Wells. ‘I’m sorry we don’t know about the lawn-mower thing,’ he says. He stands up, and so does Lena. Felicia realizes her encounter with them is over. He didn’t forget, George says: yesterday he sent the Bishop of Bath and Wells a card with a squirrel on it. He smiles, nodding again when he adds that the Bishop of Bath and Wells is probably opening it at this very moment. There was a sermon once, he says, when he was at school. In which it was stated that bishops were lonely. ‘Good luck, Felicia,’ Lena says. ‘Good luck with your fella.’ ‘I put a little rhyme I know on it,’ George says, and pauses to recite with his clear enunciation:

‘Of all the trees that grow so fair,

Old England to adorn,

Greater are none beneath the Sun

Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.’

They go, and Felicia watches them sauntering through the flowerbeds, while George’s voice continues, before it fades away to nothing.